by Elisabeth Weis 

Introduction  
This paper asks:  If voyeurism is such a fertile subject for film,  to what extent is there an aural equivalent?  I propose a possible psychoanalytic basis for considering an erotics of cinematic eavesdropping and suggest that it may be a neglected aspect of the compelling connection between audiences and films. I then turn to the film texts themselves and find that the device of diegetic eavesdropping raises a broad and complex range of moral and narrational as well as psychoanalytic issues. 

Eavesdropping is a dramatic device of  long standing.  It goes back at least to Greek drama and is a favorite trope of Elizabethan dramatists.  Think of the overheard conversation about a handkerchief in Othello or Polonius behind the arras.  In comedy, especially farce, misunderstandings of overheard conversations may be the single most prevalent catalyst for motivating plots.  From Plautus to Shakespeare to U.S. television’s Frasier, in its farce mode, aural misperceptions fuel comic complications.  The eavesdropping can be more than just a plot device, however; it can have larger implications: incomplete overhearing or misinterpreting what is heard can sometimes be a metaphor for how we misunderstand the world and our relationship to it, just as the nearly blind Mr. Magoo is an animated representation of our inability to recognize and cope with the realities of our physical environment. In films, even more than in plays, the eavesdropping is likely to have reflexive as well as diegetic significance because of our greater identification with screen characters. 

Movie eavesdropping raises issues having to do with the nature of the medium itself. For one thing, it can foreground, as does voyeurism, the way in which cinema seems to invade privacy—the way all of film drama feels overheard and spied on.   Like voyeurism, eavesdropping can reflexively question our prying relationship to film, our love of listening in, our complicity with the eavesdropper. When we find the eavesdropping to be central to the diegesis, as in Coppola’s The Conversation, the device thematizes these issues. Eavesdropping is inherently cinematic; as I will argue, the situation requires both audio and visual information and therefore perhaps can be most fully exploited on film. 

Because cinematic eavesdropping has implications unique to film, it would be useful to have terms for such behavior.  I propose the term ‘écouteur’ for an eavesdropper.  In France, the word ‘écouteur’ refers to a second ear-piece on a telephone, which allows a listener to overhear a conversation.  Like a filmic écouteur, its user can listen to but not participate in the conversation.   Besides suggesting the possibility of mechanical eavesdropping, the term ‘écouteur’ evokes its sister term, ‘voyeur.’  In psychoanalytic literature, a voyeur is a person who derives sexual pleasure from forbidden looking.   In cinema studies, the definition of ‘voyeur’ has expanded considerably from its specific, erotically charged psychiatric definition. I suggest a parallel definition of ‘écouteur’ not just to refer to the listener who derives erotic pleasure but in a broad sense that encompasses all eavesdropping behavior.  We can coin a noun for an écouteur’s condition:  ‘écouteurism’ (being careful not to mispronounce it as ecotourism—the practice of visiting rainforests or whale watching). The notion of scopophilia, or the love of looking, also demands a sonic parallel, which we’ll designate as ‘akoustophilia’  (being careful not to mix it up with an obsession for listening to whale calls—Jacques Cousteauphilia?)  We will save for extreme cases of preferring overhearing to interacting with people, the term ‘otakoustophilia,’ which means literally ‘the love of overhearing.’  Because almost every example I have found is multi-valent, I shall use ‘eavesdropping’ as the more neutral term that covers the entire range of listeners and ‘écouteurism’ when I wish to stress the erotic implications of such behavior. 

A Psychoanalytic Underpinning  
The one group of scholars who most frequently approach issues apropos of eavesdropping are the psychoanalytic theorists, who have consistently emphasized the importance of sound, so I shall briefly contextualize my ideas in relation to some psychoanalytic theory. In film most psychoanalytic writing on sound in film usually focuses on the significance of the voice.    Cinematic moments that might be considered eavesdropping are cited within discussions of the appropriation or fetishization of the voice. But even Kaja Silverman and Slavoj Zizek, who have contributed so much to our understanding of situations that involve eavesdropping, do not address the question of overhearing per se (Silverman and Salecl & Zizek). 
 
 Much early psychoanalytic theory when applied to film sound evolved from Mulvey’s suggestion that voyeurism is so central to cinema because it is one of two forms of mastery by which the male overcomes the castration threat posed by the sight of a woman onscreen.   Mulvey calls voyeurism sadistic: the mainstream cinema neutralizes and contains the woman’s threat ‘through the plot’; the plot punishes the woman—kills her off, desexualizes her; the male character investigates, demystifies and/or ‘saves’ her.  Kaja Silverman and others have suggested that voice can also be used fetishistically, that ‘Hollywood requires the female voice to assume similar responsibilities to those it confers upon the female body . . . as a fetish within dominant cinema, filling in for and covering over what is unspeakable within male subjectivity’ (Silverman 38). It would follow, then, that to appropriate that person’s voice, say, by taping the person secretly, would be to exert mastery over that person.  Thus, it might well be worth investigating whether there is a gender differential in eavesdropping situations, whether the dominant situation is male eavesdroppers listening in on women, or vice versa. 

However, my focus here will exclude such questions of sexual difference, in order to first suggest some more general dynamics of eavesdropping. Whereas the point of departure for Mulvey, Silverman, et al. is the critical developmental moment when the child discovers sexual difference, I shall take as mine the situation of the primal scene.  Freud, having first postulated the importance of children’s watching their parents make love, later decided that it was more likely to have been a case of the children overhearing their parents make love.  He theorized that they projected their own fantasies onto this violent-sounding business.  In 1925, Freud wrote that ‘analysis shows us in a shadowy way how the fact of a child at a very early age listening to his parents copulating may set up his first sexual excitation, and how that event may, owing to its after-effects, act as a starting-point for the child’s whole sexual development’ (Freud 250 ff.).  According to Freud, when children encounter the primal scene the event is traumatic; their interpretation is inevitably a sadistic one, that will probably affect their adult sexuality.    Further, Freud asserted that even if children did not encounter a primal scene, they would nevertheless develop fantasies about it.  More recent research has suggested that reactions to the primal scene are more culturally determined. 

