While Michel Chion was not the first to theorise the film voice, he was perhaps the first to invest it with a kind of theoretical mystique. Published in 1982, The Voice in Cinema not only de-naturalised a seemingly banal technical effect of sound cinema, it was also wildly faithful to its object. From the start, Chion identified the voice as fundamentally strange – ‘what grist for poetic outpourings’ – and even stranger yet when it came from the cinema, which had chattered relentlessly in the ear of its audiences for over fifty years. That it took that long to articulate a full theory of the film voice was a testament to Chion's conviction that film theory had forgotten the voice: ‘By what incomprehensible thoughtlessness can we, in considering what after all is called the talking picture, “forget” the voice? Because we confuse it with speech.’ Once Chion liberated the voice from the spoken, the film voice emerged as essentially bodiless, or perhaps more accurately, it acquired its most potent effects when it seemingly came from ‘nowhere’. When the voice is heard but not seen, it becomes a filmic god: it sees, knows and hears all. But the effect is fragile. If the voice is returned to the body, its power falters and breaks. The acousmêtre is thus by nature incorporeal; it is a voice without a mouth. In Chion's reading, the mouth is a terminal point, an inferior space of negative materiality, and so subordinate to the more critically significant work of the film voice, which seduces both viewer and theorist.

The cover of the English edition of The Voice in Cinema, however, suggests a rather different story. Four vertical stills from Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Wagner film, Parsifal (1982), show an actress (Karen Krick) first in shadow, then progressively more visible in proportion to her open mouth. In the last frame, we assume that she's singing: a voice surely rings out from the void of her black throat. In Chion's Prologue, a still from Fritz Lang's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) serves as a frontispiece. Karl Meixner holds a phone with frantic urgency; he's leaning over the desk; his right hand is caught in mid-gesture and his eyes bulge out with desperate force. And his mouth is open – something is coming out.