Original Article

Voice as objet a in Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo dilo Sean Homer Post Box 33, Oikismos Filothei, Nea Raidestos, Thessaloniki 57001, Greece. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract Tony Gatlif’s 1997 film, Gadjo dilo, portraying the search of a young Frenchman, Ste´phane, for an old Gypsy singer, Nora Luca, was heavily criticized by Roma activists for denigrating the image of the Roma through harmful stereotypes and misrepresentations. In this paper, I argue that a Lacanian understanding of the voice as objet a, as it has recently been developed through the work of Mladen Dolar, provides us with a radically different interpretation of the film. Through tracing the ´phane’s quest, the acousmatic voice of Nora Luca, I show how Gadjo dilo object of Ste undermines the notion of authenticity and truth that supports the very idea of true images or unified cultural identities. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2010) 15, 37–52. doi:10.1057/pcs.2009.29 Keywords: voice; objet a; Roma; Gatlif; Lacan

Introduction In March 1999 the bulletin of the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), Roma Rights Quarterly, hosted a discussion of Tony Gatlif’s film Gadjo dilo [Crazy Stranger (1997)]. The exchange was provoked by an article by Erik Rutherford (1999), who argued that Gatlif’s film furthered the Roma cause and, despite its flaws, would have a positive effect on audiences’ perception of the Roma. Roma activists and ERRC staff argued that, to the contrary, Gatlif’s film was not ‘a true representation of Romani culture’ (Kwiek, 1999) and would have a negative effect insofar as it perpetuated negative stereotypes. Rutherford’s article raised a number of important issues concerning the nature of the cinematic image and the politics of representation, but these issues were not directly addressed in the subsequent critique, which overwhelmingly focused on issues of stereotyping and negative images. Before I go into my own reading of Gadjo dilo in terms of the Lacanian conception of the ‘object voice’, I want to return briefly to Rutherford’s

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society www.palgrave-journals.com/pcs/

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

Homer

article, as it touches on some of the concerns that I develop in this paper. My argument is that, far from perpetuating stereotypes, whether negative or positive, Gatlif’s film questions the stability of stereotypical representations and the verisimilitude of the image. By foregrounding what Michel Chion (1982) calls the ‘acousmatic voice’, a voice for which there is no source or origin within the narrative, Gadjo dilo undermines the self-identity of the subject qua speaking subject, that is to say, as a source of authenticity and truth. As Slavoj Zˇizˇek (1996) puts it, [T]he voice through which the signifying chain subjectivizes itself is not the voice qua the medium of the transparent self-presence of Meaning, but the voice qua a dark spot of non-subjectivizable remainder, the point of the eclipse of meaning, the point at which meaning slides into jouis-sense. (p. 102) From a Lacanian perspective, by dramatizing the excess of the voice, the voice as objet petit a, Gadjo dilo answers many of the concerns raised by Roma activists in response to Rutherford’s article and the film itself.

The Voice of Experience Let me begin with Rutherford’s (1999) interesting and telling contextualization of his article and response to the film. Rutherford opens his article with an account of a conversation he had with the Executive Director of the ERRC, Dimitrina Petrova, after seeing Gadjo dilo. That conversation began with Petrova’s recounting an anecdote about someone else who had seen the film and recommended it to her. Petrova initially had a positive response to the film and found it very moving, but, looking around the room after the film had ended, she realized that this view was not shared by the five Roma members of the audience. In the discussion that followed, she learned that they had unambiguously disliked the film. They said it was hurtful stereotyping, another false gadje (foreigner or stranger) version of Roma character. Some said the lovemaking, and, more particularly, the vulgar cursing between the Romani villagers, should never have been revealed to gadje, as it was humiliating. Others felt that the Romani behaviour depicted, especially the vulgarity, was simply a false representation of how Roma really are. Once again, an outsider was claiming authority over the already abused Romani image. If Tony Gatlif was of Romani descent, he had ‘betrayed’ his people (Rutherford, 1999). In short, the Roma members of the audience concluded that ‘it was perhaps better the film didn’t exist at all’ (Rutherford, 1999). Following this encounter, Petrova watched the film again and, far from being moved a second time, she 38

