Faustian Ethos and Vocal Ambitus:
The Vocal Style of Actors Playing
Faustian Situations
1. Trust : It depends…
I am here
to talk about voice because my expertise is in the analysis of intonation –
vocal style, or "phonostylistics"[1].
With it, I try to situate my work within a broader cognitive semiotic approach
to theater and cinema reception based on empirical analysis, with references to
scholars such as Marco DeMarinis and Josette Féral[2].
Voice and
trust, risk, civility. I am
tempted to start this reflection without defining the terms. Instead, I’ll
refer to an expression that is often found in comments about one's tone of
voice or style in writing, or or about the ways of an actor, when they inspire
the intuition, when they give the feeling they are truthful, trustworthy, that
there is nothing risky about them : this expression is "an accent of
sincerity". "Accent de sincérité", "Accento di
sincerità" -- the expression is similar in French and Italian, and means
the same thing. It is used to praise a person or a character, a performance, a
poem, even a piece of music.
But does an
"accent of sincerity" have a real phonostylistical existence ?
Pierre Léon, for one, does not mention it in his Précis de phonostylistique[3]. Personally,I think it is possible to say
that people find a voice sincere when it does not show the features of a lying
voice[4]
– which doesn't say much, because good liars are hard to catch (lie-detection
for law enforcement is based on multi-sensory analysis, which will probably
include in the near future the micro vibrations of the voice, in addition to
sweat and heartbeat monitoring.) Outside of that, features of reflexiveness,
such as a slower pace, a lower pitch ; and features of eroticism and close
contact like some breathiness and
low intensity, are also chiefly compatible with the identification of
sincerity. Typically, in classical cinema, those features are found in love
scenes like this one, from the 1941 Dr. Jekyll & Mr.
Hyde[5].
What is interesting
when we take a concrete example like this one is that an abstract feature like
"sincerity" suddenly becomes a case, a case from a class of
occurrences that we feel to be virtually present to our mind, even though, when
we stop to think about it, we may not dispose of any other similar case in our
exploitable memory. Still, we are always quick to accept that someone is
"the kind who will…" or, "no, that one, he is not the type who
could…" something.
So now, after this one example, we all have a sense of our expectations for
this kind of scene, be them phonostylistical, gestural, or of any other aspect
of this art. Given a certain state of the spectator's expectations regarding
sincerity, playing the same scene differently by tampering with its equilibrium
will result in one of two things : the character will seem less
trustworthy, or the acting less effective. Please, bear this in mind when you
watch this other Dr. Jekyll love scene, filmed 10 years before my previous example : Sincere love[6].
Too loud for
sincerity, no? This is often what happens when today's spectators watch the
first talking movies. Actors back then played too mechanically or theatrically
by contemporary standards (and there are of course historical reasons for
that), but we could easily get used to it. –Human aural attention is highly
efficient in canceling out informational and stylistical noise or redundancy. I
have another example, from the same movie : this young girl[7],
who was to sound
sincere, by 1931 standards. Obviously, her intonations, together with the
ecstatic look of her eyes, make the scene intolerably naïve, which in turn
dissolves any possible "accent of sincerity".
Similarly, one could
think of a thousand situations where a character will be delivering a truthful,
transparent message using phonostylistical features coherent with the
action but which have little to do with any preconceived "standard"
accent of sincerity . Calling for help, voicing a strong refusal,
imploring a superior, or simply crying can all be sincere trustworthy conducts
associated with other principal vocal features. Still, an author could write
realistically that any of those conducts was performed "with an accent of
sincerity".
In the three types of
cases we have seen so far -- the sincere love scene, the poorly acted scene,
and the irrelevant scene -- we can see that the presence of a true "accent
of sincerity" is less a question of objective factualism than the result
of a judgment call : it involves trust in the hermeneutical evaluation of
the association of a voice, a body, a personality and a pragmatic situation. In
a movie, those judgment calls are seldom left for the audience to freely make
alone. A spectator taking the liberty to retain his trust, as we just did, is
more or less abandoning his suspension of disbelief in favour of critical thought. But, in normal Hollywoodian
cases, the director should know, line by line, who among all his characters and
his ideal spectator, is entitled to rightfully trust any assertion made on the
screen.