Psychoanalysts working with patients often hypothesize that the adult eavesdropper recapitulates the primal scene.   The listener can identify with either of the people overheard, who represent the aggressive and the submissive parent. Or the listener’s identification can be placed with the overhearing child.  Further, the triangular situation can fluctuate, with the hearer identifying at times with the listening, excluded child and at other times with one or both parents. There are any number of modifications and complications possible in this equation, not least in terms of degree of identification.  I would simply suggest here that overhearing is a fundamental experience with profound implications for film.  If we consider the film-going experience to be one of watching and overhearing characters who are separated from us, then the entire film-going experience could be defined as eavesdropping as well as voyeurism. In that case we have a general explanation for an erotics of listening, that links the film-going experience to the primal scene. The experience is one of hearing but not hearing, which may be experienced as anything from maintaining a safe distance to feeling over-stimulated sexually and/or aggressively.  On the diegetic level, if a screen character participates specifically in the act of eavesdropping, he or she could also be said to be unconsciously re-evoking the primal scene. And, finally, if one assumes that the filmgoer identifies with the diegetic eavesdropper, then we would have an almost over-determined explanation for a primal effect of eavesdropping on the film audience, because both diegetic and non-diegetic eavesdroppers recreate the primal situation of both identifying and being left out. 

Although psychoanalysts vary in their interpretations, all agree that overhearing is a primal phenomenon that invokes anxiety. Freud thus prefigured the very cinematic axiom that a threat that is heard but left unseen can allow the audience to imagine something more terrifying than anything a filmmaker could embody in a specific image. More specifically, it can help explain the frisson created by menacing off-screen sound in thrillers, war movies, and science fiction scenes where the enemy’s location is usually identified by sound long before it appears. In this paper, however, I am limiting myself to a more specific kind of overhearing: eavesdropping defined as listening secretly to what is said or done in private. 

Narrational Functions of Eavesdropping  
Having suggested that écouteurism may be a factor worth exploring in terms of the film-goer’s general experience, I will now turn to eavesdropping as a diegetic device.  Because this paper represents the start of a long-term investigation, I am interested in discovering the full range of issues that may be raised by the trope.  As a start, I have chosen to discuss films that foreground the process of overhearing other people and to analyze the narrational functions of such a device.  I am working on a taxonomy of narrational uses that range from those who accidentally overhear a conversation to otakoustophiles, those characters who prefer listening to participating. It is important to recognize the wide range of what falls into the catch-all category of overhearing in movies. Some characters stumble onto conversations, others are innocents who learn edifying things through hearing; some are professionals who record sound, and others actively listen for prurient or terrifying pleasures. Needless to say, the films that problematize the moral and narrational distinctions among the various forms of overhearing, écouteurism, and otakoustophilia are the most interesting for this investigation. 

Plot situations where we are likely to find eavesdropping include: scenes involving the telephone, tape recorders or answering machines; deliberate bugging of people or rooms; confessions, particularly in Catholic confession booths; therapy sessions; conversations overheard in adjacent rooms or spaces, particularly by jealous or paranoid characters; non-realistic scenes in which we or characters can overhear thoughts, as in Wings of Desire or many Godard films; and all films about sound recordists. 
 
I find that nearly all narrational uses of eavesdropping call for the examination of two all-encompassing considerations about the relation between the listener and the overheard party.  The first is that eavesdropping raises issues concerning intrusion, the invasion of privacy.  The second is that it is the separation that is important; this separation defines the eavesdroppers and their subjects in an opposition of social inclusion vs. exclusion. The person constructed as the outsider may be the eavesdropper or the overheard party. 

A second way of considering the subject is to ask what kind of information is heard, which in turn affects the hearer’s relation to it. Here is my proposed schema for all diegetic eavesdropping behavior.  In every case the eavesdropper acquires some form of Knowledge.  In the psychoanalytically based model, the listener relates to what is heard in a situation that somehow mimics the primal scene.  It is often not important what words are overheard; rather, that knowledge is often of something momentous, terrible (anxiety producing), erotic, and secret—carnal knowledge. The knowledge may bring pleasure or pain to the écouteur.  But there is another, more epistemologically based, model for overhearing that one might call noetic, to suggest that it is experienced through the intellect rather than the emotions. What is learned may be a simple fact, such as what time a raid will take place or a secret password. In such cases, the acquired knowledge imparts power or control over the overheard party.  But there is a second kind of noetic knowledge. That is where the eavesdropper hears information that yields a self-knowledge that the listener would not otherwise have recognized.  (We could call that recognition of the self in what one hears an ‘acoustic mirror’ if the phrase had not already been appropriated in a different context by Silverman. I’ll suggest ‘voice of reality’ instead.)  Two complications to my schema:  First, some cases of noetic eavesdropping may involve overhearing explicitly sexual material.  But it is quite possible that while the content of what is overheard is erotic, the eavesdropper’s connection is not.  Second, the schema is further complicated by the possibility that the relationship shifts during the scene as it does in the situation I shall discuss from the film Addicted to Love, which moves from the noetic model to the psychoanalytically based model, as the experience becomes less intellectual and more emotional in its impact. 

Excluded Outsiders:  Children 
 In applying my model to specific films, I’d like to look first at eavesdroppers who are separated from the mainstream of society. Let us consider the category of films portraying children—a genre that regularly depends on eavesdropping scenes. One narrational function of eavesdropping is to literalize a metaphorical or psychological gap between the listener and the speakers. In most cases, children’s eavesdropping involves their exclusion from the adult world, rather than from the companionship of their peers.  Their exclusion from adult life is by definition one of innocence because they lack certain kinds of knowledge. Not surprisingly, films about children, particularly those told from the child’s point of view, are rich with examples that suggest the primal scene. The eavesdropping trope thematizes the child’s incomplete comprehension of the adult world, including the mystery of sexuality and the threat, real or imagined, of parental rejection. In particular, films often present children overhearing custody fights or lovemaking. 

Both parental lovemaking (of a sort) and arguing about custody are central to the 1983 Australian film Careful, He Might Hear You (directed by Carl Schultz), which is virtually constructed around a series of eavesdropping scenes involving a six-year-old boy, Pierce, whose mother has died and whose father has abandoned the family. In Australia during the Depression, two very different sisters are fighting over the right to raise the orphaned son.  The working-class couple Pierce lives with are having difficulty making ends meet and have received a request from his wealthy, unmarried aunt Vanessa that he live partly with her—an offer that eventually escalates to her wanting to take him to London. 

