Page 99 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

84 Lotte Hoek

maintaining herself as a visual-moral sign “in public.” If the audience
could get hold of her by way of her likeness, disrupting her proper bodily
comportment, she salvaged her propriety by producing different visual
emanations of herself. Similarly, Shima “hid” from the audience by being
surreptitious in the dubbing studio, her voice attached to a different sig-
nifier than her own body. Not even her name appeared on screen, her
voice properly disembodied, able to attach itself to the image of another
woman. And this image would not refer back to the woman who shopped
in a shopping mall on busy Friday afternoon, her baby son in her arms.
Where sexual propriety and bodily comportment vis-à-vis nonrelated
men has become the standard for modern, “civilized” and middle-class
female identity, the touch of the mass audience is something that needs to
be hidden from.
The first part of the answer to the question why women’s voices get
dubbed while men’s don’t in the film industry of Bangladesh thus relates
to injunctions that women face in terms of propriety and the community
based aesthetic demands on their public availability. Where these stan-
dards of bodily comportment meet technologies of mass reproduction,
female artists make only certain parts of their body, under particular cir-
cumstances, available to a film industry that is generally known as
“obscene.” However, this is not the entire story. There is second part to the
question of the dubbing practices. And this relates to the erotic possibilities
of moral norms of bodily comportment and the possibilities offered by a
fragmentary technology.

Collating the Fantastic Female

The process of dubbing dialogues for 35mm cinema is a dizzying com-
plex of screens, sounds and images, translations, and repetitions. When
Shima dubbed, she stood inside the air-conditioned and soundproof stu-
dio where she watched soundless film on a screen before her. Through
her headphones, she could hear the assistant director repeat each line of

dialogue three or four times. When the image in front of her showed
Jenny mouthing the same line, she repeated animatedly what the assis-
tant director had said in a flat voice. Her microphone was connected to
the smaller studio, where the assistant director sat behind the sound
technicians controlling the mixing panels. Her voice was recorded onto
magnetic celluloid. As a dubbing artist, she performed her part in refer-
ence to both the image on screen as well as the voice of the assistant
director coming to her through the headphones. Watching the screen,