Here, an other girl[8],
from a more recent movie. She has been raped and is supposed to sound sincere
to us, the audience, and to the lawyer, who's burying his own feelings to
attack her. But not to the jury. They will make the mistake of listening to him
and believe that she has been fabricating stories about her teacher. Her
"accent of sincerity" is misunderstood, and trust is lost. And she
loses, too.
2. Risk: It comes from under
Now lets imagine another
example. It would be very close to the irrelevant type, but I want to look at
it differently : [a sitcom teenage character arrives in the kitchen, opens the
refrigerator, says "Hi Mom" normally and drinks some milk"]. Well, even there, even
in contexts like this one, where trust and sincerity apparently have little or
no relevance at all to what's happening, they are still there, in the
background, as a general presumption we have about what people usually say and
do.
In Conversation
Theory, sincerity is but one of the many rules that structure the ethics of a
civilized conversation. Coming after Austin, Grice, Searle, Lakof, Ducrot and
the many others of that field, the French Linguist Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni
made a sound exposition of those rules in her 1986 book, L'Implicite[9]. We know that these rules deal with
cooperation between speakers (turn taking, etc.) and the many assumptions
speakers make about truth, relevance, politeness, sincerity, efficiency,
modesty, and so on. It is easy to break those rules with a tone of voice -- for
example, by being rude by by talking too loud, or insolent by quoting the other
speaker but changing the contour to turn an assertion into a question. It would
be interesting to think of all the ways in which voice quality, intonation and
rhythm can contribute to following or breaking those rules, one by one. That
would make for a nice account of voice and civility.
But I would rather
take my idea of civility a bit further and speak, not about sincerity, not
about civilized conversations, but about the limits where voice risks losing
all of its civility.
Where the truth is different, and where theater and cinema sometimes take us
because, by representing human behaviours not only artistically, but also
physically with people present on the stage, they manifest strongly our being
civilized, the fact of our collective existence with others.
Now, of all the tools
given to the actor, the most civilized tool he has may well be his vocal apparatus.
Why ? First of all, because the vocal apparatus is not just one organ, but
a complex system composed of many parts: the torso, the neck and the head, the
nose, lips, teeth, tongue, hard palate, soft palate, pharynx, diaphragm, lungs…
Second, because the vocal apparatus only functions as such if each of those
elements is diverted from its original function. Learning to talk is learning
to tame all those organs which, "in the wild", were first used to
breathe, bite, chew and swallow. Only as one of the very last steps in its
evolution has our species domesticated those anatomical features to impose on
them all the subtle and highly synchronized tricks by which we talk, whisper,
sing, address foreigners with their own barbarian set of tricks or impersonate
someone else. Isn't that being civilized?
Yes, but this civility
is sure to let us down once in a while, to reveal and let hear the trickster,
the maverick beneath the surface: eructation, sputtering or bad breath enliven
kindergarten potty humour and give nightmares to any chief of protocol. On a
less trivial line of thought, voice quality and intonation often act as
disobedient servants threatening to disclose otherwise well-concealed feelings
or intentions, such as, for instance, the stage fright of an actor. And, on a
more metaphysical line of thought, while opposing soul to body as a parallel to
the opposition of good and evil, our occidental culture has a long tradition of
identifying specific vocal features with either good or evil. Clear soprano
voices seem angelic, whilst evil is associated with features recalling
low-pitched sounds, grunts for example, made by pigs, goats, bears or other
large mammals. From eructation to concealed emotion, to metaphysical axiology, civility is always deeply at stake whenever we do
what only humans do: speak.
Of course, the control
people have (and may lose) over their body is not limited to the vocal
apparatus. But only in the mouth do body and language meet through such an
essential connection. Only there do we risk so much, so often.
Now let me take you to
the human conduct I think of as the far end limit of vocal civility: the
scream. Because extremes are often more easily perceptible[10] ;
and because specially interesting phenomenons often take place at the end
of a scale[11]. First I
want to wake you up, and maybe stress you out a little: Screams.[12]
Have you ever
screamed ? Not like what we just heared, but more like Munch's[13]
"Scream": to the point, to the level where it is no longer the same
thing, when it gets out of hand? Some people have. From Artur Janov's
"primal scream" (which can be a sob, or a cry, and requires the
patient "to lose control into his/her feelings, leading to places the
therapist cannot imagine because he won’t let himself lose control"[14]
–says Janov's Center literature) ; to the esoteric Japanese martial art
named kiai jutsu,
vaguely known in Occident by its more famous "shout that kills" ; to the Greek god
Pan, who used his terrible scream against the Giants, and made them flee as
they were taken by what we now rightfully call "pan-ic", there are
plenty of cultural constructs, from different times and places, that attribute
dreadful control-lessening powers to extraordinary screams. In La Fin de
Satan, Victor Hugo
imagined that when Lucifer was sent to fall in Hell, he shouted a word,
"Death", and that this word, like a seed, later became a
person : Cain[15].
