Image and Sound in Cinema: Interview with Shiguéhiko Hasumi.

In this lecture, my first attempt to make this thesis explicit, it is shown that cinema's origins in the silent movie have not yet been transcended, and that this connects to an essential aspect of the entire 20th century. The development of visual recording was fast and popular. The ubiquity of the camera is still unmatched by the development and spread of sound recording technology. Sound recording, after the era of the silent film, was always intrusive - until the recent invention of the video camera - and alienated in various ways from the recording of the moving image. Godard and Lanzmann argued about whether the Holocaust should be represented. For both of them the question of sound representation was outside their frame of reference. When we see images of 9/11, they are silent: a 20th-century tragedy that again may only be approached through the silent medium of that age. We will never hear the roaring of the Auschwitz ovens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]