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The unheard mourning: offscreen
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun:
Depression and Melancholia,
trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York,
sound and melancholy in Applause
NY: Columbia University Press,
1989), p. 6.
Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod HYUN-SUK SEO
Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov,
'Statement on sound', in Richard
Taylor and Ian Christie (eds), The
Film Factory: Russian and Soviet
Cinema in Documents 1896-1939
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1988), pp. If there is no writing other than the amorous, there is no imagination
234-5. that is not, overtly or secretly, melancholy.1
I am borrowing this expression
from Herbert Brenon's derogatory When Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov eagerly voiced their ideal of
remark about the sudden eruption
of interest in talkies. Among many
sound cinema in the famous statement published in 1928,2 what they
other accomplished directors of were envisioning was far more complex than the general fear that cinema
silent cinema, Brenon was quick
could be reduced to a mere display of sensory awe or to what many
to dismiss and despise the 'cheap
novelty' of talking films on the
despised as 'cheap novelty'.3 To the young masters of montage, the
ground that '[the] ideal motion 'illusion of people talking, objects making a noise' upon which the early
picture should tell its story in a
'talkies' were quick to capitalize, was serving the 'wrong purpose',
completely visual manner'. 'On
sound films'. New York Times, 21
hindering 'the development and improvement of cinema as an art form'.4
October 1928, section IX 6, p. 2. Their manifesto-like declaration shows firm faith in the evolutionary
The sense of urgency implicit in
progress of the cinematic language, for which they imagined themselves
the montage artists' theoretical
proposition is understandable in in the vanguard by devising dialectical interactions between sound and
that the immediate decline of picture, or the 'contrapuntal use of sound'.
montage in the first attempt to
synchronize sound and picture is
Though never fully actualized in their own shortlived careers as
markedly visible in such films as montage artists,5 their passionate proposition called for and anticipated
The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, inventive expressions to be devised by accomplished directors of future
1927), which inevitably relied
upon long-lasting medium or
generations. To give an early example of something close to what they
medium-long shots to properly had in mind, the offscreen cry of the desperate mother juxtaposed with
display Al Jolson's improvizational empty spaces in M (Fritz Lang, 1931) intensifies the devastating absence
performances.
The early Soviet sound
of the kidnapped child. Lang's compelling expression of anxiety shows
experiment, which was conducted how sound allowed a new sensibility to evolve. But there are examples of
by Alexander Shorin, had made
the masterly use of contrapuntal sound even earlier than M, and my
viable the accompaniment of
uninterrupted sound strip.
purpose here is to examine how one of the early talkies - Rouben

195 Screen 46:2 Summer 2005

©The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The John Logie Baird Centre. All rights reserved.
d o i: 10.1093/scre en/hjhO59
Because of the nineteen-frame Mamoulian's 1929 directorial debut Applause - engendered an
interval between the picture gate
innovative cinematic syntax validating the montage artists' vision.
and the sound head, however,
shot-by-shot synchronization was
The historical significance of Applause has been widely recognized in
impossible. See Viktor Schklovsky, film studies. The film is best known for its inventive sound recording
The script laboratory', in The Film
method, which, as Rick Altman points out, resolved the much debated
Factory: Russian and Soviet
Cinema in Documents 1896-
issue of the audience's auditory perception and established the studio
norm for audio recording.6 The most focused formal analysis is in Lucy

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1939, pp. 294-5. The Soviet film
industry could not produce the first
Fischer's 1977 essay, in which she illuminates Mamoulian's
sound films until 1930, and it
remained predominantly silent-
unprecedented use of camera movement and offscreen sound as one of
based until 1935, when the the most astounding cinematic spectacles of the early sound era.7 The
production of sound films finally
academic interest in the film was renewed and broadened in 1991, when
outnumbered silent films by thirty
to seven. See table in ibid., p. 424.
Jeffrey Smith published an in-depth study of the problem of female
See Rick Altman, 'Sound space', in sexuality that operates ideologically in the film.8
Rick Altman (ed.), Sound Theory
My essay concerns how the combination of the two independently
Sound Practice (New York, NY and
London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 4 6 -
operative elements that Fischer praises, offscreen sound and camera
64. For the challenges that mobility, evoke a uniquely complex meaning in regard to the female
Mamoulian undertook, see also
protagonist's psychological dilemma, a level of signification that had
Arthur Knight, 'The movies that
learn to talk: Ernst Lubitsch, Rene
been inconceivable in the silent era. I offer a reading of the very last
Clair, and Rouben Mamoulian', in moment of the film in particular, in which the camera closes in on an
Elisabeth Weis and John Belton
inanimate detail of the narrative space accompanied by offscreen diegetic
(eds), Film Sound: Theory and
Practice (New York, NY: Columbia
music. The auditory and visual counterpoints at the end of thefilmcreate
University Press, 1985), pp. 213— a highly intricate manifestation of absence and displacement.
20. Knight notes that Mamoulian
I propose that the most useful theoretical tool with which to understand
insisted upon using two
microphones, which was unheard
this intricacy is the psychoanalytic account of the archaic mental malady
of at the time. that resurfaced in the age of mass spectacle: melancholy. The film does
Lucy Fischer, 'Applause: the visual
not necessarily depict the symptoms of melancholy per se, but the
and acoustic landscape'. Film
Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 2 (1977-
collision of the auditory and the visual signs at the end symbolically
78), pp. 25-36. probes the narrative contents of loss and despair, and reveals the
Jeffrey Smith, '"It does something
anatomical makeup of melancholy. Particularly important in
to a girl. I don't know what": the
problem of female sexuality in
understanding the semantic mechanism of the closing scene is Melanie
Applause', Cinema Journal, vol. Klein's work on melancholy. After all, the advent of new technology was
30, no. 2(1991), pp. 47-60.
a groundbreaking innovation not only in terms of what it did to the
acoustic presence of the cinematic space but also of what it did to its
visual language and psychological dimension.

