La Petite Lise

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

From his first sound film, La petite Lise (1929), the care given to the placement of sound is immediately part of an attempt to fuse the different parameters. Besides the retrograde score technique, inaugurated with the collaboration of Claude Roland-Manuel for the first time in cinema, the film nonetheless contains important work on sound atmospheres. For example, in the almost innocuous sequence in which Berthier enters a sawmill to find work, the overall sound treatment gives rhythm to the whole scene. The screech of the electric saws is then organised on the rhythmic basis of rapid, dull, regular beats and of voices interspersed between these noisy manifestations.

The appearance of the retrograde score technique, barely three years after the emergence of sound cinema in 1929, occurs when Jean Grémillon makes La petite Lise with a score signed by Claude Roland-Manuel. The example of the retrograde score occurs as Lise and her companion André arrive at the home of a Jewish second-hand dealer in order to extort money from him by pretending to sell him a fine family watch. The plan they have hatched to achieve their ends does not unfold as expected, ending in crime. The first fragments of reversed sound coincide with the moment when Lise and André climb the stairs leading to the dealer’s home.
“Wishing to portray an Oriental second-hand dealer, Roland-Manuel, in La petite Lise, had been content to play backwards the traditional call: ‘marchand d’habit!’ The French syllables turned into a sort of exotic idiom, at least to our ears, which was essential.”

The retrograde score procedure reappears in the sequence that follows the murder, when Grémillon films Lise, alone, facing her distress, seated at a table in a restaurant. A few tables from hers, André has just run into a childhood friend. The clamour of their reunion then gradually fades in favour of the reversed music, at the same time as the frame tightens on Lise’s face, until it forms a very tight close-up of her eyes swollen with tears. The mixing here makes it possible to materialise the distancing from the real sound world, that of the restaurant, in order to enter fully into another sound universe, an immaterial one this time, so as to represent and enter the turmoil of Lise’s thoughts.

In this sequence, retrogradation is applied to the entire musical score, voices and instruments included. A single motif unfolds, repeated, like so many obsessive sound loops. The music then abandons all diegetic function tied to the situation of the action, to be heard only by her alone. Over these images, mingled with this backwards, muffled sound, the sound memory of the dealer’s staircase resurfaces, like a dark murmur, revealing in an underground manner that this haunting music heard “backwards” may also signify, as if we were at the heart of Lise’s remorse: “if only it were possible, just like sound, to go back, if only it were possible not to have committed this murder”.