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Although his training at the Conservatoire was conventional and academic, with lessons in piano accompaniment, writing, and composition, Michel Fano found a catalyst in Olivier Messiaen’s teaching. Messiaen’s in-depth analysis of Don Giovanni, Pelléas, and Tristan, with a briefer examination of Wozzeck, opened up new horizons for the students, who were discovering both the Western repertoire and the music of Bali.
Fano quickly became a member of Pierre Boulez’s inner circle. He joined the Domaine musical in 1954, the same year he, echoing Boulez’s ideas, published his own manifestos in Domaine Musical Vol. 1, Le Point, and Les Cahiers Renaud-Barrault.
Two years earlier, Fano had composed two concert works: the Sonata for Two Pianos, followed by the Study for Fifteen Instruments. Both were written under the influence of Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, which laid the groundwork for total serialism — a technique implemented in these two works, as well as in Boulez’s Structures I and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel. The Sonata for Two Pianos is one of the seminal works of the 1950s and the only of Fano’s two early compositions to have been performed. Its rhythmic difficulty (Fano later wrote a second version) was influenced by both serialism and Alban Berg, with a series reminiscent of the Lyric Suite. In addition, the last note is B, an allusion to the ubiquitous knife motive in Wozzeck. As for the unpublished Study for Fifteen Instruments, Stockhausen took interest in it and borrowed it from Fano without returning it (there is a reconstruction in Fano’s archives).
These works, in their extreme difficulty, border on unplayable, which led Fano to move away from this style of writing. He found greater satisfaction in the more precise work of manipulating sound for cinema: “I remained attached to this finesse, and this is one of the reasons I turned to music for films.”1
At a certain point, Fano stepped back from composition, and nearly stopped entirely. Composing became difficult after he ran up against the limits of serialism in his two scores, as well as after his traumatic military service in Algeria (1956), an episode that left deep and painful after-effects. He reckoned he would be neither a second Boulez nor a second Jean Barraqué, but he never renounced this period of experimentation and its composers, whom he would always loyally support. His pure composition period, nonetheless, seemed to be over.
He would return to composition in soundtracks for documentaries and silent films via the roundabout route of non-pitched percussion, which bypassed any concerns with harmonic language. This approach also allowed him to go beyond the conventional notion of film music, which he found often redundant and overly illustrative in relation to the image, and limited by the director’s decisions. But his first documentary, La Bataille de France (directed by Jean Aurel, 1964), a montage of archival footage from the Munich Agreement to the Battle of Dunkirk (1938-1940), features music that, despite his intentions, did not entirely escape illustrating dramatic events and images.
Later, when frequenting Chris Marker and his Service de Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles collective of filmmakers, Fano contributed, again with percussion, to the soundtrack of Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967), a film Marker directed with Joris Ivens, William Klein, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Lelouch, with other music by Hanns Eisler, Philippe Capdenat, and Georges Aperghis. Again at Marker’s instigation, Fano contributed to the French version and soundtrack of Aleksandr Medvedkin’s silent masterpiece Happiness (1934), where Fano’s percussion is interspersed with music by Mussorgsky.
In 1995 Fano returned to purely musical composition with the Fab cycle, for three narrators, piano, bass clarinet, violin, and sound recorded over texts by Sophie Lapierre. Notable pieces in the series include Fab IV for soprano and instrumental ensemble (over a text by the composer) and Fab V for piano (1998).
