Enuma Elish

Enuma Elish is a foundational film in two respects: I composed its music after several other short films by David Duponchel since the early 1990s, and it is the first film to have benefited from a genuine production. The electroacoustic music and, more broadly, the whole soundtrack were composed at Francis Faber’s studio, La Grande Fabrique, in Dieppe. The film is also foundational because it lies at the origin of my research on electroacoustic music in cinema, which led to a DEA and then a doctoral thesis in musicology at Paris IV, defended in 2004 under the supervision of Jean-Yves Bosseur and Marc Battier, and subsequently published by éditions mf in 2012 under the title Les cloches d’Atlantis, musique électroacoustique et cinéma archaeology and history of a sound art.

Shot in black and white and in colour, on 16mm scope thanks to the Tronchet process, it was then blown up to 35mm, which gives it its very particular image grain. As no sound recording crew was present on the shoot of Enuma Elish, all of the film’s sounds, dialogue and sound effects had to be redone in post-production.

Excerpt of the first three minutes in a low-definition, compressed version.