N’importe quoi (Extérieur – Jour)

Part 2 of N’importe Quoi. Filmed with Brunhild Ferrari at her home in Montreuil and in several locations in Paris, with sound recordings by Eric La Casa and music by Brunhild Ferrari.

A portrait of Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari, who, alongside her husband Luc, did as much as anyone to realize the post-Cagean whatever of musical composition, to test the thin line between the form of the world and the forms of art. Fowler begins in Meyer-Ferrari’s charmingly cluttered studio, catching glimpses of her amidst endless stacks of tapes and analog devices for the recording and manipulation of sound. “Je pense sans parole,” she says—“I think without words”—and Fowler cuts to a pair of glasses upon a tabletop in burnished, golden light: some think with microphones, others with lenses. Meyer-Ferrari departs the studio with her microphone to collect the sounds of Parisian parks and train stations. At the moment of this transition from studio to city, she recounts her earliest meetings with the man who would become her husband and collaborator, “He engaged me for work that was really interesting to me: it was research on [the] relationship between sound and image.”

Phil Coldiron