La Dormeuse

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.

La dormeuse was shot at the Moulin d’Andé during the summer of 1962, a year before Andy Warhol’s anti-film performance Sleep, which was originally to last eight hours, the length of a night’s sleep of the artist John Giorno. In a less formal and more poetic manner, Maurice Pons’s La dormeuse is an exploration of sleep, in the sense that Maurice Pons would endeavour rather to penetrate the essence of sleep in order to seek to deliver a subjective observation of it. The indiscreet and silent camera, suspended above the bed by a mobile gondola controlled by a winch, can then surprise the sleeper in her sleep and enter with her into the world of dreams.

The choice of a musique concrète made from metallic sonorities, such as the sounds of slowed-down clock bells, is not only there to recall the way in which the perception of time becomes blurred during sleep; it also materialises the dreamlike quality of the world of dreams into which Maurice Pons seeks to draw the viewer. As if to better underline the floating, suspended slowness of the camera movements above the bed, the music takes full part in the suspension; the sounds are suspended in time.
Over the images of the sleeper’s fragmented body, the gentle deflagrations of musique concrète tear through the space of the image and the time of sleep to immerse the viewer in an evanescent sound universe, like successive waves of metallic textures, now isolated in silence, now spun out into long, stretched textures.

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.