The Resonance of the «Déjà-Là»: Correspondences, Inversions, and Material Frictions Between Chion’s Impossible History and the Electroacoustic Imperative

Traditional media historiography often treats the evolution of cinematic sound as a clean, teleological march toward technological optimization. Yet, Michel Chion’s interrupted yet contemporary interrogation, unfolding along the opening of an impossible history and unrealized paths («possibles non réalisés»), reopens an originary wound: the fracture between material resistance—fixation on the medium and localization within the audiovisual fabric—and synthetic erasure (or the neutralization of the indices of materiality).

This study returns to the foundations of audiovisual theory, placing Chion’s recent critical essays in dialogue with the concrete topography of Louis Malle’s cherished 1957 film. What emerges is not a claim of historical, logical, or syntactical priority, but rather a constellation of correspondences wherein analytical models, themselves advenient, illuminate our compressed and optimized digital everydayness—a contemporary landscape that all too often drives toward that linguistic and formal leveling that aligns well with the concept of technological lissage — to ultimately extend as a methodological imperative aimed at refounding the analysis of the electroacoustic support.

Figure 1: The place of enunciation and the dissimulated author. Still 727 from shot 121 of Ascenseur pour l'échafaud(1957), portraying Florence (Jeanne Moreau) in a lateral tracking shot. The shop window reveals a hidden silhouette, Hitchcockian in nature, corresponding to Malle’s profile—hypothesized by the author as a deliberate and otherwise unrecorded cameo. // Daniele, Romina. Ascenseur pour l'échafaud: il luogo della musica nell'audiovisione, p. 211. [Elevator to the Gallows: The Place of Music in Audio-Vision]. Milano: RDM Records & Books, Edizioni Letterarie, 2011. [ISBN: 9788890490590].

Figure 2. Guide to Reading and Argumented Index.

to a pure apport de réel.

When we return to our 2010 study, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud: il luogo della musica nell'audiovisione (Milano, RDM Records), and cross-examine this datum with the sound design of Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (by Louis Malle, 1957), we observe a brilliant formal analogy: the harsh industrial noise textures, the metallic clattering of the grate, and the heavy structural thuds of the stuck and falling elevator cabin behave exactly like non-intentional «apports de réel», sharing the same material density as the organ «cluster» in Gwangi, but with a transdiegetic value. Louis Malle does not treat these mechanical noises as clean post-production environmental effects, and their insinuation between the filmic and the profilmic is less accidental but equally surprising, as we shall see; yet, they are preserved in their raw and resistant state. These emissions rub directly against the minimalist instrumentation, anchoring the scene to a secure yet textually defamiliarizing spatial gravitythat lays bare the physical entrapment of the subject, and reveals the techno-linguistic apprehension of the author working on the filmic text during the montage phase.

Critical inquiry has widely demonstrated how these sounds dialogue in counterpoint with Pierre Michelot’s double bass and Kenny Clarke’s drums—the only two instruments present in the tracks dedicated to the elevator sequence—operating a textual friction within the soundtrack for the described scene (see in this regard the analysis in the volume Daniele, 2010, pp. 155-159). In the tracks specifically recorded for the elevator cage (Julien dans l'ascenseur and Évasion de Julien), Miles Davis, Barney Wilen, and René Urtreger do not play at all. The music is reduced to the bone, to the absolute structural essence: a duo composed exclusively of Pierre Michelot’s double bass and Kenny Clarke’s drums. The «non-intention» attributed to those sounds does not reside, therefore, in the unpredictability of the event, but rather in the material and anti-narrative status of the sound itself. It is not a clean, «catalog» sound effect crafted to blend invisibly into the cinematic illusion. It is «non-intentional» precisely because its acoustic violence, its analog grain, and the manner in which it unexpectedly fuses with Michelot and Clarke’s jazz strip it of any mere function as commentary or environmental effect. It becomes autonomous matter. This instrumental rarefaction causes the industrial, metallic, and mechanical noises of the elevator not to overlap with a melodic line, but rather to occupy the textual space left vacant by the trumpet and the piano, merging with the rhythm section into a single, dense, avant-garde sonic body. Although Chion’s structural example refers to a pure absence of intention on the level of the diegesis (resolved in the accidental cluster-event), the critical perception of the creaks and industrial cuts of that elevator—which exhibits the material flagrancy of the analog cinema of the late 1950s—makes the syntactic foreignness defined by the French theorist as «non-intentional» resonate.

Non-intention, here, reveals itself as nobly material and analog: the contemporary listener and viewer does not securely associate those noises with the mechanical origin of the elevator destined to collide, nor do they passively assimilate them into the filmed object. These extremely real and concrete sounds activate an imperative dialogue with every other filmic element, to the point of being understood as an integral part of the jazz fabric, constituting to all intents and purposes an avant-garde micro-musical texture.

This resistance to artificial smoothing becomes even more symptomatic when placed in comparison with the criticism leveled by Chion in the second chapter of Pour une histoire impossible du cinéma against Eo (2022) by Jerzy Skolimowski. Here emerge the nodes of a denunciation of the dual contemporary crisis linked to the virtualization of geographical and linguistic space through modern digital optimization.

On one hand, on the visual level, he criticizes the omniscient and detached flight of drone cameras, which performs a geometric leveling, causing the loss of the visual altitude and the terrestrial anchoring of the donkey’s point of view, elevating itself artificially to the sky. Chion writes: «It seems to me that Skolimowski could have stayed at the level of the donkey, at human/animal eye level. Filmed from the sky on several occasions, his donkey seemed to me to "step out of character" and become an extra.»

On the other hand, on the sonic and cultural level, Chion identifies a true linguistic and geopolitical lissage, attributed to the practice of universal subtitles and to the choice of making characters speak in a standardized English (as in Anatomie d'une chute, by Justine Triet, 2023). This process strips the media of their material friction, erasing regional speech and physical distances: «The point is that there is always a spot where languages clash against each other, and avoiding this clash in a multilingual film, relying solely on subtitles, means transmitting a reality devoid of thickness.»

All too often, this macro-narrative leveling of the idiom corresponds to the contemporary micro-phonic level, where a similar process of technological smoothing (lissage) erases the thickness of frequencies. This digital lamination brings us back to Florence in Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, within the visual framework of Paris, when the space literally strips itself of all its sonic connotations. Yet, the total silencing of the urban landscape and the suppression of the very words spoken by the protagonist create a deeply localized and syntactically strategic void, within the scope of the false subjective shot upon which the entire sequence is based. The surrounding metropolis does not go missing in the silence that envelops it; on the contrary, even on the ideological level, it takes upon itself an immense and crushing weight, actively resisting the placeless virtualization that defines modern digital soundscapes.

This dialectic connects, in fact, to the principle of the «déjà-là» (the already-present) that Chion evokes in the third chapter regarding The Silence of the Lambs (1991). In truth, Jonathan Demme’s film has inhabited Chion’s analytical registers since the 1990s. Already in La Musique au cinéma (1995), Chion highlighted how the mixing performed an almost «obscene» operation: «the glass is there, but the sound behaves as if the air between the characters had been sucked away», eliminating every environmental reverberation of the cell. Through the miniaturization of detail (sighs, tongue clicks), cinema no longer uses sound to describe space, but to annul physical distance, depositing the sonic block directly into the spectator's ear.

Today, with the third chapter of the impossible history, the French theorist tightens the mesh of this analysis and registers the configuration of the separation glass and the positioning of Hannibal as a simple «cinema effect» internal to the dynamics of the screenplay, elevating the barrier itself to an expression of the «déjà-là». We are tempted to join Chion in the unanimous consensus paid to this sequence, without forgetting that we have always opposed radical theoretical reservations to it: by raising questions concerning the manner—«Has he been standing for only five seconds, or has he remained in that position for an hour? And does this idea come from the director or, as far as I know, from the performer Anthony Hopkins?»—the French theorist today finally recognizes the configuration of the separation glass and the positioning of Hannibal as a «cinema effect» in keeping with the dynamics of the screenplay. The glass as «déjà-là» is an inflexible and already present visual datum; however, the erasure of air and acoustic distance transforms the entire sonic block into a conspicuous and manipulative «cinema effect». An artifice useful for channeling the emotional reaction of the spectator rather than preserving the flagrancy of matter.

Classical historiography of the support postulates a linear march toward absolute transparency and the total isolation of frequency bands; for this reason, the general public was able to welcome this entirely post-production and non-realistic sound manipulation with enthusiasm and astonishment. On the other hand, however, what we define here as contemporary technological-sonic lissage, by tending to eliminate all friction, generates artificial spaces afflicted by a radical lack of place and apprehension. The Silence of the Lambs contains everything and nothing: the persistence of an originary wound of the medium that resides as much in the ideology of the modes of production of meaning as in the resistance of materials subjugated or loaded with effect. A specular correspondence and contrast is thus established with a practice of a different ideological weight, such as that of Louis Malle, an operation that allows us to reactivate the analytical cores of our 2010 study.

In 1957, the French director valued the mechanical noises of the cage—and the studied acoustic subtraction of the metropolis—conferring upon the sonic materials such a concrete value as to act short of a neutralization of the medium, which at the time was already deeply rooted in the formal fabrics of classical transparency, well before the analog became post-modern or the digital was coded. While the structural friction in the 1991 film seems almost contingent, and is partially absorbed by the hyper-presence of the voice, Malle’s 1957 choice configures itself as a true techno-aesthetic strategy that restores to audio-vision the material density of an authentic place of the text.

II. Electroacoustics Magazine Manifesto

This analytical bridge finds its proper visualization in relation to the Manifesto of Electroacoustics Magazine: the editorial project — in which extreme importance is given to the so-defined «electroacoustic sense» — founded on the epistemological concept of the work of art, viewed as such in consideration of historical-artistic, cultural, and aesthetic values, and of reflections on the conditions of knowledge, on the means of production, on the modes of production of meaning. This project is therefore emancipated from traditional categories and genre definitions of artistic making, as it is inherent to formal and compositional processes which, from the perspective of technical and expressive research, primarily imply an analysis of systems of thought and of the structuring of the same for creative purposes.

This logic sees contemporary creators at work within a technological framework, even when they do not explicitly employ digital or electronic tools. Therefore, when we analyze the audiovisual syntax of 1957, we do not find ourselves before a primitive and pre-electronic relic. Although Malle and Miles Davis worked with acoustic instruments and physical film, they were already operating within a radical technological logic of recording, microphone placement, and tape manipulation that directly coaided the syntactic processes of thought concerning the real that becomes filmic.

