(b Yonkers, NY, May 14, 1948). American film scholar. She received the BA in French, the MA in Romance Languages, and took the doctorate in Romance Languages and Literature, all at the University of Washington (1969, 1971, and 1978). She studied in Paris from 1973–1974 with Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Roland Barthes, and Nadia Boulanger. She taught comparative literature and film studies at Indiana University from 1975 to 1990, then joined the founding faculty at the University of Washington, Tacoma, in 1990. Gorbman has written extensively on film music and film sound. She has also translated from French many of Michel Chion’s key theoretical works on the audiovisual, including Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994), The Voice in Cinema (1999), and Film: A Sound Art (2009). Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies (based on her doctoral dissertation) examined the narrative and expressive functions of music in film. It was the first to draw on narrative, semiotic, and psychoanalytic theories that flourished in film studies in the 1970s. Her use of the narrative theory-derived terminology “diegetic/non-diegetic” to assess if and how music, and the soundtrack as a whole, participated in film narration was especially far-reaching, and has since been embraced within film music studies and far beyond to other disciplines....
