Chris Marker et le collage

Quelques notes sur Chris Marker et le collage

Le collage, ce n'est pas seulement des bouts de papiers découpés et assemblés pour créer une autre image, imprévue, ce qui est l'ouverture surréaliste sur le monde ; le collage, c'est plus généralement assumer la rencontre fortuite, l'accolement, la juxtaposition, la concaténation d'éléments disparates, assumer ces disparités, et proclamer que le résultat est UN et INDIVISIBLE.

Ces éléments peuvent être tout, son, mots, qu'importe.

On sait que le cerveau n'accepte pas l'absence de sens, et en construit un coute que coute, comme l'eau épouse la forme de n'importe quel interstice et cavité.

Le cinéma dans sa version commerciale nous dit toujours le contraire, lui qui essaie de nier l'impossible et de créer des liens artificiels entre des scènes, sorte de collage certes, mais concerté, qui ne laisse rien à l'agrandissment du monde.... Ce même cinéma commerical nous impose ses figurines qu'on devrait accepter : Depardieu EST Obélix, cet imbécile de scientologue de Tom Cruise EST un héros et moi ? je suis la Reine des Pommes ?

Le cerveau considéré ici comme un bloc, un caillou : on ne lui demande pas de s'adapter, le réalisateur s'adapte à son comportement moyen, standard (pour un moment, une population donnée).

C'est un pacte passé avec le spectateur, un pacte comme un autre.

Alors que le collage, c'est le contraire : c'est chercher le disparate pour que l'assciation faite par le spectateur, inévitable, soit au si imprévisible qu'inacceptable & violente.

Alors, La Jetée est il un film de collage ? 

Parce que le spectateur est invité à reconstitué les mouvements, les lieux et scènes manquantes. 

C'est là un pari extraordinaire: le film qui offre la continuité est présenté en suite d'éléments uniques, en diapos. C'est un collage temporel : les photos, éléments uniques, atemporels, fixes, sont mis dans une séquence temporelle : la durée du film, et le spectateur est forcé de suivre ce temps troué.

On peut dire que ce n'est pas une signature de Marker, il a fait beaucoup d'autres films avec des séquences filmées. 

D'ailleurs, il faudrait être assez simplet pour attendre de quelqu'un d'indépendant qu'il fasse d'une technique aussi sommaire (en apparence) un modus vivendi.

 En revanche, ce procédé revient dans SI J'AVAIS QUATRE DROMADAIRES — chef-d'œuvre, chef-d'œuvre, chef-d'œuvre, chef-d'œuvre, chef-d'œuvre, chef-d'œuvre, chef-d'œuvre, chef-d'œuvre, chef-d'œuvre — sous une autre forme dans OUVROIR (1990), où il s'agit d'un parcours dans une exposition, exposition virtuelle, puisque réalisée dans Second Life. 

Ici, peut-être que les diapositives successives se justifieraient d'elle-même grâce au parcours de l'exposition ? 

Oui mais. 

Ce film n'est pas un livre, pas une exposition, mais un parcours imposé dans le temps par Marker à partir d'éléments atemporels : ses photos, et, cette fois-ci, ses collages.

La réalité, même si elle n'existe pas, est la grande préoccupation du documentariste. Et Marker, qui se pose en témoin ("On vous parle du Chili", "on vous parle de Prague") montre la réalité.

Et le documentaire passe un autre pacte avec le spectateur, celui de l'effet vérité. Mais Marker (sans le vouloir d'ailleurs, il a dit avoir fait des photos pour la Jetée, faute de moyens) enlève ce contrat : il ne s'agit plus de vérité, mais de pensée. 

Car en défaisant le pacte du cinéma animé, Marker offre un espace de pensée au spectateur : il n'y a plus de fiction, et on est pas là pour se faire embobiner. On est là pour considérer notre état au monde.