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

Voice as objet a in Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo dilo

conceded that it did negatively stereotype the Roma. Rutherford juxtaposes this account of watching the film with his own experience of seeing it in a ‘tiny cinema in the fifth arrondisment of Paris’ and the reception by 3000 spectators at the Locarno film festival, who had given the film a full 10-minute standing ovation. The intimate and deeply personal experience of watching the film in a ‘tiny’ cinema in Paris is seemingly legitimated through the quantification of that experience at Locarno and, perhaps, in contrast to the five members of the audience that Petrova had spoken to. Utilizing a similar rhetorical strategy to validate their reading and underwrite their critique of both the article and the film, a number of Rutherford’s critics also resorted to anecdote and their own personal experience of watching the film. We seem to be plunged immediately into that now-familiar world of Derridean deferral of meaning and the Lacanian slippage of the signifier, where questions of origin and identity are indefinitely displaced and the letter never reaches its destination (Muller and Richardson, 1988) – except that in this instance the letter does arrive at its destination and we do seem to have a point of origin or ground of meaning for the film, that is to say, the voice of experience of the Roma themselves. Petrova defers her own reading of the film to the experience of the Roma in the audience, Rutherford (1999) resorts to quoting Gatlif himself that this is a film of ‘absolute honesty and truth’,1 while his critics draw on their own experience as Roma to authenticate their reading. What interests me here is not so much which reading is the more persuasive, but the prominence given to the voice in that account. The exchange turns on the conversation, the anecdote, the report of another’s words, the direct quotation of the author’s voice as if the immediacy and self-presence of the voice gives authority and authenticity to the reading. The Western philosophical tradition, as Derrida (1967a) has exhaustively and persuasively argued, privileges voice as the expression of the speaker’s inner essence, as the guarantee of the authenticity and Truth of an expression (pp. 27–73). The voice, writes Derrida, is heard (understood) y closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, y [i]t is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. (p. 20) The voice thus appears to have an unreservedly positive value. As Mladan Dolar (2006) writes, the voice ‘implies a subjectivity which ‘‘expresses itself’’ and itself inhabits the means of expression’ (p. 15). It seems to endow that empty and negative entity we call the subject with its counterpart, its ‘missing half’ or r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

39

Homer

supplement that ‘would enable this negative being to acquire some hold in positivity, a ‘‘substance,’’ a relationship to presence’ (p. 36). The voice speaks with authority insofar as it is associated with a specific body, and that body is marked by a particular experience, in this case, the experience of being Roma. For Derrida (1967a), this ‘unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self’ is an illusion (p. 20). There is always an excess in speech that is not reducible to its expressive function (Derrida, 1967b, p. 31). Furthermore, this excess is not merely an aberration of specific speech acts but is characteristic of language itself. The voice is always already tainted with writing and contains within itself the minimal materiality of a trace that introduces a gap into the voice’s pure self-presence. For Lacan (1960), on the other hand, voice is the senseless remainder of the signifying operation that is left after the stabilization of signification. The object voice is always the intractable in the voice of the Other that imposes itself on the subject. According to Zˇizˇek (1996), whereas for Derrida writing is essentially nonsubjective, for Lacan the voice is the means through which the signifying chain subjectivizes itself by transforming written signifiers into ‘subjectivized’ speech. In this instance the voice operates not as a medium of transparent self-presence but as the point of the eclipse of meaning, the senseless nonsubjectivizable remainder (p. 102). The object voice is that which radically undermines the possibility of self-expression and self-presence, insofar as it introduces a rupture at the core of subjectivity. The object voice is something that cannot itself be present, although the whole notion of presence is constructed around it and can be established only by its elision. So the subject, far from being constituted by self-apprehension in the clarity of its presence to itself emerges only in an impossible relation to that bit that cannot be present. (Dolar, 2006, p. 42) The voice exemplifies what Freud (1919) called the uncanny, that which is at once familiar and unfamiliar, homely and unhomely; it is something that is always ‘in-between’, or extimate, to use Lacan’s (1959–1960, p. 139) neologism, that is to say, at once interior and exterior, intimate and external. The voice appears to belong to oneself, but to find one’s voice one must first incorporate the voice of the Other, introducing a fundamental asymmetry between one’s own voice and the voice of the Other (Dolar, 2006, p. 81). This is precisely the topology of the objet petit a. For Lacan, the object voice is one of the two paramount embodiments (the other, of course, being the gaze) of the objet petit a. The voice, therefore, puts into question the position of authority (the appeal to identity and experience) from which Rutherford’s (1999) critics articulate their discontent. I draw attention to this particular aspect of the critical 40

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

Voice as objet a in Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo dilo

reception of the film because Gadjo dilo itself highlights the element of voice. Gatlif’s film emphasizes voice not as a point of origin and authentic experience, as the expression of an authentic Roma identity and culture, but as a site of indeterminacy and lack. As Rutherford remarks, Gadjo dilo is not a documentary but a work of fiction, and to judge it against the criterion of cultural authenticity is to commit a category mistake that muddles the whole discussion of film and representation in general. Contrary to the prevailing critical reception of Gadjo dilo, which wants to read it as some kind of ethnographic document and according to the criterion of whether or not it accurately represents Gypsy life and culture, Gadjo dilo problematizes the whole notion of verisimilitude.

