Film Dialogue

INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF PRIMER FOR FILM DIALOGUE STUDY

JEFF JAECKLE

Consider your favourite line of film dialogue. You know the words by heart, of course, but you can also recall their tenor, rhythm and placement in the narrative. You might remember as well how the filmmakers established the mood, anchored the character, advanced the plot, or echoed other films in the genre. Lingering over this line might also call to mind the historical era, including the film’s compliance with or reaction against prevailing cultural trends or political movements. So much in fact might be packed into the wording, delivery and context of this single line that its close analysis would seem not merely worthwhile but integral to your understanding of how the film works. This sense of curiosity animates Film Dialogue; a sense that patient study of film speech yields insights into the aesthetic, narrative and cultural dimensions of cinema that otherwise go unappreciated and unheard.

This central claim of Film Dialogue is that the most established areas of film studies – specifically genre, auteur theory and cultural representation – remain ripe with opportunities for reassessment and new knowledge because scholars have largely focused on cinematic images to the exclusion of cinematic language. This volume advances language-centred arguments to remind readers that ‘spectators’ are also ‘audiences’, that the look has its equal in listening, and that images are understood and appreciated through their interactions with words. Each essay here demonstrates that film is not a visual medium, as scholars have long touted, but an audio-visual medium replete with research possibilities.

Sarah Kozloff, whose contributions to the study of film dialogue in general and this anthology in particular cannot be overstated, debunks the longstanding bias against studying film speech in Overhearing Film Dialogue (2000), the first and only academic monograph of its kind. After dismantling arguments against speech as trivial and feminine, she charges film studies scholars with misinterpreting their object of study:

Perhaps the most noteworthy consequence of this anti-dialogue bias is that it has led to misconceptions in our model of how films actually work. Many of the ways in which narrative is communicated, empathy elicited, themes conveyed, visuals interpreted come from the interaction of the words with the visual images. Ignoring the role of the words has led to overestimation of what viewers understand from the visuals or the editing alone. (2000: 14)

Kozloff exposes these misconceptions by developing a lexicon for film dialogue study that she deploys in language-centred readings of four genres: westerns, gangster films, screwball comedies and melodramas. She refutes the narrow definition of cinema as a visual medium by demonstrating that ‘what the characters say, exactly how they say it, and how the dialogue is integrated with the rest of the cinematic techniques are crucial to our experience and understanding of every film since the coming of sound’ (2000: 6). Few have heeded her call to change, however, so film dialogue study has advanced little in well over a decade.1

These critical gaps suggest that despite advancements in film sound studies, the belief that cinema is a visual medium continues to hold sway, in turn spawning a number of practical problems. Trained to critique elements of camerawork, editing and mise-en-scène, many scholars have not developed the necessary analytical tools to study dialogue. With few film studies programs offering courses on sound, and even fewer on dialogue, students are entering academia ill-prepared to pursue research agendas centred on cinematic language, while their mentors are too entrenched in image-based research modes to retrain and take on these studies themselves. Nor can they consult textbooks on film dialogue to develop these skills, for existing screenwriting and sound production manuals tend to include maxims on ‘good’ dialogue, with little in the way of context and analysis.²

Even readers of Kozloff’s Overhearing Film Dialogue will not necessarily come away with an easily deployable toolkit, for it is a study of structural and generic patterns, not a textbook. It does not include a glossary of key terms, nor does it explicitly outline a methodology. Instead, it lets the results speak for themselves, an indirect approach that Kozloff acknowledges in the book’s closing paragraph:

Earlier I spoke of the prejudices against film dialogue – despite the efforts of earlier advocates – lingering like the undead. Movies have taught me that there are two ways of finally vanquishing a vampire: driving a stake through his heart or tricking him into tarrying until touched by the light of day. What I’ve tried to do here is the latter, and my chief ploy has been seduction by quotation: Wait! Don’t leave! There’s more for you to hear, to hear again. And with each example, from Wuthering Heights to Moonstruck, my hope is that the sky has grown a little brighter. (2000: 267)

This approach shows readers great respect and makes for a study rich in examples, yet it may have limited the applicability of the analyses Kozloff so expertly performs.

The contributors to Film Dialogue want readers to see the light of day that Kozloff endeavoured to reveal. We also want them to contribute to this light through teaching and research. The remainder of this Introduction is my attempt to initiate this transformation. Rather than entice readers to me, as Kozloff does, I take a stake-through-the-heart approach by prescribing a methodology of film dialogue study designed to vanquish unproductive habits. I outline four dialogue-centred practices, model the benefits that attend their use and point to instances where ignorance or avoidance of them has led to missed opportunities and misguided arguments. I propose these critiques not as indictments but as instructive examples of practices that, when followed, can yield deeper and more nuanced analyses. In the same spirit, I recommend essays here that readers might consult for illustrations of each dialogue practice. This explicit, step-by-step method aims to inculcate common-sense approaches to film dialogue study, so that readers can practice them, publish their findings and pass on their knowledge and skills to students.

