Un carnet de bal

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.

When he composes the Valse grise, inspired by Jean Sibélius’s Valse Triste, Maurice Jaubert illustrates the memory sequence in which Christine Surgère recalls her first ball in flashback. The psychic phenomenon of memory operates in reverse. A moment of the past resurfaces in the present. There is a rupture in the natural unfolding of time. The retrograde score technique is called for here to bring the compositional process closer to the mechanics of memory.

By writing his music backwards, Jaubert models his approach on the pattern of human thought and creates a musical metaphor of memory that “returns” to the past, just like music played backwards. The resonances that precede the attacks lend this sequence a strange embellishment, such as memories are sometimes capable of engendering. Like Jean Vigo in Zero for Conduct, and to underline the beauty of the memory that springs up like a dream, Julien Duvivier shoots the ball scene entirely in slow motion.