Among his musical influences, Fano has emphasized the unique and inventive teaching of Messiaen at the Conservatoire and the close-knit community of the Domaine musical, through which he met influential figures such as Pierre Souvtchinsky and André Schaeffner. Like many other composers of his generation (including Boulez, Barraqué, André Boucourechliev, Henri Pousseur, Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, and Luigi Nono), he was profoundly influenced by Boris de Schlözer’s Introduction à J.-S. Bach (1947), from which he took the concepts of immanent music (music as self-referential, not pointing to anything outside itself) and the active role of the listener, as well as the idea that understanding a work requires reconstituting it rather than passively receiving it. In Schlözer’s words, “Listening and understanding a work is not being subjected to it . . . it is reconstructing it.”2 Fano also adopted Schlözer’s notion that it is impossible to separate content from form without distorting it.3 Fano would implement these ideas in his future soundtracks. He remained fascinated by listening, which he further explored in Miroslav Sebestik’s 1992 film:
Increasingly assaulted by a polluting sound environment, can we hope that the confusion between “hearing” and “listening” will be definitively abolished? Can we accept that listening is work, in the same way as reading, viewing a painting, or watching a film?
His other key reference was Wozzeck, which he encountered in Messiaen’s class and later saw at the festival L’Oeuvre du XXe Siècle (1952) organized by Jascha Horenstein. Fano subsequently co-authored his famous book Wozzeck d’Alban Berg with Pierre-Jean Jouve, alternating his own meticulous analysis with Jouve’s commentary, which met with a severe judgement from Schlözer.4
In addition to his thorough knowledge of Berg’s opera, Fano was deeply influenced by Souvtchinsky’s idea of “rhetorization of drama through music” (1963). As Fano articulated in his article “Vers une dialectique du film sonore,” “To ‘rhetorize’ the image would be the true power, not just of film music, but of the total soundscape (words, noises, musical sounds).”5
Fano derived the idea of film-opera from Wozzeck, which Boulez had just performed at the Opéra in 1963. He based this idea on Wozzeck’s cinematic dimensions, which he elaborated in an article citing numerous examples from the opera such as dissolve, “dolly zooming” on Wozzeck, cinematic cuts, flashbacks and flash-forwards, the use of silence, and intertitle effects.6 His interpretation is confirmed by the central interlude of Lulu, which Berg explicitly scripted as “Filmmusik” and for which Fano created a filmed sequence, projected during the 1979 production in Paris directed by Boulez and Patrice Chéreau.
Lulutakes the idea of rhetorizing drama even further through the use of “deferred forms” — for example, the sonata representing the character Dr. Schön is interrupted and then resumed later — within an entire work conceived as an arch form. It was no coincidence that Fano would return to this “musician of the image” in his new analysis ofLulu.7
Berg had edited pre-existing texts to create his two operas. For Wozzeck, he created a montage from Georg Büchner’s unfinished drama, organizing it into three acts and fifteen scenes (with a transition from the “power” of the narrative in the first act to that of the music in the inventions of the third act), and he structured Lulu based on two plays by Frank Wedekind. Fano used a similar approach for Le Territoire des autres: he took 47 kilometers of film shot by François Bel and Gérard Vienne over seven years, and selected and sequenced 90 minutes.
The film is nearly silent, containing only animal sounds without spoken commentary; it thus gives primacy to the soundtrack. Each part is based on a phase of animal behavior: characters, setting / gaze / animal presence / movement / social life / family life / territory, sexuality, speech. Just as Berg structured the second act of Wozzeck as a symphony in five movements, Fano distributed the film’s themes into a long symphony in seven movements, alternating slow and fast. He empowered the music by articulating and rhetorizing each section.
Le Territoire des autres is distinct from animal documentaries; it is a fictional work based on the gaze: “It’s the first time we’ve seen animals looking at man, rather than man looking at animals.”8 The film remains one of Fano’s most inventive achievements. Because of his work on the scenario, he is credited, along with Jacqueline Lecompte, as a co-director.