The burden of hearing

Before I analyze the effects of the conceptual collision of sound and
image, it might be useful to summarize some of Mamoulian's technical
and aesthetic accomplishments that Fischer and Altman have
acknowledged. First, I should acknowledge the irony of addressing the
physical conflict between the auditory and the visual. In the early days of
sound cinema, the technical conditions for audio recording and camera
movement literally clashed with each other on the set. What Mamoulian
and cinematographer George J. Folsey had to overcome was the pressing
burden that hearing imposed upon the camera; encumbering the camera
movement was the 'ice box', the bulky, heavy and overheated makeshift

1 9 6 Screen 46:2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
9 Fischer discusses in depth the for isolating the camera noise. As Fischer recognizes, such working
production environment that
conditions increase our appreciation of the visual awe created by the
Mamoulian faced when filming
Applause. See Fischer, 'Applause.
promising Broadway stage director. The uncompromising mobility
the visual and acoustic injected into the narrative space a kind of semantic fluidity, with a
landscape'. See, for a brief
convincing fluency and precision that Andre Bazin would have readily
description of the camera
appreciated.10

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placements in the film, Ron
Mottram, 'American sound films, The film is also known for its accomplishments in sound recording,
1926-1930', in Weis and Belton
which is significant here for the analysis of the conceptual basis of
(eds). Film Sound: Theory and
Practice, pp. 221-31. Mamoulian's vertical montage. In his analysis of the film, Altman
10 For his discussions of camera records the efforts among some concerned engineers to standardize the
movement and editing, see Andre
'proper' way of constructing acoustic reality.11 According to the most
Bazin, 'The virtues and limitations
of montage', in What Is Cinema?
convincing model proposed by technician-theoretician J.P. Maxfield,
Volume I. trans. Hugh Gray Altman notes, 'the image scale' and 'the audio scale' had to correlate in
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA:
proportion with each other in order for the audience to perceive a
University of California Press,
1967), pp. 41-52.
coherently realistic narrative space. The solution that Mamoulian and
11 See Altman, 'Sound space'. sound engineer Ernest Zatorsky put into practice, however, was boldly
Altman points out that the faith in
simple. Their method ruled that the sound volume for the same speaking
the proportional relation between
image and sound prevailed in the
subject in a given space could remain constant and stable regardless of
industry as the theoretical the changes in the distance between him/her and the camera.12 The
standard believed to enhance the
hearing apparatus was thus given a human-like adaptive ability to even
proper sense of 'reality'.

12 Altman acknowledges Applause

out psychologically the slight fluctuation of the amplitude of airwaves.
as the starting point for the even- Thisfixed-point-of-audition/even-levelapproach became an industry
level approach, while he notes standard for all subsequent Hollywood productions. In the generations to
that even the most acclaimed
sound director at the time was not
follow, the imaginary ear would remain detached from the camera body,
in full command of the acoustic smoothly concealing its symbolic presence as well as the constant
composition of the narrative changes in camera-to-subject distance; sound came to play an essential
space. See Altman, 'Sound space'.
role in the system of invisible editing.
This conceptual and technical detachment of sound from the camera
allowed Mamoulian to devise far moreflexibleconstructions of auditory
information, liberating him from the totalizing logic of looking and
13 In an attempt to contextualize
formulaic patterns of visually stagnant storytelling prevalent in early
Applause, Smith names The Lights 'dialogue films'.13 Concealment of editing was doubtless one important
of New York (Brian Foy, 1928) as result of the audio autonomy, but for a director who cared more for
an early paradigm for the
'dialogue laden, theatrical, static,
uninterrupted camera movement than interlocking shots, the main benefit
and visually dull' model of sound was the potential for more organic interactions between two mutually
cinema. See Smith, " I t does independent channels of signification. What he constructed in the film is
something to a girl"'.
14 The term 'audiovisual' is borrowed
a complex 'audiovisual'14 landscape, in which visual and auditory
from Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: signifiers make up synthetic meanings while maintaining their
Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia independence.
Gorbman (New York, NY:
Columbia University, 1994). Chion
The sound autonomy in Applause is most effective in the use of sound
explicitly uses the term to whose source is not visible, or asynchronous sound. The simple, yet
challenge the prevalent connective, juxtaposition of image and asynchronous sound, or the
construction of 'audio-visual counterpoints',15 in Eisenstein's term,
ocularcentrism in cinema studies.
15 Eisenstein, 'A dialectic approach
to film form', in Film Form: Essays transforms the two beyond their primary, indexical function, a process
in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay that is precisely the basic principle of dialectic montage. What is
Leyda (New York, NY and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949),
remarkable about the closing shot in Applause is that Mamoulian and
pp. 45-63. Folsey actualized the Eisensteinian principle through the use of what

1 9 7 Screen 46:2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
 later became the emblematic marker of the anti-Eisensteinian, Bazinian
realism, namely the long take and camera tracking.

The virtue of visual mobility

In general, the dramatic effects created by camera tracking are intricate

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and precise. Its impact on narrative cinema, similar to that of the zoom
lens developed much later, is activated by the spectators' conditioned
expectation that the cinematic representation should produce a symbolic
16 This is why Jean-Luc Godard's coherence beyond the bleak materiality of the cinematic space.16
unconventional, superfluous zoom
Isolating a detail or extending the frame to a wider view, track-in or out
in the dialogue scene of Weekend
(1967), to illustrate the point with can effectively transform the 'plasticity' of cinematic space to the
a counterexample, works as an symbolic dimension, fulfilling the Bazinian 'realist' aim.17 By visually
absurd fetishization of the
movement itself, its symbolic
emphasizing an element within a larger landscape, or the larger space
function divorced from the content surrounding a small part, it not only directs the spectator's attention but
of what the characters utter. also assures its symbolic centrality in the narrative. Put simply, mobility
17 Bazin advocates uses of deep
space and long take as the 'realist'
is symbolic as well as physical.
aesthetics to adequately replace The camera tracking at the end of Applause is remarkable in that it
montage. What he is primarily
initiated a style that was too refined to become a popular convention -
concerned with is the relation that
cinema has with 'reality,' which
very few films in cinematic history actually end on track-m shots. Even
montage only serves to fragment after the invention of the zoom lens, narrowing the range of vision as a
and 'analyze' for the viewers. See
closing device was never common practice. An overused convention for
Bazin, The evolution of the
language of cinema', in What Is
narrative closure has been the opposite - the expansion of the range of
Cinema? Volume I. pp. 23-40. My vision - either through editing or camera movement.18 Specifically,
point is that the Eisensteinian
when the camera zooms, tracks, or cranes out from a closeup of the
montage does not always reduce
meanings for the audience but, on protagonists to wider framing, it serves to emphasize their position
the contrary, can accomplish the within a larger pattern with a sweeping sense of coherence and
opposite when it involves
integration. Consider the typical endings in such films as Murder!
audiovisual counterpoints.
18 As an example of alternate (Alfred Hitchcock, 1930), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley
methods that accomplish the Donen, 1954), South Pacific (Joshua Logan, 1958), Dr No (Terence
same nuance as track-out or
zoom-out, Breakfast at Tiffany's
Young, 1962), Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980), Pretty Woman
(Blake Edwards, 1961) ends with a (Garry Marshall, 1990), Serendipity (Peter Chelsom, 2001), or even an
series of stable shots that animation feature like Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park, 2000), in
gradually move away from the
protagonists kissing each other. At
which the stars display their enduring romantic or familial bonds, set
the end of films like Modem Times within an open space. The gradual expansion of the static spectacle to a
(Charles Chaplin, 1936) and
manageable fullness suspends the fragile moment of happiness and
Romancing the Stone (Robert
Zemeckis, 1984), it is the
evokes a kind of simple poetic logic, through which the immensity of the
protagonists who move away from unknown is magically turned into a glimpse of unchanging complacency,
the steadily locked camera
an impression of 'ever after'. Such visual invocations of completion and
achieving a visual effect nearly
identical to that of track-out.
preservation seek to defy the relentlessness of time and to claim a victory
over uncertainty. The all-encompassing extradiegetic music enhances the
symbolic unity by silencing all distracting noise from the corporeal world
and saturating the space with harmonious swelling tones. Such effective
masking of noises and smoothing of crevices has of course become the
Hollywood way of securing a 'happy ending'. If cinema endows the
19 See Bazin, 'The ontology of the
photographic image', in What Is
preservation of life and longing for eternity, as Bazin contends,19
Cinema? Volume I, pp. 9-16. Hollywood epitomizes that longing most explicitly through the use of

