Cœur de secours

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.

In 1973, François Bayle collaborates once again with Piotr Kamler to illustrate a short animated film entitled Cœur de secours. Once again, Piotr Kamler transports the viewer into a dreamlike and strange world, which stages a tightrope walker, a balancing artist and a small character who carries a heart preciously in his hands. The little man moves sometimes on foot, sometimes by velocipede, in a supernatural world made of gears and imaginary mechanisms. In this hostile, manipulated atmosphere, the love he tries to preserve appears more fragile, harder to protect.
François Bayle’s music illustrates this universe by means of constantly evolving sound loops based on sounds of bass clarinet and music box. Depending on the tableaux, these loops are transposed into different registers to materialise the repetition and transformation of the sketches traversed. This minimalist sound universe, peopled with small discreet sounds, composed like a watercolour by Raoul Dufy, boils down to a few lines, a few stains that are founded on the structure of the images.