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“More Sexpression Please!” 85

Shima attempted to synch the dialogues with the lip movement of the
actors on screen. With inexperienced assistant directors, this task was
laborious.
The exclusive use of dubbing, or Automated Dialogue Replacement
(ADR), to record dialogues for Bangladeshi popular cinema has techno-
logical, financial, and aesthetic reasons. The predominant use within the
industry of the noisy Arriflex 2C camera without blimp does not encour-
age on-set sound recording. The routines of everyday life at the FDC stu-
dio floors and the material and human insensitivity to noise reduction are
similarly uncongenial to sound recording. For producers and directors, the
conventional use of the dubbing theater saves both time and money, as
shooting without sound speeds up takes and requires less on-set personnel
and equipment. The routinized use of the dubbing studio, with its fixed,
FDC employed personnel, similarly encourages dubbing and makes it a
relatively efficient alternative to on-set sound recording. The distinctive
aural result has become a aesthetic convention within Bangladeshi main-
stream cinema, forming an integral part of the aesthetics of popular
Bangladeshi cinema. Lack of synch, generic sound, little background
sound and a limited numbers of voices within a single film, and across
films, mark Bangladeshi popular cinema and make it recognizable.
Growing out of the common use of ADR during the 1950s, this represen-
tational technology has become normalized and institutionalized at the
FDC and has become an aesthetic convention in its own right.
In the case of Bangladeshi popular cinema, then, there exists the pecu-
liar situation that the sound track of the film is in no indexical sense tied
to its images. In the complete severance of the image reels from the sound
reels, disrupting all connections between the two, the producer of a film
can construe female characters on screen who are made up of the elements
of two female artists. As predicted by Walter Benjamin, the fragmentary
nature of the sound film allows the performance of the actor to be broken
up into small pieces and realigned in a contrivance of reality, “the orchid
in the land of technology” (1999[1936], 226) where the actor looses against
a contrivance of himself that enchants the nonreflecting audience. This
contrivance can easily contain the voice of another, as sounds, unlike

images, are attributable. As John Belton suggests, “The sound track cor-
responds not, like the image track, directly to ‘objective reality’ but rather
to a secondary representation of it, that is, to the images that . . . guarantee
the objectivity of the sounds” (2004, 389). Sounds are attributed to the
images and this allows the attachment of Shima’s voice to Jenny’s image.
In the study of cinema sound, it is more fruitful to think about sound
representation than sound reproduction. Rather than thinking about the
“mismatch” between Shima’s voice and Jenny’s body, then, the object of