Page 102 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

“More Sexpression Please!” 87

woman produced on screen therefore does not refer back to Shima nor to
Jenny but rather to a “phantasmatic” woman, an ideological enunciation
that fits within social and cultural expectations. In the case of Jenny and
Shima, it is the mesmerizing beauty of an orchid made up of the best ele-
ments of those available to the producer: Jenny’s exposed body and Shima’s
cultured voice.
The combination of female voices and bodies in Bangladeshi cinema
sutures the spectator into the ideological universe of popular cinema. In the
case of Shima and Jenny, Shima’s voice fits unproblematically onto Jenny’s
body. Filming Shima’s body was an impossibility given the current “obscene”
nature of the industry that has driven middle-class actresses to television and
away from cinema. But retaining Jenny’s own voice would have been jarring,
disrupting the cinematic fantasy that is produced in the “fantasmatic body”
that is an ideological enunciation. Its “grain” would have revealed both
Jenny’s working-class origins and her masculine position. To not disrupt the
fantasy formation that is purposefully produced on screen by film directors,
and implicit in the gendered expectations of female bodily comportment in
Bangladesh, Jenny’s image had to be safeguarded from her voice. It is Shima’s
cultured voice that the spectator expects. As Shima said, this fantasy must
not be disrupted by displaying her name in the credits. Shima’s voice sutures
the ideological fantasy, and her voice seems to “fit” onto Jenny’s body because
“sound ‘fidelity’ is an effect of inscription” (Lastra 2000, 148, emphasis in
original). The addition of Shima’s voice makes Jenny a legible figure. As
Lastra notes, within cinema’s aesthetic regimes, it is not about the true origin
of a sound, but about “our ability to identify a sound’s source” (126).
Combined Jenny and Shima produced a well composed and comported
female character that fits into the “dominant fiction.”
The possibility of separating and rejoining the visual and the aural
allows directors to produce an ideological enunciation that they consider
most appealing to its imagined audience. This is not a peculiarly
Bangladeshi situation. Jeff Smith has discussed the dubbing of the singing
voices of Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte by white opera singers
in the case of the movie production of the musical Carmen Jones in 1950s
America. He highlights how “[t]he technological separation of image and

sound . . . enables a white performer to speak through the black body that is
seen on screen” (Smith 2003, 39). This was not merely a matter of produc-
tion logic but the directors:

were attempting a somewhat peculiar cultural balancing act, one intended
to exploit the local “color” and exoticism of rural African-American culture
(voodoo, jazz, roadhouses, sexuality) while simultaneously preserving the
aesthetic dominance of opera. In this respect Carmen Jones could have it