UC Riverside

This dissertation takes a sonic centric approach to intersections of cinema, poetry, and media/cultural studies more broadly through insights from a revision of Michel Chion’s contributions to criticism of film through sound and critiquing the limits of sound in discussions of cinema so far. Where the cinema meets reception in venue revolution of experience occurs which whisks away the audience’s tertiary retentions and encourages them in their willful suspension of disbelief. And so where the poetic is spoken, the speaker has an audience to whisk away, and the act of poetry is thus encapsulated in those cinematic events where poetry is shown not just through the visual invocation of the lines of the poem but indeed by the power of the voice over to bring the poem into the film, to inscribe that ethos into the audience and then to repeat this anew each time, a poetic speaker in the loudspeaker, always already prepped and ready to perform. In general, the “sound envelope” is a way of organizing time, so we can also say, a way or stratifying temporality in the cinematic context. By this stratification and organizing of time “sound envelopes” are sonic demarcations of intentional duration which dictate the legibility and meaning of a given narrative in the phantasmagoric event of cinema. I assert the spatiality of the sound envelope while also arguing for its arrangement as a matter of temporality. Sonic spaces are perhaps related to temporality but also queer and distort time, especially in the sense of “queering time” or destabilizing the hetero normative construct of linear time. In the end I argue that by orienting the sensorium around sound, subjectivity is fostered in the space that sound creates and that this space remains poetic in quality, a kind of confessional of the self, to the self, and for the self as a poetic turn in sound that manifests the space denied in the visually governed logics.