Six Singers in Search of a Voice

At the beginning of her career, Cyndi Lauper was told that success was just around the corner—if only she could use her amazing voice to sound more like Barbra Streisand. "I think that job has been taken," she replied, knowing that success would come only if she could find her own voice. That quest, with its philosophical and existential turns, is the central focus of the films selected for this course, where the search for one’s voice begins as an identity crisis and leads to the discovery of one’s roots (This Must Be the Place, 2011), their rejection (The Jazz Singer, 1927), a struggle against the pit of self-doubt (Little Voice,1998), or the ability to remain oblivious to it (Florence Foster Jenkins, 2016). In all these cases, the joy of performance becomes possible only after one’s voice is found—whether it is used to write and sing songs that have already been written (Yesterday, 2019), or through the realization that the voice has always been there and that the career did peak; it just happened before anyone noticed (A Mighty Wind, 2003).