Les Îles resonnantes

This intimate look at Éliane Radigue, a French pioneer of minimalist and electroacoustic music, explores the sensorial singularity of her “sound sculpture” and its meditative virtues.

Plunging with no voice-over into the work of Éliane Radigue, a pioneer in France of minimalist and electroacoustic music, the filmmaker invites all of us to a physical and spiritual sound experience. The first sounds could be those of an orchestra tuning up; but this initial indecisiveness serves as a bridge into the concentration that the compositions both require and produce. The film shows a violinist and cellist rehearsing with Éliane Radigue, but this is not simply a documentary on creation. It sharpens our ears. As the composer says: “The freedom to let yourself be invaded, submerged by a continuous surge of sound in which your perceptive acuity is honed as you discover a few micro-beats, there, behind, pulsations, breath”, while her utmost ability to listen comes through in a magnificent close-up on her gaze. The film’s dispositif generates the mental images that music is intended to create, proposing soundscapes that draw on the resources specific to cinema. In tune with Radigue’s stated Buddhist influence, it proposes to reach “a consciousness without a brain, like a flow that continues beyond the body” – “a subtle awareness” that imperatively needs to be seen in a film theatre. (Charlotte Garson)