American Music

The abstract reads: “The increasingly sophisticated use of sound and music in film has not yet dispelled the notion that cinema is an essentially visual medium. Cinema’s aural encounters with vision as action are addressed. Film captures objects for display, but also captures the presentation of seeing for display, where images become place-holders for vision itself. This notion of seeing, most obvious in a point-of-view shot, can become the topic of a soundtrack’s characterization of action on the screen. Examples from Citizen Kane, Indiana Jones, Saving Private Ryan, The quick and the dead, Kitty foiled, Vertigo, North by northwest, American beauty, Contact, and The Elephant man are used to suggest how film can extend, encode, and simulate vision by way of the ear.”

American Music, 22(1), Spring 2004
“Nor the eye filled the seeing: The sound of vision in film,” 76-90
Stan Link (Author)
Courtesy of Stan Link