François Musy

Recording For Godard

Published in Cinesonic - Cinema & the Sound of Music - AFTRS Publishing, Sydney © 2000
Transcribed & edited by Philip Brophy from the talk delivered at the conference in 1999

Introduction

Jean Luc Godard is one of the few directors in film history who have been extremely vocal about the role sound plays in the cinematic experience. His production company - Son/Image - was as much a polemical statement as a catchy name. While many of us are familiar with that 60s 'Godard effect' when the music or a sound atmosphere brutishly cuts in or cuts out of a scene like someone is randomly cutting-&-pasting the various tracks, little critical thought has been given to the way Godard has worked this effect from the 80s on.

François Musy has designed, edited and mixed most of Godard's films since his pioneering work on Godard's Passion in 1983. Numerous films have followed - including Hail Mary, Nouvelle Vague and Alas pour Moi - which collectively display the high degree of aural sophistication with which Musy details and enhances the supposedly naturalistic aura of these films' soundtracks. Based predominantly on the employment of location sound - a strategy refined to an art form in France yet frustratingly blocked by various post-production conventions in most Anglo countries - Musy's work hovers between the orchestration of musique concrete and the lush evocation of ambient soundscapes. They are integral to the audiovisual make-up of Godard's late cinema.

Philip Brophy

Recording Sound for Godard

I have chosen to speak specifically about three films directed by Jean Luc Godard: Passion, Soigne Ta Droite (Keep Up Your Right) and Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). These films are particularly interesting because they show how Godard uses sound as part of the writing of his scripts, and avoids the use of post-syncronized sound. Godard places much importance on location sound. I have worked with him on 20 films and we have never employed post-synchronization. As you can imagine, that entails quite a few problems, some of which I will talk about later.

Passion

I will start with Passion which is the first film on which I worked with Godard. Central to the film is a story about a director making a movie. In Passion there is a scene featuring one long take, and incorporated into the location sound is the sound of music coming from a portable stereo which gets louder or softer. The actors follow this in a way: all the close ups and long shots are in accordance with their decision to come closer to the camera or move away from it, so the sound appears to be responding in a way. At one stage the music stops and the actor playing the director even talks to me on set, and Godard perversely has me answer him as he asks me to change something about the playback of the music.

At another stage, the director asks an actor "Do you really feel for what's happening in Poland?". This was shot right at the height of Solidarnosc. The actor asks the director "Do you want to go back home?". Well, the director is played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz who was from Poland, and he was actually waiting to go back home to Poland. Now this might not be a very important detail from the sound point of view, but it demonstrates the way that Godard works by responding to both people immediately around him and larger events happening in the world. He has always incorporated such things in his films.

Soigne Ta Droite

Soigne Ta Droite is a film about creativity and the act of creating something. It is centred on the band Les Rita Mitsouko, and many sequences feature the two members of the band in the studio composing and recording songs. In many ways the shots are more conventional than the use of long tracking shots as in Passion, but in terms of sound, all the sound you hear is still location sound. You hear all the sounds of the band recording their music in the studio - including feedback, intercom voices, etc.

This occurs all through the film, as we were filming and recording the band while they were composed and recorded their music. At the end of the film, the band actually finishes the album. Soigne Ta Droite comes from the period when Godard discovered stereo. Prior to this film, he directed Detective where he used it to its full effect, and this film carries on some of those ideas. But what I suggested to Godard for Soigne Ta Droite was to not use the master of the music in the final mix as we had done previously, but to use the multi-track that was used for the recording, and access the separate individual tracks for mixing.

In one scene, we are cutting from many locations or environments - inside and outside of the studio - while the music from the multi-track is sometimes synced to the band on screen, and then other times combined with other sound. At one point we are in a plane with a pilot who is in the cockpit reading a book

. All the scenes shot in the plane were also shot using location sound - at 2000 meters in the air. The problem with such a small plane is that the sound was completely saturated with engine noise and we couldn't record anything. So we had to negotiate with the pilot to run the engines in a way that a certain frequency would be reached were we could record. The pilot had to keep flying so that the engines played this frequency so we could continue shooting and recording. At one stage there is a scene where we shoot the pilot to show that he is flying, but to do that we had to place the camera man in the cockpit next to the pilot's seat, and you can see that the actor playing the pilot is nervous about having a camera person virtually flying the plane. But the scene did require that the character of the pilot appear nervous, so Godard got the desired effect.

