Les Achalunés

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.

A short experimental film that could belong to the lineage of Jean Painlevé’s scientific cinematography, exploited here for the purpose of artistic research, from black-and-white images by René Laloux that recount visual phenomena observed in nature, without it being possible to recognise which animal or plant species they belong to. Organic forms beat and are reabsorbed, reflections dance to the rhythm of the music of Henk Badings, circles of light blink like disquieting eyes, perpetual metamorphoses evoke a great living, palpitating organism.

The first film mentioned in the internal catalogue of the films of the Service de la Recherche, Les Achalunés thus inaugurate the first visual experiments of the GRI (Groupe de Recherche Image) directed by Jacques Brissot, who cultivates an ambiguity as to the origin of the visual matter through a material at once concrete and abstract, which extends René Laloux’s experiments consisting in filming the effects of light diffracted by shards of glass on a screen.
The music of Henk Badings, based on retrograde piano sounds and scales of improbable concrete objects, seems to constitute a form of primer in the relations that visual objects and sound objects maintain.
Date of production: 1959

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.