Clip 1: Careful, He Might Hear You.  Opening scene. 
This first clip presents some of the conventions of eavesdropping scenes.  First, it includes watching as well as listening—as is true in the majority of cases. The visual emphasis is on the listener’s eyes, a pattern which usually obtains even when he or she can’t see what is overheard. (Images of ears are not very expressive—except maybe to David Lynch.)  This equal dependence on the audio and visual components is an important principle of eavesdropping scenes. Although on the diegetic level the boy may be experiencing the situation through instinct as a kind of rejection, cinematic convention demands that on the non-diegetic level his comprehension be conveyed to the audience via the image of his open eyes. 

 Because the sound is more important for the purposes of exposition to the audience, it is the view that is partially obscured, not the voices. Indeed, the aunt’s voice is quite loud and has some reverberation, to suggest an interiority as does the extreme close-up of the child’s eyes.  What is not typical is that the film stays in the room with the listener, rather than cutting at some point to the overheard party. The usual convention is to cut to the overheard speakers even when the listener does not see them—presumably for expository clarity or to enliven the mise-en-scene.  In this particular case, the aunt’s insistence on not closing doors becomes a major motif of the film. To her mind, not closing the child out conveys her empathic view of child-rearing.  But in fact the view of the world she is trying to impose on Pierce is at least as false as Vanessa’s. 

In the next clip, a door is closed, but the camera cuts into the room with the overheard couple for quite a while.  Indeed, this is the point where Schultz abandons the boy’s perspective for long periods as the screenplay gets more interested in the psychology of the aunt.  At the start of this scene, the wayward father, Logan, has returned while the boy is staying with Vanessa. In some ways Vanessa is the quintessential cliché of the love-starved spinster; she is frigid—in the not very original words of Logan: ‘a virgin queen.’ Visually, however, Vanessa is presented not as a ‘dried up old maid’ but as an exquisite beauty.  She is introduced into the film, through the boy’s eyes, in an excess of glamorous, diffuse lighting (as is the father, glimpsed briefly by the boy at a cemetery).  Two of the problems in the film are the extent to which the boy, however much he does not want to live with Vanessa, envisions her as a romantic figure and the extent to which she eroticizes him. Vanessa explicitly uses him as a husband substitute.  Early on we have viewed her ritual behavior during thunderstorms:  in the most sensuously shot scene of the film we have watched her gather Pierce into her arms, moaning ‘Hold me, Logan, hold me.’ (Of course, with a character named Pierce we might expect that the boy can be seen as a male sex object.) 

 Clip 2:  Careful, He Might Hear You.  43"-48"   
The first eavesdropping act in this scene begins and ends with Pierce behind the stair rails, to emphasize his separation visually. But the boy’s eavesdropping is more or less forgotten during the melodramatic moments that explicate Vanessa’s pathology. We cut only once away from the room back to Pierce. He is presumably more upset during the second part of the scene, when Vanessa embraces him. A distinction is made between the boy’s timidly staying behind the staircase and a maid rather aggressively eavesdropping and spying.  I would presume that the addition of the maid’s spying, complete with a keyhole matte, is there to emphasize how embarrassingly private are the matters being unleashed. But because the sight of a maid listening at a keyhole has such resonance with comic dramatic traditions, it also lightens the melodrama and lessens any invasiveness the audience might feel. 

Half an hour later in the film, in another back-to-back set of eavesdropping scenes, virtually all the situations are reversed, as Pierce retaliates.  He has told his birthday party guests about Vanessa’s needy behavior (clutching Pierce to her while calling out his father’s name), and the children start to imitate her. From this point on it is Vanessa who is presented as more of an outsider than Pierce, by virtue of her sexual fears. We get a scene in which she first overhears, then watches, her public humiliation.  The psychological impact on Vanessa is emphasized by the use of reverberation in the children’s voices, and it is she who is on the far side of a doorway.  This scene has an interesting interchange of adult and children’s roles.  In taunting Vanessa about behavior in which she has conflated the child with the man she loves, the children have appropriated the adult’s language with their juvenile voices. Thus her words echoing back obscenely in the high-pitches of children are all the more tormenting. 

Clip 3:  Careful, He Might Hear You.  1’14"-1’17"  
 In the second part of the scene, it is again Pierce overhearing the adult world. And, as in the opening scene, he is listening from bed with the lighting emphasizing his eyes. Although Pierce cannot see his aunt, there is no reduction in the volume of her crying when we cut from her to him in bed.  His growing ability to ‘hear’ his aunt stands in for his empathy for her. Also, it is now Vanessa who says ‘go away.’  The rhyming of this scene with the opening of the film emphasizes how Pierce has changed. The difference between these scenes marks his growth.  Pierce not only has learned about adult sexuality but about its complications.  Eventually Pierce’s empathy with the aunt is so great that he ‘hears’ Vanessa’s screams as she drowns far away.  Ultimately, Pierce has acquired all the types of knowledge in my schema: secret knowledge about sexual desire, knowledge about death and denial, knowledge about the ways adults tell lies to maintain their views of the world, and finally self-knowledge about his identity. The last shots of the film are of Pierce running through the woods claiming the name of his mother’s father.  Pierce has rejected both of his aunts’ attempts to become his surrogate mother, their lies, and their attempts to control what he sees and hears.  By the end of the film he has acquired enough self-knowledge to determine his own identity. 

A more recent, Australian film also is centered on a child’s feelings of exclusion:  Rolf de Heer’s The Quiet Room (1996), which foregrounds overhearing in two ways.  First, and more traditionally, we hear the parents’ marriage disintegrating as the seven-year-old girl overhears their quarrels escalating in intensity, from beyond her room, where she and the camera stay for most of the film. As in Careful, He Might Hear You, the child devises a punishment for the adults.  She refuses to speak to her parents.  Thus, the audience has a second experience of overhearing; throughout most of the film we are able to hear the girl’s thoughts—both to herself and to her parents as she carries out her end of the dialogue with them in her mind. 

The Voice of Reality  
There is a class of people whom Hollywood may consider to be even less socially acceptable than children:  single, no longer nubile women. We have seen that Careful, He Might Hear You puts Vanessa in the humiliating position of having her neediness revealed publicly. It’s somewhat of a staple of women’s melodrama to show older or single women overhearing people who have cast them as outsiders.  Eavesdropping is a useful narrational device in a genre that often accentuates the discrepancies between what the audience knows and what individual characters know. 

