Resonant Bodies in Contemporary European Art Cinema

Provides the first consideration of sound and the body in contemporary European art cinema.

Offers detailed analysis of the underexplored dimension of sound in the work of some of the best-known contemporary European art film directors.

Provides a stimulating contribution to theories of cinematic spectatorship showing how sound, noise and listening can rethink all aspects of the filmic experience.

Explores the conceptualisation of cinema as a resonant body.

Considers the sonic dimensions of cinema alongside prescient current debates in European film and criticism about the body, migration and exile, as well as anthropocentrism and anthropocentric modes of representation.

What does it mean to exist, in our experience of cinema, according to listening? How do sound and ‘noise’ reconfigure relations between spectators and screens, and by extension, spectators and their worlds? How do films raise questions about the ethics and politics of listening to different bodies?

Resonant Bodies in Contemporary European Art Cinema answers these questions through an analysis of films by Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, Tony Gatlif, Arnaud des Pallières, Lars von Trier and Peter Strickland. These post-millennial European directors have worked with sound in ways that resist the full-definition and perfect hearing offered by Dolby technology. Instead, they have privileged ‘noise’ - sounds that take us to the limit of what we can hear - in a move that foregrounds the body on screen and constructs spectators as listening bodies.