Les Chants de bataille
Guy Girard
2003 - 47 min - Super 8 mm - Couleur - France

Outstanding trumpeter and singer, Jac Berrocal is a mythic figure of the French underground scene, on the borders of Ornette Coleman’s or Albert Ayler’s free jazz and of Vince Taylor’s or Alan Vega’s performative rock'n'roll.
"Battle songs" is a journey into the worlds of Jac Berrocal. A portrait in shreds. And in the making. The substance of his flesh and sound seems to be engendered in a purely autonomous way, even in its very breaking points, when the camera leaves Berrocal the trumpeter sitting melancholically on a sofa covered with green arabesques to meet him again in a black car driving through a desert to the rhythm of his sobbing. Voices, cries and whispers, an existential hypothesis and loads of trouble.