R. ne répond plus

Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne & 50' — 1981

Seven radio stations called “free”, as opposed to radio stations “linked” to the state, which we visited for three months (December, January, February 1981). Seven radios which are seven worlds, mixtures of practices and myths organized around the circulation of this primary and paradoxical element: sound, invisible medium, which does not give itself to the image and which is however the largest producer, the most fruitful source of image myths. Making images and sound (making a film) on free radios can be a certain way of making images on images, trying to capture with images and sound a situation, a moment in the operation of a radio, the sound, like the incarnation or the impossibility of incarnation of an image, of a myth. The film is this attempt to image the myths conveyed by the sounds of free radio stations. Myths which are directly linked to the metamorphosis and communication powers of sound, revised and corrected by our obsessions with communication today: the more it communicates, the better (cybernetic myth). A new medium, a new demiurge of the social revolution (political-technical myth). We filmed free radios in situations where myths and realities meet, when the myth of the voice taking action becomes: emitting a volume of sounds = building a sales area, issuing a call to take to the streets becomes 2,000 demonstrators fighting the police overnight. They are filmed at the moments when the myth comes crashing down on the ground of reality, where communicating a fact is reversed in a delirium of opinions, where the language which believed to say true is overcome by the language which says strong. Between these myths and the practices of the different radios, between the images born by the powers of sound and the images of the radios broadcasting their information and their music, arise, like devils from their box, the Ks, the film commentators both caught in the mythical net and seeking to undo the meshes, laughing philologists in search of the meanings of this new alliance between the word radio and the free adjective, untimely questioners in pursuit of an answer that does not come : here K2, ask where has the Real gone? Are free radios a possibility to recreate reality, do their voices have enough breath to revive it, or) the reverse do they begin to speak true, to transmit reality only when it already has begin to exist, as in 1977 on the streets of Milan and Rome, as in 1980 on the streets of Zürich.

Belgium

Production : CBA, Médiaform & Collectif Dérives

Réalisation
Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Scenario
Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne
DOP
S. Gatti & Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Sound
JP. Duret & E. Luyckx
Image editor
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Mix
C. Mouriéras
Production
CBA, Médiaform & Collectif Dérives
Image Format
Video 3/4
BW/Colour
Color
Languages OV
FR

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