In a world where screen sizes are diminishing and speakers—especially headphones—are improving, sound is becoming an increasingly important aspect of contemporary aesthetic experience. Yet film scholars persistently theorize the medium in terms of images and visual spectacles. We say we watch or go see a movie. However, as we all know, we also listen to films! Our class is going to explore cinema as an audiovisual medium, learning about the history of filmmakers’ experiments with relations of sight and sound. We shall look and listen carefully to ways that the mechanical reproduction of sound has been used to create both pleasure and meaning—as speech, music, and noise—by experiencing, among others, films by Jane Campion, Alfred Hitchcock, Derek Jarman, Fritz Lang, Lynne Ramsay, and Jacques Tati. We will also explore philosophical conceptualizations of what makes listening distinctive, reminding ourselves, for instance, that unlike the eye the ear has no lid. In doing so, this class is positioned at the cutting edge of a rapidly growing field within Film Studies interested in sonic aesthetics, as well as within the field of Sound Studies more broadly.
