Mediapart

Les Cloches d’Atlantis, subtitled Musique électroacoustique et cinéma and Archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, is one of those rare and indispensable works for anyone interested in sound, and even more in its relationship to the image. Philippe Langlois’s book fills a gap that those of Michel Chion have only skimmed, with an exaggerated hold on the subject. The writing is clear, the examples concrete, the quantity generous and the leads multiple, even if I noted here and there a few errors, approximations or unfortunate omissions, but what encyclopaedia escapes them? Add a website with more than sixty excerpts from the films recounted in these 480 pages, a few sound excerpts, and you can rely on this summa as you would on Le traité des objets musicaux by Pierre Schaeffer, Acoustique et musique by Émile Leipp, Praxis du cinéma by Noël Burch, the writings of Edgard Varèse, Arnold Schönberg or Jean Epstein, not forgetting Olivier Koechlin’s CD-ROM on La musique électroacoustique and a few other essentials to which you will return throughout your life!

Another work nevertheless remains to be written, because Philippe Langlois here favours facts over the search for meaning, the theoretical reflections being atomised throughout the pages. The intrinsic properties of sound in the audiovisual are only sketched, in the chapter on auteur cinema, in particular with the films of Tarkovski, Kobayashi or Lynch, and in his commentary on the work of Michel Fano on the sound score. Archaeology stops where practice begins. Les cloches d'Atlantis is a good basis for imagining the future with full knowledge of the facts, foundations that it would be a pity to pass over in silence. In a first part in which he begins by evoking at length the Italian and Russian Futurists, the author inventories the new instrument-making of the twentieth century, when that of our own is already consigning it to the museum. The second part is concerned with sound devices in cinema up to 1950, while the following ones address electroacoustic music in cinema. The short epilogue on our present day can only leave one wanting more (“hungry” or “at its end”, spell that word as you hear it) so much has the evolution of new technologies over the last twenty years upset practice without, alas, advancing intelligence, namely the use of sound in its complementarity with the image, its power of evocation and the immense unexplored field that its syntax could offer to those who love meaning.

Jean-Jacques Birgé

http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/jean-jacques-birge/061112/les-cloches-datlantis