Simon Frith theorises music in terms of how it produces and shapes an experience, and the characters within. Our experience of this aesthetic medium must be had from a space of subjective and collective identity, which means that as we experience music, we also change our own subjectivity, and thus identity. So, ‘identity is mobile, a becoming and not a being’.
In Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, much of the sound seems as though it is non-diegetic because of its obvious removal from the temporal space of eighteenth-century France, even if it is represented as coming from the frame. Coppola presents sound in terms of both music and voice as deterritorialized from the space and time of the film’s historical universe. Music within the space of the film as product, such as New Order’s ‘Ceremony’, and a montage sequence with ‘I Want Candy’ layered over the images, form two purposes: the image and images become what they are by direct relation (ie. in reality) to the sound, but also the space of the images are enlarged by sounds (ie. our formation of ideas is driven mainly by what the sound does to the image) . The sound thus alters the way that we see the space and consume the world offered to us from the film- does it allow us to form a close relationship to the film, or does it dislocate us too strongly from it by its lack of symbiosity between characters and surroundings? Either, I think – depending on how we react to the sound. By violating spectator expectations, film can force us to change our subjectivity, and expand our understanding of what is acceptable/possible/reality, so if we do allow ourselves to expand with the film we can become closer to the film world. Coppola recreates history, a new, groovy, glamourous history in which Marie Antoinette (or anyone) is not actually seen dead. Because Coppola focuses so much on making MA seem young and funky, and that’s just about it, it is hard to get past this dislocative sound and to see the film as something of reality/relevant.
Patricia Pisters writes that voice and body ‘can express the same thing’. As an extension of this, the removal of vocal and bodily self-function and their objectification can represent the same thing; both serve to disempower and deterritorialize. Coppola removes Marie Antoinette’s ability to own and control both her own voice and her body, filling her vocabulary with culturally and periodically jarring words like ‘ridiculous’, and never allowing us to be unaware that Marie Antoinette’s body is subjected and scrutinized, but rarely admired, by spectators.
But what of MA when she sings in her own performance? A woman-becoming? This act of becoming does not really offer a transcendence, she is still stuck in the prison-like closed territory of public and private scrutiny.
Becomings furthermore make us realize that we are witnessing a becoming-cinema of the world and the becoming-life of the cinema. (Pisters 2003:215)
Cinema enables the representation of becoming, is the holding medium of variations of sound and image together that allow the image to become outside of its literal (signified) space and allow the spectator to become outside of their relational subjectivity into a collective one. But cinema can also fail at that.
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