In the process of writing my dissertation I find myself in a continous oscillation between intellectual ups and downs. A moment of ‘up’ is taking place right now and although there might be a chance I’ll destroy it by my attempt to keep it, I can’t resist to write about it.
It started with a recommendation of the book Over-Sensitivity by Jalal Toufic. It’s about… yes, it’s not always easy to understand what it’s all about, but I’m especially interested in the chapter on what he calls the voice-over-witness. His notion is based on voice-over in film in cases where “voices are non-representational not because they create what they are talking about but because they are themselves a creation – a creation that tells the truth.” The voice-over “is out of nothing” and here Jalal Toufic extracts his theory from Claude Lanzman’s Shoah, the almost 9 hour long film on concentration camps during World War 2, where the narration is driven by the voices of survivors revisiting the places of the camps. The “out of nothing” is the voice that comes from the physical non-presence of the real witnesses, those who died and are buried in the silent land shown in the film, but the out of nothing is nevertheless put into words by the survivors of the extermination camps.
It is a heavy topic. Which might be why I have difficulties understanding Jalal Toufic’s notion of the voice-over-witness. It is for me still an abstract notion even though he does a great job in drawing on a wide range of films. I started to list all the films he mentions throughout the chapter so as to understand the theory through them. So far the list is as follows:
Films:
Ingmar Bergmann:
Persona (have seen)
From the life of the marionettes
Maya Deren:
Ritual in transfigured time
Assia Djebar:
La Nouba des Femmes
Marguerite Duras:
India Songs
The Vice-consul
Son nom de venise dans calcutta desert
Hiroshima mon amour (have seen)
Aurelia Steiner
Le Camion
Ernie Gehr:
Eureka
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi:
People, years, life
Herzog:
Land of Silence and Darkness (have seen)
Heart of Glass
Lessons of Darkness
Every man for himself and god against all
Alfred Hitchcock:
Vertigo
Kiarostami:
Where is the friend’s home?
Akira Kurosawa:
Rashomon
Claude Lanzman:
Shoah (have seen)
Meredith Monk:
Book of Days
Nicholas Ray:
The lusty men
Michael Snow:
Seated Figures
Wim Wenders:
Kings of the road
Vertov
Man with a movie camera
Robert Zemeckis:
Back to the Future I-III (have seen)
Radio:
Artaud:
To have done with the judgment of god
Yes, the list is quite long. And it’s quite embarrassing only to have seen 4-5 of the films.
The one I chose to see tonight was India Song. The image above is from the beginning of the film and yes, it is a bit pretentious to begin with. It is difficult to get into the movie, the first couple of minutes is a still of a sun slowly setting over a dusty, cloudy sea. A voice-over tells the introductory information about Anne-Marie Stretter, the main character of the film. She is dead and what we see is a recalling of one of her last nights. The voice-over is annoyingly innocent and sexy in a boringly normative way. She speaks slowly as the camera points to 3 people walking ever so slowly down a staircase outside a huge house. It’s India in 1937 in the residence of the English ambassador.
So, why was I so excited about the film? It could have been really bad; too rich people too bored to be alive in a colonised country only concerned about love? What about gender, race, postcolonial and heteronormative issues? As you can see, the main character is dressed in a red dress and surrounded by men in suits. Could it be possible to create a more tired cliché?
Most of the film takes place indoor in the same room. The camera is fixed and the characters enter and exit the frame, often with Anne-Marie Stretter dancing with one of the men. The soundtrack is voices and India Song repeated again and again. We hear people talk about the protagonist, Anne-Marie Stretter. These voices come from guests at the ball, which is supposedly taking place in the almost always empty room. Doors are opening as the mirror in the middle of the room double the characters and shows us the back of the room.
The characters on screen have an almost ghostly presence as the other guests of the ball are edited out and invisible. We only hear their gossiping voices. At times the only trace of action is smoke issuing from insence. The highly dramatic story is silent and poetic as a result of the loss of action on screen.
Are the characters on screen haunting the house where Anne-Marie Stretter lived her last days?
I guess the film gets strongness from the characteristics of the form. It is the loss of origin, where the constant rupture between the voice-overs and the characters is complete. The physically present bodies have no voice and the voices no body. It creates a gap between the image and the sound that leaves the viewer/listener with a continuous flow of cracks to fill with thoughts and imagination. Thereby the film doesn’t appeal for already closed readings and as such it can avoid to be a big cliché.
I got into the film. It almost hypnotized me as the images floated by and the voices sucked me into their universe. I was watching the scenery of Anne-Marie Stretter’s life, while it was explained to me in past tense by commentators. Still, at the end of the film, I knew nothing about Anne-Marie Stretters thoughts or inner feelings; nothing is explained by her. At the same time I knew all there is to know, as I had been on a fantastic journey into a universe devoted only to her deathly destiny.
It came out of nothing;
as if voices were a creation;
to tell the truth.
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