Category Archives: La Dolce Vita – Disembodied Voice

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La Dolce Vita: Her Disembodied Voice

A woman can throw her voice and ask for what she wants, but her body will betray her.

In La Dolce Vita (1960, Fellini), two casual lovers encounter each other at a party in a castle. Maddalena leads Marcello to a room “for serious talks,” and leaves him there, alone. She walks to another hall and whispers into a spittoon, which carries her voice, loudly, into the room where she’s left Marcello.

Her voice surrounds him, envelopes him. From this remove, Maddalena’s voice can propose marriage, confess love, and admit to her inner conflicts.

Her voice tells Marcello that he would come to hate her because it’s too late for her to choose anything other than being a whore, but his voice, reaching her through the spittoon, objects.

Marcello’s voice speaks of her virtues, but Maddalena’s physical space has admitted an intruder.

As Marcello speaks the shadow of another man’s body looms over Maddalena, who barely moves.

Her body is no longer able to produce a voice.

She can hear Marcello, but her body is being played and it succumbs to her own certainty that she is a “hopeless” prostitute. Her voice was honest, but disconnected. And so she remains.

Marcello and Maddalena could emotionally express themselves, but only because of their physical disconnection. The scene dissolves into tragedy as Marcello leaves the room to find Maddalena, but gets swept along by other party-goers who are parading through the castle. Marcello is distraught that he can’t find Maddalena, he can’t find the source of the Echo. At that moment he is not like Narcissus, who rejected Echo and sought only his own reflection. At that moment Marcello seeks to redeem the Echo of Maddalena, who has separated and banished herself. What if her echo could respond to Marcello’s praise and desire?

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Arrival and the Translator

Ted Chiang wrote this character, Amy Adams acted her out in the film Arrival.  She’s a quiet, solitary academic.  A translator.  A de-coder of languages that are not her own.  She is tapped to decipher the non-verbal, pictographic language of alien visitors.

The metaphors here are just so good.  The female translator, Louise Banks, beats her male competition to become the translator of aliens by correctly translating the Sanskrit term for ‘war’ as meaning ‘a desire for more cows.’  Not bulls, but cows.  Not male beef, but female fecundity and nurturance.

At the crucial moment, when governments worldwide are misunderstanding the aliens and shutting down communications in order to aim munitions, Banks speaks up.  She shouts, “we need to be talking to one another!”  She knows that cooperation is necessary.  The men in the room aren’t listening.  So she walks out to have a private, nonverbal conference with alien beings.

Louise learns an alien language, sees and hears echos from the future, and then she saves the world.  The pivotal message is spoken over a stolen telephone, in Chinese without subtitles.  She speaks aloud, just as she receives the same message in her ear from the future, from the person she is speaking to.  Louise is echoing the words of a man’s dead wife over the telephone.  This echo of female voices alters the fate of humanity.  The voice of the woman heralds arrival and survival.

all stills from Arrival, Dir: Denis Villeneuve, Paramount Pictures, 2016
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Eleanor Antin: AND!

“And, But and Or,

They’ll get you pretty far.”

CONJUNCTIONthis&thatsmall

 

 

 

I began thinking about AND while visiting an exhibit of an artist who embodies AND.  Eleanor Antin is an artist who can draw and write and perform and direct.  She creates work that is conceptual and sensuous.  She performs as a ballerina and a king and a nurse.  She just kept saying AND.  Her work kept showing me AND.  Her work started me echoing AND.

AND is the persistence of freedom, of resisting confinement by label or convention, of singing even when silenced, even if only in the privacy of the cave.  AND is the redeemer of But.

Late-born and woman-souled I dare not hope,

The freshness of the elder lays, the might

Of manly, modern passion shall alight

Upon my Muse’s lips, nor may I cope

(Who veiled and screened by womanhood must grope)

With the world’s strong-armed warriors and recite

The dangers, wounds, and triumphs of the fight;

Twanging the full-stringed lyre through all its scope.

But if thou ever in some lake-floored cave

O’erbrowed by rocks, a wild voice wooed and heard,

Answering at once from heaven and earth and wave,

Lending elf-music to thy harshest word,

Misprize thou not these echoes that belong

To one in love with solitude and song.

Echoes

by Emma Lazarus, written in 1880

Doesn’t the word ‘Twanging’ just make you laugh!

Sing more songs of AND for Echo…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Now, Voyager: Dora the Treasure

“Dora, I suspect you are a treasure,” says Charlotte Vale to the nurse.

After her journey Charlotte has returned home.  Charlotte must face her mother, but, luckily, Mother has engaged a nurse, Dora.  Mother calls out and Charlotte must obey, but in the meantime Dora has already spiked the old woman’s hot toddy.

Her mother’s voice vibrates in familiar ways, but Dora, the outside voice of bemused tolerance, can intervene.  She instructs the obedient Charlotte in techniques of conflict deflection and avoidance.  She positions herself between mother and daughter, intercepting the echo that the mother still expects to elicit from her adult child.  Charlotte offers the echo of independence instead.

from Now, Voyager, 1942, Dir: Irving Rapper; with, in order of utterance, Mary Wickes, Bette Davis and Dame Gladys Cooper; music by Max Steiner.

Please post other echos of women’s independence, for the archive.

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