Jacques Rancière: Film Fables (2006)

Film Fables traces the history of modern cinema. Encyclopedic in scope, Film Fables is that rare work that manages to combine extraordinary breadth and analysis with a lyricism which attests time and again to a love of cinema.

Jacques Ranciere moves effortlessly from Eisenstein’s and Murnau’s transition from theatre to film to Fritz Lang’s confrontation with television, from the classical poetics of Mann’s Westerns to Ray’s romantic poetics of the image, from Rossellini’s neo-realism to Deleuze’s philosophy of the cinema and Marker’s documentaries.

The Film Fable shows us how, between its images and its stories, the cinema tells its truth.

Translated from the French by Emiliano Battista
Series: Talking images series
Publisher Berg Publishers, 2006
ISBN 184520168X, 9781845201685
196 pages

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Michel Chion: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1990–) [FR, ES, EN]

“In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception.

Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception: we don’t see images and hear sounds as separate channels, we audio-view a trans-sensory whole. Expanding on arguments made in his influential books The Voice in Cinema and Sound in Cinema, Chion provides lapidary insight into the functions and aesthetics of sound in film and television. He considers the effects of such evolving technologies as widescreen, multitrack, and Dolby; the influences of sound on the perception of space and time; and the impact of such contemporary forms of audio-vision as music videos, video art, and commercial television. Chion concludes with an original and useful model for the audiovisual analysis of film.”

First published as L’audio-vision: son et image au cinéma, Nathan, Paris, 1990.

English edition
Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman
Foreword by Walter Murch
Publisher Columbia University Press, 1994
ISBN 0231078986, 9780231078986
239 pages

Publisher (EN)

L’audio-vision: son et image au cinéma (French, 3rd ed., 1990/2017, added on 2020-9-19)
La audiovisión: Introducción a un análisis conjunto de la imagen y el sonido (Spanish, trans. Antonio Lopez Ruiz, 1993, unpaginated, added on 2014-3-8)
Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (English, trans. Claudia Gorbman, 1994, updated on 2012-7-17)

Bruno Latour: Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004)

A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology–transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society–and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced.

In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division–which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.

Translated by Catherine Porter
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2004
ISBN 0674012895, 9780674012899
307 pages

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