The Sound of Rust

The irreducible excess of voice. The horror of the Lamella?

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!
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ALSO

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

rubbadub dub a dubbed Dybbuk box-office dibbouk

....rubbadub dub a dubbed Dybbuk box-office dibbouk has all the eating, voice horror/ possession horror tropes you could shake a bottle of faux-holy water at. You could see this as a film about puberty, fearing change, vocal change, bodily change etc. But I'd also like to think of the dybbuk box (which in this is film is spliced with the old pandora's box myth to some degree) as an avatar for the shiny little boxes of friends, spirits and voices that kids carry around all day.... the power of the little box becoming their friend before possessing them entirely and taking over their lives.... Anyhow, fun flick, and if you don't fancy hearing Mercedes Cambridge's roars of "Merrin!!!"this is a lighter substitute - it even has some scenes taken directly from Friedkin's classic (the MRSI, is a direct rip - with a pseudo subliminal face emerging to boot).

I'd like to think about the Yampolsky text and this film along with a Michael Jackson/Prince story.    The version presented in the Spike Lee "Bad" documentary tells of how MJ got spooked when Prince brought a voodoo box along to their first meeting - and that is why their collaborative single never quite happened. That is all I know, its a story of hearsay. But I'd like to think it, the box that spooked MJ, was a dybbuk box - a box harbouring a spirit from outside, a change, a possession - a vocal change. Everything that, people say, Michael Jackson (peter pan) was deeply averse to. Prince brought along a box containing the unnerving prospect of uncontrollable physical and vocal change. As one comment in the documentary mentions, MJ had a massive vocal range and would answer the phone in a gruff 'regular' voice - when asked why he doesn't talk like that more often, or sing using his lower vocal range, he replied that he just preferred the other way. MJ spent his life controlling his voice and his body (through gravity defying dance moves, or plastic surgery) - and so he would've had the most to lose, the most voice to lose, the most body to lose, the most control to relinquish, the most reasons for fearing the box that was brought to the meeting.... The Prince's dybbuk box scared The King of Pop away.

The Shining - Horror in Voice + Dolar Thoughts

Thought I'd link my posts on voice here, I posted them on my other blog because I didn't want to clog Vocalities up too much with my own stuff. But seeing as all I think about is voice they are kinda relevant, extrinsic ;-) - I've been watching a lot of horror films recently and thinking about voice in horror: clicky for my thoughts

A few of the essays coming up are about cinema so I'm really looking forward to revisiting those with a few horror scenes in mind. - If anyone has a particularly 'eerie' example of V∅ICE in a film scene please let me know. The holiday is a great time to binge on films.

I Re-watched Kubrick's The Shining the other day -  spectral and split subject voices are in almost every scene - kinda felt that the terror, the horror, in that film comes from the uncertainty of it being always either spectral/hotel haunting or a subjective possession - can the Overlook Hotel possess a man or is it just haunting? Is Jack going mad or is he possessed? Is Danny's ESP real or not? Tony is presented as a part of Danny's psyche - a visible split subject voice, his most inner turmoil is flexed inside out for the viewer to see.... but this is against the backdrop of a building that haunts - a haunting that (in the first parts) is reserved only to Danny. By the end of the film the question of the location of the terrors (be it physical, psychological or architectural) actual locations does not actually matter - but it is this uncertainty that maintains such a satisfyingly taut tension for the first two thirds of the film.

Surrounding all this is a soundtrack of (I think mostly in the film it is Ligeti - right?) cacophonies of dissonance. Etherial, ghoulish wafts of pneumacentric presence (choirs) blow through the corridors and up the stairs. Seducing and possessing you - just like the Overlook's resonating corridors (Bronchi and Bronchiole) and room 237 (larynx) did to Jack.. Was he possessed or was he just weak? In an odd way I'd like to think of jack as a failed Orpheus - when he heard the voices he tried to beat them by playing his weapon of logos (the typewriter rather than the lyre), he played it more and more: "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy". But in the end he succumbed to the Siren call - the unseen presence - an unseen that's ambiguity of location (subjective/objective - past/present) only amplifies the uncertainty, the horror to relish.

