Michel Chion


Michel Chion is a French film theorist and composer of experimental music.

Life

Born in Creil, France, Chion teaches at several institutions in France and currently holds the post of Associate Professor at the where he is a theoretician and teacher of audio-visual relationships.
After studying literature and music he began to work for the ORTF Service de La recherche as assistant to Pierre Schaeffer in 1970. He was a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales between 1971 and 1976.
His compositions elaborate on Schaeffarian theories and methodologies which Schaeffer referred to as musique concrète.
He has also written a number of books as well as essays expounding his theories of the interaction between sound and image within the medium of film.
In particular, the book titled L’audio-vision. Son et image au cinéma, originally published in France in 1990,
has been considered by all critics as the definitive book on the relations between sound and image, which are described as two different languages within the multimedia art form, discussing the argument from both technical-linguistic and aesthetic points of view, where before it was discussed principally in terms of narrative implications.

Writings