Voices and speech in the cinema during the Popular Unity

Abstract

This article studies the sound, voice, speech, and dialogue records in three films made during the Chilean Popular Unity: the documentary La batalla de Chile (1975) by Patricio Guzmán, the fiction feature film Nadie dijo nada (1971) by Raúl Ruiz, and the short documentary Ahora te vamos a llamar hermano (1971), also by Ruiz. Under the framework of "sound studies", attention is drawn to the specific materiality of the sound aspect of filmic discourse and its cultural, social, and political implications. In particular, these voices and speeches -framed within the emergence of the popular subject during the Unidad Popular- represent three different types of conceptions of national and popular fellows: the popular speech as a national symbol, the drunken's dialogues as a useless group of people, and the Mapuche sound as spaces to debunking national identity.