The memory cards of Jeux impairs are laid out in a symmetrical rectangle on the table, which is brightly lit. A camera and a microphone have been installed at a fixed point above the table. Everything is set up and ready when Jacob is dropped off by his parents at the location of filming. We don’t want to waste any time, so we immediately begin, making use of the magic of curiosity, the excitement of the unknown, and the close concentration arising from new discoveries. The film team quickly introduce themselves. I explain the scene and the game, and the actor explains the roles and the rules of the shoot: never look directly at the camera, behave as if the equipment were not there. Jacob is visibly impressed, but not intimidated. We get started. The cameras are rolling. The actor asks Jacob who should turn over the first card. He thinks about it and then whispers, “You start.” She continually asks him questions about the images on the cards. What do you see? Do you recognize that place? Do the cards go together? He usually answers very briefly and only in a whisper. Even though she asks him several times to speak more loudly, he goes on whispering. We take a break and ask him to speak normally. Why is he whispering? So that the microphones can’t hear him, he tells us with a mischievous smile. He jumps up to the microphone over the table and blows into it loudly. The sound assistant cries out.
This anecdote from the shoot could lead to different analyses. For example, it could be seen as part of Jacob’s strategy of taking control, meaning that his whispering might be read as a rebellious act aiming to change the rules of the game [E is for Evaluation/N is for Normality Principle]. In terms of its effect, whispering also creates a different kind of ‘voice’ which leads to a sort of polyphony, not only through the changed quality of sound but through the associations it awakens: speaking in a whisper evokes the possibility that different voices might be joining in (the opinions of others, secret thoughts, ghosts, etc.).
Polyphony has become one of the basic montage principles of the film-essay. The fugue as a musical form of composition, which is characterized by a complex discussion of themes through repeating deployment of motifs in different voices, also served Maya Deren as a structural point of reference as she developed her Film in Progress. Her planned montage was to use contrapuntal polyphony to make the shared patterns visible in rituals, with different voices corresponding to the different cultures which she wanted to bring together [C is for Cross-Cultural]. The polyphony which forms the basis for the cross-temporal fugue in my film-essay Face No Dial of a Clock was originally contained in the different perspectives associated with the life stages of the people in the selected case studies: temporal perceptions in childhood, in the vita activa, and in advanced age. The multiple layers of asynchronicity only become clear through a further aspect: it is not only about the perspectives of different age groups as temporal perceptions determined by socially constructed regimes of time, but also about the subjective experience of several different responses to time at the moment of a particular life situation, i.e., the multiple layers of subjectivity itself. The different voices of a group of people or characters are supplemented by the polyphony within each of these subjects.
The polyphony of the fugue as a form is characterized by varying repetition of themes in different voices, which produce contradictions: for a particular theme, there is a counter-voice (a counterpoint), and the two pursue each other with particular urgency (fuga in Latin means ‘flight’). Transferred from music to film, these formal principles of the fugue are implemented at several different levels in my film-essay: in the montage as a whole, which creates rhythms and ‘movements’ from the interplay of images and sound, and also in the narrative voice of the voiceover. This may be one voice – that of the narrator, who describes various encounters and conversations – but at the same time, various different voices become audible within that of the narrator. In the process of developing this narrative voice as a form of mental dialogue with the invented character of Chiara [H is for Historical Present], I found a possible way to explore the internal polyphony of subjectivity more deeply.
“I often see more clearly from somewhere else, as someone else. And in that imagined other, I sometimes find what I may have been hiding from myself. In the free play of imagination, in the words that rise from unconscious sources, as well as in the bodily rhythms that accompany the act of writing a novel, I am able to discover more than I can when I simply try to remember. This is not a method for disguising reality but for revealing the truth of experience in language.”57
At another point, Siri Hustvedt describes fiction writing as the ‘open listening’ of an imagined other, and connects this with psychoanalysis and the form of the fugue. This involves attention to repetition, variations and opposing voices, to the point that the whole process is a “search for a story […] that feels right and makes sense.”58 As a writer, Hustvedt is concerned with turning the process of the search into a part of the story, whereas I see the orality of the voiceover as offering further potential for searching: not only by including the search in the narration, but also through the way in which different voices emerge in the variations in the speaker’s voice, in the differences in sound and timbre, in the rhythm and in the level of tension in the speaker’s body.
Over a period of eighteen months, I went to the sound studio six times to re-record the voiceover. Sometimes this was because the text had changed, and sometimes it was because I wanted to change the way I spoke in the new recording. Since I am not a professional voice actor, I often found it frustrating that I could not control my own voice in such a way that the result would match what I imagined. But precisely due to the inconsistency and subtle breaks in the voice which became audible in the montage between the parts cut together from recordings at different times, the sound which emerged was an internal, subjective polyphony. Thus, the final version of the voiceover was not seamless either, but remained a patchwork of recordings of various attempts.