C'est pour cette raison que tous les imbéciles, suiveurs et autres fans de Marker parlent de philosophie — sans avoir la moindre idée de ce que cela peut être. En fait, Marker pense en cinéma, pense avec le cinéma. Et c'est tellement rare que c'est associé à la philosophie, le dernier endroit où l'on pense, comme chacun sait.. On a donc une lecture temporelle subjective d'éléments hors temps, d'où le caractère touchant, humain, qu'il provoque. Parce que dans ces interstices, l'espace mental entre les photos, comme l'espace entre les éléments collés sur la feuille, se glisse la musique, la grande chérie de Marker, qui fait le LIEN.

graffitis à Chambord

Ayant passé breaucoup de temps au château de Chambord, j'ai eu le temps d'apprécier, outre la beauté extraordinaire de l'architecture (qui a encore beaucoup de secrets à nous révéler) et la symbolique étrange de la construction, tous les graffitis qui inondent les murs.

Il s'agit le plus souvent de noms, suivis d'une date :  Fossard 1737, Bruneau 1631, Maurice 1921, etc.
Il y en a des dizaines de milliers. Partout. Sur les cheminées, DANS les cheminées, sur les rebords de fenêtre, de toutes époques.
C'est un témoignage magnifique du temps humain qui a passé sur le château. Les pierres, le monument ne disent rien, ne parlent pas, mais les noms, les gens, leur visage par la signature expriment le temps et l'érosion.
C'est à mon avis la raison de leur existence.
Je ne crois pas que les graffiteurs ont envie d'âbimer le château, le détruire.
Ou peut-être que si, un peu, victimes du syndrome de Stendhal.
Mais surtout, je pense qu'ils ont besoin de marquer le temps qui passent, et leur fragilité humaine sur le monument de pierre qui veut nier le vieillissement.

music, notation, from heavens to history, back to the cloud.

The first main historical articulation in western music is the apparition of notation. Let's not try to fix an exact moment in time, an exact location, nor its conditions neither its internal evolution. Let's just consider the general changes it implied.

It's generally accepted that the notation — (music notation, and any kind of language notation) —  allows sharing, comparing, transforming, elaborating.
In the case of music, the time before notation can be called the Orphic period: music was transmitted from one to one, this individual being half deified, in possession of a special power. This power was connected to magic, to gods, to charms. One can think of the bard, of the singing ladies in Africa when one passes away to have living examples of this conception.
That's why catholic Church kept suspicion on music for such a long time: it was suspected to be either too sensual (made for the entertainment of the crowd) or pagan: a contrepower to Jesus one. Music, before being written, was a divine power. The first musician had magic powers, and he was the only one to have it. Given by gods, music was to come to certain persons, exclusively. Music and musicians, therefore, were not questionable, they were superior.  Before music was writable, notated, it had to be thought as a a-historical art: a dangerous a temporal magical apparition which could put crowds in trance. Time, evolution, comparison and hierarchy was not in use.

The apparition of notation is the start of the critical historical period, in which music falls from the Heaven to the mass of humans, ready to absorb it, copy it, analyze it, discuss it, change it, sign it. Music falls from the hands of God to the hands of the craftman.

This switch is the start of the notion of humanization of music, the authorship, the artist as a human living being. From there, the nostalgia of the first period is an easy path : the romantic artist will emphasize the connection between him and God, or at least the infinity, the transcendence. Liszt and Wagner for instance consider the artist to be the interface between the people and God, and music is the tool for that communication, under the name of GENIUS.
For Liszt, this genius goes through the path of virtuosity, the virtuoso being the assessor between mortality and deity. The construction of the Wagner personality cult is based on this nostalgia of the transcendent, para religious and superior role of the artist.

But since the beginning of the XX° century, when the industrial revolution starts to become the technological revolution, we are now leaving this critical historical period. The notation in music is not the central point of work for artists, neither it is the pivot in evolution of musical styles anymore. The musical score, which has been for centuries the main medium for music propagation, for the establishment of styles, for the teaching processes is now considered as a burden, a heavy tracing tool which can more easily and practically be replaced by video, and all the digital devices of producing music.

One side effect of the dissolution of the music score as a main media for transmission of music, is the reification of the score.
More attention is given to the conventional signs, which are so complex and peculiar that they are all but conventional.
The preface of the score can also grow and take more and more importance, when the actual staves are not strong enough to support all the information.