The manifesto asserts that the contemporary landscape must be understood through the terrain of the audiovisual, as a place of convergence and ferment; and that the histories of modern technological arts, such as photography and electronic music, are internally defined by the profound passage from analog friction to digital imaginaries. Today, the audiovisual device represents the definitive place where these digital, musical, and visual imaginaries confront each other to trace human consciousness back to its own cognitive origin.

Part I. The Trajectory of the Recent Chapters Chionians and the Articulation of Acoustic Matter

I.I. Between the «Impossible», «Lissage», «Déjà-Là», and Pan-Significance

The progression of Chion’s recent online chapters allows for the articulation of a three-moment interrogation into acoustic matter, examining the way in which structure, body, and signal interact in the history of cinema.

Figure 5: Confinement in Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1957). The vertiginous low-angle frame smashes Julien’s body (Maurice Ronet) inside geometric, inflexible perspective lines. Visually, this claustrophobic rigor corresponds to the drastic timbral stripping of the soundtrack: the silence of Davis’s trumpet leaves space solely for the material friction (frottement) of the drum brushes and the pizzicato of the double bass, which resonate in the vacuum as mechanical and biological extensions of the elevator shaft.

The Impossible and the Destructuring of the Origin (Chapter 1 – Morlaix)

• Key Concept: Interlocking/embedding («enchâssement») as a geometric structure of the impossible.

• Analytical Focus: In Morlaix (Jaime Rosales, 2024), the wild and acodified use of cinematic parameters (arbitrary variations of ratio, still frames, narrative loops) renders the film impossible to recount in words.

• Analytical Focus: The interlocking/embedding (the film within the film) is not a virtuosity, but the illustration of Lacan’s maxim according to which «the impasse secretes the fictions that rationalize the impossible from which it originates».

• Sonic Connection: This formal dead end bonds with the Chionian «impossible anacusmetro» (1981): if the acousmetre is the omnipresence of the «déjà-là», the anacousmetre represents the traumatic, abrasive, and corporeal fall of the voice that scratches the margins of the visible, exhibiting its constitutive lack.

• The Structural Counterpart of Rohmer: To understand the true scope of the Chionian rejection of the «Rohmerian» cliché applied to Morlaix, it is necessary to go back to the direct use that the theorist makes of the cinema of Eric Rohmer. In Écrire un scénario (1985), Chion indeed takes Pauline à la plage (1983) as a master model of comédie de moeurs capable of dismantling the monopoly of the classical Hollywood screenplay. In that essay, Rohmer is praised for a virtuous and elegant construction that distributes the action within the rigid boundary of a single week, rejecting visual gags to confer a voluntaristic weight upon the word. The Rohmerian word is therefore not the «chaotic flow» or the documentary direct sound recording (presa diretta) of Rosales, but a logical architecture that culminates formally in the pronounced sentence.

Digital Standardization and «Lissage» (Chapter 2 – EO)

• Key Concept: The «lissage» (the smoothing/polishing) of contemporary media.

• Analytical Focus: Looking at EO by Jerzy Skolimowski, Chion diagnoses the erosion of concrete matter on two distinct fronts. He criticizes the visual choice of the omniscient flight of drones, which abandons the terrestrial perspective of the animal for a virtual verticality. In parallel, he identifies in linguistic lissage the result of universal subtitling and the globalization of English in dialogues; practices that act like a clinical patina, removing the acoustic friction and the specific thickness of mother tongues. This geopolitical leveling can accommodate, by extension, a critique of the lissage of the acoustic signal.

Structural Anteriority and Material Accident (Chapter 3 – The Valley of Gwangi / The Silence of the Lambs)

• Key Concept: The «déjà-là» (the already-present) and the encounter with the «apport de réel».

• Analytical Focus: Chion unites in this chapter the physical accident of The Valley of Gwangi (the cowboy who accidentally falls onto the organ, provoking an unforeseen sonic «cluster», a pure contribution of reality) and the famous sequence of the encounter between Clarice and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The pivotal principle is that the spatial and objectual configuration preexists the entry of the characters: the organ (which was already there in the desert) or the cell preexist the subjects. Lecter is already there, immobile and frontal, before the framing and the subject converge upon him. On the audiovisual plane, textual analysis reveals a paradox: while the découpage visually erases the presence of the dividing glass, making it almost invisible and leaving Clarice ideally exposed, the sound mixing cancels the environmental acoustic absorption on Lecter’s voice, restoring it in an unnaturally close close-up devoid of reverberations, which sharply contrasts with the oppressive heaviness of the micro-noises of the cell-cage.

The Suspended Time and the Capitalization of the Medium (Chapter 4 – Blade Runner)

• Key Concept: The «suspended time» and «pan-significance».

• Analytical Focus: This progressive reconfiguration of acoustic matter finds its historiographical fulfillment in the recent fourth chapter of Chionian reflection (June 2026), wherein cinema is defined as a «concrete art» regulated by the principle of «pan-significance». In this theoretical horizon, the articulation of the text can no longer be parceled out into abstract macro-categories: every minimal element recorded and fixed onto the medium — from the microscopic tressaillement (shudder) of an actor, to a millimeter-precise editing match, down to the morphological fusion of sound waves and lights (think of the test sequence in Blade Runner) — becomes an absolute carrier of meaning. Within this phenomenological grid, the backbone of direction and perception is no longer the visual order, but rather «time» admirably held back, whose controlled suspension configures itself as the sole condition capable of allowing the spectator's eye and ear to perceive and see the micro-fluctuations of luminous and sonic matter in motion. The consequence is a radical historicization of underground currents — such as the transnational trajectory of the «laconic film» between the late Sixties and the early Seventies (from Kubrick to Leone and Pasolini), characterized by ample laconic extensions, deliberately stripped of music or dialogue — which Chion mobilizes in opposition to the rigid categorical compartmentalization of traditional criticism.

The choices made at the mixing desk are never mere technical options; they are profound ideological and formal actions that sometimes flatten the material world into a frictionless, or placeless, commodity, and at other times preserve its raw and inflexible bones to lay bare the work on the «conditions of knowledge, on the means of production, on the modes of production of meaning».

On one hand, we witness the clinical aesthetic lamination of contemporary lissage strategies — of which EO is the emblem and which the manipulative use of voice in The Silence of the Lambs had already foreshadowed — where every physical barrier is smoothed away and places are neutralized to cradle the listener even within the most terrifying story. On the other hand, a dialectical relationship is established in favor of a complex electroacoustic friction — Ascenseur pour l'échafaud —, in which the raw physical properties of sound generate meaning independently of classical definitions of musical or cinematic genre.

It is necessary to clarify that the loss of friction we lament here is not to be attributed to a chronological-technological transition from analog to digital. Contemporary smoothing is a linguistic choice, not a limitation of the medium: the digital itself, within the horizon of the electroacoustic imperative, is a device and a material of friction to be sculpted, an elevated and open medium of creation, rather than an instrument of perceptual anesthetization. The assumption that the latter operation seems to prevail does not concern the feasibility of the artwork, but once again the conventions of the industry, which we like to call by its true name: a mere ideological drift.

I.II. The Musicological Counterpoint: Inverse Correspondences and Resistances of Matter

Rather than considering these three contemporary perspectives as isolated phenomena, our 2010 research offers a precise musicological parallel to Chion’s current formulations. Rooted in Chion’s fundamental principle according to which film music intervenes directly on the meaning of filmic reality through its formal (technical-aesthetic and linguistic) qualities and its modes of production, the study investigated the visual framework and the specific structural positionings of the soundtrack within film language.

Let us return to the claustrophobic core of Malle’s elevator. The interaction between the naked, isolated pizzicato of Pierre Michelot’s double bass and the inflexible mechanical noise of the machine creates a transdiegetic space. The soundtrack systematically denies the reassuring and traditional structures of an orchestral or instrumental score, while the noise of the diegetic apparatus and the sonic-musical signal act in a dialectic relationship that coincides with the «electroacoustic sense». When we juxtapose our 2010 models with Chion’s recently published definitions of the «déjà-là» and the «sentiment du concret», we observe a mirrored and inverse analysis that shows the living resistance of matter prior to its technological capitulation.

The loss of matter, the erasure, the clinical smoothing (lissage) of which Chion writes today allows us to see by contrast how, in a work such as Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, matter is alive, pulsating, resistant, and present: in the rendering of the sonic lack within the diegesis, where the music on the soundtrack dialogues with the structure of the «montage» in the pivotal scene with Florence; and in the dialectic counterposition between the sounds of the elevator and the avant-garde soundtrack, in the scene with Julien. — And let us remember that, in the Florence sequence, the false subjective, or the «real objectivity of the silent place»), implies the studied subtraction of the city’s environmental noises to exhibit the impersonal enunciation of the text, transforming the urban space into a rigid and silent geometric-linguistic container that isolates the character’s body and makes her vulnerability resonate. —

If Michel Chion, in the first chapter of his essay, goes so far as to define Morlaix a «beloved film» precisely by virtue of that expressive disarray and that acoustic-visual variation devoid of legible codes, our bibliographical analysis imposes a necessary reversal of course. Certainly, a film configured exclusively on direct sound recording (presa diretta), anchored to the environmental noises of the small Breton town and to the naked musicality of the spoken word, is destined to enthuse the cultists of a certain Nouvelle Vague sentiment — or those critics inclined to superficially dismiss the work under the lazy label of a «rohmeriano» preciousness, justified only by the dense presence of sentimental and youthful digressions. This is a juxtaposition that tightly constrains Chion radically: «Rien à voir, à mon avis» («Nothing to do with it, in my opinion»), he cuts short, denying any direct kinship with the Nouvelle Vague or with the cinema of Jean Eustache. Where criticism discerns French dialogic naturalism, Chion traces an opposite structural mechanism based on embedding/interlocking (enchâssement); a formal choice that shifts Rosales’s genealogy outside transalpine borders to anchor it to a deep Hispanic matrix (from Cervantes to Raúl Ruiz). Yet, according to the French theorist: «the resources, the changes of ratio or coloration seem unleashed and vary disorderly, without referring to a legible code. What is more, the end is not an end, it seems as though one is caught in a loop. All this contributes to making this film impossible to recount except by evoking its cinematic form, and this literally, as it proceeds. It comes at the perfect time, since in my view it is about the impossible.» This Chionian idealization forces us to look severely at the relationships between materials and processes of meaning. It is not enough to accumulate chaotic materials (be they fragments of direct sound recording or continuous changes of visual format) to automatically generate meaning. The risk — to cite an expression that Chion himself uses in the third chapter as a warning — is that the film slides into a sterile «gesticulation» or into a «formalisme» («formalism») as an end in itself, incapable of becoming an authentic narrative. Where Chion sees an impossible story linked to the specificity of the device, we trace an impossibility of wanting to continue, an ostentation in the lack of meaning rather than in openness, a voluptuousness toward remission.