1 9 8 Screen ^ 2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
 track-out shots. This is not to claim that the Hollywood films are
Bazinian, but to note that track-out as a Hollywood convention responds
to the same psychic needs that Bazin proposes as the ontological basis of
photographic image.
Such an optimistic proposition reenacts the psychological experience
that Klein calls 'idealization', a form of defence mechanism in favour of

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20 For Klein's systematic mapping of the good object in the infantile 'depressive position'.20 According to
such key concepts as introjection,
Klein, the 'depressive position' is a state that is established when an
projection, psychosis, paranoid
and depressive anxieties, see
infant at the stage of weaning experiences failure in internally securing,
Melanie Klein, 'A contribution to or a loss of, the good object, namely the breast. The distressing condition
the psychogenesis of manic-
ensures the internalization of the object of love, symbolized by the
depressive states', Love, Guilt and
Reparation and Other Works
breast, which is then split into the good, reparative one and the bad,
1921-1945 (New York. NY: The persecutory one. This normal condition characterizes what Klein calls
Free Press, 1975), pp. 262-89. For
the 'paranoid-schizoid position', and the depressive position is the result
a more focused and developed
discussion of the depressive
of the increased contact with the external world and the consequent
condition, see Klein, 'Mourning integration of the split representations or imagos.21 The depressive
and its relation to manic-
position is thus a state in which complex feelings of need, love, anxiety,
depressive states', pp. 344-69.

21 Klein distinguishes the depressive

fear, hatred and contempt share the same psychogenetic conditions, and
position from the preceding are closely bound up with one another. Klein stresses that actual loss of a
paranoiac position, in which the loved person, followed by mourning, in adulthood revives the infantile
external object is internalized as
split imagos and accordingly
loss of the mother and her bodily part. This state of 'melancholia in statu
fragmenting the ego. This theory nascendC22 involves the fearful, defensive desire to destruct or condemn
accounts for the clinical the bad, dangerous object in hopes of protecting the ego, often expressed
connection and original continuity
between the two. See Klein, 'A
in omnipotent and violent fantasies. Anotherflight-mechanism,referred
contribution to the psychogenesis to as 'idealization', sets out the opposite extreme, namely over-
of manic-depressive states'.
admiration or perfection of the good internal object.23
22 Klein, 'Mourning and its relation
to manic-depressive states',
If cinema can reactivate the childhood fantasies and unconscious
p. 345. anxieties, as many theorists have contended, this might explain why
23 Klein stresses that idealization is
tensions in romantic comedies often build upon hateful or aggressive
an essential part of the manic
position. See Klein, 'A contribution
attitudes (for example, the female protagonist's antipathy towards the
to the psychogenesis of manic- hero in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom [Steven Spielberg,
depressive states'. Afterwards,
1984]). The conventional narrative structure of romantic comedies
she makes a note of Melitta
Schmideberg's finding that the
constantly restages the unification process of external and internal, loved
flight to the internalized good and hated, real and imaginary objects, a process that is an essential part of
object is a fundamental
development in childhood, according to Klein. In this light, the final
mechanism in schizophrenia,
which also involves distrust in the
scene's visual expansion serves as celebratory evidence of the triumph of
object. See Klein, 'Mourning and the good imago over the threat of the persecutory objects and ensuing
its relation to manic-depressive
destructive fantasies. A crucial Kleinian claim, however, is that the
states', p. 349.
unification at the infantile state of ambivalence is hardly a definitive
process; it does not completely resolve the split of the good and the bad,
24 Klein, 'A contribution to the but rather 'leads again to a renewed splitting of the imagos'.24
psychogenesis of manic- Overvaluation of the good internal object can even be a dangerous
depressive states', p. 288.
transaction, closely linked to many forms of illness, including mania and
schizophrenia.
The euphoric closure in narrative cinema in this light is a precocious
and powerful mechanism. With the aid of a swelling melody, track-out/
zoom-out functions to consummate thefictivecontentment by smoothing

1QQ Screen 46:2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
 the crevices inherent in the system of interlocking shots. This function is
crucial if we compare track-out to shot/reverse-shot, another major
Hollywood convention. As theorists such as Jean-Pierre Oudart, Daniel
Dayan and Kaja Silverman observe, the shot/reverse-shot structure is a
systematic self-repairing apparatus in which the interlocking relations of
25 See Jean-Pierre Oudart, 'Cinema shots fabricate a fictive sense of wholeness.25 According to their

