Synchronization, fundamental to mainstream sound cinema, suggests conformity and fixity; it functions through the normalizing assimilation of meaning by fusing different tracks. Synchronicity, a concept rooted in the experience of time, has also become interrogated in recent work on queer temporality. This talk explores perversion of these forms of temporal matching-or what Hilderbrand calls queer soundtracks: image-sound relations that are unfixed in ways that are not only dynamic aesthetically but that also evoke an affective, diachronic bond to the past. The talk will draw from queer theory and sound studies in an analysis of two sexually explicit 1960s underground films that refused synchronized soundtracks: Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth (1963), which is intended to be screened with a live radio soundtrack, and Andy Warhol's Couch (1964), which is typically shown silently. These films suggest a flow of orientations that counter synchronization and that simultaneously seem to rupture the linear cinematic chronology from repression toward increasing sexual expression.

Lucas Hilderbrand is the author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright and is currently working on two books: Paris Is Burning (Queer Film Classics series, forthcoming 2012) and a cultural history of gay bars in the U.S. from the 1960s to the present.