2015 LaScam Radio Night LaScam Radio Night
Shockwaves
When I proposed this theme to LaScam last Autumn, I wanted to pay homage to radio production which breaks free of the standard flux of sound, dynamites accepted codes and carves out its own creative path, to testify in a certain way to the fact that radio can communicate everything, from the beautiful to the abject, provided it is done all together and with style.
No one could then foresee the attacks of January 2015 and the way they ripped through our lives. This 15th “Radio Night” inevitably bears the scars. Amid the Ina archives I found examples of great predators and the just, heard echoes of distant wars, savoured the silent material freed by speech, felt the fright and its antidote, tenderness or lifesaving laughter. The whole aim was to create dialogue and resonance among these selected archives.
Claire Hauter
An audio programme proposed by Claire Hauter.
With the collaboration of Frédéric Fiard (editing and mix) and Stéphanie Place (Ina archive researcher).
1h30 of audio excerpts to be listened to with headphones
In order of sound appearance:
Briser la glace
Luc Ferrari composed this symphonic tale evoking a young woman's trip on an ice-breaker. Collette Fellous spoke words whose “sensual warmth attempted to ward off the cold”. This creation entitled Et si toute entière maintenant was awarded the 1987 Italia prize in music.
1988, France Culture, 0’41
Du jour au lendemain
Producer: Alain Veinstein
Compositeur : Luc Ferrari
Il ne faut rien couper, il faut tout garder !
Jean-Christophe Averty, a great craftsman of television art, beguiled audiences over twenty-eight years with Les Cinglés du Music-hall on France Inter and France Musique. Averty who had, so it was said, “everything you don't need to do radio” was also an ongoing contributor to Des Papous dans la tête and Décraqués, created by Bertrand Jérôme, whose voice is heard in this extract.
1991, France Culture, 2’36
Le bon Plaisir de Jean-Christophe Averty
Producer: Sylvie Andreu
Technical director: François Bréhinier
Ils eurent vingt ans dans les Aurès
In a series of radio reports on the Algerian War, Daniel Mermet interviewed some former conscripts from the valley of Saint-Dié. “Time passes”, noted the producer of Là-bas si j'y suis, “but this package of ugly memories they brought back with them is still there, in the folds and cracks of their conscience and our memory”. A lot of former soldiers who came back seriously damaged from this “war without a name,” have tried in vain to forget. A small number, including Raymond Dieudoné, who invited him into his farm in the Vosges, declare that they regret nothing.
1998, France Inter, 4’53
La Guerre d’Algérie
Producer: Daniel Mermet
Technical director: Bruno Carpentier
Tous des cons !
Bertrand Jérôme presents a rare item: an improvised sketch by the cartoonist Chaval with his friend Doctor Rouzié, lampooning racist stupidity. Chaval said of his cartoons: “If they're better than the others, it's because they go all the way: they destroy everything because that's where I'm going and I'm destroying myself as well.” He committed suicide in 1968. As for Simon Rouzié, he played in Paris cabarets before setting up as a country doctor in a small village, Lésigny-sur-Creuse. He brought together a whole gang of malicious wits, lovers of second degree irony: Pierre Etaix, the cartoonist Mose, André Frédérique, Jean Carmet and of course Chaval who he recorded on a Tandberg tape recorder.
1977, France Culture, 8’20
Mi fugue, mi raisin
Producer: Bertrand Jérôme
Technical director: Claude Chebel
On me dit que je suis blonde
S'entretenir is a series of anonymous portraits broadcast throughout the 2009-10 season. Its goal? Paint the widest and most colourful possible portrait of a certain contemporary France. In this excerpt, Arnold Pasquier and Marie-Laure Ciboulet point their microphone at Alice Diaz. How do you see the world at ten and a half?
2010, France Culture, 5’20
ACR – S’entretenir
Producer: Arnold Pasquier
Technical director: Marie-Laure Ciboulet
Au temps de l’AOF
Samy Simon was one of the pioneers of radio reporting. He found himself facing a microphone for the first time in 1923 during a student strike. With a forty kilogram Nagra strapped over his shoulder, he travelled around the planet, from Mexico to Haiti, from China to India. “The world needs myths, radio brings them into your home. We live in a world of virtual images which are more and more superimposed over real images and tend even to substitute for them,” he said in 1949. “Radio has tamed and domesticated fiction, giving life to ghosts.” Here he is in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) recording as it happens a cataract operation in the White Fathers' Mission in Ouagadougou.
1955, RTF, 5’41
Afrique d’hier et d’aujourd’hui
Reporter: Samy Simon
Le frère du citron
With his intensity, singular voice and diction, and quasi mystical presence, Alain Cuny burst onto the public stage in 1942 with his role in Marcel Carné's The Devil’s Envoys. A companion of Jean Vilar at Avignon and the TNP, he shot with Fellini, Buñuel, Godard and many others. The definition of his craft? “Being an actor means that your personality is scattered, you are in shreds. What we do on the stage is what we don't do in our lives. And for a few instants, the two processes resemble each other...” In this À voix nue in ten episodes, Jean Mambrino takes on the sometimes delicate task of conducting an interview.
