Music in Cinema - (Film and Culture) by Michel Chion

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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 Felicité, 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 concrète, 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.

Review Quotes

Michel Chion is the most influential sound scholar working today. In Music in Cinema, he examines film music through expansive, multiple lenses, combining histories of different practices with theoretical and analytical insights. Claudia Gorbman's expert translation retains Chion's delightful writing style, combining its quirky phrasing and shrewd observations. An intellectual delight.-- "Caryl Flinn, University of Michigan"

Michel Chion is the world's leading scholar of the film soundtrack, and Music in Cinema is one of his greatest works. Clearly written and jargon free, this account of music in cinema will interest readers from students to film buffs to scholars. I appreciated Chion's personal spin on this subject and found him making me reevaluate what I thought I knew about soundtrack music.-- "Alan Williams, author of Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking"

About the Author

Michel Chion is an independent scholar, composer, filmmaker, and teacher who has written more than thirty books on sound, music, and film. His previous Columbia University Press books include The Voice in Cinema (1999); Film, a Sound Art (2009); Words on Screen (2017); and Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (second edition, 2019).

Claudia Gorbman is professor emerita of film studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. She has written widely about film sound and music and has translated several books by Michel Chion.