Aesthetic Effects of The Voice-Over In Orson Well's The Magnificent Amersons

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay argues that the voice-over is a distinctive technique of film art that embodies the heterogeneous relation of words and images in film by looking at the aesthetic effects of the voice-over in Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. Most early film critics asserted that the voice-over in film merely serves as an easy or pseudo-literary device that imposes the auteur’s diegetic message on the audience. Yet the voice-over narration exemplifies the unstable yet boundless potentiality of filmic representation, an integrated genre of images and words. The voice-over in The Magnificent Ambersons generates various and versatile aesthetics effects. First, the voice-over functions as an oral storyteller that Walter Benjamin explains as a mediator of collective memory. It also serves as a humorous and un-authoritative novelistic narrator that stands on the equal level with the characters. Lastly, the voice-over produces the ‘acousmetre’ effect when it returns with the celebrated face scene of Major Amberson, which reveals the ‘contaminated’ relation of words and images in film. The voice-over in The Magnificent Ambersons constitutes not only a remarkable aesthetic achievement in film history but also a significant manifestation that illustrates the heterogeneous relation of words and images in film.

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