![]() Black filmmakers, Latinx, female, LGBTQ, working class directors, writers, cinematographers can voice (note the use of the word as a verb) the soul, agendas, sensibility, humanity, the dignity of where they come from - the paradox here being that in doing so they render the particular universal. Stop there… a filmmaker can speak for a community, a culture, can give “voice” to the oppressed, the under-represented, the marginalized, the disrespected, the abused, those blocked from opportunity, participation, and fulfillment by the structures of society and politics and the people these serve. Then, again: The expressed opinion or will of the people, a group, etc. A say in what we know as “the conversation”. (A word can be like a tree - a trunk of original meaning, branches its usage in varying contexts, twigs and leaves its figurative resonances.) The right to have a part or share in the control or deciding of something an opportunity to express an opinion etc. How might this work figuratively? What might vocal organs represent? The psyche of the filmmaker? Their persona? Their background, personal history, circumstances? Their traumas, complex PTSD, general screwed-upness? Or something more mysterious? Their soul? Their creative soul? (How do you define that?) Or are the processes of filmmaking themselves, the story-making, story understanding and telling, the processes of pre-production, collaboration, the shoot, the cut and post-production, are these, metaphorically speaking, those vocal organs, aquiver at the delivery of a story? Or is the filmmaker’s choice of material - their story and characters, their milieu, conflict, theme, drama not the aforementioned sound itself but the vocal organs, the means of its dissemination? ![]() What are we looking for? Voice, in our sense, is used metaphorically, thus that sound correlates with… what? Address? Style? Tone? Choice of subject matter, genre, dramatic register, world? Which? Then: produced by the vocal organs. Open the app… enter voice, a nano-pause and… the literal meaning heads the list: Sound produced by the vocal organs of humans or animals… A moment to consider. Back to basics then - what’s in the dictionary? As a Brit my go-to is The Shorter Oxford. But no, I realized - it was high time I thought the student’s question through, providing them with more helpful considerations even if a definitive answer might prove elusive.įirst things first: what do we mean by the concept of voice? It’s a word everyone uses, a notion we all affect to understand - but do we? Where to start? Always a challenge when common usage has long since buried meaning. (Nabokov said the act of writing a story begins with a throb.) Offer half a dozen such maxims, I hoped, and I could disguise my inability to come up with an answer. (Know them, embrace them, and there you have it.) T S Eliot on how “immature writers imitate, and mature writers steal.” (It’s not what you pilfer but how you use what you’ve pilfered.) Hilary Mantel on the creative act - coming from the gut, she posits, as she reflects from her head. Susan Sontag on how limitations form voice. Impulse, too often my muse, instructed me to offer a few pithy references. If only I knew, I could pen a best-seller, rest up into my dotage. Not “How do I work with actors?” (important, yes), not “How do I block a scene?” (depends), not “What do I need to know about lenses?” (let the physics serve the storytelling, the emotion), not “How much rehearsal do I need per page?” (maybe you have the wrong idea here?), not “How many scenes should there be in a movie?” (you’ve definitely got the wrong end of the stick), nor “Should I storyboard or not storyboard?” (pre-visualization, on-set flexibility the more fundamental considerations), but “ How do you find your voice?” ![]() Well-known decade, band, singer, well-known voice.Ī student came with a question.
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