“If you wish to see, listen. Hearing is a step toward seeing.” It is as Bernard of Clairvaux wrote already in the 12th century. Words are hemmed in with silence, and the voice itself pokes and wears holes in the silence which surrounds it.
I have long been interested in the function of the voiceover, how the reading of a text can change and infuse the images with meaning and gravity. Writing and written or spoken word has regularly played a role in my work, but with films like ASCENT (2016) and DEAREST FIONA (2023), the role of the voiceover and of the voice have become key and vital. Memory and its connection to images in our minds is something I repeatedly re-examine. Cinema in particular enjoys a special place in this relationship. Both film and memories can transport us to a different place and a different time. An experience like a double projection, of being in two places at once.
My goal is that the narrator’s speech is not monotonous, but rather it fluctuates; it lets you hear things instead of hearing about them. For DEAREST FIONA, the voice became a character of flesh and blood, thought and emotion. Slowly the film emerges from the crossing over between image-built and text-built narrations, between tactile images and the touch of the narrator’s voice, supported and contrasted by the film’s expansive soundscape. I have often thought that the term should be not “voiceover”, but rather “voiceunder”.
Fiona Tan, born in 1966 in Pekanbaru, Indonesia, works as an artist and filmmaker in the Netherlands. Her work has been presented at numerous solo exhibitions around the world. Her third feature-length film DEAREST FIONA was invited to the Berlinale Forum in 2023.
