Beyond the Visual: Sound and Image in Ethnographic and Documentary Film

by Iversen,Gunnar

• ISBN13: 9788789825939
• ISBN10: 8789825934
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2010-09-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

One of the most critical issues in film and media studies is how images create a sense of authenticity. Largely absent from debates in this area is the key role of sound in representations of reality. This book tackles the theory and significance of sound and its contribution to systems of meaning and semiotics. Particularly unique to the volume are the insights that emerge from interactions between film theorists and practitioners, who work on the relationship between sound and image, and visual anthropologists investigating the importance of sound in human communication and ritual and the creation of meaning and cosmologies. This stimulating book advances the disciplines of film and media studies, visual anthropology, and cultural studies.

Author Biography

Gunnar Iversen is Professor in Film Studies in the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He has author of many books and essays on film history, documentary and early cinema, including Nordic National Cinemas (Routledge 1998, with Tytti Soila and Astrid S÷derberg Widding).

Jan Ketil Simonsen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has carried out extensive field work on ritual performances among Mambwe-speaking people in Zambia and is currently engaged in collaborative research on the ethnography of childhood in contemporary Africa.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. 7
Introduction	p. 9
Audio-Vision	p. 21
Sounds of Silence: The aural in anthropology and ethnographic film	p. 22
Sound Rendering	p. 50
Added Value: The Role of Sound in Documentary Film Theory and Visual Anthropology	p. 70
Beyond the Visual: Inside and Through Sound	p. 87
Seizing Novels from Life - Oral/Aural self-mythologizing in 'Pour la Suite du Monde'	p. 105
Seeing, Hearing, Feeling: Sound and the Despotism of the Eye in 'Visual' Anthropology	p. 127
Case Studies	p. 151
Something Else - Indexical features of sound from the point of view of filmmaking	p. 152
Performative Nature - The Nature of Sweden in Arne Sucksdorff's Wartime Documentaries	p. 164
Documentary Re-enactments; A Paradoxical Temporality That Is Not One	p. 190
Access or alienation? Subtitling in ethnographic films	p. 212
Sound and Image in Performance and Ethnography	p. 229
Picture recitations of the Jadopatias in North East India	p. 230
Ephemeral images in Chisungu female initiation ritual	p. 254
Seeing the beat, and hearing the dance	p. 283
Notes on contributors	p. 299
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