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The relationship between the soundtrack and the image has long been conceptualized by both practitioners and theorists as a "marriage', a problematic metaphor whose gendered implications have been frequently examined and criticized in the scholarly literature. A film such as Jacques Rivette's L'amour fou (1969), which tells the story of the unraveling of a marriage between a stage director and an actress, is well positioned to make provocative thematic use of this venerable metaphor in a way that obliquely anticipates the scholarly critique. The relationship between sound and image in the film is frequently fraught if also structurally obscure, but across the four hours of the film the dissolution of the relationship between the couple is reflected in an increasingly disjointed treatment of sound, which we interpret in terms of Deleuze's crystal-image.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-51680-0_14

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