I illustrate this methodology through Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), a long favourite in discourses on cinema. Robert Kolker captures the film’s critical reputation best when describing the numerous essays and monographs on Psycho as indicative of ‘the progress of film criticism itself … from formal analysis through methodologies of gender and psychoanalytical criticism, theories of the gaze, and that rarest of all things, analysis of the film’s music’ (2004: 26). It is therefore an excellent example upon which to gauge the exigency and efficacy of a methodology of film dialogue study.3

Step #1: Quote film dialogue

Whereas screen shots aid analyses of cinematic images, quotations of film dialogue aid analyses of cinematic language. Yet few scholars take advantage of quotation, choosing instead to describe dialogue to summarise plot or articulate themes. Kozloff observes, ‘for the most part analysts incorporate the information provided by a film’s dialogue and overlook the dialogue as signifier’ (2000: 6). This approach gleans surface-level content at the expense of word choice, sentence structure and literary and/or rhetorical qualities, not to mention aural elements of pitch, pacing and volume that affect every line’s delivery. Quotation of dialogue is therefore essential to grasping what characters say as well as how they say it; it is the means by which scholars can appreciate aesthetic, narrative and ideological details only glimpsed in descriptions.

Raymond Durgnat’s descriptions of Marion in the first third of Psycho, first published in The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, or the Poor Man’s Hitchcock (1974), underscore the value of dialogue quotation in arguments about characterisation and mood. Recall that Marion (Janet Leigh), in a ploy to marry her debt-ridden boyfriend Sam (John Gavin), steals $40,000 in cash and flees Phoenix, Arizona to be with him in Fairvale, California. Along the way, she encounters an unnamed highway patrolman, who questions her for sleeping in her car, and a used-car salesman, who trades her car for another. Durgnat describes these encounters to develop his portrait of Marion:

A big, brutal-looking motorbike cop with dark glasses trails her, suspiciously […] He is the ‘law’, but he has a special, personal brutality of his own. Is he really following her, or is she only imagining he is? The psychological pressures complicate and intensify. To shake him off, she exchanges her car at a garage run by a very obliging character, apparently the very antithesis of the cop. The cop is saying, ‘I remind you of punishment: go back!’; the garagehand, ‘I make crime pleasant and easy, go on.’ (2004: 87)

Durgnat’s alliterative descriptors ‘punishment’ and ‘pleasant’ are a clever way to capture Marion’s ambivalence, and his speculations on her interior monologue are rhetorically powerful. If, however, we quote and analyse the characters’ dialogue, we can perceive and appreciate verbal complexities that complicate their personalities and show them to be surprisingly similar.

Some of this dialogue supports Durgnat’s argument. His claim, for instance, that the motorbike cop is a ‘menacing figure’ is substantiated by the fact that he is unnamed and speaks in commands, such as ‘Hold it there!’ and ‘Turn your motor off’, and in curt statements and questions such as ‘Frankly, yes’ and ‘Well, is there?’4 Yet Durgnat’s descriptions overlook the officer’s concerns with Marion’s safety, such as when suggesting that she stay in a motel, and his use of ‘may I?’ and ‘please’, which soften his character and highlight Marion’s paranoia. The dialogue also supports Durgnat’s claim that the salesman is a ‘very obliging character’. His non-threatening name, ‘California Charlie’, and considerate statements about treating Marion ‘fair and square’ and allowing her to do ‘anything you’ve a mind to’ make him sound harmless. Yet Charlie also reminds Marion of possible threats. He references ‘trouble’, asks if someone is chasing her, and tacitly questions if she stole her car, which complicate his obliging demeanour with a palpable sense of danger.

These findings, while certainly not earth-shattering, demonstrate that dialogue quotation can yield nuances that otherwise go unheard; in this case, they reveal details of characterisation that affect our judgements of the scene. Marion is, as Durgnant suggests, ambivalent about the theft; however, quotation reveals an unexpected parallel in characterisation: the cop and salesman are ambivalent as well, aiding and impeding Marion during their conversations with her. These shared ambivalences actually strengthen Durgnant’s argument by making Marion’s encounters more unsettling and confusing, thus heightening the tension and suspense that swirl around her indecisiveness about the theft.

