The Melancholic Voice-Over in Film Noir

Abstract

The melancholic voice-over emerged in American film noir as a means of communicating memories of violence, loss, and guilt through first-person narrative discourse. Unlike comparable voices in film, radio, and literature, this audiovisual device represents embodied forms of testimony confession and intersubjective, deictic transference. In its time, it worked to produce a newly receptive listening audience and a historically specific mood that indirectly registered the transnational traumas of World War II and the Holocaust. Its persistent resonance is theorized in terms of social and psychological accountability, historical approaches to affect, and Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of the "dialectic of enlightenment."

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