This handbook offers new ways to read the audiovisual. In the media landscapes of today, conglomerates jockey for primacy and the internet increasingly places media in the hands of individuals-producing the range of phenomena from movie blockbuster to YouTube aesthetics. Media forms and genres are proliferating and interpenetrating, from movies, music and other entertainments streaming on computers and iPods to video games and wireless phones. The audiovisual environment of everyday life, too-from street to stadium to classroom-would at times be hardly recognizable to the mid-twentieth-century subject. The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics provides powerful ways to understand these changes.
Earlier approaches tended to consider sound and music as secondary to image and narrative. These remained popular even as practices from theater, cinema and television migrated across media. However, the traversal, or "remediation," from one medium to another has also provided practitioners and audiences the chance to rewrite the rules of the audiovisual contract. Whether viewed from the vantage of televised mainstream culture, the Hollywood film industry, the cinematic avant-garde, or the participatory discourses of "cyberspace," audiovisual expression has changed dramatically.
The book provides a definitive cross-section of current ways of thinking about sound and image. Its authors-leading scholars and promising younger ones, audiovisual practitioners and non-academic writers (both mainstream and independent)- open the discussion on audiovisual aesthetics in new directions. Our contributors come from fields including film, visual arts, new media, cultural theory, and sound and music studies, and they draw variously from economic, political, institutional, psychoanalytic, genre-based, auteurist, internationalist, reception-focused, technological, and cultural approaches to questions concerning today's sound and image. All consider the aural dimension, and what Michel Chion calls "audio-vision: " the sensory and semiotic result of sound placed with vision, an encounter greater than their sum.

This handbook offers new ways to read the audiovisual. In the media landscapes of today, conglomerates jockey for primacy and the internet increasingly places media in the hands of individuals-producing the range of phenomena from movie blockbuster to YouTube aesthetics. Media forms and genres are proliferating and interpenetrating, from movies, music and other entertainments streaming on computers and iPods to video games and wireless phones. The audiovisual environment of everyday life, too-from street to stadium to classroom-would at times be hardly recognizable to the mid-twentieth-century subject. The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics provides powerful ways to understand these changes. Earlier approaches tended to consider sound and music as secondary to image and narrative. These remained popular even as practices from theater, cinema and television migrated across media. However, the traversal, or "remediation," from one medium to another has also provided practitioners and audiences the chance to rewrite the rules of the audiovisual contract. Whether viewed from the vantage of televised mainstream culture, the Hollywood film industry, the cinematic avant-garde, or the participatory discourses of "cyberspace," audiovisual expression has changed dramatically. The book provides a definitive cross-section of current ways of thinking about sound and image. Its authors-leading scholars and promising younger ones, audiovisual practitioners and non-academic writers (both mainstream and independent)- open the discussion on audiovisual aesthetics in new directions. Our contributors come from fields including film, visual arts, new media, cultural theory, and sound and music studies, and they draw variously from economic, political, institutional, psychoanalytic, genre-based, auteurist, internationalist, reception-focused, technological, and cultural approaches to questions concerning today's sound and image. All consider the aural dimension, and what Michel Chion calls "audio-vision:" the sensory and semiotic result of sound placed with vision, an encounter greater than their sum.

How can a voice whose source is never seen--such as Norman Bates's mother in "Psycho" or Hal in "2001: A Space Odyssey"--have such a powerful hold over an audience? And how have such directors as Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock used "the being heard but not seen" to build suspense in films since the advent of "talkies" in 1927? In a brilliant exploration of a subject no one else has written on at any length, one of the foremost experts on film sound explores the mysterious power of the human voice-particularly the disembodied voice-as deployed in cinema. Michel Chion, author of "Audio-Vision," analyzes imaginative uses of the human voice by directors like Lang, Hitchcock, Ophuls, Duras, and de Palma. The first part of "The Cinematic Voice" considers the hidden, faceless voice and its magical powers, particularly as used in Fritz Lang's "Testament of Dr. Mabuse." Chion sees this film, produced at the dawn of the sound era, as a template for the voice in cinema. The middle section's five essays explore entrapment by telephone, voice-thieves, screams of terror, siren calls, and the silence of mute characters. Finally, Chion looks at "the monstrous marriage of the filmed voice and body" as figured in "Psycho's" Norman Bates. Claudia Gorbman's fluent translation introduces readers to Chion's sophisticated and accessible analysis in a work that established his reputation as a major voice in French film criticism.

