La Messe de Terre by Michel Chion: From Liturgy to Self-Portrait
Celebrated as much for his essays on cinematic soundtracks as for his concrete music compositions, Michel Chion (b. 1947) is also developing a body of cinematographic and video work that constitutes an extension of his musical writing. An encyclopedic work spanning two and a half hours, La Messe de Terre is a true “audio-logo-visual liturgy” combining concrete music with a very sophisticated assembly of images. If the work is dominated by the caesura, the incongruity between what we see and what we hear, the two elements steadily converge into a common “architecture of time.” At the very edge of the mass form, we find traces of a video self-portrait combining home movie and work journal.