An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer's "The Old Man Who Read Love Stories" (2003)

Abstract

I argue in this paper that the auteur Australian film-maker Rolf de Heer has recognized the theme of the feminine maternal in his adaptation ("The Old Man Who Read Love Stories" 2003) of Sepúlveda’s ecological morality tale, the 1989 novella, "Un Viejo Que Leia Novelas de Amor," and subsequently employed a female narrator in the soundscape of this film to foreground this interpretation. In doing so he has confounded expectations of feminists such as Kaja Silverman, who see male film-making auteurs as serving to reinforce notions of cinema as a site where "male lack is disavowed" (1988: 188) through the typically masculine auteur's complicit exploitation of "a complex system of displacements which locate the male voice at the point of apparent textual origin" (45).