SCUM MANIFESTO Echoes 65

— a vertical/in-depth axis (three machines: the camera, the typewriter, the monitor displaying evening television news pos-sibly dating from 22 August 1976, successively presented by Jean-Claude Bourret and Bruno Masure). 1

However, this mise-en-scène does not revolve around the bina-ry oppositions of female/male, machine/human, and of the action — to read/to say, to dictate/to be dictated. The Portapack’s opti-cal movements — backward/forward, sometimes slow, sometimes quick — continuously reconfigure the space. And the counterpoint between the reading voice and the silent images of television news in which it resonates, keeps changing the tension between two dis-cursive situations: the Manifesto and the information; Delphine’s free and jumpy reading, and the news as a set of “(w)orders”, refer-ring to the control society (most of the time, the TV news topics show images of territorial, sea, aerial and even space conquests).

Counterpoint

The voice of the Manifesto frees itself from the voices of infor-mation and power (which, it should be underlined, have long been masculine), from the temporality and the rhythm they impose to the listener. It is in the relationship between image and sound that the emancipation occurs: while the four letters of SCUM seem spelt out by four keystrokes on the typewriter, when Delphine reads out the date “1967” — the publishing year of the book —, Carole trans-lates it by a dozen hits on the same key. This rhythmical discrep-ancy frees the listener, providing a space of resonance to this voice. Listening shifts from the authoritarian injunction (“Listen!”), from the “(w)order”, ready-made thinking to reflection, and interpreta-