eponine (1984) michel chion [eng sub]

“When I began to write and shoot my film eponine in 1975, I wanted to consciously ‘test’ this and other concepts of analysis with a film; the character of a mother without a face; the suggestion through sound of an outside world that one never sees (since the film takes place within the walls of a house from which one does not go out); the creation of an imaginary topography. The success of this film showed me that the concepts ‘worked’. Thus, for me, theory is not a dead demonstration. A living theory must be drawn from a personal experience.“ - michel chion the original meaning of the word acousmatic: an aspect of pythagorean pedagogy involved the master communicating his lessons to his students from behind draped material in order to not distract from the voice and to lend it a rather divine authority. the sight of the speaker wouldn’t distract them from the message… the history of the term in interesting. the french word acousmate designates “invisible” sounds. apollinaire, who loved rare words, wrote a poem in 1913 entitled “acousmate, ” about a voice that resonates in the air. the famous encyclopédie of diderot and d’alembert (1751) cites the “acousmatiques” as those uninitiated disciples of pythagoras who were first obliged to spend five years in silence listening to their master speak behind the curtain, at the end of which they could look at him and were full members of the sect. it seems that clement of alexandria, an ecclesiastic writing around 250bc may be the sole source of this story, in his book stromateis. the writer jérôme peignot called this term to the attention of pierre schaeffer. ἄκουσμα akousma acousmatic “a thing heard“ “When the acousmêtric presence is a voice, and especially when this voice has not yet been visualised - that is, when we cannot yet connect it to a face - we get a special being, a kind of talking and acting shadow to which we attach the name acousmêtre. An entire image, an entire story, an entire film can thus hang on the epiphany of the acousmetre. Everything can boil down to a quest to bring the acousmetre into the light. Being in the screen and not, wandering the surface of the screen without entering it, che acousmêtre brings disequilibrium and tension. He invites the spectator to go see, and he can he an invitation. to the loss of the self, to desire and fascination. But what is there to fear from the acousmêtre? And what are his powers? The powers are four: the ability to be everywhere, to see all, to know all, and to have complete power. In other words: ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence. The acousmêtre is everywhere, its voice comes from an immaterial and non-localised body, and it seems that no obstacle can stop it. Media such as the telephone and radio, which send acousmatic voic­es traveling and which enable them to be here and there at once, often serve as vehicles of this ubiquity. the acousmêtre has only to show itself-for the person speaking to inscribe his or her body inside the frame, in the visual field- for it to lose its power, omniscience, and (obviously) ubiquity: I call this phenomenon de-acousmatization. Embodying the voice is a sort of symbolic act, dooming the acousmêtre to the fate of ordinary mortals. De-acousmatization roots the acousmêtre to a place and says, “here is your body, you’ll be there, and not elsewhere.“ Like­ wise, the purpose of burial ceremonies is to say to the soul of the de­ ceased, “you must no longer wander, your grave is here.“ De-acousmatization, the unveiling of an image and at the same time a place, the human and mortal body where the voice will hence­ forth be lodged, in certain ways strongly resembles striptease. The process doesn’t necessarily happen all at once; it can be progressive. In much the same way that the female [xyz] are the end point re­vealed by undressing (the point after which the denial of the absence of the [pp] is no longer possible), there is an end point of de-acousmatization - the mouth from which the voice issues. So we can have semi-acousmetres. or on the other hand partial de-acousmati­zations, when we haven’t yet seen the mouth of a character who speaks, and we just see his hand, back, feet, or neck. A quarter­ acousmêtre is even possible - its head facing the camera, but the mouth hidden! As long as the face and mouth have not been com­pletely revealed, and as long as the spectator’s eye has not “verified“ the co-incidence of the voice with the mourn (a verification which needs only to be approximate), de-acousmatization is in complete, and the voice retains an aura of invulnerability and magical power.“ - michel chion, voix au cinema