La Marche des machines

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, first quarter 2012.

As Paul Gilson points out in the film’s flyer, La marche des machines is the fruit of very extensive image processing in the laboratory. Through optical printer tricks, Deslaw himself develops negatives and duplicate negatives, augmenting certain scenes and reusing several motifs in order to obtain recurrences of rhythm. To accompany this marginal visual aspect, Russolo’s futurist instrument is called upon in the context of a film screening at the Studio 28, in Paris, where, for the first time, a totally new sound accompanies images, in an interpretation of the image that surpasses, above all in terms of timbre, the improvisations of the pianists during silent-film screenings. It is unfortunately impossible to verify this, for lack of any sound document –  the surviving copies of this film being hopelessly silent –  but it seems that the different modes of playing and timbre of the rumorharmonium on Deslaw’s manipulated images may have had a real expressive power, and may have aroused the enthusiasm of the audience at the time. However, Eugène Deslaw himself takes part in the quarrel between supporters and detractors of sound cinema in the London journal Close Up:

“My film’s conception? An entirely “silent” conception. Adding sound to La Marche des machines showed me that the more perfect the machine, the less noise it makes. Deprived of its realistic noises, reduced to the silent music of its wheels and pistons, the machine gains in cinematic value and strikes the nerves better. It speaks better.  But, but, but… Silent films are no longer made. So I chose to make a sound film that is as unrealistic as possible. The accompaniment of Vers les robots will be created with the Rumharmonium of the composer Russolo” .

A poster found at the Musée Montmartre, announcing a screening at the Studio 28 for the opening of the 79th Prampolini exhibition on 15 November 1928, confirms that Deslaw was still performing with Russolo’s unusual instrument. The poster indeed announces the screening of Tolstoï intime as well as La marche des machines, with Russolo and his rumorharmonium.

The version presented here was the subject of an attempted reconstruction, based on a commission placed with the composer Xavier Garcia, taking as its basis five noise-making instruments of Russolo and carrying out only electroacoustic transformations, mainly affecting only the parameter of pitch.
This version was given in April 2004. at the CNAC/ Centre Georges Pompidou as part of the retrospective of Eugène Deslaw’s films under the direction of Lubomir Hosejko and Philippe-Alain Michaud.
Another live version was also shown at the Studio National des Arts Contemporains du Fresnoy, on 4 November 2004, as part of a lecture by Philippe Langlois on the theme of the city symphony.

Please note that the version shown here has a shift of one frame per second owing to digitisation from a VHS.