Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/15/2026
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
What can a film’s voice tell us about the world that produced it? Join Damien Pollard of Northumbria University at this week’s Humanities Center Colloquium on Thursday, January 15th at 3:30 pm in 4010 JFSB. His presentation will show how voices on screen carry traces of cultural, political, and economic forces, with examples from Italian giallo horror and Ugandan action cinema. Refreshments will be served.
Title: Voices in Stories and Stories in Voices: What Film Sound Can Tell Us about Social Change
The human voice is often the formal cornerstone of film’s sound design. It is also the product of many industrial processes and acts of labour that take place on set and during post-production. The industrial processes that create the cinematic voice are in turn shaped by the political, economic and cultural forces that bear down on a film’s production. In this way, the voice on a film’s soundtrack is more than just an aesthetic object, it is also the material trace of the commercial and social milieu in which a film is made and with which it is in conversation. Listening closely to the voice might therefore deepen our understanding of a film’s form, of the context the film comes out of, and of the relationship between the two. This paper will argue that the voices we hear on films’ soundtracks always have stories to tell about the societies in which the films were produced. It will do so with reference to two case studies: one Italian giallo horror film from the 1970s and a micro-budget Ugandan action film from 2005.
About our guest:
Damien Pollard is Assistant Professor of Film at Northumbria University. His teaching and research interests include film sound, Italian cinema, East african cinema, and the horror film. He is the co-editor of Film Exhibition: The Italian Context (2024) and author of Sound and Horror in the Giallo Film which was published in Marc Olivier’s Icons of Horror Series for Indiana University Press in 2025.
