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The Film
Philippe Garrel’s family psycho-drama is an infamous internalisation of the events of May 1968. Involved in the student barricades at the time, Garrel later that year went to Munich and filmed this silent B&W re-enactment of primal scenes, biblical allegory and political subtext. Working closely with three actors and two camera personnel, he shaped a ‘cine-tract’ which complexly maps its dramatic arcs through a series of mesmerising moments and psychological schisms. Viewed 36 years later beyond the over-mythologized glory of May ‘68, the film’s originating layers of meaning can still be gleaned, but only through the cinematic sheen which renders the film more of a Lumière Brothers’ anthropological document than an enshrined political calling-card. The raw cinematography and the brutishly arcane lighting ‘reveals’ the palpable quality of the actors’ facial nuances, their ragged clothes, the awkwardness of their bodies, the flat beauty of the landscape and interiors. Maybe less polemical and more poetic at this point in history, the disquieting overlapping between the skewed and flayed emotional states of the family resonate unnervingly well in today’s dysfunctional climate.
The Score
Rather than pretend that we are ‘going back to 68’ by experiencing “Le Révélateur” in 2004, Philip Brophy’s Aurévélateur is a reconstructed/reinvented score that disavows historical illusion and instead focuses on the emotional fissures of the film as forensic data: visible evidence that suggests motivation to the twists and turns of the film’s cycles of embrace and rejection. Avoiding recourse to the stereotypical ‘romantic agony’ which French cinema loves a bit too much, Aurévélateur presents an intense aural explication of the psychological nodes that direct the film’s momentum, providing a sensory synaptic read-out of the on-screen characters’ interior states. Eviscerating the harmonic formulae of late 60’s French pop chansons, the score works with a studio-based ensemble of organ, vibraphone, bass and drums. These sections and fragments are then recomposed and digitally processed, and mixed in quadraphonic sound. Embellished by live keyboards by Philip Brophy and guitars by Dave Brown, Aurévélateur creates an appropriately dysfunctional sono-drama to match the disjointed beauty of the original film.The overall concept behind composing a score to “Le Révélateur was to create a parallel text that literally and figuratively 'plays with' (in the musical sense) the primary visual text. The idea was to work musically/musicologically in a 'cinephilia' mode by generating texts that talk back to the film rather than 'accompany' it as per the method used mostly in film scoring. The key formal aspect that developed and became a guiding principle was that the music became the 'backing' to the performers as if they were rhythmatized-musicians themselves. In the case of sections which feature sung lyrics, the performers are treated virtually as mime artists - mainly cued by the a fewmoments in the film where the woman looks at the camera. On top of this, the musical content is essentially a musicological map - in fact, quite possibly a true historical palimpsest rather than a metaphor for one - based on forward-tracing the influences that have accrued in the proceeding 36 years founded on the major mexus between the Velvet Underground's US drone rock and the European 'Krautrock' assimilation of the Velvet's pre-deconstructed rock sound. The actual momentum and musical dynamics of each track are directly responding to what I would perceive as the psychological dimension of the man/woman's love-hate drama as it unfolds as a compressed 'micro-theatre' in front of the child-audience.
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