La Griffe et la dent(1973), Fano’s second wildlife film with Bel et Vienne, gives even greater importance to the soundtrack through multi-tracking and new technical means. The images of Africa are as sumptuous as ever (love among felines) and sometimes violent (the felines’ hunt of their victims). The score is a correspondingly harsh and strong presence. Focused on African landscapes, the film is not about animals butwith animals, emphasizing animal interactions: the impact of nature on groups, group dynamics, the influence of individuals on the collective, and the relationships among different groups.9
Fano has drawn inspiration from inventive uses of sound in other films, which he cites as references. He contrasts Sergei Eisenstein’s October with the more conventionally cited Alexander Nevsky. He highlights Fritz Lang’s M as his first experience seeing a soundtrack used to signpost a narrative and Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Crucified Lovers for its seamless integration of language and music. He notes how in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, music becomes the film’s third character, while in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, sounds reflect the main character’s mental states. Fano also points to Orson Welles, who drew on his radio experience in his films, and to Godard’s First Name: Carmen.
As a specific example, Fano points to the bells in Hiroshima mon amour: the female character mentions that they are ringing, even though the sound is inaudible, which avoids simple illustration. Later, the bells are heard out of context, which retroactively gives meaning to the earlier scene. Fano found a similar approach in the Last Year at Marienbad, again by Resnais, which follows “shot-by-shot” Alain Robbe-Grillet’s ciné-roman (“cinema-novel”). (Hiroshima mon amour is based on a screenplay by Marguerite Duras, who would also go behind the camera to film some of her own novels; in contrast, Robbe-Grillet never adapted his novels for film but instead wrote original screenplays, or ciné-romans, specifically for the cinema.)
In 1967 Fano scored two films using pre-existing music to suit the subject matter. In Aurel’s Lamiel, a woman (Anna Karina) has affair after affair in search of true love. Her libertine banter is paired with the overture from Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, which is heard no fewer than fifteen times, in addition to a few borrowings from Domenico Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto.
For Nelly Kaplan’s documentary Le Regard Picasso, Fano’s score is more engaged and subtle. The film alternates between spoken words, wordless images, and music — there is never a superimposition of narration and music, though sometimes written captions appear over the music. This turn-taking allows the text and music to coexist without contradicting each other. Fano’s score explores Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, a choice that aligns with certain passages of the narration. For example, the narration mentions “He enjoys dismantling things to better study their construction,” and includes quotations from Picasso such as, “In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. … A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions.”10 Fano generally quotes Beethoven’s variations in chronological order and without repeats, but only ten variations are used in their entirety. Others are used partially, and some are played two or three times.
Fano found another opportunity to experiment with desynchronization between image and spoken text in Marcel Hanoun’s innovative film L’authentique Procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung (1977). The witnesses seen on screen speak with another, post-synchronized voice provided by Michael Lonsdale. The only moment when the image and sound are synchronized is during the guilty party’s confession: “Yes, I killed!” Hanoun, who elsewhere also uses pre-existing music (such as in his Les Saisons), depicts the guilty character playing a fugue from The Musical Offering on the harpsichord (perhaps an allusion to the art of the fuite [the art of escape]) and watching Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice on television (which symbolizes the impossibility of bringing a loved one back from the underworld).
In reading Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes, Fano was immediately attracted to the “musical quality” of the writing. He envisaged a film adaptation with the director Noël Burch, though he abandoned the project because of financial constraints. The musical quality he perceived in Robbe-Grillet’s texts relates to a musical form and combinatory approach, playing between memory and premonition in a manner similar to Berg’s techniques in his operas.
L’Immortellewas Fano’s first collaboration with Robbe-Grillet. It marked Fano’s first step toward the concept of a “sound score,” which he would fully realize inTrans-Europ-Express, where he significantly challenged traditional narrative structures. This approach would be even more pronounced in his two subsequent films.
In The Man Who Lies, Fano was able to achieve such an approach because he was involved in the shooting from the outset. The film was shot without sound, and the speaking, sound effects, and music were added later in post-production. This allowed Fano to introduce various forms of desynchronization — between past and future, and between memories and premonitions — as was done in Wozzeck. In The Man Who Lies, the lies of the protagonist are immediately exposed through the contrast between the narration (voiced by Jean-Louis Trintignant) and what is actually visible on screen. While the character says, “I wandered down the street, anonymous in the crowd of passersby,” the street is deserted. He then claims, “I headed for the inn, also empty,” though it is crowded and filled with the hubbub of conversation.
