Appétit d’oiseau

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.

Not without recalling the film by Bertold Bartosh, L’idée in 1934 with music by Arthur Honegger based on ondes Martenot, this short animated film by Peter Folldès is a dreamlike tale on the eternal theme that the artist pursues in most of his films, namely the relations between man and woman. A boy chases a girl, but he is metamorphosed into a lion while she turns into a bird. What will be the consequences of this mutation? Is there any other outcome to this situation than the one imposed by the law of the strongest, beyond what appearances dictate?

In the manner of cartoon music, the music of Geneviève Martin punctuates the narrative thread of this short film, energising the telling of this dreamlike tale.
The instrumental music for piano, xylophone, clarinet, double bass and solo ondes Martenot accompanies the general thread of the cartoon as well as the chase scenes between the female and male entities symbolised by the lion and the bird.
Interspersed with passages of electroacoustic music, with jazz quotations over live-action images of women undressing, and with incongruous electroacoustic sound effects accompanying the transformation passages, the music mixes heterogeneous genres to accompany a film that also borrows from various codes of animation cinema, not without a touch of political incorrectness.

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.