To appreciate similar nuances of speech that might exist in any film, scholars must quote film dialogue with the same frequency and attention to detail that they currently afford images. Quotation is the prerequisite for dialogue analysis, for it allows scholars to perceive – to a degree that descriptions cannot achieve – subtle yet telling speech patterns that deepen our understanding of a film, whether about the character who uttered or reacted to a line, the performer who delivered it, the writer who composed it, or the numerous others who miked, lit, photographed, mixed and edited it. However, some lines yield greater fruit than others, just as some images do. The first three chapters of Overhearing Film Dialogue outline the forms these felicitous lines might take, including those that characters repeat to themselves and others, those that begin or end a scene and those that strike audiences as novel, whether for their length, literariness, or delivery. I encourage readers to consult these chapters to learn what to listen for. Readers can also turn to any chapter of Film Dialogue to study instances of dialogue quotation, but might pay special attention to Thomas Leitch’s quotations of monologues and Brian Wilson’s and François Thomas’ quotations of multi-character exchanges (polylogues). Above all, I would stress that readers approach dialogue quotation as a matter of course when studying any film, for a line’s presence on the page is the first step in explications that can improve understanding of it, the entire film and the broader verbal dimensions of cinema.

Step #2: Verify the accuracy of film dialogue quotations

Accurate quotations of film dialogue are essential to studies of cinematic speech, for they guarantee that arguments are based, quite literally, on a common language.5 When scholars rely on screenplays and subtitles instead of on-screen dialogue, misquotations can and do occur. Kozloff does not address these habits in detail, but warns against relying on dialogue compilations, such as those acting students use, since ‘anthologies of film dialogue contain discrepancies from the film’s final dialogue’ (2000: 67). She also admonishes scholars for analysing subtitles because they ‘only translate a portion of the spoken text, and only that portion that the subtitler has decided is most important’ (2000: 26), thus leaving scholars prone to misquotations. Regardless of where they originate, once published, misquotations spread misinformation about how films actually work.

Robert Samuels’ ‘Epilogue: Psycho and the Horror of the Bi-Textual Unconscious’, first published in his Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory (1998), illustrates the importance of accurate quotation when advancing arguments about characterisation and representations of gender and sexuality. He argues that the film dramatises shifts from concealment to revelation and, in the context of the female subject, from revelation to effacement. Sex plays a large role in these transformations, which Samuels claims are apparent in the film’s opening scene, when audiences encounter Sam and Marion engaged in pillow talk in a cheap motel during her lunch hour. Their innuendo quickly turns to a matter-of-fact discussion of their future, including Marion’s insistence that they achieve a modicum of respectability by meeting in public and at her house for dinner. Marion’s directness and partial nudity in this scene strike Samuels as an unprecedented revelation of sexuality in Hitchcock’s oeuvre that will eventually demand her punishment:

However, in this film, everything is pushed up a notch, and that which is usually concealed begins to be revealed. This movement of revelation is, in part, highlighted when Sam says to Marion: ‘You make respectability seem disrespectful.’ Hitchcock’s attempt to present sexuality in a respectful way has now crossed over to its crude opposite. (2004: 154–5)

Samuels misquotes twice: the phrase is ‘sound disrespectful,’ not ‘seem disrespectful’, and Marion says this line, not Sam. The first error is minor: Samuels cites the wrong word ‘seem’, which has a similar meaning to the correct word ‘sound’. The second error is major, for it provides false evidence for Samuels’ reading of sexual repression in Psycho, specifically his claim that the ‘male-dominated cultural order works by effacing the female subject’ (2004: 154).

In this misquoted conversation, Sam links Marion to the disrespectful and crude, prefacing her effacement later in the film. In the actual conversation, Marion challenges Sam:

MARION: Oh, we can see each other. We can even have dinner, but respectably, in my house, with my mother’s picture on the mantel, and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three.

SAM: And after the steak, do we send Sister to the movies, turn Mama’s picture to the wall?

MARION: Sam!

SAM: All right. [pause] Marion, whenever it’s possible, I want to see you, and under any circumstances, even respectability.

MARION: You make respectability sound disrespectful.

SAM: Oh no, I’m all for it. It requires patience, temperance, and a lot of sweating out. Otherwise, though, it’s just hard work. But if I can see you and touch you, even as simply as this, I won’t mind.

