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Abstract
Moving images without sound tend to lack the dimension of embodiment. Music forestalls or remedies this lack; it projects and specifies a lifelike effect of embodiment on behalf of the images. Classical music in particular tends to project an idealized body image characterized as smooth and closed (what Mikhail Bhaktin calls the “classical body”). But it does so only in relationship to a contrary, more porous, sometimes violent mode of embodiment, which may equally reveal itself through classical music. Examples in cinema include Mike Figgis’s The Loss of Sexual Innocence and Jacques Audiard’s De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (‘The Beat that my Heart Skipped’).