{"id":1040,"date":"2016-03-29T16:12:32","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T16:12:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/?page_id=1040"},"modified":"2016-04-07T14:12:59","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T14:12:59","slug":"adrian-martin-a-voice-too-much","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/reflections\/adrian-martin-a-voice-too-much\/","title":{"rendered":"Adrian Martin: “A Voice Too Much”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>First\u00a0published at WORLD WIDE ANGLE – De Filmkrant<\/a><\/em> |\u00a031 June 2010. Originally online at\u00a0<\/strong>http:\/\/www.filmkrant.nl\/world_wide_angle\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

By Adrian Martin<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Having provided over 30 audio commentaries for DVD releases \u2013 one of them, for Mizoguchi\u2019s The Loyal 47 Ronin<\/em>, being four hours long \u2013 I feel I have earned the right to criticise the format. These voice-over commentaries provided by filmmakers, critics and historians are decidedly a mixed blessing. I sometimes wonder whether anybody, except the most dedicated and\/or masochistic researcher, ever listens to them all the way through. No one can doubt that these voice-tracks sometimes give us splendid insight or information that we cannot obtain elsewhere in print. But are they really the best we can do in the quest to marry film criticism with the film-object itself?<\/p>\n

It is not usually recognised that audio commentaries on DVD arose due to a legal loophole. No permission is usually needed from the makers or rights-holders to a film to add such a \u2018bonus\u2019 soundtrack of somebody (or several somebodies) droning on for approximately 2 hours over the top. Officially, the film has not been \u2018tampered with\u2019 or re-edited in any way. You can choose to listen to the vocal extra or not. And this points to the first problem with audio commentaries: they are the easy, quick way to provide scholarly analysis, the \u2018soft option\u2019 \u2013 take it or leave it.<\/p>\n

Audio commentaries are simply an extension of written criticism. The voice of the critic speaks \u2013 sometimes literally reads \u2013 a verbal text. It usually coincides only loosely with the moment-by-moment flow of the film. The format is, in fact, at worst impossible, and at best a compromise: it is like a mad, desperate, jiving riff over a fleeting, ever-vanishing film-object. Try it in your lounge room sometime, you\u2019ll find out how hard it is \u2013 and how easy to more or less ignore the film and offer a standard lecture on its context, background information, director biography, etc.<\/p>\n

The DVD craze has led to an intriguing mutation: the audiovisual analysis, or \u2018digital video essay\u2019, which re-edits clips to fit a concise voice-over analysis. This form flourishes on the Internet, thanks to admirable sites such as Kevin B. Lee\u2019s Shooting Down Pictures<\/a> and Catherine Grant\u2019s Film Studies For Free<\/a>\u00a0. These are more adventurous than the mere vocal overlay. But still: the voice \u2018leads\u2019. It is the voice which has authority \u2013 more than the original images and sounds of the movie. There is something frustrating, even wrong about this.<\/p>\n

It is instructive to compare both DVD audio commentaries and video essays to what Jean-Luc Godard does in his massive Histoire(s) du cin\u00e9ma<\/em>. In fact, Godard has complained in an interview that he hates it when the voice \u2013 the law of the written\/spoken text \u2013 dominates in a filmic \u2018essay\u2019: there is a lot of vocalising in Godard, but it is always displaced, decentred, at war with all the other elements of the work. It is not a voice which legislates or pontificates, which closes down meaning. It reminds me of what one unkind critic said when he exited the premiere of Chris Marker\u2019s Sunless<\/em> (1982): \u2018Every image has its main point of interest in the centre of the screen, and the voice spells out everything for ninety minutes in a monotonal vacuum\u2019 \u2013 like a TV travelogue. Of course, every film critic today secretly wants to be Chris Marker!<\/p>\n

Recently in Melbourne, the OtherFilm collective from Brisbane presented a \u2018film collage\u2019 devoted to jazz in cinema: prints were projected and played with on multiple screens, torches were waved around the theatre, sound was mixed live. It was an intoxicating mix of old-fashioned scholarly research, performance art, and \u2018expanded cinema\u2019. But there was deliberately something missing: a voice too much, explaining what it was meant to be all about. Critics need to make this kind of extra leap if they want to be, finally, artists or poets.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Adrian Martin May 2010<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First\u00a0published at WORLD WIDE ANGLE – De Filmkrant |\u00a031 June 2010. Originally online at\u00a0http:\/\/www.filmkrant.nl\/world_wide_angle\u00a0 By Adrian Martin Having provided over Continue ReadingAdrian Martin: “A Voice Too Much”<\/span>→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1058,"parent":42,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1040","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4VcpT-gM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1040"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1055,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1040\/revisions\/1055"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/42"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}