The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause

• Published in: Screen (London) 2005-06, Vol.46 (2), p.195-211
• Main Author: Seo, Hyun-Suk
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0036-9543; 1460-2474
• DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjh059

This article offers a psychoanalytic reading of the very last shot of Applause. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian in 1929, the early sound masterpiece has been acknowledged in a number of academic studies for its innovative uses of camera movement and off-screen sound. In this essay, I analyze how the combination of off-screen sound and camera track-in at the closure of the film in particular evokes a highly abstract, dialectical meaning that unsettles the typically euphoric sense of completion and coherence. Both a signifier of the absolute absence and governing logic of the punctuating irony, this audiovisual construction mirrors the Freudian concept of melancholy, in which the absence of the desired object is internalized. By extending my theoretical perspective through Melanie Klein's concept of 'depressive mode', I investigate the psychological implications of the semantic mechanism particularly in regard to the mother-and-daughter relationship portrayed in the narrative. In short, I examine how the structurally simple construction proposes an intricate map of the wounded ego perpetually trapped in the state of double failure, or reciprocal coexistence of love and hatred, desire and loss, pleasure and death. Sound at this very early stage of application, my analysis implies, inspired the coinage of a highly sophisticated cinematic syntax. (Author abstract)