Contrefaçons by Marc Baron + Eric La Casa

Recording : Hiventy film restoration and development laboratories, Joinville-le-pont (near Paris) in June and September 2023
Re-listening / re-recording sessions (Montreuil) : February 2024 - February 2025
Mixing: July 2024 - February 2025

In September 2023, at the Hiventy laboratories in Joinville-le-pont - formerly Pathé - we recorded the film restoration (image and sound) and development processes. Following the mechanical and digital processes, we listened to and interviewed the technicians to understand what goes into restoring a film. How do you restore a film to its original state? To do this, we need to get close to what viewers of the film could perceive in the cinema. The way we look at and listen to a film has evolved since the birth of cinema. Today, wouldn't they want an 8K dolby atmos print ? We are now used to increasingly accurate digital sound and images. So the first version of a film on an analogue medium, which seemed like an archive and a fixed point in our memory, is in fact just a fragile memory in an ever-changing world.
Based on our field recordings, in the small rooms of the laboratories, we carried out destructive re-listening sessions. Marc, with his magnetic tapes, his analogue and even mechanical treatments (demagnetisation), and his multiple loudspeakers, puts them in abime in the space of his studio. At the same time, Eric records both the moment when the replayed original begins to transform or even disappear, and its reappearance in Marc's studio space. Our dynamic listening produces a permanent interplay with the gestures and spaces of the laboratory and our own studio. At every moment, we explore the multiple possible representations of the world contained in listening to a single recording.
How do the tools of sound recording and restoration attempt to represent the world, even as the materiality of that world is constantly changing ?

For 30 years, while listening to the environment, I have been questioning the perception of reality and has tried to expand the notion of infra-ordinary (space-time at low intensity), from background noise to the inaudible, through the wait, the pause.

ericlacasa.info
swarming.fr
Swarming radio