Fer chaud

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.

In this film, Jacques Brissot dematerialises the “cybernetic” sculptures of Nicolas Schoeffer just as he dematerialises the name of the kinetic artist in his title, citing it backwards, a concrete procedure to translate the cinematographic gesture which consists in taking from these works only their movement, by placing a translucent screen between them and the camera. Purged of its details, the image thus obtained offers a vision of this sculpture reduced to plays of moving light. A rapid editing of the images was organised over an extract from an electroacoustic piece by Iannis Xenakis.

Fer chaud also belongs to the series of films in which the image was edited to pre-existing music, here from Diamorphose by Iannis Xenakis.
As often in the films of the Service de la recherche, the synchronisation of the sound is in a way disconnected from the picture editing, while still providing very salient audiovisual points of encounter. In Fer chaud, the visual editing seeks to amplify the movement of the forms and lights of the moving sculptures that dance on the screen. Offering a great audiovisual contrast, the slow inflections of Xenakis’s music are then set more to the morphology and amplitude of these internal visual movements than to the tight rhythm of the 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.