Michel Chion is renowned for his explorations of the significance of frequently overlooked elements of cinema, particularly the role of sound. In this inventive and inviting book, Chion considers how cinema has deployed music. He shows how music and film not only complement but also transform each other. The first section of the book examines film music in historical perspective, and the second section addresses the theoretical implications of the crossover between art forms. Chion discusses a vast variety of films across eras, genres, and continents, embracing all the different genres of music that filmmakers have used to tell their stories. Beginning with live accompaniment of silent films in early movie houses, the book analyzes Al Jolson's performance in The Jazz Singer, the zither in The Third Man, Godard's patchwork sound editing, the synthesizer welcoming the flying saucer in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Kinshasa orchestra in Felicite, among many more. Chion considers both original scores and incorporation of preexisting works, including the use and reuse of particular composers across cinematic traditions, the introduction of popular music such as jazz and rock, and directors' attraction to atonal and dissonant music as well as musique concrete, of which he is a composer. Wide-ranging and original, Music in Cinema offers a welcoming overview for students and general readers as well as refreshingly new and valuable perspectives for film scholars.

Michel Chion's landmark Audio-Vision has exerted significant influence on our understanding of sound-image relations since its original publication in 1994. Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception. Sound in audiovisual media does not merely complement images. Instead, the two channels together engage audio-vision, a special mode of perception that transforms both seeing and hearing. We don't see images and hear sounds separately-we audio-view a trans-sensory whole. In this updated and expanded edition, Chion considers many additional examples from recent world cinema and formulates new questions for the contemporary media environment. He takes into account the evolving role of audio-vision in different theatrical environments, considering its significance for music videos, video art, commercial television, and the internet, as well as conventional cinema. Chion explores how multitrack digital sound enables astonishing detail, extending the space of the action and changing practices of scene construction. He demonstrates that speech is central to film and television and shows why "audio-logo-visual" is a more accurate term than "audiovisual." Audio-Vision shows us that sound is driving the creation of a sensory cinema. This edition includes a glossary of terms, a chronology of several hundred significant films, and the original foreword by sound designer, editor, and Oscar honoree Walter Murch.

Michel Chion's landmark Audio-Vision has exerted significant influence on our understanding of sound-image relations since its original publication in 1994. Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception. Sound in audiovisual media does not merely complement images. Instead, the two channels together engage audio-vision, a special mode of perception that transforms both seeing and hearing. We don't see images and hear sounds separately-we audio-view a trans-sensory whole. In this updated and expanded edition, Chion considers many additional examples from recent world cinema and formulates new questions for the contemporary media environment. He takes into account the evolving role of audio-vision in different theatrical environments, considering its significance for music videos, video art, commercial television, and the internet, as well as conventional cinema. Chion explores how multitrack digital sound enables astonishing detail, extending the space of the action and changing practices of scene construction. He demonstrates that speech is central to film and television and shows why "audio-logo-visual" is a more accurate term than "audiovisual." Audio-Vision shows us that sound is driving the creation of a sensory cinema. This edition includes a glossary of terms, a chronology of several hundred significant films, and the original foreword by sound designer, editor, and Oscar honoree Walter Murch.

Michel Chion is well known in contemporary film studies for his innovative investigations into aspects of cinema that scholars have traditionally overlooked. Following his work on sound in film in Audio-Vision and Film, a Sound Art, Words on Screen is Chion's survey of everything the seventh art gives us to read on screen. He analyzes titles, credits, and intertitles, but also less obvious forms of writing that appear on screen, from the tear-stained letter in a character's hand to reversed writing seen in mirrors. Through this examination, Chion delves into the multitude of roles that words on screen play: how they can generate narrative, be torn up or consumed but still remain in the viewer's consciousness, take on symbolic dimensions, and bear every possible relation to cinematic space. With his characteristic originality, Chion performs a poetic inventory of the possibilities of written text in the film image. Taking examples from hundreds of films spanning years and genres, from the silents to the present, he probes the ways that words on screen are used and their implications for film analysis and theory. In the process, he opens up and unearths the specific poetry of visual text in film. Exhaustively researched and illustrated with hundreds of examples, Words on Screen is a stunning demonstration of a creative scholar's ability to achieve a radically new understanding of cinema.

Michel Chion is renowned for his explorations of the significance of frequently overlooked elements of cinema, particularly the role of sound. In this inventive and inviting book, Chion considers how cinema has deployed music. He shows how music and film not only complement but also transform each other. The first section of the book examines film music in historical perspective, and the second section addresses the theoretical implications of the crossover between art forms. Chion discusses a vast variety of films across eras, genres, and continents, embracing all the different genres of music that filmmakers have used to tell their stories. Beginning with live accompaniment of silent films in early movie houses, the book analyzes Al Jolson's performance in The Jazz Singer, the zither in The Third Man, Godard's patchwork sound editing, the synthesizer welcoming the flying saucer in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Kinshasa orchestra in Felicite, among many more. Chion considers both original scores and incorporation of preexisting works, including the use and reuse of particular composers across cinematic traditions, the introduction of popular music such as jazz and rock, and directors' attraction to atonal and dissonant music as well as musique concrete, of which he is a composer. Wide-ranging and original, Music in Cinema offers a welcoming overview for students and general readers as well as refreshingly new and valuable perspectives for film scholars.

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.

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.