Nouvelle Vague

In Nouvelle Vague I think it is very interesting in the way that the sound is built from the text, and the way that the dramaturgy meshes with the soundtrack. In the scene where Alain Delon is stranded and trying to get a lift from many cars passing on the country road, you have location sound of all the cars passing and their car horns. Well, the string quartet music which is in that scene was decided upon prior to the scene being shot, and the direction of the traffic is in fact timed to how the music was known to play across the whole scene. The traffic is built upon the music. As the shots at the end of that sequence change focus - going from sharp to blurry - it was shot to the rhythm and timing of the music.

In a following sequence, Delon is in a very noisy factory. Delon is shot in the foreground, and in the background is all the activity of the factory - people talking, machines, etc. The dialogue heard here is not that important. Delon is asked what he is doing here; he replies that he is inspiring pity. When shooting in that factory, we of course could not turn off any of the machinery, so the actors were put in the situation of being in a real factory rather than a set. This adds to the drama.

Questions

Have you worked on anything which required post-production sound or sound not composed solely from location recording?

I did the stereo remix for Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). It is quite the other extreme from the work I have done for Godard. The score is by Michel Legrand, who did the score for Godard's Bande a Part. When the film was first released in 1963, Jacques Demy wanted to produce the film in stereo but was not able to do so. Then in 1997, Agnes Varda supervised a re-release of the film and I was asked to re-master the film in high fidelity stereo from the original tracks. I stress that I re-mastered rather than remixed because the film was originally recorded in stereo in 1962.

What or who have been some of your influences?

Well someone who I would like to pay tribute to is (?) who worked on Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. The sounds I worked with in that re-mastering were his originally-recorded sounds. Another person whom I regard as very important is someone I regard as the master of the modern mix in film sound Jacques Maumont. He worked on many films including an American film The Longest Day.

In terms of your working relationship with Godard, how do you both decide on which songs to use in a film?

As far as music is concerned, Godard selects everything before the shoot. Sometimes I will suggest some music to him. For example I gave Godard an early recording of Arvo Part before Part had became quite famous, and Godard ended up using Part in a number of films from that point. As far as other non-musical sounds are concerned, most of it is sourced from location recordings. Sometimes Godard and I compose with those sounds afterwards while editing the film. When Godard works on a scene he is very precise not only in his use of the script, the actors, the visuals, but also the music and sounds. He plans much of the soundtrack before the shoot, and never regards it as something to be added later.

Do you ever have arguments with Godard?

No. It is always better to choose to work with someone you don't argue with. Still, it's not always that easy.

Do you work with more than two channels of direct sound when recording on location?

I work recording sound on location as most other sound recordists would, but because Godard pays so much attention to sound prior to going on location, my methods are a little different. I use 2 stereo recording machines, so there are always at least 4 tracks being recorded. Godard likes to document and retain every sound that is happening while shooting, even if some of those sounds end up only in the background. I therefore try to record all that is happening with a scene. Because Godard is so particular, I have to be equally particular about my recording. For example, Godard might have built a whole sequence around the sound of a door, so a very good recording is needed of that sound while the scene is being shot.

Godard's soundtracks often have music that starts and stops abruptly. How do you and/or Godard decide when music and silence occur?

The placement of music and silence is never random although it may appear that way. When we are editing, Godard is clear about exactly when he wants any sound to occur. The logic of that placement very much matches the way Godard directs. The way he chooses the music is the same way that he chooses his imagery - it's all part of his particular creative process. Sometimes I have disagreed with where the sounds are placed in relation to the image. The placement may have appeared too much of a counter-rhythm to the image or whatever, but then when I listen to it carefully I understand why the choice was made for that placement. It's all part of Godard's decision-making process as a director.

Why does Godard mostly use source songs rather than scored music for his films?

Godard used composers and musicians in early films like Contempt, Pierrot Le Fou and Weekend, but later he used only music that was already recorded or about to be published. In these latter cases he would have worked out an agreement with the record publishers prior to the music being released. This was not for financial reasons, but because of the way Godard would think about the music for his films prior to shooting rather than dealing with a score later.