This scene emphasises Marion’s presence and power, not her crudeness. It is she who dictates the terms of the couple’s relationship and chides Sam for making light of them, while he crudely references sex in his comments about sending away her sister and turning her mother’s picture to the wall. Sam also shamelessly confesses his attraction to Marion and his commitment to changing his behaviour; he wants to see her ‘under any circumstances’ and ‘won’t mind’ the hard work required to do so. Marion summons this power in her subsequent interactions with the film’s other male characters: she maintains her composure with the unnamed motorcycle cop, stands her ground with California Charlie and refuses Norman’s request to tarry in his parlour. Her dialogue in this opening scene with Sam is therefore crucial to understanding her character, for it establishes her verbal power over men, in addition to her more obvious physical allure. Samuels’ misquotation leads him away from these facts and thus from a fuller comprehension of Marion and the film’s treatments of gender and sexuality. His mistake demonstrates that misquoting even a single line of dialogue can transform how we read a scene, its characters and the entire film.

Scholars can avoid these pitfalls by quoting dialogue directly from the finished film, not from screenplays, subtitles, or dialogue anthologies. These texts are handy for quickly locating a line, but they should not be considered authoritative documents. Instead, I recommend that scholars manually transcribe dialogue that they intend to analyse. Hearing the dialogue as performed on-screen is certainly a good starting point for film dialogue study, particularly for vocal analyses, but transcriptions are the best means of verifying word choices, sentence structures and literary/rhetorical devices. Comparing these transcriptions to available screenplays and subtitles can clarify these details, but if these texts diverge, scholars should always defer to the finished film. (A notable exception would be research that explicitly traces a film’s evolution from script to screen.) Every essay in this volume models this practice of accurate quotation, but readers might find it instructive to consult the contributions by Hye Seung Chung and Stephane Dunn for transcriptions of dialect-heavy speech. Following these steps can ensure that quoted dialogue is accurate and therefore valid evidence, which subsequent scholars can bolster or challenge through recourse to the same language.

Step #3: Analyse the aural and verbal components of film dialogue

Whereas a single cinematic frame is an assemblage of photographic details of angle, scale, focus and lighting, a single syllable of film dialogue is an assemblage of phonographic details of pitch, pace and volume; this syllable also has linguistic and literary qualities pertaining to national language or regional dialect, word choice and wordplay. Audiences experience these elements simultaneously, but scholars can divide them into aural and verbal components for the purpose of study. The vast majority of dialogue in narrative cinema reveals a combination of these components, as performers’ voices shape sounds into words, clauses and sentences with aural form and ideational content. Concentrating on one to the exclusion of the other would obviously be a missed opportunity, yet many scholars do just that, typically by focusing solely on voices.

The most notable scholar of voice-centred analysis is Michel Chion, who has advocated convincingly for cinema as an audio-visual medium in Audio-Vision (1994), The Voice in Cinema (1999) and Film, A Sound Art (2009). However, he maintains a film-sound hierarchy that ranks the purely aural aspects of the human voice higher than its uses of language. Kozloff is critical of this position, explaining that Chion ‘regrets the dominance of intelligibility; he prefers what he calls “emanation speech” (what I term “verbal wallpaper”) – speech that may be inaudible, decentered, and that serves no narrative function. I find his argument misanthropic’ (2000: 120).6 Her frustrations stem, I believe, from the fact that Chion’s position flies in the face of how most narrative films actually work. Audiences gain information about characterisation, plot and theme from the specific words characters use. Without them, most narrative films would quickly fall apart and cease to compel our attentions.

Chion’s analysis of Psycho’s Mother in The Voice in Cinema illustrates that verbal-aural approaches to film dialogue can expand our appreciation of character dynamics. Chion contends that Mother’s existence as an ‘acousmother’ – an animate voice that lacks an animate body – does not diminish her dominance over Norman (Anthony Perkins), which she first exercises through her harsh criticism of him for inviting Marion to supper. He explains:

That’s when she [Marion] overhears a row offscreen, coming from the house, between Norman and an old woman with a hard, powerful voice that also sounds far-off and improbably bathed in reverb. The ‘acousmother’ unleashes her anger at her son’s gall, this libidinous boy, in proposing to bring a strange woman into her house. (1999: 141)

Chion’s descriptions of Mother’s vocal qualities ring true, yet their broad strokes fail to account for verbal patterns that unite the ostensibly opposite characters and show Norman to be a good deal more than a ‘libidinous boy’. An aural-verbal analysis of their dialogue reveals parallel argumentative strategies of mocking, rhetorical questioning and generalisation that suggest a twist on an old adage: like mother, like son.

Mother initiates these patterns in her opening exchange with Norman about inviting Marion to supper:

MOTHER: No! I tell you no! I won’t have you bringing strange young girls in for supper – by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap, erotic fashion of young men with cheap, erotic minds.

NORMAN: Mother, please!

MOTHER: And then what, after supper? Music? Whispers?

NORMAN: Mother, she’s just a stranger. She’s hungry, and it’s raining out.

