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Listening to the Pain of Others: Isabel Coixet’s La vida secreta de las palabras (The Secret Life of Words)

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Scars and Wounds

Abstract

Isabel Coixet’s film, La vida secreta de las palabras (The Secret Life of Words, 2005), primarily set on an oilrig off the coast of Britain, dramatises the struggle of its hearing-impaired protagonist Hanna (Sarah Polley) to overcome the trauma of the Balkan wars (1990s). The chapter situates Hanna’s trauma-induced silence within the context of the politics of truth commissions. This analysis is primarily vococentric (Chion 1999) since Coixet explores Hanna’s suffering through her voice rather than her image. The traumatic past of experiences in the Balkans echoes in the disembodied voice of Hanna’s pain. As well as the haunting acousmatic voice of Hanna’s trauma, we have the voice of her American burn victim patient Josef (Tim Robbins). As discussed in several feminist readings, the director disables the male lead’s gaze by virtue of his temporary blindness so that he may learn how to listen to Hanna’s voiced experiences. I posit that Hanna and Josef begin to practise what Lisbeth Lipari has called ‘listening otherwise’, or allowing oneself to be transformed by listening to the other. I argue further that listening otherwise in the film supports an ethics of healing that runs counter to the shock value of images of war and torture that Susan Sontag discusses in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003).

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  • La vida secreta de las palabras (The Secret Life of Words, Isabel Coixet, Spain, 2005).

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  • Mi vida sin mí (My Life Without Me, Isabel Coixet, Spain and Canada, 2003).

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  • Nadie quiere la noche (Endless Night, Isabel Coixet, Spain, 2015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Erin K. Hogan

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  1. Erin K. Hogan
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Correspondence to Erin K. Hogan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Nick Hodgin

  2. Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

    Amit Thakkar

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Hogan, E.K. (2017). Listening to the Pain of Others: Isabel Coixet’s La vida secreta de las palabras (The Secret Life of Words) . In: Hodgin, N., Thakkar, A. (eds) Scars and Wounds. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41024-1_7

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