TY - JOUR
T1 - Mediated Auscultation
AU - Talijan, Emilija
N1 - Included in BFI 2021 poll of 30 video essayists, academics, critics and filmmakers who give 120 recommendations: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/best-video-essays-2021
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Mediated Auscultation aligns cinema and the stethoscope. It asks how one form of media (the stethoscope) might reveal something about another (cinema), thinking through both as technologies of “mediated auscultation”. This phrase hails from stethoscope inventor Rene Laennec’s treatise on the diagnosis and diseases of the lungs and heart from 1819 and it is defined in contrast to immediate auscultation—that is, the direct application of the ear to the body of the patient. More recently, sound theorist and historian Jonathan Sterne defined mediated auscultation as the practice of “listening to movements inside the body with the aid of an instrument, at a physical distance” (2003: 128). It is this definition of mediated auscultation that this video essay extends to cinema, conceiving of it as an instrument that opens a technologically mediated aural pathway towards the body via sound, allowing us to listen to its murmurings and exhalations at the surface and at a physical distance in ways that decompose the traditional boundaries of the body. In both cases - cinema and stethoscope - sound is subtended by an image, by sight, a stillness; both provide an immersive experience of the interior; and both entail a split between sound and body, sound and listener. This unique combination of factors provides the basis for the analogy of cinema as stethoscope.
AB - Mediated Auscultation aligns cinema and the stethoscope. It asks how one form of media (the stethoscope) might reveal something about another (cinema), thinking through both as technologies of “mediated auscultation”. This phrase hails from stethoscope inventor Rene Laennec’s treatise on the diagnosis and diseases of the lungs and heart from 1819 and it is defined in contrast to immediate auscultation—that is, the direct application of the ear to the body of the patient. More recently, sound theorist and historian Jonathan Sterne defined mediated auscultation as the practice of “listening to movements inside the body with the aid of an instrument, at a physical distance” (2003: 128). It is this definition of mediated auscultation that this video essay extends to cinema, conceiving of it as an instrument that opens a technologically mediated aural pathway towards the body via sound, allowing us to listen to its murmurings and exhalations at the surface and at a physical distance in ways that decompose the traditional boundaries of the body. In both cases - cinema and stethoscope - sound is subtended by an image, by sight, a stillness; both provide an immersive experience of the interior; and both entail a split between sound and body, sound and listener. This unique combination of factors provides the basis for the analogy of cinema as stethoscope.
M3 - Article
SN - 2469-4312
VL - 8
JO - [In]Transition Journal
JF - [In]Transition Journal
IS - 3
ER -