On some truly sound films

Film sometimes creates the illusion of a natural link between sound and picture, without taking their real heterogeneity into account. Actually, sound and image are two languages, two rhythm systems, and two powers that develop according to distinct characteristics of space and time. Certain directors elaborate their films based on the observation of this difference, which may even be an opposition, between sounds and images. Six excerpts from films by Bergman, Godard, Oliveira, and Straub are given as an example. Far from dreams of unity and merging, they attest to another potential cinematographic complexity, built upon the intensification of the contradictions and dialectics between the registers of sound and visual.