Maskerage

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.

The film depicts a nocturnal wander, by torchlight, through the galleries of a castle whose corridors are peopled with ancient masks. The image lends itself to the dreamlike quality of the young musique concrète for Pierre SCHAEFFER’s first film score; the sound resources draw on different registers, combining prepared piano sonorities, bell effects, a few sound fragments taken from the Symphonie pour un homme seul and – a fact doubtless unique at the time – excerpts of traditional African music.

The first short film to benefit from musique concrète in 1950, Maskerage is also Pierre SCHAEFFER’s first film score, inaugurating research around the notion of sound object and visual object, notably through the use of musique concrète in relation to cinema. Initiated theoretically with his Essai sur la radio et le cinéma (1941), research in the field of the audiovisual is an activity that Pierre SCHAEFFER would never cease to develop, first within the GRMC and then within the Service de la recherche of the ORTF, which he directed until 1975, with the aim of developing a genuine solfège of audiovisual objects, which unfortunately would never see the light of day.
“Since sound and image can now be recorded and manipulated, we must recognise the extent of this upheaval. It imposes, at the very root of the traditional arts, the necessity of a revision. It offers the possibility of it, allows experimentation, opens up a prodigious field of experimentation. The task is to examine, in complete independence of mind, the new conditioning of the work. This fundamental research engages the whole of art”. Pierre Schaeffer, Les machines à communiquer.
The film was presented under the Dutch flag at the second Cannes festival.
Date of production: 1950
Programme company: Office Radio Télévision France
Broadcast channel: 1st channel

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.