THE AUDIOVISUAL ONTOLOGY TO THE TEST

Since the late 1960s the cinematogiraphic language has been marked by the recurrent outpouring of two drives. A drive to disintegrate the narrative structure by replacing chronological time, which is homogeneous, irreversible, q_uantitative and calculable, with existential time, which is unextended, indivisible, q_ualitative, heterogeneous, non-measurable and reversible. A drive to dissolve the diegetic and extradiegetic voices by concealing or deleting their sources, by dissociating them from the bodies they belong to and from the individualities they embody, by multiplying their reverberations. Th•ese drives push image and sound toward a divorce, toward a sort of «acousmatic» cinema which q_uestions the ontology and innocence of its audio-visual technologies, exposing the ideology and dogmatism that have transformed the union of sound and image into religion.