Death giving birth, giving birth to an assassin. Well, these are all
constructs, myths, ways for Man to structure, rationalize, narrate something
essentially unknown to rational thought, and frightening. Because, in my mind
at least, the Final scream, the one that looks like Munch's painting, is what we fear the most : we know it
would melt us. I will even go a step further. Panic, lethal, primal, this
scream is at the horizon of each and every little fear we have tasted tasted, through life, art and
dreams.
Now I want to bring
your attention to a scientific hypothesis that could explain part of the
fascination that Munch's Scream has over us. It is the idea that emotion processing and memory is
hard-wired in our brain and maybe even stored throughout our body (here I can
name Candace Pert, the neuroscientist who wrote the controversial Molecules
of emotion in 1997[16],
or Joseph LeDoux, with his Emotional Brain[17]). Following this, fear would be felt,
known and remembered by the body before being processed by consciousness. This
somatic knowledge of emotion, on which hard science is now working, has already
been hypothesized for a long time by theater practitioners. Stanislavski for
instance, in Building a Character, in 1938, explained that spectators could even
understand an actor who plays in a foreign language unknown to them, as long as
the actor’s words and sounds still carry their own material dynamics, emotions
are passed directly from the actor's embodiment to the spectator's somatic
knowledge. In the Stanislavski tradition of play direction, an actor should so
totally lend his person to his character that a sort of possession should
arise. The actor should, in effect, be in a sort of trance that has its roots
in the bodily experience of playing the character from the inside.
According to this
system, an artist can find the right physical expression for an emotion if he
is able to truly recall that emotion for himself, using his own subjective
"affective memory". Lee Strasberg's method, used at the famous
Actor's Studio in New York, dwells on the same tradition and postulates the
same homogeneity of the emotional experience, from the body to the soul. This
leads actors to ignite even the less civilized, the deepest aspects of their
humanity. Alternating nightly between, say, hot-blooded lust and violent rage
not only tires one, it can even exhaust a person and, from concentration to
trance to delirium, plunge a person into true mental illness, or
"possession syndrome" as it is referred to nowadays. Such cases are
not frequent, but they do exist: Glenn Wilson mentions some in his Psychology
for Performing Artists[18].
I am not advocating
for or against the pedagogical virtues of this type of method for preparing
actors. –There exist totally
opposite theories praising mechanical acting, convincing theories, dating back
very far (think of Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien or the whole kathakali tradition). My point is simply that, if somatic cognition
exists, and if its functioning differs from exclusively verbal communication,
then panic-, lethal- or primal-screams probably fall into the somatic cognition
category. And just as anyone fears screaming the Big scream for real, any actor
may fear "losing it" to their character. Because of that bodily part
of themselves they have felt to be common to them and the character, they risk
discovering a foreign continuation of themselves, one that is truer because it
starts in their body. So I am here again: beneath one’s voice lies a body,
uncivil, that risks taking over.
3. Civility: Between limits
In a book titled Performance Theory, Richard Schechner, who is also behind New
York's Living Theater, says that
as
Lévi-Strauss has shown, the basic transformation from raw to cooked is a
paradigm of culture making : the making of the natural into the human. At
its deepest level this is what theater is "about," the ability to
frame and control, to transform the raw into the cooked, to deal with the most
problematic (violent, dangerous, sexual, taboo) human interactions[19].
In Schechner's mind,
theater converts the raw, problematic aspects of life into culturally
acceptable performances. To him, somatic cognition (which could seem to fall
into the raw paradigm) has its place in a successfully "cooked"
performance, without breaking Lévi-Strauss' raw-to-cooked, nature-to-culture
axiology. On the contrary: Schechner was among the first scholars to extend the
definition of "performance" so as to include in it all sorts of
rituals or special social situations that have almost nothing to do with
Occidental text-theater, and which may rely entirely on non-verbal, bodily
conducts. In fact, his focus is more on defining what a performance is, and
less on verifying whether the raw-cooked paradigm of culture would rightfully
apply, as he's put it, between, on one side, a theater that "frame[s] and
control[s]" and, on the raw side, "human interactions" that are
"violent, dangerous, sexual, taboo". Personally, I am not sure this
raw-interaction to framed-cooked theater works, because, however
"taboo" they be, human interactions are never "natural" but
always, necessarily, already "human" – in other words, they are
always civilized in
some way. So, the raw-to-cooked scheme would rather be a cooked-to-cooked-again
process – an idea that resembles intertextuality as it is put forward in
literary studies, by Kristeva for instance. But here, the linking process we
are thinking of should also include somatic cognition.
