The Telephone in the Cinema: From Vocal Transmission to Audiovisual Inventions - Text 1
The telephone has profoundly changed the ways and means of remote communication from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Developed in 1876, it saw a series of innovations, including the dial in 1896. Whereas its contemporary, the cinema(tograph), was initially silent, the telephone was blind; today, however, both are audio-visual devices. What can we learn from a joint reading of their parallel histories? Can studying the listening and recording systems that film forms bring to the fore through the use of the telephone add to our analysis of these forms?
In 2013, Dork Zabunyan and Emmanuelle André gave the name “telephonic photogénie”[1] to “the paradoxical proximity” to which remote audio communication gives rise, implying a “new articulation of the visible” because, for the first time, “presence and visibility no longer coincide.”[2] This articulation of time and space appears, therefore, to be particularly well-suited to the play of editing and mise en scène, enabling viewers to see and hear two characters on the telephone who hear but do not see each other. Crosscutting and split screen would become two frequent forms of “telephonic suspense fiction.”[3] Filmmakers play with the telephone’s effect of appearing ubiquitous, meaning the sensation of being in several places at the same time, in order to intrigue the audience or the character to whom snatches of a place in which they are not located reach them.
Alfred Hitchcock explored the dramaturgical possibilities of the telephone on several occasions. The two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956) grant a major place to scenes of telephone calls, at times providing the audience with a character’s point of view in order to play on their frustration at hearing an indistinct voice without being able to identify the origin of the call, and at other times showing each interlocutor along with anyone listening to the conversation. In Dial M for Murder (1954), the character played by Grace Kelly is even the victim of a murder attempt orchestrated by her husband which was predicated on the use of a corded telephone, obliging the victim to remain in a static position. The telephone was thus a tool for controlling the body, for freedom-killing possessiveness, of which planned femicide is the apogee.
