ABSTRACT
Hollywood 1928: the actress Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) is already a big star when the imminent introduction of sound film threatens her career because her shrill and piercing voice is inappropriate for talkies. In her first sound picture she is therefore dubbed by the young and talented Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), but this substitution is being kept hidden from the public until Lamont is asked at a cinema theater to sing a song live on stage. Selden is standing in the wings, lip-synching the star with her beautiful voice until the curtain opens to reveal the deception and expose the discrepancy between image (Lamont) and sound (Selden). Body and voice no longer fit together, or rather: the scene restores their technical separation in the film-making process, usually hidden but now made palpable for the diegetic audience (the one watching the performance) as well as for the film audience (watching the film). SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (US, 1952) is not only the crowning achievement of a cycle of musicals made by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen in the 1950s, but also an ironic, selfreflexive meditation on the transition from silent to sound film, as well as the “nature” of synchronized sound. In the film, the relation between body and voice is fundamentally called into question, as this problematic relation is staged time and again on several levels, primarily for comic effect. The ontological bond between a sound and its origin that appears so self-evident to us in everyday life is cancelled out and annihilated in the technological set-up of sound cinema.1
