Voices and Talking Heads

Bringing a step further the trend started in 2000 of using well-known film actors as voice-over narrators in commercial nonfiction productions (Honess Roe 2018), in the last five years in Italian documentaries, and especially in art-related ones, national film stars have increasingly been employed as voices-of-authorities. Attention is paid to choosing for the role performers whose star personas well fit the subject matter addressed. Yet, while the selected stars are called to exhibit their acting qualities through reciting, in voice-off, documents or excerpts of literature concerning the aspect of the real tackled by the film, their bodies are usually treated as mere “attractions”, restricting their appearance to shots that have a purely “exhibitionist quality” (Buckland 2006).

After introducing this phenomenon, the paper focuses on two biographical titles that are an expression of it: Diva! (2018) by Francesco Patierno, wherein eight contemporary Italian stars illustrate each a portion of actress Valentina Cortese’s existence through reciting also excerpts of her autobiography, and Nilde Iotti, il tempo delle donne (2020) by Peter Marcias, wherein popular actress Paola Cortellesi similarly leads the viewer at the discovery of the life of female politician Nilde Iotti spouting also declarations from this pioneering woman. Through a close analysis of these two films, the paper demonstrates how, if showcasing the star’s body is a-problematic when done in art-related documentaries, the same is not true when it comes to biographical titles. Indeed, the paper shows how, in works as Diva! and Nilde Iotti, il tempo delle donne, the incorporation itself of the body of a star with the intertextual references to previous roles and public identity that it brings with itself determines for these biographical films to lose the status of documentaries proper and become fact-fiction hybrids close (but not superimposable) to docudramas.

What social and ethical consequences arise when talking head interviews are repurposed for alternate narratives? This question has long been asked of documentaries, but it is also vital in our current age of fake news, when deepfakes can make anyone appear to say or do something they never did. In this presentation, I discuss a 2018 deepfake video where Jordan Peele impersonates Obama to warn viewers about lip-syncing AI. I show how the technological and aesthetic manipulations that hack Obama’s speech reflect social and political concerns that have also permeated scholarship on found footage and documentary voice, music sampling, and audio-visual manipulation technology. Building on these studies, I situate deepfakes in a long history of lip-syncing technologies, where technicians and industries have often employed racial and gendered stereotypes to make audio-visual synchronization more believable to spectators. As deepfakes attempt to replicate Obama’s presidential character, they reveal the audio-visual efforts of embodied performance that construct Obama’s public persona.

To specify how deepfakes construct Obama’s persona according to audio-visual stereotypes, I compare deepfakes to the talking head device in documentary—inspired by the technicians who call their deepfakes talking heads. As scholars like Bill Nichols, Pooja Rangan, and Salomé Skvirsky have shown, talking heads can be empowering for documentary subjects, but directors also can manipulate talking head footage to create their desired interpretation of events. Talking head deepfakes similarly distill the multiple significations of one’s voice and body to create a believable persona. Thus, the deepfake talking head carries lip sync’s technological and aesthetic baggage of synchronizing a subject to a stereotypical image for the purpose of quick signification to audiences. Much as lip sync creates a type of homogenous embodiment that unites a subject’s voice and body with a film’s truth claims, talking head deepfakes attempt to pass as embodied speech.

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the documental and evidential value of sound recordings in the frame of documentary forms that reflects on colonial pasts and post-colonial relations, focusing on the case study of the 2007 documentary The Halfmoon Files – A Ghost Story by Philipp Scheffner. The film is constructed around the ethnographic vocal recordings hold at the Lautarchiv in Berlin, a collection comprising around 1,650 shellac discs recorded in German prisoner-of-war camps during WWI in the frame of a project initiated in 1915 by ethno-linguist Wilhelm Doegen. Doegen’s intent was, in his words, to build “the first global sound library” collecting languages and music of ethnographic groups coming from all over the world. Prisoners involved in the project came mainly from the colonial territories of France, Russia and the United Kingdom, with a large presence of Muslims form India and North Africa. In his search for finding an image, a ghostly body for the voice recording number PK619, Scheffner questions the value of sonic documents in creating a particular narrative of European democracies’ colonial past.

In the first part of the paper I interpret the film in the light of the “evidential paradigm” elaborated by Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg and focus on the relation between acoustic and visual documentality. In the second part I reflect on the different values of the sound recordings – the epistemic and scientific value on one hand and the archival and memorial value on the other – problematizing European regimes of knowledge production and the issue of restitution in the frame of post- and neo-colonialist archival relations.