This is close to what
Michel de Certeau posits in The Practice of Everyday Life, although he reserves one little exception
(and it interests me very much). In this book, he explains that man transforms
everything, absolutely everything he touches, into signs, into instruments of
cognition and socialization. Elaborating on a concept, "arts de faire", that covers even more humanity than
Schechner's performance,
he writes:
À [la]
passion d'être un signe, seul s'oppose le cri, écart ou extase, révolte ou
fugue de ce qui du corps échappe à la loi du nommé. Peut-être toute
l'expérience qui n'est pas cri de jouissance ou de douleur est-elle collectée
par l'institution. Toute l'expérience qui n'est pas déplacée ou défaite par
cette extase est captée [...] et utilisée par le discours [...]. Elle est
canalisée et instrumentée.[...] Aussi faudrait-il chercher du côté des cris ce
qui n'est pas « refait » par l'ordre de l'outilité scripturaire[20].
I like to present this
"arts de faire" concept as an all-encompassing rampart of
civilization, outside of which not much "raw" material is
left out in the wild. Outside the walls, says de Certeau, all that remains
are screams of pain and pleasure. That is his only exception. The only thing Man
will not, cannot, make into an
instrument, civilize, would be a true scream. The only human conduct foreign to
culture. Forever raw.
That idea seemed like
a challenge to me, and I asked myself if I really knew any "true, forever
raw scream". Did that concept really make sense, or was it just some
intellectual wild card? Well, if you followed me so far, you understand that
introspection, or, more precisely, psycho-somatic introspection, is the activity that seemed required at
that point. That led me but to an optimistic "maybe".
So then I turned to
theater and cinema. And that did not take long. In my humble repertoire, I knew
right away where to look for the strongest scream I had ever heard. The burning
scene in The Devil's Advocate, a U.S. blockbuster movie with Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves and Charlize
Theron.
The plot is simple:
Lomax, a young successful married lawyer, is framed by Milton, the mysterious
owner of a law firm (who happens to be his unknown father, and the devil!) -he
is set up to be attracted to a beautiful woman (who happens to be his unknown
sister). Evil Milton wants them to make love on an altar to conceive the
Antichrist. But all Lomax knows is that the firm starts paying him lots and
lots of money. Among numerous bad deeds, Milton seduces, rapes and injures
Lomax's wife at a moment when both men are also elsewhere together, so Lomax
does not believe his wife when she tells him her story. In the end, Lomax
understands he is being set up and, out of free will, commits suicide at the very
last minute, just when everyone thinks he is about to mate with his sister.
Milton then experiences a spectacular crisis: he bursts into flame, screams
like hell and transforms himself back into Lucifer, with wings and all. Lomax,
who should be dead, is taken back in time, far enough so that he will be able
to act differently and avoid the same trap. But the last scene shows us Satan
as Milton preparing to pull a new trick on Lomax
In our
culture, Evil has often been represented as a highly civilized character who
tries to deceive Faustian risk-takers but ends up revealing his true bestial
self. In his civilized guise he can be an elegant, confident, off the cuff,
soft talker, like here, when Al Pacino enacts the seduction[21]
of Charlize Theron. His effortless countenance is built upon a low-pitched
voice uttered with lots, lots of air, very slowly, and, most of all, with
vowels vocalized with a very limited number of cycles, which is the key to
sounding in control. This voice has more than an accent of sincerity, it does
not need sincerity, it is pure, bodily connotated, civilized might. We all
trust him. Not one hair of the beast is visible.
And then,
at another point of the story, almost at the end, you get to hear it…
unleashed, his other brutal personality totally taking over. Lets hear Al Pacino screaming in the
vest of Milton[22],
revealing the devil in himself.