In Search of the Other The genre of Balkan Gypsy films is usually a variation on the travelogue or quest narrative, which Balkan scholars see as characteristic of the construction of the Balkans in the Western Imaginary (Todorova, 1997; Iordanova, 2001). The very unconventionality of Roma life is seen to offer something more real, genuine and visceral than does our own alienated existence. The question of which set of norms this ‘unconventionality’ is set against is not usually addressed and is assumed to be given. The typical ‘Gypsy’ film, writes Dina Iordanova (2003), ‘is a melodrama, with a plot line usually evolving along inter-racial romance’ (p. 8). This romance ‘usually revolves around a pure and spontaneous liaison between a Romani girl and a man from the main (‘‘white’’) ethnic group’ (p. 8). The plot line presupposes a number of significant assumptions: ‘Gypsy love can be nothing but all-consuming passion; Gypsies are in possession of love secrets that are out of reach, yet perpetually desirable for the dominant (‘‘white’’) ethnicity’ (p. 8). That may be a stereotype, and a rather worn one at that, but as films such as Chocolat (2000) and the whole acting persona of Johnny Depp testify to, it is a stereotype with persistent cultural appeal (see also Dobreva, 2007). In its narrative construction, Gadjo dilo is a very conventional ‘Gypsy’ film. It recounts the story of a young Frenchman, Ste´phane, who travels from Paris to Romania in search of an old Gypsy singer, Nora Luca. He arrives at a small Romanian village in the middle of a freezing night, and nobody will open their doors to him. In contrast to the indifference shown him by the local population, he is ‘adopted’ by an old Roma man (Isidor) who is drowning his sorrows in vodka in the village square (his son has just been arrested and imprisoned). Ste´phane is subsequently taken by Isidor to a small Romani community on the outskirts of the village. Isidor insists that he knows Nora Luca and that he will take Ste´phane to her the next day, but first he parades his new French friend through the Romani camp and local village. The humour of the film r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

41

Homer

derives from Gatlif’s reversal of the usual stereotypes: Ste´phane is suspected by the Roma community of being a chicken thief, a scrounger and a bum who will steal the community’s women and children (he has holes in his shoes and very few possessions). As McGregor (2008) points out, Ste´phane is a quintessential bobo – a ‘bourgeois bohemian’ – who, ‘while appearing destitute in his worn clothing and ripped boots, is clearly well-off enough financially to spend the time and the money to travel from Paris to Romania with his expensive DAT recording equipment in tow’ (p. 93). The civilized Western habits of this crazy stranger (he is very polite, does not initially like to drink or gamble, and cleans the house where he is staying) are estranged through the eyes of the Gypsy community, as he slowly and inevitably ‘goes native’, becoming acculturated into the Roma community. He also meets and falls in love with the ‘beautiful’, ‘passionate’, ‘sensuous’ (to use just a few of the usual orientalist adjectives) Sabina. Isidor’s son, Adriani, is released from prison but almost immediately provokes a fight in the local cafe´, inciting retribution from the villagers against the Romani community as a whole. As Sabina and Ste´phane make love and run naked through the woods, the villagers burn the Roma camp and incinerate Adriani in his own home. The film ends where it began, on the roadside by a milestone. Drinking vodka and ritually dancing over the grave, Ste´phane destroys and buries the tapes of Gypsy music he has so carefully made and catalogued. The camera pans across to the car, where we see Sabina wake up and, as she watches Ste´phane dance, her expression turns to a smile as the credits begin to roll. The critical reception of Gadjo Dilo reads it as a film about self-discovery and truth: Ste´phane’s is a process of acculturation – he moves fully in the direction of Romani society and emulates its habits in order to gain access. In this sense his experience fused with the camera’s eye purports to be an intimate discovery of the people behind the wall of stereotypes so robustly constructed around Romani culture. Gatlif’s pedigree – he is half- Roma himself – assures us that this is a true picture. (Thompson, 2000)2 The verisimilitude of the text is further underscored by Gatlif’s background as a documentary filmmaker, in particular his unobtrusive cinematography (long takes) and simple editing (no special effects or dramatic edits), the use of nonprofessional actors, and his mise-en-sce`ne (the background to his shots are either static or empty). I maintain that, if this is indeed a film about the discovery of truth, then it is not the discovery of the truth hidden behind the wall of stereotypes, but the revelation that there is nothing to discover behind the wall. There is no truth to personal or cultural identity that can give us the ‘true picture’, whether the director is Roma or not. 42

