L’Araignéléphant

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.

L’araignéléphant is, in a way, humanity: a strange being whom Jacques Rouxel and Piotr Kamler follow step by step, moving through an abstract setting of lines, points and coloured planes. What defines him: indecision, for this strange animal, half spider, half elephant, ponders …: “should one be, should one not be … while being… but not too much… or vice versa … and all this while walking, walking … and always on the same side …” Convinced he is on the right path until he bumps into a box, the box for turning back time … ” so, not knowing what else to do, he multiplied a great deal … a great deal … and always on the same side … ” This animated film also exists in a “musical” version, in which the commentary on the strange and abstract adventures of the Araignéléphant is left to the spectators’ imagination.

In 1965, Jacques Rouvel collaborated for the first time with Piotr Kamler on the film Planète verte. He persists in the vein of the “moral fable”, as he likes to define the Shadoks, by working with Kamler again on L’Araignéléphant (1967), for which Rouxel wrote the commentary spoken by the actor Pierre Bertin.

From the outset, the text places itself in an orbit not very far from the planet Shadock, since the film begins with these words: “It happened long ago, not even long ago but before long ago, in fact it was at a time when no one quite knew what time was.”

The music is entrusted to Bernard Parmegiani and the soundtrack already sounds like a foretaste of what the sonic environment of the Shadoks would be: a polished and funny commentary, accompanied by a sort of very light furniture music, itself embellished by incongruous concrete sound effects. In this respect L’araignéléphant as well as SOS Les Zlops attaquent seem directly to constitute the close ancestors of the famous Shadocks.

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.