Michel Chion: Film, a Sound Art (2003/2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, audiovisual, cinema, film, film history, film sound, film theory, hearing, listening, music, noise, poetics, sound, sound studies, time, voice
“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.”
First published as Art sonore, le cinema, 2003
Translated by Claudia Gorbman
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2009
ISBN 0231137761, 9780231137768
536 pages
via johnsonleow
Reviews: Knakkergaard (MedieKultur, 2010), Whittington (Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2010), Jaeckle (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2011).
PDF (Index missing, 58 MB, no OCR, updated on 2023-3-9)
Comment (1)Annie van den Oever (ed.): Technē/Technology: Researching Cinema and Media Technologies (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, cinema, film, film theory, image, machine, media, media technology, media theory, perception, phenomenology, philosophy of film, philosophy of technology, photography, technē, technology, television, video, vision
“This fourth title in the series The Key Debates sets out where the term technē comes from, how it unleashed a revolution in thought and how the concept in the midst of the current digital revolution, once again, is influencing the study of film. In addition, the authors – among them André Gaudreault, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Martin Lefebvre, Dominique Chateau, Nanna Verhoeff, Andreas Fickers and Ian Christie – investigate how technologies have affected the major debates about film, how they affected film theory and some of its key concepts. This is one of the rare books to assess the comprehensive history of the philosophies of technology and their impact on film and media theory in greater detail.”
Publisher Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2014
The Key Debates: Mutations and Appropriations in European Film Studies series
Creative Commons BY NC ND License 3.0
ISBN 9089645713, 9789089645715
413 pages
Julia Vaingurt: Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, aesthetics, architecture, art, art history, avant-garde, biomechanics, body, cinema, communism, constructivism, design, literature, machine, politics, russia, science fiction, sexuality, socialism, soviet union, technē, technology, theatre
“In postrevolutionary Russia, as the Soviet government was initiating a program of rapid industrialization, avant-garde artists declared their intent to serve the nascent state and to transform life in accordance with their aesthetic designs. In spite of their professed utilitarianism, however, most avant-gardists created works that can hardly be regarded as practical instruments of societal transformation. Exploring this paradox, Vaingurt claims that the artists’ investment of technology with aesthetics prevented their creations from being fully conscripted into the arsenal of political hegemony. The purposes of avant-garde technologies, she contends, are contemplative rather than constructive. Looking at Meyerhold’s theater, Tatlin’s and Khlebnikov’s architectural designs, Mayakovsky’s writings, and other works from the period, Vaingurt offers an innovative reading of an exceptionally complex moment in the formation of Soviet culture.”
Publisher Northwestern University Press, 2013
SRLT series
ISBN 0810128942, 9780810128941
322 pages
via Sorin
Review: Boris Dralyuk (NEP, 2013), Tim Harte (Slavic Review, 2014).
PDF (updated on 2022-11-12)
See also the science-fiction film Aelita, Queen of Mars, dir. Yakov Protazanov, 1924, 111 min, based on Tolstoy’s novel.
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