A growing segment of contemporary narrative cinema attempts to immerse the audience in a protagonist’s immediate personal experience. This results in an affective interiority based on audiovisual impressionism rather than an articulation of thoughts, feelings, and motivations by way of an inner voice and emotionally coded music. Facilitated by technological developments and a more integrated musicalization of narrative films in the 21st century, many elements of this nonverbal audiovisual style have been touched upon in recent film sound scholarship, but not yet with a primary focus on subjectivity. The goal of Oswald Iten’s dissertation is therefore to establish and describe the auditory aesthetics instrumental in producing such an experiential subjectivity in contemporary first-person narratives. Writing about audiovisual intricacies is often hampered by the readers’ potential lack of familiarity with the sensory and experiential aspects of the objects of study. The secondary objective of his PhD project is thus to establish exploratory videography as a method for qualitative empirical research of film sound and the audio–visual relationship.
