Sound: Building the Invisible

Film sound evokes the existence of spaces beyond the frame. It also influences what is visible, and shapes our response towards what we see on the screen. This chapter examines sonic space in two Gothic melodramas, Secret Beyond the Door (Lang 1947) and Midnight Lace (Miller 1960). It attends to the vocal performance of the actress starring in each film, (Joan Bennett and Doris Day respectively) and at the material choices made in recording their voice and layering it into the film text. Each film portrays a woman who has married a stranger and come to live in his dangerous house. They inhabit their respective sonic domains in contradictory and often surprising ways. Lang’s film plays with voice-over and voice doubling, whereas Miller’s later update of the genre remains strictly synchronised. However, we discover that sound is not so easily moored to image. Theoretical issues around attempts to contain and recess female subjectivity are challenged and reviewed. The presence of a restless and errant female subjectivity is discovered to travel along the invisible conduit of sound and to link with the melodramatic substrate of both narratives.