Meurtre

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.

Piotr Kamler has freely transposed this short story by Franz Kafka into a disquieting world of abstract animation. The role of the official has become an improbable insect which, on an immaterial scaffolding, unless it is its legs, slowly juggles with its head. The arrival of red balls interrupts its tranquillity. They become more and more aggressive until the insect transforms into a devouring monster that swallows them. This is the murder. The apparent calm returns but the insect decomposes and gradually disappears.

In a genre that developed within the Service de la Recherche, narrativity is very frequently displaced and, under the pretext of futile “little stories”, adventures of forms, of dynamics, or of phenomena are drawn. It is thus another form of “cinema of the real” mingling “the objective and the subjective: something other and the same as the real; something other and the same as a message”, says Pierre Schaeffer.

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.