The audiovisual chord: making film as a composition of sounds and images

In this talk, Martine sets out an approach to film-making, and film analysis, that includes certain assumptions: that film is a composition of sounds (including music and speech) and images; that the perspective of the listener/spectator is as important as the perspective of the film-maker-as-author; that the title of film-maker does not refer to the foremost position in an hierarchy of film creation, but to one who makes decisions and choices in the collaborative process of film-making. Within this approach, the embodied first-person perspectives of the listener/spectator and of the maker each play crucial roles.

Martine uses two clips from Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped as a starting point to introduce a phenomenological approach to sound and listening in film. The aim is to shed light on the process of listening, exploring that which does not immediately appear on the surface but deeply affects the film experience.

From this she will expand into Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the concept of embodiment, or the role of the body in experience and perception.

The third part of the talk is about the audiovisual chord as a tool for the analysis and design of film as an audiovisual composition. The audiovisual chord combined with embodiment provide a model for film (sound) education, allowing students to find their own voices in creative work.

First in a series of 4 talks that are aimed at both practitioners and academics.

2 hours including Q&A.
Each ticket includes free access to a recording of the event for 6 months.
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Dr. Martine Huvenne retired after a career teaching and researching in the audio-visual field. She was a senior lecturer in Sound and Music for Film at the Kask – Conservatorium School of Arts, Ghent, where she developed a phenomenological approach to music and listening. She graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 2012 with a dissertation on sound in film, “The sound in film as an inner movement in the transfer of an experience in film: a phenomenological approach.” Her research and teaching focuses on the auditory aspect of the creative process of filmmaking. Huvenne was curator and co-organizer of the Film Fest Gent annual Seminar on Music and Sound in Film. She coordinated the curriculum development of the European Postgraduate in Arts in Sound (EPAS).

Martine’s new book, The Audiovisual Chord: Embodied Listening in Film, published by Palgrave Studies in Sound, 2022, is available online.

Read her essay, ‘Transmitting an Experience’, in the TEACHING section of this website.