Speakers
Description
The cinematic voice is often the formal cornerstone of a film’s sound design. It is also the product of very specific industrial processes that take place on set and during post-production. These industrial processes are in turn shaped by the political, economic and cultural forces that bear down on a film’s production. This presentation argues that the voice in a film is therefore more than just an aesthetic object; it is the material trace of the commercial and political milieu in which a film is made and with which it is in conversation. This presentation contends that listening to the voice in these terms might deepen our understanding of a film’s form, of the context the film comes out of, and of the complex relationship between the two. It does so with reference to three brief case studies: two Italian giallo horror films from the 1970s and a micro-budget Ugandan action film from 2005.
I am Assistant Professor in Visual Communication and Digital Cultures at Northumbria University. My research focuses on film sound, Italian cinema, and popular African cinema. I’m particularly interested in how film sound brings together questions of films’ industrial production and questions of film form, merging the contextual and the textual. Much of my work suggests that the study of film sound can therefore help us to better understand films’ complex interactions with the social and historical contexts in which they were made. I explore these ideas in my monograph, Sound and Horror in the Giallo Film (Indiana University Press, 2025). I have also co-edited the volume Film Exhibition: The Italian Context (with Edward Bowen, Legenda, 2024). Additional articles have appeared in Screen, Discourse, Sound Studies, The Soundtrack, the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, and L’Avventura. Prior to completing my PhD, I was a non-fiction filmmaker. My current teaching spans film history, film theory and film practice.