In the
dramaturgical language, such moments are called recognitions, and recognitions
almost always include a phonostylistical contrast between the two personas. We do not have time to analyze the sequence
in detail (it is worth it), but I need to acknowledge how overwrought
everything is, from the acting to the visual and sound effects: after the gunshot,
the audio has the screams of Milton and the girl, bells, violins, a choir, and
special synthesized effects that follow the flames' bursting. The visual has
Milton, four kinds of flames dancing, a grey living sculpture with two
subjects, nude, and a young undressed woman getting up from the altar. All that
gives a sense of overfill to the sequence, a quality that could seem baroque,
but I don't think "baroque" says it all. In my mind, what happens
here is that the wealth of esthetic devices, this "sur écrire" as
Philippe Lejeune would say[23],
hides the simple fact that the plot calls for a very deluded Milton, not
necessarily for this new full-scale damnation of Satan. Nonetheless, this is
what the audience gets, and to render this in a contemporary movie, the sole
body and voice of an actor, even one as great as Pacino, cannot suffice. A
“mortal” voice alone is not enough to render the mythical consequences of
Lomax's suicide, not to describe the drastic shift that brings him from risking
his soul, like Dr. Faust, to now gambling on God, like Jansenist Blaise Pascal.
The narrative stakes rank so high in our Occidental metaphysical axiology that
this movie must scream with
voices, bodies, fire, choreography and music.
But think of it the
other way around. Listen again and again to the clip, like Proust going back to
his "petite madeleine". Listen[24].
Starting from this shout, many things are known. Such as the assurance that no
director will ever trust the shout of Milton to a “good guy”, not even the
director of a French film that would normally shun a Hollywood ending. There is
epic and evil in this scream. Can you imagine a drama
character screaming like that? Woody Allen, Tom Hanks? Maybe yes -- but only if
he was weak and looking death in the face, like the rest of us sinners. Think
of Zeffirelli's Jesus on the cross: is he a man? One thing is sure, when facing
death, Zeffirelli makes him utter a whole sentence. He speaks, but he does not
scream. He was made into a good Christian with a good conscience. But I don't
think a good conscience is really human, not in the bodily part of us. And I
even have a counter-example[25] :
one of a more-than-human good conscience made into a scream, a sceam that
is not of evil death, nor of human fright, but of divine triumph : it is
Jeanne d'Arc’s battle cry.
When thinking about
risk, trust, civility, one must beware that these are what I would call
“liminary” concepts, meaning that each of them presupposes a treshold between two
contextually defined situations. For risk, it could be winning or losing; for
trust, it could be hostility or cooperation; for civility, barabarism and
utopia, or other similar oppositions. These liminary concepts are also
teleogically oriented following some universal axis that goes from chaos to
order, with victory, cooperation and utopia being on the side of order. In our
culture, from Plato to the Fathers of the Church, what our body knows of the
scream is most probably at the other end of the axiological spectrum[26].
It ignites us, it tastes of possession, trance or ectasy.
4. Prominence and Ambitus
Now, to name the
somatic-cognitive effect of the multimedia aesthetical emphasis found in
Milton's scream, I would like to propose using the word "prominence".
In phonetics, the
prominence is "the degree to which a sound or syllable stands out from its
phonetic environment"[27].
In phonostylistics, I
find prominence can be a question of frequency, amplitude, duration, rhythm,
articulation or voice quality. Here, I see no reason to limit the list of
causes that contribute to our hypothetical somatic-cognitive prominence because, although its epicenter
is obviously still Al Pacino's body in the powerful unleashing of a scream, the
artistry of a small army was necessary to produce this scene, every one of them
manipulating many variables. So, for the time being, this prominence will have
to be defined more from the side of the reception, than from that of its
genesis.
In conclusion, I will
throw away (but telegraphically) intuitions that aim to sketch the mapping of
this concept with regard to some fundamental epistemological categories.
Substance : the
substance of this prominence will not be easily denoted in words. It is of the
nature of what literature still refers to as pleasure, trauma, libido, dream
content, mood, tone. It is composed of what the body remembers. But it is not
the colors, the shapes, the movements or the soundwaves themselves. One extreme
example is found in this scene, from Jeanne d'Arc, when God answers[28]
her prayer.
Cognition :
knowledge of prominence is more somatic, less rational. More animal. More Hyde,
less Jekyll ; more bat, less dandy, more grunts[29]
than of talking.
