Film Sound: Theory and Practice

This classic anthology provides essential models for analyzing sound stylistics through the detailed study of critical sound films. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton carefully curate major essays from the world's most respected film historians, aestheticians, and theorists, including Douglas Gomery, Barry Salt, Rick Altman, Mary Ann Doane, S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, René Clair, Béla Belázs, Siegfried Kracauer, Christian Metz, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Noël Burch, and Arthur Knight. Their selections recount the innovations and triumphs of Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Rouben Mamoulian, Dziga Vertov, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola, among many others, and explicate the techniques and practices of sound filmmaking from initial recordings to final theater playback. Film Sound is the ideal companion for anyone seeking both a comprehensive introduction to the form and a rich survey of its historical and global evolution.


About the Author
Elisabeth Weis is professor of film at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and executive director of the National Society of Film Critics. She has written or edited books on sound, comedy, and star acting. John Belton is professor of English and film at Rutgers University and the author of five books, including Widescreen Cinema, winner of the Kraszna-Krausz prize for books on the moving image, and American Cinema/American Culture, a textbook accompanying the PBS series American Cinema. He has also edited three books, including Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, and is associate editor of the journal Film History.