MOTHER: ‘Mother, she’s just a stranger.’ As if men don’t desire strangers. As if – oh, I refuse to speak of disgusting things because they disgust me. Do you understand, boy? Go on! Go tell her she’ll not be appeasing her ugly appetite with my food, or my son. Or do I have to tell her ‘cause you don’t have the guts? Huh, boy? Do you have the guts, boy?

NORMAN: Shut up! Shut up!

Mother’s insults and commands establish her verbally abusive personality and set her apart from Norman, whose opening lines in the film (‘Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you in all this rain. Go ahead in, please’) characterise him as boyish and placating. Yet a comparison of Mother’s tirade about supper with Norman’s rant on institutions reveals the characters’ strikingly similar methods of verbal attack. After hearing Marion use the phrase ‘some place’ in connection with Mother, Norman leans forward and begins his verbal assault:

NORMAN: You mean an institution? A madhouse? People always call a madhouse ‘some place’, don’t they? ‘Put her in some place’.

MARION: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound uncaring.

NORMAN: What do you know about caring? Have you ever seen the inside of one of those places? The laughing and the tears and the cruel eyes studying you? My mother, there? [pause] But she’s harmless! [pause] She’s as harmless as one of those stuffed birds!

MARION: I am sorry. I only felt – it seems she’s hurting you. I meant well.

NORMAN: People always mean well. They cluck their thick tongues and shake their heads and suggest, oh so very delicately.

Like Mother, Norman is cruel and insistent, as his stutters are replaced by quickly paced yet articulate speech. Closer inspection reveals the verbal parallel of mocking. When Norman points out that Marion is a stranger, Mother transforms his words into a whiny plea: ‘“Mother, she’s just a stranger.” As if men don’t desire strangers.’ When Marion suggests putting Mother some place, Norman throws the words in her face: ‘People always call a madhouse “some place”, don’t they? “Put her in some place”.’ The characters further their insults through rhetorical questions. Mother’s criticism of Norman’s erotic mind is paired with the questions, ‘And then what, after supper? Music? Whispers?’ Norman highlights Marion’s uncaring attitude by questioning her knowledge of institutions: ‘Have you ever seen the inside of one of those places? The laughing and the tears and the cruel eyes studying you? My mother, there?’ These tirades also share a conspiratorial quality, evident in the speakers’ generalisations via rapid shifts from second- to third-person plural. Mother’s anger over Norman’s apparent attraction to Marion quickly becomes a critique of ‘strange young girls’ and ‘young men’, which is further generalised to ‘men’. Norman reacts to Marion’s suggestion of ‘some place’ with an immediate shift to ‘people’, all of whom apparently refer to madhouses euphemistically and also mean well. These parallel speech patterns show that Chion’s voice-only argument correctly characterises Mother, but at the cost of understanding the verbal components that shape Norman’s character and Mother’s relationship with him.

To ensure a balance of aural and verbal analyses with any film, scholars should approach each component separately, after which they can generate synthetic analyses. Listening to a scene while not viewing it can heighten perception of a performer’s vocal qualities of pitch, pace and volume, while also increasing awareness of overlapping dialogue and unintelligible speech. After transcribing the scene, scholars will have an easier time performing linguistic, literary, or rhetorical analyses. As suggested earlier, the first three chapters of Overhearing Film Dialogue outline the most common narrative functions of film dialogue, which scholars can consult to learn what to listen/read for. While every essay in this anthology combines aural and verbal study, readers might pay particular attention to those by Thomas Leitch, Deborah Carmichael and Edward Buscombe for analyses of linguistic, literary and rhetorical patterns; chapters by Donna Peberdy, Paul Wells and Vivian Sobchack showcase analyses of voices both human and nonhuman. Finally, scholars can synthesise their findings to determine how these components complement or challenge each other in advancing the film’s aesthetic, narrative and ideological agendas.

Step #4: Analyse the literal and figurative components of film dialogue

While film dialogue can be divided into aural and verbal components, the latter can be subdivided into literal and figurative components. Literal dialogue – what the characters say – advances plot, aids characterisation, or conveys messages or themes, while figurative dialogue – how characters deliver these lines, especially the words they use – gives rise to wordplay, or what Kozloff terms ‘verbal embroidery’, such as alliteration, rhyme, metaphor, pun and allusion (2000: 52). Focusing one component to the exclusion of the other would be yet another missed opportunity. As noted earlier, the vast majority of scholars attend solely to the literal aspects of dialogue; however, some create the opposite imbalance by analysing figurative dialogue while disregarding literal context.

