The interpreter

The "interpreter" machine takes up the typology of a projection device from the beginning of cinema: a projection surface, a musician set back (the column).
The latter element is designed as a musical instrument in its own right. The lower part is a subwoofer and the upper inclined plane reflects the highs coming from tweeters placed behind the LCD screen (pianos). The keyboards were filmed with an audio/video sampling device. The editing was done on a specific audio/video loop sampling program.
The images were taken from Robert Wiene's "Orlacs Hände" (1924) and Karl Freund's "Mad Love" (1935). Both films are adaptations of Maurice Renard's novel "Orlac's hands" (1921), in which a famous pianist is grafted with the hands of a murderer following a train accident.

The Interpreter is a cinematographic essay. "A sound is one thing, an image is something else, this sound and this image together is something else again". Taking advantage of this observation, the composer Michel Chion envisaged a new medium, audio-vision, where sound and image would have the same importance and would be created jointly. In practice, it is otherwise. The paths of musical and sound creations most often unfold like two parallel lines that never intersect in a simultaneous practice. We create music on an image, an image inspires a sound. We go from the piano to the editing table, from the camera to the multitrack tape recorder. We do not do both at the same time. "The Interpreter" is an attempt to unify the two practices in the same gesture and the same inspiration. Considering that a visual stimulus is worth a sound stimulus, that image and sound are as inseparable as chroma and light, I use the editing table as much as an instrument of sound composition as visual.
I first used an audio-video sampling process to record myself on the piano. Then I deconstructed the image and sound material by creating evolving loops using algorithms. I made very large slow motions on the silent film by erasing the jerky aspect thanks to a pixel remanence process. Then I applied the editor's tools (repetitions, inversions, rhythmic figures, speed variations) to recompose film and music jointly (there is the influence of experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold).
At the end of this long, complex process, there's "The Interpreter", about a man who can no longer play the piano. Who can no longer be spontaneous. Who can no longer be in communion with an audience, in the moment and in gesture. This is the story of cinema, when it stopped being a live performance with a musician and commentator and became an exclusively recorded spectacle. It's also my personal story with the piano: I can only improvise. I'm incapable of playing the same thing twice. If I put myself under the constraint of interpreting and re-editing, my hands just won't respond. For something to come out of it, I have to forget them, or rather they have to forget me, which is the theme of "Orlac's hands".