Her

I put some thoughts on Spike Jonze's film Her - here

Dr Phibes, the inverted ventriloquist?

A ventriloquists dummy adopts life through a voice given to it. Dr Phibes cinematic appearance is the morbid inversion of this. The watcher knows that the voice is supposed to come from Dr Phibes, and indeed, knows that it does - but is given no animate correlate to the voice. The voice is half way between the standard talkie formulation (a voice coming from a seen source) and acousmatic (a sound with an unknown source). Dr Phibes grim mask (masking any vitalism) cleaves a horror between the two poles of cinematic vocalic formal norms.

The Acousmatic/Ventriloquised Voice of Mercedes McCambridge in The Exorcist

Mercedes McCambridge - listen from 05:55.

then.

The Exorcist Scene Dissected:

Watch from 1:56 first then go back to the first scene - better that way!

My 4 voice/horror tropes

Finally got round to posting something about my 4th trope, a-linguistic sounds of transformation. It's all about the grain basically. The trope overview sums up the latter 3.

a-linguistic corporeal sounds of transformation

Split subject voice

Dislocated/Relocated voices

Spectral Acousmatic Voice

trope overview

Aristotle on Hiccups + Artaud + Bane

Sup phonephiles.

I got it totally wrong in the seminar. It is Aristotle who makes the distinction between voice and bodily sounds as that of soul in breath...

“Voice then is the impact of the inbreathed air against the “windpipe,” and the agent that produces the impact is the soul resident in these parts of the body. Not every sound, as we have said, made by an animal is voice (even with the tongue we may merely make a sound which is not voice, or without the tongue as in coughing); what produces the impact must have soul in it and must be accompanied by an act of imagination, for voice is a sound with a meaning, and is not merely the result of any impact of the breath as in coughing; in voice the breath in the windpipe is used as an instrument to knock with against the walls of the windpipe. (Aristotle 2001, De Anima, 420b 28-37)” (Dolar, 2006, pp. 23)

If Bane's voice is modulated by analgesic gas then one could argue that he does not have a pure voice. He has a techno-pnematically modulated cyborg voice - making Bane even more of a true cinematic character.

 Not only is the source (the oral void) absent from the image on screen, suspending his act in a corporeal - half-way house between traditional voice forms-within-cinema (acousmatic and non-acousmatic - but of course all cinema voices ARE acousmatic - that's the illusion). But his voice is also, just like every other film character, technologically modulated - amplified. Bane is traditional cinematic vocal operation embodied, or rather the operations of cinematic voice uncovered and summed and ciphered into a body on screen, stuck inside the diegesis - horrifically. The source of his voice is hidden and his sonic is altered too - pure cinema!
-----------------------

ALSO

Antonin Artaud  - "To have done with the judgment of God"