{"id":668,"date":"2011-12-22T13:07:04","date_gmt":"2011-12-22T12:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/?p=668"},"modified":"2022-10-21T18:20:26","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T16:20:26","slug":"la-melodie-du-monde-de-walter-ruttmann-1929","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/la-melodie-du-monde-de-walter-ruttmann-1929\/","title":{"rendered":"LA MELODIE DU MONDE de Walter Ruttmann (1929)"},"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, first quarter 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 1929, in his first sound film Melodie der Welt \u2013 La m\u00e9lodie du monde \u2013 Walter Ruttmann exploits noise, for its musical essence, in two sequences that show a desire to translate a certain universal harmony, detectable from the opening credits onwards, on reading the director\u2019s statement of intent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film is conceived as a journey around the world. The first shots thus reveal a port where liners lie at anchor. The impressionist music of Wolfgang Zeller, favouring the woodwind and brass families of instruments, unfolds.
The first integration of noise in the opening credits corresponds to the intervention of the sound of the liner\u2019s foghorn, which announces the casting off and the beginning of the voyage. This sound replaces the concluding cadence of the instruments. Technically, Ruttmann simply edited in the sound of the horn in place of the concluding instrumental chord. To carry out such an operation, Zeller\u2019s music was probably commissioned by Ruttmann after the shooting and the recording, so as to encompass the note of the foghorn in the tonality of the music. This siren sound regularly reappears in the first minutes of the film, curiously mingling with Zeller\u2019s melodies. The composer, moreover, plays with this ambiguity a little further on in the credits, devising certain playing techniques on the bassoon modelled on the sound of the foghorn, so that at times one no longer knows whether it is the sound of a horn or of a musical instrument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listening to the short sequence that follows (around 2\u201920), just before the accordion theme, does not make it possible to determine the sound source or the technical process employed. Timed precisely to images of the surf and following the breaking of the waves, the sound texture obtained shows a great proximity to the sound of the foghorn, without however presenting itself in a natural manner. A reversed loop seems to have been used, almost indefinable, mysterious, in the slow repetition of seven identical rumblings. Did Ruttmann try to loop the sound on itself\u00a0? Did he reverse the direction in which the sound is played, or did he mix the horn with instruments\u00a0? The poor quality of the soundtrack makes it difficult to decipher this work, but it certainly reveals the use of a process that undoubtedly belongs to primitive electroacoustic practice and that, astonishingly, even points, as early as 1928, to a precursory derivative of Pierre Schaeffer\u2019s \u201cclosed groove\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same integration of noise and music observed earlier is found again at the end of the credits (at 4\u201930\u2019\u2019). Once again it is the sound of the foghorn that concludes the harmonic cadence on the note D. As Dziga Vertov would do the following year in the famous sequences of Enthusiasm made from siren sounds, Walter Ruttmann calls on a siren sound as a marker of form and considers it a driving element in the general structure of his film.
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