King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937) contains an example that is classical in what it accomplishes but transcendent in the subtlety of the feelings it conveys. In Stella Dallas the mother is not only separated from her husband (by her choice) but separated from the social class that she wants her daughter to marry into.  The eavesdropping scene on the train in which Stella and her daughter overhear the humiliating chatter of girls describing the public spectacle she had made of herself earlier that day foreshadows the final scene of her watching her daughter’s wedding from outside the window, excluded from society. But it is also a paradigm of overhearing the voice of reality.  An earlier scene on a train, in which Stella and her male friend laughed hysterically about his itching powder pranks, had shown Stella to be absolutely oblivious to the reactions of others, even when Vidor has the couple enter a first class car in order to reveal their impact on an upper-class audience. But the scene in which Stella hears herself talked about finally confronts her with the reality of social distinctions, as is indicated by the last part of the scene with the daughter asleep but the mother, eyes open, planning to give up her daughter for good.  Linda Williams has captured the subtlety of perceptions here. Note also the extent to which she uses the word ‘see’ in the second half of this citation. ‘What is significant . . . is that Stella overhears the conversation at the same time Laurel does—they are in upper and lower berths of the train, each hoping that the other is asleep, each pretending to be asleep to the other. So Stella does not just experience her own humiliation; she sees for the first time the travesty she has become by sharing in her daughter’s humiliation . . ..  By seeing herself through her daughter’s eyes, Stella also sees something more. For the first time Stella sees the reality of her social situation from the vantage point of her daughter’s understanding, but increasingly upper-class, system of values . . ..’ (Williams 310; italics mine). 

The visual terminology used by Williams suggests that knowledge is visual, that understanding is seeing—which of course is an ideological notion the cinema conspires in perpetuating.  It’s the visualization that helps us register the significance of what the characters, and we, hear.  The linguistic isn’t enough. The film’s cinematic conventions insist that the facial expressions of the two women must convey their understanding of what is being overheard. Thus, on the diegetic level, it is the girls’ words that convey reality to Stella.  But on the non-diegetic level, it takes the images of the women’s expressions to convey to us what they understand.  Having finally seen herself as others see her, Stella in the very next scene offers her daughter up to her future stepmother. 

It is interesting to note that in creating the scene in which Stella humiliates herself in front of the rich and tasteful, Vidor and Stanwyck emphasize the display visually as an excess of makeup, gesture, and garish clothing. She has made herself up as an erotic object, unlike the rich, whose tasteful style is one that represses vulgar eroticism. However, in this eavesdropping scene on the train, when the girls report the event, they use aural language, turning so-called ‘loud’ clothing into a literal description; they speak of ‘bracelets up to here that clinked’ and ‘bells on her shoes that tinkled.’ 

Sanctioned Eavesdropping  
The 1997 comedy Addicted to Love also uses overheard sound as a weapon that forces a character to acknowledge a painful reality that he has been avoiding. The reality heard by the protagonist is not a class reality, but the sexual truth about his ‘beloved.’ But this case is more complex, as the voice of reality experience also becomes a sado-masochistic erotic experience.  This film provides a perfect match when a voyeur meets up with an écouteur.  Both Sam (Matthew Broderick) and Maggie (Meg Ryan) have been jilted by lovers who are now a couple. The jilted lovers hole up in a nearby apartment in order to try get their loved ones back—through the unlikely methods of spying and harassment. Sam rigs up a form of camera obscura to watch his girlfriend, and, projecting her image against his wall, he creates a benign scene in which, to the background of a love song, he talks to her image. She appears to hear him and to laugh at his cleverness.  He is able to recreate his vision of an ideal love between them.  However, Maggie, the more aggressive and sadistic of the two, tries to persuade Sam to become as angry and vindictive as she is. She adds sound to his pictures by bugging the other couple’s apartment. Inevitably, we overhear a lovemaking scene, and inevitably the new lover is evoking from the girlfriend cries of passion that Sam had never stimulated. (The new boyfriend is French.) In this film, aural evidence is incontrovertible. It is also a weapon. Maggie turns the orgasmic sounds up to a deafening level and uses them to batter Sam with the truth—so that he absorbs the lesson not just intellectually but emotionally; his body assumes a defensive position as he writhes in pain. 

Addicted to Love provides an intriguing transition between films that look at the victims of eavesdropping and those that stress the intrusive behavior of the perpetrators. Usually, an audience is predisposed to dislike eavesdroppers.  However much the public dislikes Monica Lewinsky for having exposed the President’s priapism, it is more hostile towards Linda Tripp for having betrayed her friend by taping a confidence.  Yet some films, including Addicted to Love, and M*A*S*H, which I will take up next, find ways of sanctioning the behavior of eavesdroppers. 

In Addicted to Love, Sam is both perpetrator and victim (as Nixon managed to be when he destroyed himself with his own tapes). Sam’s voyeurism via telescope is sanctioned by the film’s presentation of his character as an astronomer, who in the heyday of his relationship with his girlfriend, trained his telescope on her at noon every day—with her knowledge—so that they could communicate across a few miles’ distance. Once she has left him for the French lover in Manhattan, his illicit telescope setup seems almost natural.  It takes the aggressive, leather-clad, cycle-riding Maggie to take the seemingly perverted and immoral step of physically entering and bugging the lovers’ apartment. The scenario attributes the blame to the aggressive woman and thus removes the onus of guilt from Sam, who nonetheless participates fully in the surveillance of the lovers. 

 The film also constructs an elaborate apparatus for raising and then defusing the guilt of voyeurism-écouteurism by sanctioning those acts via the victim status of those doing the surveillance. By mid-film, we see Sam and Maggie on a couch, watching and listening to their exes by means of their audio and video technology. They’re eating take-out food, laughing like a couple at home watching a video. The film is not so subtly suggesting that scopophilia and akoustophilia, especially as voyeurism and écouteurism, are the fundamental pleasures of the cinema. If such behavior can be sanctioned by the plot as ‘overhearing’ rather than actively sadistic intrusions, or as intrusions by victims upon the lives of their oppressors, we can safely identify with those doing the intruding.  It becomes more problematic for both the psychic and the studio censors when full-fledged écouteurism is indulged for the unsanctioned pleasures of eroticism and sadism.  Even Addicted to Love found some critics more disturbed than amused by the couples’ sadistic torturing of their former loves. 

