Melodrama og forskel

Melodrama og forske

I will leave you now and this loudspeaker will take my place

Notions of ‘presence’ and ‘liveness’ run through academic theories and popular conceptions of sound mediation generally, and mediation of voice in particular. This article looks at experimental video that engages with these questions, particularly around the notion of the ‘authentic’ voice and vocal ‘presence’. We will demonstrate how these different experimental approaches explore the interaction between voice, vocal technique and audio-visual technology, thus challenging and interrogating conventions of how the soundtrack represents the voice and (in conjunction with the moving image) the audio-visually mediated body. Presenting Anneke Kampman's work as an experimental practice-led research response to seminal theories of sound and the film soundtrack, we provide further context through engagement with key examples of earlier video art and sound art by Vladan Radovanović, Richard Serra, and Meredith Monk. Overall, the article intervenes by demonstrating how video art and sound art can address key theoretical questions concerning voice and body in a broader sound and moving image context, as well as adopting a sound-focussed approach to aesthetic analysis of video art

Male gays in the female gaze: women who watch m/m pornography

This paper draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research that examines the motivations behind women who watch gay male pornography. To date there has been very little interdisciplinary research investigating this phenomenon, despite a recent survey by PornHub (one of the largest online porn sites in the world) showing that gay male porn is the second most popular choice for women porn users out of 25+ possible genre choices. While both academic literature and popular culture have looked at the interest that (heterosexual) men have in lesbian pornography, considerably less attention has been paid to the consumption of gay male pornography by women. Research looking at women's consumption of pornography from within the Social Sciences is very focused around heterosexual (and, to a lesser extent, lesbian) pornography. Research looking more generally at gay pornography/erotica (and the subversion of the ‘male gaze’/concept of ‘male as erotic object’) often makes mention of female interest in this area, but only briefly, and often relies on anecdotal or observational evidence. Research looking at women's involvement in slashfic (primarily from within media studies), while very thorough and rich, tends to view slash writing as a somewhat isolated phenomenon (indeed, in her influential article on women's involvement in slash, Bacon-Smith talks about how ‘only a small number’ of female slash writers and readers have any interest in gay literature or pornography more generally, and this phenomenon is not often discussed in more recent analyses of slash); so while there has been a great deal of very interesting research done in this field, little attempt has been made to couch it more generally within women's consumption and use of pornography and erotica or to explore what women enjoy about watching gay male pornography. Through a series of focus groups, interviews, and an online questionnaire (n = 275), this exploratory piece of work looks at what women enjoy about gay male pornography, and how it sits within their consumption of erotica/pornography more generally. The article investigates what this has to say about the existence and nature of a ‘female gaze’

Undoing violent masculinity: Lynne Ramsay’s You were never really here (2018)

Reviewers described Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (2018) as a “Taxi Driver for a new century.” Certainly, its narrative of an inarticulate killer who is also the would-be saviour of a lost and damaged “little white girl” recalls that of Scorsese’s 1976 film., and the two films share a fragmented, hallucinatory quality. Yet what such comparisons miss is both the devastating critique of this culturally powerful narrative to be found in Ramsay’s film, and the connections it makes between this paradigmatic story of a failed and violent but ultimately sympathetic white masculinity and another: that of the traumatising mother who is responsible for the violence of her psychotic son. In this article, I explore the nature of Ramsay’s critique, arguing that her film both refuses and interrogates both of these readings of gender. Ramsay’s protagonist, like Scorsese’s, is a traumatised war veteran, but his identification is not with a fantasised and recuperative ideal masculinity but with its feminised victims: girl and mother. His tragedy is not that he fails in his rescue attempt, or that he is in thrall to the “death mother”, but that he believes that the means of this rescue might be masculinity

Melodrama, temporalitet og genkendelse: amerikansk og russisk stumfilm.

Mary Ann Doanes artikel om det tidlige amerikanske og russiske me- lodrama fra stumfilmsperioden kan måske synes at have et meget eksotisk tema her i 1990. Men hun beskæftiger sig for det første med en genre, melodramaet, som indtager en enestående central plads i både filmens og TV-mediets historie, og hvis historiske rødder derfor har stor aktualitet. Desuden kaster hun et kønsteoretisk aspekt ind- over genre-diskussionen i sin beskæftigelse med sammenhængen mellem kønsroller på lærredet og i den virkelighed, som publikum og filmene befandt sig i. Endelig rummer hendes artikel en central pointe i en generel genre- diskussion: genrerne er i høj grad bundet til deres sociale, kulturelle og historiske produktionssammenhæng - de er ikke ontologiske, over- historiske skabeloner. Det amerikanske og det russiske melodrama er to meget forskellige udgaver af en basal, melodramatiske oplevel- sesmåde. (Artiklen er oversat af Ib Bondebjerg og er i sin engelske udgave trykt i "East-West Film Journal", vol.4, no.2, juni 1990)

The Trope of the Turn and the Production of Sound Space

This talk explores the impact of new technologies of sound (e.g. Dolby Atmos) on cinematic space and the classical concept of the diegesis using the trope of the ‘turn’. The turn as performed by a character or the camera within the film helps to carve out the space of the diegesis, to lend it a depth denied it by the two-dimensionality of the image. For the turn makes visible that which was concealed – the ‘other side’ – an other side that does not materially exist in the two-dimensional realm of cinema but is continually evoked, imagined, assumed. Given the physical immobility of the spectator, the necessity of facing forward to see the screen, that turn must be delegated to someone or something else – character, figure, camera. Navigable space is on the side of the screen. The turn of the spectator toward the back of the theatre must be taboo. What are the effects of this delegation to figure or camera of a bodily gesture that is critical to the subject’s relation to space? New sound surround systems, in addition to IMAX and 3D, seek to expand the space of the diegesis into the auditorium, to produce a &#8216;frameless&#8217; space and hence to foster the notion of spectatorial &#8216;immersion&#8217;. In doing so, they risk activating the space behind the spectator’s head, drawing attention away from the screen. This lecture analyzes these strategies and risks in relation to the more general delocalizing effects of contemporary media networks and the commodification of the environment. Mary Ann Doane is Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media at The University of California-Berkeley, and currently the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She is the author of The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (2002), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (1991), and The Desire to Desire: The Woman&#8217;s Film of the 1940s (1987). In addition, she has published a wide range of articles on feminist film theory, sound in the cinema, psychoanalytic theory, television, and sexual and racial difference in film. She is currently completing a book on the use of the close-up in film practice and theory, and the way in which screen size and its corresponding scale have figured in the negotiation of the human body’s relation to space in modernity.Mary Ann Doane, The Trope of the Turn and the Production of Sound Space, lecture, ICI Berlin, 21 November 2016, video recording, mp4, 48:39 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e161121