Page 91 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

76 Lotte Hoek

Jenny’s distinctive voice, however, was unfamiliar to the cinema audi-
ence. Her gruff voice was never recorded. Although Jenny, in her mid-
twenties, was a seasoned actress, she never dubbed her own parts. In the
cinema hall it was only the sight of her body that was presented to the audi-
ence. To the image of her adorned body, the voice of another woman was
added in the dubbing rooms of the Bangladesh Film Development
2
Corporation (FDC). Often, this voice belonged to Shima.
When I first met Shima, she was dubbing Jenny’s voice, besides two
other prominent parts in the same film, as well as filling in some exclama-
tions and sighs here and there. Echoing the sentiments put forward by
many film critics, scholars, and journalists (Khan 2005–2006; Nasreen
and Haq 2008), Shima explained to me how the film industry had changed:
“New types of people have entered the FDC . . . because of them, the envi-
ronment has changed a lot. Nowadays they make commercial films, every-
thing has become commercial.” The notion of commerce referred to the
practice of including sexually explicit and suggestive footage in action
films. The arrival of new people (directors, producers, actors and actresses),
from working-class and lower middle-class backgrounds into the industry
was often quoted by “old-hands,” such as Shima, as the reason for the move
toward “obscenity” and “vulgarity.” But Shima was aware that this shift
was keeping her work schedule filled. The “new” actresses, working in
films that were pornographically tinted, were considered incapable of
speaking “proper” Bengali, or shudha bhasha.

Shima: We have many actresses who don’t want to dub, can’t dub. Their
pronunciation isn’t good, the delivery of the dialogues isn’t nice. If they
had to dub [their own parts], their acting would be spoiled.

By invoking how many actresses would ruin their acting because of their
bad pronunciation, Shima confirmed the class difference that spoke
through accents of the younger actresses. She felt, with many producers,
that this would interfere with a “nice” presentation on screen. What Roland
Barthes has called the grain of the voice would disrupt the seamless cine-
matic fantasy of the woman painted on screen. Barthes defines the grain as

“something which is directly the singer’s body, brought by one and the
same movement to your ear from the depths of the body’s cavities, the
muscles, the membranes, the cartilage . . .” (1991[1982], 270), it is “the body
in the . . . voice” (ibid.). Jenny’s low-pitched, husky and accented voice
would bring her physical self, formed by her social conditions, to the fore
and this would “connote masculinity rather than femininity” (Silverman
1988, 61), as Kaja Silverman has suggested about the voices of Mae West,
Marlene Dietrich, and Lauren Becall. Instead, middle-class girls such as