“Words are the Noises Humans Make”: Sound as Abstraction in French New Wave Cinema Abstract: The period around 1960 saw two opposite but interdependent developments in French film. From a technical perspective, it became possible to record sound and image simultaneously on location. Just as ethnographers began to exploit the possibility of shooting footage with synchronous sound, filmmakers in the Nouvelle Vague (“New Wave”) movement began to experiment with splintering sound from image for aesthetic effect. Describing his ideal soundtrack for L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet imagined breaking the generic contract that treats film sound as the effect of a cause shown onscreen: “I wanted the man’s footsteps to be always on the gravel, even when he was on carpeting and the woman’s footsteps always to be on carpeting, even when we saw her on gravel.” Although director Alain Resnais ignored these suggestions, Marienbad and several contemporary films stretched or dispensed with rational connections between sound and image. In Hiroshima mon amour(1959) and Marienbad, sound effects such as screams and breaking glass are fragmented, shown as happening simultaneously in two different time frames, resulting from different causes and images in each. In Jacques Rivette’s Paris Nous Appartient (1961), the characters fetishize a cassette tape of music by a Spanish anarchist who died in mysterious circumstances, while the film’s soundtrack features musique concrète by Philippe Arthuys. Even the 1962 documentary Octobre à Paris, a collage of eyewitness testimonies of the October 1961 massacre of Algerian immigrants in Paris, turns to a musique concrète accompaniment. In these examples and others, the relationship between sound and image is rendered as arbitrary. Drawing on theoretical texts and practical examples, this paper proposes that the rupture of cause from effect, voice from subject, in Nouvelle Vague cinema was a workshop for concepts that would become central to psychoanalytic and language theory in the coming decade. Bio: Mary Ann Smart is Gladyce Arata Terrill Professor in the Department of Music at Berkeley. She is the author of Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera and Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Italy. She is currently at work on a book about how new technologies and modes of listening impacted French theories of language in the mid twentieth century.