Love Me Tonight

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.

In his third film, Love me tonight  – Aimez-moi ce soir – (1930), Rouben Mamoulian gives us to see and hear one of the most representative manifestations of the city symphony. The opening sequence reveals how the noises of the capital are capable of creating a veritable musical construction, which he calls “the symphony of Paris awakening”. To introduce Maurice Chevalier’s song smoothly, he devises one of the most elaborate transitions of the genre, resorting to a stylistic and formal subterfuge hitherto unseen. Rouben Mamoulian in fact imagines a singular progression, starting from silence, then from silence broken by noise, then noise organised and constructed on a polyphonic model, to finally arrive at an accomplished orchestral musicality. It is by proceeding through the rhythmic accumulation of sound elements taken from the various trades of morning Paris that Mamoulian seeks to enter imperceptibly into the song that opens this musical comedy, The song of Paris, performed by the inimitable Maurice Chevallier.

As Mamoulian had already tried to do in his adaptation of Porgy and Bess on Broadway in 1927, by orchestrating the noises of the city and by “building the rhythm of the noises on 4/4, then 2/4, finally 6/8 to lead into Charleston music”, Rouben Mamoulian this time exploits all the possibilities of cinematic montage in this impressive Bruitist construction. Unlike Ruttmann, who pastes noises one after another in Week-End, Mamoulian prefers a horizontal construction favouring work in stratified layers of sound. The result is, admittedly, a music of noises that is relatively simple in its sonic and rhythmic make-up, but which nonetheless reveals an impressive polyphonic composition of noise, a city symphony.