When they appear in the 1990s at the heart of abandoned production zones, free parties, a new form of industrial counter-culture, assemble young people of all horizons and cross borders, from England to France and then further in Europe. The youth, the sons and daughters of the working-class, living in rural or peripherally urban zones, find, for awhile, their place in this marginal world that comes at times to fill a void in an existence marked by forms of wandering.

Contrary to rave parties, free parties are free-entry parties and free in the sense of, open to everyone, constructed without authorization or institutional support and even against all form of institutional support. These outside forms of leisure will soon become “illegal” as Nicolas Sarkosy, then Minister of the interior, in 2002, applies a law to free parties (Article 53 of the LSQ – Loi de Sécurité Quotidienne) that allows to arrest organizers as well as participants, to take hold of the sound system, to charge with fines and incarcerate those who are implicated with the movement.

Nowadays, not much is left of this story in terms of images and sounds.

When I decided to make a film for my PhD in sociology, I wanted to tell this story otherwise then with images of people sitting in a chair and answering to an interview. I wanted the audience to experience, even in a small degree, what it feels like to be part of this transgressive and illegal movement and its evolution in and out of the system. This point of vu is based on the idea that sociological knowledge can be brought up by the sensitive knowledge, or we could say, the knowledge of senses.

In this frame, I would like to expose in this communication the process of reconstruction conducted with an editor and a sound engineer. I will show through a 5mn film sequence (Cadences, 38mn, France, 2014) how using different materials and working on different levels of narration was done in the sense of bringing up sociological tensions, tensions between individual and society, norm and deviance, politic and community.