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 Art considers 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 Shining to the way actors from different nations use their voices and words, Film, a Sound Art showcases the vast knowledge and innovative thinking of a major theorist.
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Preface to the English Edition Translator's Note Part I. History 1. When Film Was Deaf (1895-1927) 2. Chaplin-Three Steps into Speech 3. Birth of the Talkies or of Sound Film? (1927-1935) 4. Jean Vigo-The Material and the Ideal 5. The Ascendancy of King Text (1935-1950) 6. Babel 7. The Time It Takes for Time to "Harden" (1950-1975) 8. The Return of the Sensorial (1975-1990) 9. The Silence of the Loudspeakers (1990-2003) 10. On a Sequence from The Birds: Sound Film as Palimpsestic Art Part II. Aesthetics and Poetics 11. Jacques Tati, the Cow, and the Moo 12. The Disappointed Fairies Around the Cradle 13. The Separation 14. The Real and the Rendered 15. The Three Borders 16. Audiovisual Phrasing 17. Alfred Hitchcock: Seeing and Hearing 18. The Twelve Ears 19. Orson Welles: The Voice and the House 20. The Talking Machine 21. Faces and Speech 22. Andrei Tarkovsky: Language and the World 23. The Five Powers 24. God Is a Disc Jockey 25. Max Ophuls: Music, Noise, and Speech 26. Like Tears in Rain Glossary List of Illustrations Index
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Michael Chion's books on film sound... have been revelotory syntheses of an expansive knowledge in elegant, accessible prose. -- Dell Tamblyn Film Comment Exceedingly teachable and surely welcomed by instructors... Film, a Sound Art is indubitably an asset to the study of cinema. -- Kyle Stevens Film Criticism
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Rethinking the experience of film and film history through sound.

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780231137775
Publisert
2009-07-16
Utgiver
Vendor
Columbia University Press
Høyde
235 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Forfatter
Oversetter

Biographical note

Michel Chion is a composer of musique concrete, a filmmaker, an associate professor at the Universite 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.