Le Jabrebbock

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.

The Jabrebbock is a mythical figure who introduces confusion into language, jostles syllables and destroys the meaning of sentences. The text by Lewis CAROLL is first dictated to a pupil hard at work at the desk; the dictation ends with this solemn warning: “my son, beware the jabrebbock!” – Then the text breaks loose over images of waters, of particles of matter convulsed by an immaterial wind: an entire dreamlike universe in which images and words no longer represent but evoke, and which ends with “the death of the jabrebbock!”

This film marks a new orientation of the Service de la Recherche, which consisted in no longer simply broadcasting on air the experimental essays presenting the results of fundamental audiovisual research, but in including these essays in more conventional television formats for its audience. Hence the idea of materialising the ravings of the Jabrebbock from a text by Lewis CAROLL and a mysterious creature who can give free rein to audiovisual creation.
The music by Ivo MALEC is exclusively instrumental and reveals the composer’s inclination for instrumental music, in which he in no way denies his past as a concrete musician, quite the contrary, by integrating into it principles of editing, alloys of timbre and sound morphologies directly inherited from concrete composition.
Production: Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF, 1964
Music by Ivo Malec

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.