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

Voice as objet a in Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo dilo

The Voice as Objet a Ste´phane’s quest is ostensibly a search for a singer, Nora Luca, and this quest slowly develops into the recording and cataloguing of the music that he comes across. When he first meets Isidor in the village square and plays him a recording of Nora Luca, Isidor is confused. ‘It’s a beautiful song’, he remarks, but ‘[t]here are songs like that everywhere around here.’ It is only when Ste´phane understands the import of Isidor’s remarks that he abandons his attempt to find the singer, the presence behind the voice, and to capture and definitively fix the object of his desire, the objet a. Lacanian psychoanalysis argues that a subject’s desire is founded through the desire of the Other and the subject’s attempt to locate his or her place in the desire of the Other. As Bruce Fink (1995) puts it, ‘In the child’s attempt to grasp what remains essentially indecipherable in the Other’s desire y the child’s own desire is founded; the Other’s desire begins to function as the cause of the child’s desire’ (p. 59). In this process of trying to fathom the unfathomable, the child is forced to recognise his or her status as a subject of lack and, more important, that the Other is also lacking. This overlapping or conjunction of two lacks Lacan calls separation, and it is at this point that the subject can differentiate his or her own desire from the desire of the Other. For the purposes of our discussion, it is important to keep in mind that, although the desire of the Other always exceeds or escapes the subject, there nevertheless remains something that the subject can retain and that sustains him or her as a desiring subject. This something is the objet a, the object cause of desire. Lacan (1964, 1974) added to Freud’s (1905) list of part-objects (the breast, faeces and the phallus) two new objects, the gaze and the voice. Psychoanalytic film theory has shown considerably more interest in the former of those objects than in the latter, starting with the early cine-psychoanalysis, through its feminist critique to contemporary late Lacanian film studies. Slavoj Zˇizˇek (1996) has to a certain extent redressed this balance, but it is primarily through the work of his long-time collaborator, Mladen Dolar (2006), that the full implications of the object voice are now being explored.3 The voice ‘is the excess of the signifier, initially displayed as the excess of the demand of the Other, the demand beyond any particular demand, demand as such, and at the same time the demand put to the Other’ (p. 81). The voice is thus tied both to language and to the body but it is part of neither; it is that which cannot be said and does not contribute to meaning. It ex-sists (if we may borrow from Heidegger, cited in Fink, 1995, p. 25) in the gap between the subject and Other, in the overlapping of the two lacks, what I have called separation. It is through the excess of the demand of the Other that the subject’s desire is born and, as Lacan (1972–73) put it in one of his final seminars, ‘as substitutes for the Other that these objects are laid claim to and made into the cause of desire’ (p. 126). r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

43

Homer

Let us now return to the film to trace the trajectory of the song and the inauguration of Ste´phane’s desire.

The Acousmatic Voice Nora Luca was Ste´phane’s father’s favorite singer and hers was the song that he repeatedly listened to on his deathbed. His father was an ethnologist 4 who spent his life traveling around the world recording traditional songs. He died in Syria on one of his many trips and far from his wife and child. Ste´phane tells Sabina that he did not really know his father, that he was away a lot and he did not see very much of him. His father, then, was an enigma; what motivated him to be away from his mother and him remains a mystery to Ste´phane. In this sense, the search for Nora Luca is a search for meaning, the meaning of his father’s absence, but it is also a search to understand his father’s desire. What is it about these songs or an old Gypsy singer that so infatuated his father that he would leave his wife and son? Ste´phane’s search is a search for what is unfathomable in the desire of the Other. The first time we hear the song, in the opening scenes of the film when Ste´phane plays a tape of the song to Isidor, we hear only the voice without instrumental accompaniment and without an image of the singer to accompany it. This is what Michel Chion (1982) calls the ‘acousmatic voice’, a voice that is heard without its source being seen. The acousmatic voice seems to wander along the surface (of the image or the screen), ‘at once inside and outside, seeking a place to settle’ (p. 23). It is a voice whose origin cannot be identified or placed. All modern communication technology – the radio, phonograph, tape recorder and, above all, the cinema – can be said to possess this uncanny acousmatic property in one degree or another, albeit now a little jaded through familiarity. The acousmatic voice is an enigma, an absolute mystery, for we cannot locate it or pin it down to a source. It is, in other words, a voice in search of an origin. Indeed, the only assurance we have that this voice has an identifiable source is the protagonist’s desire to believe that it does, and through our desire as spectators the search will be successful and the emptiness filled. Ste´phane believes that by finding Nora Luca, by locating the source of the voice, he will be able retrospectively to give meaning to his father’s absence and his own sense of loss or lack. The female voice, as Kaja Silverman (1988) persuasively argues, ‘may be asked to represent that phenomenal plenitude which is lost to the male subject with his entry into language’ (p. 39). For Lacan, the Oedipus complex marks the transition from the illusory plenitude of the imaginary to the barred subjectivity of the symbolic; it involves, therefore, the installation of the paternal metaphor, the substitution of the desire of the Mother by the Name of the Father. In short, it involves the recognition of sexual difference and the threat of castration. Ste´phane mistakenly thinks he 44

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

Voice as objet a in Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo dilo

will be able to fill the hole left by his father’s death, to restore the lost plenitude of the imaginary 5 – mistakenly, I suggest, because the objet a is both that which comes to fill the gap and the gap itself. The object voice, in other words, is both the gap that opens up between subject and Other and that which resonates within the gap. The female voice as objet a is that little bit of the Real that sustains Ste´phane’s fantasmatic structure. For Lacan, the subject is split between desire and jouissance. Desire is oriented towards a lost object and seeks satisfaction through achieving its aim. Jouissance, on the other hand, serves no purpose; it has no aim. Jouissance is absolute and certain; it is a sensation beyond the pleasure principle, that is to say, the death drive. The voice is on the side of ˇ izˇek (1996) observes, jouissance and the Real, and it is no coincidence that, as Z it has something of the quality of the ‘living dead’ about it (p. 101). The two acousmatic voices we hear in Gadjo dilo are Nora Luca’s and that of Isidor’s dead father. The jouissance of the voice entails a presence beyond the continuous quest of desire, but, as such, it remains unsymbolizable in itself. The female voice, the song of Nora Luca, masks the fundamental lack experienced by Ste´phane, but if the voice is to function as more than a fetish covering over an unspeakable absence then it must be, as Lacan (1959–60) said, elevated ‘to the dignity of the Thing’ (p. 112).

