Robert Cahen
Le Maître du temps - Pierre Boulez dirige "Mémoriale" - Installation - 2011
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 13
Installation
The project consists in filming Pierre Boulez directing a work from 1985, Mémoriale, dedicated to the memory of Lawrence Beauregard, a flautist from the Inter Contemporain Ensemble who died that year. By filming Pierre Boulez, the author aims to define and make visible the gestures invented by this great conductor. A full-length vertical shot, Pierre Boulez faces us, alone.
No image of the instrumentalists interrupts this solitude, but the music is there, and the spectator’s listening is directed by the precise, coded gestures of the Master. The Master of Time. In this film, the author tries to define the language of this great conductor. This work of installation aims to be a tribute to the composer and conductor.
Dans cette réalisation, le vidéaste tente de cerner la spécificité de ce langage des gestes.
Ce travail d'installation se veut un hommage du grand vidéaste au compositeur et au chef d'orchestre.
Robert Cahen
Born in 1945 - lives in Mulhouse. Graduating from the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique in Paris in 1971 (in Pierre Schaeffer’s class), he has proved able to bring to video the technical and linguistic experience of the school of musique concrète. As a researcher, Robert Cahen was head of experimental video in the research arm of the Office de Radio- Télévision Française (1970/1976) and has been a pioneer in the use of the electronic instruments. Treating images like sounds to be organized and transformed, his works offer a prime example of the possibility of interchange between the models and parameters of the image and those of music. Regarded as one of the most significant figures in the field of video, his oeuvre is recognizable by its use of slow-motion and in the manner in which it explores the sound-image relationship in constituting a poetic universe. Robert Cahen’s works invariably feature certain fundamental ingredients: the juxtaposition of fixed and moving elements; oscillation and multiplicity of viewpoint; the physical experience of the work as spatial arrangement. In his very first video in 1972, L’Invitation au Voyage, he manipulates his images, rendering them malleable. In 1983 he shot the thirteen-minute fiction video Juste le Temps, regarded as a landmark piece in 1980s video art. Its key characteristic being the use of slow motion to render visible “time restrained”…