I.III. The Morlaix Case and The Impossible Anacousmetre

Reading and interpreting Michel Chion directly in the language of origin, we clash precisely with the most intimate paradox of audiovisual enunciation: «At the dawn of cinema, the "already-there"... was not yet there. A certain number of films were necessary to confer existence and meaning upon it.»

This means that cinema and the recorded track have invented a specific way of making one experience the being-as-origin: in the «montage» and the découpage, the device isolates the objectivity of the world (the profilmic) and transforms it into a destiny. Apparently neutral elements are fragments of the world that man did not create expressly for that specific action, but which welcome the action itself, found it, and make it «concrete» in time. Thus is configured the opening in which three parallel dimensions coexist: the impossible of an origin that gives itself only when it is «déjà-là» (already-present), the impossible of a film that cannot be translated into linguistic codes (Morlaix), and the impossible of a pure voice that resists the prison of the flesh (the «anacousmetre»).

If cinema is the place where the origin manifests through the trauma of recording, contemporary criticism struggles to understand texts that exhibit this wound in a radical way. It is thus that we can attempt an understanding of the intrinsic reasons for which Chion expresses an unconditional feeling of affection for the case of Morlaix by Jaime Rosales, an exhibition of the «impossibile» which, according to a precise historiographical line, unites the formal anarchy of Rosales to the monumental and primigenio attempt of D.W. Griffith in Intolerance (1916).

The word «impossibile» reveals itself as the secret center—recognized retrospectively by Chion himself—of all his theoretical reflection. It binds itself double-threaded to his own biography: divided between the institutional, paternal validation of Pierre Schaeffer and the psychoanalytic horizon of Jacques Lacan. It is no coincidence that the pivotal section of his first essay, La Voix au cinéma (1981) — a deeply Lacanian text —, was programmatically titled «l'impossibile anacusmetro» (l'impossible anacousmêtre). If the acousmetre is, par excellence, the entity of the déjà-là — a u-topic voice (devoid of place) that preexists the framing and enjoys omniscience and omnipotence precisely because it is not yet bound to the prison of visibility and the flesh (the voice before the mirror stage) —, the anacousmetre (that is, the non-acousmetre) represents the mirrored drama of presence. It stages the inconceivable and violent union of the body with the voice: the traumatic impact between the purity of the origin (the voice alone, the silent call) and its fall into corporeal and visual determination.

As much in the visual and structural chaos of Morlaix as in the radical de-synchronization of the acousmetre, the filmic text ceases to be a code to be decoded and offers itself as pure material resistance. Cinema discovers itself then as the art of the Impossible: a device which, in the desperate attempt to capture itself while it gives itself, can retain the origin only by exhibiting its very own, ungraspable lack (a structural impossibility that anticipates here our subsequent Derridean curvature of the text).

On the other hand, the historiography of the supports reminds us that we have plenty of radical precedents founded on the total abjuration of extradiegetic music, and with a far greater theoretical thickness:

• The American Direct Cinema (1960s): The aesthetic of Leacock and the Maysles brothers elects synchronous direct sound recording (presa diretta) devoid of musical commentary as an ethical bulwark against the manipulation of the spectator.

• The observational documentary of Frederick Wiseman: In masterpieces such as Titicut Follies (1967), institutional hum and the naked word alone structure the rhythm of the «montage», without any orchestral crutch.

• The fictional radicalism of Dogme 95: Lars von Trier’s vow of chastity definitively historicizes the prohibition of using music not present on the set as a marker of authenticity.

• The chromatic guerrilla warfare of the Czechoslovak Nová Vlna (e.g., Sedmikrásky / Daisiesby Věra Chytilová, 1966): A monumental model of formal decomposition that demolishes the classical visual code by alternating arbitrarily and in full disarray sequences in black-and-white, saturated monochromatic tinting, and color, attacking the stability of bodies and space through a «montage» that brutally dissects the details of faces.

• The multi-format collage and the destructuring of the portrait in the Jean-Luc Godard of the 1960s (from Vivre sa vie to La chinoise): Where the use of traumatic jump-cuts that shatter the anatomical continuity of the framed face, combined with the frontal clash between films of differing grain, mattes, and unstable visual formats, acted as a device of political estrangement, demonstrating that formal rupture acquires meaning only if it becomes an explicit critique of the ideology of the support.

For all these monumental precedents, we could debate whether the breaking of the code — be it the harshness of direct recording or the chromatic-structural decomposition of the frame — corresponds to a retreat into arbitrariness, or to an act of formal resistance that refounds a precise regime. On the other side, Chion seems to elect Morlaix as his «film chéri» precisely by virtue of that disarray in which the changes of ratio and coloration seem «déchaînés» («unleashed») and devoid of a describable dialectic tension, that is to say, one corresponding to an apprehension toward the processes of writing. In doing so, the French theorist performs a fascinating operation of philosophical anchoring: he enlists Lacan’s famous maxim according to which «l'impasse sexuelle sécrète les fictions qui rationalisent l'impossible», to elevate the film to a poetic demonstration of the cinematic «impossible» and of the irreconcilable body-voice fracture (his «impossible anacousmêtre»). However, the risk — «one must dare» («bisogna osare»), Chion says — is that the post-digital anarchy of Morlaix ends up consuming the void without critical redemption. It is precisely this radical gap between the illegible contemporary and the endurance of cinematic modernity that illuminates, by contrast, the underground and far more rigorous operation performed in 1957 by Malle.

In Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, the interlocking/embedding does not occur through the fragmentation of visual formats on a documentary basis, but through a stylistic indifferentiation of grammars: he interlocks the noises of the machine into the structural voids of the electroacoustic modal fabric.

Both models, however, reject commercial lissage (smoothing): if Morlaix exhibits the wound of enunciation through the impossibility of critical reading, Ascenseur exhibits it through material flagrancy, a decomposition of traditional codes that interrogates reality on the plane of its very own linguistic mechanisms.

PARTE II: The Transdiegetic Sonic Body and the Reversal of the Silent Opening

As previously anticipated, within this complex texture two distinct modalities immediately emerge to constitute the status of matter: on one hand, the mechanical friction of the claustrophobic closure through the transdiegetic soundtrack — that is, structured according to a dense counterpunti-dialectical relationship between the diegetic level of noises and the non-diegetic level of the score during Julien’s entrapment —; on the other hand, the complete erasure of urban sound within the false subjective upon which is founded what we define as the silent urban opening, embodied in the pivotal scene of Florence’s walk, which we have already analyzed under the microscope in the 2010 book and whose summary can be found in Appendix A.

In Ascenseur, Malle utilizes radical acoustic omissions and presences to exhibit the friction of materials. The French director thus creates linguistic relations and counterpoints that lay bare the worldly and psychological fractures of his environments, anchoring them to the physical and claustrophobic density of analog cinema from the late 1950s. The framework is not chronological but linguistic.

II.I. The Claustrophobic Closure and the Electroacoustic Friction

In the claustrophobic core of the elevator, matter is neither erased nor smoothed away; on the contrary, it resists and demands to be listened to in its rawest form. The linguistic estrangement — which in Christian Metz’s theories (1968) is fulfilled at the moment a filmic element is subtracted from its immediate referentiality to assume an autonomous textual function — does not occur here by means of an artificial alteration, but rather through the exasperation of the very natural and concrete elements of the diegetic sound itself. The noises of the plunging elevator are not merely deafening, but are technically dislocated at the exact moment they interact with the meshes of the soundtrack, generating a single electroacoustic sonic fabric.

In this specific node, the hybridization is not limited to a textual cohabitation, but becomes «para-acusmatic» — occupying a threshold of adjacency and deviation with respect to the pure acusmatic —: the mechanical noise strips itself of its narrative and anecdotal contingency to become pure sonic morphology, integrating itself vertically into the spectrum of musical frequencies. Far from resolving into that «smoothing» (lissage) devoid of apprehension that is unfortunately typical of contemporary production — or into the plague of that unleashed and disorderly embedding in which people mistakenly discern an certain linguistic development — this process reclaims the material density of the analog wound. The hybrid does not erase the friction; on the contrary, it exasperates the physical presence of the cinematic device through an unpacified coexistence between the frequency bands. — By the term «para-acusmatic» we intend to define here a liminal condition of filmic listening: a situation in which the source of the sound is diegetically identified and confined within the visual space (the elevator cage), but the status of the acoustic material, by virtue of density and syntactical dislocation, deviates toward the morphological properties of the reduced listening typical of the Schaefferian acousmatic phenomenon. The term para-acousmatique (or para-acusmatic) appears rarely in international avant-garde essays: employed for the most part in border zones of French Lettrist and Situationist performance (see the historical theorizations on the vocal manipulations of Guy Debord or Gil J Wolman) to indicate a laterality with respect to pure acousmatic listening. It is adopted here in the context of filmic textual analysis. The Greek prefix para- (indicating proximity, alteration, or the overcoming of a limit) is engrafted onto the Chionian concept of the «acousmatic» to define a situation in which the visual source is theoretically known and confined (the noises in the falling elevator), but the sound behaves in a partially autonomous way, altering the standard diegetic pact and emancipating itself toward electroacoustic composition, until it intersects with the soundtrack and assumes the status of pure concrete morphology. —

The instrumental rarefaction and timbral stripping in Julien dans l'ascenseur — due to the duo composed exclusively of the naked pizzicato of Pierre Michelot’s double bass and the neurotic hammering of Kenny Clarke’s drums — transmutes the rhythm section into a cell generating concrete resonances, where the grave strings of the double bass seem to evoke the tense elasticity and the friction of the steel cables, while the cymbals and brushes of the drums reflect, through acoustic sympathy, the high metallic frequencies of the cage. Let it be well understood: even though we are describing a cinematic event, this does not imply that this description is to be considered conclusive: far from it! No other way remains to experience this event than to make a return to Malle’s 1957 film. Neither the CD of the soundtrack nor this description in periphrasis can substitute for the cinematic event in itself. — It follows that wherever a filmic object programmatically eludes critical articulation (such as the formal chaos of Morlaix), it redefines the very limits of theoretical investment, shifting the axis from textual analysis to the pure statement of its material resistance.—

The musical subtraction in terms of melody produces a radical reconfiguration of the enunciation space. The industrial, metallic, and mechanical noises of the cabin — the creaks, the electrical shut-offs of the stopping cage — do not superimpose themselves onto a preexisting musical theme, but rather interlock into the structural voids of a modal fabric «already-ahead-of-itself», in line with a status of a «déjà-là» of the most authentic kind: a Heideggerian advenante. The noise of the diegetic apparatus and the signal of the rhythm section do not fuse to smooth the space, but collide within the same textual enclosure, exalting the acoustic, even unpleasant grain of confinement, and elevating the analog friction to a transdiegetic avant-garde sonic body. The indefinite pitch of the creak and the percussive attack of the jazz note weld into an indivisible material continuum. The bass does not accompany the noise of the machine, nor does the noise disturb the weave of the bass; both cohabit in a phono-fixed groove that anticipates the intuitions of spectral music and industrial sound design, extending the horizon of cinematic sonorization toward the territories of avant-garde acousmatic research (typical of contemporary phonology laboratories). The elevator cabin ceases to be a mere scenographic element to transform into a true autonomous electroacoustic resonator: a black box in which the analog glue between noise and instrument unveils the most visceral and least virtualized core of modern cinematic sound.

