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This chapter examines the interaction between voice, sound, and space in the little-known comedy Keep Your Right Up: A Place on Earth (Jean-Luc Godard, 1987), focusing in particular on the sculptural capacity of the raw, fluid, and dynamic singing voice of Catherine Ringer, the lead singer of the French electro-pop band Les Rita Mitsouko. Analysis of the compositional role of the nonsync singing voice is underpinned by Georgina Born’s conceptualization of musical spatiality, encompassing key concepts proposed by the sound theorists Simon Emmerson and Denis Smalley. The principal argument is that although the singing voice constitutes one of the central organizing elements in this film, it is not the singing voice alone that is powerful. Rather, it is the blending of voice with the ambient soundscape and the alignments of voice with the visual image that together generate a unique relational space that reconfigures the relationship between spectator and screen.

Rather than accepting a particular language as a bounded entity, the UK-based French-Norwegian poet Caroline Bergvall positions her multimedia work Drift within the oceanic fluidities of linguistic and etymological change. Despite the passage over centuries and languages of her main source text, the anonymous Old English poem TheSeafarer, the movement of contemporary migrants at sea is brutally constrained. This conflict is an acoustic paradox: if language is already resonant with the echoes of so many transitory pasts, how it can be used to sustain rigid identities and borders? These questions of orientation and direction are posed in relation to acousmatic listening, where the source of a sound is not revealed, as well as through the affordances of collaborative sound and visual performance. Listening becomes a critical process of locating oneself in social, ecological and political contexts.

Disembodied voices resound across the post-Vietnam Hollywood combat film. Some are heard in real time by way of military technology, such as radios which let soldiers and audiences experience battles which are heard but not seen (acousmatic battles, in Michel Chion’s term). Different wars present different technological opportunities to unify the dispersed nature of modern combat by way of the soundtrack. Disembodied voices also enter these films by way of tape recordings sent from home, allowing the voices and perspectives of women into otherwise all-male films. Letters heard in voice-over frequently deliver the voices of soldiers who died in the line of duty. When present, voice-over narration in these films is assigned to specific characters who offer their individual perspective on events. Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line takes this approach an extreme, combining voice-overs attached to specific characters with acousmatic voices that speak from a kind of soldier’s over-soul.

Chapter six turns to Marcelo Piñeyro’s El Método (2005) to examine a perceived tension in contemporary societies between the depoliticization of the public sphere and the opposite call for its repoliticization. The film productively presents this tension in two ways: first, by inviting viewers to participate in depoliticizing structures of power, and then by inviting them to question their role and responsibility in those structures. On the one hand, the film uses the cinematic split-screen technique to grant viewers a godlike perspective and ability to watch different actions and events synchronically, as if through a surveillance camera. Job candidates are scrutinized from the point of view of a multinational corporation during massive anti-corporate globalization protests in Madrid, which the mass media presents in dismissive terms. On the other hand, the film’s subtle use of sound effectively disrupts the complicity of the viewer in these structures and provides possibilities for political subjectivation. Drawing on the work of Michel Chion and Mdalen Dolar, the chapter shows how the “acousmatic sound” of protest irrupts into the viewer’s given space of the visible and provides avenues for what might be called a “sonic emancipation.”