For two decades, Michel Chion has been asking basic questions about cinema sound and coming up with startling, seminal answers. It all started with The Voice in Cinema and a simple question: why are so many films built around voices separated from the image of their sources? Elementary questions, creative responses, and clear prose make this one of the few books on film sound capable of simultaneously satisfying scholars and students alike. How wonderful to have The Voice in Cinema available, finally, in such a readable English translation. -- Rick Altman, author of A Theory of Narrative and Silent Film Sound
How can a voice whose source is never seen have such a hold over the audience? And how have directors used the "being heard and not seen" to build suspense in films since the advent of "talkies"? In this exploration, one of the experts on film sound explores the power of the human voice-particularly the disembodied voice-as deployed in cinema.
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Summary
For two decades, Michel Chion has been asking basic questions about cinema sound and coming up with startling, seminal answers. It all started with The Voice in Cinema and a simple question: why are so many films built around voices separated from the image of their sources? Elementary questions, creative responses, and clear prose make this one of the few books on film sound capable of simultaneously satisfying scholars and students alike. How wonderful to have The Voice in Cinema available, finally, in such a readable English translation. -- Rick Altman, author of A Theory of Narrative and Silent Film Sound
How can a voice whose source is never seen have such a hold over the audience? And how have directors used the "being heard and not seen" to build suspense in films since the advent of "talkies"? In this exploration, one of the experts on film sound explores the power of the human voice-particularly the disembodied voice-as deployed in cinema.
Description
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.
Critic Reviews
“"Elementary questions, creative responses, and clear prose make this one of the few books on film sound capable of simultaneously satisfying scholars and students alike. How wonderful to have Voice in Cinema available, finally, in such a readable English translation." -- Rick Altman, editor of Sound Theory, Sound Practice”
[A] creative look at sound in the cinema. -- R. Blackwood Choice
About the Author
Michel Chion is a composer of musique concr te, a filmmaker, an associate professor at the Universit de Paris, and a prolific writer on film, sound, and music. His other books with Columbia University Press are Film, A Sound Art 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 (1987), 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 Film, A Sound Art, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, and 2001: Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey.
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