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and suture'. Screen, vol. 18, no. 4
psychoanalytic accounts, a single closeup shot within a sequence is
(1977-78), pp. 35-47; Stephen
Heath, 'On suture', in Questions of
retroactively rendered incomplete by the following reverse-shot. The
Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana relatively restricted range of vision that comprises the first shot connotes
University Press, 1981), pp. 7 6 -
the unknowable imaginary space beyond what is already seen and
112; Daniel Dayan, The tutor code
of classical cinema', in Bill Nichols
known, where 'the absent-one' hovers. 'The absent-one' is the ghostly
(ed.), Movies and Methods spectator who occupies the complementary field that is not seen on
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and
screen. The reverse-shot then compensates for the incompleteness of the
London: University of California
Press, 1976), pp. 438-51.
previous shot by promptly offering a 'stand-in', afictivecharacter, which
takes the place of 'the absent-one'. This notion of 'stand-in' is borrowed
from Jacques-Alain Miller, who contends that inherent in the logic of the
26 See Jacques-Alain Miller, 'Suture signifier is the lack in the Lacanian sense.26 Not exactly 'purely and
(elements in the logic of the
signifier)', Screen, vol. 18, no. 4
simply absent', the Lacanian lack renders the object of desire
(1977-78), pp. 24-34. inaccessible and detaches the subject from the signifying chain. Miller
names the relation of lack to the structure of which it is an element as
'suture'. While Miller explicates the central role of lack in the signifying
structure, such film theorists as Silverman stress the remedial function of
suture. Suture in classical narrative cinema serves to repress any possible
marginality that threatens the integrating unity of the narrative space and
27 Kaja Silverman, The Subject of its cinematic representations.27
Semiotics (NewYork, NY: Oxford
What is secured by the movement of track-out/zoom-out is far more
University Press, 1985)
convincingly remedial, in that the gradual inclusion of the surroundings
turns potentially unsettling parts of the invisible into accomplices of the
symbolic totality. It is not just the final kiss that produces a sense of
completion at the end of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or Pretty
Woman, it is the enlargement of vision that authenticates the security of
the cinematic phenomena. This visual effect becomes even more forceful
when the shot fades to black or yields to any nondiegetic element that
signals the end of the narrative, such as 'The End' sign or the end credits.
This impact is further enhanced by its role as a grand punctuation,
completing the entire system of signification as a self-contained form.
Track-out, I might add, attempts at reaffirming not only the wholeness of
the narrative space but also the competency of the cinematic language
itself, which, according to Jean Louis Baudry, is designed to '[unite] the
discontinuous fragments of phenomena, of lived experience, into
28 Jean-Louis Baudry, 'Ideological
unifying meaning'. The filmic surface in its ideological operation,
effects of the basic according to Baudry, assures a sense of identity by repressing or
cinematographic apparatus',
abolishing the threats it faces. The efficacy of the concluding track-out
trans. Jean Andrews and Bertrand
Augst, Film Quarterly, no. 28
lies precisely in its double purpose to both function as and secure a
(1974-75), pp. 39-47. uniting cinematic form; it is a defence mechanism par excellence. The
wholeness of the cinematic space that it initially constructs delivers
the coherent cartography of identity and meaning, finalizing the

Oflfl Screen 46:2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
 self-sufficiency of the signifying mechanism. The camera's capacity
simply to extend the parameter of the visible also regenerates the
auxiliary faculty to validate its very own totalizing authority. Track-out
as a closing device, put simply, is the culmination of the desire for
completeness and stability, and it finalizes the semantic sovereignty of
the camera itself as the authoring and suturing apparatus.

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In contrast to the effects of track-out/zoom-out that I have
contemplated so far, consider a moment when the camera tracks/zooms
in towards a speaking subject or the source of diegetic sound, when the
frame emphasizes the visual presence of the host of auditory information.
In the closeup shot that the camera movement comes to, the body bears
an excessive significance as the moving camera overdetermines the
synchronicity between sound and image. This synchronicity serves a dual
function. On the one hand, in collapsing the two channels of signification
it triumphantly celebrates the salient presence of the sounding body that
hosts excessive perceptual information. On the other, the excess creates a
demand for an expression of the inertia of the overdetermination, or a
proper response to the excess of information. It thus constructs
simultaneously a temporary sense of condensation and a need for
adequate evidence of its impact, as if the excess cannot fully mask the
absence. Through this dual function, track-in/zoom-in mobilizes a
dramatic tension rather than relieving it. For this reason, track-in/zoom-
in is scarcely used with synchronous sound as a closing device in
narrative films; its preferred use is rather as a tension-generator.
It is no coincidence therefore that the most frequent user of track-in as
a closing device in classical cinema is Alfred Hitchcock. When a film
ends with track-in or zoom-in, the enclosing camera movement tends to
recapitulate or even augment the impact of the absent, as in some of
Hitchcock's films including The Lady Vanishes (1938), Rebecca (1940)
and Notorious (1946). Although the romantic relationship is restored to
stable ground at the end of these films, the emphasis on specific visual
details curtails the evidence of the perfect recovery of the illusive good
object. At the very moment of final fade-out, furthermore, the traumatic
event appears to have reached reconciliation, but its devastating impact
on the protagonist's psyche remains uncertain. Inherent in the final
amplification of the traumatic sight or lost object is what possibly
29 Not included in the discussion, but
worth mentioning, are Citizen
contaminates the assumed happy ending that we never actually see.
Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), Les Though varying in degree, these films, not unlike Applause, respond to
Quatre cents coups (Frangois the traumatic event with a kind of fascination beyond the pleasure
Truffaut. 1959) Friday the 13th
principle of cinema.29
(Sean Cunningham, 1980), and The
Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). An useful example comparable to Applause in this regard is Michael
Citizen Kane and The Shining end
Snow's experimental film Wavelength (1966), the majority of which is
with stable shots that follow
track-in shots. The zoom-in effect
devoted to an excessively slow zoom-in. Not unlike the ending shot of
at the end of Quatre cents coups Applause, Snow's camera gradually expels all sound sources from the
was done through optical printing,
frame and negates the construction of a coherent and euphoric narrative
not camera movement, although
the effect likewise amplifies
space by eventually confining the frame to a minute detail on the wall,
uncertainty. irrelevant to the previous events. In both Wavelength and Applause, the

201 Screen 46:2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
 narrowing of vision evokes an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and
30 Singing in the Rain (Stanley displacement. Whereas the narrative disintegrates into an array of pure
Donen, 1953) and Gentlemen
optical events in Wavelength, Applause intensifies the narrative content
Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks,
1953) are interesting, rare
and poeticizes the residue of displacement to signify the wound in the
examples of films in which track-in ego - precisely the condition of melancholia.
shots serve the euphoric
conclusion. Whether track-in shots
The case of Applause is significant on a number of levels in regard to

