The Human Voice Q A With Pedro Almodovar And Tilda Swinton Hosted By Mark Kermode

A woman watches time passing next to the suitcases of her ex-lover (who is supposed to come pick them up but never arrives) and a restless dog who doesn't understand that his master has abandoned him.

La Voix Humaine is a concerto for soprano and orchestra, centering on the break-up of a relationship by telephone. It represents one side of a conversation between a young woman (sung by American soprano, Julia Migenes) and her lover, who has jilted her. In a 1930s, Parisian apartment, a woman is seen making for the door. As she passes the telephone, it rings. From now on she sings, sitting, standing, on her knees, pacing up and down the room, pulling at the telephone cord, going through every emotion until ultimately, in despair, she takes her own life. Jean Cocteau wrote, it is not just that the telephone is sometimes more dangerous than the revolver but that its tangled cord drains us of our strength, while giving us nothing in return.

A monologue of a woman talking on the phone with her longterm lover who is about to marry another girl.

This silent educational film from Bray Studios is all about that “marvellous sound producing instrument, the voice box”. Produced six years before the introduction of “talkies”, there's something pleasingly odd about a film dedicated to the mechanics of the human voice being entirely devoid of its subject matter — where the voiceover would soon boom we are treated to just the poignant silence of intertitles. Founded in 1912, Bray Productions was initially devoted to making animated series, including Max Fleischer's marvellous Out of the Inkwell series. The Human Voice utilises a range of animations, often combining them with filmed footage of a man's head to reveal the subdermal mechanisms at play, and at one point we take a slightly terrifying “trip down ‘Throat Lane’” to find an animated glottis in song behind an overlaid stave.

The great oral historian Studs Terkel was an inspiration to StoryCorps, and he was also an early participant in the project. In this animated short, he speaks out on what has been lost in modern life and where he sees hope for our future.

After “five years of happiness,” a love affair is ending. The woman uses the telephone as the last remaining connection with the man, who is now planning to marry someone else.

Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström takes on Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice.

Short based on the Jean Cocteau play following a final telephone conversation between a couple.

A film adaptation of the one-woman play by Jean Cocteau starring Shelby Satterthwaite as a woman who deals with the emotional turmoils of talking to her lover one last time over the phone.

The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House presents a new production of Poulenc's short opera La Voix Humaine, featuring soprano Danielle de Niese and shot on location in Paris and London.

On a foggy afternoon, a woman who is lost in the middle of the countryside, finally reaches him on the phone. She calls him “darling” but has to give back his letters.

She's alone in her huge, empty house. Just a dog. His dog. And the remains of what once was. Her lover of five years has left her. Only few of his things are left behind. His last call may change things.

The artist sits in a chair in front of a table and, looking at the camera, cuts tape to turn on a radio in which a pre-recorded speech sounds with which she tries to coincide in a simultaneous reading of it from a text she carries on paper. Part of a book by Miguel Cereceda, The Origin of the Subject Woman to deliver a discourse on the space of enunciation of the woman in the symbolic order while slowly "silencing" her voice by sticking the tape in her mouth until it is finally "silenced".

A woman’s last phone conversation with her lover, who now loves someone else.

A woman spends a surreal evening unraveling on the phone with her recently lost lover.

In 1930 Jean Cocteau premiered "La Voz Humana" in Paris. In 2013, actress Karina Gidi interprets "La Voz Humana" under the direction and adaptation of the renowned director Antonio Castro in Mexico.

A TV adaptation of Jean Cocteau's play La voix humaine about a woman talking to her lover over the phone.

An elegant young woman in her messy room answers the phone call from her lover. This one, who intends to leave her, tries to make her understand what he is up to without hurting her too much, hypersensitive as she is. All means are good: big words, cajolery, denial, lies. As for the woman, who senses that this is the end, she desperately tries to win him back, passing from tenderness to passion, from the threat of attempted suicide to calm, from regret to outbursts of violence.

Running through Bartók’s disenchanted tale, whose haunting music was initially condemned as unplayable, and the expression of despair in Poulenc’s monologue, the director Krzysztof Warlikowski perceives a shared dramatic thread, a shared feminine consciousness and a shared sense of imprisonment and suffocation: for the woman who penetrates the confines of Bluebeard’s castle and Elle, the woman who clings to a telephone conversation with a man as the only thing worth living for, are condemned to share the same fate. And this man she speaks to, does he really exist? Unless the director has interpreted Cocteau’s words to the letter and the telephone has become a “terrifying weapon that leaves no trace, makes no noise”…

In this, queer re-interpretation of Jean Cocteau's timeless classic, an actor has a breakdown, pining for their love, locked in a green room before they are supposed to go onstage.