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MOST ANALYSES OF CINEMATIC PERFORMANCE focus on three areas of an actor's performance style: his or her gestures, facial expressions, and vocal qualities. This paper examines the third of these in great detail, utilizing and expanding scholarly concentration on accent, intonation, and the unique timbre and materiality that belong to a particular voice. Although voice continues to stand at the heart of the actor's sound performance, the greater issue of sound and performance includes an array of other matters, such as the interplay between sound and image, including the animated image; the effect of changes in sound technology; the relationship between the dialogue track, music track, and effects track; and the question of agency in determining who-the sound technicians or the actor-actually creates the performance. My interest in these issues derives from a larger concern with defining film acting as distinct from theater acting. This focus on medium specificity, though sometimes relegated to the background of a given analysis, guides the three sections of this paper. By highlighting the uniquely filmic components of sound and performance, I hope to suggest some of the ways both sound creation by the actor and sound crew and sound perception by the spectator function across the sound era to characterize and complicate what counts as film acting.
The influence of sound in shaping performance has been central to the filmic medium-and to the comparison of film and theater-since the introduction of sync sound in the late 1920s. Critics writing at the time, such as Rudolf Arnheim, proclaimed that "sound film ... [is] a means of'canning' theater," a "replacement for theater," and that "sound film is theater which has been technically perfected" (29-51). Those who focused on the work of the actor, specifically, also remained tied to a comparison with theater. René Clair, however, also identified differences between the two, ascribing a more nuanced and realistic style of acting to sound film. Writing in 1929, Clair praised cinematic actors for the "total lack of theatrical affectation in their voices" and claimed that the "actors show remarkable flexibility... their acting with speech is as natural as was their silent acting in earlier films" (43). These quotes clearly illustrate two important points: the perception of film as "the same" as theatrical performance...