There is something irreducibly human in film music. Amine Bouhafa, 39, of Tunisian origins, gave a brilliant demonstration of this during the traditional music lesson at the Cannes Film Festival, the youngest composer ever invited to this exercise. The one who started playing the piano at three years old, studied engineering before returning to music and film, sees himself as an author who leads the director to look at his own film differently. This conception of music as “revelation” has guided his work since Timbuktu by Abderrahmane Sissako (2014), film with 7 Césars, including Best Music.
A few days earlier, the composer and singer Camille, who accompanied in competition Gentle Monster by the Austrian Marie Kreutzer, spoke to us about “a creative intimacy” with the films and their authors. “I really like reading the script, and the music comes from the emotion that the story gives me, sometimes even before the casting.” From the first intuitions emerging with closed eyes, from a character, a scene, a transversal message, which are not necessarily those which remain, but which establish an entry into the film to be written musically.
“Lighting, to make something invisible in the film audible”
For Camille, film music is not an exercise in subordinate style: it is “a lighting, to make audible something invisible in the film”. However, the soundtrack sometimes takes off. His titles for musical comedy Emilia Perez by Jacques Audiard proved that a good film song must be able to live without images: “It serves a film and obviously it is linked to it. But it must also make sense without the images.”
For Cécile Rap-Veber, general director of Sacem, the composer of the image must be able to maintain his own voice while slipping into the head of a director. She advocates for a film’s music to be fully included from the earliest stages of production, and not relegated to the final weeks of post-production. “There are three co-authors in a film: the director, the screenwriter and the composer. As soon as they are combined from the start, the result is even stronger. »
Reduce factory costs using AI
But it is in a climate of unprecedented concern that the celebration of composers is taking place in Cannes, on the red carpet this Monday. Generative artificial intelligence, trained on existing directories without authorization or remuneration, poses a direct threat. “We find ourselves with American and Chinese AIs which have plundered the entirety of cultural content,” denounces Cécile Rap-Veber, “to finally regurgitate synthetic content which directly competes with the creations that are original music.”
If composers with a strong reputation maintain their privileged link with the directors who call for them by name, the threat is real and immediate. The economic temptation for producers to reduce film manufacturing costs by using “the way” AI is great. “For a young generation of composers, we are going to have to really differentiate ourselves.â€
Sacem is careful to avoid artificial duplication of music. Positive signals are emerging: the National Cinema Center (CNC) recently affirmed that it would not finance works that have chosen to substitute AI for human creation.
Because what Amine Bouhafa and Camille remind us is that composing for cinema means first of all being sensitive: to a story, to characters, to the singular vision of a director. A sensitivity that no algorithm, however sophisticated, can simulate, reproduce or imitate: the (human) dizziness of watching a film and hearing, for the first time, what it had to say.
