Le cliquetis des linotypes

Abstract

In the 1980s and 1990s, the France Culture documentary makers recorded the oral memory of professional worlds in crisis, undergoing a process of socio-symbolic disintegration. They also endeavoured to collect the soundscape of those worlds through the recording of the rumbling of machines, the sounds of objects of domestic environments, as well as the resonance of the workplaces’ acoustics on the workers’ language and bodies. In those documentaries, this attention to the sounds of manual work contrasts with the absence of sound effects in the sequences of interviews with personalities from the intellectual and cultural world which were recorded in the neutral acoustics of a studio or an office. This article explores how such sounds categorise the interviewees into distinct social worlds that can be perceived through listening, as well as their meanings and significance at a time when the culture and vernacular savoir-faire of those trades are at risk of extinction.

Keywords

• radio
• documentaries
• history of labor
• France Culture
• soundscape