Le Territoire des autres

The text and the video excerpt below document Philippe Langlois’s book, Les cloches d’Atlantis, Musique électroacoustique et cinéma, Archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, éditions mf, Paris, 2012.

In Le territoire des autres (1970), “deliberately conceived for image and sound to the exclusion of words”, François Bel and Gérard Vienne shot, over six years, more than forty-five kilometres of images of animals across the whole of Europe. Having as yet no experience as directors, they shoot the sequences without a plan or any preconceived idea. Michel Fano offers to edit the image on a musical structure “in the manner of the fugue that Eisenstein used for October”. For more than a year, he becomes, at the editing table, the a posteriori director of the film.

“Creation takes place at the stage of the scissors and the tape, on the table in relation to the image and in relation to the two, three or four sounds associated with the sound phenomenon”.

Michel Fano can thus modify the picture editing of certain scenes in relation to the sound conception he has of them. It is thus that, progressively, images and sounds adapted to one another and became interlocked. The film then took the form of a symphony in ten movements (pollution, camouflage, survival, reproduction, the cry of animals, etc.), with an overture and a coda. Instrumental sounds are integrated into natural sounds and then into transformed sounds until the sought-after sonic continuum is created.

Opening credits

Embryo sequence