{"id":18419,"date":"2020-07-30T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-30T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/?p=18419"},"modified":"2021-01-13T18:30:19","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T16:30:19","slug":"school-of-spontaneity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/society\/learning\/school-of-spontaneity\/","title":{"rendered":"School of Spontaneity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The film Atelier des sons & expressions spontan\u00e9es<\/em> is a free interpretation of the experimental artistic practices undertaken in schools in the 1960s and 70s, in particular sound experimentations conducted with schoolchildren as part of the Freinet pedagogical method. The film is documented by a collection of audio archives (vinyl 45\u2019s) and magazines (Art Enfantin) published by the Institut coop\u00e9ratif de l\u2019\u00e9cole moderne (ICEM, Freinet method), a rather exhaustive collection reunited specifically for this project. These sound archives, replayed especially for the occasion and juxtaposed with film scenes of diverse origins, generate a kind of joyful ambient chaos, offering a phantasmagorical account of these pedagogical excursions into utopian experiments that hoped to counteract the monotony and boredom in schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Vincent

Vincent Epplay, stills from the film Atelier des sons et expressions spontan\u00e9es, 2020<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Luc Cl\u00e9ment: This new film fits in perfectly with your artistic practice, which often associates archive images with experimental sound production along a rather discrepant mode (dissociating sound and image). It seems, however, that this project developed quite by chance.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vincent Epplay:<\/strong> The project started with my personal research into the notion of sound and musical experimentation conducted by children in schools. To be more specific, it actually started to take shape when I rediscovered the magazine Art enfantin, several issues of which included a record and an explanatory note or a text about the experience of making the recordings. My initial intention wasn\u2019t to make a movie, and even less a documentary on the topic, rather to use these collected recordings and documents to create an open installation for reproducing these experiments, including programmed listening sessions within a kind of reading and reference library with a selection of texts and image-documents. In brief, a sort of mini studio-library open by appointment. But like usual, these initial ideas change as opportunities come up. So the idea for a film suddenly became concrete following a proposition by Pascale Cassagnau (art critic and Doctor of art history) for the \u2018rendez-vous du Gai savoir \u00e0 Paris\u2019 initiative.
Unlike many of my previous films — Mn\u00e9motechnie sonore & musicale, X\u00e9noglosie Radio, Le Club des Animistes, La fabrique du consentement \u2018Hypnose musicale\u2019<\/em> (assemblage films composed primarily of archive images, conceived as film scores for concerts\/screenings where the sound is played live) — the film Atelier des sons & expressions spontan\u00e9es<\/em> had a screenplay and was edited to the soundtrack, which was recorded beforehand and composed essentially out of ICEM and \u00e9dition CEL productions. In this context, the images work to accentuate the idea of musical experimentation, the visual sequences were selected to amplify the sound material independently of their original meaning. Even if it seems like sometimes a narrative might be surfacing, the raw and free music aspect of the soundtrack, associated with specifically-edited superimposed images and the unsynchronized sounds, make the final product rather untameable. Let there be chaos! Something is bound to come of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LC: While watching, one cannot help but think of Jean Vigo\u2019s cinema and Zero for Conduct, even more so than, for instance, the Truffaut of \u2018400 Blows\u2019. Did you have this reference in mind or are the images, as the title suggests, spontaneously larger than life?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

VE<\/strong>: The different film scenes I used are primarily documentary in origin, or served as propaganda, dating back to the 1930s until the late 1970s, which gives them a very particular esthetic and temporal sheen.
For the most part, they consist of little scenes pulled from newsreels: on a hands-on class busy building sculptures for the children\u2019s carnaval in the Czech Republic; on a religious institution of deaf-mutes in Larnay, near Poitiers (\u201cThe School of Miracles\u201d); on a group of children improvising with Baschet sound structures as part of the Bruits en f\u00eate et sons du plaisir<\/em> event; on an advanced class at Emile Levassor primary school that uses Freinet techniques in Ivry-sur-Seine; on the electroacoustic musical initiation at GMEB (Experimental Music Group of Bourges) that used the Gmebogosse synth designed by IMEB (International Institute of Electroacoustic Music in Bourges); on an American school in the 1950s (\u201cFormes & formations: peintures et musiques des gestes enchant\u00e9s\u201d<\/em>); or even on an architectural experiment entitled Du r\u00eave en cube conducted by Jean Boris at the Freinet school in Vence.
Throughout this diverse array of documents, you always come across the school context: school, the classroom and educational workshops, where children are grouped together to provide a framework for putting into practice the idea of collective experience. In these situations, which have to do with playing and games, whether it be with musical instruments or other objects not necessarily related to music, recording devices act as a witness to all these experiments. As to the references, there are many and may recall films like \u201cLe Moindre geste\u201d by Fernand Deligny, co-directed with Jos\u00e9e Manenti and Jean-Pierre Daniel (1962-1971), or \u201cLes enfants de Summerhill\u201d or, indeed, \u201cZero for Conduct\u201d and that pillow fight scene in the dormitory\u2026 A magnificent moment of poetic folly.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"Images

Vincent Epplay, stills from the film Atelier des sons et expressions spontan\u00e9es, 2020<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n

LC: Although the film is an incredible account of the freedom and daring behind the educational experiments of the time, what comes across is, above all, a lot of emotion. Are you aware of having expressed, with this project, something more personal than in other works, that draws on your own experience at the Freinet school in Vence, in France?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

