CINE 488CSound and Moving Images

Catalog

The dominance of film vision and its capture of our sight often relegates sound and sonics to a material afterthought present only to better ground our belief in the cinema. As such, it is treated as secondary, and therefore subordinate, to the ocularcentric obviousness of themedium. Our goal in this class, therefore, will be as much to 'tune' ourselves sensorially to the many sounds of cinema as it will be to conceptually theorize those sounds. While this course is not a history of sound technology in the cinema, students will nonetheless become familiar with historical uses of film sound-from the silent era to the most recognizable and influential scores-as well as read texts from sound studies, musicology, film theory, and philosophy. This goal is shaped, in part, by the ontological nature of sound itself, a fragile and ephemeral object haunted by disappearance, which the cinema both thematizes and uniquely expresses. From Andrei Tarkovsky's dripping rain in Nostalghia to Wong Kar-waia's symphonic repetitions in In the Mood for Love, our class will treat the cinema as a privileged object for studying sound.