Through Susy’s Eyes
Sight, Sound, and Subjectivity in Mancini’s Wait Until Dark
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21789211 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Cosper (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 137-166 |
| Publication date | 2023-12-27 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Music, Sound, and the Moving Image (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1753-0768 • E-ISSN: 1753-0776 |
| Publisher | Liverpool University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3828/msmi.2023.10 |
| OpenAlex | W4390266147 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 36 |
The centrepiece of this essay is a close reading of Henry Mancini’s score for the 1967 suspense film Wait Until Dark, starring Audrey Hepburn. Drawing on poststructuralist narrative theory, I explore the implications of a blind protagonist for received thinking about focalisation and propose a music-informed narrative reading of the film. Informed by feminist disability studies and the work of film critics including Steven Shaviro, Stan Link, Vivian Sobchack, Michel Chion, and others, I propose that, unlike other films with visually impaired protagonists, which affirm the stability of visual experience by presenting blindness as an epistemological prop for theorising sight, Wait Until Dark effects a decentring of vision in cinematic experience that challenges traditional associations between sight and selfhood. Based on musical and narrative analysis, I argue that Mancini’s score is significant to this process
Aesthetics · Art · Blindness · Close reading · Linguistics · Literature · Musical · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Sight · Sociology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Medicine · Music History and Culture · Philosophy · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Optometry
Narrative Discourse
Narration in the Fiction Film
Visual and Other Pleasures
Transparent Minds
Language and Cinema
The Address of the Eye
[ Inaudible ]
Men, Women, and Chain Saws
Invisible Disability
Aesthetics and Rhetoric
Nor the Eye Filled with Seeing
Sound and vision
Narration in Light
A Disability History of the United States
Teller-Characters and Reflector-Characters in Narrative Theory
Sounds and Images
The Multimodal Experience of Art
The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator
Trousers and Tiaras
Her Body, Himself
De-Disciplining the Eye
Feminist Disability Studies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |