Sound Evidence: An Archaeology of Audio Recording and Surveillance in Popular Film and Media.

audio surveillance;media archaeology;crime;film studies;media studies;detection;Film and Video Studies;Arts;Screen Arts and Cultures

Pavlounis, DimitriosScannell, Gerald Patrick ;

University of Michigan

关键词: audio surveillance;    media archaeology;    crime;    film studies;    media studies;    detection;    Film and Video Studies;    Arts;    Screen Arts and Cultures;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/133386/dpavloun_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

;;Sound Evidence” traces the historical appropriation of sound recording technologies in the United States for purposes of surveillance and social control from 1910-1975. While the idea of the disembodied voice as a marker of identity was a subject of philosophical and narrative interest before the late nineteenth century, the advent of technologies that could record voices reenergized cultural investment in this relationship. As both real and fictional detectives mobilized ;;records;; of ostensibly guilty voices as evidence, legal and social institutions employed sound technologies to monitor citizens and construct individual bodies as criminal, immoral, or dissident. Moreover, American crime films and television series during this period became spaces for transmitting knowledge and shaping public understanding of the materiality and social function of emerging sound surveillance technologies. I excavate this often-overlooked history of sound recording media by putting the methodologies of media archaeology into conversation with film studies. I examine three cultural moments when sound surveillance became a major topic of public and cultural interest, and I argue that crime cinema and television must be understood as constituent parts of the technological history of audio surveillance. ;;Sound Evidence” begins in 1907 with the invention of the detective dictograph. By examining how visual and narrative culture mediated the dictograph in the 1910s, I make a case for the historical significance of popular mediations of technology and argue that technology can only be understood as existing between the material and the imaginary. The remaining chapters explore cultural anxieties around the governmental and domestic use of sound recording media during World War II and the early Cold War period; the unencumbered use of miniature bugging devices in the 1960s; and the revelation of Richard Nixon’s system of self-surveillance during the Watergate hearings. Drawing from primary and secondary sources that include newspapers, trade magazines, popular science magazines, technical journals, court transcripts, policing manuals, and film production documents, ;;Sound Evidence” positions key texts within their specific historical and technological moments. In doing so, it makes a case for the centrality of cinema and television to understanding the cultural processes through which sound media became surveillance media.