Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Into the Vortex
ISBN: 9780252092411
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Illinois Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Voice-overs.; Voice in motion pictures.; Women in motion pictures.;

Into the Vortex challenges and rethinks feminist film theory's brilliant but often pessimistic reflections on the workings of sound and voice in film. Including close readings of major film theorists such as Kaja Silverman and Mary Ann Doane, Britta H. Sjogren offers an alternative to image-centered scenarios that dominate feminist film theory's critique of the representation of sexual difference.
Sjogren focuses on a rash of 1940s Hollywood films in which the female voice bears a marked formal presence to demonstrate the ways that the feminine is expressed and difference is sustained. She argues that these films capitalize on particular particular psychoanalytic, narratological and discursive contradictions to bring out and express difference, rather than to contain or close it down. Exploring the vigorous dynamic engendered by contradiction and paradox, Sjogren charts a way out of the pessimistic, monolithic view of patriarchy and cinema's representation of women's voices.

Britta H. Sjogren is a filmmaker and associate professor of cinema at San Francisco State University. Her films include Jo-Jo at the Gate of Lions (1992), A Small Domain (1996, Grand Jury Prize for Best Short Film at Sundance) and In This Short Life (2005).