Jean-Louis Ughetto: The Sound of Things

For nearly a century now—longer, if one takes live scoring into account—cinema has been an audio-visual art but, with a few notable exceptions, critic and theorist Michel Chion foremost among them, the aural element is far too-little explored in writing about film. Metrograph invites audiences to listen closer with The Sound of Things, a series that traces the storied career of audio engineer Jean-Louis Ughetto, an autodidact who, after taking on a string of odd jobs (elevator repairman, union organizer, electrician in Côte d’Ivoire), picked up a boom pole on the set of Maurice Pialat’s 1968 Naked Childhood and embarked on a new line of work that over the years would encompass collaborations with François Truffaut, Jean Eustache, Robert Bresson, Leos Carax and, beginning with her first feature and ending with his death in 2011, Claire Denis. An opportunity to study, per Chion, “the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image,” under the guidance of a master.