Barthe & The Aterlife of Music

"Originally, the singer Teresa Stratas was asked to play the role of Callas, but she was replaced, at her own request, by an actress. The part, as Stratas understood it, required an actress rather than a singer: someone who makes believe she is singing rather than someone who really sings" (38).

"In Callas Forever, a mirror is positioned very close to Callas’s mouth, and a technician supervises the fit between the movements and shapes her mouth makes and the singing it must appear to produce (see Fig. 1). Sometimes the fit is successful, at others less so, as when we see Callas relearning at what point in a given phrase she must pause for a breath. Thus the dubbing session takes us behind the scenes to witness the process of transforming Ardant into Callas, or, put differently, to see what it takes for Ardant to become Callas for 108 minutes. We become acutely aware that Ardant does not sing a single note of what we are hearing. But the scene also has the opposite effect: the attempt to simulate a perfect match, the close-up on Ardant’s mouth-with-the-Callas-voice, is so unsettling that we can forget that Ardant is not Callas and allow her to become Callas" (42).

Friedlander seems to position cinema as a lower art form, especially when compared to opera and singing. I interpret the quote above to be a claim that voice is timeless, and that cinema cannot accurately represent or depict external voice. Cinema makers must first acknowledge the clashing between cinema and other forms of media (like signing) with its audiences before they may produce "unsettling" voice synchronization that allows external voices to comfortably rest in actors and actresses. My question is, then, how do"unsettling" voice synchronizations allow casting and matching voices be forgiven?

Jennifer Lopez lip syncs the entirety of all of her performance scenes in the film Selena. Many of the shot choices are close-up shots and add emphasis to the fact the Lopez is lip syncing. Is it inappropriate to compare the way that film shoots these shots as a "cinematic pheno-text"? The focus of cinematography is to communicate, so does that mean film cannot truly be told as a geno-text--or perhaps geno-text emerges as a process of the struggle of an actor or actress attempting to portray character?