Communication :
probably something as described in Essai sur les données immédiates de la
conscience (Time and free Will), when Bergon
says that artists establish an esthetic communication that transits from the
manifestation of his sentiment to the spectator's body, without being filtered
through rational mediations[30].
In the last example, the uneasiness of the film crew right after Shreck's first
grunts: it travels in the room and sets in through this kind of communication
among the characters.
Structure : the
contrast between prominence and non-prominence suggests the corollary
hypothesis of a positively described second term. This binarity of prominence
vs non-prominence can apply to the description of diachronic structures,
successions of different qualities and intensities; and of synchronic
structures, based on the co-presence of harmony or unharmonic discrepancies
between characters, and between the audience and the characters. For example,
in this scene, the configuration of prominence and non-prominence between the
two characters takes the interesting form of a chiasmus[31] :
when he shouts, she whines; when she screams, he whispers ; when he
shouts, she is diminished; when she shouts, he is ashamed.
Evolutionary
ethology : probably useful, as an archeology.
Social and comparative
ethology : big question, I have the feeling we are testimonies of a
general crescendo of prominences, or maybe is it just an inflation, that makes
music louder, movies more strenuous, erotism more pornographic, etc.
Method of
enquiry : phenomenological.
Context :
Prominence can stand out in a
movie or a play, and be simultanedous with the dramaturgical climax or
"clou du spectacle"; or it can stand out in single dialogue, or a
monologue ; or can spring forth out of a collection of many movies and
plays, just like The Devil's Advocate came to my mind.
I have a word that I would like to
proposed to name the structural context of prominence. The word is "Ambitus".
This Latin word designated space
surrounded by walls or fences. This recalls de Certeau's idea thatthe scream
belongs outside of culture : since I study prominence in movies where the
supernatural, the extra-human, is given beautiful artistic audiovisual
signifiers, I find my object to be intra-cultural (even if it alludes to the
Unknown, and even if I posit it is chiefly somatic).
"Ambitus" has also
meant a space between two buildings, and now, for musicians, it denotes
something like the tessitura, the tonal range of an instrument, of a singer or of a piece of music.
Prominence is necessarily in relation to such a range. Think of a battle movie
where people fight da capo a fine -- from beginning to end. In a sense, the ambitus is civility for prominence : it
grounds it.
-Which takes me to the last
meaning I found for the word "ambitus", in Larousse's first, gigantic
and not always reliable Grand
dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle :
"In the middle ages, ambitus was said of a consecrated ground surrounding a
church, ordinarily filled with tombs, and serving as a safe-haven."[32] I like to see voice's civile ambitus always dwelling
over silenced bodies ; the prominence like a trembling tower ; the
play or the movie, like a surrounding safe haven ; and something above to
reach at with voices like bells.
Sébastien Ruffo
Queen's University
[1] Online, see RUFFO, Sébastien, "Studying the Voice of the Dramatic Character", Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, vol. 4, n. 2, juillet 2003. http://www.aber.ac.uk/tfts/journal/archive/ruffo.html and
RUFFO, Sébastien, "Vers une critique comparatiste de la voix au théâtre", Études françaises, vol. 39, n. 1, 2003, pp. 99-110. Multimedia version : http://www.erudit.org/revue/etudfr/2003/v39/n1/006902ar.html.
[2] See her website at http://www.josette-feral.org/ .
[3] LÉON, Pierre, Précis de phonostylistique, Paris, Nathan, "Nathan Université", 1993, 335 p.
[4] This hypoythesis seems compatible with the one put forward by Paul Bouissac whe he says that : "evolution has provided the human primate with a toolkit of trust assessment that is both fast and robust but operates by default, that is, by using an algorithm of the following form: if not a, b, c, n… then trust." BOUISSAC, Paul, "What is a Trustworthy Face?" in Position Papers of "Risk, Trust and Civility : A Pluridisciplinary Symposium", PDF document, Toronto,Victoria College, May 6-8, 2005, p.3. In-site hyperlink to the document: http://www.semioticon.com/virtuals/risk/Trustworthyface.pdf.
[5] In-site hyperlink to the video file LOVE.mov, from :
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Victor Fleming (director), Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner (actors),Warner Home video, DVD, Region 1 encoding, 2004 for this 1932-1941 versions double feature DVD (first released by MGM, 1941).
Video clips are in Quicktime format. Free player available at
[6] In-site hyperlink to the video file 2LOVE.mov, from :
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Rouben Mamoulian (director), Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart (actors),Warner Home video, DVD, Region 1 encoding, 2004 for this 1932-1941 versions double feature DVD (first released by Paramount, 1931, 1932 for this uncut long version).
