One day, speech came to the movies. Until then, words were formed by the mouths of the figures on the screen, borne by their bodies, filmed in the act of being proffered. These words were not heard beyond the filming location. It was not a system of recording and reproducing sound that was lacking Thomas Edison developed the phonograph in , but the practical possibility of reliably synchronising the recorded sounds with the images from which they were supposed to be born.
Five decades later, with the cinematograph in existence for more than 30 years, the era of synchronism was finally ushered in. From that point on all cinematic and, later, all audiovisual production was kept in its realm, with very few exceptions.
Now that the visual perception of lips forming phonemes and the auditory perception of the sounds that they produce essentially coincide, now that synchronism has become a rule, an order, a norm, it may be appropriate to interrogate the movement which has led to this unfailing conjunction between the filmed face and recorded speech — as if letting us hear the latter required that we be shown the former. If everything is thought of in terms of the visible — including monsters, threats, horrors — it is because we are witnessing a loss of desire for the hors-champ : why indeed, should we remove from the screen what, as is commonly believed, only acquires value when being seen?
And what reason is there to append an outside to the screen, given that the script is accountable for or guilty of all narrative hypotheses, and given that nothing can arise which is not agreed upon in advance? The end of the hors-champ is, first of all, the end of the unexpected, of the non-programmed, of the out-of-synch, of non-pertinence, of the mysterious supplement, of the thing from another world , of the thing without a name.
Here, however, this addition is rarely enacted. Most often, Lavigne chooses not to follow the indications that the text could give, not to follow the script, and instead to take the words as bearers messengers of a desire for unprepared and unexpected images.
