Martha Nochimson asks
> I wonder if either of you is interested in the
> qualification
> of these issues by film genre and the difference between
> Hollywood movies and
> those created by more or less oppositional filmmakers?
First of all I doubt it. If I go back to the voice, then those singers who
evoke in me a similar response to Barthes's response to Panzera range across
singers of many different genres, from Kathleen Ferrier, Maria Callas, Tito
Gobbi and Dietrich Fisher Dieskau (who Barthes finds anathema) to Lotte
Lenya, Violetta Parra, Carlos Gardel and Ewan McColl.
Second, I find the question problematic because there are _many_ different
types of film other than Hollywood and 'more or less oppositional
filmmakers'.
As for Andy Birtwistle's objection ("It seems to me the voice doesn't have
'grain', but rather that the grain is the voice itself... re-grafting the
visual notion of grain back onto the visual of film via a shaky sonic
concept is problematic, even if we think it might eventually have value as
an exercise. Concepts, metaphors, conceptualisations can't be simply handed
from the sonic to the visual and made to fit - we are always talking about
something else, we always have to begin again.") there is of course some
truth in this. I myself regard my contributions to this thread, as I said at
the outset, as entirely provisional. But a couple of things might be said
here. First, Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice is itself a metaphor,
though not at all a new one. (Shorter Oxford: 'The arrangement and size of
the constituent particles of any substance, determining its texture, 1600.')
Second, yes, the voice and its grain are inseperable, but this doesn't make
the notion of grain inoperative - the voices mentioned above are all very
different (and one or two are not even conventionally good voices at all).
Third, it turns out, as I've mentioned already, that there is at least one
sense in which, applied to film & photography, it is _not_ a metaphor, since
indeed there _is_ a granular texture in the photographic image, which is
normally invisible but which appears - in the example I gave - when you push
the exposure (and which can also be revealed in other ways). (By the way,
this is also true of video, although the visual result is different.) So I
think the idea is still worth thinking about, and I shall certainly continue
to do so, though I may not have anything new to contribute for the time
being. But thanks to Michele for raising the question.
Michael Chanan
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