Alain Franco
‘I am not really an inveterate reader; I don’t have anything like a
favourite book or piece of music I want to read or listen to again and
again, but I have noticed that I recurringly turn to the poems of René
Char. I have read the complete works of the nineteenth-century German
author Theodor Fontane, who wrote about a world that no longer exists.
I read that with as much pleasure as the works of Marcel Proust. But I
read more sociological works, and a little philosophy, than novels or
short stories. I prefer to explore a piece by Plato than one or other
novel. I also go for recently published works, mainly in the
philosophical-sociological area. I recently read a book by the German
sociologist Ulrich Beck on the challenges of globalisation, and La civilisation des médias
by the twentieth-century Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser. I am not
really part of that world, nor am I really involved in those matters,
but I do consider it necessary to stay informed about them, and to
confront them for myself. I can’t imagine that anyone engaged in their
own development at the present time should hide away from that world. I
find it necessary to let myself be touched by the world and to let the
wound thus created ‘ooze’. I mean that in a positive sense: an oozing
wound enables the world to penetrate straight inside.
I don’t actually listen to much music, because I play for myself rather than listen. On a Sunday afternoon I find it more fun to pick up a collection by Liszt – just as one might pick up a weighty volume – and spend three hours at the piano reading the music as I play it. This is not like giving a concert or an exercise or technical preparation, but simply reading music as one would a book. I have as many scores at home as I have books: they include contemporary works, but also older ones and even some very early ones.
As far as films are concerned I have a strong preference for the French avant-garde: Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais and of course Jean-Luc Godard. It is no coincidence that they are all film auteurs who hover between the worlds of literature and music. I don’t really keep up with art. I often have a problem with theatre-makers who see the image as the essence of theatre. I am not interested in the brilliance and illusion of the image, with its glitter and dazzle.
I have not constructed ‘a central edifice’ in the course of my
reading. There are people who as their lives move on are able to say
that something is the essence around which everything revolves. I think
in our era it is in any case by no means simple to put together this
sort of central edifice. It is precisely because the world has changed
so much that I can now understand why I go back to a work like Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier, which dates from what one might call the ‘stone
age’. What I am interested in is the reality of the subject matter
stored within that work: the work forces you to confront this subject
matter. That’s what I appreciate so much in such theatre-makers as Ivo
Van Hove and Peter van Kraaij: that constant return to the stalemate
between both the trial of strength and the subject matter. It seems
good to me to tackle these matters again and again: they lie hidden in
and will perhaps even disappear in our era, swallowed up by the
acceleration of our world. But at one time or another they will have to
come back to the surface again, just as one of the spaceships always
has to crash into a planet in SF films. This leads to a clash, which
makes a noise, and it is precisely this abrupt restriction of speed
that reminds us of the materiality of reality, and of the existence of
that planet. This music of Bach’s is there, it exists, you can’t just
push it aside. We shall be faced with both its disappearance and its
return. I wonder how future generations will deal with it. And even if
it doesn’t return, I am still curious about how it doesn’t, how they will deal with immateriality, how they will translate into image or picture what in the past was matter.’
(MVK - Bulletin Sep|Oct 2006)
12/9/2006 - Sacre, the Rite of Spring
22, 29/10/2006 - Das wohltemperierte Klavier
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