L’Esprit des lieux

How can you film the intense and scarcely visible activity of listening in all of its depth? The film opens with a shot of Marc Namblard – an atypical sound engineer settled in the Vosges region – as he closes his eyes. This closing is an invitation: and so begins an epic on listening, from recording (the nights he spends in the forest during the rutting season) to transmission (to his daughter, the first to hear his sound tableaux, and initiated into life through the prism of his knowledgeable and creative ear). Sometimes, transmission is in the direction of an artist such as composer Christian Zanési, who comes to choose from his collection of mysterious sounds for an electroacoustic piece. Marc Namblard is a naturalist: much like the herbalists of older times, he goes into the forest to expand his collection, hiding his stereo microphone in the foliage, blending in with the landscape. When we see him at his office with headphones over his ears, identifying and classifying, his work inevitably appears as a mirror held up to all documentarians. What they have in common is the search for emotion: when Marc and his brother listen to old tapes recorded by the family, the origin of his passion appears, along with conversations so banal and familiar that they seem to be the quintessence of what, for each of us, is the very stuff that any family is made of. (Charlotte Garson)