Claps and Bangs

This volume presents a focused examination of two short film works: Sink, a segment from Michael Snow’s expansive investigation into sound-image relations,

Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974); and Matchbox (Audio-Visual Experience) (1975) by the Polish conceptual artist and filmmaker Wojciech Bruszewski. Both films engage critically with the inherent disjunction between sound and image in the cinematic apparatus—a consequence of their separate recording processes. The necessity of manual synchronization in post-production serves here not as a technical limitation, but as a conceptual catalyst.

Through their divergent strategies, Snow and Bruszewski foreground the slippage between auditory and visual registers, challenging the presumed naturalness of sync and exposing its constructed nature. These works stand as key contributions to a broader artistic discourse on synchronization, in which the “problem” of sync becomes a productive site for formal experimentation and theoretical inquiry. Accompanying the text are digital versions of both films, provided on a USB card, along with a portrait of the author by Friedl vom Gröller. The author, a scholar of media aesthetics and the politics of perception, situates these films within a lineage of experimental cinema that interrogates the conditions of audiovisual experience.