Overhearing Film Dialogue (2003)

OVERHEARING FILM DIALOGUE Sarah Kozloff Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 323 pp. For the past seventy years, nearly every time cinema-goers have sat down to watch a film, they have listened to characters speaking to one another. Even in the most silent of films, this dialogue has amounted to a veritable mountain of words. As a result, it seems extraordinary that Sarah Kozloff's Overhearing Film Dialogue should be the first book-length account of what all this talk is about. In her study, Kozloff succeeds in presenting a clear model of how dialogue functions. Emphasizing careful film analysis, she explores the relationship of spoken texts to cinema's images, sound tracks, and narratives. The book is informative, well-written, and essential reading for anyone interested in narrative film since 1927. Although Kozloff's subject is American fiction films (with some references to British examples), she explicitly invites readers to test her findings in other historical, national and linguistic contexts and points out how this might be done. In fact, one of her book's greatest strengths is its suggestiveness, as a host of historical, social, and formal concerns are raised in its pages. Examples include the development of speech norms across particular periods, the use of speech in non-English-language cinema, the use of non-English speech in American cinema, the relationship between censorship and the evolution of speech styles, and interdisciplinary links between drama and cinema studies. These concerns and others indicate possibilities for important further research and make the book relevant well beyond the limits of its own context. The study is also notable for the quality of its film analyses, which show how attention to dialogue can offer new insights into films we thought we knew well. At one point, for example, Kozloff takes up the bravura visual filmmaking of the party scene at the center of Notorious. Without lessening our appreciation of the images and montage in this sequence, she demonstrates that the visuals are free to achieve such artistry because the characters' dialogue repeatedly delivers essential causal and explanatory information to the audience. In a different vein, she reveals how the well-crafted and well-presented dialogue in ET.: The Extra-Terrestrial juggles realism and sentimentality. Over the course of her study, Kozloff also provides detailed and illuminating discussions of Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Mrs. Miniver, So Proudly We Hail!, Stage-coach, The Magnificent Seven, Bringing Up Baby, The Palm Beach Story, The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, Now, Voyager, and Terms of Endearment. Numerous shorter discussions of other films appear throughout the work. While the book's suggestiveness and its textual readings are important, the root of its excellence is its methodology presented in the opening three chapters and applied to questions of genre in the following four chapters. The methodology is clear and workable, and it provides the conceptual tools necessary to identify dialogue functions, dialogue styles, and the ways dialogue is coordinated with images and non-speech sound. It is developed through a synthesis of relevant aspects of drama theory, speech-act theory, and an analysis of a large body of films. Furthermore, it is comprehensive and extremely detailed, permitting Kozloff to explain, for example, how dialogue identifies settings, describes characters, and establishes narrative causality, how it exploits the artistry of language, and how it directly articulates thematic material. Kozloff's methodology takes into account, among other things, the quantity of dialogue, the length of speaking turns, and the use of slang. It is designed to equip film viewers with the categories and vocabulary they need to describe the characteristics of a particular film's dialogue. Furthermore, discussions of dialogue extracts, buttressed with abundant stills, demonstrate how these categories might aid scholars in accounting for relationships between speech and other components of a film. …