Lumière d’été

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.

The plot of Lumière d’été sets two warring worlds against each other. The world of the bourgeoisie, of idleness and envy, embodied by most of the characters who lounge in a luxury hotel, and the world of work, that of the workers building a dam not far away.
Grémillon personifies the dam, where the film closes in the confrontation of the two worlds. To this end, he records more than two hundred industrial sounds, in factories and on building sites, to assemble a genuine Bruitist composition in order to give “a sound image richer than raw sound”.

This sequence would be noticed by Pierre Schaeffer in 1946 for the remarkable musicality of its noises even before the invention of musique concrète.

The final rescue sequence combines, once again, an inventive integration of all the elements that make up the film’s soundtrack.