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.