Radical otherness: voiceover, autoethnography, performativity
Radical otherness: voiceover, autoethnography, performativity
This chapter’s discussion is organized around the discursive as well as bodily understanding of the voice within Western intellectual traditions, through which it examines the voice’s disembodiment facilitated by media technology. Specifically, the voice that is split from the image in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking becomes what Mary Ann Doane calls the ‘radical other’. This chapter argues that the disembodied voice’s radical otherness has the potential to empower silenced or misrepresented subjects to re-claim their vocal power within these filmic traditions. However, this re-claimed voice is neither discursive nor normative. Instead, this voice is re-embodied through performative, improvisatory, and vibrational strategies, exemplified in live performances by Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky-That Subliminal Kid) and Tanya Tagaq, alongside experimental documentaries and essay films including Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982), and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989).
Keywords: voice, voiceover, documentary, autoethnography, performance, embodiment
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