 By contrast, M*A*S*H, which also tries to sanction eavesdropping through the disabling mechanism of comedy, was hugely successful at the time (1970), although today it looks as cruel, sophomoric, and misogynistic as it is funny. Altmann’s quintessential anti-establishment film posits its outsider/victims, Margaret and Frank, precisely as those two characters who most adhere to establishment rules—in this case, those of the Army and organized religion.  One of the best remembered scenes of the film is that in which the surgeons and Radar slip a microphone under the bunk while the outsider-couple make love. This excerpt reverses the paradigms we have looked at, in which we move from listener to target to listener. 

 Clip 4:  M*A*S*H.  ~70"-73"  
 It is not by accident that the scene introduces the notion of listening to the radio. The priest’s mistaken impression that the group is listening to a specific radio show is prompted by their physical arrangement in such a way as to evoke nostalgic images of family and friends huddled around the radio in its golden days. And eventually, the eavesdroppers do transfer their private listening session to the camp’s public address system, thereby creating a public broadcast. Under the guise of producing a public performance, the perpetrators can suggest that their motive is entertainment rather than prurience or sadism. Later Hawkeye, Trapper, and company will humiliate nurse Margaret visually by raising the tent in which she is showering.  The notion of spectacle there is reinforced by their lining up seats in preparation, by their applauding, and by their explicit references to the ‘show.’  In the bugging scene most of the sounds we can identify of frenzied love-making are uttered by Margaret.  The film’s sympathy is with the adolescent sensibilities of the mostly male diegetic audience. The sole eavesdropper who empathizes with the love-making is the woman. For the boys of the 4077, taking seriously anything other than surgery is anathema. It is hip to show no feeling. It is Margaret’s seeming excess of desire, as well as her command over the male lover, that is therefore a subject of ridicule.  Thus we have the antinomy of the cool characters listening vs. the hot lips of Major Houlihan and Major Frank Burns.  The explicit sadism of eavesdropping is sanctioned here by the in-group, by the pre-feminist social mores of the late 1960s, and by the genre, comedy. 

I do not teach M*A*S*H in my American Film Comedy class.  I cannot persuade my students that it was ever considered hilarious. My students and I find the behavior of Hawkeye and Trapper to be sadistic rather than funny.  Nonetheless, this scene does have a timeless aspect to it that provides the humor:  It exposes the sheer clumsiness and fumbling of love-making that are usually not subject to observation in films about adults, especially in Hollywood films in which movie stars all have the technique of James Bond and Mata Hari.  This type of humor, funny because of our nearly universal insecurities about love-making, is possible only through sound.  To show the fumbling would make it improbable and too specific in terms of sexual logistics.  As presented, the scene suggests two more narrational uses for eavesdropping—to let us hear what cannot be shown and to provide the requisite distance for laughter. I would suggest that the presence of the intermediary diegetic eavesdroppers mitigates our own guilt and sanctions the pleasure of listening in on private sexual activity. 

Surveillance 
Because of the intrusive implications of eavesdropping, one of its most frequent narrational uses is to define character.  Eavesdropping can characterize an entire society, as in Wenders’ The End of Violence (1997), Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), or Truffaut’s  Fahrenheit 451 (1966), where surveillance is a social comment on the lack of privacy in the modern world, whether that invasion be ascribed to the state or to the capitalist free market.  But I am referring here to its use as a short cut to define an individual.  To characterize someone as sneaky, make him an eavesdropper. The Salieris of the world are often found lurking behind doors and curtains in contrast to Hollywood western heroes who face the enemy at high noon, in public (while the cowards shoots their opponents in the back, under cover of night, without revealing their presence). Thus, when the M*A*S*H surgeons publicly acknowledge their bugging by broadcasting it, they are coded as All-American boys.  They have not concealed their behavior, and their victims are not seen as deserving privacy. 

Frequently, to stress the intrusive nature of eavesdropping, films portray it as revealing the victims’ inner-most, emotional lives. Thus, even when the targets’ personal lives are incidental to the purpose for the bugging—as in much police surveillance—writers typically add a very private moment to the tape.  For example, the bugging in the comedy-thriller Conspiracy Theory (1997) is a minor plot event, wherein one character is tracking another’s location through an electronic bug placed in a box of pizza. But the first part of the conversation being monitored between Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts is a touching reference to his love for her.  In many films, the example is less delicate:  when electronic bugging is involved, the filmmakers can use its invasive potential as an excuse for a gratuitous sex scene. 

As for the characterization of the individuals who engage in bugging, perhaps the fact that the individual eavesdropper must operate surreptitiously is also behind the negative image. Even if someone eavesdrops for socially redeeming reasons—such as exposing crimes—the act will usually be encoded with additional negative associations. For example, the eavesdropper may be linked with images of filth. Harry Caul, the surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman in Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), is seen installing a bug while working around a toilet. Touch of Evil (1958) ends with an extended scene of body bugging by the ‘hero,’ portrayed by Charlton Heston. Morally compromised in his pursuit of evidence to incriminate Orson Welles’s Inspector Quinlan, Heston tracks his target alongside the oil-slicked, garbage-filled river into which Quinlan ultimately falls as he dies. 

Two key American films that focus on bugging, Blow Out (1981) and The Conversation, question of course the whole notion of whether one can trust the objective reliability of sound recordings, and, by extension, anything we hear.  In focusing solely on how these films represent eavesdropping, we should consider how both films emphasize its lethal potential.  During the opening scene that depicts the original recording of The Conversation, the ‘targets’ are photographed through a so-called ‘shot-gun’ mike and lined up in cross-hairs.  Harry’s fears that his tapes will be used to murder a philandering couple are explained in part by his guilt deriving from an earlier incident in which his tapes resulted in the gruesome deaths of an innocent family. In De Palma’s Blow Out, Jack (John Travolta) is a sound man for third-rate horror films.  He has relegated himself to this job because of his guilt about a tragedy he inadvertently caused when he worked for the police helping them wire undercover cops to catch criminals. In the film’s main action, Jack, while trying to do the right thing after discovering that he has inadvertently taped a political murder, is unable to save a woman after he has wired her. Michel Chion comments that Blow Out’s action begins with a search for a scream to dub onto an actress in a low-budget horror film.  The screaming-point, as Chion calls it, is an audio-visual culmination of many lines of action in a woman’s scream (Chion 75-79). It’s satisfying, necessary. And we may recast it as a supreme moment of voyeurism and écouteurism in such movies. The sound man does get his scream, ironically enough, at the end of the film as he (and we) listen with fascinated horror as his girlfriend is murdered. 

