Crystal sounds in contemporary film and TV

Abstract

At the core of Deleuze’s theorization of the time-image is the ‘crystal image’ that appears as a direct presentation of time in an indiscernibility of the actual and the present from the virtual in various forms. Lending his ears to cinema after the Second World War, Deleuze coins the term ‘sound-crystal’, but he neither sufficiently engages with it nor thinks about it beyond music. Turning to film sound scholarship or film philosophy is futile in a similar fashion. To address these gaps in Deleuze, film philosophy and sound in cinema, I listen carefully to a number of contemporary films and TV shows in which sound crystallization splits time in an indiscernibility of the perceived actual from the virtual sounds of recollections, dreams, hallucinations, fantasies and worlds. I argue that crystallization of sounds avoids an anthropocentric approach to understanding the relation between a sound and its source which cannot be claimed to ‘voice’ it.