1988, France Culture, 5’14
À voix nue
Producer: Jean Mambrino
Technical director: Marie-Andrée Armynot
La corde au cou
In December 1959, Prévert recorded for the radio the tender and sardonic memories of his childhood. In this fourth episode, the seven year old Jacques casts a protective look on his parents, subject to frequent visits by the bailiff and equally frequent changes of address. Everything is there, his neurasthenic and melancholy father, his gentle, laughing mother, his grand-father, president of the Central Office of the Poor...
1960, RTF, 3’33
Enfance
Producer and technical director: Albert Riera
Music: Henri Crolla
Marqués comme des bêtes
Hélène Hazera interviewed Jean Ferrat five times. In this extract the singer talks more particularly about his childhood and family heritage. We discover that his Jewish father fled the Russian pogroms in the Caucasus after 1905 to be caught up by the racial laws of the Vichy regime. Jean the child had to hide until the liberation. Having become a popular and exacting singer, he tried, as Hélène Hazera emphasizes, to “make a pact with happiness while denying or forgetting nothing”.
2004, France Culture, 5’51
À voix nue
Producer: Hélène Hazera
Technical director: Patrick Molinier
Une sorte de juif corse
Among the anonymous subjects of the series S'entretenir, Arnold Pasquier and Marie-Laure Ciboulet met Arthur, a young student at the Paris School of Fine-Arts. The chance to provide a luminous reflection on identity, belonging, the relations between reality and truth. Today, Arthur Eskenazi is an artist and choreographer.
2010, France Culture, 7’13
ACR – S’entretenir
Producer: Arnold Pasquier
Technical director: Marie-Laure Ciboulet
La curiosité, il n’y a que ça !
In 1950, Robert Mallet suggested a series of long interviews to Paul Léautaud then living as a hermit in Fontenay-aux-Roses. The author of Journal littéraire accepted on condition that he could speak with complete freedom and without preparation. “For the first time,” remembered Mallet, “the public had the impression of listening to a confidential conversation between two men who had forgotten the presence of the microphone.” These interviews turned out to be a landmark in radio history. In this excerpt, the writer speaks of his father's death, an event that seems to have moved him very little. And with reason: his father neglected him during his entire childhood, caught up as he was in his job as prompter at the Comédie Française and by his love life. Léautaud, old “antisocial” as Rachilde called him, had these last words to say before dying February 22, 1956: “Now, fuck off and leave me alone!”
1950, France Culture, 5’06
Entretiens avec Paul Léautaud
Producer: Robert Mallet
Technical director: Georges Godebert
Good Morning Vietnam
Alain Trutat, creator in 1969 of the Atelier de Création Radiophonique, suggested to Janine Antoine the production of a programme based on the fifty hours of sound brought back from Vietnam by Claude Johner. Johner was a war reporter described by Andrew Orr, producer at Radio Nova and France Culture, as a “magnificent planter of sound bombs.” The result was “a strange documentary without commentary where only sounds narrated this dirty war and the horrors of all wars,” according to Janine Antoine. We hear in particular Wandering Soul, Ghost Tape Number 1, a mix of high frequency sounds and voice played from loudspeakers tied to US helicopters designed to terrify the population and push Viet-cong soldiers to desert.
1972, France Culture, 8’35
Good Morning Vietnam
Producer: Claude Johner
Technical director: Janine Antoine
Prix Ondas 1972
Pire que le coup de foudre !
In front of Jean Marcourel's microphone, Isabelle, born in the 19th century, and Bernard tell us how they met. A loving dialogue set to the sounds of François Parisi's inspired accordion.
1995, France Culture, 5’51
ACR – Le Triomphe de l’âge
Producer: Jean Marcourel
Accordion: François Parisi
Les tuer jusqu’à la racine
In 1999, five years after the genocide, Madeleine Mukamabano, journalist at RFI, returned to Rwanda. All along the five episodes of this series, she met survivors, victims and killers incarcerated in the Kigali prison. Léa, who lived in Kigali in 1994, evokes the role played by Radio Mille Collines in inciting the massacres of Tutsis.
1999, France Culture, 6’47
Rwanda 1999. Revivre à tout prix
Producer: Madeleine Mukamabano
Technical director: Mehdi El Hadj
Casse-têtes
Interviewed by Antoine Perraud, François Cavanna evokes with emotion the memory of his friend Gébé, deceased two years earlier in 2004. A gentle anarchist, Gébé was chief editor of Hara-Kiri then Charlie Hebdo until 1985. The other arrow in his quiver was song. “I wrote one day for Hebdo a text whose rhythm made me start a new line,” he remembered. “And as I had the flame of illumination within me, I went straight to the end in one stroke”. Noticed by Yves Montand who also wanted to sing it, the text “Casse-têtes” was put to music by Michel-Philippe Gérard. He had the idea of turning it into a tango maintaining its full explosive power.
2006, France Culture, 4’06
Jeux d’archives
Producer: Antoine Perraud
Technical director: Franck Lilin
Des souvenirs pour la vie
Sometimes the best interviews are the ones without questions. This is the case in this last archive: Omar Berrada and Lionel Quantin remembered, when they met Prosper on the Île de Ré, having put their recorder on the oilskin covered table and pushing the “record” button. The result: nine minutes of peerless prose where the subject matter ranges from sardine fishing to tectonic plates, from brushes with death to the creation of stars, from solar storms to shockwaves.
2010, France Culture, 9’23
ACR – S’entretenir
Producer: Omar Berrada
Technical director: Lionel Quantin