Le Tempestaire

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.

Le Tempestaire is the fruit of a close collaboration between a director, Jean Epstein, and a composer, Yves Baudrier. This film constitutes an exceptional audiovisual symbiosis. The study of Le Tempestaire proves crucial from the perspective of research into the emergence of electroacoustic music in cinema, because the inventiveness and originality of the acoustic processes deployed in it open onto a new aesthetic, even a new poetics, of the sonic and the musical. Moreover, this film is also one of the essential milestones in the prehistory of the electroacoustic processes that lead to the birth of musique concrète.