Resonant Bodies in Contemporary European Art Cinema

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. Cover Half-Title Dedication Title Page Copyright Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Part I The Unlistenable 1 The Body at Close Range: Volume and the Unlistenable in Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell 2 Sonic Subjection: Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible and the Dystopian Limits of the Resonant Body Part II Migratory Noise 3 A Stranger Everywhere: The écho-monde of Tony Gatlif’s Exiles 4 Feedback, Asynchronicity and Sonic Sociabilities: Arnaud des Pallières’s Adieu Part III Nonhuman Noise 5 Listening at the Limit: Nonhuman Noise in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist 6 Listening to Things: Foley as ‘Alien Phenomenology’ and Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio Conclusion Filmography Bibliography Index Provides the first consideration of sound and the body in contemporary European art cinema.