Abstract
This study aims to theorise a sonic experience that is informed by psychotic, or more specifically schizophrenic, perception. This kind of experience, characterised mainly by dissipation of recognisable sounds into a multiplicity of fragments, manifests itself in certain experimental films from the 1960s and 70s.
With the help from certain works of 'anti-psychiatry movement' and like-minded philosophers such as Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze, the study addresses how the auditory perception in schizophrenia can be expressed in cinema and in what ways it can problematise the dominant regime of signification. Two distinctive films, Jane Arden's The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) and Frans Zwartjes's Pentimento (1979), serve as case studies.