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safely function as a complacent the final confinement of vision, not least the fact that it preceded the
closing device in these romantic Hitchcockian fascination with ambivalence. If the film does indeed
comedies is debatable. Lucie
Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca
'strengthen and broaden the montage methods of influencing the
interpret the final reframing in spectator',31 as the montage artists proposed, it also demonstrates that the
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as the montage method, however simple the construction, can create a highly
symbolic undermining of the
patriarchal order that the dramatic
subtle and complex set of meanings. When the camera isolates and
situation appears otherwise to moves in on a detail within a space that is not the source of the sound
celebrate. See Lucie Arbuthnot being heard, or 'acousmatizes' the sound,32 the construction avows the
and Gail Seneca, 'Pre-text and text
in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes', in
incompleteness of the spatial wholeness by further fragmenting the
Patricia Erens (ed.). Issues in audible from the visible, and vice versa. The 'acousmatic sound', in other
Feminist Film Criticism words, does not necessarily become the stopgap for the invisible; rather it
(Bloomingdale and Indianapolis,
evokes the threat of the absent-one. Put simply, asynchronicity literally
IN: Indiana University Press,
1990), pp. 112-25.
unsettles the unity of signification. As the camera closes in, the two
31 Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and autonomous, yet interfluent, instruments disrupt each other's initial
Alexandrov, 'Statement on sound', meaning and produce a highly complex third one. As I shall show, the
p. 234.
32 Chion uses the term 'acousmatic
actual effect of this contrapuntal construction is far-reaching.
sound' to refer to 'sounds one
hears without seeing their
originating cause'. He points out Almost ever after
that acousmatic sounds can
convey 'suspense' and 'mystery'. This dialectical audiovisual landscape is certainly dramatically
Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on
Screen, pp. 71 - 2 .
motivated, as it highlights the key elements of the main narrative tension
33 Smith offers the first study to
of Applause, namely displacement, anxiety, loss and despair.33 These
articulate the complex interlocking elements make up the psychological structure of the depressive position,
relations among formal elements,
which, according to Klein, is formed by the subject'sfluctuatingrelation
textual meanings, and ideological
functions of Applause. See Smith, to the mother. The plot dwells specifically on this relationship, following
'"It does something to a girl"'. He the ill-fated bond between a burlesque dancer mother and her convent-
points out that the film employs
montage and long takes discretely
educated daughter, Kitty Darling (Helen Morgan) and April Darling
at different points to highlight (Joan Peers). April is forced to choose between her boyfriend, a naval
differing types of narrative serviceman from Wisconsin who offers a happy married life in his
tension. We might add that the
finale of the film offers a
country home, and the harsh reality of the burlesque business, when her
momentary and concise mother is forced off the stage because of her age. The conflict reaches its
convergence of both paradigms. climax as April sacrifices her marriage plans and throws herself
desperately into the rapacious world of show business, determined to
support herfinanciallyand emotionally wrecked mother. At the height of
this conflict, the crosscut scenes show Kitty fatally poisoning herself in
an effort to relieve her tormented daughter of this burden, and April
simultaneously making her debut on stage. April's initial performance
turns out to be a phenomenal 'success', going by the excited reaction of a
lecherous male audience, who fill her with revulsion. The film ends with
a classical resolution as the heroine is saved by the hero: April's
boyfriend Tony (Henry Wadsworth), who was thought to have been

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 driven from the city by April's ending of their romance, unexpectedly
arrives backstage to rescue her from despair. Now shown to understand
April's dilemma, he instantly reinstates their marriage plans, this time
factoring Kitty into their idyllic new life in the country. Unaware that her
mother is lying stone cold in the dressing room, April embraces Tony to
celebrate this opportunity for her and her mother to escape the

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degradations of the burlesque business.
The final conversation that reunites the lovers is captured by one
continuous camera tracking in two phases. While April briefly explains
her situation to Tony, the camera slowly closes in from a long shot
(figure 1) until it stops and stays still on them as they optimistically
resolve April's problem (figure 2). What the camera stresses when it
tracks in again is not the rejoicing lovers but the abandoned promotion
poster on the back wall showing a young Kitty at the peak of her career
(figure 3); the camera expels the lovers from the centre of visual
attention. The unbroken inward camera tracking accompanies offscreen
diegetic sound, the chorus coming from the stage that April has just left.
With the offscreen sound saturating the space with the acoustic presence
of the invisible dancers, the camera tracking magnifies the visual
presence of a soundless detail; or, rather, the invisibility of the sound
source underscores the irreducible gap between perceived sound and
perceived image. The discrepancy between what becomes exclusively
visible and what becomes excessively invisible imposes an overpowering
and ominous sense of disjunction, unsettling the matrimonial bond
between auditory mise-en-scene and visual mise-en-scene.
This disjunction points to the primary element in the anatomy of
melancholy, namely the lost object. As the swelling music magnifies the
semantic incompleteness of the visual space, the growing, two-
dimensional image of Kitty stands in for the uncanny presence of the
invisible dead body lying in the dressing room. Further displaced from its
source by the indifferent camera, the acousmatic sound places its spectral
curse into the frame. Released from its physical anchor, the sound
quickly assumes a symbolic presence as the entrapment that Kitty could
escape only by death. Meanwhile a frivolous and lifeless visual detail in
the background becomes a definite piece of evidence for the absolute
absence, its symbolism acoustically activated by the displaced auditory
signifier. The introverted camera movement that narrows the perspective
to the internal symbolism of a visual detail effectively expresses
instability and inadequacy.

Figures 1 - 3 The growing, two-

dimensional image of Kitty stands

in for the uncanny presence of the

invisible dead body. Applause

(Rouben Mamoulian, 1929).

2 0 3 Screen ^ : 2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
 In other words, the camera is liberated from the traditional task of the
silent era to visually express sound by showing the sound source in
'explanatory' shots and redirects its unburdened mobility to 'explain' an
object that is simply silent. The impact of the visual magnification is
powerful precisely because the object lacks sound. Furthermore, its
efficacy is reciprocal, or fetishistic in the Freudian sense, in that it

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substitutes for what is absent. It is sound that activates the full
signification of the camera tracking; the collision is highly 'intellectual'
in the Eisensteinian sense. Neither the poster on the wall, nor the camera
tracking, can fulfil such a complex function alone; it is the combination,
or rather the collision, of the contrapuntal sound and the camera tracking
that produces the surplus meaning. The effect is that the vertical montage
evokes ambivalence and inadequacy, ultimately signifying the absolute
absence of the loved object. The final residue of inadequacy and
incompleteness comes as a poignant irony, resonating with the
impossibility of resolving the mother-child relationship.

The spectral spectacle of failure

What the precise synthetic punctuation reveals is not only the inadequacy
of the long-sought happiness and security that the lovers celebrate but,
more significantly, the very shortcoming of the spatial and semantic
unity. The narrative space becomes an empty shell of the emerging
meaning, a transient material basis for the failed synchronicity between
the two seductive signifiers; the absolute incompleteness erupts on the
symbolic level rather than in the plasticity of the physical space. The
synthesis effectively constitutes a firm and active marker of a system that
operates through structural displacement, a system of signification that
recognizes death as the logically inevitable destiny, the absolute
signified. As such, death almost makes visible the flimsiness of the
signifier.
The latent logic of death works through an intricate system of
repression, in which the unrestricted flow of story information functions
as an active agent. What activates the economy of the signifying system
is the ironic gap in knowledge between the audience and the characters of
Kitty's untimely death. Once the narrative effectively separates April and
Kitty, the cinematic logic of camera/audience omnipresence works
systematically to fabricate invisible causality, showing the audience
Kitty's death through crosscutting without allowing April to share in this
knowledge. The final scene recasts the audience's knowledge of the
death as the knowledge of April's ignorance. This is the reason that
April's celebration of certainty and anticipated happiness is excessively
incomplete and ephemeral. Knowing not only what lies beyond the wall
but also the lack in April at the very moment of tracking, the audience is
invited to participate in the privileged system of signification by
recognizing the gap that the narrative closure creates. What is explicitly
denied in this mechanism is April's omnipotence, a condition that makes

