10 - Talking Photographs: The Speaking Subject in Anglophone Newsreel and Documentary (1927–1936)

Summary

Abstract: While feature films and newsreels almost immediately exploited the use of direct sound, filmmakers working in the field of documentary focused their creative energies on other aspects of cinematic soundscapes. Orchestrated noises, music, and occasional commentary tracks alongside collages of on- and off-screen voices were more frequent than synchronously recorded speech. In documentary film, speaking subjects emerge much later than in features or newsreels. Indeed, there was profound ambivalence toward giving individual embodied speech a central place. Instead, the suggestive sounds and noises of a world were intertwined with scripted poetic and collective voices. Individual embodied voices do appear, but hesitantly, with a mix of working-class subjects always discursively framed by culturally sanctioned public servants.

Keywords: non-fiction, embodied speech, subjectivity, testimony, historical reception

It is at the moment when the sync-sound embodied speech emerges as a technological and ideological possibility that its stakes, limitations, and possible futures become visible. While feature films and newsreels almost immediately exploited the use of sync-sound technology, filmmakers working in the field of “documentary” – as first used in English by John Grierson to refer to a kind of non-fiction filmmaking – focused their creative energies on other aspects of cinematic soundscapes. Orchestrated sounds and noises, music, and commentary tracks alongside collages of on- and off-screen voices were more frequent than synchronously recorded speech. In Anglophone documentary film, speaking subjects emerge later than in features or newsreels. Indeed, there was profound ambivalence toward giving individual embodied speech a central place in early documentary of the 1930s. Instead, the suggestive sounds and noises of a world were intertwined with omniscient and collective voices, expressed through scripted and performed polyvocal and poetic soundtracks. Individual embodied voices do appear, but hesitantly, and with a mix of working-class subjects always discursively framed by culturally sanctioned public servants.

This chapter is part of a longer examination of the genealogy of the ‘talking head’ and embodied testimony in nonfiction cinema. This incorporation of voices takes on varied forms, political aspirations, and meanings with different historical moments, social crises, and types of media (print, radio, film, digital video, and now even in VR). Here I explore the earliest uses of embodied speech in newsreels, news magazines, and documentary film. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the new possibility of sync-sound vocal address to a distant audience was a practice with affective and epistemological effects that would be put to multiple uses.