Listening to Movies

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will shift your attention from watching movies to also listening to them. It will introduce you to a new way of experiencing films by educating your sense of hearing. Amid a strong emphasis on cinema - ranging from musical accompaniment during the silent era to sound in experimental films; or from classical Hollywood underscoring to Bollywood musicals - we will consider the soundtrack of moving pictures within the larger history of audiovisual media from lantern shows to television series or from commercials to video games. Based on a core repertory of twelve films, the course will cover various topics and issues surrounding film sound: aesthetic and psychological (such as representation, narration, emotion); social and political (such as race, ethnicity, propaganda); cultural and economic (such as production, technology, dissemination). After taking this course, you will never quite look at a screen without listening to the soundtrack, having come to perceive and understand how the powers of sound and music shape our ways of knowing the world.