Reflets
Piotr Kamler, 1961
The documents 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.
At the end of a listening session, during the traditional meetings of the Service de la Recherche held every Friday afternoon, the filmmaker Piotr Kamler discovers Reflets (1960), which Ivo Malec composed as his trainee Etude (Etude de stage). Won over by the luminosity this piece gives off, Kamler immediately proposes to make a film of it. To allow Kamler to work as close as possible to the music, Malec produces a very beautiful, previously unpublished graphic score, on which the composition of the four tracks of Reflets appears clearly, with a precise temporal breakdown (to the half-second), an elaborate diagram that will allow Kamler to construct his film.
Reflets takes place at night, at two o’clock in the morning, under the Pont neuf: the moon is reflected in the Seine in lines altered every second, broken, and recomposed by the current. One can watch this film in this way. From this “scenario”, Kamler works on continuous metamorphoses of forms, from figurative synthesis to the analysis of matter, whose elements he obstinately catalogues.
Malec was delighted with the result; he felt, he says, “a form of happiness through the sensation of having been understood, that someone had quite simply understood the essence of what you have done”. The images, like the music, bathe in a light, transparent luminosity, and graze drama only fleetingly. The successful experience of Reflets prompts Malec to invert the initial proposition: to write music for Kamler’s next film, Structure (1961).
This film won a prize at the animated film festival in Rimini (Italy) in 1962.
Just after, an “exclusive from Cloches d’Atlantis”: the totally unpublished facsimile of the manuscript score of Reflets by Ivo Malec.
As well as the Schéma directeur by Pierre Schaeffer given to composers as a framework for the composition of their Etude de stage (trainee study)