David Sterritt’s reading of Psycho in The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (1993) demonstrates the value of considering both the literal and figurative dimensions of film speech to appreciate its narrative import. He concentrates largely on scatological and erotic puns in the conversation between Marion’s employer Lowery (Vaughn Taylor) and Tom Cassidy (Frank Albertson), the man from whom she steals the money. These puns include Lowery’s complaint that large cash transactions are ‘irregular’, Cassidy’s response that it’s his ‘private’ money and Cassidy’s later remark that Marion watched as he ‘dumped’ out the cash, which for Sterritt makes the ‘money=shit equation almost explicit’ (1993:105). While these puns are quite clever, bypassing their literal meanings leads Sterritt to inflate their figurative significance at the expense of grasping their narrative significance.

When examined literally, this same dialogue signals that Marion is in a unique position to acquire a large amount of money from an ideal source. Lowery’s comment that a $40,000 cash transaction is ‘irregular’ conveys not only a pun on bowel problems, as Sterritt suggests, but also that Marion is unlikely to be in proximity to such a huge sum again, thereby justifying her decision to commit theft. Cassidy’s response that the cash is his ‘private’ money may reference genitalia, but it also conveys the important fact that the money is untraceable and therefore ideal for stealing. The word ‘dumped’ could be a pun on defecation, but it also aligns with Cassidy’s vernacular speech patterns, which include ‘oughtta’, ‘thirstarooney’, ‘ain’t’ and ‘hot creepers’, that establish him as bizarre, corny and ‘other’ – character traits that make him less sympathetic as a victim of theft. Sterritt’s limited focus on figurative dialogue also deafens him to literal dialogue elsewhere in Psycho that explicitly supports his arguments about the film’s obsession with filth. These include Sam and Marion’s comments on motels that are ‘cheap’ and ‘of this sort’, Norman’s descriptions of the night as ‘dirty’ and dampness as ‘creepy’ and Mother’s complaints about ‘cheap, erotic minds’ and ‘disgusting things’.

To appreciate the literal and figurative dimensions of dialogue that may exist in any film, scholars should attend to each component separately, and then synthesise their findings. First, study the literal content of the dialogue, including how it aids in characterisation and advances the narrative; then, study the figurative implications of the dialogue, including the possible presence of alliteration, rhymes, puns, allusions and other devices that enrich the literal content with aesthetic or meta-textual flourishes. Readers will benefit from Kozloff’s overview of the literal and figurative functions of dialogue in chapter one of Overhearing Film Dialogue, but they will also learn from the models of literal-figurative analysis here, especially Todd Berliner’s essay on literal dialogue gone awry, and Vivian Sobchack’s and Jeremy Strong’s contributions on figurative dialogue that takes the form of poetic and coded language. The synthesis of these literal and figurative analyses will deepen readers’ understanding of the relationships between dialogue content and form, thus expanding their knowledge of how films actually work.

***

Equipped with these four practices, readers should be more capable of locating, citing and analysing dialogue when studying film. Having seen the benefits that come with film dialogue study, and the missed opportunities that result without it, readers should be more inclined to treat film dialogue with the same seriousness and attention to detail that they have likely afforded images. They should also be more attuned to the methods and motives of the essays that follow, each of which quotes dialogue accurately as evidence in support of aural and verbal, literal and figurative arguments about films, genres, filmmakers and cultural representations. Each contribution also eschews sweeping theories of film sound in favour of practical criticism of film dialogue in the belief that readers will derive greater benefit from accessible (and replicable) models of close analysis.

Section I, ‘Dialogue and Genre’, reminds readers that film genres evince verbal patterns. Just as genres coalesce around common iconographies, so too are they held together by speech patterns that ebb and flow throughout the life of a given genre. Kozloff set these arguments in motion with her language-centred readings of westerns, gangster films, screwball comedies and melodramas. The contributors to this volume look to other understudied areas to demonstrate that dialogue patterns are integral to single and hybrid genres, live action and animated films, as well as fiction and nonfiction films.

In her essay on science fiction cinema, Vivian Sobchack argues that the genre’s concerns with alienation and dehumanisation, fears of the future and the unknown, and the simultaneous fascination with and terror of technology, are well chronicled in patterns of banal and unemotional language, alien and inhuman languages, and uncomfortable silences. Yet Sobchack also demonstrates that such language is in tension with occasional and often startling uses of oratory, poetry and ritualised speech that attempt to capture the beauty and wonder of the images.

