Nora Alter | Listening to Marker

Nora Alter, Chair and Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University

Nora M. Alter’s teaching and research focus on twentieth and twenty-first century cultural and visual studies from a comparative perspective, and she published the first English-language study of director Chris Marker in 2006. In her talk, Alter investigates Marker’s complex use of sound, paying particular attention to how music operates on multiple registers in order to expand the cinematic frame both temporally and spatially.

Her other publications include Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996) and Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (2002). She co-edited Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004) with Lutz Koepnick. Alter also published essays on German and European Studies, Film and Media Studies, Cultural and Visual Studies, and Contemporary Art. She is currently completing a new book on the international essay film and has begun research for a new study devoted to sound.