La Chute d’Icare

The text and video excerpt below document the book by Philippe Langlois, Les cloches d’Atlantis, musique électroacoustique et cinéma archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, éditions mf, Paris, first quarter 2012.

A film of great abstract beauty, La chute d’Icare offers a camera magnification of a concrete material, simple sand laid on a flat screen lit from behind, to reveal the changes of form and the movements of matter once placed in contact with the elements: water, fire, earth and air. Particular care was taken over the correspondence between sound and image: the compositions of the image (colours, nodes of density, movements) find, in astonishing fashion, their equivalent on the sonic plane in the music of Mireille Chamass.

As with sound objects, the notion of the visual object rests on its representation in a decontextualised dimension, so that the object exists only by itself, without being attached to any causality whatsoever. This cinema of visual objects thus privileges close-ups of objects of nature, journeys to the centre of matter, and plays of light and colour capable of revealing a complete world to explore, and at bottom draws up the same project as musique concrète.

This information notice was co-produced with INA/GRM for the creation of the multimedia fresco – Artsonores – L’aventure électroacoustique, in the category Films produced by the Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF from 1950 to 1975.