Turning from the fantastic to the ‘real’, Deborah Carmichael examines how documentary filmmakers use speech to establish personal and political relationships with audiences. After reviewing two strategies of documentary narration, voice-of-god and on-screen narrators, Carmichael turns to the work of Emile de Antonio to assess a third, less-studied technique that eliminates narration entirely and instead relies on the skilful editing of interviews, speeches and other footage to convey the filmmaker’s perspectives through the mouths of social actors.

Paul Wells argues that because only an actor’s vocal performance is significant in animated films, the images can liberate dialogue from its literal context (the actor) and transfigure or re-contextualise it in ways unheard of in other genres. This allows for greater sweep and play with language registers, from heightened naturalism to pronounced artificiality, often within a single character or scene, thus amplifying an audience’s awareness of and engagement with dialogue.

Jeremy Strong demonstrates that the dialogue patterns of several well-recognised genres, including war films, westerns, caper movies, sports films and action movies, culminate in a hybrid genre that he terms ‘Team Films’, which relies extensively on verbal cues that enunciate the team’s existence and hierarchies, member identities, codes of professionalism and principal goals.

Thomas Leitch reveals that while film adaptations can cut across any literary medium, style, or period, a common verbal thread is their reliance on lexical rather than oral presentation, which include ostentatiously correct grammar and enunciation, Latinate words and constructions, hypotactic syntax, long sentences and speeches.

The rationale of Section II, ‘Dialogue Auteurs’, is that just as genres evince verbal patterns, so too do filmmakers construct complex tapestries of speech that showcase their preoccupations with film as an audio-visual medium. In the same manner that scholars have associated filmmakers with signature visual flourishes – be it long takes, spiralling crane shots, or spectacular digital effects – the contributors in this section demonstrate that filmmakers often construct a signature aural style through diction, grammar, syntax, sentence structure and literary and rhetorical patterning.

Todd Berliner argues that, in stark contrast to the flawless, purposeful and unified dialogue commonly found in Hollywood movies, the dialogue in John Cassavetes’ films seems to have no overriding authorial or narrative purpose; instead, it focuses on narrative detours, irrelevancies and other impediments to linear narration. These differences help us understand why Cassavetes’ film dialogue, though it mimics the patterns of real speech, sounds so peculiar when we hear it in the context of a movie.

Drawing on the full range of Howard Hawks’ sound films, Brian Wilson charts the filmmaker’s preoccupations with two ostensibly opposed forms of dialogue: naturalistic, conversational speech and highly stylised, poetic speech. He reveals that instead of focusing on a single verbal form for a given film or genre, Hawks weaved both forms into a complex verbal system that transcended genre to become his signature style.

François Thomas traces Orson Welles’ use of overlapping dialogue from his early radio plays through to his final films to expand our existing notions of the filmmaker’s aural trademark. His argument underscores both the complexity and density with which Welles employed overlapping dialogue, with particular emphasis on sentence length, speed, volume, number of speakers and vocal ranges.

I argue that despite Preston Sturges’ well-earned reputation for crafting highly literate and formally complex lines of dialogue, an equally important though understudied source of his films’ greatness is their use of misspeaking, which includes mispronunciation, exaggerated dialects and malapropisms. Although these techniques vary in density from film to film, I demonstrate that they occur in every one of Sturges’ single-authored screenplays, thus revealing misspeaking as central to his filmmaking style.

Section III, ‘Dialogue and Cultural Representation’, builds upon Kozloff’s observation that cultural studies of film tend to concentrate on plot and characterisation to the relative exclusion of dialogue. ‘What is often overlooked’, she observes, ‘is how much the speech patterns of the stereotyped character contribute to the viewer’s conception of his or her worth; the ways in which dialect, mispronunciation, and inarticulateness have been used to ridicule and stigmatise characters has often been neglected’ (2000: 26). The contributors to this section reverse these trends by examining filmic presentations of gender, race, ethnicity and nationality from the explicit perspective of dialogue.

Edward Buscombe provides an historical overview of Native American film dialogue, from the vocabulary and syntax of dime-store novels that contributed to the pidgin English spoken by Indian characters in early westerns to the relatively recent use of subtitled tribal languages. Buscombe demonstrates that no matter what verbal patterns are employed, Native American film dialogue always involves a degree of stylisation that renders these characters as different or ‘other’.

Hye Seung Chung identifies parallel strategies of ‘othering’ in her focus on Asian film dialogue, advancing an argument for what she calls ‘sonic Orientalism’: a vocal system based on diction, syntax, pitch and intonation that performers (both Asian and Caucasian) have adopted to convey their characters’ pan-Asian otherness.

Stephane Dunn identifies verbal strategies that promote both othering and community in her study of African American dialogue in black action films of the 1970s, observing that their dialogue conveys the overt racial tensions and politics during this historical period. Yet she also finds that the dialogue performs black political discourses that, often through call-and-response patterns, declare the voice of the black community as a central character.

