ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the mediatized unity of voice and body of the cinematic apparatus has affected the embodied-ness of the operatic voice in live performance. In psychoanalytically oriented film theory, cinema's castration anxiety is interpreted as the origin of its envy of a live medium, such as opera, in which the voice is naturally embodied. Sam Abel contends that, in live theater, performing bodies are the primary condition for emotional and the psychological communication between performers and the audience, whose bodies occupy the same space at the same time of the performance. The Freudian concept of the castration can be applied to another dimension of absence in the cinematic apparatus namely, the lack of natural unity between voice and body. Hans-Jurgen Syberberg is another director who has explored non-synchronous sounds, as against the general practice in mainstream especially Hollywood cinema of using embodied voices.
