Towards Affective Listening: Hearing Corporeal Memories in Cameraperson and Stories We Tell THESIS Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Alper Gobel, B.A. Graduate Program in Film Studies The Ohio State University 2019 Master’s Examination Committee: Margaret Flinn, Advisor Erica Levin Sean O’Sullivan Copyrighted by Alper Gobel 2019 Abstract This thesis focuses on two documentaries: Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016) and Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012). By proposing the term affective listening, it foregrounds affective engagement with the voice of documentary. The thesis argues that listening to the materiality of voice(s) is inextricably bound up with embodied experiences of social subjects. Affective listening creates an auditory experience, establishing a direct link between worldly experiences of documentary subjects and corporeal memories. In both documentaries, listening to multiple voices requires attention to bodily expressions and sensations. The emphasis on corporeal expressions incorporates a multiplicity of affect conveyed through vocal conventions of documentary such as the voice-over and the interview. Consistent with the two documentaries, affective listening emphasizes a multiplicity of affect, a multiplicity that is ingrained corporeal memories. ii Dedication Dedicated to my mother, Sevim Sahin iii Vita 2013 (May).....................................................B.A. Radio, Television, and Film, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey 2013 (June).....................................................B.A. Political Science, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey 2017 to present ...............................................M.A. Film Studies, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Film Studies iv Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iii Vita ..................................................................................................................................... iv Chapter 1: Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Listening to Corporeal Memories in Cameraperson ........................................ 5 Chapter 3: Listening to Fluid Voices in Stories We Tell .................................................. 17 Chapter 4: Conclusion....................................................................................................... 32 References ......................................................................................................................... 35 v Chapter 1: Introduction “When he was six years old, Stravinsky listened to a mute peasant who produced unusual sounds with his arms, which the future musician tried to reproduce: he was looking for a different voice, one more or less vocal than the one comes from the mouth; another sound for another sense than the one that is spoken.”1 “… a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.”2 Voice has remained central to documentary studies, but it has been examined in relation to a dominant paradigm. The category of voice, according to several documentary scholars, including Pooja Rangan, has been studied as a useful tool, vehicle, or metaphor for conveying the meaning of a given film and ensuring documentary’s truth claim.3 Considering voice as a metaphor has its roots in Bill Nichols’ seminal essay, “The Voice of Documentary.” In this essay, Nichols draws a distinction between the voice of the text as a whole and its components emerging from interview, dialogue, and voice- over commentary. Nichols argues that “we may think we hear history or reality speaking 1 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 7. 2 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 66-67. 3 Pooja Rangan, “Audibilities: Voice and Listening in the Penumbra of Documentary: An Introduction,” Discourse 39, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 280. See also: Annabelle Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore, “Introduction: Documentary’s Vocal Projections,” In Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 2. 1 to us through a film, but what we actually hear is the voice of the text.”4 Nichols explains what the voice of the text means: it “conveys to us a sense of a text’s social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting to us.”5 In conjunction with visual metaphor, Nichols proposes that a documentary consists of a wide range of voices, all of which “come to function as signs; they bear meaning, though the meaning is not really inherent in them but rather conferred upon them by their function within the text.”6 Within this conventional view, the voice as a useful vehicle prioritizes a coherent and comprehensible message of the text delivered through vocal conventions of documentary such as the voice-over and the interview. Nichols’ meaning- oriented approach ends up with a rigid formula: the more-meaning centered the voices become, the less there is to hear. In other words, Nichols’ theoretical framework privileges the textual message conveyed through speech acts of documentary subjects. Other documentary scholars have, however, recently challenged prevailing assumptions about the metaphorical use of voice. For example, Pooja Rangan investigates “the persistent logocentrism of voice” that “is conflated with meaning, and specifically, with logos: the referential content or message of the text.”7 Rangan explores how documentary’s meaning-oriented approach to voice “amplifies some features of reality and muffle others.”8 By contrast, Rangan conceptualizes the voice “as a form of 4 Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” Film Quarterly 36, no.3 (Spring 1983): 20. 5 Ibid., 18. 6 Ibid., 20. 7 Pooja Rangan, “Audibilities: Voice and Listening in the Penumbra of Documentary: An Introduction,” 280. 8 Pooja Rangan, “Auditing the Call Centre Voice: Accented Speech and Listening in Sorali Gulati’s Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005),” In Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary, ed. Annabelle Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore, (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 33. 2 audibility” that “operates in ways that are both less literal than spoken words and more concrete than mere metaphor.”9 Similarly, Annabel Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore scrutinize “the sense-making imperatives of language that has dominated documentary studies” while simultaneously turning attention to “sonic capacities of human and non- human voices.”10 These current studies undermine the documentary’s discursive regime that gives a secondary status to the voice. Such recent studies, in parallel with the work of Mladen Dolar, escape the grid of approaching the voice as “a vanishing mediator” that “is the material support of bringing about meaning, yet it does not contribute to it itself.”11 These inquiries shift attention from visual referentiality to sonic materiality, stressing both phonic utterances as well as qualities of sound such as sighs and tones. This departure from metaphorical discourse towards the materiality of voice opens up new channels for rethinking the voice of documentary. The emphasis on the materiality of voice incorporates a new engagement, especially paying attention to the work of sound studies scholars. For example, Don Ihde highlights the importance of “auditory experience,” suggesting that listening to sounds creates “the richness of primary experience.”12 Likewise, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, the experience of listening goes beyond the meaning-oriented sense of the world, generating a new understanding of multiple senses.13 Consistent with these studies, listening to documentary subjects allows us to discover the relationship between the 9 Pooja Rangan, “Audibilities: Voice and Listening in the Penumbra of Documentary: An Introduction,” 280. 10 Annabelle Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore, “Introduction: Documentary’s Vocal Projections,” 1-2. 11 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 15. 12 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (Albany: University of New York Press, 2007), 13. 13 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, 36. 3 embodied dimension of voice and lived experiences. The embodied dimension of the voice bears the reminder that bodies speak to us in a documentary. Documentary listening, as Irina Leimbacher puts it, opens the way for “affective and existential contact.”14 This thesis sets out to listen to the plurality of affect ingrained in sonic events. If “the work of art is a bloc of sensations, a compound of percepts and affects,” as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, listening to multiple voices plunges us into a multiplicity of affect.15 By proposing the term “affective listening,” the thesis rests on the assumption that Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016) and Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012) can be understood through affective engagement. Rather than privileging a meaning-oriented engagement with the voice of documentary, affective