Ciné-concert ‘Le Petit Fugitif’ par Eric Chenaux

‘A propos’ by Eric Chenaux

The original sound and soundtrack of ‘The Little Fugitive’ consists of the ambient sound of streets, an apartment, the subway, Coney Island and the beach at Coney Island as well as a persistent harmonica mostly vamping on the old American chestnut Where The Buffalo Roam. The ciné-concert sound/score can be separated into two parts: 1. Ambient sound I have always appreciated films with little or no music, so began I by deleting the harmonica, which I found overnarrated the feeling of the film. Inspired by the films of Bresson, Godard, Tsai Ming–liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul and their employment of ambient sound in the location where the camera is shooting, I decided to remake and accentuate the ambient sound of ‘The Little Fugitive’ by recording, here in Saint-Ouen, all of the “types” of ambient sound in the film. I walked around Saint-Ouen with my portable recorder for a few weeks and recorded places that simulated these places in the film. The apartment, the subway, the desolate area, the inside of a store and the various street scenes were easy enough to find. We have those in Saint-Ouen and I consider myself lucky to have an apartment. Coney Island was more of a challenge. The closest thing I could find was the marché, a place of vitality, with people yelling and vendors shouting into the crowd. But what about the beach? Saint-Ouen is landlocked, so I was stuck.  Then I remembered the indoor public swimming pool (it was October!) where I regularly swim, and recorded children playing in the water. After recording all of these places I synchronized them with the film, following the edits of the camera. The film now had a new soundtrack that resembled, if only generally, the ambient sounds in the original. 2. Dialogue and Guitar It is a little harder to describe this part, but I will give it a shot. One of my reveries has been to make a soundtrack for film that would only have music when there is dialogue. Usually, there is dialogue and then music, so that the dialogue is not drowned out by music and the music “fills in” the spaces between dialogue – continuing the narrative, in a way. I came at this from another direction – putting music and dialogue together, like a song! And the rest of the time, we can bathe in the images along with my retrofitted ambient sounds of those locations. I proceeded by sending the original sound of the film out of the projector and into a very small cell-phone speaker, which I placed in my mouth. Yep, I open my mouth, to let the sound out, only when there is dialogue. I keep my mouth closed the rest of the time (no harmonica!). What we hear is the dialogue filtered through my mouth cavity, much like the sound of the “talk-box” guitar in Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer”, or if you wish, a very cheap wah-wah pedal. This mouth-filtered dialogue is also triggering the amplified sound of my guitar playing. I play a long melody throughout the entire film and it is only heard when it is triggered by the sound coming out of my mouth. When my mouth is closed, therefore, we do not hear the guitar. What we hear is some kind of rhythmic counterpoint between the phrases spoken in the film and the guitar melody. The film begins with a lot of dialogue and slowly moves towards very little dialogue (therefore very little guitar), which makes for a rather minimal take on the idea of a ciné-concert. In the end, the work becomes more ciné than concert–but only if we do not consider the field recordings to be music, which, I believe, is something we may be able to enjoy doing.

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Eric Chenaux: guitar, miniature loudspeaker

A creation of the Vendôme Film Festival, in partnership with Figures libres and with the support of the SACEM.