Michel Chion in Audio-Vision and a practical approach to a scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia

This article analyses the final sequence in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) using Michel Chion’s interdisciplinary method for the analysis of sound and image described in Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994). The analysis focuses on the separation and modification of both basic audiovisual elements —the soundtrack and the image— in order to analyse them and draw conclusions about the nature of the image-music relationship originally established by the author. To do this, the original music in the sequence of the film, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, is replaced with a random segment from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata BWV 54, and an analysis is conducted of how this manipulation modifies the diegetic space-time of the film.