This paper aims to examine Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), in relation to the emerging technologies and the electrification of media in the late 19th century. Heart of Darkness is structured as an embedded narrative, recounted orally through multiple narrators and storytellers whose bodies remain unseen. I will argue that these literary devices partly reflect the uncanny effect of a voice mechanically amplified and detached from its human source —a product of Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention of the phonograph. I will also refer to the psychoanalytic notion of voice as a partial object, as mentioned by Friedrich Kittler: Lacan adds the voice and the gaze to Freud’s list of partial objects; according to Kittler, “this is psychoanalysis in the media age” because cinema restores the disembodied gaze, and the phonograph transmits the disembodied voice.

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When a local radio program is interrupted by the report of a missing child, the inhabitants of Jennings Lodge are gripped by fear. A gang with masks and hoods is roaming the woods. Are they performing some rite by playing a game or are they planning a crime? How are these events linked, and what is the meaning behind them?

The stories unfold in some unspecified town with all the stereotypical traits of small-town America. This makes for an eerie, evocative environment that mirrors a fabricated impression of America as it has been shaped by neo-noir cinema, literature, and television. Using allegory and spatial displacement, the artist poses questions about cultural identity and the appropriation of narratives through cultural products. At the same time she explores the convergence of visual arts and cinematic narratives by mixing together different tools, storytelling conventions and languages, hence blurring their boundaries.

One of the most strange films in this year’s competition section of the Short Film Festival in Drama, Jennings Lodge is an American panorama that includes a series of elements such as the Ku Klux Klan, the late-night shows of American television, references to the genres of documentary and early underground. Somewhere between reality and fiction, an agile and humorous investigation on the boundaries of national identity, or a nightmare-thriller, Aliki Souma’s movie introduces a director with a distinct political view, regarding not only the modern societies and the violence of the spectacle but also the boundaries of cinema itself as a reflection of a disturbing world.