Embodying Dialogue: Rich Voices, Expressive Mouths and Gesticulation

This chapter considers the relationship between embodiment and dialogue in American independent cinema, arguing that such filmmakers and performers can aim to create the impression of character interiority and performer improvisation. For example, speech can be scripted to changes direction, while actors are called upon to deliver dialogue as though thinking ‘out loud’. In addition to exploring distinctive verbal and/or vocal styles (including a notably fast-paced delivery), the chapter pays particular attention to the expressiveness of hands and mouths. It is argued that gesticulation – or talking with one’s hands – can contribute a sense of live thought to rehearsed dialogue. The analysis includes case studies of the performance styles of Chris Eigeman and Greta Gerwig, whose distinctive voices and delivery are tied to their success as independent film actors. Through consultation with screenplays and interviews, the chapters reveals how independent writer-directors increase their influence on dialogue embodiment by scheduling long rehearsal periods and through written script directions.

Verbal Extremes and Excess

This conclusion brings together the book’s key findings in relation to dialogue in selected American independent cinema. It surmises that such speech is often written, performed, recorded and integrated in such ways that audiences construct meaning by joining the dialogue dots, or filling in the dialogue blanks. Individual lines are rarely memorable, yet this is not found to be a weakness of such independent film dialogue. Instead, it is the outcome of speech that is carefully entwined with the films’ various components. The remembering and repetition of specific lines by audioviewers is uncommon in these cases precisely because the language accumulates meaning through its execution in the finished film. Instead, indie dialogue can operates on complex levels that allows for alternative forms of audience pleasure. Overall, such dialogue is found to be characterized by: (1) alternations between verbal efficiency and excess; (2) ‘gaps’ in verbal meaning and (3) the reflexive, exaggerated treatment of mainstream dialogue norms. The book’s conclusion relates such cinematic forms of verbalism back to independent and art cinemas more broadly. It also identifies future research directions.

Measuring Engaging Dialogue

Sarah Kozloff (2000) argues that generic speech conventions were established early in the sound era. This book considers how, and gauges why, American independent filmmakers manipulate such internalised conventions. This chapter provides an overview of the methodological framework for doing so, including the rationale for studying the significance of dialogue to low-budget cinema more generally. Addressing the long-standing bias against film dialogue, the chapter outlines the precarious status that dialogue holds in film studies, and the film industry, since the introduction of sound or ‘talking pictures’. The chapter connects niche film audiences with niche forms of dialogue, such as those in indie and art cinemas. Drawing on audience studies and cognitive film theory, it also considers the appeal of alternative dialogue styles in American independent cinema.

Verbal-Visual Style and Words Visualised

This chapter examines the relationship between dialogue and what is simultaneously shown on screen, in order to develop an understanding of verbal-visual style in contemporary indie cinema. In considering what makes certain combinations of words and images jarring or pleasurable for audiences, the chapter includes analysis of: textual speech; voice-over as a double-layered structure; and textual signposts. The chapter also examines words that are visualised, as with intertitles and text that is embedded in the mise-en-scene. It finds that the six writer-directors considered ‘cinematic verbalists’ can substitute verbal interest for visual interest, or for visual interest that depends on the verbal for its impact. The chapter charts the relationships between visual and verbal synchronicity, as well as between observational styles of viewing and audiences being positioned as eavesdroppers: when they must piece together verbal information.

Adapting Dialogue and Authorial Double-voicing

Dialogue’s association with the literary arts is a key reason why it has been historically undervalued within film studies. Adaptation scholars have demonstrated sustained interest in voice-overs, as part of a broader interest in the transcodification of narration techniques across media. However, the discipline has tended to downplay the significance of dialogue more broadly. By focusing on the verbal elements of adaptations, as well as other literary influences on American independent cinema, this final chapter begins to address this imbalance. The chapter examine how independent writer-directors’ literary interests can influence the dialogue in their original and adapted works. After considering Whit Stillman’s multi-directional adaptations, dialogue as storytelling, and reflexive adaptation, it is found that dialogue can be used to create verbal consistency between these writer-directors’ adaptations and their original screenplays. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary concept of ‘double voicing’, the chapter also explores how indie writer-directors’ use characters as mouthpieces that reflecting their own opinions.

Gendered Verbal Dynamics: Sensitive Men and Explicit Women

This chapter focuses on gendered verbal dynamics in selected American independent cinema. Male and female characters are found to resist internalised ideals of gendered speech, both in relation to cinema and society more generally. Their dialogue, including in voice-overs, offers more nuanced representations of what type of speech is ‘appropriate’ for males or females, revealing a refusal to divide characters’ verbal styles on the basis of gendered stereotypes. The language of male characters is found to advance a complex representation of vulnerable and expressive masculinity. They are allowed to remain silent, to voice their deepest feelings, or to verbally align themselves with homosexuality and alternate forms of masculinity. Through speech that is considered ‘unruly’ or ‘unladylike’, female characters are also found to have a verbal freedom that is at odds with more conservative estimations of female film dialogue. Partly through profane language and an unrepentant discussion of sexuality, women in American independent cinema can break away from the norms for how women tend to speak in more mainstream cinema. Case studies include women’s verbal victories in Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship (2016).

Dialogue and Character Construction

This chapter examines how speech in American independent cinema can be crucial to individual character construction and to the development of group character dynamics. It considers creative naming practices; the ways in which dialogue is used to individuate a character through a personalised speaking style; how nuanced choices of words and phrasing can influence how we perceive and understand characters; selective and racial silencing; and how idioms can be used to represent a group of characters as part of a particular sub-culture. The chapter demonstrates the various ways in which American indie filmmakers can foreground verbal games and debates as a form of action. It also argues that, in keeping with the tendency for such cinema to capture the mundanity of everyday life, dialogue can also be used to create the illusion that characters exist independent of the film world. The analysis includes a case study of Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America (2015).

The Integrated Soundtrack and Lyrical Speech

This chapter considers dialogue in relation to the film soundtrack as a whole, arguing that careful approaches to dialogue in American independent cinema extend to include a creative strategy when combining dialogue, music and sound effects. Analysis of the interaction of music and sound effects with dialogue includes: how musical choices made by characters are verbally contextualised, and how indie filmmakers blur the boundaries between sound effects and dialogue. It is argued that by incorporating portions of inaudible dialogue, American independent cinema can position audience members as eavesdroppers rather than sanctioned listeners – calling on us to listen selectively, and engaging us in the process. The chapter extends Claudia Gorbman’s concept of ‘melomania’ by thinking about characters’ discussion of music as related to her focus on music loving directors. The examination of the integrated soundtrack also considers lyrical speech in relation to polyglot (multilingual) cinema and repetition. Through a case study of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), the chapter also theorises the links between both language and music as markers of time.

Introduction

This introduction explore the book’s aims of demonstrating the ability of dialogue to engage audiences and bind together the narrative, aesthetic and performative elements of selected independent cinema, from the 1980s until the present day. The chapter justifies the focus on the verbally creative works of Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater and Whit Stillman, while highlighting links between such cinema and that of New Hollywood and the French New Wave. It introduces the concept of ‘cinematic verbalism’ and the related label of ‘cinematic verbalists’, which will be used throughout the book to refer to these writer-directors’ work. Overall, the chapter details how, by focusing on the ways in which dialogue in American independent cinema is designed and executed, we can question the association of dialogue-centred films with the ‘literary’ or ‘un-cinematic’.