From Fetish to Objet a Ste´phane believes he can fill the lack because he believes the object can be captured, that the object can be fixed through its recording and transcription, that the voice can be tied to the signifier. But, as Lacan (1953) reminds us, the signifier is the death of the thing. As Ste´phane’s relationship to Sabina develops, she mediates between him and the local community and takes him around the villages so that he can record different songs. During one recording session Sabina begins to dance and sing as the song starts up. Her singing and the sound of her feet on the wooden floor of the cafe´ interrupt Ste´phane’s recording, and he asks her to stop so that he can begin recording again. What Ste´phane wishes to capture through these recordings is the authentic voice of Gypsy song, presumably before they disappear, but it is the very ‘authenticity’ of the moment that is eclipsed through its transcription. It is the excess of the voice that constitutes its function as objet a, and it is this very excess that Ste´phane tries to strip away in his recording of its essence. Fetishizing the voice of Nora Luca, Ste´phane turns it into an object that can cover his lack. This is not, however, the object voice, the voice as objet a. The object voice cannot be turned into an object of immediate attention and aesthetic pleasure, which would turn it into a fetish, for ‘‘the fetish object is the very opposite of the voice as object a; y r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

45

Homer

music evokes the object voice and obfuscates it; it fetishizes it, but also opens the gap that cannot be filled’ (Dolar, 2006, p. 31). For Lacan, fetishism is a symbolic process through which the subject disavows the absence of the maternal phallus and substitutes the fetish object in its place. The voice, as I have noted, may be tied to language, the signifier, but it is not reducible to the signifier. Indeed there is a dichotomy between voice and signifier. The voice is the nonsignifying remainder; it ‘is precisely that which eludes the signifier and cannot be pinned down by its logic, it is the leftover of the signifying operation’ (Dolar, 2006, p. 130). The fetish object is a signifier that substitutes for an absence; the song of Nora Luca appears to be that object for Ste´phane, but as such the fetish ‘consolidates on the verge of a void’ (p. 69). The void itself, which is opened up by the voice, remains, and it is this aspect of the object voice that Ste´phane cannot capture on his digital audio tape recorder. One is reminded here of Mark Lewis’s failure to capture the fear on the faces of his victims at the moment of death in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), that is to say, to capture the real of death. The only thing left for Mark to do is restage the same scene over and over again until the final scene of the film where he stages and films his own death. Similarly, Ste´phane’s quest seems doomed to failure. When songs are sung throughout the film, some traditional and others composed and played by Gatlif himself, they are inevitably accompanied by the diegetic ‘audience’, singing, dancing and clapping or smashing plates. There is no clear boundary between audience and performers, no inside or outside. There is a libidinal excess that overflows the song itself and is realized in its moment of being sung (along with the dancing and drinking and plate smashing) but is not recordable. The excess cannot be captured, but this is precisely what Ste´phane tries to do. In short, Ste´phane erases the very thing that he desires in the first place – the song’s vitality, its life, its very mystery, that which drew his father to it as well. It is the very excess of the voice that so captivates but cannot be captured in return. By recording the song, transcribing it in the symbolic, Ste´phane kills the Thing itself.6

Unlocking Desire The voice is the object cause of desire but not, as Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zˇizˇek (1996) remind us, in the sense that we fall in love with the voice itself; rather, the voice acts as ‘a medium, a catalyst that sets off love’ (p. 3). The objet a is something we believe we have lost and therefore we desire it. It is what sets desire in motion. We can see how this works in Gadjo dilo: the song of Nora Luca is played a number of times throughout the film, but there are, I think, three key moments when the song is heard. I have already discussed the first time we hear the song, in the opening scenes of the film, when Ste´phane plays a tape of the song to Isidor. There, I have 46

