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.