Professional Situations:  Therapy Sessions and Confessionals  
Two additional professional situations often imply eavesdropping:  psychotherapy and the Christian confessional. The therapist and priest are figures whose role is to be entrusted with people’s innermost secrets, but, like professionals who wield microphones, they can abuse their privileged positions as listeners. No wonder that so many therapy and confession scenes act as the intermediary for the cinematic audio-viewer and have reflexive implications. The 1971 film Klute is interesting in this respect because the mediation is used less with the heroine’s therapy sessions than with tape recordings.  Jane Fonda’s character, Bree, a call girl, is seen on many occasions talking to her therapist. Bree’s monologues during therapy are set in opposition to her monologues as a professional seducer. Most of the times when we hear Bree in therapy, we do not see the therapist but rather stay firmly fixed on Bree, talking almost at the camera.  The film’s recurring therapy sequences are photographed and acted in a style that suggests the relatively unmanipulated manner of Direct Cinema. This style creates a sense of verisimilitude that heightens our sense of intrusion at the same time that it puts the filmgoer in the privileged position of the therapist. In the therapy scenes, there is little mediation between the listener and Bree/Fonda, who seems to be speaking the words just as they occur to her. 

At the other extreme is our experience in listening to the tapes that form the contrasting major motif of Bree talking. These are tape recordings on which we hear Bree’s pre-sexual spiel, intended to seduce and relax her various clients.  The spiel is introduced during the opening titles, as we look at a small tape recorder.  There is no distracting action on the screen and the voice provokes, in most viewers, I should think, both extreme discomfort at overhearing private language and prurient curiosity about how a professional goes about seducing a client. In a sense, we are being seduced as well.  Through repetition in later scenes, the tapes start to lose their shock value, but their effect varies because, as in The Conversation, we hear what is essentially the same spiel in different contexts, as we watch different images—in this case, various listeners. Some discomfort at intruding does remain, even though Bree speaks of this activity as performance, as acting, and has told her therapist that she hasn’t been able to give up being a call girl because of the sense of control it gives her.  Whereas the therapy monologues present an unmediated and tentative Bree thinking her way through therapy, the tape scenes present a performing, confident woman, and we experience them (except during the credit sequence) while watching a surrogate male listener who stands in for the original male listener. Eventually, the danger associated with the tapes escalates as does the threat to Bree herself. A stalker, who has been phoning Bree but not speaking, finally terrorizes her by playing one of these tapes to her over the phone.  When she finally confronts him in person he plays a tape that is even more painfully intimate: it is his voice as he speaks to a woman whom he is about to murder, followed by her screams.  The film suggests that overhearing a woman’s lasts moments is even more obscene than the content of the earlier tapes.  Bree does not look at the tape player or the camera, but rather weeps silently, with her head averted and eyes down. She is now not a voice without an image, but an image without a voice.  She has lost control, and, for once, it is the man who is talking.  We realize that the situation is doubly obscene; the playing of the tape challenges our roles as eavesdroppers because we are watching and hearing what may be the last minutes of Bree as well. 

I shall not venture into the vast territory suggested by the topic of therapists themselves as écouteurs, but instead move to a second film that uses therapy sessions in ways that challenge the audience’s involvement. In Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988), therapy sessions are overheard by a diegetic outsider.  (Perhaps we should not be surprised that Allen might be paranoid about having one’s therapy sessions overheard.) In this case, the vent of a therapist’s office allows the tenant in the next apartment to hear with absolute clarity.  Unlike some directors who make us strain to listen during eavesdropping sequences, Allen keeps the overheard voices unrealistically audible and the images very spare; there is a minimum of detail or movement in the frame, so that we can concentrate on the voices.  This is decidedly a metaphorical rather than a realistic case of overhearing. 

Roger Ebert’s review commented on his sense of invasion when watching Another Woman:  ‘Film is the most voyeuristic medium, but rarely have I experienced this fact more sharply than while watching Woody Allen’s Another Woman. This is a film almost entirely composed of moments that should be private. At times privacy is violated by characters in the film. At other times, we invade the privacy of the characters. And the central character is our accomplice, standing beside us, speaking in our ear, telling us of the painful process she is going through.’ 

Allen’s eavesdropper is yet another of the director’s cold and proper intellectuals who have achieved outward success at the price of denying their emotional lives.  This point is articulated a dozen times by various characters, thus leading to a paradox:  although the film is aimed at intellectuals or quasi-intellectuals (it drops the names of such cultural icons as Rilke and Klimt), it insults our intelligence with redundancy on the screenplay level. It is the enunciation of the film that is intelligent, in its complex shifts between voice-over, fantasy, flashback, and dream sequences, indebted to Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. The action is initiated when Marion, a philosophy professor played by Gena Rowlands, having rented a room to write a book, overhears the therapy sessions of Hope (Mia Farrow) in the next room. Hope articulates all the problems that Marion has been repressing—such as the inadequacy of her marriage and the regret that she did not marry the one man for whom she felt true passion. Marion gets progressively more involved with her doppelganger—her acoustic mirror—meets up with her, and eventually has lunch with her. 

Another Woman, can be said, like Stella Dallas, to use eavesdropping to waken a character to her own reality—but it is a psychic not a social reality.  This is clearly a case of eavesdropping that breaks through the listener’s life-long resistance. The overheard voice can be interpreted either as Hope’s or as entirely a projection of the professor’s imagination—her subconscious finally breaking through to destroy her illusions.  The film does play with the audience’s prurience.  The first patient overheard by Marion is a man who describes his initial sexual experience with another man, his masturbation fantasies, and the like—all in the space of a minute.  When the next, whiny  voice overheard is that of  Mia Farrow (Marion’s Great Whiny Hope?), whose problems are more cosmic than sexual, we are forced to ask whether we are disappointed. Later, when even Hope is not talking, when she has sat for almost an entire session in silence, we share Marion’s disappointment. 

