Chion Reading Thoughts

Preparing for last week's class, I read over the Chion article; however, we ran out of class time to discuss it. So I decided to look over it once more and use it blogwise.

First of all, one of the first things I learned in Intro to Film was the fact that it was sound that makes shots flow seemingly invisibly, and if it wasn’t for sound, editing would be much more blatant. My professor that year put on a clip from the film, Seven, and we watched it on mute, only paying attention to shots. The first thing I noticed was the number of cuts that I hadn’t really paid attention to before. I even began to count cuts and realized how much more edits there really were. Then, we watched the same clip, only with sound, and it was a whole different experience. In the Chion reading, this is the first concept he discusses.

Next, I really liked the factors of temporalization that Chion discussed, specifically how predicable a sound can/can’t be to create different effects. In Experimental Film, we just created soundtracks that were anything but predictable and then had to place images to synch with the sounds. The effect all the final products had was almost completely disorienting at times and also made the sounds and pictures seem as if they were meant to be. This just goes to show that the relationship of the two can be used to modify or oppose one another.

Since the sound experience early on in my film studies to the experimental project recently completed, I’ve questioned why films are still sometimes referred to as motion pictures and movies, when sound is the glue that holds the moving images together. Without it, we’d be lost and focused to much on the different shots, rather than the story itself.