Lignes et points

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.

In making Lignes et points (1961), an attempt at the parallel creation of sound and image, Piotr Kamler extends his collaboration with a new young composer, François Bayle, on a totally abstract film. Piotr Kamler and François Bayle choose a prior material: violent patches of light, continuous lines, sound means. Having thus defined their visual and sonic means, they jointly establish a breakdown in which sounds and images are considered as parallel elements. The result plunges us into an imaginary universe, a sidereal infinity peopled with strange sounds, where luminous forms, lunar patches and swarms of dots, sometimes crossed by immaterial lines, emerge and evolve with movements that are now slow, now jerky.

The film gives the visual sensation of sonic impacts, of blurred patches, of car headlights in a tunnel on a foggy night, of very fleeting and dynamic flashes, of directed gusts, approaching, receding, of tunnel effects, of voids, of disappearances and sudden explosive entrances.
The sounds, percussion and resonances seem to be modelled on the very theme of Lignes et points: impulses as points, resonances as lines. If the music is autonomous and seems not to obey the image, the synchronisation then occurs almost by chance and at random, in a poetic encounter of image and sound.
Lignes et points for acoustic concrete sounds and images is today part of a larger cycle and is integrated into L’expérience acoustique (1966) for four tracks and large screen. It comes just after Métaphore, created from scratch solely from electronic sources. This experiment, when it is given in concert today, still bears the indelible mark of the Service de la Recherche.
There is another version with another score by François Bayle for instrumental sounds.

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.