Single channel, Colour, Sound, HD Video
The films Les souffles is one of Bertrand Lamarche’s works relative to his interest in recorded music and sound and how to show the process of listening. In several of his installations or films, Bertrand Lamarche uses turntables in some ‘mises en scenes’ where the records, the turntables and the sounds are equally important. They are all used to pinpoint the idea that space and time can be distorted or twisted by using and playing with the reality and the image of a spiral. The film Les souffles shows a close up on a phonograph that reads a record which has been previously covered with wax. The needle of the machine reads the record and a thin thread of wax grows in a constant and moving shape that breaks while too long and too fragile to resist the rotation of the turntable. It is then swallowed by a vacuum cleaner that one can just hear. This thread is eventually the negative figure of a recorded song that one can see but not hear. It shows convulsive disorder, like if the timeline organized in the constant spiral of the record had become a complete chaos.