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

Voice as objet a in Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo dilo

suggested, the song functions as an acousmatic voice, a voice that plays across the surface of the text, a voice in search of an origin that inaugurates Ste´phane’s search. All that is written on the label of the cassette, we later learn, is the name Nora Luca. The second key moment when we hear the song is toward the end of the film. Late one night in a tavern in Bucharest, Ste´phane, Sabina and Isidor are getting drunk on vodka and dancing to the Gypsy band that we saw Ste´phane recording earlier in the film. Towards the end of the evening, the musicians shift from the wild and flamboyant dance tunes to a more melancholic tone and, as the band begins to play the song Nora Luca, Sabina sings along. Slowly the voices of Nora Luca and Sabina segue together in the score, and Ste´phane snuggles into the nape of Sabina’s neck, murmurs the name of the ‘singer’. It is at this point that Ste´phane recognizes the significance of Isidor’s words in the opening scenes – ‘It is a beautiful song. There are songs like that everywhere around here’ – that is to say, these songs are not the property of an individual voice. Hence, Isidor’s confusion as he takes Ste´phane around the village to meet one singer after another: none is ever the singer that Ste´phane wishes to find. To put it another way, Nora Luca does not exist; the object of Ste´phane’s search, his object of desire exists only insofar as he has constructed it to give meaning to his father’s absence.7 At this point, Ste´phane’s object of desire metonymically shifts from the singer ‘Nora Luca’ to the singer Sabina, who becomes the embodiment of the song, and, later, to Sabina herself. What we can see taking place here is the unfixing of the object and the inauguration of desire as metonymy. Ste´phane’s desire is freed from its fixation on the object (Nora Luca) to an object (the song, and later Sabina). This is not the end point of the process, however, as Ste´phane still believes he can possess the objet a, as Nora Luca and Sabina become one. There is a fundamental confusion within Ste´phane between the Other and the objet a: If it is truly, as I say, petit a as fallen from the Other, we can exhaust its structural function only by bringing our inquiry to bear on what the Other is as a subject, for voice is the product and object fallen from the organ of speech, and the Other is the site where ‘it’ – c¸a – speaks. (Lacan, 1974, p. 87) We must avoid, observes Lacan, confusing the Other with the subject who speaks from the place of the Other, even if that subject speaks ‘through its voice’ (p. 88). At this point in the narrative Ste´phane retains his investment in the song, but the song, as voice, is embodied in Sabina. Gatlif will brutally drive home the impossibility of this encounter with one final rendition of the song that tears away any residual sentimentality or romanticism we may have. After the burning of the Gypsy village and the incineration of Adriani, Sabina and Ste´phane seek out Isidor to tell him that his son is dead. The musicians have been booked to play at a private party in a large country residence. As their r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

47

Homer

village is burning, the Gypsies are entertaining the local bourgeoisie with traditional music and young Gypsy girls dancing on the table. As Sabina and Ste´phane enter the house, we hear the mournful strains of Nora Luca, and Ste´phane is greeted by the sight of a group of complacently well-fed, drunk, middle-aged, middle-class Romanians singing the lament that has been so poignant and painful for him to listen to. The song that has driven him from Paris to a Gypsy camp in Romania is nothing but a sentimental cliche´. Just as Ste´phane previously had to accept that there was nothing essentially in it that was intrinsic to the singer, he must now acknowledge that there is nothing intrinsic to the song either. Chion (1994) calls this process of demystifying the acousmatic voice, of trying to pin it down to a source, de-acousmatization. De-acousmatization consists of an unveiling process that is unfailingly dramatic. ‘[I]t can also be called embodiment: a sort of enclosing of the voice in the circumscribed limits of a body – which tames the voice and drains it of its power’ (p. 131). Chion compares this process of de-acoumatizations to a striptease in that it is a gradual unveiling. The ultimate stage is finally reached when one actually sees the mouth. [W]hen one sees the gap, the crack, the hole, the cavity, the void, the very absence of the phallus, just as in Freud’s famous scenario. This is how Freud accounted for fetishism: one stops at the last-but-one stage, just before the void becomes apparent, thus turning this penultimate stage into a fetish, erecting it as a dam against castration, a rampart against the void. (Dolar, 2006, p. 68) The gap between the voice and its origin can never quite be bridged; when the voice finds its body, it turns out that this body is never quite right: ‘the voice doesn’t stick to the body, it is an excrescence which doesn’t match the body’ (p. 61). Dolar goes on to write, ‘When the voice gets attached to the body, it loses its omnipotent charismatic character – it turns out to be banal’. (p. 67). As he listens to the assembled party sing Nora Luca the camera holds on a close-up of Ste´phane’s still and bewildered face until the strains of I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967) cut in and we hear Isidor’s anguished wails for the earth to open up and swallow him. Ste´phane stands at the edge of the void and stares into the mouths out of which this voice comes. It is unequivocally not the mouth he anticipated or fantasized about when he began his search. The process of unveiling the voice reveals nothing behind it, and this is an important distinction I think between the acousmatic voice and the object voice. According to Chion (1994), acousmatic sound in a film usually takes one of two forms. Either a sound is associated with a precise image to begin with and then this image will recur in our minds each time we hear the sound acousmatically later in the film; or the sound is heard acoustmatically in the first instance and will be visualized 48

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

Voice as objet a in Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo dilo

only at the end of the film (p. 72). This embodiment of the voice is revealed through Chion’s process of de-acousmatization, the acousmeˆtre, specific kinds of characters ‘whose wholly specific presence is based on their characters’ very absence from the core of the image’ (p. 129). So, is Nora Luca our acousmeˆtre? Not in Chion’s sense, for she lacks the essential powers of all seeing, omniscience and omnipotence characteristic of the acousmeˆtre. Nora Luca’s voice is pure voice, voice as objet a for which there is no final embodiment or presence. In other words, there is no de-acousmatization in Gadjo dilo. We never locate the source of the voice; it is a search doomed to failure for the object a is no-thing. There is no authentic or genuine essence intrinsic to the singer or the song to resist the banality of sentiment and cliche´. The real of this voice, its excess, is something we can anticipate and know retrospectively but never possess. It is this, I think, that Ste´phane recognizes at the end of the film and this is why he destroys his own collection of tapes.

