JACQUELINE CAUX & OLIVIER PASCAL PRESQUE RIEN AVEC LUC FERRARI (2005)

Directors: Jacqueline Caux & Olivier Pascal

Year: 2005

Time: 50 mins

Music:

Luc Ferrari

Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain

Elise Caron

Claude Berset

Christof Schlaeger

Erik M

Eye of Sound: The decision to retain the original title of this documentary, instead of following the rule of translating all film names, can be justified by the fact that anyone familiar with Luc Ferrari will recognize the reference to some of the composer's most famous works, the Presque Rien series, and particularly his 1989 piece Presque Rien avec Filles (Almost Nothing with Girls). Much more than a mere music-documentary, Caux's and Pascal's Presque Rien is possibly the definitive Ferrari doc, not only because of the composer's willingness to play along with the directors' playful design but mostly because of their creative assimilation of his artistic and philosophical mischievousness. Although comprising several different sections that use different aesthetical and narrative strategies, Presque Rien almost seamlessly flows between these often contradictory approaches, its multifarious form being in itself an implicit tribute to the chronic deviancy of Ferrari's career. The film's narrative linchpin is a series of autobiographical notes taken from an homonymous book by Caux herself. But the use of these fragments is far from conventional, since Caux and Pascal decide to pull a narrative trick rarely seen outside Chris Marker's works: to subvert the tradition of the "voice of god" documentary voice-over by having an actress, Elise Caron, deliver Ferrari's most intimate confessions and remembrances - perhaps to reinforce the association between the composer and the Filles allegedly lacking in his life but so deeply present in his music, as well as to multiply the myriad personas emerging from his oeuvre. Ferrari also plays himself, but mostly on more "technical" notes (in which, nevertheless, his generosity and inability to take himself too seriously are absolutely transparent). There is the more conventional melange of live and backstage footage, including rehearsals for his Cahier du Soir "opera" with Elise Caron and the Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, live collaborations with Christof Schlaeger and Erik M (this one using old Ferrari raw materials), and short excerpts from a 2003 Claude Berset performance of the 36 Enfilades piece for piano and magnetophone. Some of the most beautiful moments, however, stem from an audiovisual installation Ferrari produced between 1995 and 2000: entitled Cycle de Souvenirs (Cycle of Remembrances), it was composed of footage captured in key locations of Ferrari's personal and artistic life, supported by a random composition in which six discs comprising recordings of anodinous urban and domestic soundscapes were constantly shuffled and rearranged, bearing the mark of the composer's concern with chance events and the relations between memory and biography. Several other events contribute to the narrative's richness and density: the perhaps surprising election of John Cage as his major aesthetic and philosophical influence (upon whom Ferrari's early escape from serialism and life-time commitment with non-alignment are implicitly predicated), the identification of the soundtrack for Honegger's classic Pacific 231 (soon on SOE) as a decisive moment in his aural formation, or the jocose justification of his early involvement in concrète explorations as the most barbaric possibility available at the time. If forced to choose one single highlight, however, I'd go for Ferrari's hilarious audio stroll through a parisian suburb amusement park: surrounded by excessive chromatic and sonic stimuluses, the composer's posture betrays neither the shyness of the guilt-ridden voyeur nor the blind aggressiveness of the artist ready to devour his source materials at the cost of their dignity; like a child in a candy store, his is a gaze of sheer delight, immersed in the overwhelming and unembellished pleasures of his senses.

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PRESQUE RIEN AVEC LUC FERRARI

LUC PETER RECORD PLAYER: CHRISTIAN MARCLAY (2000)

Director: Luc Peter

Year: 2000

Time: 42 mins

Music:

Christian Marclay

with

Elliott Sharp & DJ Soulslinger

Lee Ranaldo & Thurston Moore

DJ Olive & Erik M

Eye of Sound: Although the history of musical pillage certainly starts way before the 20th century, the practice of plunderphonics (stealing snippets of pre-recorded sounds, often leaving its sources perfectly recognisable, in order to create something new and normally at odds with its original purposes) arose with the broadening of the aural spectrum brought about by the musique concrète revolution of the 1950s. The fact that it took so long after the invention of the first recording devices to take this decisive step is probably due to the resilience of modern ego-centered concepts of authorship and individuality that, although still prevalent in face of all the contradictory evidence, gradually started weakening after WWII. Inspired by the roads previously paved by concrète musicians and theorists, but also heavily influenced by the worlds of performance art, punk rock and no wave, Christian Marclay was probably the first musician to steal the plunder from the academic domain and to consistently work on the possibilities of disarranging previously ordered sonic artefacts. Long before being a d.j. meant anything more than someone putting one record after the other to make people dance (which is still what it means today), Marclay was exploring old vinyl collections, scratching vinyl in ways unthought of by Bambaataa, destroying needles against turntables and breaking up records in order to discover what lies beneath the groove. In this fairly conventional documentary, Luc Peter offers us a short portrait of Marclay's activities in more recent years, at a time when he's been elevated to avant-stardom by a society reasonably accustomed to the ideas of a musician using ready-made sources or of someone commanding people's respect behind the decks. Marclay briefly discusses his background, methods and artistic purposes, together with considerations on the turntable/record as an instrument or its place in improvisation and pop music. Luc Peter complements those statements with footage from four live performances. The first one, recorded at the IRCAM in Paris, presents us Marclay as he became known to the world: playing solo with his prepared records and turntables. The remaining performance feature Marclay's more recent challenges, i.e. improvising live with musicians from fairly different backgrounds: downtown NY heavy-weight Elliott Sharp and young noise-turntablist Soulslinger at the Tonic; Sonic Youth's guitar men Ranaldo and Moore at the legendary Victoriaville festival; and finally Olive (of the "illbient" collective We) and Erik M (one of the most interesting turntablists of the post- Marclay/Yoshihide/Tétreault generation) at the Centre Pompidou. Record Player hardly goes beyond the intrinsic interest of his subject, which is always a good way to measure one's merit in making a documentary: it is unfortunate, in particular, that no attention whatsoever is payed to Marclay's work as a visual artist (which, as he says, is as much a reflection on sound as his music), that the mighty turntablist's past works aren't even mentioned, and that Peter wasn't able to tap into the artist's known theoretical verve. Nevertheless, Record Player has its strong points: it's clean and sober, it offers us a rare opportunity to see Marclay playing solo and with a few top-notch musicians, and - perhaps even more important and certainly rarer - it gives us a chance to see the man haggling at a local sale for a stack of cheesy old records.

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