Compare and Contrast the Relationship Between Voice, Space, and Forms of Intimacy in Two or More of the Films Studied on this Unit

Abstract

In both Sud and E-muet, voice and space inform the ethical as well as the aesthetic. Voice in documentary may be taken literally to mean the voices of social actors, or that of the author. However, as Bill Nichols suggests, it may also be used as a catch-all term for the director’s ‘voice’, often expressed through non-verbal means (1983). This essay will refer to the latter definition, but in view of criticisms of its expansiveness (see for example Leimbacher, 2017), focuses on instances where voice is undermined, negated or nuanced by other kinds of expression. Space has a similarly complex definition, since all conceptions of cinematic space form within each viewer’s imagination, tending to perceive documentary space as contiguous with the ‘real world’. Both Akerman and Shawi disturb this notion, challenging the truth claims of the documentary mode in order to place their spectator critically, an ethical strength that complicates the balance between distance and closeness. Analysing each film in turn, I will first illustrate the structure of Sud to introduce theories surrounding voice and space, and how they inflect interpretations of intimacy relating to the trauma of the murder, before investigating the contrasting model of E-muet and its potential parallels. This, I hope, will reveal how both film-makers use film to shape the ethics of their approaches to depicting socially marginalized subjects (in Sud, the black community of the American South; in E-muet, women in middle-eastern patriarchal society), enabling evaluation of the films’ socio-political implications as well as showcasing the creative aesthetic possibilities of the documentary form. Sud is the second in a series of four documentaries by Akerman, following D’Est (1996), a film which exemplifies what Marianne Hirsch refers to as the transmitted trauma of ‘post-memory’ (2008) by filming the lives of residents of the former Easternbloc, creating imagery that recalls that of the Holocaust. Akerman’s interest in postmemory arguably attunes her to the sensitivity required of representations of the suffering of others, and Sud strongly refers to this sense of a necessary, though painful, reconnection with history. Claire Atherton, Akerman’s editor, has described Sud as aiming ‘to film the landscape and to feel how history is encrypted in it’ (Margulies, 2019), highlighting the importance of its conception of space. Structured by long, contemplative shots of the town and countryside juxtaposed with interview scenes that contextualize the murder, Sud alternately prioritizes the fragmented spoken accounts of the interviewees, and the quiet space of the exterior world. The obscurity this generates aligns Sud with Janet Walker’s ‘trauma cinema’, which locates ‘a sense that what is being represented is extraordinarily memorable at the same time that it is partly unfathomable’ (2005: 190). Sud emphasizes the schism that prevents an intimate grasp of the trauma,