Film Sound - by Elisabeth Weis & John Belton (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This classic anthology provides essential models for analyzing sound stylistics through the detailed study of critical sound films. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton carefully curate major essays from the world's most respected film historians, aestheticians, and theorists, including Douglas Gomery, Barry Salt, Rick Altman, Mary Ann Doane, S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, René Clair, Béla Belázs, Siegfried Kracauer, Christian Metz, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Noël Burch, and Arthur Knight. Their selections recount the innovations and triumphs of Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Rouben Mamoulian, Dziga Vertov, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola, among many others, and explicate the techniques and practices of sound filmmaking from initial recordings to final theater playback. Film Sound is the ideal companion for anyone seeking both a comprehensive introduction to the form and a rich survey of its historical and global evolution.

From the Back Cover

The only comprehensive book on film sound, this anthology makes available for the first time and in a single volume major essays by the most respected film historians, aestheticians, and theorists of the past sixty years.

Review Quotes

Film Sound is a pleasure to read. In addition, the book's general organization and range of selections present an accurate summary of the development of film sound and attitudes toward it from the late twenties to the eighties. For anyone interested in finding ways out of the present theoretical confusion, Film Sound is an excellent place to start.-- "Film Quarterly"

Both comprehensive in its choice of readings and creative in its editorial approach... Film Sound, as well as being an eminent introduction to the writings in the field, forcefully demonstrates the need for the study of the media to be both textually and institutionally grounded, and both theoretically and historically informed.--Richard Allen "Framework"

Convincingly suggests that an exciting new field has been opened up, one that may well come to determine the way we look at the cinema as a whole.... [Film Sound] pays attention to the new technologies as they affect not only the cinema but also how we come to view its history.-- "Sight and Sound"

Indispensable... [a] superb collection of essays.... An important contribution to our literature on film theory and practice and... necessary reading for anyone interested in the art and the practice of filmmaking.-- "Journal of Popular Film and Television"

An extremely useful and wide-ranging collection of essays devoted to a topic often ignored or taken for granted by visually-dominated studies of the moving picture...--Gerald Mast, University of Chicago

About the Author

Elisabeth Weis is professor of film at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and executive director of the National Society of Film Critics. She has written or edited books on sound, comedy, and star acting. John Belton is professor of English and film at Rutgers University and the author of five books, including Widescreen Cinema, winner of the Kraszna-Krausz prize for books on the moving image, and American Cinema/American Culture, a textbook accompanying the PBS series American Cinema. He has also edited three books, including Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, and is associate editor of the journal Film History.