Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision.
Chion takes as his motivation, both for this book and in his work more generally, the neglect of sound in cinema studies. Here, Chion focuses on the “audio-visual contract”: the relationship between sound and image in cinema, the way audio perception affects visual perception and vice versa. He deems the book both theoretical and practical. Audio-Vision reads like a manual in audiovisual analysis interspersed with theoretical claims about the nature of sound and its various subtypes. Chion aims to introduce a theoretically-grounded, analytical language with which to approach sound on screen. Throughout the work, he constantly distinguishes between different types of sound in cinema, as well as the perceptual effects of these sounds. In this text, he theorizes the “three modes of listening” (causal, semantic, and reduced), the “three modes of speech” (textual, theatrical, and emanation), “spatial mangnetization” (70), the “audiovisual chain” (47), the differences between on-stage, off-screen, and non-diegetic sound (75)…the list goes on.
So, how are these terms useful to someone studying nineteenth-century literature? Let me count the ways. First, many of Chion’s concepts make explicit cinema’s indebtedness to nineteenth-century stage practices and narrative conventions. His “in-the-wings effect,” for example, describes a cinematic imitation of a theatrical sound effect: when off-stage (and, in cinema, off-screen) sounds are linked to something just exiting or likely to appear (approaching footsteps, for example). Of course, one must be careful not to anachronistically impose a term created for twentieth-century cinema onto the nineteenth-century stage. A discussion of Chion’s “acousmetre” (129) in nineteenth-century performance would undoubtedly need to account for the differences in theatrical and cinematic off-stage utterances. Yet, Steven Connor has found this concept very helpful in his discussion of nineteenth-century practices of ventriloquism. In short, Chion’s terminology can shed light on the ways nineteenth-century narrative and performance anticipated and influenced cinematic sound. Take, for example, “emanation speech,” or indistinguishable background talk, in film. Chion argues that emanation speech is uniquely nonliterary and nontheatrical, unlike the “theatrical” speech of dialogue and the “textual” speech of voice-over narration. Yet I see in Victorian literature attempts to create the effect of emanation speech in writing. We hear snatches of speech in the chaotic wedding feast of EBB’s Aurora Leigh and in the hubbub of the Jago in Morrison’s A Child of the Jago. So, Chion’s critical vocabulary can aid in describing the sound in and of Victorian literature.
