La Planète verte

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, 2012.

Somewhere in space, the galaxy RK12 lies 3,000 light years from the Earth, where there is an inhabited planet called “Acture the Green”, on which live “the Actuphages”, whose appearance may be placed somewhere between the amoeba, the flea and the caterpillar, and whose behaviour, in order to avoid monotony, is to change shape ceaselessly: “tell me how you change, and I will tell you who you are”, says the Acture proverb. Although deaf, the Actuphages adore music and also set vibrating the stringed instruments on which they stroll about, which inspires them to change shape. But their main activity is to manufacture time: time to waste, time that does not pass, time to gain, not to mention dead time…

If, in the context of research into programmes intended for experimental, humorous television entertainment, Planète verte prefigures the famous series Shadoks, mixing science fiction, pataphysics and humour, this film represents above all, thematically and graphically, an anticipation by almost twenty years of the feature-length animated film that Piotr Kamler made in 1982: Chronopolis, with music by Luc Ferrari. Its narrative thread indeed seems to draw directly on Planète Verte, where, just like the actuphages, its inhabitants devote their time to manufacturing time.
It is once again, quite definitely, the notion of the transformation of matter that is at the centre of this short film, made from the animation of white powders. Yet the music of Ivo Malec wrong-foots this notion by using only an instrumental ensemble whose principles of composition are directly inherited from the composition of musique concrète. In the manner of “Mickey Maousing”, Ivo Malec composes an “illustrative” music that matches the movement of the forms unfolding on screen, locking onto the virtuosity of the actuphages’ transformations.

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.