204 Screen 46:2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
 the depressive position even more difficult to resolve in that it can lead to
excessive attachment to the good internal object in Klein's scheme.
Denial also takes place on another level. With the supreme knowledge
that no character can have, as the audience we demand a new spectacle,
not the logical, predictable outcome of which we are fully aware, but one
more resonant with our knowledge, a reward for our participation, so to

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speak. The brilliant synthesis of the camera tracking and the acousmatic
sound is a skilful response to this demand. Mamoulian thus disallows us
an image of April's mourning, not simply because the depth of sorrow it
signifies would be unbearable, but, more importantly, because it is
already known before it happens - the event will have already happened.
The excessive evidence of the predicted consequence would have only
nullified the efficacy of the audience's knowledge and the economic
efficiency of the narrating apparatus. Censoring the coming deterioration
of the narrative tension and seeking the consent of the audience to curtail
the predictable, the elliptic closure itself functions as a sort of
'intellectual' spectacle. As the knowledge gap between the audience and
April remains open, we are mobilized by the burden of our own exclusive
knowledge, our superiority realized as intellectual gratification that
accesses disjunction and displacement.
This logic of inevitability reverberates with the Kleinian proposition
that the object has already been lost in the depressive position. The
question, which is always the central problem in melancholy for Klein, is
how to restore the world of good internal objects. The curtailing of
mourning specifically avoids this problem. The intellectual closure
serves to hide the rupture of sorrow, which could have extended the plot
beyond the moment of the lovers' celebration. The methodical, yet
redundant, delineation of sorrow often seen in earlier silent melodramas
is thus obscured in Applause, substituted by the intellectual ellipsis that
resonates with poignancy instead of insistent verbosity. This repression is
more or less a byproduct of the economic integrity of the narrative
structure. At the same time, it also activates its own systematically
operative mechanism that works throughout the film, namely to suspend
34 Under this systematic repression, the state of the pain by disallowing complete discharge.34 With this dual
even the most extreme despair in function of the ellipsis, Mamoulian ends up sketching the audiovisual
the film, which takes place in the
scene of Kitty's suicide attempt, is
landscape of the injured ego. What is left out in this mechanism is April's
delicately depicted through chance to 'properly' mourn the mother, a process that, according to
irrelevant sounds from the street, Klein, involves the recovery of the good internal object despite the
not by any auditory
external loss.
representations of the extreme
emotion. The validity and efficacy of the new signifying system thus renews
cinematic pleasure by refusing to revise undesirable emotions with
excessive sensory signs, emotions that, in contrast, early silent
melodramas had nurtured within silence. The contrapuntal auditory signs
that Mamoulian uses for Kitty's despair rule out the possibility of
creating an 'adhesive' relation to the emotionally excessive closeups of
the troubled Lillian Gish characters in Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919)
or Way Down East (1920), for example. The silent mourning body that

OQC Screen 46:2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
 had become the spectacular marker of melodrama in the silent era hardly
secures a place in Applause, just as Chaplin's tramp failed to embody a
35 Chaplin did not give a full talking proper voice.35 As Alan Williams explains, the melodrama genre,
voice to his tramp character
'written and executed in the hyperbolic, ultra-sentimental style', was
throughout the 1930s. He
recollects in his autobiography: 'if
already fading away with the advent of 'another kind of cinema, and
I did make a talking picture, no another sensibility'.36 In Applause, sound plays a major role in proposing

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matter how good I was I could
that new sensibility, by repressing the signs of mourning.
never surpass the artistry of my
pantomime. I had thought of
possible voices for the tramp -
whether he should speak in
The black bile unsilenced
monosyllables or just mumble. But
it was no use. If I talked I would Twelve years before Applause was made, Freud proposed that
become like any other comedian.' melancholy is the internalization of the loss of an object, both loved and
Charlie Chaplin, My
Autobiography {Hew York, NY:
hated, an introverted parallel of mourning, which, by contrast, is
Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 387. occasioned by the actual loss of a loved object.37 The analytic
36 Alan Williams, 'Historical and distinction/pairing that he makes between mourning and melancholy is
theoretical issues in the coming of
revealing for my purpose here in that Applause systematically privileges
recorded sound to the cinema', in
Altman (ed.), Sound Theory Sound
one and represses the other, transforming the condition of external
Practice, pp. 133-5. discharge into a setup for an internalized, more complex mechanism. The
37 Sigmund Freud, 'Mourning and
curtailing closure verifies the threat of the absence by perversely
melancholia', in James Strachey
et al. (eds), The Standard Edition
magnifying its spectral signifier with a flimsy gesture to transcend its
of the Complete Works of threat. Furthermore, its denial of both April's omnipotence and proper
Sigmund Freud, Volume 14
mourning intensifies the haunting of the unseen, unmourned grief.
(London: The Hogarth Press and
the Institute of Psychoanalysis,
The implications of Freud's analysis of melancholy are far-reaching,
1953-1974), pp. 239-58. and it is particularly through Klein's theories that we can scrutinize the
complexity embedded in the finale of Applause. One of the crucial points
for the Freudian account of melancholy is the opposition of two
extremes, in which 'the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the
38 Ibid., p.256. other to uphold this libido-position against assault'.38 This dual
opposition that Freud maps out forms the foundation of Klein's account
of the internal loss of the loved object. One of Klein's points of departure
from Freud is her emphasis on the infantile loss of the mother's breast
during weaning, a crucial phase in the development of the mind. The
feared loss of the good object precedes the depressive position and
becomes the deepest source of painful sorrow to be reactivated in
experiences, such as mourning, in adulthood. This is possible because the
object of love and loss is necessarily processed in the infant's mind as
39 This is one of the reasons that both actual object in reality and internal representations.39 The process of
Klein prefers the term 'position' as internalization, in other words, occurs in the very early phase of child
opposed to 'phase' or 'stage,'
development, in Klein's view.
indicating her resistance against
the linear development of This double structure works as a latent layer of tragedy and begins to
psychological mechanisms.
work early in the film to govern April's ambivalent attitudes towards the
mother. The external condition makes explicit the fluctuation of her
mother as both good and bad object. The early phase of the plot shows
Kitty's maternal devotion, of which her decision to send April away to a
convent is a part. The film also depicts April's longing and love for Kitty
despite the physical distance that separates them. April's ambivalent split
with the mother in the Kleinian sense surfaces clearly, however, when

