Words to the wind: voice, body and melodrama in sound cinema

Abstract

In this article we focus on film melodrama, traditionally regarded as a predominantly visual mode of representation, in which moral clashes manifest in visible signs. Within the literature that fundaments research in the field, melodrama is said to be a drama of muteness: the voice does not offer enough tools to adequately express overwhelming emotion. That notion, however, reveals itself fragile under a more attentive eye regarding ideas of voice, body and logos. Informed by authors who discuss sound and voice, we propose a reformulation of that assertion: once free from the shackles of language, voice persists in its most natural materiality, in the form of screams, cries, sighs and singing. The limitation wouldn’t be one of the voice, but one of speech – the limitation of language’s capacity to express the unspeakable. Melodrama wouldn’t be the drama in which voice fails, but the one in which the vocal surpasses the verbal, the drama in which the voice triumphs over logos.