Words on Screen

Michel Chion is a composer of musique concrete, a filmmaker, an associate professor at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and a prolific writer on film, sound, and music. His previous books with Columbia University Press are The Voice in Cinema; Film, a Sound Art; and Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Claudia Gorbman is emeritus professor of film studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. She is the author of Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, the editor of several books, and the author of many articles on film sound and film music. She has translated four other books by Michel Chion.

Words On Screen offers a radically new understanding of cinema. By concentrating on the written word in a very wide variety of films, Chion turns what in the past has always been no more than a passing concern into a full-fledged reading strategy, applicable to films of all periods and types. I never could have imagined that Chion would once again create an entirely new approach to cinema. -- Rick Altman, author of A Theory of Narrative We tend to take the appearance of written words in movies for granted. In this book, the great film critic Michel Chion compiles an inventory of textual effects, and shows us just how strange, powerful, and surprising words on screen can be. -- Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University We too often think of the film as a purely visual medium and the text as a purely verbal one. In his highly original and incisive study, Michel Chion illuminates the overt yet overlooked presence of the fusion of visual and verbal that is writing on the screen. The results are revelatory. Chion tracks the whole panoply of inscriptions in film and makes clear how our understanding of film depends on the force of these inscriptions. You will never again look at or read the titles, intertitles, subtitles, signage, or hand-written letters on screen in quite the same way. -- Ian Balfour, York University

• List of Illustrations Preface Introduction Part I: An Infinite Inventory 1. The Name on Screen 2. Nondiegetic Writing 3. Diegetic Writing as Athorybos Part II: Writing, Reading 4. Fingers, Tablets, and Machines Writing 5. From Books Undone, Films 6. Half-Reading 7. Hearing One Language and Reading Another Part III: Writing in Film Space 8. Writing in the Land of Three Dimensions 9. Anagrams and Clinamen 10. Excription Glossary Notes Bibliography Index