Short Stories

The specialist's opinion

A tribute to cinema, one might say, to describe the universe of this piece which, from then on, can be listened to as a series of five short films linked by a leitmotif.

This characteristic theme by its descending fourths and its rhythmic 7 is metamorphosed according to these five movements and will ensure the transitions between each of these worlds.

Each of these stories, without being explicitly linked to a particular film, is nourished by my experience as an improviser which has led me to accompany so many silent films for more than twenty years. It is certain, for example, that the inhuman machinery of Fritz Lang's Metropolis inspired the cold and haunting rhythmic writing of the first piece, and that the memory of the frenzied hi-hat staged by Jean Renoir in Sur un air de charleston radiates the central scherzo, while the second story gives way to a song that seems to come from the East, declaimed on an inexorable drumming background. It is on a kind of slow almost unreal tracking shot where time seems to finally stretch that the fourth movement opens before throwing itself, after a few unsuccessful attempts, into a brief final summary.