Film, a Sound Art

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.

• 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

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