Fano’s concept of the sound score, borrowed from Edgard Varèse, departs radically from the traditional role speech has in film, where it is “the guarantor of narrative comprehension.”11 Fano challenged this convention by placing speech, sound, and music on equal footing, creating a sound continuum that seamlessly transitions between these three elements. This approach allows the whole film to be carried by this auditory experience. For instance, when the protagonist in The Man Who Lies speaks to one of the women, then closes his mouth as his words continue, the shift from actor to narrator alters the viewer’s perception.
Drawing on Umberto Eco’s concept of “variable semantic thickness” from La struttura assente (The Absent Structure, 1968), Fano applies the notion to the power given to either speech or music, with noise or background sounds as intermediaries:
Speech has maximum semantic thickness, which conveys meaning. Musical sound has almost no semantic thickness. Between these two extremes, there is an extremely interesting zone of non-musical sound, which can serve as a link and allow the transition from a word to a noise, and then from a noise to a musical sound, almost imperceptibly.12
Sound can change meaning through manipulation, such as by filtering a machine-gun blast to resemble the hammering of a woodpecker, or transforming the sound of dripping water or a broken glass into a vibraphone or celesta. Fano also used “chimeric sounds” where, for example, a slamming door might coincide with the sound of a bell, which itself refers to another situation. By developing a limited thematic repertoire of noises that become musical, Fano could shift these sounds in time so they would not always appear in the same context, thereby expanding their meaning.
Thus implemented, the sound score, which Fano calls his greatest accomplishment, adds a layer of complexity to the perception of the film, demanding the viewer’s full attention. The experiment provoked reactions, notably from Pierre Schaeffer’s acolyte Michel Chion, who criticized Fano’s self-professed “post-serial atonalism.”13 Chion argued that the audiovisual dissonance Fano employed “is merely an inverse distortion of convention, and thus an homage to it, trapping us in a binary logic.”14
But Fano’s sound score is far from being systematically binary. It makes it possible to establish numerous connections between different events in the film, creating a back-and-forth movement within a narrative deliberately obscured by Robbe-Grillet’s writing. The film’s subtlety can only be grasped after several viewings. Fano explains that the “compositional power and circulation of meaning define the new systems for articulating all the sounds among themselves, breaking free from the ‘naturalness’ of narrative to approach the musical forms of organizing duration.”15
Before The Man Who Lies, Robbe-Grillet had asked Fano to introduce musical elements borrowed from Verdi — one of the writer’s favorite composers — into Trans-Europ-Express by manipulating excerpts cut note by note from La Traviata. Fano would use the same procedure again with Il Trovatore in Playing with Fire (1975).
Fano used synthesized sounds for Eden and After (1970), a film that, according to Robbe-Grillet, responds to a “serial conception” based on a combinatorial approach, which inspired the idea of an open form when the film was edited into a version for television. The television version was named N. a pris les dés (1971), an anagram of the original French title, L’Éden et après.
We should also mention the radio play La Chambre secrète (1981), based on a short extract Fano selected from Robbe-Grillet’s Instantanés (1962). Fano explained,
I asked Michael Lonsdale to speak the text in three different ways: neutral, whispered, and bombastic. From these three elements, I created a spiral structure like the text itself — there are three or four sections that return to their beginning to start over, but with variations . . . And I did this by creating a kind of imaginary film because I was unable to imagine a sound construction in abstracto. So I created images for myself, which do not appear but which I needed as a support.16
Through recomposing the three readings, rendered in a “ghostly language,” Fano continued his work on the continuum between speech and music, and on meaning. Disrupted by Fano’s manipulations, meaning oscillates between the comprehensible (the staircase, the column, the hommusique [Robbe-Grillet’s term], etc.) and the incomprehensible, as Fano inserts sounds from the Robbe-Grillet films on which he had collaborated.
