Portrait Dubuffet

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, 2012.

It is around Dubuffet’s canvases, gathered under the generic name of Fleur de barbe, during their exhibition at the musée des arts décoratifs, that Gérard Patris finds the formal idea around which he will organise his entire self-portrait Dubuffet.
Fleur de Barbe is also the title of a poem written by the painter himself, a poem that Dubuffet will chant, sing and shout in his sublime, rasping voice, accompanying himself on traditional musical instruments: flutes, percussion, bird calls, metals, etc., creating a strange cantillation whose accents recall ancient traditional rites.
Hidden cameras filmed him, unbeknown to him, at work in his studio, and then while he was being shown sequences of the programme Terre des Arts in which he had taken part. His reactions were edited in alternation with the projected passages that appear on the screen of a television set – “All this, he says, is cinema!” – and serve to demonstrate, by its opposite, the testimonial value of the invisible camera – The film thus made goes beyond a mere approach to the work by offering more than a portrait in negative, the truest face of the artist and of the man, his self-portrait by another.
One cannot strictly speak of a film score to accompany this “television essay”, insofar as the film is structured mainly around Dubuffet’s poetic interventions.
In the credits, the sound work is mentioned as follows: “Sound elements Jean Dubuffet Luc Farrari”. Luc Ferrari’s interventions are relatively discreet, playing the role of a structuring element by punctuating the pivotal moments of the film, and leaving pride of place to Dubuffet’s sublime poetic actions.

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.