"for what has not yet been heard": Sonic Resistance in Women’s Experimental Film Culture

Abstract

This chapter explores how experimental women filmmakers mobilise sound as a site of resistance within moving-image culture, focusing on practices that destabilise conventional audiovisual synchrony. Through the lens of Abigail Child’s Mutiny (1982–3), it develops the concept of “sonic elongation”: the process by which sound stretches away from its visual anchor to become unfamiliar, ambiguous, and interpretive. Sonic elongation unsettles cinematic expectation by dislocating sound from image, creating moments of rupture that expose film’s materiality and demand new, active forms of listening. Tracing its genealogy through musique concrète, feminist film theory, and interdisciplinary histories of art and music, the chapter situates this technique as a crucial aesthetic and political strategy for women artists. In challenging synchronicity, filmmakers contest the patriarchal structures embedded in cinematic traditions, foregrounding labour, embodiment, and marginalised voices. Sonic elongation provides a connective tissue between experimental film, the sonic arts, and feminist practice: it is both a compositional technique and a feminist gesture that resists the normalisation of sound, image, and gendered representation. By privileging noise, rupture, and dissonance, women’s experimental film cultures cultivate an oppositional audiovisuality that renders audible what Child describes as “what has not yet been heard.