L’Idée

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.

When Berthold Bartosh’s animated film L’idée, shot between 1931 and 1934 from the woodcuts of the Belgian Expressionist painter Franz Maseréel, was released in cinemas, some critics spoke of a genuine “revolution in animation” aimed at an adult audience. The film’s genesis was compromised by the Nazis’ rise to power in Berlin: Bartosch had to take the film to Paris, where it was completed and shown for the first time, in 1934, to an audience of intellectuals at the Vieux Colombier. It reveals the strange beauty of a symbolic world that resembles our society and whose main character is an idea. This idea takes shape as a naked woman and symbolises popular revolt against every form of oppression, insurrection against authority. This woman will be hunted down by society, pursued through the streets by soldiers, priests and merchants, fought, then annihilated before being reborn from the split skull of the man who imagined her.
The incarnation of the idea takes different forms in Arthur Honegger’s music, notably through the use of the ondes Martenot. The choice of an “abstract” sound to represent an idea, an ideology, of a modern sonority linked to Maseréel’s resolutely “anticipatory” artistic thought, and the use of a “revolutionary” sound to embody a revolutionary character: these are all elements that lead Honegger to choose the ondes Martenot as the solo instrument in his score.