O n e Screen 46:2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
 April faces the shocking 'truth' about her mother's humiliating social
status. The bad mother comes back as a devalued mother, with which the
empathic daughter painfully has to identify. The plot precisely and
secretly activates this necessity for internal identification by presenting
the corresponding external condition when the voracious manager pushes
April to follow her mother's career. Upon this activation, the narrative

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retells the infantile dilemma and confines April to two practical options:
to accept her mother's undignified position and fully cultivate her affinity
with it, or to reject her identification with the mother's inferiority and
retreat to a romantic relationship. April's choice to identify with the
mother, morally justified as selflessness, complicates the infantile
dilemma.
At a certain point this dilemma becomes gender-specific in that the
subject has to cope with the devalued social position of the mother in a
male-dominated society, a condition that overshadows her identification
with the mother. Silverman and Kristeva address this dimension of adult
melancholy. Influenced by the culture that devalues the mother,
according to Silverman, the daughter either displaces her desire onto the
father or develops melancholy by insisting upon her identification with
40 See Silverman, The Acoustic the mother.40 April, unable to negotiate with her initial shock at the loss
Mirror: the Female Voice in
of her mother's dignity, fails to secure a realistic resolution between the
Psychoanalysis and Cinema
(Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN:
two options.41 This failure corresponds to the failure in securing a good
Indiana University Press, 1988). internal object in the Kleinian sense. The complex psychological
41 Smith analyzes the ideological mechanism of the depressive mode involves the unconscious wish to
dimension of this dilemma, which
situates the split as the
destroy the internal object. As Kristeva asserts, the matricidal impulse
contradiction between two social both torments and seduces the melancholic woman, who in fact is
positions, domestic and
permanently trapped by the impossibility of actualizing the repressed
glamorous, morally tamed and
sexually subversive. In doing so,
wish.42 In April's case, however, we might rule out this scenario on the
he acknowledges that the textual grounds that the omnipotence of her superego is denied, as I suggested
dynamic of the film is far more
earlier. If April's condition includes the suicidal impulse, which is
complex than the plot outline
suggests. What mobilizes the
conceivable, it is rather due to the empathic effort to save the good
dynamic is the tension between object.43
two contradictory social roles. See
Smith, '"It does something to a
Within this binding economy of longing and repulsion, Kitty's death
girl"'. promises to be a convenient resolution for April in her failed attempt to
42 See Kristeva, Black Sun: resolve the Oedipal dilemma, a perfect alibi to break away from the split
Depression and Melancholia.
and withdraw her libidinal energy. The first phase of the last camera
43 Such self-destructive aim
presupposes the full and stable
tracking (figure 1) celebrates the promised efficacy of this enticement. It
identification with the good expresses the triumphant substitution of heterosexual affection, or rather
object, according to Klein. See
its desirability, by framing the socially approved substitute in
Klein, 'A contribution to the
psychogenesis of manic- symmetrical unity. It is this lure of the new dependency, conveniently
depressive states'. separated from the ill-fated maternal force and imposed upon April as a
suitable vision of happiness, that doubly motivates the synthetic sign to
curtail the depiction of mourning over the permanent loss of the maternal
bond. It thus becomes evident why the sight of mourning is curtailed so
effectively in the film. The repression of the regressive wish appears at
first so thoroughly systematic, as to simultaneously stage mourning as its
singular outcome and perpetuate the undesirability of mourning by both

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 producing and concealing it. The power of ideology lies not only in its
function to reduce the complexity of human desire into predictable
effects, but, more importantly, in the ability to make the representations
of the effects of marginalized desires undesirable. The efficacy of the
visual display of the new monogamous dependency and the patriarchal
supremacy that it reinforces removes the possibility of resigning from the

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trauma of loss through proper mourning. Again, what is important is that
the mourning, proper or pathological, is merely anticipated and never
shown. Disguised as the convincing logic of tragedy, this repression
works as an effective narrative device precisely because the synthetic
sign carefully conceals what is absent. This is exactly how the finale
consummates the textual matrimony of the symbolic loss of the mother
and the rise of the heterosexual cathexis.

In the realm of guilt

What is more significant in understanding the implications of thefinaleof

Applause is that the complexity of April's Oedipal dilemma revives the
key figure in the tragedy of the depressive position, namely the severely
sadistic superego. By proposing internalization as the fundamental
condition in the depressive position, Klein places the death drive in the
oral phase, another significant point that separates her from Freud. For
Freud, the narcissistic libido partly deflects or projects the destructive
impulse, which is nevertheless partially introjected and thus intervenes in
44 See for an in-depth discussion of the protective scheme forming masochistic tendencies.44 In Klein's view,
the difference between Freud's
in contrast, internalization reconfigures frustration over lost access to the
and Klein's views on the death
drive and the formation of the
loved object as both a sadistic assault against the actual object and a
superego Esther Sanchez-Pardo, threat against the ego. The death drive, in the Kleinian scheme, plays an
Cultures of the Death Drive:
integral part in the child's first relationship with the external object,
Melanie Klein and Modernist
Melancholia (Durham, NC and
indissolubly in interplay with the protective instinct. What distinguishes
London: Duke University Press, Klein's notion of the 'oral-sadistic stage' from the Freudian oral stage is
2003).
her observation that the threat of the destructive instinct is perceived by
the individual as danger and that 'anxiety would [thus] originate from
45 Melanie Klein, The Psycho-
Analysis of Children, trans. Alix
aggression'.45 Klein defines the mechanism that results from the
Strachey (New York, NY: internalization of the persecutory external object, the authoritarian parent
Delacorte Press, 1975), p. 126. The who controls the child's access to the breast, as the superego.46 The
problem of the depressive
formation of the Kleinian superego, in other words, takes place in the
position, in Klein's view, is
inseparable from the Oedipal one. early oral phase, not in the phallic phase as Freud observed.
46 As Sanchez-Pardo points out,
Having identified with the lost object, the superego - however
Klein has offered two conditions
for the formation of the superego,
precocious - comes to play a key role as an active agency in the
namely the internalization of the depressive position, exercising its aggressive severity outward and/or
real parent and the death drive. internally. The defining characteristic of the depressive position is the
The latter directly reiterates
Freud's view that the superego of
domination of the severely sadistic superego, of which aggression, in the
the melancholic is 'the pure form of ambivalence, can furnish a self-destructive aim. One of the
culture of the death instinct'. Klein workings of the superego is to push the split of the imago to the extreme.
abandons this view in favor of the
former. See Sanchez-Pardo,
This extremity becomes excessively visual during April's first
Cultures of the Death Drive. performance, as she displays a near-schizophrenic frenzy in identifying

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with the 'bad' mother, the one who has sent her away and is morally
corrupt. The opposite extreme in the spectrum of love and hatred ensues
backstage as April triumphantly recovers the good substitute, Tony. The
extremity of April's split, so severe and abrupt, indicates the severity of
her superego's sadism and, accordingly, the difficulty in overcoming the
depressive mode.

