Film: a Sound Art

by Chion, Michel

• ISBN13: 9780231137775
• ISBN10: 023113777X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-07-01
• Publisher: Ingram Pub Services

Summary

French critic and composer Michel Chion argues that watching movies is more than just a visual exercise& -it enacts a process of audio-viewing. The audiovisual makes use of a wealth of tropes, devices, techniques, and effects that convert multiple sensations into image and sound, therefore rendering, instead of reproducing, the world through cinema.The first half of Film, A Sound Artconsiders developments in technology, aesthetic trends, and individual artistic style that recast the history of film as the evolution of a truly audiovisual language. The second half explores the intersection of auditory and visual realms. With restless inventiveness, Chion develops a rhetoric that describes the effects of audio-visual combinations, forcing us to rethink sound film. He claims, for example, that the silent era (which he terms "deaf cinema") did not end with the advent of sound technology but continues to function underneath and within later films. Expanding our appreciation of cinematic experiences ranging from Dolby multitrack in action films and the eerie tricycle of Stanley Kubrick's The Shiningto the way actors from different nations use their voices and words, Film, A Sound Artshowcases the vast knowledge and innovative thinking of a major theorist.

Author Biography

Michel Chion is a composer of musique concrte, a filmmaker, an associate professor at the Universit de Paris, and a prolific writer on film, sound, and music. His books with Columbia University Press are The Voice in Cinema and Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Claudia Gorbman is a film studies professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma. She is the author of Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, the editor of several books, and the author of many articles on film sound and film music. She is also the translator of Michel Chion's The Voice in Cinema, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, and 2001: Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey.

Table of Contents

Preface to the English Edition	p. ix
Translator's Note	p. xiii
History
When Film Was Deaf (1895-1927)	p. 3
Chaplin: Three Steps into Speech	p. 21
Birth of the Talkies or of Sound Film? (1927-1935)	p. 31
Jean Vigo: The Material and the Ideal	p. 59
The Ascendancy of King Text (1935-1950)	p. 67
Babel	p. 85
The Time It Takes for Time to "Harden" (1950-1975)	p. 99
The Return of the Sensorial (1975-1990)	p. 117
The Silence of the Loudspeakers (1990-2003)	p. 147
On a Sequence from The Birds: Sound Film as Palimpsestic Art	p. 165
Aesthetics and Poetics
Jacques Tati: The Cow and the Moo	p. 189
The Disappointed Fairies Around the Cradle	p. 201
The Separation	p. 221
The Real and the Rendered	p. 237
The Three Borders	p. 247
Audiovisual Phrasing	p. 263
Alfred Hitchcock: Seeing and Hearing	p. 281
The Twelve Ears	p. 289
Orson Welles: The Voice and the House	p. 321
The Talking Machine	p. 327
Faces and Speech	p. 353
Andrei Tarkovsky: Language and the World	p. 379
The Five Powers	p. 385
God Is a Disc Jockey	p. 407
Max Ophuls: Music, Noise, and Speech	p. 439
Like Tears in Rain	p. 453
Glossary	p. 465
List of Illustrations	p. 501
Index	p. 507
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