As a professional, what do you think are the relationships or differences between sound as it is produced for European films, and sound as it is produced in American Hollyood movies?

In France, you could say we have the same tools for film making as does Hollywood, but the two cinemas - French and American - are very different culturally, which is just as well for everybody. Working on a French film may be quite similar to working on an American one, but once again cultural differences arise. It is true that recording sound on location as opposed to post-producing it later in studios is determined by economics, but in French cinema that factor became more of a cultural choice.

In Italy, though, if you are working on location and you ask for silence if someone is banging on something in the carpentry department, they will not stop. In France there are many comedies based heavily on dialogue, so location recording of the actors' talking is a better way to work with the sound. It is also true that recording on location and using location sound in a production has been perceived as a specialty in French cinema, but now many other countries adopt this approach: Spain, England, even the States. In fact, the issue of using location sound is now mostly a directorial choice rather than a cultural or economic one.

Most films produced for sale in international markets require a Music & Effects mix, where all the music is placed on one track, all the sound effects on a second track, and all the dialogue on a third. This requires that those categories of sound remain separate so that the dialogue track can be replaced with a foreign dubbed track. Considering how much you fuse all these componenets by your comples use of location sound, how do you produce M&E tracks for international releases of Godard films?

Godard works in a rare and unusual way. He does not wish to produce any international versions of his films. He thus does not have to produce M&E mixes to sell to territories and countries outside of France. The exceptions to this have been Nouvelle Vague and Detective. These were released in international versions requiring M&E mixes. But other films I have worked on not directed by Godard have required me to produce M&E mixes.

Considering Godard's way of working with actors and with location sound, have you found that you have had to re-shoot scenes because the sound was no good or fix the dialogue up in post-production?

Well, Godard tries to use the sound from the location, but if he has to redo the sound, he will redo it on location. That is, we will record the required dialogue 'wild'.

Considering how much location sound is recorded live while a scene is being shot, how do you set up microphones to record a scene?

Good question - but I don't really how I'm doing it until I start on the day. I can use anywhere between 1 to 5 microphones, but I have to be careful using too many mics or else I will start to hear the 'floor noise' or deep ambient rumble from all the mics recording at once. I have to very careful about this. I'd like to acknowledge the contribution of all the sound recordists and boom operators who work on the films, because they are the ones who are most responsible for the quality of the sound that I will then be working with.

Many Godard films feature characters quoting or reading from books. Are those lines of dialogue recorded while a scene is being shot, or are they recorded separately and edited in later?

Sometime those lines are recorded separately, but sometimes there is someone off-camera reading those quotes, because Godard likes the actors to react to that on set.

Who initiated the CD release of the complete soundtrack to Nouvelle Vague in 1997, and how was it received?

The CD release arose from the German record label ECM wishing to work with Godard in some way, so an agreement was reached between them and Godard for that recording. There have been other examples where the complete soundtrack to a film has been released on record, where you hear every footstep, dialogue line and music, etc., but it is very rare. Apocalypse Now was released in that form. The problem with such 'soundtracks' is of course their commercial viability, but there does appear to be some measure of interest in such projects. In fact shortly we will have the release of Godard's complete Histoire(s) du Cinema released on a 5 CD set. Virgin is another label that has been interested in these type of releases. A problem, though, that arises with these sort of releases is the copyright permission required for not only the music, but also the actors. There are many grey areas here.

It is interesting that you say that in France, recording post-sync dialogue is too expensive, therefore location sound is preferred. In the United States, the situation is that post-syncing dialogue is employed because recording good dialogue on location is regarded as being too expensive.

A lot of actors in France work within a pro-rata system where the actors are paid for their work at the same rate whether they are doing post-syncing in a studio or performing during the shoot. This means that if you have to use them and pay accordingly, you may as well re-shoot. Of course in France we will use post-sync dialogue if it is obviously reasonable to do so.

Another important factor in this is the comparative budget differences between French and American films. A French film budget will be more towards $3m to $6m. Plus, the studio facilities in France are extremely expensive. Yet even though the cultural practice in France is to use location recording mostly, there are exceptions. Directors like Jean-Jacques Annaud does all his films with post-synced dialogue, so as I said before, the choice is really up to the director.