When There Is No More Music To Write, and other Roman Stories

2022
Country: France
Duration: 59 mins
Colour,
Sound: Stereo
Ratio: 4:3
Available Format/s: DCP
Original Format: Super 8mm Film / Found Footage

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Underneath the lengthy title of Éric Baudelaire’s new film, three films are hiding, separated by three credit rolls
and three titles (Four Flat Tires, The Lost Score, and When There Is No More Music to Write). They evoke the
figure of avant-garde composer Alvin Curran in his relationship to Rome, where he settled in the mid-1960s, and
the music he created there, mainly within the famous Musica Elettronica Viva collective. But as the sub-title of the
last of these films indicates “of about Alvin Curran”, the project is no less a portrait than a collaboration:
Baudelaire’s collaboration with the composer, whom he never films in person, but whose thoughts and sounds he
borrows; with his long-time editor, Claire Atherton; and with Maxime Guitton, a researcher involved in the project
right from the start and who unearths priceless material. But Baudelaire also draws on Alvin Curran’s
collaborations with his own companions, such as the underground filmmaker Annabella Miscuglio, of whom
Baudelaire includes several films; with his city and his times, marked by the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and the
revolutionary struggle. For it was in reaction to the discourses on the end of history and to the Years of Lead that
Alvin Curran justified a musical art free from scored music and focussed on collaborative and performative
processes. And to oppose political deadlocks and death, the cinema of Éric Baudelaire, in league with the oeuvre
he documents, plays down the figure of the author and the pretension to an art as a single unit. Three times over
the film ends and restarts, with the certainty that by replaying the end, everything can begin again • Antoine
Thirion, Cinéma du Réel catalogue

More works by Eric Baudelaire

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