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‘Say it with Georges Auric’: Film Music and the esprit nouveau

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2011

COLIN ROUST
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Abstract

Although he composed more than 120 film scores during his career, Georges Auric (1899–1983) did not compose his first until well after his thirtieth birthday. However, as a disciple of Guillaume Apollinaire's esprit nouveau he was interested in the genre much earlier. Between 1919 and 1928 he published three pieces of film music criticism that are couched in the rhetoric of Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau. In 1931 he composed his second film score, for René Clair's 1931 film A Nous, la Liberté! Although the music was composed after the esprit nouveau movement had effectively faded away, it is one of the clearest examples of that aesthetic. Because of the extraordinary collaborative relationship between Clair and Auric, the film also presents one of the most striking early solutions to the problem of how sound could be incorporated into the artistic rhetoric of silent cinema.

Type
Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , September 2009 , pp. 133 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

Filmography

Clair, René, director. A Nous, la Liberté! Music by Georges Auric. 83 minutes. DVD, Criterion Collection, 2002.Google Scholar
Cocteau, Jean, director. The Blood of a Poet. Music by Georges Auric. 50 minutes. DVD, Criterion Collection, 2002.Google Scholar
Le Roux, Maurice, producer. Georges Auric: la Musique de notre temps. TF1, 21 May 1978 (television documentary).Google Scholar

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