When Sound Leaves the Screen: Records, Voices, and the Making -- and Unmaking -- of National Cinema

In this talk, I examine how sound moves beyond the cinematic screen, shaping how national cinemas are formed and contested over time. Rather than treating film sound as something contained within the text, I follow sound as it circulates across cinema and media infrastructures. Focusing on mid-twentieth-century Iranian and Egyptian commercial cinemas in dialogue with Indian cinema's regional circulation, I show how the movement of sound, and especially the embodied labor of female performers, both stabilized and unsettled claims about national cinema. I conclude by briefly gesturing toward a second project on contemporary media in the Persian Gulf, where listening to sound infrastructurally offers a way of understanding how labor and mobility are organized within global cinema today. Taken together, these cases argue for sound as a method for writing cinema and media history that is attentive to circulation and the uneven conditions of preservation.

Claire Cooley is Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in Film and Media Studies and Middle Eastern Studies. Her research examines sound, cinema, and media infrastructures across the Middle East and South Asia, advancing questions of circulation, labor, gender, and transregional exchange within film and media studies. Her publications have appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Film History, and Jump Cut, and her book is forthcoming with the California Series in Music, Sound, and Media at the University of California Press. Her teaching spans film and media theory, sound studies, Middle Eastern cinemas, and film and media history and historiography.