The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics ed. by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (review)

A wide variety of perspectives and interests tend to huddle together beneath the academic umbrella of the audiovisual. For this reason, The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics collects essays that appeal to a wide readership interested in the relationship between sight and sound. Even so, there is only so much ground one can cover in one volume. Editors John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis take Part I of the book to introduce the varied scenes set by the term audiovisual, most notably by inclusion of “nonor extracinematic forms” (p. 4), even as they acknowledge the debt that so many audiovisual media owe cinema (pp. 5–6). The introduction contains some unnecessary meandering, especially given the page count, but they strike a rich vein when they list fifteen points of consideration that face the broader field of audiovisual studies:

1. 1. Audiovisual interrelations (how sound and vision interact)

2. 2. Beyond audiovisuality (how other senses are, or might be, incorporated into the experience)

3. 3. Narrativity, semiotics, and stylistic conventions (diegesis, interpretation, coded meanings)

4. 4. Intertextuality (the relations of given audiovisual performances to other texts)

5. 5. Intermediality (mode of performance as influenced by other media)

6. 6. Technology (how it is used/what is being said about it through its use)

7. 7. Space and place (onscreen/offscreen, diegetic/nondiegetic, natural/imaginary)

8. 8. Temporality and synchronization (time’s relation to audiovisual elements, content, and experience)

9. 9. Aestheticism and affect as resistance (affect of tone and mood through visual/aural experience)

10. 10. Economic factors (what economic conditions liberate/constrain content and media of dissemination)

11. 11. Interactivity and immersion (receiver participation in and suspension of disbelief in audiovisual experience)

12. 12. The voice (use of human voice, how it manipulates and is manipulated to affect experience)

13. 13. Soundtrack elements (interaction of music, Foley, dialogue, and environmental noises)

14. 14. Audiovisual ecology (nature of sound in audiovisual performances and its relation to its surroundings)

15. 15. Cultural identity, affiliation, and spec-tatorship (the biases of the intended audio-viewer)

Most of these issues are addressed (to varying degrees) over the course of the volume, with some whole sections given over to them. I will treat each of the book’s sections in turn.

This first section (“Theoretical Pressure Points”) comprises five chapters of a more philosophical nature. The first two chapters in this section address ideas just as relevant to readers with audio-only concerns as to those with an audiovisual bent, addressing the affects and notions of technology and embodiment (Lawrence Kramer) and the mentality of remix culture, musical ownership, and copyright law (Nicholas Cook). Obviously, these are music-heavy concerns, but are nonetheless tangential to the audiovisual realm as a whole. To balance this, Michel Chion’s fascinating contribution narrows in on the non-musical audiovisual complexities presented by the translation of film dialogue into other languages. Broadly applicable in any narrative audiovisual medium is Anahid Kassabian’s suggested revision of the old diegetic/nondiegetic dichotomy, or even Ben Winters’s theoretical trident of diegetic/intradiegetic/extradiegetic (Ben Winters, “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space,” Music & Letters 91, no. 2 [2010]: 224–44). Given the proliferation of video games, viral videos, and Web sites, the binary (or trinary) distinctions of diegesis may be less central than in older media. Steven Connor’s chapter discusses the metaphysical experience of film as though it were a living creature with which we share eyes and ears. Specifically, he discusses the peculiarities that sharing a body with the film presents and how we suspend the expectations of our normal experience (e.g., distracting noise or out-of-sight objects emitting sound).

Part III, “Narrative, Genre, Meaning,” is divided into three subsections. The first of these, entitled “Changing Times, Changing Practices,” contains fascinating essays on documentary films, television serials, and big Hollywood blockbusters. This section even...