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In critical and historical accounts of documentary film practice, voice-over commentary in the 'classical' documentary of the 1930s and 1940s is commonly equated with a 'Voice of God'. Disembodied, this voice is construed as fundamentally unrepresentable in human form, connoting a position of absolute mastery and knowledge outside the spatial and temporal boundaries of the social world the film depicts. Vocal commentary for The March of Time often serves as the prototype: stentorian, aggressive, assuming a power to speak the truth of the filmic text, to hold captive through verbal caption whatthe spectator sees, lnthe 1950s and 1960s, most histories tell us, the technique was rejected as authoritarian, didactic, or reductive by filmmakers who, committed to new strategies of observation (direct cinema, cinéma vérité, cinéma direct), opted for location sound, the authenticity of which was presumably commensurate with that of the photographic image. To the extent that vocal narration remains in use - by filmmakers schooled in the vérité critique but seeking to recover some of the power of the voice to narrate or explain-voiceover typically is considered less assertive or homogenous than in documentaries of an earlier era: voices are personal or casual, multiple or split, fragmentary or self-interrogating, lacking a full knowledge of events or the motives and causal logic that a classical documentary would claim to disclose.1
The remarks to follow query standard accounts of the history of documentary voice-over from two perspectives: first, by exploring some general issues suggested by the language we currently use to describe a commentating voice in documentary; second, by considering the range of vocal strategies found in American documentaries in the early years of sound, with particular attention to The Spanish Earth (Ivens, 1937) and The battle of Midway(Ford, 1942). If the notion of a 'Voice of God'-accepted, rejected, or deflected and dispersed - plays a central role in the way the history of documentary has come to be written, this concept also may mask those elements of sound film practice in the 1930s and 1940s that are most intriguing and instructive - instructive for what they tell us about both changing conceptions of documentary style and a field of historical cross-references that to the modern viewer may be lost.
Voice-over as metaphor
A key term...