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Summary:

The author argues that watching movies is more than just a visual exercise--it enacts a process of audio-viewing. The audiovisual makes use of tropes, devices, techniques, and effects that convert multiple sensations into image and sound, therefore rendering, instead of reproducing, the world through cinema. This book considers developments in technology, aesthetic trends, and individual artistic style that recast the history of film as the evolution of a truly audiovisual language. It also explores the intersection of auditory and visual realms. The author describes the effects of audio-visual combinations claiming, 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. He also discusses 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.

Table of Contents:

• History. When film was deaf (1895-1927)
• Chaplin: three steps into speech
• Birth of the talkies or of sound film? (1927-1935)
• Jean Vigo: the material and the ideal
• The ascendancy of king text (1935-1950)
• Babel
• The time it takes for time to "harden" (1950-1975)
• The return of the sensorial (1975-1990)
• The silence of the loudspeakers (1990-2003)
• On a sequence from The birds: sound film as palimpsestic art
• Aesthetics and poetics. Jacques Tati: the cow and the moo
• The disappointed fairies around the cradle
• The separation
• The real and the rendered
• The three borders
• Audiovisual phrasing
• Alfred Hitchcock: seeing and hearing
• The twelve ears
• Orson Welles: the voice and the house
• The talking machine

• Faces and speech
• Andrei Tarkovsky: language and the world
• The five powers
• God is a disc jockey
• Max Ophuls: music, noise, and speech
• Like tears in rain.

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Author/Creator:

Chion, Michel, 1947- , author

Contributors:

Gorbman, Claudia , translator

Languages:

English
French

Language Notes:

Item content: English
Translated from (original): French

Main Work:

Art sonore, le cinema [by Chion, M.] (English)

Related Series:

Film and culture

Subjects:

Sound motion pictures

Motion pictures — Sound effects

Motion pictures — Aesthetics

Motion pictures

General Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Translated from the French.

Physical Description:

xii, 536 pages : illustrations, music ; 25 cm.

Physical Characteristics:

illustration; music

Call Numbers:

PN1995.7 .C4513 2009

ISBNs:

9780231137775 (pbk., alk. paper)
023113777X (pbk., alk. paper)
9780231137768 (cloth, alk. paper)
0231137761 (cloth, alk. paper)

Library of Congress Control Numbers:

2008054795

OCLC Numbers:

286516299