Introduction in FOCUS: Revoicing the Screen
IN FOCUS: Revoicing the Screen Introduction by TESSA DWYER and JENNIFER o’mEARA, editors he paradoxes engendered by voice on-screen are manifold. Screen voices both leverage and disrupt associations with agency, presence, immediacy, and intimacy. Concurrently, they institute artifice and distance, otherness and uncanniness. Screen voices are always, to an extent, disembodied, partial, and Tunstable, their technological mediation facilitating manipulation, remix, and even subterfuge. The audiovisual nature of screen media places voice in relation to— yet separate from—the image, creating gaps and connections between different sensory modes, techniques, and technologies, allowing for further disjunction and mismatch. These elusive dynamics of screen voices—whether on-screen or off-screen, in dialogue or voice-over, as soundtrack or audioscape— have already been much commented on and theorized by such no- tables as Rick Altman, Michel Chion, Rey Chow, Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman, and Mikhail Yampolsky, among others.1 Focusing primarily on cinema, these scholars have made seminal contribu- tions to the very ways that film and screen media are conceptual- ized through their focus on voice, voice recording and mixing, and postsynchronization as fundamental filmmaking processes. Altman 1 Rick Altman, “Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 67–79; Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia Univer- sity
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