Audio Foundation & Aut Presents: Michel Chion

Audio Foundation & Aut Presents: Michel Chion(France)

Pioneering composer, filmmaker, historian and writer Michel Chion is one of the world's foremost thinkers on sound in cinema. This spring, Chion is set to visit New Zealand where he will present two very special events. In the 1970s Chion was a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), the influential collective led by composer and theoretician Pierre Schaeffer dedicated to furthering the art of ‘musique concrète’ through experiments in audiovisual communication, audible phenomena and music in general.

Lecture Performance:

The Voice in Cinema, or The Acousmêtre and Me

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Wellesley St E, Auckland

Thursday 31 August, 6.00pm

In this specially commissioned lecture-performance, Chion traces a history of the ‘acousmêtre’ – his term for the mysterious off-screen voice in cinema – through his own oeuvre, and the works of Robert Bresson, Fritz Lang, Hans-Jugen Syberberg, Spike Jonze & more.

A Liquid Architecture project in partnership with Audio Foundation, AUT and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Concert:

The Audio-Spectator

Auckland Unitarian Church, 1A Ponsonby Road Auckland

Friday 1 September, 8.00pm

Presale tickets ($25) available at http://www.undertheradar.co.nz/ticket/7040/Michel-Chion.utr / door sales avilble ($30)

Chion presents his classic work Requiem (1973) alongside his new audiovisual composition Third Symphony (2016) and musique concrète piece The Scream (2017) over an epic two-and-a-half-hour concert for ten surround-speakers.

A Liquid Architecture project in partnership with Audio Foundation and AUT.

Since the 1980s, Chion has written extensively on the relationship of sound and image in the cinema, publishing in 1990 what many consider the definitive theoretical guide to the subject, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. In this momentous book, Chion advances a whole new lexicon for describing audio-visual concepts, via the works of Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard and others. On reading, film scholar Claudia Gorbman was moved to name him "a poet in theoretician's clothing."

Chion's tour to Australia and New Zealand is an historic and unlikely to be repeated occasion. It is made possible by the generous support of Institut Français, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, AUT, the Audio Foundation, Creative New Zealand and Liquid Architecture.

ENDS

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