Étude aux allures

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.

L’Etude aux Allures brings together two parallel experiments, one sonic, the other visual, through the exploration of an equivalent phenomenon: “l’allure”. The allure is the oscillation that results from the sustaining of a sound, the internal rhythm of its sound structure, what makes it live and change from its emission to its extinction. In this study, the painter Raymond HAINS attempts a visual transposition of this acoustic law by filming his works through fluted lenses fixed directly onto the camera, creating effects of optical vibration that animate the forms and colours and produce a coloured rhythm from the permanence of visual objects. Using the music as a montage canvas, the painter makes perceptible the secret language that establishes itself between sound and image events.
This film also belongs to the series of audiovisual essays that present a new type of relationship, in which the proposition is inverted by making a film from pre-existing music, thereby transposing into the activity of the film score the theory of “the inversion of the direction of composition” specific to musique concrète. Diamorphose by Iannis XENAKIS thus becomes the model onto which the film Fer chaud by Jacques BRISSOT is grafted, just as the Etude aux allures by Pierre SCHAEFFER is here put into images by Raymond HAINS.
“The most remarkable thing is the ease, precisely, of a counterpoint that could unfold quite freely, as soon as the structure of the images and sounds was related. No need to adjust beats or movements numerically. It was the spirit that counted, not the letter […]” Pierre SCHAEFFER in Le contrepoint du son et de l’image.

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.