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Fiction and the `Unrepresentable'

All Movies are but Variants on the Silent Film

University of Tokyo, shasu21{at}gol.com

In this article I argue that basic characteristics of the medium of cinema formed during the relatively brief era of silent movies continued to characterize film throughout the 20th century. Despite the development of talkies in the 1920s, sound was never truly integrated into the composition of cinema in the sense implied by the term `audiovisual'. This is a reflection not only of technological constraints but also of a fundamental ideological orientation that prohibited the direct representation of the voice. This `prohibition' of the voice is not a phenomenon confined entirely to cinema. Through a critique of the debate begun by Godard and Lanzmann on representation of the Auschwitz gas chambers in film, I consider how the issue of the `unrepresentable' must be extended beyond the issue of visual representation so as to also include the matter of representation in sound. It is only now that we have entered the 21st century that the `visibility' of this larger issue of representation is presented to us.

Key Words: aural representation • Auschwitz • history of film • visual representation • the Voice

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26, No. 2-3, 316-329 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409103110


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