Also - the 1920's bar tender is obviously the blue-print for that possession from the future Drink Drive advert:

the original had no sound

edit - sorry, got carried away with that film, mean't to post my old thoughts on Dolar - I wanted to let the dust settle on that essay for a while before linking my very subjective comments!

Mr Sardonicus + Laughter

Ripe for psychoanalytic musings. I almost want to say the masked speaker is an inversion of the possessed victim. An eerie voice from an unseen - in both instances, one (Regan) having animation but an incongruous unpresent/present voice, the other a true voice, a locatable source, but no facial animation, no locus of emittance.... but this is too simple. Well Sardonic scene at the end too, scope Vladimir Propp's comments of ritual laughter accompanying death and killing, all involving groups. These he characterized as sardonic laughter.

"Among the very ancient people of Sardinia, who were called Sardi or Sardoni, it was customary to kill old people. While killing their old people, the Sardi laughed loudly. This is the origin of notorious sardonic laughter (Eugen Fehrle, 1930), now meaning cruel, malicious laughter. In light of our findings things begin to look different. Laughter accompanies the passage from death to life; it creates life and accompanies birth. Consequently, laughter accompanying killing transforms death into a new birth, nullifies murder as such, and is an act of piety that transforms death into a new life."
Sophie K Scott and her team have done some interesting research into laughter. Is sardonic laughter (in the ancient Sardinian context) a method of exploiting the first mode of rhythmical exchange in order to mollify a victim? A vocal weapon that releases a sickly serotonin against the listeners/victims will? On the other hand, when one realises a laughter is mocking, it is not communal but dangerous, it is worse than words - cue Regan:



And of course who can forget the classic Vincent Price cackle at the end of Michael Jackson's Thriller (just google vincent price laugh, or MJ's Thiller). A laugh deployed as sinister affect, the most blood curdling effect of a vocalised revelation - the horror laugh is often wheeled out at points of transformation/revelation/protagonist realisation - in a sense the laugh can be thought of as a marker of change. The point at which an evil villain chooses to finally break the tension and reveal their true intentions to the audience and the victims -  and their victims doom. The true intention is not granted utter explicitness, not fully inscribed within language (utter explicitness kills horror - we all know that, the villain will never turn around and say "OK, so this is our dungeon we'll be killing you within 25 minutes but a few housekeeping points first") - but is given it's most breathy, vital and crucially ambiguous marker. An utter vocalisation of intent, intention is revealed most sonorously, most infectiously BUT retains an ambiguity. The evil cackle is introduced at the point of the baddie winning, showing his or her true intentions, the point at which secrecy can be jettisoned - let is all out devil, relax, you have your prey now:

"The incident recorded by Ionov shows that hunters laugh after capturing an animal. Consequently, laughter is not a means for capturing it. However, the hunter's interests are naturally concentrated on the capture. We may suppose that the hunters laughed to resurrect the dead animal to a new life and to capture it a second time; that is, they were laughing "for the birth" of the animal, just as the Yakuts laughed "for the birth" of a child. That hunters tried to resurrect a slain animal by various means (in particular by burying its bones) for a second hunt is well known in ethnography (Propp 1934). Laughter is one of the means for the creation and recreation of life." (Propp, 135)

The horror laugh, is a sinisterly knowing affect, it is a neon sign to say 'the chase is over, you'll never escape, my plans are complete - but the torment won't stop - even after I've hunted you I'll hunt you again' - For the victim their enemy's cackle can be heard to say that the horror of the pursuit is finished, and that now there is only the horror of the capture, a grimly static horror without the momentum of hope or the prospect of freedom.



Edit - and how could I forget, another film full of masks and sardonic laughter:

Hammer House Of Horror: Ep. 12 - The Two Faces Of Evil

I used to be obsessed with dopplegangers. This is very scary, I'm not sure what's more frightening though, the glottal groans and velociraptor shrieks or the obtusely quaint englishness of it all.

The architecture and decor in that hospital spells trouble from the start - totally up on that gothic christianity / pagan masonic tip - you can almost smell the tannis root....

Great tip Mark.