Asynchronicities: Sound-image disjunctions, deviant meanings, and Euro-American cinema

Film theory is dominated by the under-examined assumption that film as a medium, cinema as a complex of technologies, and film reception as an embodied experience, have first and foremost to do with sight or visuality. Combining film history, feminist film theory, and critical race and queer theories, this thesis foregrounds the cinema sound-track and asserts its need for more concerted research and theorization. To this end, an extended analysis is offered of ways in which departures from the prevailing Euro-American industrial film aesthetic---the synchronization of sound and image---have produced reception sites for under-represented audiences, have multiplied the registers of film semiosis, and have proliferated possibilities for identification that deviate from hegemonic race, sex, and gender norms. Shifts in sound-image relations instigate changes in the receptive subject, in structures of meaning, and in the modes available for representing non-normative sexualities. This thesis argues that such shifts and variations demand fuller accountings than are possible using film-theoretical models that privilege the visual.; Chapter One, centering on the films of Alice Guy Blache, mobilizes examples that demonstrate how early cinema sound often supported resistant reception and generated counter-narration. Chapter Two re-reads Dorothy Richardson's film writings, contextualizing these within emergent and sometimes competing discourses of sexuality and race in the 1920s; an aesthetic of asynchronous sound-image relations is discovered that positions these writings as arguably the first extended body of film-sound theory. The resonating effects of Richardson's sapphic modernist context are tracked in Chapter Three to the aesthetic of film noir, and to new renderings of cinema sound-space influenced by radio in the 1940s. RKO's "cat people" films are closely read to illustrate how new structures for representing sex/gender deviance and new models of the sexual subject were enabled by changes in sound technologies and sound-image relations. The limitations of feminist theorizations of the "gaze" in the 1970s are revisited in Chapter Four. Chantal Akerman's films become points of departure for proposing alternative theoretical models that give weight to sound and to image equally, open up possibilities for re-theorizing the cinematic subject, and accommodate more flexible "morphological imaginaries."...