From this perspective, the formal autonomy of cinematic sound is no longer measured by its fidelity to the visual, but by its capacity to become a permanent inquiry into its own conditions of knowledge, its own processes, and its modes of production of meaning. This complex audiovisual textuality anticipates the insights of successive electronic avant-gardes: Malle’s work does not wait for historiographical codification to legitimize itself; nor does it need the most advanced analog or digital systems of the High-Tech corporate industry. It inhabits, from its very inception, the originary anticipation of its own linguistic becoming, demonstrating that the «black box» of the elevator is not a mere diegetic expedient —and that the filmic text is not an exercise in style—, but a technical-linguistic and aesthetic resonator in which composition discovers its deepest, most visceral, and radically integrated nature. Furthermore, let us not forget that if Julien’s cabin saturates space through a transdiegetic sonic body, Florence's famous night walk (Nuit sur les Champs-Élysées) represents its exact structural reversal: a spatial opening defined by a diegetic sonic void.

II.II. Acousmatic Filters, and Spatial Thresholds

To fully validate how these strategies of linguistic and historical resistance operate at a micro-textual level, it is necessary to reexamine more closely the precise audiovisual mechanisms at play.

In the claustrophobic core of the elevator, the severe minimalist reduction forces the spectator into an oscillation toward a state of «reduced listening» («l'écoute réduite»). This structural confinement operates through three distinct phenomenological levels:

• The Preserved Friction and Textual Estrangement: The industrial and harsh noises of the elevator mechanism — the clattering of the metal, the dull hum of the electrical grid, the heavy structural thuds — are intentionally preserved, demanding to be listened to in their rawest form. They represent what Chion defines as the «sentiment du concret» (the feeling of the concrete), forcing the spectator’s ear to oscillate between causal listening (the origin of the cage) and a genuine «reduced listening». By excluding the distraction of the main melodic line of trumpet and sax, attention is channeled entirely toward the purity and morphological violence of the remaining sonic materials (the creaks, the thuds), independently of their cause or their narrative meaning. It is here that the linguistic estrangement theorized by Metz (1968) and already detailed in the 2010 text (Daniele, 2010, pp. 155-159) is fulfilled: by subtracting the melodic section (trumpet, sax, piano), the text forces the perception of the «raw acoustic matter». The diegetic noise is technically dislocated, subtracted from its mere indexical function and transformed into an autonomous textual unit that interacts with the meshes of the soundtrack to generate an unprecedented electroacoustic sonic body.

• The Low-Frequency Impulse and Biological Extension: Melodic safety is completely denied; Miles Davis’s soaring trumpet remains entirely silent, depriving the spectator of any traditional cinematic comfort. The vertical void is occupied exclusively by the naked and isolated pizzicato of Pierre Michelot’s double bass, echoing inside the dark shaft. As demonstrated by the monographic analysis (Daniele, 2010, p. 212; infra, Figure 5), this low-frequency pulse does not function as accompanying music, but interlocks millimetrically with the cuts of montage and with the slow times of the camera. This beat ceases to act as external music and substitutes itself for the character’s biological pulse and the mechanical movement of the elevator, configuring itself as an «inner clock» and as a rhythmic extension of the metallic cage.

• The Minimalist Reduction and Structural Confinement: The beat of the rhythm section introduces a concrete, modal, and irremovable weight that occupies a large part of the space, refusing to let the ear escape through any concept of virtualization or lamination (lissage). The walls of the elevator function as a «para-acusmatic confinement device» which, while anchored to the brutality of the falling elevator, works as an electroacoustic element of the music that in turn fuses with the flesh of the profilmic.

II.III. The «Electroacoustic Sense» as an Epistemological Threshold

The elevator is a space of temporal suspension and decomposition of classical narrative logic, and it is a laboratory of applied concrete music.

Ultimately, we are faced with a collision—more accurately defined as a difference—between contemporary dematerialization and the work of Louis Malle. If the current digital transition operates by means of a lamination that erases the physical resistances of mediums and the specificity of diegetic chronotopes, resulting at best in a stylistic and grammatical authorial anarchy, Malle’s work acts according to the originary principle of difference, of reduction and resistance.

Audiovisual power does not achieve emancipation through the technological optimization or normalization of spaces, nor does it disperse into the arbitrariness of a groundless anarchy; rather, it asserts itself by reducing the profilmic world to its linguistic structures. It is an aesthetics of subtraction that, by suspending significant excess, opens the text to the origin, ensuring that the filmic apparatus exhibits the investigative posture of the gaze and the phenomenological status of knowledge—the modes of meaning production remain distinct, different, and always open.

The formal drama of closure: the physical act of sealing the structure—of arresting the syntactic and grammatical curvature of a film and a text—configures the ontological laceration of closure, understood as a retaining, rather than a sacrifice, of meaning’s expansive force. Yet, whereas Jaime Rosales’s The Morlaix Case responds to the trauma of textual farewell through a centrifugal loop, the indifferentiation of discourses in Malle is philosophical as well as stylistic: it becomes a resonator of a retained origin, opening the field to the paradox of the concluding threshold.

Part III: Historiographical Synthesis and Openings of Audio-Vision

The structural correspondences between Michel Chion’s latest critical essays and our 2010 analysis of Ascenseur pour l'échafaud reveal several crucial problems in audio-vision and electroacoustics, confronting the latter with an inescapable urgency: the necessity to critically investigate itself and its own material nature in order to avoid assimilation into today's aesthetic flattening. Precisely in reaction to this risk, one observes how the contemporary practice of «levigamento» (lissage) and digital lamination—traceable in contemporary sound design in ideal continuity with Chionian linguistic critiques—is nothing but the extremization of that horror vacui which classical Hollywood attempted to impose through fluid and transparent mixing. On the other hand, the historical avant-garde—from Ejzenštejn’s theories of counterpoint to the radical acoustic fractures of the Nouvelle Vague—has always sought to preserve the «apport de réel» (the contribution of reality) through the resistance of materials and the marking of structural thresholds.

Furthermore, this smoothing is historically opposed by the underground and trans-epochal trajectory of what Chion dubs the «laconic fillm»: an aesthetic attitude traversing the decades—from the works of Kubrick, Melville, Leone, and Pasolini at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, to the density of Blade Runner (1982). However, the true epistemological challenge of the «elettroacoustic sense» is not exhausted by an ascetic purification of the text from music, by an idolization of direct sound recording, or by an absolute primacy of silence—as these very filmmakers cited by Chion have amply demonstrated through their unquestionable attitude and apprehension toward the processes of meaning production and technical-aesthetic indifferention. The deepest theoretical wager consists in making music, the diegetic environment, and the para-acoustic dimension co-exist and interact within that same «tempo mirabilmente trattenuto». When this occurs, the material and transdiegetic density of double bass and drums, for instance, becomes concrete and structural matter, capable of claiming the very same resistance of the device that our analysis traces within the theories of audio-vision.

This complex negotiation between trace and resonance, inaugurated by such material sensibility, certainly finds a foothold and a historical radicalization within the heights of the modern fissure around 1968. One thinks of 2001: Odissea nello spazio by Kubrick, where the realistic silence of the cosmos is countered by an audiovisual score that fuses the biological and ultra-proximate noise of the spacesuit's respirator with the micropolyphonic textures of György Ligeti; here, the music loses any function of commentary to become a frequency mass, an electroacoustic territory endowed with a fertile material grain within an unsustainably suspended time. Likewise, in Pasolini’s Teorema, the laconic emptiness of the volcanic ashes and the absence of dialogue shatter against the textual blocks of Mozart’s music and Ted Curson’s free jazz; Pasolini operates through cuts and acoustic traumas, treating the score like a sonic detritus and a heterogeneous instance of the textual cage, imposing the friction of the medium. Finally, in C'era una volta il West, the shrill and mechanical wheeze of Charles Bronson’s harmonica—originating as an object internal to the diegesis—undergoes a saturation that transmutes it into an abstract, destabilizing, and extradiegetic motif, cooperating with the micro-direct recording of the desert and the grating orchestration of Ennio Morricone.

This trans-epochal constellation is imbued with electroacoustic sense.

If film theory has extensively dissected and deconstructed its own technological devices, tracing precise strategies of enunciation and material resistance within the analog and digital audiovisual apparatus (from the «apport de réel» of the accidental cluster to the lissage of contemporary lamination), musicological reflection often appears disciplinarily younger, less rich, and historically entrenched in formal abstractisms.

The most solid philological results are therefore obtained by understanding that the toolbox for decoding the electroacoustic medium originates precisely from this analytical maturity of film analysis, articulated along three indispensable axes:

The status of «Virtual Space» versus acoustic physicalism: Electroacoustic music thrives on spatialization (one need only think of the acusmonium), yet musicology tends to describe it in purely acoustic or physical terms. Conversely, film theories (from Mitry to Metz, up to Sainati) have for a century studied how an imaginary and mental space is constructed through fragmentary cues. Cinema knows how the eye and the ear cooperate to negotiate presence and absence. As recently reiterated by Chion (2026), cinema configures itself as a «concrete art» founded on «pan-significance», wherein directorial wisdom hides precisely within a wonderfully «retained time»—the only kind capable of allowing the listener to hear and perceive the profound movement of sound waves and lights upon the medium. When musicology speaks of «soundscape», it often engages in naive sociology; film theory, on the other hand, possesses the tools to dismantle the structure of that landscape.

Overcoming the illusion of Objectivity through the Enunciative Instance: Much of electroacoustic musicology has remained anchored to a pure phenomenological approach (the Schaefferian sonorous object captured in reduced listening), as if sound floated in a vacuum. But the moment a sound is fixed onto a medium and manipulated, an impersonal instance intervenes to organize that chaos. Film theory has thoroughly explored the concept of enunciation (who speaks? from where? how is the spectator's gaze/listening oriented?). Applying filmic enunciation to electroacoustics means shifting from asking «how is this sound made?» to asking «what is the discursive strategy behind this medium?». These are questions in front of which, clearly, the analytical approach of classical musical notation has shown its structural and methodological limits for many decades.