Turning from the community to the individual, Donna Peberdy’s essay explores how utterances construct or challenge the image of male identity fostered onscreen, with particular attention paid to the role of speech affectations in presenting and performing maleness. Using the careers of Humphrey Bogart and James Earl Jones as case studies, Peberdy demonstrates how performers adopt, suppress and exaggerate such affectations to shape their identities.

Although these essays constitute an important step forward in studies of film dialogue, they are unable to offer a complete history of dialogue in cinema. Despite the studies on science fiction and documentaries, there are unwritten works on horror and film noir. Despite the essays’ contributions to our knowledge of the dialogue strategies of Orson Welles and John Cassavetes, we remain ignorant of those employed by Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee. Despite new insights on the verbal stereotyping and marginalisation of African Americans and Asians in cinema, research is still needed on the sonic portrayals of Latinos and Muslims. For everything that this anthology does include, I am reminded as an editor of what it leaves out. Thus is the complicated position for the first collection of essays on a massive yet historically overlooked field of study. I am optimistic, however, that, inspired by these essays, scholars will hopefully begin to research, publish and teach on this long-silent area of film studies, so that critical discussions of film dialogue will one day be as common as today they are rare.

notes

1 Kozloff’s influence is most apparent outside film studies, in linguistics, where scholars such as Monika Bednarek (2010), Kay Richardson (2010), Marta Dynel (2011), and Roberta Piazza et al. (2011) have applied her theories in the contexts of pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Even among film sound scholars, dialogue remains a distant fourth area of inquiry, behind scoring, voices, and sound effects. Elisabeth Weis (1982), Kaja Silverman (1988), and Michel Chion (1994, 1999, 2009) have done outstanding work on the gendered, ideological, and epistemological implications of the voice in cinema, yet they have largely ignored the verbal dimensions of the dialogue that these voices shape. John Belton and Elisabeth Weis (1985), Rick Altman (1992, 2004), James Lastra (2000), Richard Abel and Rick Altman (2001), and Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda (2008) have advanced our knowledge of technological and cultural developments in silent and sound cinemas, but their work has yet to be applied to the production and consumption of film dialogue.

2 Gianluca Sergi advances a similar argument in his study of Dolby: ‘The soundtrack is an area of creativity as fertile and exciting as any in filmmaking, yet the majority of scholars and critics have by and large remained impervious to all things sound for nearly a century. The origin of this neglect can be traced to another short statement: film is a visual medium. […] The vast majority of established theories and notions of cinema revolve around this statement, and so do the methods of analysis that scholars employ to investigate movies. Textual analysis, mise-en-scène, the auteur theory, views of spectatorship and audience behaviour, notions of genre, studies of performance, histories of the cinema, and issues of representation: these are but a handful of core concepts in film studies that operate from the assumption that film is indeed a visual medium’ (2004: 4).

3 Kolker’s assessment of the ‘rarest’ area of film study is inaccurate. Whereas Royal S. Brown (1982), Elisabeth Weis (1982), Jack Sullivan (2006) and other scholars have studied scoring in Psycho, sincere engagements with its dialogue are exceedingly uncommon, perhaps the best example being William Rothman’s Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1982). Most scholars appear to have taken their cues from Hitchcock, who claimed to care nothing for film dialogue, preferring it ‘simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms’ (Hitchcock in Truffaut 1967: 163). Kolker’s oversight of dialogue analysis hints at a similar dismissal, and it suggests that the most crushing blow to film dialogue study is not a vocal crusade against it, but a passive slighting through silence.

4 All dialogue quotations are from my transcriptions of the films. See the subsection of this Introduction, ‘Step #2: Verify the accuracy of film dialogue quotations’, for an explanation of this practice.

5 Rick Altman, McGraw Jones and Sonia Tatroe advise against transcribing dialogue, contending that ‘the object of study is in fact not the film soundtrack, nor even a specific identifiable portion of the film’s sound, but a linguistic construct substituted for the film’s actual sound’ (2000: 340). Not surprisingly, I find this argument untenable. Film dialogue is composed of sounds and words with formal and semantic features, making it a ‘specific identifiable portion’ of film sound. Transcriptions of these sounds and words facilitate analysis, in the same way that notations aid studies of score. These transcriptions are obviously substitutions for recorded dialogue, but how else could one study it carefully? Anything less, as I demonstrate in this introduction, might yield abstract and unsubstantiated arguments.

6 See Jaeckle (2011) for a critique of how Chion’s film-sound hierarchy affects his arguments in Film, A Sound Art.

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