Forbidden Lies : sound analysis

Within this dramatization of Norma’s original story as released in her books, the love story between Norma’s best friend and her supposed lover is emotionally realised through the music. The post-dubbed track is that of a woman singing a beautiful love song entailing lines such as “hear these words and set her free” and so on. This functions to establish a specific ambience that is jarringly crushed when the female journalists voice suddenly interrupts the music as she assertively comments ” this is not the truth’. The sudden cutting of the music functions to jolt the audience out of a complacency whilst encouraging them to realise that the dramatic re-enactments just seen are completely untrue. From such point, the narrative progresses strongly with this jordanian woman’s voice over regarding her work in the investigation of jordanian women’s deaths. Norma then appears as she reads her book in sections which then jump to women proving that Norma’s words are all incorrect and filled with lies. The importance of sound at in this segment is highlighted within these sudden cuts that follow a systematic approach: norma is heard audibly reading a section from her book, follow by a voice suggesting these statements are invalid. As the filmmaker follows the journalist discovering the lies in the book a fast paced, playful and investigative soundtrack functions as background music to elevate the explorative mood. What is interesting in this segment regarding the sound, is the contrast between norma’s words and the journalists. As they’re voices are intercut, we can still hear a clear distinction between the recordings of these voices. The somewhat rusty recordings of the journalist function to emphasise the present tense in which she currently speaks, whilst the higher volume clear recording of Norma’s voice adopts a fictive characteristic. This contrast is elevated through the lower volume level of the journalists speech in comparison to Norma’s. Similarly, the naturalised atmospheric sounds present when the Journalist visits many of the described places in Norma’s story serve as a kind of comic irony to the fictive sounds of Norma as she reads her book aloud. These sounds, such as the subtle background speeches of random passers by also function to emphasise the reality of these sequences as opposed to Norma’s ultimately fiction book. The great thing about this segment is that the filmmaker was able to get a complete Audio reading of the book by norma and manipulated her voice in a way that it functioned to provide episodes that are then chronologically proved untrue.

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