The Absence and Intensification of Musical Influence on the Perception of Time - Text 2
A completely opposite effect may be sought. In Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (Zéro de conduite, 1933), whose music by Maurice Jaubert is heard in reverse, the recording of the music was also played in reverse (Jaubert printed the score in reverse for the musicians). The effect is quite strange, as Vladimir Jankélévitch remarks: “Reversing the reversal never re-establishes things in entirely the right spot.”[2] And as Paul-Emmanuel Odin has remarked, drawing on comments by Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, music “gives tone to disorder”[3] to make the “internal rhythm”[4] of the images perceptible. This rejection of musical expressivity as such and the search for decorative music led him to see the accompaniment of scenes from a more conceptual perspective, which the viewer will not necessarily be aware of, like an unknown form of dissonance. In the present case, this “false place” is aligned in reality with an “unbalanced time”[5]: “this “music in which the instruments’ resonance cannot match the melodic line because it is going in the opposite direction. Such a contradiction at the heart of the music produces a poetic high tide, a vital drive.”[6]
Equally, from the perspective of a vital drive creating rhythm within an image, in this case the transposition of the Shepard-Risset glissando from the pitch to the rhythm provides an illusion of constant acceleration (or slowing down). A concrete example can be found in Aurélien Charpy’s short film MAT (2021), whose music was composed by by Adrien Sassier, one of the co-authors of the present text.
