The harpsichordist, organist and musical director of Clavecin en concert, an event in which he is preparing to give his last concert of the season, takes the time to remember his cinematographic emotions…
Luc, what is your first memory of a movie theatre?
I don’t remember exactly… Maybe it was the drive-in… I’m from a generation that was a child in the 1960s. There were movies like “Ben-Hur” or “La melody of happiness”, it is vague. I remember movies, some images, sound, but it’s blurry. I can’t view the first movie theater.
Your first remarkable film?
Spontaneously, these are the images of “The Melody of Happiness”, the mountains, the song. The songs are what marked me, I think we sang them in elementary school. […] We had a piano at my parents’ house, so I think that unconsciously, I knew that I wanted to be a performer. I always played by ear, I reproduced melodies. “Do Re Mi”? I did this with a finger. The landscapes were so beautiful.
And a newer one?
I really like Pedro Almodovar’s films. My favorite of him is ‘Talk to Her’ and it’s been a few years. This is a movie that brought me to tears. Films are like concerts, it depends on our state of mind, on how we receive things at a specific moment in our existence.
What is film music to you?
I find the music of a film extremely important. Music is the extension of the image, of the emotion. Music magnifies everything. The image has an objective side, as soon as there is music, it “subjectivizes” it. The power of music is quite incredible.
Film music that knocks you down?
As a musician, the greatest achievement is “Amadeus”. When Mozart dictates his “Requiem” to Salieri, he does so voice by voice. We hear, we see the music building. We hear the result as he dictates it and it comes together at the end. It is fabulous. What a good movie! What a beautiful movie!
A film that you would have liked to set to music?
Quite honestly, all films that talk about music, whether it’s “All the mornings in the world” or “La passion d’Augustine”, touch me. What would I have put to music? I do not know. But I would have chosen a Quebec film, that’s for sure!
The movie you didn’t manage to watch until the end?
In fact, these are films that show quite late at night on Radio Canada and I had to go to bed. I stopped the film with regret. It is in this sense that I did not manage to finish a film. I may have walked out of a movie theater once because the movie was going nowhere. I don’t remember… maybe because the film wasn’t worth remembering.
The film or the film universe in which you would like to live?
I seem to be going back to the past, but I would like to go back to the films of Louis de Funès. It must have been quite funny. These days, the world isn’t very happy and we don’t always have good news… Going back to that time, when we could have fun without having a gray cloud above of the head.
