Resonant Bodies in Contemporary European Art Cinema

Product description Review Taking us on a thrilling journey through sound, Emilija Talijan explores what it means to become 'all ears' in the experience of film. With eloquence and erudition, she articulates new critical perspectives on noise and listening, making this essential reading within both film and sound studies. An altogether exquisite book.--Sarah Cooper, King's College LondonThis film-philosophical foray into a range of fascinating sonic problems--the aesthetics of volume, Foley as a formal restraint, violence and vibration, the nonhuman dimension of rustling--compellingly models the book's thesis that listening is a radical mode of attention, and that deep attention is a form of thinking itself.--Eugenie Brinkema, author of Life-Destroying Diagrams From the Back Cover What does it mean to exist, in our experience of cinema, according to listening? How do sound and ‘noise’ reconfigure relations between spectators and screens, and by extension, spectators and their worlds? How do films raise questions about the ethics and politics of listening to different bodies?Resonant Bodies answers these questions through an analysis of films by Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, Tony Gatlif, Arnaud des Pallières, Lars von Trier and Peter Strickland. These post-millennial European directors have worked with sound in ways that resist the full-definition and perfect hearing offered by Dolby technology. Instead, they have privileged ‘noise’ - sounds that take us to the limit of what we can hear - in a move that foregrounds the body on screen and constructs spectators as listening bodies.Emilija Talijan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at St. John’s College, University of Oxford. She received her doctorate in French from the University of Cambridge. Her articles on film sound have been published in Screen, Studies in French Cinema, Film-Philosophy and Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. About the Author Dr Emilija Talijan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford Read more