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

Starrs, D. Bruno (2008) An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer's "The Old Man Who Read Love Stories" (2003). Metro 156:pp. 148-153.

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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).

Item Type:Journal Article
Status:Published
Keywords:Rolf de Heer; Luis Sepulveda; The Old Man Who Read Love Stories; aural auteur
Subjects:410000 The Arts > 410300 Cinema, Electronic Arts and Multimedia > 410301 Film and Video
410000 The Arts
220000 Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts - General
410000 The Arts > 410300 Cinema, Electronic Arts and Multimedia > 410302 Cinema Studies
410000 The Arts > 410300 Cinema, Electronic Arts and Multimedia
ID Code:10464
Deposited By:Starrs, D. Bruno
Deposited On:29 October 2007
Alternative Locations:http://www.metromagazine.com.au/
Copyright Owner:Copyright 2008 D. Bruno Starrs