Clearly, the traditional notation has made its time, and its practical tonal emphasis on pitches and rhythms are just not appropriate anymore.
Everybody who wants to have a precise timber evolution with a bow, for instance, or notate the extraordinary potential of the sounds of the bow on the strings faces incommensurable difficulties.

Lachenmann string quartet. the notation emphasizes the timber evolution.

Therefore, the complexity of the notation raises, and becomes less and less sharable.
Each composer, even each score develops its own conventional system, (consistent or not).

That is exactly the opposite of notation: it's cryptic and requires a new reading learning each time.

And to go a bi further in this direction, this complexity, or at least the graphic potential as well as the musical developments don't need to coincide nymore, the score becoming an independant object, a work by itself.
Instead of concentrating its tools to the realization of the musical project, the score becomes a selfcontent object, a fetishized score.

Brian Ferneyhough, Unity Capsule

The hierarchy between professional musicians, listeners, producers is more and more disappearing, and is replaced by a cloud, fundamentally digital, and superficially manifested as a network. It's never been so easy for non musical readers to produce complex music, by the only use of alternative languages, proposed in the music softwares. Another symbolization of the music parameters than the traditional notation, simplified, but directly accessible, non to be read but to be assembled, distorted, through the visual interface tools: stretching the sound shape stretches the duration of the sound, etc.
The network which before was music schools, ensembles, orchestras, concert houses, opera houses, churches, is now the computer, the internet, some concert halls, festivals, clubs, and more specifically the different operators and distributors of music: youtube, Spotify, Facebook — all the rapidly changing and adapting the general movements.

This period replaces the perspective in historical critical view by a systemic and structural thought.
Technology gives us new powers: a feeling of ubiquity (we can see, listen and communicate with any part of the world where we are not physically present). We now can listen to music which is not performed at the same moment, neither at the same place, not even by LIVING musicians.
A good illustration of the drama carried by technology in the relation to the world in the 50s is the formal refusal of traditional Indian musicians to record their performance, because their music (ragas) is to be performed at certain hours of the day and not others. To play this music at another moment of time might disrupt the normal course of the universe.

As folklorist this vision can seem today, one must not underestimate the beliefs that underlined the roles, functions and meanings of music. Exorcisms, ritual dances in shamanism, were sociological and cultural structural elements, not decorating superfluous entertainments.

And now that with technology everyone is able to produce music without notation, and the networks make it possible to spread music all over without any pressure from a social group, (no professionality needed), we are slowly turning back to the orphic conception of music: ubiquity, no authorship, divine power, eternal life of the artist, universality of the message...

The New Discipline, by Jennifer Walshe

“Theater provides the unique experience of watching the body in real time, inside a story…there is reality occurring in front of viewing eyes, and the combustible mix of reality with what is being presented on stage is enticing and electric.”

— Richard Maxwell, Theater for Beginners

“…I was born with an ectomorphic body, all skin and bones. However, after being inspired by a passage from the diaries of the Pop artist Mr. Andy Warhol – a passage where he expresses his sorrow after learning in his middle-fifties that if he had exercised, he could have had a body (imagine not having a body!) – I was galvanized into action…..Hence, I now have a body.”

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X

“The New Discipline” is a term I’ve adopted over the last year. The term functions as a way for me to connect compositions which have a wide range of disparate interests but all share the common concern of being rooted in the physical, theatrical and visual, as well as musical; pieces which often invoke the extra-musical, which activate the non-cochlear. In performance, these are works in which the ear, the eye and the brain are expected to be active and engaged. Works in which we understand that there are people on the stage, and that these people are/have bodies.

Examples of composers working in this way include: Object Collection, James Saunders, Matthew Shlomowitz, Neele Hülcker, François Sarhan, Jessie Marino, Steven Takasugi, Natacha Diels, myself.

