{"id":1419,"date":"2012-11-22T22:49:50","date_gmt":"2012-11-22T21:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/?p=1419"},"modified":"2022-11-01T13:28:16","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T12:28:16","slug":"la-dormeuse-de-maurice-pons-1965","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/la-dormeuse-de-maurice-pons-1965\/","title":{"rendered":"LA DORMEUSE de Maurice Pons (1965)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The text and video excerpt below document the book by Philippe Langlois, Les cloches d\u2019Atlantis, Musique \u00e9lectroacoustique et cin\u00e9ma, Arch\u00e9ologie et histoire d\u2019un art sonore,<\/em> <\/a>\u00e9ditions mf, Paris, 2012.<\/p>\n

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La dormeuse was shot at the Moulin d\u2019And\u00e9 during the summer of 1962, a year before Andy Warhol\u2019s anti-film performance Sleep<\/em>, which was originally to last eight hours, the length of a night\u2019s sleep of the artist John Giorno. In a less formal and more poetic manner, Maurice Pons\u2019s La dormeuse is an exploration of sleep, in the sense that Maurice Pons would endeavour rather to penetrate the essence of sleep in order to seek to deliver a subjective observation of it. The indiscreet and silent camera, suspended above the bed by a mobile gondola controlled by a winch, can then surprise the sleeper in her sleep and enter with her into the world of dreams.<\/p>\n

The choice of a musique concr\u00e8te made from metallic sonorities, such as the sounds of slowed-down clock bells, is not only there to recall the way in which the perception of time becomes blurred during sleep; it also materialises the dreamlike quality of the world of dreams into which Maurice Pons seeks to draw the viewer. As if to better underline the floating, suspended slowness of the camera movements above the bed, the music takes full part in the suspension; the sounds are suspended in time.
Over the images of the sleeper\u2019s fragmented body, the gentle deflagrations of musique concr\u00e8te tear through the space of the image and the time of sleep to immerse the viewer in an evanescent sound universe, like successive waves of metallic textures, now isolated in silence, now spun out into long, stretched textures.<\/p>\n\n\n