Conclusion Let me return to the final scene of the film, where Ste´phane drives back along the road that we saw him walking down in the opening scene. He is going back to where he originally came from, perhaps. He stops by the milestone and the camera holds on a close-up of his face through the car windscreen. It then cuts to a closer shot and holds, then cuts to a mid-shot as we see Ste´phane get out of the car, light a cigarette and look back down the road in the direction of the village and the Roma camp. He mutters, ‘Great mate’, an expression of intimacy he shared with Isidor, his surrogate father, and turns to the car to take out his tapes and vodka. Does he stay in Romania with Sabina or take her to France? Or does he return to France alone? I have no idea and think that the film deliberately leaves this ending open and ambiguous. What we see is that Ste´phane destroys his tapes on the top of the milestone. A milestone marks a distance taken. But is this a distance to or from somewhere? Gadjo dilo does not answer this question; it does not offer us narrative closure but circles around it, just as Ste´phane circles around the object voice but can never quite grasp it. In his response to Rutherford, Gregory Kwiek (1999) argues that the Roma are not yet in a position socially whereby representations, such as those in Gadjo dilo, can circulate without being misunderstood. Consequently, he maintains, the image of the Roma is denigrated. Under present conditions, he writes, ‘We [Romani people] are in the position of having to fight false representations of Romani culture wherever we see them’. For Claude Cahn (1999), the central problem with Gatlif’s film is that we take the particular group of Roma that Ste´phane meets ‘to stand for all Roma and for Roma as such’. What we are cheated of, he goes on, ‘is the immense diversity of Romani r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

49

Homer

culture, the plurality of Romani personalities’ which Gatlif replaces through ‘a reified, unitary Romani culture’. It is precisely such notions of authenticity and truth, of a unitary and homogenized culture, that Gadjo dilo questions and undermines through the deployment of the acousmatic voice. Gadjo dilo does not oppose ‘true’ representations to false ones but reveals the emptiness of the image itself. The voice is never embodied within the film. There is no source or origin representing the authentic singer. We are left with the sense of the voice as excess, as a remainder, as that which cannot be captured and represented in the symbolic.8 Through the Lacanian notion of voice as objet a, Gadjo dilo explicitly questions the authenticity of any cultural identity and undermines attempts to impose uniformity on the diversity of Roma culture – thus giving us the kind of film Gatlif’s critics are asking for. Gadjo dilo gives us not an authentic representation of Roma culture but the impossibility of such representations and of ever capturing the real of our desire.

About the Author Sean Homer is an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the European University Cyprus, where he teaches courses in critical and cultural theory. He is author of Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics. Postmodernism and Jacques Lacan. He is co-editor, with Douglas Kellner, of Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader and, with Ruth Parkin-Gounelas and Yannis Stavrakakis, of Objects: Material, Psychic, Aesthetic, a special issue of Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, Vol. 14.

Notes 1 In an analysis of the linguistic aspects of the film, Andrew McGregor (2008) explores the contradictions between Gatlif’s metanarrative of authenticity and truth and the film’s diegesis. For McGregor, Gatlif’s own metadiscourse serves to undo the critique of ethnic identity implicit in the film’s diegesis. 2 It seems to be generally accepted that, after he destroys his tapes, Ste´phane ‘decides not to return to France’ (Imre, 2003, p. 20). I see no textual evidence for this; as I suggest later, the ending of the film appears to be much more open and ambiguous. 3 Notable exceptions to this trend in film theory include the seminal work of Michel Chion (1982) and Kaja Silverman (1988). 4 His father’s profession is crucial, I think, as the whole debate around Roma films is whether or not they provide us with an ethnologically accurate picture of Roma life and culture (see Iordanova, 2001, 2003; Dobreva, 2007; McGregor, 2008). Gatlif is foregrounding once again the way in which the Roma are ‘objects of study’ for Western academic discourse rather than subjects in their own right. 5 Ste´phane, in fact, does find ‘a’ substitute father through his search; Isidor adopts Ste´phane as his own son, sent by God, to replace the son that has been taken from him. 6 As a number of critics have noted (Orle´an, 1998; McGregor, 2008), Ste´phane’s recording of Roma music can be interpreted as a metaphor for the film itself insofar as ‘its significance resonates with the broader ethnographic objectives of cultural representation in filmmaking as a whole’ (McGregor,

