Currently showing at Sémaphore alongside Vivaldi and me, Philippe Béziat’s film offers a dense and immersive immersion into the Orchester de Paris by shifting its gaze from the lyrical to the symphonic.
Cinematographically, the device is impressive. The installation of ninety microphones at the heart of the music stands creates a sound material of rare precision, almost tactile. The camera, mobile and close to the bodies, circulates within the very interior of the orchestra and embraces the tensions as well as the breathing.
Silences et regards
With We the Orchestra, he not only films the music, he captures its production, in what is collective, fragile and profoundly human. It is also part, more broadly, of a recent movement which sees cinema reconnect with musical subjects, whether fiction or documentary. Films like Divertimento by Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar, Boléro by Anne Fontaine on Maurice Ravel, or Vivaldi et moi by Jean-Louis Guillermou look elsewhere. Work, transmission, what circulates between individuals.
The starting point is simple and dizzying: what makes an orchestra? What alchemy allows exceptional individuals to blend into a common entity without disappearing completely? The film progresses without didacticism, letting the answers emerge in gestures, silences and looks.
Jean Nouvel’s Philharmonie de Paris then becomes a real playing partner. The shots travel through its lines and volumes, and show how the architecture models the sound as much as it welcomes it, making the whole thing a real living space for the music and the orchestra. The film also arrives at a time when musical cinema is changing course.
Five heads
Béziat shows five conductors with profoundly contrasting aesthetics, who draw a true map of contemporary musical direction: Elim Chan, Klaus Mäkelä, Herbert Blomstedt, Daniel Harding and Kazushi Ono.
Five gestures, five temperaments. The luminous and nervous precision of Elim Chan, the physical and structuring energy of Mäkelä, the interior and almost spiritual authority of Blomstedt, the architectural breadth of Harding, the controlled dramatic tension of Ono, so many irreducible visions which pass through the orchestra without ever freezing it.
Beyond this diversity, music is constantly re-examined by its own interpreters. The musicians listen, comment, relive the extracts, in a continuous dialogue between practice and awareness of the gesture. The scene of the blind recruitment competition constitutes one of the most revealing moments: behind a large black curtain, the bodies disappear and only the sound remains. A raw moment where entry into this collective balance is decided.
Collective ideal
Béziat finally touches on internal tensions, fatigue, demands, rivalries, without ever transforming them into a dramatic engine. Here, it is no longer a question of telling the music, nor even of dramatizing its behind the scenes, but of following it, as closely as possible, in its flow, where it is made, as opposed to the sarcastic and truculent vein of The Orchestra, created by Mikkel Munch-Fals, who on the contrary makes it his driving force. Because We the orchestra is not a conflict film, but a sensitive exploration of a collective ideal. How, from irreducible individualities, an orchestral “we” can be born, fragile, moving, but deeply alive. After the great frescoes of the 80s and 90s, Amadeus by MiloÅ¡ Forman, Don Giovanni by Joseph Losey, or The Music Master of Gérard Corbiau, centered on figures and destinies, something is moving.
The current resurgence of films devoted to music only reinforces the scope of this proposition, recalling how cinema remains a privileged space for showing and hearing this art of the time. The musical flow of the film is also essential, carried by a superb soundtrack, which accompanies this permanent circulation between stage and backstage. A great film about music which profoundly changes the way we look at and hear a symphony orchestra.
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