The writing voice in cinema: A preliminary discussion
As an artifact in cultural representation, the voice has a much longer history than cinema. Older representational forms based in writing—poetry, literary fiction, essays, and nonfiction in general—all bear remnants of the voice in different registers. In cinema studies, however, theorists and critics have tended to suspend this longer history in order to foreground the more technically specific aspects of voice manifestation as they show up in a particular film system (such as Hollywood). This means that discussions of the cinematic voice tend to present us with an object of study that is radically truncated from the get-go, leaving the complex historicity of the voice as a fictional artifact largely untouched. With reference to Derrida, Bakhtin, Mladen Dolar, and Michel Chion, and through a reading of the film The Lunchbox, this essay aims to bring some of this historicity back into the picture.