The eavesdropping device becomes richly reflexive—or perhaps I should say echoic—in a scene where Marion finds herself as the topic of Hope’s therapy sessions after the two women have met. Suddenly it is Marion’s private life being described; she is eavesdropping, as it were, on herself.  Inasmuch as the filmgoer has identified with Marion, we too feel violated. Yet the professor has also been portrayed as insufferably smug.  Thus, the film has interesting ways of making us alternate between identifying with the character and objectifying her. 

Clip 5:  Another Woman. ~1’07"-1’10"  
This scene’s inversion, with the eavesdropping turning in on itself, is consistent with the rest of the film, that often reverses conventions. The society portrayed in this film is comprised of couples who consider it chic to discuss their sex lives in public. Its characters ‘perform’ more histrionically in real life than they do when acting in plays. And scenes of overhearing patients in therapy are not as painfully obtrusive as some moments of public embarrassment. Needless to say, thanks to the miracle of dime-store Freud, Marion is ‘cured’ by the experience, meaning that she not only mends all her relationships and divorces her husband but—more important to us academics?—she finds that she no longer has a writing block! 

Like therapists, hearers of confessions can be constructed as benign, neutral, or overly-curious.  In some Catholic confession scenes the camera remains on the speaker; this choice usually stresses either the mysteriousness of the vaguely discerned ear beyond the screen or the cleansing relief attained by the act of confessing. I have yet to locate films other than comedies that overtly depict a priest as a prurient listener. There is one where the listener’s curiosity is quite literally morbid:  To me the most invasive confession scene ever remains that in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956), where the knight’s confessor is revealed to be Death himself. 

The extent to which a confession scene has a reflexive quality—that it reminds us that we are overhearing privileged secrets—is almost directly correlated to the difficulty we have in discerning what is said. The confession scene in The Godfather, Part III (1990) takes place in a courtyard with Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) and the cardinal facing each other, yet the images create an experience for us that suggests the effect of a confession booth. 

Clip 6: Godfather III.  Confession to Cardinal.  1’43"-1’45"  
This scene is coded to suggest intrusion.  First, the camera physically places us in the position of eavesdroppers by putting images between us and the speakers. Second, some leaf-covered statuary creates a visual separation between the characters—but just from our perspective, not from theirs. Third, Michael’s voice drops down as he confesses to having ordered his own brother’s death. Oddly, I find this scene less intrusive than another in which Michael is alone speaking to the recently deceased body of his friend Don Tomasino and vows to ‘sin no more.’  Whereas the actual confession scene with the cardinal puts more emphasis on Michael’s need to confess for the release it brings, the scene of him speaking to the corpse both creates a sense of intimacy and makes us aware of the enormity of Michael’s secret.  I would suggest that what we feel in scenes like the one with the corpse—a combination of intimacy and identification with yet a sense of intrusion—characterizes the attraction-repulsion nature of écouteurism as an aspect of the film-goer’s experience. 

I have yet to investigate whether eavesdropping on television scenes has the same effects that it has in the movies. However, the assumption that an audience has an insatiable appetite for eavesdropping on confessions is such a given that an entire television movie is predicated on it.   In Original Sins (1995), a radio talk-show host comes up with the idea that listeners may call in to confess their secrets over the air, and the ratings soar.  What the audience and the station owners do not know for most of the film, is that the host is himself . . . a priest. The film does not exploit the écouteurism motif per se.  Like its diegetic station, this tv movie uses overhearing confessions as a gimmick rather than a rich motif.  Thus, it is only interesting for our purposes in that it assumes that such a program would attract a wide listening public. 

Otakoustophiles  
Original Sins assumes a whole society of eavesdroppers.  My last three examples concern individuals who have a pathological preference for overhearing rather than participating in life. My search for film protagonists with otakoustophilia so far has uncovered only three—in films by Coppola, Kieslowski, and Egoyan.  I have mentioned only in passing the best known example, the professional bugger in The Conversation, because that film has received extensive attention in print. Most relevant to this discussion is the work of Kaja Silverman, who argues that Harry Caul’s ‘fear of being overheard is as intense as his compulsion to eavesdrop on others’ (Silverman 88). She also evokes the image of the primal scene, which she suggests is reenacted by Harry when he bugs the adjacent room from a hotel bathroom (92).  I will concentrate on the two less-scrutinized exemplars of akoustophilia. 

Kieslowski’s eavesdropper appears in Red (1994), the culmination of his ‘Three Colors’ trilogy. One of the two protagonists, a retired judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, is a misanthropic recluse in Geneva, whose main preoccupation is listening in on his neighbors’ telephone conversations. In a sense, his private listening is an extension of the ‘hearings’ he had held professionally—but without his having to render judgments. The judge’s social isolation is interrupted by a model—a professional exhibitionist, as it were—whose life intersects with his when she accidentally injures his dog.  She is present when he listens in on a neighbor, who is ostensibly a happy family man, having a warm phone conversation with his male lover.  When the model runs next door to warn the wife, she cannot bear to destroy the woman’s complacency and leaves without saying anything, even though she sees their young daughter listening impassively to her father’s conversation on an extension phone. The judge and the model argue about whether they should interfere with the lives of those they overhear. 

The model eventually manages to forge an emotional connection with the reclusive judge, and she tells the judge to stop eavesdropping.  That night he turns himself in to the police, thereby facing a trial and public contempt. But he is also redeemed. Red, which opens with an image of transatlantic telephone cables, is about connections among people. Kieslowski, having created in Blue, White and Red, a whole trilogy of characters who have cut themselves from off society, finally allows for reconciliation in this, his last film.  The judge is shown to be capable of reintegration within the social sphere. Or he may have gone further—there is a suggestion, that having earlier quit the bench and dropped out of society in order to avoid any responsibility for human or even canine life, the judge now goes to the other extreme and controls the fates of those he overheard (and even characters from earlier films of the trilogy) with the omnipotence to determine who survives a transchannel ferry accident—that he may himself have caused. 

Kieslowski’s film operates both as an exploration of human psychology and as a philosophical investigation.  He investigates the nature of eavesdropping per se, but ultimately places the eavesdropping in broader contexts:  the reciprocal relationship between spying and being spied on, our ethical connections to people we see and hear, our social responsibility for each other, and ultimately our ability to control our own fate and those of others. 

