‘Can’t you hear me?’: Ideologies of the voice in giallo cinema

Abstract

The voice is inherently interstitial, it resounds between locations and categories. It originates, for example, in both body and mind – flesh and thought – yet can be fully pinned to neither. It also combines reason and emotion, in varying proportions depending on whether one is speaking, singing, screaming or crying, but remains a mediator suspended between the two. More broadly, it oscillates between the personal and the social: what is more distinctive than one’s voice? Yet what ultimate purpose does that voice serve if not to communicate, somehow, with another? In its interstitiality the voice knots together many threads, interlacing the individual with the social and thus the political, economic and historical. The voice in film thus offers a key point of entry, on the one hand, for thinking the position of characters within diegetic ideological structures, and on the other hand, tracing the interplay between a film’s sound design and the wider, extra-diegetic ideological forces at work around the text.