The New Discipline is a way of working, both in terms of composing and preparing pieces for performance. It isn’t a style, though pieces may share similar aesthetic concerns. Composers working in this way draw on dance, theatre, film, video, visual art, installation, literature, stand-up comedy. In the rehearsal room the composer functions as a director or choreographer, perhaps most completely as an auteur. The composer doesn’t have aspirations to start a theatre group – they simply need to bring the tools of the director or choreographer to bear on compositional problems, on problems of musical performance. This is the discipline – the rigour of finding, learning and developing new compositional and performative tools. How to locate a psychological/physiological node which produces a very specific sound; how to notate tiny head movements alongside complex bow manoeuvres; how to train your body so that you can run 10 circuits of the performance space before the piece begins; how to make and maintain sexualised eye contact with audience members whilst manipulating electronics; how to dissolve the concept of a single author and work collectively; how to dissolve the normal concept of what a composition is.

And always, always, working against the clock, because the disciplines which are drawn from have the luxury of development and rehearsal periods far longer than those commonly found in new music. Then again, the New Discipline relishes the absence of that luxury, of the opportunity to move fast and break things. In this way, it is a *practice* more than anything else. And the concomitant: the New Discipline is located in the fact of composers being interested and willing to perform, to get their hands dirty, to do it themselves, do it immediately.






The New Discipline thrives on the inheritance of Dada, Fluxus, Situationism etc but doesn’t allow itself to be written off merely as Dada, Fluxus, Situationism etc. It’s a music being written when Dada, Fluxus, Situationism etc have aged well and are universally respected. It takes these styles for granted, both lovingly and cheekily, in the same way it takes harmony and the electric guitar for granted. As starting points. As places to begin working.

New Discipline works can easily be designated, even well-meaningly ghettoised, as “music theatre”. While Kagel et al are clear ancestors, too much has happened since the 1970s for that term to work here. MTV, the Internet, Beyonce ripping off Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Stewart Lee, Girls, style blogs and yoga classes at Darmstadt, Mykki Blanco, the availability of cheap cameras and projectors, the supremacy of YouTube documentations over performances. Maybe what is at stake for the New Discipline is the fact that these pieces, these modes of thinking about the world, these compositional techniques – they are not “music theatre”, they *are* music. Or from a different perspective, maybe what is at stake is the idea that all music is music theatre. Perhaps we are finally willing to accept that the bodies playing the music are part of the music, that they’re present, they’re valid and they inform our listening whether subconsciously or consciously. That it’s not too late for us to have bodies.

Jennifer Walshe, Roscommon, January 2016

jones big ass harmonisation

Where does this fascination for the harmonization come from ?

A lot of musicians nowadays post arrangements of anything spoken, sung, whether it is spectacular, like Obama 's speech, or funny and cheap, like the example of Jones Big Ass Truck rental.

What is the source of this attraction, and of this interest ?

First one must say that the technic is not new: already in the seventies, and early eighties, artists like Zappa have been interested in the music of the speech, and reinforced it by simple doubling :

Then the next step in elaborating on spoken voice introduced into music was to add an harmonization, by Steve Reich, for instance:

Here the samples of the voices are very short, and the music is more important than the quantity of text, of prerecorded material.

In the case of pre recorded material, like Big Ass Jones, the idea is more to give a musical environment to natural sounds, whether they are vocal, or environmental, accompanied with image. In the case of Reich, it's more a material to elaborate a classical composition.

THe fundamental idea in this doubling is the idea of melting different layers of perception and reality: one being daily, without value, with no importance: the spoken voice, even for Big Ass Jones, parody, dirtiness of signification. To give it a new value, a astonishing value, a preciousness which is far from being implied by the first material :

 In the case of Reich, it's a bit different, since the samples are cleaner, and selected to such a degree that they could have been recorded on purpose.

The basic, the fundamental idea in this confrontation of reality and the precious world of delicate harmony (in the case of Big Jones Ass it's particularly sophisticated) is the magical idea of revealing the invisible in the visible, namely to reveal the hidden musical structure of the banal common life. 

It is restauring a sort of unity which is not lost, but seems to have always been here although hidden.

It is not religious, since it doesn't imply an idea of any god or any humiliation/passivity/acceptance, it's really inside the nature of music, which is to be a magical act of revealing the secret relations between our perception and nature.