Galaxie

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.

“Between desire and spasm, between potency and existence, between essence and fall, falls the shadow”. It is around this quotation from T-S Eliot that Piotr Kamler’s abstract film develops, bathed in a predominantly red colour, both in the backgrounds and in the forms that cross the screen, in order to evoke in an abstract way the life and power of a red form, a distant galaxy, upon which external elements, invaders, bring shadow and destruction.
An experimental film whose television broadcast is not mentioned in the catalogue of the Service de la Recherche, and which condenses the work of fundamental audiovisual research on the notions of visual and sound objects.

The music of François Bayle, like Kamler’s film, unfolds essentially from three salient audiovisual elements: a background that develops throughout the film, presenting itself in the form of a slowed-down sound texture obtained, it seems, from sustained organ notes mixed with noisy sounds to accompany the crossing of the clouds of red matter; percussive sounds in delta, played forwards and backwards to punctuate the appearance of less nebulous forms on the screen; then sonorities that recall the amplitude and dynamics of improbable spoken language by means of filtering, to figure the teeming of matter and of forms dancing on the screen.
This audiovisual approach is not without recalling Lignes et points, another major audiovisual experiment which again brings together Piotr Kamler and François Bayle.

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.