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ABSTRACT
Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s Le Joli mai documents Paris in May 1962 – the first month of peace after the Evian agreements brought a conclusion to the Algerian War. It is a film that is often discussed in relation to its importance as a sociological text and for its artistic value. Yet, its importance as a milestone in the history of French film sound design remains to be explored. This article will consider how emerging technologies shaped the production process of Le Joli mai, where sonic considerations often led decision making about the images in a reversal of the conventional image-sound hierarchy. While the film employs a score by Michel Legrand and the voice of Yves Montand, smooth integration of the soundscape is destabilised due to the desire to capture real-world sounds and atmosphere. The article situates Le Joli mai at the nexus of sonic tradition and innovation, considering the film in relation to documentary sound, song in French cinema and the innovations of contemporary New Wave film. It argues that Le Joli mai presents a model of French film sound design that reflected social disruption sonically and paralleled ongoing polemics of early 1960s France.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the Editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and insights. I would also like to express thanks to Sarah Gubbins and Emily Payne for comments on early drafts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Musique concrète refers to electroacoustic music which separated sounds from their sources by recording and subsequently manipulating them in studios.
2. ‘Sound design’ in this article is interpreted holistically as encompassing music, sound effects, dialogue, voiceover rather than the narrower definition of postproduction sound effects only.
3. The music in Marker’s early essay films is discussed in McMahon (Citation2015).
4. Writings on music in New Wave cinema include Williams (Citation1985) and McMahon (Citation2014).
5. The interview format elicited many comparisons between Le Joli mai and Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961) in both contemporary reception and secondary literature. Sonically, Le Joli mai’s soundscape is more complex due to the range of sonic elements at play: commentary, direct sound, pre-existing song, original score by Legrand.
6. See Braggs (Citation2016) on post-war musical migration of African American musicians to Paris and the importance of the jazz club in Parisian musical and social life.
7. See Claudia Gorbman’s seven principles of composition, mixing and editing (Citation1987, chapter four).
8. Marker’s cartoon of his cat Guillaume was used at the 2018 exhibition celebrating his work at the Paris Cinémathèque instead of the director’s photograph.
9. Jennifer Rowekamp (Citation2019) has explored the persistence of this musical trope in more recent Hollywood films.
10. Martin Barnier observes that the siren, usually tested on the first Wednesday of the month, can be interpreted as a call to alertness on the part of the audience and as establishing the opening of the documentary as the start of the month of May (Citation2008, 206).
11. I am grateful to sound designer Steve Fanagan for noting this at a paper presentation of this research.
12. Orlene Denice McMahon has researched Marker’s earlier essay films, exploring how music works in their combinative architecture to argue that his soundtracks critique the ethic of objectivity presented by realist documentary forms by deliberately drawing attention to sound’s creative impact on the images.
13. ‘In any documentary, one can distort reality, thanks to commentary, music, etc. Direct sound makes it almost impossible.’
14. ‘All those who have worked with Antoine know his dedication to going looking for “ambiances” – all alone at dawn, in the street, in the country, on the lookout for the first tremors of the city, the passage of birds, the distant pulse of a factory, bringing back the trophies of this fishing for sounds, of which, after mixing, there will only remain a few seconds, but a few completely unexpected seconds. […] For him, the sound was not raw data that one hears passively and records from purely technical parameters, it was a force to understand, to seize, to capture, to tame, to metamorphose. In this the sound was really the metaphor for the whole world, for all society.’
15. Schaeffer began his experimentation in the wake of WWII, establishing a research group, writing about his work in contemporary journals and piloting new music in concerts. The programme notes for the first public concert of musique concrète in March 1950 described it as ‘the use of sound in its native state, supplied by nature, fixed by machines and transformed through their manipulations’ (quoted in Goldman Citation2015, 185). More important to the dissemination of musique concrète was the radio, particularly the Club d’Essai, a key site of experimentation that could reach larger audiences than ever before. Its situation as a locus for sharing new work with the masses is reflected in the range of French poets and artists who engaged with it. Indeed, Alter records that in 1949 and 1950 Marker made several broadcasts on the radio and his programme ‘Jusqu’à la fin des temps’ (Citation1949) was transmitted through the Club d’Essai (Alter Citation2006, 11).
16. ‘Neither sound effects nor symphony, musique concrète easily demonstrated its dramatic effectiveness, its broadcasting potential.’
17. See Kulezic-Wilson (Citation2018) and Langlois (Citation2012). Walter Murch has described the impact of musique concrète on his thinking about sound during his formative years; see Ondaatje (Citation2002).
18. It is interesting to note that this seems to be an extension of Marker’s approach on the simultaneous project La Jetée, where he preferred that the sound engineer Bonfanti was not influenced by the images (see Barnier Citation2008, 202).
19. ‘Bonbon isolated a voice and attracted the attention of Pierre who came to frame his sound source, or vice versa, never losing sight of the objective, understanding what Pierre was aiming to capture and going to capture the sound corresponding to the flight, like a cormorant his fish. In the same way that the violin and viola are in concert, one could say that these two invented the concerto for the Éclair and Nagra.’
20. ‘Pierre had only one earphone to be able to hear at the same time with the other ear, as he was framing with one eye while keeping the other open. It gave him lots of ideas. When I went to get a little sound next to him, he heard it, opening his eyes, and if it was interesting, he would go. Subsequently, he could not do without the sound, if I forgot the listening back facility he was mad with rage. That was a great innovation in the image/sound relationship.’
21. Thanks to the anonymous reviewer who pointed this out.
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Laura Anderson
Laura Anderson is Assistant Professor in Musicology at University College Dublin specialising in film music, sound design and twentieth-century music. Previously, Laura was Irish Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellow at Maynooth University (2017–2019) where her project ‘Disruptive Soundscapes’ offered a new view of avant-garde post-war French film sound design by examining its relationship with wider cultural developments. She has published in Music and Letters, Twentieth-Century Music and The Journal of Film Music. Other current projects include publications on pre-existing music in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Les Enfants terribles and music and sound in Brian Boydell’s documentary films.