Restoring sound and music: a new composition?

There can be no film restoration without sound restoration. Over the last twenty years or so, the digital revolution has increased the possibilities. But technology cannot do everything, and the meticulousness of such work, akin to the work of an archaeologist, will require ever greater patience and sensitivity.

What about documentary sound? Is there a difference between preserving sound recorded in a studio and preserving sound taken live on location? Restoration does not consist of renovating a soundtrack in order to achieve perfection but, on the contrary, of restoring the original listening conditions: returning the film to its original state, as seen and heard by its contemporaries.

Technique aside, the sound archive is also an artistic material in its own right. On the one hand, it inspires composers who work on the resonorisation and musicalisation of the first silent films, integrating into their scores a whole series of original elements that are hijacked and then reused in order to take over a voice that is missing. On the other hand, artists take advantage of these waves from the past to experiment with the plasticity of the material: saturations, stridency, alterations… What, then, is the meaning of restoration? Isn’t the inevitable degradation of the tape the work itself and its mutation over time?

This round table proposes to share the various sound recompositions that go beyond the framework of documentary cinema to include radio creations and contemporary art.

Moderated by: Antoine Guillot – journalist – France Culture

With:

• Rodolphe Burger
  — musician, composer
  author of the soundtrack for the restoration of Edward S. Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters (1915), © 2014, Capricci / Dernière bande
• Laurence Braunberger
  — producer (Les Films du Jeudi)
• Mauro Coceano
  — musician, composer
• Enrico Camporesi
  — head of research and documentation at the film collection department of the Musée national d’art moderne, author of Futurs de l’obsolescence, Essai sur la restauration du film d’artiste (2018, Ed. Mimésis)
• Léon Rousseau
  — mixer, composer, sound restorer, studio L.E Diapason
• Vincent Fromont
  — Head of Radio Restoration & Mastering – INA