Michel Chion

Pioneering composer, filmmaker, historian and writer Michel Chion is set to visit New Zealand for the very first time during which he will present two special events. Michel Chion is one of the worlds foremost thinkers on sound in cinema. In the 1970s he 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.

The Audio-Spectator
Auckland Unitarian Church, 1A Ponsonby Road Auckland
Friday 1 September, 8.00pm

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 theoreticians clothing.

Chions tour to Australia and New Zealand 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.