50

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

Voice as objet a in Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo dilo

2008, p. 95). Ste´phane’s failure to ‘sample’ and capture this exotic ‘other’ culture, therefore, suggests precisely the kind of instability of identity that I am arguing for in this paper. 7 Just as Lacan does not mean that there are no women in the world by his slogan ‘‘The Woman does not exist,’’ I do not mean that there is no such singer but that it remains unclear what the status of this singer is in relation to the song. As the only words written on the tape label are Nora Luca, Ste´phane takes these signifiers to be the name of the singer but they could equally be the name of the song. The film credits attribute the ‘interpretation’ of the song Nora Luca to Monika Juhasz-Miczur; the CD of the film’s music has two versions of the song, the first with instrumental backing attributed to Tony Gatlif, and the second, voice only, sung by Nora Luca. Ste´phane’s father’s recording, which he first plays to Isidor, is the voice-only version; all subsequent versions of the song we hear in the film have musical accompaniment. 8 I should underscore here that the excess in question is an attribute of the object voice and not of Romani culture. My argument does not, therefore, constitute yet another orientalist fantasy about Gypsy life and culture as it applies to all cultures.

References Cahn, C. (1999) Response to Erik Rutherford. Roma Rights Quarterly, http:// www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=966, accessed 14 February 2007. Chion, M. (1982, 1999) Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Chion, M. (1994) Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1967a, 1976) Of Grammatology, Translated by G.C. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1967b, 1973) Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, Translated by D.B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dobreva, N. (2007) Constructing the ‘Celluloid Gypsy’: Tony Gatlif and Emir Kusturica’s ‘Gypsy films’ in the context of New Europe. Romani Studies 17(2): 142–154. Dolar, M. (2006) A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fink, B. (1995) The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freud, S. (1905, 1953) Three essays on the theory of sexuality. Standard Edition 7, London: Hogarth Press. pp. 125–245. Freud, S. (1919, 1955) The uncanny. Standard Edition, 17. London: Hogarth Press. pp. 217–252. Imre, A. (2003) Screen Gypsies. Framework: Journal of Cinema and Media 44(2): 15–33. Iordanova, D. (2001) Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media. London: British Film Institute. Iordanova, D. (2002) Emir Kusturica. London: British Film Institute. Iordanova, D. (2003) Introduction. Cinematic images of Romanies. Framework: Journal of Cinema and Media 44(2): 5–14. Kwiek, G. (1999) Response to Erik Rutherford. Roma Rights Quarterly, http:// www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=966, accessed 14 February 2007. Lacan, J. (1953, 2002) The function and field of speech in psychoanalysis. In: E´crits: A Selection, Translated by B. Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 31–106. Lacan, J. (1959–1960, 1992) The Seminar. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, J.-A. Miller (ed.), Translated by D. Porter. London: Routledge. r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52

51

Homer Lacan, J. (1960, 2002) The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious. In: E´crits: A Selection, Translated by B. Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 281–312. Lacan, J. (1964, 1994) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, J.-A. Miller (ed.) Translated by A. Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lacan, J. (1972–73, 1998) The Seminar. Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (Encore), J.-A. Miller (ed.) Translated by B. Fink. New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1974 1990) Introduction to the names-of-the-father seminar. In: J. Copjec (ed.) Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, Translated by D. Hollier, R. Krauss, A. Michelson and J. Mehlman. New York: W.W Norton. McGregor, A. (2008) Encountering multilingual Europe on a Romani holiday: Cultural authenticity and orientalism in Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo Dilo. In: J. Warren and H.M. Benbow (eds.) Multilingual Europe: Reflections on Language and Identity. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 91–106. Muller, J.P. and Richardson, W.J. (eds.) (1988) The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Orle´an, M. (1998) Gadjo Dilo. Cahiers du cinema 523, April, p. 78. Rutherford, E. (1999) Tony Gatlif’s film Gadjo Dilo furthers the Roma Cause. Roma Rights Quarterly, http://www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=966, accessed 14 February 2007. Salecl, R. and Zˇizˇek, S. (eds.) (1996) Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Silverman, K. (1988) The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Thompson, N. (2000) Understanding the gulf: Tony Gatlif’s. Gadjo Dilo. Central European Review 2(41), http://www.ce-review.org/00/41/kinoeye41_thompson.html, accessed 15 November 2004. Todorova, M. (1997) Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zˇizˇek, S. (1996) The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso.

Filmography Chocolat. (2000) Dir. Lasse Hallstro¨m. Miramax. Crazy Stranger (Gadjo dilo). (1997) Dir. Tony Gatlif. Lions Gate Films. I Even Met Happy Gypsies (Skupljacˇi perja). (1967) Dir. Aleksander Petrovic´. Avala Film. Peeping Tom. (1960) Dir. Michael Powell. Warner Home Video. Time of the Gypsies (Dom za vesanje). (1989) Dir. Emir Kusturica. Columbia Pictures.

52

r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Vol. 15, 1, 37–52