The Dialectics of the Invisible (Off-screen vs. Acousmatic): Chion defined an era precisely because he understood that the acousmatic (a concept born within musique concrète) found its spectacularization and its profound truth in cinema, through the play of the off-screen space. Cinema understood that the invisibility of the source is not merely a technical datum, but a dramaturgical tension, an anxiety, a dialectic of power. Electroacoustic musicology manages blindness as a starting point; cinema manages it as a structural force in the making.

In this light, the concept of the «para-acousmatic» introduced by us acts as an instance of epistemological disclosure aimed at creating a dialogue and integrating the assumptions of both sides. To film theorists, it serves as a reminder that enunciation does not stop at the visual logic of the off-screen space, but interrelates with the concrete frequencies and the grain of the medium; to electroacoustic musicologists, it imposes the evidence that it is impossible to analyze the morphology of a mechanical noise without understanding the enunciative structure and the textual cage in which it is historically embedded. In short, electroacoustic musicology possesses the raw material, but film theories possess the awareness of the text. Electroacoustics, to save itself from becoming a mere technical-engineering exercise or an evanescent suggestion, must grant itself that structure which only the great school of film analysis can offer it.

Il dialogo con la materia disintegrata e ricomposta, un’analisi di Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) di Luciano Berio — The dialogue with the disintegrated and recomposed matter, an analysis of Luciano Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) — in which we examine the electroacoustic composition that decomposes the originary textual and phonetic element to reorganize it into new structural constellations, represents our attempt so far to guide musicology toward an analytical rigor akin to that gaze upon the text proper to film criticism.This is done with the hope of tracing, even within the micro-texture of the electroacoustic medium, that «transdiegetic material friction» capable of courageously dialoguing with the theories of the apparatus. By finding these intellectual parallelisms, the electroacoustic community acquires a vital analytical shield against the clinical patina of contemporary digital media. When one realizes that the architecture of the «déjà-là» (the already-there) is an ad-venient technical-linguistic and aesthetic condition of the audiovisual medium, it becomes possible to evaluate contemporary sound design not for its technological novelty, but for the relationship that the concrete world has always had with the originary investigation; in view of the shaking necessary to open a reclaimed perception and intellectual engagement, the tear from the hypnotic passivity of the worldly or commercial dimension is «already ahead of itself» in the originary opening of research.

III.I. The Electroacoustic Imperative: Between Scientific Research and Concrete Composition

Chion’s late arrival touches upon and converges with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical framework regarding the time-image, yet it does so through the concreteness of organizational practice and the philology of filmmaking crafts. This is a convergence rooted in an attention to the technical fragment and the accident fixed upon the support. Yet, what most interests our discourse in this venue is the extension of such a posture to the living flesh of acoustic matter and to the methodological imperative of the electroacoustic support.

While Deleuze defines the time-image in a philosophical key as the emergence of pure time, severed from the logical-causal chain of action (the transition from the sensory-motor link to a purely optical and sound dimension), Chion provides an exquisitely concrete reading of it, bound to the support. This convergence is articulated across three foundational axes:

• The «Suspended Time» as Deleuzian Suspension: When Chion writes that Ridley Scott’s masterful direction is founded upon an admirably «suspended time», he is describing the physical condition of what Deleuze terms the suspension of action. In classical cinema (the movement-image), time is subordinated to action: we hear a sound because someone is shooting or fleeing. In Blade Runner, or within the directors of the «laconic film» cited by Chion (Kubrick, Leone, Pasolini), time stops, dilates, and "holds itself back". This pause—this opsigne and sonigne, to borrow Deleuze's terminology—is the sole phenomenological condition that allows lights and sound waves to detach themselves from the narration in order to be perceived as pure presence and material density.

• The «Pan-significance» and Cinema as Concrete Art: Deleuze argued that cinema was not a language, but a signaletic material laden with non-linguistic expressive features. Chion arrives precisely here with the concept of «pan-significance»: the moment time is suspended, the micro-sign (the flinch of an actor, the grain of the support, the background hiss) is no longer a «sideways noise» subordinated to dialogue, but becomes a pure sign, an autonomous constituent of the text carrying the same weight as the macro-verbal content.

• The Capitalization of the Support and the Electroacoustic Shift: The crucial difference resides in the fact that Chion confines this intuition within the boundaries of the philology of filmmaking crafts (Hartstone’s miraculous mixing, the sounds of the Voight-Kampff test detector). The problematic and original core of our research is located precisely at this breaking point: when we weld the Chionian suspended time to the phonetic disintegration of Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), we accomplish a further leap. Indeed, we demonstrate that the electroacoustic operation upon the support radicalizes the Deleuzian time-image; by subjecting word and sound to the physical decomposition of the tape, the composition compels the listener to experience pure time and the very friction of matter. The Chionian intuition, born on the set and at the mixing console, thus finds its definitive epistemological and philosophical foothold within musical matter.

To the skeptic of film or musicology—mindful of our aspiration for electroacoustics to inaugurate an analytical path that is more radically cinematic in looking at itself—it is necessary to recall that the heart of the discourse lies precisely in the status of the support (the magnetic tape / the fixation). Before the advent of sound cinema and recorded music, music was configured as an art of linear and ephemeral temporal flow (live performance). With the birth of magnetic tape and the film soundtrack, the very same ontological revolution takes place: sound and time become a solid, segmentable, manipulable matter objectified upon a support. If in cinema (Chion/Scott) the director and the sound engineer isolate a micro-sign (a breath, a rustle) and fix it upon the support, tearing it from the chaos of reality to confer upon it a structural value independent of dialogue, in concrete and electroacoustic music (Berio) the composer intervenes directly upon the body of the magnetic tape: the composer operates through sections, caesuras, and physical cuts, severing the linearity of the recorded voice to recompose it into new constellations. This is the exact same operation carried out by the film editor. Film theories are the only aesthetic theories that for a century have interrogated the way in which isolated fragments bound to a support generate time and space; applying such a gaze to pure electroacoustics (Thema) therefore constitutes a rigorous philosophical connection and an intrinsic urgency of electroacoustics itself. Sergei Ejzenštejn’s inquiry from the late 1930s—whether sound could ever achieve a technical reproduction capable of mimicking the active behavior of the eye—finds here its corresponding anchor. By operating upon the support with the same constructive force as the filmmaker, the electroacoustic composer demonstrates that the "deconstruction and reconstruction" (smontaggio e rimontaggio) of material constitutes their common, profound genetic code. It is not a matter, then, of "forcing" cinema into music, but rather of demonstrating that electroacoustics shares with the filmic apparatus the exact same material status (the friction of the support) and the same, inescapable deep operation: the manipulation of time.

Epistemological Premise

I. Critical Nuances and Correspondences from Pour une histoire impossible du cinéma

In the recent writings of Michel Chion, particularly in the third chapter of Pour une histoire impossible du cinéma and starting from the analysis of The Valley of Gwangi (1969) by Jim O'Connolly, the French theorist highlights the concept of the non-intentional event as an element that brings a contribution of reality («apport de réel»). This phenomenon is activated when an actor, backing away terrified inside a church, inadvertently falls onto the keyboard of an organ, provoking an anarchic and involuntary «cluster». This accidental sonic collision acts upon the perception of the audio-viewer as the unplanned physical result and byproduct of a body impacting against an apparatus, generating a genuine feeling of the concrete rather than configuring itself as a calculated musical insert. Chion’s explicit use of the term «cluster» claims a precise musical categorization of the accident, elevating the simultaneous agglomeration of

Figure 3: The shattering of Morlaix (The crisis of the post-digital code).

The polyphonic fragmentation and formal anarchy in Morlaix (Jaime Rosales, 2024). The film adopts continuous and seemingly chaotic variations of ratio, fast-motion (accelerati), and passages between black-and-white and color which, as highlighted by Michel Chion, act «in disarray» («in disordine»), refusing to become a grammatical code or a reassuring temporal delimitation (past/present). This decomposition of cinematic form is indissociable from the story itself: a structure of loops and interlocking settings («enchâssement») which, as Chion says, is not sterile mannerism, but a specific means of cinema that cannot be explained except through cinema itself.

Figure 4: The spatial typologies of confinement.

(Above) Structural anteriority and the transparent enclosure («déjà-là» as a cinema effect) in The Silence of the Lambs (1991): the case that operates on a double track; the unbreakable glass barrier is nearly concealed by the «montage», while the sound direction exacerbates the confinement through a hyper-realistic and close-up treatment of the voice.

(Below) Visceral material friction («frottement») in Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1957): the physical entrapment of Julien Tavernier within the heavy mechanical structure of the elevator cabin. Malle rejects smoothing, orchestrating a structural convergence between the industrial noises of the cage and the jazz rhythm section (bass and drums) to generate that «sentiment du concret» and that resistance of materials that shatters the flatness of the filmic space.

Malle operates here a total suspension of the urban landscape and of the protagonist's very words, configuring a mute urban opening that actively resists the virtualization of modern digital landscapes which do not care about technical-aesthetic localizations. In this topophonic void, Miles Davis's trumpet intervenes as the authentic transdiegetic surrogate of the unspoken word, interlocuting with the visual editing to isolate the character's body and make her existential vulnerability resonate (Appendix A).

Finally, this dialectic of absence and subtraction, which shifts the axis of meaning onto the pure sonic trace, reveals its own theoretical and formal archetype by tracing back to the very origin of cinematic writing. This enunciative logic, capable of redefining audiovisual power relations, finds an extraordinary historical anticipation in the plastic textures of the first French avant-garde, particularly in the theorizations on «photogénie» by Jean Epstein and on temporal density in La Chute de la maison Usher (1928). This is an elected formal territory that our research has investigated on a theoretical level in the essay Audio and Images in Epstein and which finds a concrete translation in the forthcoming audio CD The Echoes of Usher (RDM Records, 2026). The release, which exclusively documents the audio recording of the live soundtrack performance executed at the Conservatory of Milan in 2010, operates a radical «sound-thought» (suono-pensiero) reinterpretation of Epstein’s work.

The screeching cables, the metallic click of the switch, and the pneumatic silence of the cabin no longer function as elements of suspense. Through the emphasis placed on the electroacoustic sense, we are forced to hear the sequence as if the elevator itself were a tape recorder, a media-fixing device that manipulates phonic matter. The mechanical noises interlock with the silences of Davis’s trumpet not out of emotional counterpoint, but out of morphological affinity: they are both sonic bodies isolated from their original context and hurled at the spectator with a friction («frottement») which contemporary digital cinema (lissage) does not have care about. In this way, the enunciative horizon is historicized: the impersonal enunciation becomes incarnate in the very matter of concrete sound.

