Sound, death and Amour

Abstract

This article explores Michael Haneke’s Amour by following two pairs of complementary elements: silence and noise (to which the voice is added to complete what we understand as sound in cinema), and death and love. At the core of Haneke’s project, representations of love and death are the driving narrative force of the film while the dialogue between image and sound is the aesthetic driving force. The argument shows how Amour depicts death and love on two levels: on the one hand thematically, and more importantly on the other hand cinematically, in the editing, the particularity of the shots and most clearly in the unique manipulation of sound.