Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
LUC FERRARI: RECHERCHES FILMIQUES
November 21 – November 27
French composer Luc Ferrari (1929-2005) was one of the progenitors of musique concrète and a pioneer of and resonantly idiosyncratic voice within electroacoustic music. Ferrari was an early participant in the Groupe de Musique Concrète and, with Pierre Schaeffer and François-Bernard Mâche, co-founded the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1958. In the mid-1960s, largely unaltered environmental recordings began to work their way into his compositions, a process that culminated in the tremendously influential “Presque rien No. 1 (Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer)” (1970), a work whose source material was comprised exclusively of recordings made from a point overlooking a beach on the Dalmatian coast.
Throughout his career, Ferrari worked in multiple forms: instrumental works, vocal music, text scores, electronic and electroacoustic music, and Hörspiele. A lesser-known dimension of his career, however, is his intersection with the cinema. Together with Gérard Patris, he realized the marvelous series of short documentary films about musicians in rehearsal entitled THE GREAT REHEARSALS (1965-66), and soon thereafter made a short film of his own, LES JEUNES FILLES (1967). He also contributed musical scores to a wide variety of moving-image works, from the educational film FAR FROM EQUILIBRIUM (1978) and Patris’s THE MAGICIAN’S APPRENTICE (1977) (a feature-length piece inspired by the life and writings of Boris Vian), to the extraordinary CHRONOPOLIS (1981-82) by avant-garde animator Piotr Kamler (the subject of his own retrospective taking place simultaneously here at Anthology; click here for more details).
Anthology is thrilled to host a film series encompassing all of the above-mentioned works. The series is presented on the occasion of the publication of the book “Luc Ferrari: Complete Works” (Ecstatic Peace Library), and in conjunction with “Luc Ferrari: Stereo Spasms,” a festival of concerts taking place at Pioneer Works on November 18 & 19.
For more info about “Luc Ferrari: Complete Works” and “Luc Ferrari: Stereo Spasms” visit: https://ecstaticpeacelibrary.net and https://pioneerworks.org/
This retrospective is presented with support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. Special thanks to Brunhild Ferrari, David Grubbs, and Eva Prinz, as well as to Oliver Dickens (Close-Up), Amélie Garin-Davet (Cultural Services of the French Embassy), Matthieu Lamotte (AAA Production), Andrew Lampert, Catherine Marcangeli, Tazz Nishihara, and Eve Patris Schaeffer. The introduction and film descriptions are adapted from texts by David Grubbs and Eva Prinz.