VE:<\/strong> While making the movie, I didn\u2019t really know what I was getting into at first, and the furthest thing from my mind was what it might provoke in the spectator. After the first screening, a woman familiar with the topic told me, \u201cThis is not a film about Freinet\u2026 it is a Freinet film!\u201d which sums it up nicely. My personal experience is clearly not incidental to the story, but I tried to avoid using the film to talk about myself. Instead I approached the subject in a disjointed, even dreamlike way, starting with the idea of being an enthusiastic listener of this spontaneous music, of this free expression, while trying to find my own way of recreating all these experiences, each unique in their kind, be they conducted in the early 1960s or late 1970s. These productions correspond to a very specific moment in time when children still weren\u2019t too influenced by commercial, mainstream music, and when the distribution tools for culture and information — radio and black and white television — were not yet completely dominant. So what came out was something akin to a manifesto. Deep down, the children were saying: Today we need to show educators that this music will take up the eminent place it deserves within our modern classrooms, in service of children\u2019s creativity, of musical culture, of life.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

LC: We touched briefly on how you also spent some time at a rather incredible school in which a number of artists and unique personalities passed through. Could you tell us a little more about it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

VE:<\/strong> I was brought up in the Freinet school of Vence (in south of France) from 1969 to 1975, so for my very first years of schooling! It was certainly a period when the Freinet movement was in full swing, with the ICEM (Institut Coop\u00e9ratif de l’Ecole Moderne). In one scene, we get a glimpse of an architectural experiment conducted in the Freinet school of Vence in 1971 by Jean Boris (architect, researcher, founder of RAUC – the Research Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Construction). The idea behind this experiment was for children to investigate the theme \u2018Your real habitat\/Your dream habitat\u2019<\/em>. To do so, the architect crafted semi-rigid foam modules in the shape of trapezes, triangles, and handed them over to the children as their primary building materials. We stood before a literal mountain of foam blocks, and for an entire month we built, individually or in small groups, an ideal habitat in the middle of the forest. We could sleep there and occupy it during the day\u2014it was a pretty incredible life experience and way to understand space. Robert Filliou was not far away, in Saint-Jeannet where he lived at \u201cR\u00e9publique G\u00e9niale\u201d. He and his wife Marianne sent their daughter Marcelle to the Freinet school in the very early 1970s and they came to propose their own interventions, like many other parents, to share their skills and desires. Another amazing personality, Ib Schmedes, a Danish entomologist and filmmaker, regularly visited to conduct workshop-lectures dedicated to the fauna and flora of Provence. In fact, he even initiated an eco-museum that was finally opened in La Gaude (not far from Vence). I don\u2019t remember everything\u2026 there were certainly many others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Jean

Vincent Epplay, stills from the filmAtelier des sons et expressions spontan\u00e9es (Architect Jean Boris’ workshop in Freinet school)<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n

LC: What role did this education play in the evolution of your artistic work?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

VE:<\/strong> I would say it kind of imbued my way of making art: the idea of experimentation prevails over the final result. To consider an artist\u2019s activity as a way of exchanging, of shifting things and creating encounters, that is perhaps something I picked up from my time at a Freinet school. I got even more interested in approaches related to music made by artists, who are often not musicians. You can actually find similarities in approach between these spontaneous musiques brutes made by children and other experiments in music, for example music by \u201cthe insane\u201d, or Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn\u2019s Musique chauve and Musique ph\u00e9nom\u00e9nale, Alain Saverot\u2019s La ballade rustique, the duo Nu Creative methods<\/em> by Bernard Pruvost and Pierre Bastien, and many others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LC: The film is a chance to discover an ensemble of documents, magazines and vinyl records published by ICEM and \u00e9ditions CEL. What was the role of this publishing company, which no longer exists today?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

VE:<\/strong> The ICEM (Institut Coop\u00e9ratif de l’Ecole Moderne), a non-profit organization created by C\u00e9lestin Freinet in 1947, united teachers, trainers and educators. The CEL (Coop\u00e9rative d\u2019enseignement la\u00efque) distributed publications (BT booklets, working libraries, or the magazine Art enfantin) and other materials: musical instruments like Ariel, tape recorders, turntables, tools for printing, one of the bases of Freinet teaching. These structures were two complementary entities whose goals were research and innovation in education, disseminating the Freinet method alongside refining and experimenting with classroom teaching tools, and publishing magazines and documentary recordings for children and teachers.
These educational publications give a unique account of the issues related to musical practice: How do you teach music? Which methods are effective? What is the relationship between the free expression we advocate and music? Starting from these questions, music workshops and sound creation studios were set up, equipped with acoustic and electronic instruments that were provided, in some cases, by CEL, or fabricated by the children themselves.
\u201cAs long as we are children, we think and live without differentiating between working, inventing, creating and even playing. The word \u2018art\u2019 does not mean anything other than being alive every day, normally and \u2018naturally\u2019, while proclaiming it.\u201d MEB and J.-P. L. \u201cEncore un disque nouveau\u201d, \u00e9ditions CEL.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Archives

Vincent Epplay, stills from the film Atelier des sons et expressions spontan\u00e9es<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n

LC: Today, critical pedagogy has seen a resurgence, particularly in Montessori schools. Yet if we watch the film carefully, we cannot help but wonder whether this enormous capacity for experimentation has truly and fully taken anchor. What is your perspective?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

VE:<\/strong> Indeed, that all corresponds to a particular era, the early 1960s until the mid-70s, when concrete music was emerging from the studio-labs of La Maison de la Radio and free jazz hit its climax as a form of protest music; but it was also a time of experimenting with utopian architecture for all, the early stages of handheld recording with Portapak video recorders, and many other tools that foster the imagination and creative desires\u2014an era when utopias did not frighten us. In fact, you can read it in the texts that accompanied the CEL recordings: \u201cThis recording is neither a reward nor promotion, and even less a favor. It is simply a way of entering into dialogue and remains a medium for expression. In order for this expression to become communication, it is desirable that it elicit reactions.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n