La voix-over dans le cinéma documentaire
This exploratory thesis examines the various practices of voice-over in documentary  film. Questioning the highly heterogeneous nature of voice in the over register, I first discuss  it with respect to the material aspects of sound before examining it’s functions in the  elaboration of documentary discourse. Because this is a new undertaking, I will travel back-  and-forth between the rare studies concerning voice-over–almost exclusively confined to  fiction film (Kozloff, Châteauvert, Boillat)–and works proposing different theoretical and  critical views on the representation of reality in documentary films (Nichols, Niney,  Gauthier). This will help bring to light the specificities of documentay cinema where voice-  over is used less towards the production of a narrative and more towards the articulation of  discourse.    With the help of examples from a range of documentary films, I will show how speech  (both as an occurrence of sound and as a means of producing meaning) is placed over the  images, in a sometimes converging, but sometimes diverging, interdependent relationship.  This will help demonstrate that the specific use of voice-over in documentary film makes  manifest the act of speech of the sensitive, thinking subject who offers, no more no less, than  an interpretation of the world. Also, this thesis is a diptych and needs to be considered in  correspondence with the documentary film D'où, chose étonnante, rien ne s'en suit that  constitutes second part of the work.  Keywords : cinema, documentary, voice-over, speech, sound.
Cinema Documentary Voice-over Speech Sound Voice-off