The coupling of optics and acoustics in cinema never was a natural given, but always a construction and as such highly fragile, dependent on technical equipment, and therefore also open for experimentation.
The film «La Boum» from 1980 is a particularly interesting case in point not only because it contains a surprising scene of synchronisation. But the film seems to think through the many implications and ambivalences of this process. It shows us the combination of the audible and the visual as a contradictory process that splits what we thought was unified and welds the incommensurable.
It is for this video essay with its own techniques of synchronization and de-synchronization to bring this to the foreground and to our ear through an act of distortion for recognition.
This video essay, with written accompaniment, is published in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (Spring 2022) guest edited by Liz Greene.