Vocalities of Violence: Acousmatic Sound and Trauma in Latin American Cinema (1999-2016)

Abstract

“Acousmatic” describes a sound that occurs without an identifiable visual origin.Similarly, trauma is built upon gaps between source, cause, and effect, where an event of violence is not entirely psychologically assimilable. Through examples in contemporary Latin American cinema depicting forms of social, political, and economic violence, I show that trauma and acousmatic sound are mutual operations whose displaced articulation serves as a new cinematic narrative strategy. I argue that this mode of storytelling through sonic incongruence in soundscape, voiceovers, and embodied voices emerges uniquely within the New Cinema movement since the late 1990s and a transnational context of collective trauma.