Salut …
I keep distracting myself from actually writing this thing with the Internet and French websites, so I guess I might as well tell the Internet what it is I am writing about. I am currently working on my MFA (Master of Fine Arts) thesis in Sound Design, and I’m really hoping to get it published in the summer so I often find myself agonizing over every word … so maybe this is a low pressure way to get myself typing and organize my thoughts a little bit.
Anyway I’m writing about a 2010 film called Enter the Void. The film is in English, but it takes place in Tokyo, and the director (Gaspar Noé) is French. The film takes place entirely in the first-person perspective. The audience observes the protagonist Oscar take hallucinogens like DMT and LSD and have out-of-body psychedelic experiences from an ‘inside his mind’ viewpoint. As if that’s not enough, we then observe his subsequent death and the wandering of his soul as it visits his loved ones in the aftermath of these events. He relives all of the memories that brought him to this point, and still all of this happens in a first-person perspective.
The topic of my paper is how acousmatic score and sound effects work to alter the audience’s experience of cinematic subjectivity in order to place us in these extreme psychological states. There’s a fair amount of psycho-analysis in there and I talk a lot about jouissance and self-loss and things like that. Actually, one of the reasons that I decided to seriously learn French was the fact that so many of the influential writers and thinkers I’m studying for this paper are French. Obviously there is LACAN, but I can’t wait until I get to the point where I can read Roland Barthes in the original French, I just love his work so much.
Ok lingq. I don’t know if anybody out there is a big cinema studies nerd like me. But feel free to hit me up on Skype if you are (even better if you’re a native French speaker!).
Ciao!