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Gabrielle McNally, Annabelle Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore (eds), Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary, Screen, Volume 61, Issue 2, Summer 2020, Pages 333–336, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa023
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Extract
The notion of ‘voice’ in documentary studies has been skewed towards rhetoric since Bill Nichols first published ‘The voice of documentary’ in 1983. By metaphorically codifying documentary voice as an implicit filmmakers’ tool, the multifaceted ways in which voice truly functions have been overlooked. The editors of this volume – Annabelle Honess Roe, an award-winning scholar in animation studies, and Maria Pramaggiore, a leading scholar in voice studies – have devised an innovative text that explores through a nuanced curation of essays the complexities of voice in documentary, often turning Nichols’s definitions on their head. This edited volume re-evaluates and departs from Nichols’s use of the term ‘voice’ as a metaphor, and addresses the ‘role of voices as they produce speech, music, and sound as an integral aspect of documentary representation’ (Pramaggiore, p. 78). The contributing authors do not look at voice theoretically but rather as a real sonic medium that bears meaning and provides evidence independent of its rhetorical function.