Tr. Claudia Gorbman
New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
This page created on 25 July 2009; last updated 26 July 2009.
The book was originally published as Un art sonore, le cinema: histoire, esthétique, poétique (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma/essais, 2003).
This file has a complete list of chapter titles, headings, and subheadings for the English edition. A simple chapter list may be found HERE: Book on CUP website. OR HERE Book on Barnes & Noble website.
The book has 26 chapters gathered in two parts: go to Part I (History); go to Part 2 (Aesthetics and Poetics
Preface to the English Edition
Translator's Note
Part One: History
Chapter 1: When Film Was Deaf (1895-1927) -- 3
Chapter 2: Chaplin: Three Steps into Speech -- 21
Chapter 3: Birth of the Talkies or of Sound Film? (1927-1935)
Chapter 4: Jean Vigo: The Material and the Ideal -- 59
Chapter 5: The Ascendancy of King Text (1935-1950) -- 67
Chapter 6: Babel -- 85
Chapter 7: The Time it Takes for Time to "Harden" (1950-1975) -- 99
Chapter 8: The Return of the Sensorial (1975-1990) -- 117
Chapter 9: The Silence of the Loudspeakers (1990-2003) -- 147
Chapter 10: On a Sequence from The Birds: Sound Film as Palimpsestic Art -- 165
Things Moving Without Noise -- 3
Suggesting Sound with Images -- 4
Sound Effects in the Silent Era -- 7
The First Stake: Live Music -- 8
A Third Stake: The Intertitle and Elastic Speech -- 10
The Intertitle and Distanciation -- 14
The Intruder -- 16
1. -- 21
2. -- 22
3. -- 24
"Singing" or "Talking": The Jazz Singer -- 31
The Context of the Birth of the Sound Film -- 32
The Moment the Music Ceases -- 34
The Hetereogeneity of Early Talking Cinema -- 36
The New Rapture of Synchronization -- 37
The Acousmatic Imaginary in the Cartoon -- 39
The Dionysian Years -- 40
The X" Era -- 42
Collective and Spontaneous Speech -- 44
Does the Sound Film Imply Naturalism? -- 45
A New Way to Film Speech -- 46
Experiments in the Early Sound Film -- 47
1. Audio Dissolves -- 47
The Reintroduction of Pit Music -- 54
2. The Auditory Tracking Shot -- 48
3. Microediting Sounds -- 51
4. The X-27 Effect -- 53
1. -- 59
2. -- 62
Three Kinds of Speech -- 67
1. Theatrical Speech -- 67
The Temptation of Textual Speech -- 69
2. Textual Speech -- 68
3. Emanation Speech -- 68
Classical Sound Film, a Verbocentric Art -- 73
The Art of the Continuous -- 76
The Voice-Over in Laura, or the Case of Quotation Marks Left Open -- 79
Film Henceforth Anchored in Language -- 85
The Question of a Film's Language -- 87
Stateless Cinema -- 87
American Film: a Cinema of Verbal Confrontation -- 89
Italian Film: Assimilationist Language -- 90
French Film: Between Affectation and Naturalist Folklore -- 92
Technical Mobility or Stability -- 99
Music: From Unity to Diversity -- 101
Music Becomes a Star -- 105
Rhetorical Practices in the Spotlight -- 106
Time Becomes Autonomous -- 107
The Birth of Ritualized Film -- 111
The Working Masses of Noise -- 117
Decoupage Restructured -- 118
The Birth of Polyrhythm -- 121
A Physical Reaffirmation of Sound -- 124
The Aesthetic of Imprecision, By Design -- 126
Sound Aiding a Return to the Sensory Dimensions of Silent Film and its Cult of Montage -- 129
Spatial Problems in the First Dolby Period -- 133
Disturbances of offscreen Space -- 136
An Increasingly Divided Auditory World -- 138
Foleyed Cinema -- 139
Dubbed Cinema -- 141
A Space to Empty -- 147
To What Extent is There a Digital Revolution? -- 151
The Era of the Remix -- 153
European Auteurs and Dolby -- 154
Kurosawa: The Mountains are not Listening -- 156
Ite Missa Est -- 158
Melanie Doesn't Hear -- 165
An Overdetermined Song -- 167
1. Temporal Continuity -- 168
Returns to Silent Cinema, Conspicuously or Discreetly -- 171
2. The Exasperation of Waiting -- 168
3. Mathematical Structure of Time -- 168
4. Unity of Space -- 169
5. Spells and Witchcraft -- 169
6. Pretext for a "Phantom" Sound -- 170
Audio-Division -- 173
Read Me -- 174
Read My Lips -- 177
Audio-Division: A Marriage of Phantoms -- 180
Editing in the Silent and Sound Film -- 182