Page 101 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

86 Lotte Hoek

study should be the compound character represented on screen. James
Lastra argues that “[c]ontrary to the claims of theory, which locates all the
significant ideological work in what the device does to the original event,
the primary ideological effect of sound recording might rather be in creat-
ing the effect that there is a single and fully present ‘original’ independent
of representation” (2000, 134). This effect is the character made up of
Shima and Jenny, seemingly referring back to a single, “original,” woman.
If sound is then attributed to image and the combination of sound and
image produces a secondary representation that seems to refer back to an
original, in the case of Bangladeshi filmmaking, this practice does not
happen in the same way for men and women. The ways in which Benjamin’s
orchid is assembled in Bangladeshi popular cinema is differentiated accord-
ing to gender as the generic use of sound technology is different for male
and female actors. There does not seem to be a straightforward financial
logic underlying this differentiation. Why would a film producer hire and
pay an extra artist like Shima when they could make Jenny dub her own
part? Why would a film producer hire Shima at the cost of an extra salary?
The answer lies in the symbolic value of the compound figure created by
Jenny and Shima.
The way in which sound technology is used in Bangladesh should be
understood in a wider social and cultural context as “film sound is in a
constant state of interchange with the culture at large” (Altman 1992, 14).
After the shooting and the editing of the rushes, the dubbing theater is a
crucial location of the construction of the ideological effect of an original
preceding its reproduction. This imaginary original is ideological not only
in terms of the cinematic technology that hides its own material heteroge-
neity. The postulated original woman that Jenny and Shima’s combined
effort refers back to is also ideological in the sense that it urges its viewers
to see that representation as a real woman. Mary-Ann Doane notes that
the resulting “body constituted by the technology and practices of the
cinema is a phantasmatic body, which offers a support as well as a point of
identification for the subject addressed by the film” (Doane 1980, 33–34,
emphasis in original). The resulting body she terms an “enunciation,” not
just a juxtaposition of elements but a discourse. Kaja Silverman suggests

that “what is at stake within cinema’s acoustic organization, as within its
visual organization, is not the real, but an impression of ‘reality’ ” (1988,
44). Cinema creates this “impression of reality” by participating in the
production and maintenance of its culture’s “dominant fiction” (ibid.). She
relies on Jacques Rancière’s idea of a dominant fiction as “the privileged
mode of representation by which the image of the social consensus is
offered to the members of a social formation and within which they are
asked to identify themselves” (Rancière 1977, in Silverman 1988, 44). The