Jour après jour

In Canada, at the National Film Board (NFB), the film composer Maurice Blackburn is one of the spearheads of all-round sound experimentation, first alongside the animation filmmaker Norman McLaren, then on documentary and fiction films.

After two stays in Paris, in 1948 and 1954, he discovered the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer, and became aware of the formidable field of exploration offered to him by the possibility of manipulating sound recorded on an optical track, before applying these discoveries in collaborations with directors who wished to extend their visual experience into the universe of sounds.

In his view, the composer must take charge of a film’s sound as a whole, from the writing stage of the film, in collaboration with the filmmaker, the picture editor and the sound editor. The entire soundtrack thus becomes the film score, in a total electroacoustic approach in which speech, music and noises are exploited musically, in an aesthetic he calls “Filmopéra”.

In the 1960s, the idea of sound collage and audiovisual counterpoint took a new turn with Clément Perron’s film Jour après jour, which gave him the opportunity to produce a total soundtrack composed from musique concrète, industrial noises and various effects recorded in the studio or taken from a sound library: “we went looking for everything”, says Maurice Blackburn, “galloping horses, train noises, whistles, trees crashing down, machine noises”. The film was shot in Windsor, in Quebec, in the middle of the forests, where six thousand five hundred inhabitants live off the paper industry. A text by Clément Perron, spoken by Anne-Claire Poirier, is entirely  integrated into this composition. The mixture of text, images and soundtrack invites reflection on the place that man has given to the machine in our society. The result is a total sound poem singing the universal domination of the machine gone mad.