Fano primarily made a name for himself as a director of music documentaries. He produced several notable works, including two dedicated to Boulez (Boulez in 1960 and Boulez chef d’orchestre in 1976), Olivier Messiaen et les oiseaux (with Denise Tual, 1972), and Musique et informatique (with Maurice Le Roux, 1975).
His most significant contribution was a series of seven one-hour television documentaries titled Introduction à la musique contemporaine, conceived with Dominique Jameux in 1980, at a time when such programs were possible on public channels like Antenne 2. Each documentary begins with a credits sequence featuring birdsong from nature documentaries and introduces the subject matter in a fictional format. Commentary is provided by Boulez, while the ever-faithful Lonsdale plays the various characters (Jules Verne discussing modernity, an investigator, a psychoanalyst, a composer, or a director). The documentary then transitions to a filmed concert of repertoire related to the theme.
Most of the themes presented largely reflect Fano’s own interests as a composer and creator of sound scores: “Music and Modernity,” “Material and Instruments,” “Music and Machines,” “Repetition and Difference,” and “Music and Narrative” all connect to his experiences in cinema. For example, the episode on narrative presents the prologue of Lulu, superimposed over the opening of Ophuls’s Lola Montès. Here, the ringmaster in Lola Montès mirrors the animal trainer in the opera, creating a multiplication of meaning through the desynchronization between what we see and what we hear, and through the parallel drawn between Lola and Lulu, united by the same tragic fate.
These documentaries also show how Fano approaches the filming of a concert. He deliberately avoids framing a particular solo instrument — “if you see the flute, you hear it louder, even though it is not playing any louder” — in favor of a more musically balanced representation of the score. Once again, Fano goes against conventional practices, transgressing them in a way that is consistent with his dual identity as both a musician and a filmmaker.
Translated from the French by Chrisoula Petridis
1. FANO, “Les années Messiaen,” interview with Jean-Pierre Derrien, in 20e siècle: Images de la musique française, Sacem-Papiers, 1986, p. 140. ↩
2. Boris de SCHLÖZER, Introduction à J.-S. Bach, ed. Pierre-Henry Frangne, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009, p. 35. ↩
3. Ibid., p. 21. ↩
4. Ibid., p. 149. ↩
5. FANO, “Vers une dialectique du film sonore,” Cahiers du cinéma, 1964. ↩
6. FANO, “Quatre notes sur le ‘temps’ in Wozzeck,” in Avant-scène Opéra 36 (September-October 1981), p. 96-99. ↩
7. FANO, Lulu et après? Aedam Musicae, 2020. ↩
8. FANO, “Les autres,” in Critique nos. 375-376, “L’animalité” (August-September 1978), interview with François Bel and Michel Fano, hosted by Antoine Compagnon, p. 660. ↩
9. Pierre MOINOT, La Griffe et la dent, Paris, Denoël, 1977, p. 7. ↩
10. English translation from Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, ed. Alfred H. BARR, Jr., in collaboration with the Art Institute in Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, 1939, p. 13. ↩
11. FANO, “Le son et le sens,” in Cinémas de la modernité: films, theories, Colloque de Cerisy, dir. Dominique Château, André Gardies, and François Jost, Klincksieck, 1981, p. 106. ↩
12. Philippe LANGLOIS, Les Cloches d’Atlantis. Musique électroacoustique et cinéma. Archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, MF, 2012, p. 345. ↩
13. Michel CHION, La Musique au cinéma, Fayard, 2019, p. 380. ↩
14. CHION, L’audio-vision, Armand Colin, 2017, p. 47. ↩
15. FANO, “Le son et le sens,” p. 108. ↩
16. FANO, “Messiaen et l’opéra,” in Anik Lesure and Claude Samuel, Olivier Messiaen, le livre du centenaire, Symétrie, 2008. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?