I am not sure whether my last otakoustophile has been reassimilated into society or will be capable of normal relationships when the film ends.  The protagonist of Atom Egoyan’s 1993 film Calendar is a photographer whose idea of dating is to hire a woman who will engage in erotic talk with a man on the telephone in an exotic language as our photographer overhears and is excluded. These dates occur twelve times, one for each month of the calendar, with twelve women speaking twelve different languages. We infer that each woman has been instructed in advance that when he pours the last of the wine, she is to ask to use the phone. 

Clip 7: Calendar. 27"-29"  
The otakoustophile here is a professional photographer in Toronto who is trying to understand how his relationship with his wife fell apart.  Like his wife, he is a Canadian of Armenian descent.  He had gone to Armenia on commission to shoot pictures of twelve churches for a calendar, which we see hanging by the telephone. He had also made a videotape of the trip. The sounds of three discourses—the video, the women talking on the phone, and his voice speaking aloud the words he writes during the dates—all bleed into each other.  Sometimes the sonic discourses overlap; sometimes we hear the sound of one while we watch the image of another. Occasionally we hear his estranged wife leaving messages on the answering machine because he will not pick up the phone.  From the video we learn that his wife, who still spoke Armenian, had translated for the local guide who led them to the churches and explained their cultural significance. Gradually the wife had fallen in love with the guide, and the photographer had filmed them talking in a language he did not understand.  Thus he has arranged for his dates to duplicate the pain of hearing his wife speak with a man she came to love.  He writes of the masochistic impulse: ‘all that’s bound to isolate is bound to hurt.’  It is not clear whether the experience is simply a masochistic duplication of his feelings of exclusion or a repetition compulsion designed to help him overcome his pain.  He seems to relate a bit more to the last ‘date’ as an individual; he listens more attentively as she converses with him before using the phone.  In either case, a traditional psychoanalytic interpretation would be that in forcing himself to overhear, the photographer has masochistically created a reenactment of the exclusion of the child who witnesses the primal scene. 

You will notice that I have suggested a possible erotic interpretation only in this last case of the three otakoustophiles I have discussed. Although the judge in Red also listens in on some phone sex, I see no basis for assuming that he or The Conversation’s Harry Caul gets off sexually on listening.  The question remains, does the construction of such characters raise the ante in appealing to any erotic impulses in the audience?  Again, I do not think the answer is simple. Is there any parallel to Hitchcock’s use of voyeurism where the audience is encouraged to watch along with the voyeurs?  Hitchcock usually creates strong emotional identification with the attractive characters who exhibit anti-social behavior, thereby forcing us to recognize its seductiveness and suspend our judgment.  However, the eavesdroppers in Red, The Conversation, and Calendar are constructed as more pathological extremes.  Their behavior is constructed as anti-social.  On the other hand, all three films tease us by letting us overhear conversations along with the eavesdroppers. The extent to which we strain to listen inevitably makes us conscious of our curiosity.  But that curiosity may be as much intellectual as prurient. Further, Red and The Conversation include diegetic discussions of the moral implications of such behavior.  And just because the protagonist of Calendar has an erotic response, that does not mean that the audience does.  In presenting the psychoanalytic theory that eavesdropping may rouse primal memories, I mentioned two complicating factors:  the shifting of identification and levels of conscious awareness.  Both factors probably obtain in the above three films.  It may be when otakoustophilia is so central to the narrative that our very consciousness of the issue makes it more of an intellectual device than an erotic one. 

Ultimately, I do not feel comfortable determining the nature of the listener’s response in particular instances, diegetic or actual. My purpose here is not to provide a global theory, but in having aired examples, to open up some of the issues that are raised by filmic eavesdropping behavior.  I can, however, offer concrete evidence of the lure and frequency of eavesdropping behavior by providing reality bites in the form of statistics on the actual listening habits of Americans. The publisher of the scanner journal Monitoring Times estimates that between ten and twenty million people in the States use scanning equipment to listen in on a range of wireless devices (Kratz 30).   And in 1998 the United States Justice Department released figures that government wiretaps had reached a record two million private conversations. And that’s just the federal, legal ones.  Any private party who wants to tape a telephone conversation can.  Radio Shack reports booming sales of telephone jacks that enable any user to tape a conversation without notifying the other party—for as little as $19.99. 
 
 

I am indebted to Claudia Gorbman, Pamela Grace, Jeff Smith, and Jane Buckwalter, who made generous contributions of time and ideas to this manuscript. 

This article was published in Cinesonic:  The World of Sound in Film, ed. Philip Brophy (North Ryde:  Australian Film Television & Radio School, 1999). 
 

Works Cited 

Chion, Michel, ‘The Screaming Point,’ in The Voice in Cinema, Claudia Gorbman, ed and trans, Columbia University, New York, 1999, 75-79. 

Dolar, Mladen, ‘The Object Voice,’ in Salecl, Renata and Zizek, Slavoj, eds, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, Duke University, Durham, 1996, 7-31. 

Ebert, Roger, ‘Another Woman,’ Chicago Sun-Times (8 November 1988). 

Esman, Aaron, ‘The Primal Scene:  A Review and a Reconsideration,’ in Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol 28, International University Press, New York, 1973. 

Freud, S. ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomic Distinctions Between the Sexes,’ in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytic Works of Sigmund Freud, vol 19, Hogarth, London, 1961. 

Hinsie, Leland and Campbell, Robert, Psychiatric Dictionary, 4th edn, Oxford University, New York, 1970. 

Kehr, Dave,  ‘Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors,’ Film Comment XXX (Nov-Dec 1994). 

Kratz, Michael, ‘Guess Who’s Listening,’ Time CXLIL (27 January 1997), 30. 

Lawrence, Amy, Echo and Narcissus:  Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema, University of California, Berkeley, 1991. 

Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen, XVI:3 (1975), reprinted in Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures, Macmillan, London, 1989. 

Salecl, Renata and Zizek, Slavoj, eds, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, Duke University, Durham, 1996. 

Silverman, Kaja, The Acoustic Mirror:  The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1988. 

Williams, Linda, ‘"Something Else Besides a Mother":  Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,’ Cinema Journal XXIV, 1 (Fall 1984), reprinted in Landy, Marcia, ed, Imitations of Life, Wayne State University, Detroit, 1991. 
 
 published in CINESONIC