Scene from NE CHANGE RIEN.
The rogue pianist Glenn Gould gave up the concert stage for the studio in 1964, a highly unorthodox move described in Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould as “a defense of recorded music as the reality of music.” Directors Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont draw upon a wealth of archival footage to tour us around the Gould’s makeshift recording space in the back of a Toronto department store, but the film ultimately settles for a shorthand approximation of the pianist’s exacting recording habits (footage of him twiddling knobs plus voiceover from one of his former assistants recalling long hours of work). The craft itself remains remote in the film’s dense thicket of psychological speculation and brilliant playing.
Balibar talks to the sound engineers and puts on a set of headphones to listen to the backing tracks as she records her vocals. We only hear her voice, exposed in the silence. Where is the reality of the scene? The fact that we’re not hearing the same thing as the performer dispels the chimera of unity and clarifies our listening in a way that’s quite beyond most music documentaries. But then the irreducible remainder of beauty leaves us right where we started, enraptured with the singer when all we have is the song—not even that.
Pedro Costa’s Ne change rien restricts itself to the effort of music, its trials rather than its triumphs. The film is a working portrait of the French singer Jeanne Balibar apart from her audience, shot in a slightly more romantic style than Costa’s celebrated Fontainhas Trilogy (the images still edge towards interminable duration and negative space, but the lustrous black-and-white cinematography suggests late-night longing). We observe Balibar in a variety of different performance situations—on stage and in the studio, training for opera and warming up backstage—but it’s difficult to absorb this full spectrum because of the immersive quality of Costa’s shots: Each image feels like its own island of existence, and we’re ever left to fend for own response without cues from director or subject. If I write that Balibar is an established actress and the daughter of a philosopher (or that the lyrics of many of the plaintive songs are written by Pierre Alféri, Jacques Derrida’s son), it must be understood that this information is out of bounds in the film itself. As in Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, Costa’s earlier portrait of the French filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, the film proposes that the artist can only be understood in relation to his or her actual practice: a matter of repetition, digression, and physical endurance rather than historical chronology or biography.
The difference of Costa’s approach is especially striking in the remarkable long sequences that take place in the recording studio. For all the hundreds of documentaries about musicians, very few apply themselves to the peculiar reality of recording (Jean Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil is a prominent exception). Studio footage is typically framed with the finished product already a foregone conclusion, as in a dynamic early sequence in Genius Within concerning Gould’s landmark recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Still photographs of Gould in the studio are energetically cut to the thrilling recording; expert opinions of the musical form and significance are doled out; the camera pans across the original album cover with something like awe. The sequence could just as easily cover a landmark victory in sports, politics, history—the rhetorical moves are the same.
The reality of the studio, as any working musician can tell you, is simultaneously more mundane and spellbinding. Gould’s lover Cornelia Foss remarks in Genius Within that the pianist took Bach’s composition apart and put it back together again as if it were a clock—which, when you think about it, is the default mode of recording. Musicians deconstruct their own songs in order to reconstitute an equalized whole from the discrete parts: the process of making a recording sound natural is, from the perspective of live performance, wholly unnatural. Costa’s rigorous visual delineation of space nicely reflects the way that multi-track recordings isolate each instrument on separate tracks. The long takes follow the crooked course of time in the studio’s padded environs; an hour or two is easily lost perfecting a mic setup or snare sound. These deliberations are minute enough to seem arbitrary, a point that attracts Costa’s interest in Ne change rien.
Studio footage is typically framed with the finished product already a foregone conclusion, as in a dynamic early sequence in ‘Genius Within’ concerning Gould’s landmark recording of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations.’ Still photographs of Gould in the studio are energetically cut to the thrilling recording; expert opinions of the musical form and significance are doled out; the camera pans across the original album cover with something like awe. The sequence could just as easily cover a landmark victory in sports, politics, history—the rhetorical moves are the same.
The director places emphasis attention on the way the musicians work with their own material ghost in playbacks and loops, blurring the lines of solitude and collaboration. One is hard-pressed throughout to discern when “it” is happening: there are no clear lines between rehearsal and recording, practice and performance, seclusion and collaboration. Put another way, he reveals the hidden labor that goes into the finished commodity. All this stands in stark contrast with the Goldberg Variations sequence in Genius Within, in which the recording comes down as a seminal event, assured of its significance and fixed in time.
Although Costa’s style is easily read as distancing, that’s not to say Ne change rien isn’t seductive—quite the contrary. The ratio of dark to light in the compositions is roughly the inverse of what you might expect from a film noir, and the image of Balibar’s face swallowed in deep chiaroscuro unavoidably recalls Josef von Sternberg’s tempestuous films with Marlene Dietrich. The film suggests that even as you peel back the reality of the recording process (that as far as the finished recording is concerned, there is no there there), the singer retains her utterly mesmerizing power over the imagination. In one particularly entrancing long take we watch Balibar recording a vocal track in front of a small window (a rare reminder of the world outside). She talks to the sound engineers and puts on a set of headphones to listen to the backing tracks as she records her vocals. We only hear her voice, exposed in the silence. Where is the reality of the scene? The fact that we’re not hearing the same thing as the performer dispels the chimera of unity and clarifies our listening in a way that’s quite beyond most music documentaries. But then the irreducible remainder of beauty leaves us right where we started, enraptured with the singer when all we have is the song—not even that.
Scene from GENIUS WITHIN: THE INNER LIFE OF GLENN GOULD.