[8] In-site hyperlink to the video file HOG.mov. from :
The Devil’s Advocate, Taylor Hackford (director), Keanu Reeves, Al Pacino, Charlize Theron (actors), Warner Studios, DVD, Region 1 encoding, 2004 (first released 1997).
[9] KERBRAT-ORECCHIONI, Catherine, L'Implicite, Armand Colin, 1998 [1986], pp.194-239.
[10] A fondamental premise of Paul Bouissac's leuco-signal hypothesis : "[for trust assessment algorithm] to be adaptive […] information must be as unambiguous as possible, that is, be of a binary nature and based on a maximal contrast. This is why it makes sense to look first at the leuco-signals as a source of such crucial information. The white of the sclera and the teeth maximizes the reflectance of light and can be perceived even in poor luminosity".
[11] Vocal gesture is evidently produced and received as a scalar conduct : we spontaneously evaluate the amount of energy used by any phonation. In Roland barthes' language, that scalar aspect of its semiotic structure could be said to be bathmological : "La bathmologie, ce serait le champ des discours soumis à un jeu de degrés. Certains langages sont comme le champagne : ils développent une signification postérieure à leur première écoute, et c'est dans ce recul du sens que naît la littérature." BARTHES, Roland, "Lecture de Brillat-Savarin" in Le Bruissement de la Langue, Seuil, 1984, p. 285.
[12] In-site hyperlink to the audio file CRI.mov. Scream files downloaded from http://screaming.lucyjordan.com/, with reference to free sites from XOOM and http://www.eventsounds.com.
[13] In-site hyperlink to the graphic file MUNCH.JPG, from the WebMuseum, at http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/munch/.
[14] Janov's website: http://www.primaltherapy.com/CORES/warningCore.htm
[15] "Il tombait foudroyé, morne silencieux, / Triste, la bouche ouverte et les pieds vers les cieux, / L'horreur du gouffre empreinte à sa face livide. / Il cria : - Mort! - les poings tendus vers l'ombre vide. / Ce mot plus tard fut homme et s'appela Caïn." HUGO, Victor, La Fin de Satan, 1886. Available at http://abu.cnam.fr/cgi-bin/go?satan1.
[16] PERT, Candace, Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine, Scribner, 1997.
[17] LEDOUX Joseph, The Emotional Brain, Touchstone, 1996.
[18] WILSON, Glen D., Psychology for Performing Artists, Second edition, London, Whurr, 2002, p.32.
[19] SCHECHNER, Richard, Performance Theory. New York, Routledge, 1988 [1977], p.191.
[20] M. de Certeau, L'invention du quotidien 1. Arts de faire, Gallimard, 1990 [1979], p. 219.
[22] In-site hyperlink to the video file MILTON.mov from The Devil’s Advocate, op.cit.
[23] LEJEUNE, Philippe, Le pacte autobiographique, Seuil, coll. "Poétique", 1975, p.191.
[24] In-site hyperlink to the video file MILTON.mov from The Devil’s Advocate, op.cit.
[25] In-site hyperlink to the video file DRAW.mov, from
The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Luc Besson (director), Milla Jovovich, Dustin Hoffman, John Malkovich (actors), Columbia TriStar Home Video, DVD, Region 1 encoding, 2001 (first released by Gaumont. 1999).
[26] For a discussion of this, see RUFFO, Sébastien, "La Voix prisonnière : phonostylistique de l’extase", in « La Clôture » -Actes du Colloque Interdisciplinaire et International tenu à Bologne et à Florence les 8, 9 et 10 mai 2003 – Préface de Claude Thomasset, réunis par L.-X. Salvador, Bologne, CLUEB, 2005, "Heuresis strumenti", pp.203-214.
[27] Oxford English Dictionary.
[28] In-site hyperlink to the video file YELLING.mov, from The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, op. cit.
[29] In-site hyperlink to the video file SCHRECK.mov, from
The Shadow of the Vampire, Elias Merhige (director), John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe (actors), Universal Studios, DVD, Region 1 encoding, 2001 (first released 2001).
[30] BERGSON, Henri,Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience , PUF, 1985 (1927), pp.13-14.
[32] LAROUSSE, Pierre, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, Tome premier, 1866. My translation.