The phenomenological investigation into the materiality indices and spatial thresholds of Ascenseur pour l'échafaud cannot be exhausted by the simple cataloging of a textual hybridization. The radicality of Louis Malle’s operation demands a critical paradigm shift, capable of emancipating itself from traditional categories and definitions of genre in artistic practice to position itself within the horizon of an authentic «electroacoustic sense», as theorized in the Manifesto of Electroacoustics Magazine (Arts and Technologies).

The moment the [para-]acousmatic nature of the cabin transforms mechanical creaking and the vibration of the double bass into a single material continuum, the work acts directly upon its own formal and compositional processes, structuring the modes of systems of thought. If, when faced with the radical formal ruptures of the coeval cinematic avant-garde — as in the extreme case of Morlaix — Chion rejects traditional critical labels to highlight a device in which expressive parameters «seem unleashed and vary in disorder, without referring to a legible code» («semblent déchaînés et varier en désordre, sans renvoyer à un code lisible»), Malle’s horizon outlines a radically different epistemological posture: a philosophical undifferentiation of discourses and grammars in which the collapse of linguistic hierarchies between music, noise, and ambience ceases to be a deconstructive gesture for its own sake or a fragmentary anarchy. Instead, this clearing away of classical codes becomes the main axis of a new, rigorous textual stability, capable of governing the very architecture of the work. [On the application of this Pasolinian indifferention (at the core of my entire analytical-musical production) to sound and vocal structures, see the theoretical line in Daniele 2008].

Figure 6: The spatialization of the track and the writing of the tape. Luciano Berio during the production of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958) and a detail of the composition's graphic-chronometric score. The decomposition of Cathy Berberian’s phonetic text on the magnetic medium serves as a visual translation of the theoretical axis between acoustic "time-image" and the "para-acusmatic", wherein time becomes concrete, segmentable, and manipulable material. Luciano Berio and the transcription score of Thema (Omaggio a Joyce). Source: Shipwreck Library / Joyce Music - Berio: Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) – Shipwreck Library.

Ultimately, this is how a direct outline can be presented to the musicologist of how the Berio-Deleuze axis hooks us directly to our cinematic concept of the «Para-acousmatic»:

1. The Support as a «Virtual Screen» Even though the visual trace is absent in Berio, the fixation of the voice (the text by Joyce read by Cathy Berberian) upon the magnetic support and its subsequent electroacoustic disintegration create a temporal grid that functions exactly like filmic space. Time is no longer a fluid line (as in live instrumental performance), but becomes a concrete, manipulable, and segmentable matter. Electroacoustics, precisely because it lacks visual images, requires film theories for its rigorous analysis—the only theories that for a century have studied how isolated fragments fixed upon a support generate meaning, time, and space within the mind of the listener.

2. The Acoustic Time-image Deleuze himself specifies that the time-image does not necessarily require the visual in the traditional sense: it is defined by the emergence of sonignes (pure sound-signs) and opsignes (pure visual-signs) that free themselves from movement and action. Through our analytical trajectory, we highlight how in Thema, Berio takes the linear flow of language and breaks it, stops it, and decomposes it into phonemes, compelling the listener to experience pure time and the grain of the voice. This is, to all intents and purposes, the operation of a Deleuzian time-image, applied to pure phonetic matter, on this side of the screen.

3. The Placement of Our Concept of «Para-acousmatic» If pure acousmatics (Schaeffer) claims that sound floats in a vacuum by ignoring the context, and film theory (Chion) binds the acousmatic to the interplay of the visual off-screen, our model establishes an essential convergence: the analytical, close-up gaze borrowed from cinema, when applied to a work of audio alone, demonstrates that «pan-significanza» (the absolute value of the micro-sign, of the fragment, of the friction of the tape) governs Berio’s composition just as much as Scott’s direction governs Blade Runner.

It is precisely within this theoretical posture that the «Para-acousmatic» reveals its trans-epochal nature, expanding and bringing to completion the structural theses of our 2010 monograph on Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. Within Julien's claustrophobic cage, the para-acousmatic filter strips the industrial noises of their anecdotal contingency: the audio-viewer forgets their mechanical source as they occupy and redesign the pneumatic voids left by the silence of the trumpet. Here, a duo of double bass and drums pulses and vibrates rather than plays, transmuting into a low-frequency pulse that welds to the metallic squeaks. What is generated is the flagrancy of a single, indissoluble «electroacoustic sense» wherein music, the noise of the machine, and the entire apparatus fuse into an indivisible material continuum. In Berio just as in Malle, the friction of the support and the resistance of materials do nothing but confirm the very same methodological imperative: the living flesh of sound which, emancipating itself from the smoothing of the code, claims its own absolute structural autonomy and reveals itself as the text itself.

If film theory has widely deconstructed its apparatuses and linguistic structures, and if the historical avant-garde has radically shattered the linearity of classical notation, the contemporary challenge for musicological research does not reside in the algorithm, but rather in the exploration of the dialectic between scientific analysis and concrete composition, understood as an autonomous source of knowledge and as an act of investigative apprehension aimed at capturing the authenticity of existence.

The most robust philological results are obtained by analytically applying these categories of film language to electroacoustic matter: a tape, an electroacoustic support, or a fixed sound are not exhausted within their musical encoding; their true life is activated within the transdiegetic material friction that interrogates the epistemological meaning of the being who investigates and composes. When acoustic material is analyzed as a concrete and spatialized entity that differentiates itself as much from the smoothing of the contemporary digital as from the embedding that refuses to be read, research operates within that territory wherein the raw element, the original index of materiality, is structured and preserved as an object of apprehension.

While Chion, in his recent theoretical developments of June 2026, mobilizes the status of the digital to redefine the historical concepts of acousmètre, noise, and void, and extends the scope of the medium through the formulation of «pan-significanza», it must be recognized that the digital has irreversibly altered our ear as twenty-first-century viewers. Consequently, when we listen today to Davis’s trumpet, the creaking of the 1957 elevator, Berio’s phonetic decomposition, or Kubrick’s laconic densities, ours is already a «post-digital» listening. Recognizing this historiographical and textual shift is not a limitation, but an act of technical-linguistic autonomy.

Following up on our previous critique of a musicology entrenched in formal abstractions, we hope that electroacoustic musicology will likewise overcome passive archival cataloging and, borrowing the precision of the frame-by-frame gaze, become a permanent investigation into the structural tension and the linguistic and aesthetic production that claims its place. And may there always be eyes to hear and ears to see beyond the clinical anesthesia of the medium, in favor of the original and unrealized possibilities («possibles non réalisés») of our very own knowledge.

III.II. Impossible Conclusions

For to speak is to know that thought must become foreign to itself in order to be pronounced and to manifest itself. That is, it wants to recover itself while giving itself away. This is why beneath the language of the authentic writer, of he who wants to keep himself as close as possible to the origin of his act, one hears the gesture of withdrawing, of holding back the exhaled word. — Jacques Derrida, Force and Signification

Living permanently within the openness of research, wherein even closing an essay configures itself as a painful act, if we direct our thought toward the capillary Derridean trace that innervates both this theoretical reflection and the compositional praxis of our composition Necessity (Part II) (in Spannung, 2015), the originary intuition continues to reveal itself in all its urgency. Hence, we perceive the necessity to fling open a parenthesis upon eternally connected topics, capable of recalibrating themselves and continuing within the horizon of a magnum opus. While the path of Voce Sola challenges history, construct, and time according to a trajectory of profound resistance that evokes the Proustian temporal cathedral, we cannot avoid emphasizing how even this final reflection is, structurally, already there, «already-having-been»; originally «ahead of itself».

Bibliography and Online References

I. Monographs and Manifesto by the Author (Primary Literature)

• Daniele, Romina (2010/2011), Ascenseur pour l'échafaud: il luogo della musica nell'audiovisione, Milan, RDM Records, Edizioni Letterarie [ISBN: 9788890490590].
  Note: Chosen monographic study used as the structural analytical basis for the deconstruction of the visual frame, montage blocks, and audiovisual subjectivities in Louis Malle’s film.

• Daniele, Romina (2010), «Il dialogo con la materia disintegrata e ricomposta», un'analisi di Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) di Luciano Berio, Milan, RDM Records, Edizioni Letterarie.

• Daniele, Romina (2008), Aisthànomai, il Dramma della Coscienza, theoretical line and aesthetic essay included in the CD booklet, Milan, RDM Records. Note: Pivotal text for the author's first systematic theoretical formulation of the concept of "philosophical indifferention of grammars and linguistic codes" understood as the foundation of cognitive, phonic, and vocal research. URL: https://rominadaniele.com/aisthanomai-theoretical-line

• Daniele, Romina (2011), Agli esordi di Spannung, introductory essay and program notes for the Premio Arci for musical experimentation, Milan, RDM Records. Note: Theoretical-programmatic text that historicizes the application of linguistic indifferention and the oscillation between genres (from blues to the electroacoustic avant-garde) during the gestational phase of the Spannung project. URL: https://rominadaniele.com/at-the-beginning-of-spannung

• Daniele, Romina (2011), Theoretical Analysis: Ejzenštejn's Montage and Electroacoustic Reality, in «ElectroAcoustics Magazine», RDM Records, Milan,, 9 settembre 2011. URL: https://rdmrecords.com/il-montaggio-di-sergej-ejzenstejn.

• Electroacoustics Magazine (2026), Arts and Technologies: Manifesto of the Editorial and Epistemological Project, RDM Records, Technical-Scientific Periodical Project. URL: rdmrecords.com/electroacoustics-magazine-and-news.
  Note: Programmatic text outlining the cultural-technological logic, interdisciplinarity, and the «electroacoustic sense» within the syntactic processes governing the constitution of contemporary artworks.

• Riccardo Sinigaglia Ensemble featuring Romina Daniele (2010/2026), The Echoes of Usher, RDM Records, audio CD, Official Label Edition 2026. Live recording of the soundtrack performance at the Milan Conservatory, July 17, 2010. URL: https://rdmrecords.com/new-release-the-echoes-of-usher.

II. Contemporary Historiographical and Theoretical Sources (Electroacoustics and Cinema)

• Barnouw, Erik (1993), Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
  Note: Historiographical reference text for the genealogy and ethical-theoretical presuppositions of American Direct Cinema (the observational cinema of R. Leacock and the Maysles brothers) and Frederick Wiseman’s documentary evolution based on the renunciation of extradiegetic musical manipulation.

