Voice-off and the First-Person Plural: the Women’s Strike Film of the "long 68"

media release:

During the 1960s and 1970s the voice as medium and concept traverses activism, filmmaking, and an emergent film theory — from psychoanalytic approaches to film sound to consciousness-raising groups to the consolidation of the testimonio genre. It is especially germane to what B. Ruby Rich deemed “cinefeminism”: the global explosion of feminist filmmaking, collectives, and festivals internationally throughout the 1970s, prior to the emergence of feminist film studies in academia. This talk engages the sororal modality of documentary filmmaking I call the women’s strike film, which deployed the oft-maligned strategy of voice-off to index the strike as collective formation. Drawing on contemporaneous examples from Colombia, India, France, Bolivia, and the U.S., I show how filmmakers of the 1970s turned to voice-off to encode labor resistance as a pronomial experiment in the feminized first-personal plural. In the women’s strike film, disembodied or semi-disembodied vocal commentaries query understandings of the voice as irreducibly specific (sutured to individual biographies) while also eschewing the voice-over (with its fraught “voice-of-God” legacy). Drawing on both classic and contemporary approaches to off-screen sound in documentary and fiction film, I show how voice-off produces the complex, at once intimate and ironic, collective subject of the women’s strike film: a “we-narrative” emerging through strike-making and collaborative approaches to filmmaking and circulation. Contra claims that locate the strike in the past tense — as an antiquated strategy that ostensibly peaked in the 1970s — the international women’s strike film of the long ’68 has become newly relevant in the contemporary period, with festivals, journals, and restorations attesting to its ongoing resonance as cross-class feminist coalition work.

Biography:

Sarah Ann Wells is associate professor in the Department of English at UW-Madison and member of the steering committees of the Center for Visual Cultures and Havens Wright Center for Social Justice. A specialist in Latin American film and media studies, she is the author of Media Laboratories: Late Modernist Authorship in South America (2017) and co-editor of Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema (2015). She is currently completing a book entitled The Labor of Images: the Strike Film and World Cinema Form, the recipient of fellowships from the ACLS, Fulbright, and Cornell Society for the Humanities.