Unlike the five senses that provide us with impressions of the world, the voice lends us a form of expression, instilled with meaning through language. Yet the sounds produced – mumbled, spoken, sung, shouted – are as fleeting as they are direct. Sound vanishes in the air. Only with the invention of electronic media was it possible to record, store, alter, play back and broadcast human communication over great distances, turning the voice into an object of memory. Technical reproduction renders perfect what the voice appears to have been all along: an entity outside the body. The four films of World of Speech explore the relationship between sight and hearing and the forms of communication that defy rational interpretation and social norms – from the mysterious, vulnerable world of children in Gunvor Nelson’s My Name is Oona and Johan van der Keuken’s Blind Kind [Blind Child], to Not I by Samuel Beckett (who in his absurdist theatre and television works continually dramatized the senselessness of the world and the dubiousness of language), to Miriam Bajtala’s new film Sofern real [In as far as it’s real] about the depiction of mentally ill people by actors.