• Berio, Luciano (1976), Poesia e musica — un'esperienza (1959), in H. Pousseur (ed.), La musica elettronica, Milan, Feltrinelli, pp. 124-135.

• Chion, Michel (1985), Écrire un scénario, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma / Éditions de l'Étoile (consulted and updated ed.: Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma, 2007).
  Note: Foundational theoretical-methodological text in which Chion formally analyzes Éric Rohmer’s Pauline à la plage (1983). The film is used as a reference model to demonstrate the structural and logical endurance of the spoken word within the French cinematic tradition, elected as the primary geometric alternative to classical Hollywood screenwriting codes.

• Chion, Michel (1981), La voix au cinéma, Paris, Éditions de l'Étoile/Cahiers du Cinéma (Italian trans. La voce nel cinema, Turin, Pratiche Editrice, 1991).

• Chion, Michel (1991), L'Art des sons fixés ou La Musique Concrètement, Fontaine, Éditions Métamkine (Italian trans. L'arte dei suoni fissati o La Musica Concretamente, Rome, Edizioni Interculturali, 2004).

• Chion, Michel (1990), L'Audio-vision. Son et image au cinéma, Paris, Nathan (Italian trans. L'audiovisione. Suono e immagine nel cinema, translation by Dario Tomasi, Turin, Lindau, 1997; reprint 2001).
  Theoretical Focus (The «indices de matérialité»): See in particular Chapter 6 («The Border of Sound») and paragraphs dedicated to the distinction between «Rendering» (rendu) and «Reproduction», and to the structural definition of «Materiality Indices» (the details pointing toward the material constraints of sound production and propagation: friction, heavy breathing, background noise of the acoustic space).

• Chion, Michel (1995), La Musique au cinéma, Paris, Fayard (Italian trans. La musica nel cinema, Milan, Ricordi-Lim, 1996).
  Note: Focused study on the dramaturgical contrast between classical music commentary and the tensive silences applied to Clarice Starling's confession in The Silence of the Lambs.

• Chion, Michel (2003), Un art sonore, le cinéma: histoire, critique, aesthetics, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma (Italian trans. Cinema, un'arte sonora, translation by Alessandro De Francesco, Venice, Marsilio, 2007).
  Critical Focus: Essential text for the analytical integration on The Silence of the Lambs, theorizing the concepts of «sound centralization», the acoustic rendering of barriers, the effects of the «standardization of the cleaned-up», and the recording in «absolute presence» and devoid of reverberation of Hannibal Lecter's electroacoustic voice.

• Chion, Michel (2026), Pour une histoire impossible du cinéma [For an Impossible History of Cinema], Online critical pathways and tracks of impossible historiography. Online reference: michelchion.com (Essays and critical interventions section).
  Chapter 1: The Valley of Gwangi (Jim O'Connolly, 1969). Theory of the «apport de réel» (reality contribution) and the «unintentional cluster». Chapter 2: Eo (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022). Critique of camera placement in drones (loss of visual altitude) and the theory of linguistic lissage caused by universal subtitling and dialogue standardization in multilingual films. Chapter 3: The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). Formulation of the «déjà-là» (the already-present / the invisible infraction of the acoustic barrier). Chapter 4 (June 2026): Cinema as «concrete art» and the horizon of «pan-significanza»; reconfiguration of mise-en-scène and critique of the rigidity of auteur theory through the category of admirably «suspended time» (analysis of Blade Runner, 1982). Historiographical mapping of the transnational and subterranean current of the «laconic film» (Kubrick, Melville, Leone, Pasolini) devoid of musical and verbal commentary between the late 1960s and early 1970s.

• Daniele, Romina, Audio and Images in Epstein: The Relationship Between Audio and Image in the Live Music Experience, RDM Records Editorial Portal. URL: rominadaniele.com/it/audio-e-immagini-in-epstein.

• Di Scipio, Agostino (2000), Da un'esperienza in ascolto tra phoné e logos. Testo, suono e musica in "Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)" di Berio, in «Il Saggiatore Musicale», VII, no. 1, Bologna, pp. 120-138.

• Von Trier, Lars / Vinterberg, Thomas (1995), Dogme 95: Le vœu de chasteté [The Vow of Chastity], Copenhagen.
  Note: Theoretical-expressive manifesto applied to fiction, historicizing the prohibition of using musical commentary not present within the profilmic setting (obligation of exclusively diegetic and direct sound) as a mark of authenticity and rhetorical subtraction.

• Zavagna, Paolo (1992), «Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)» di Luciano Berio. Un'analisi, in «Quaderni della Civica Scuola di Musica», vol. XI, no. 21-22, pp. 58-64.

• Mitry, Jean (1963-1965), Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma Vol. 1: Les structures (1963); Vol. 2: Les formes(1965), Paris, Éditions Universitaires (Italian trans. Estetica e psicologia del cinema, Milan, Silva, 1971).
  Note: Pioneering text for the determination of filmic space understood not as a mere physical reflection of recording, but as a mental and psychological construction. Crucial for the analysis of formal matches and for the negotiation between frame (limit) and window (off-screen) through continuity cues.

• Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1972), Empirismo Eretico, Milan, Garzanti, pp. 9-28. Note: Reference theoretical text from which the author borrows and re-elaborates the definition of "philosophical indifferention of grammars", assumed as the backbone for the flattening of classical codes and the redefinition of textual structures both in her electroacoustic work and within Louis Malle's audiovisual horizon.

III. Philosophical, Textual Horizons and Film Theory

• Aumont, Jacques (1983), «Le point de vue», in «Communications», no. 38 (Italian trans. «Il punto di vista», in L. Cuccu - A. Sainati (eds.), Il discorso sul film. Visione, narrazione, enunciazione, Naples, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987, pp. 23-44).

• Aumont, Jacques (1989), L’oeil interminable. Cinéma et peinture, Paris, Librairie Séguier (Italian trans. L’occhio interminabile. Cinema e pittura, Venice, Marsilio, 1991).

• Bazin, André (1945), Ontologie de l'image photographique, in Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 1958 (Italian trans. Che cosa è il cinema?, Milan, Garzanti, 1986).

• Benjamin, Walter (1936), Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, in «Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung», V, no. 1 (Italian trans. L'opera d'arte nell'epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica, Rome, Donzelli, 2012).

• Benveniste, Émile (1966), Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris, Gallimard (Italian trans. Problemi di linguistica generale, Milan, Il Saggiatore, 1971).

• Bernardi, Sandro (1998), «I regimi dello sguardo», in Introduzione alla retorica del cinema, Milan, Franco Angeli, pp. 72-79.

• Branigan, Edward (1984), Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Narrative Film, Berlin/New York/Amsterdam, Mouton.

• Casetti, Francesco (1986), Dentro lo sguardo. Il film e il suo spettatore, Milan, Bompiani.

• Debord, Guy, & Wolman, Gil J. (1956), «Mode d’emploi du détournement», in «Les Lèvres Nues», no. 8.
  Note: Avant-garde theoretical text crucial for the historical comprehension of early voice manipulations and lateral dislocations relative to pure acousmatic listening, placed here in genealogical dialogue with the notion of the «para-acousmatic».

• Deleuze, Gilles (1984), Cinema 1. L'immagine-movimento, Milan, Ubulibri (new ed. Turin, Einaudi, 2016).

• Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2. L'immagine-tempo, Milan, Ubulibri (new ed. Turin, Einaudi, 2017).

• Derrida, Jacques (1963), Force et signification, in «Critique», no. 193-194; then in L’écriture et la différence, Paris, Seuil, 1967 (Italian trans. Forza e significazione, in La scrittura e la differenza, Turin, Einaudi, 2002).

• Ejzenštejn, Sergei M., Pudovkin, Vsevolod I., & Aleksandrov, Grigori V. (1928), «Manifesto sul suono», in S. M. Eisenstein, La forma del film, edited by Pietro Montani, Turin, Einaudi, 1986. (See also: S. M. Ejzenštejn, Teoria generale del montaggio, Venice, Marsilio, 1985).

• Godard, Jean-Luc (1971), Jean-Luc Godard per Jean-Luc Godard (critical writings and interventions published in «Cahiers du Cinéma»), edited by J. Narboni, Italian trans. by A. Aprà, Rome, Bulzoni.

• Heidegger, Martin (1927), Sein und Zeit, Halle, Niemeyer (Italian trans. Essere e tempo, edited by F. Volpi, Milan, Longanesi, 2005).

• Manovich, Lev (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press (Italian trans. Il linguaggio dei nuovi media, Turin, Lindau, 2002).
  Theoretical Focus: Analysis of the technological transition from analog to digital cinema; useful to the text to map the concepts of the loss of cinematographic matter, fragmentation of the support, and the clinical smoothing (lissage) of contemporary textual structures highlighted by Chion.

• Metz, Christian (1968), «Immagini soggettive, Suoni soggettivi, “Punto di vista”», in Essais sur la signification au cinéma (Tome I), Paris, Klincksieck (Italian trans. La significazione nel cinema, Milan, Moizzi, 1975, pp. 129-155).

• Metz, Christian (1977), Le signifiant imaginaire. Psychanalyse et cinema, Paris, Union Générale d'Éditions (Italian trans. Cinema e psicanalisi. Il significante immaginario, Venice, Marsilio, 1980; reprint 2002).
  Theoretical Focus (Absence and Acoustic Illusion): Core text for the definition of the cinematic signifier based on the perception of absence (the imaginary) and the mental negotiation of the real void filled by fragmentary cues. It detaches the status of sound from naturalistic «acoustic physicalism», demonstrating how recorded and re-spatialized sound is a manipulated construct that emulates an effect of presence.

• Metz, Christian (1991), L’énonciation impersonnelle, ou le site du film, Paris, Méridiens Klincksieck (Italian trans. L’enunciazione impersonale, o il luogo del film, edited by Augusto Sainati, Naples, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995).

• Miccichè, Lino (1975), Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, Venice, Marsilio.

• Panofsky, Erwin (1932), La prospettiva come «forma simbolica», Milan, Feltrinelli, 1961.

• Sainati, Augusto (1998), «Supporto, soggetto, oggetto: forme di costruzione del sapere dal cinema ai nuovi media», in Costruzione e appropriazione del sapere nei nuovi scenari tecnologici, Naples, CUEN, p. 154.

• Sainati, Augusto (2001), La regia cinematografica, Rome, Editori Riuniti.

• Sainati, Augusto / Gaudiosi, Massimiliano (2007), Analizzare il film, Rome, Carocci.
  Theoretical Focus (The Textuality of Virtual Space): Methodological reference texts for the decomposition and analysis of the audiovisual text. They demonstrate how space never pre-exists as an objective or geographical datum, but is an effect of meaning generated by the strict rules of montage, segmentation, and the dramaturgical management of the off-screen through singular cues.

