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...
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Summer 2022
Book Review|
June 01 2022
Review: Music in Cinema, by Michel Chion; translated by Claudia Gorbman
Music in Cinema
, Michel Chion; translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press
, 2021
, 380 pp.
Sergio De Iudicibus
Sergio De Iudicibus
Sergio De Iudicibus is a graduate student of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California, having earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University as a concentrator in French and Italian literature. His research addresses the history and influence of Italian film, which he often approaches through a musicological lens. He is currently working on the history of Argentinian tango as soundtrack in European art cinema and its sociological implications.
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Resonance (2022) 3 (2): 214–218.
Citation
Sergio De Iudicibus; Review: Music in Cinema, by Michel Chion; translated by Claudia Gorbman. Resonance 1 June 2022; 3 (2): 214–218. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2022.3.2.214
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