Michel Chion: The Voice in Cinema (1984–) [EN, ES]

“How can a voice whose source is never seen—such as Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey or the mother of Norman Bates in Psycho—have such a powerful hold on an audience? When does “synchronized sound” fail to link bodies to their voices, and how do such great stylists of sound film as Jacques Tati, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Marguerite Duras deploy the power of the voice?

In this brilliant essay, Michel Chion, internationally cited authority on the history and poetics of film sound, examines the human voice in cinema. The Voice in Cinema begins with the phenomenon of film’s hidden, faceless voices and their magical powers, particularly in the context of Lang’s Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Chion then explores subjective voices, bonding and entrapment by telephone, voice-thieves, screams (male and female), siren calls, and the silence of mute characters-all uniquely cinematic deployments. In conclusion, Chion considers “the monstrous marriage of the filmed voice and body” as embodied in Norman Bates. Claudia Gorbman’s fluent translation retains Chion’s sophisticated and accessible style, introducing readers to a distinct and paradigm-changing voice on film.”

First published as La voix au cinéma, Cahiers du Cinema, Paris, 1984.

English edition
Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman
Publisher Columbia University Press, 1999
ISBN 0231108222, 9780231108225
183 pages

Review: Tim Anderson (Echo, 2000).

Publisher (EN)

The Voice in Cinema (English, trans. Claudia Gorbman, 1999, updated on 2020-9-19)
La voz en el cine (Spanish, trans. Maribel Villarino Rodriguez, 2004, added on 2020-9-19)

Yve Alain Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss: Formless: A User’s Guide (1996/1997)

“In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss convincingly introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Formless constitutes a decisive and dramatic transformation of the study of twentieth-century culture. Although it has been over sixty years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the idea of the “formless” been deployed in theorizing and reconfiguring the very field of twentieth-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content, whereas “formless” constitutes a third term that stands outside the opposition of form and content, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal.

In Formless, Bois and Krauss, two of the most influential and respected art historians of our time, present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They map out its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a “job.” The job of Formless is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this innovative reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.”

First published as L’Informe: mode d’emploi, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1996.

Publisher Zone Books, 1997
ISBN 0942299434, 9780942299434
304 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2013-1-15)

Richard Coyne: The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media (2010)

How do pervasive digital devices—smartphones, iPods, GPS navigation systems, and cameras, among others—influence the way we use spaces? In The Tuning of Place, Richard Coyne argues that these ubiquitous devices and the networks that support them become the means of making incremental adjustments within spaces—of tuning place. Pervasive media help us formulate a sense of place, writes Coyne, through their capacity to introduce small changes, in the same way that tuning a musical instrument invokes the subtle process of recalibration. Places are inhabited spaces, populated by people, their concerns, memories, stories, conversations, encounters, and artifacts. The tuning of place—whereby people use their devices in their interactions with one another—is also a tuning of social relations.

The range of ubiquity is vast—from the familiar phones and handheld devices through RFID tags, smart badges, dynamic signage, microprocessors in cars and kitchen appliances, wearable computing, and prosthetics, to devices still in development. Rather than catalog achievements and predictions, Coyne offers a theoretical framework for discussing pervasive media that can inform developers, designers, and users as they contemplate interventions into the environment. Processes of tuning can lead to consideration of themes highly relevant to pervasive computing: intervention, calibration, wedges, habits, rhythm, tags, taps, tactics, thresholds, aggregation, noise, and interference.

Publisher MIT Press, 2010
ISBN 0262013916, 9780262013918
344 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-2-6)