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Applause precisely recognizes this dilemma as the final shot extends
beyond the triumph of the heterosexual resolution. What is fascinating is
that this taxidermic undermining of grief renders the evidence of the
heterosexual substitution improper. The celebratory space that the
seduction creates never manages to secure its completeness through the
cinematic means. Otherwise track-out would have been the perfect way
to end the narrative. It is this irony that becomes the new form of
spectacle, which substitutes for the externality of mourning in return. The
second, more subliminal, function of the insistent camera tracking is to
crystallize this incompleteness. Even though the story naively suggests
the lovers will live happily 'ever after', the semantic intricacy of the
audiovisual composition debases the innocuousness of this suggestion,
posing the question: 'ever after what?' The subtle and precise potency of
the audiovisual montage overshadows the promised flight, expelling the
sight of heterosexual positivism and hosting the perpetual state of
impossibility in the elliptical punctuation. The dissonance built in the
final synthetic sign contains the incongruous, yet perfectly logical,
coexistence of the inadequately triumphant proposal of the patriarchal
hegemony and the incomplete transference of the ill-fated maternal
bond; April fails to secure her psychological autonomy in either
direction.
This double failure, in essence, permanently entraps April between the
inadequacy of the patriarchal solution and the mother's ghostly place
packaged as guilt, in the doubly matrimonial contradictions of pleasure
and pain, love and hatred, desire and withdrawal. The impossibility of
resolving the pre-Oedipal split and of fulfilling the promise of the
substitute contaminates the economy of the spectacle. The failing
synchronicity of the two cinematic instruments permanently fixates the
psychological makeup of the irony in the ambivalence of promise and
failure through poetic simplicity. The synthetic sign only pretends to
curtail the pain of loss; in fact, it circulates the devastating effect of the
loss in perpetual reciprocity, the loss that can only be mourned silently
and internally. The mechanism that activates this perpetuity is guilt.
According to Klein, guilt is the inevitable outcome of the sadistic
severity of the superego. The aggressive fantasies or actions against the
loved object stem from the fear that the ego will be destroyed by the
internal persecutors or from the realization that reparation has not
succeeded and will not succeed. Klein stresses that the fearful
aggression, the sadistic gratification of overcoming or even damaging the
object, is intimately linked to what she calls the 'pining for the loved
object'. In the state of ambivalence, the triumph over the parents in the

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 aggressive fantasies gives rise to the overwhelming sense of guilt, the
power of which even prevents fulfillment. This crippling mechanism
disturbs reparation and internal harmony, accordingly entrapping the
subject within the benign cycle of obsessional and manic defences. Guilt,
in other words, refers to the perpetuity of failure by means of nullifying
the reparative efforts. If the last frames present any information, it is the

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hard proof of the failure contained in guilt.
The domination of guilt precisely characterizes the mechanism of
adults' melancholy, in which the ghostly presence of the mother haunts
the subject perpetually. The phantastic pain, as Kristeva asserts, is in
permanent suspense because the melancholic subject can neither expel
47 See Kristeva, Black Sun: the mother nor overturn the separation.47 Inherent in her silence and
Depression and Melancholia.
modesty is the supremacy of death, signified by the spectral mother,
whose power is unbearably tormenting because the secret pleasure that it
gives is never complete. Properly installing this entrapping perpetuity,
the synthetic sign at the end of Applause quickly yields to a nondiegetic
audiovisual construction, the theme music that overcomes the diegetic
chorus by following its melody with the decisive self-reflexive signifier
that hardly secures the end of the dilemma, 'The End'.
This perhaps explains why the contradictory discrepancy between the
two instruments at the end can hold together so closely the core of the
narrative, namely the unspoken fascination with death. 'Messengers of
Thanatos', as Kristeva notes, 'melancholy people are witness/
accomplices of the signifier's flimsiness, the living being's
48 Ibid., p. 20. precariousness'.48 This is indeed Mamoulian's hidden brilliance, to
suggestively nullify the effects of the most spectacular signs of earthly
49 Ibid., p. 4. pleasures and to '[reveal] the absurdity of bonds and beings'49 with the
simple juxtaposition of an unsettling camera movement and a piece of
contrapuntal sound.
One of the most significant accomplishments in Klein's account of
melancholy is that she creates a complex cartography of mental illnesses,
including mania, paranoia, neurosis and psychosis, which she explains in
relation to the depressive position. The infantile dilemma of having to
resolve the split of the imagos can lead to many flight-mechanisms,
which is why the discussion of the depressive position is so central to
Klein's thoughts. It is the variety of clinical complexities that the finale
of Applause opens up. Which of theseflight-mechanismsthe tormented
protagonist retreats to, we do not learn. Which infantile symptoms she
would go back to - whether she denies the psychic reality, retreats to the
good internal object (mania), attempts to save her good object (suicide),
or combats the fear of deterioration (obsession) - remains uncertain. One
thing is certain, though: the external object is already lost, as it has
always been, since the infantile inauguration of the depressive position.
And, the finale lingers on the possibility of losing the internal one.
Expanding Freud's theory on melancholy, Klein notes the importance
of the painful acknowledgement of the loss of the loved object, or
'testing of reality', in adult mourning and contends that the same process

2 1 0 Screen ^ : 2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
50 See Klein, 'Mourning and its takes place in the infantile depressive position.50 It is the process of
relation to manic-depressive
checking the absence of the loved object in psychic reality that leads the
states'.
depressive infant to devise ways of coping with the threat. If the finale of
Applause confirms anything by magnifying the external reality through
audiovisual means, it is the loss of the loved object. By simultaneously
concealing and embracing the ultimate loss, the signifying system enacts

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this paradoxical reciprocity itself. It is precisely this construction which
is the psychological content of the concluding spectacle. One thing is
certain: when mourning eventually becomes melancholy, as Esther
51 Sanchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Sanchez-Pardo states, bereavement can no longer be resolved.51 Frozen
Death Drive, p. 56.
at the transitory, precarious state of impossibility, the closure absorbs
even the slightest indication of the reparative impulse to applaud.

O11 Screen 46:2 Summer 2005 • Hyun-Suk Seo • The unheard mourning: offscreen sound and melancholy in Applause
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