• Sainati, Augusto (2011), Il cinema oltre il cinema, Rome, Carocci.
  Theoretical Focus (The Relocation and Expansion of the Apparatus): Core text for the historicization and methodological legitimation of the dynamics of uprooting, relocating, and expanding the filmic experience outside the coordinates of the traditional cinema hall.

IV. Examined Filmography and Textual Coordinates

• 2001: A Space Odyssey — Directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA/UK, 1968. Music by György Ligeti, Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss.

• Ascenseur pour l'échafaud — Directed by Louis Malle. France, 1957. Music by Miles Davis.
  Analytical references: "Architectural Tomb" sequence (double bass pizzicato by Pierre Michelot); "Night Odyssey" sequence (frames 119–124, track Nuit sur les Champs-Élysées).

• Blade Runner — Directed by Ridley Scott. USA, 1982. Music by Vangelis. Sound Design by Graham V. Hartstone.

• C'era una volta il West — Directed by Sergio Leone. Italy/USA, 1968. Music by Ennio Morricone.

• EO — Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. Poland/Italy, 2022. Music by Paweł Mykietyn.

• La Chute de la maison Usher — Directed by Jean Epstein. France, 1928.
  Analytical references: Historical model of temporal destructuring and visual plasticity based on the heightened use of slow-motion, superimpositions, and atmospheric density; used as a formal archetype of the visual matter's resistance to classical encodings and as an already-existing trace (déjà-là) in the electroacoustic investigation of the pure phonographic support.

• Le Cercle rouge — Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. France/Italy, 1970. Music by Éric Demarsan.

• Morlaix — Directed by Jaime Rosales. Spain, 2024.
  Analytical references: Narrative structure founded upon embedding (enchâssement); systematic breaking of the classical cinematic code through uncodified variations of ratio, freeze-frames, time-lapses, and arbitrary shifts from color to black-and-white; concluding loop structure.

• Salesman — Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin. USA, 1969.
  Analytical references: Summit of American Direct Cinema founded on the synchronous interaction between microphone and camera, devoid of manipulative musical commentary.

• Sedmikrásky — Directed by Věra Chytilová. Czechoslovakia, 1966.
  Analytical references: Monumental model of visual destructuring within the Nová Vlna; anarchic and uncodified use of shifts from black-and-white to chromatic tints, combined with a fragmentary montage attacking the visual continuity of faces.

• Teorema — Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Italy, 1968. Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ted Curson.

• The Silence of the Lambs — Directed by Jonathan Demme. USA, 1991. Music by Howard Shore.
  Analytical references: Dividing-wall sequence between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling (optical transparency and acoustic proximity effect).

• The Valley of Gwangi — Directed by Jim O'Connolly. USA, 1969. Music by Jerome Moross.

• Titicut Follies — Directed by Frederick Wiseman. USA, 1967.
  Analytical references: Foundational model of observational documentary; total absence of an extradiegetic score, where the rhythm of the montage is structured exclusively on the naked word and the institutional murmur of the direct sound.

• Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux — Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. France, 1962. Music by Michel Legrand.
  Analytical references: Apparatus of formal estrangement based on the use of traumatic jump-cuts, anatomical decomposition of facial details, and multi-format collision of the film grain.

Appendix A: Register of Stylistic Marks and Phenomenological Levels in Nuit sur les Champs-Élysées (Daniele, 2010)

1. The Mute Urban Opening as Textual Reversal

If Julien's elevator is a void saturated by transdiegetic acoustic matter, Florence’s nocturnal walk along the Champs-Élysées represents its structural alternative: a spatial opening defined by diegetic sound vacuum. Within the visual frame of Paris, space is not explicitly virtualized or aestheticized for global consumption, as occurs in modern digital non-places. Conversely, Malle operates a total suspension of the cityscape and the subtraction of the very words uttered by the protagonist, who moves within a disassembled interior monologue.

This strategy constructs a false eye-line match (falsa soggettiva) or a real objectivity of the mute place, whose rare ambient noises ambiguously blend with the off-screen—in a tight, yet poetic, dialogue with the rhythms of the montage. Within the diegetic sound vacuum, Miles Davis’s trumpet speaks directly to the structure of the visual montage through a dialectic of gripping and releasing continuously discontinuous planes, wherein the image of Jeanne Moreau is repeated yet differentiated. The mute urban opening of Ascenseur actively resists placeless virtualization, both on a technical and a linguistic level. Florence’s void is not the absence of world, but a textual presence in which structural relationships interrogate reality at a philosophical level.

2. The Three Phenomenological and Linguistic Levels of Acoustic Reversal

This descent into existential isolation is textually indicated through a radical subtraction of diegetic sound, articulating itself across three precise phenomenological and linguistic levels:

• The Acoustic Threshold and the Cross-Fade: The sequence initiates at frame (inquadratura) 119 with a sharp clap of diegetic thunder. This sound object undergoes a deliberate cross-fade toward the opening bars of the jazz texture (Take 3). This transdiegetic extension of sound acts as a true structural wedge: the spatial threshold of reality is breached at the exact moment the natural noise dissolves into the modal fabric of the soundtrack, surgically severing the audio-viewer's link with the indexical reality of the visual frame.

• The Erasure of the World and the Diegetic Void: Although the visual frame presents a bustling metropolis—crowded with moving cars, illuminated shop windows, and passing pedestrians—the concrete soundscape of Paris undergoes a total suspension. Even more radically, the subtraction of the protagonist's very voice is accomplished; we see her lips moving in tormented close-ups, yet her spoken thoughts are entirely deprived of acoustic presence. As previously highlighted in our analyses (Daniele, 2010, p. 197), this strategy is not a mere psychological device, but constructs a precise lexical fabric centered on the falsa soggettiva—or a real objectivity of the mute place—wherein the rare audible ambient noises ambiguously merge with the off-screen, entering into a tight dialogue with the rhythms of the montage.

• The Acousmatic Trumpet and the Power of the Mute Word: In this diegetic sound vacuum, Miles Davis’s trumpet behaves as an authentic acousmatic surrogate (the trumpet in place of words), speaking directly to the structure of the visual montage through a dialectic of gripping and releasing continuously discontinuous planes, wherein the image of Jeanne Moreau is repeated yet differentiated. The music occupies the physical space of the protagonist's missing words, transforming the disassembled interior monologue into a «broken poetry» that perfectly embodies what Chion defines as the supplementary power of the mute word. This suspension of the absolute and defensive word persists until the music cuts abruptly at frames 123–124 upon the cold, material, and real sound of a car door closing, instantly shattering the aesthetic isolation and hurling her back into the physically shared world.

Figure 7: Nuit sur les Champs-Élysées (Miles Davis, 1957). Transcription of the basic musical architecture from page 212 of the author's monograph (Daniele, 2010). The layout explicitly traces the musical bars, demonstrating where the cuts of the filmic montage are structurally located directly upon the score (highlighted in gray and marked with asterisks).

Figure 8: (Appendix 1a): Falsa soggettiva. Key horizontal film frames in a double-column layout from frame 123, from page 197 of the author's monograph (Daniele, 2010). The layout traces Florence’s (Jeanne Moreau) physical and emotional descent through the neon-lit space while the external cityscape undergoes a total sonic erasure.

Figure 6: The Collaborative Encounter. Jeanne Moreau and Miles Davis during the historic nocturnal recording sessions for Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1957) in Paris. The image captures the intimate and experimental atmosphere of the studio from which the electroacoustic sound experience of the film's soundtrack originates.

3. Analysis of Stylistic Marks and Musical Structure

This operation of subtraction, which formalizes impersonal enunciation through the sound vacuum of the metropolis (Daniele, 2010, p. 135), finds its counterpoint in three specific stylistic marks identified by the textual analysis of Sequence 9 («Nuit sur les Champs-Élysées»):

• The «Subjectivity Without a Subject» of the Falsa Soggettiva: The use of the falsa soggettiva determines the transition from a state of «imprecise subjectivity» to one of «apparent objectivity» (p. 139). In such a configuration, «the camera looks, but one cannot trace back who is behind it». It is precisely this rhetorical device that visually translates the impersonal instance of enunciation, objectifying space.

• The «Avoided Points of Synchronization»: From the perspective of audiovisual mixing, the absence of noises and words coordinates with a phrasing wherein Davis constructs musical sentences by «constantly delaying the first sound in relation to each plane and to the cut between one plane and another» (Daniele, 2010, p. 135). This structural non-synchronism generates a movement of anticipation that eludes linear alignments, delegating the articulation of the nexus directly to the mind of the viewer and displaying the constructed nature of the cinematic text.

• The Depersonalization of Bodies in the Background: The geometric rigor of the urban container within which Florence’s isolated body moves is accentuated by the interaction with the environment. The analysis highlights how the representation of the modern world operates to the detriment of human individuality, canceling out differences: the protagonist's action is constantly flanked by «human figures with depersonalized movement» occupying the background of the sequence (p. 146).

On the strictly musical-compositional level, enunciation and dramaturgical tension are fulfilled through the soloist's treatment of time and form. Davis dilates and constricts the regular 4/4 meter (Daniele, 2010, p. 141) and, by resorting to the blues interval of the flatted fifth (A-flat) alternating with the perfect fifth (A-natural), develops a melodic curve that «prepares but continuously defers its cadence», systematically resolving into a «deceptive cadence» (falsa cadenza) (Daniele, 2010, p. 152).

Author’s Analytical Note: Frame 727 and the Disguised Auteur

In frame (inquadratura) 121, the visual frame captures Florence in a lateral tracking shot along the Parisian sidewalk, with her profile positioned on the right side of the screen. The shop windows behind her transform into a complex tapestry, animated by the blurred (flou) reflections of neon lights, city traffic, and passersby.

Through a strict musicological deconstruction conducted frame-by-frame, a vital historical detail emerges within the reflection of the glass at Frame 727: two men are glimpsed observing the protagonist as she speaks to herself. While one of the two faces forward, the other—walking in profile parallel to Florence—closely matches the slender build and distinct physiognomy of a young Louis Malle.

Although official production documentation remains silent on the matter, the positive comparison with coeval archival photographs of Malle strongly supports our hypothesis that this is a deliberate and hidden cameo by the director. Just as in Alfred Hitchcock’s famous tradition of appearing disguised on the threshold of his stories, Malle subtly weaves his own physical imprint into the reflection of his debut film. In doing so, he anchors the site of authorial enunciation directly within the architectural textures of the concrete world, mirroring that very same structural friction that governs the entire soundtrack.

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