Le Télescripteur

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.

A teleprinter is a device that equips television control rooms and makes it possible to write credits and texts, mixed or not with other images, intended to appear on the television screen before being broadcast to viewers. In this film, conceived as a genuine interlude to be slotted in between television programmes, a little character representing the teleprinter struggles to write on the screen “In a few moments, the rest of our programme”. The film is made from a very simplified animation and graphic design. The sound gags are just as important in it as the visual gags.

This film is revealing of the orientations of the Service de la recherche, which seeks, as early as 1964, to show that it is just as concerned with the on-air integration of its productions as with pure fundamental audiovisual research. This involvement extends even to what usually falls under on-air presentation and continuity. Small productions conceived as little interludes between programmes seize on this theme the better to try to subvert it.
The music, by Bernard Parmegiani, mentioned in the INA notices as “original music, television work”, is built in the form of a horizontal collage, in cut-up, of concrete sounds, of very identifiable noises, of short vocal sequences, organised like a veritable programme-based musique concrète, constituting a form of sonic burlesque, in direct synchronisation with the mishaps of a little character who tries, not without difficulty, to interrupt the programmes and who then grows impatient, with just as much difficulty and exasperation, at managing to resume them. Bernard Parmegiani’s music also tries to free itself from the rules of concrete composition, not without a touch of self-mockery transgressing all the rules specific to the solfège of musical objects, but where the idea of the sound gag takes on its full meaning.

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.