La Mélodie du monde

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 1929, in his first sound film Melodie der Welt – La mélodie du monde – Walter Ruttmann exploits noise, for its musical essence, in two sequences that show a desire to translate a certain universal harmony, detectable from the opening credits onwards, on reading the director’s statement of intent.

The film is conceived as a journey around the world. The first shots thus reveal a port where liners lie at anchor. The impressionist music of Wolfgang Zeller, favouring the woodwind and brass families of instruments, unfolds.
The first integration of noise in the opening credits corresponds to the intervention of the sound of the liner’s foghorn, which announces the casting off and the beginning of the voyage. This sound replaces the concluding cadence of the instruments. Technically, Ruttmann simply edited in the sound of the horn in place of the concluding instrumental chord. To carry out such an operation, Zeller’s music was probably commissioned by Ruttmann after the shooting and the recording, so as to encompass the note of the foghorn in the tonality of the music. This siren sound regularly reappears in the first minutes of the film, curiously mingling with Zeller’s melodies. The composer, moreover, plays with this ambiguity a little further on in the credits, devising certain playing techniques on the bassoon modelled on the sound of the foghorn, so that at times one no longer knows whether it is the sound of a horn or of a musical instrument.

Listening to the short sequence that follows (around 2’20), just before the accordion theme, does not make it possible to determine the sound source or the technical process employed. Timed precisely to images of the surf and following the breaking of the waves, the sound texture obtained shows a great proximity to the sound of the foghorn, without however presenting itself in a natural manner. A reversed loop seems to have been used, almost indefinable, mysterious, in the slow repetition of seven identical rumblings. Did Ruttmann try to loop the sound on itself ? Did he reverse the direction in which the sound is played, or did he mix the horn with instruments ? The poor quality of the soundtrack makes it difficult to decipher this work, but it certainly reveals the use of a process that undoubtedly belongs to primitive electroacoustic practice and that, astonishingly, even points, as early as 1928, to a precursory derivative of Pierre Schaeffer’s “closed groove”.

The same integration of noise and music observed earlier is found again at the end of the credits (at 4’30’’). Once again it is the sound of the foghorn that concludes the harmonic cadence on the note D. As Dziga Vertov would do the following year in the famous sequences of Enthusiasm made from siren sounds, Walter Ruttmann calls on a siren sound as a marker of form and considers it a driving element in the general structure of his film.
 

After the credits, a succession of tableaux describe the different customs and habits found across the planet according to common categories : dress traditions, dances, leisure, or again food, religions, etc.
When the tableau entitled “work” appears, Zeller’s music gives way to a sound montage in direct correspondence with what is represented on screen. In other words, we see what we hear, and what we are given to hear breaks radically with accompanying music. It is no longer the image that enslaves the sound but the reverse. The aim in this sequence is to represent the diversity of trades : Ruttmann then abandons the strictly instrumental domain to employ natural sound sources. Built on a rhythmic model, this sequence contains no mixing; the sounds follow one another in a dazzling montage of noises. The sonority of hammers, anvils, hand saws and power saws, machines, or voices shouting orders in German, sets the cadence of this sound composition. This Bruitist collage is obviously the fruit of meticulous sound composition work seeking to bring out the rhythmic value of sounds/noises. Listening to this sequence immediately recalls the montages at the beginning of Wochenende, some of whose sounds would be reused two years later. They are already just as skilful, just as precise, their sonic articulations already just as rich. In this sense, the work sequence can be considered a complete premonition of what he would achieve two years later in Week-End.