Review: Music in Cinema, by Michel Chion; translated by Claudia Gorbman

When Michel Chion first published La Musique au cinéma in 1995, Thierry Jousse—writing as a reviewer for Cahiers—quickly identified the “certain inaccuracies” and “inevitable imperfections” of the monograph, attributing the author’s unsatisfactory analysis of jazz, for example, to his “status as a composer of electronic music.”¹ Though the present edition of Music in Cinema does indeed treat jazz quite superficially in the few scattered pages dedicated to the genre, Chion’s primary focus as a musician has not impeded the academic world from embracing his theory wholeheartedly; thanks to Claudia Gorbman’s other translations, the composer has become a central figure in the world of film sound since the late 1990s. With this particular monograph, Chion builds upon Audio-Vision and upon past versions of Film, a Sound Art to construct a two-part treatment of music in cinema (“and not only ‘film music,’” as he specifies), approaching the subject matter both...