Event

Nora Alter
Professor, Film and Media Studies, Temple University

Sound as Method

Writing in 1929, V.I. Pudovkin vehemently proclaimed that “Music…in sound film must never be the accompaniment. It must retain its own line.” My presentation will explore the way in which sound is used in cinema to organize space, time and movement. In particular, I will examine the possibility of thinking the non-fiction cinema with an ear to the ephemeral domain of the acoustic, namely music. What follows will constitute a journey that tracks the echoes and reverberations of chords, strains and fragments interwoven into audio-visual compositions. These sound traces provide access to the tenor of different times and spaces, they allow us to “hear elsewhere,” as Jean-Luc Godard would put it, which in turn enable us to see and understand elsewhere as well.