09/09/07
Text: Jennifer Nies, Cheyne Nadeau
There was a period between ‘66 and ‘71 when the best films that imagined the future were made. 2001, Play Time, Fahrenheit 451 and THX 1138 were not flashy, aggressive fantasies, but rather more mellow meditations on the sort of world we humans might inherit. Daft Punk’s Electroma could quite easily have come from this batch, since it shines with a similar aesthetic applied with a completely fresh approach. Shot by Thomas Bangalter himself, the film can only be described as a piece of visceral art free from the traditional foundations of narrative filmmaking. It’s a fully imagined experience made from Daft Punk’s robot guts.
It’s a lot easier to understand Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo if we stop thinking of them as mere musicians who get distracted by side projects and start thinking of them as multi-media artists propelled by an excitement for what comes next, no matter the form. Driven to satisfy nothing but their own creative curiosity, they will always be trying new things to challenge themselves and in turn their audience. This year they’re touring their unparalleled live show and asking their fans open their minds to Electroma.
Anthem was fortunate enough to speak with Thomas Bangalter about the music of film, Kanye West and the days when memory was a commodity.
How did Electroma come about?
We’ve always been excited and interested in images and film as much as music—at every opportunity we try to transcribe music into images. We set up our production company, Daft Arts, two years ago in America to experiment with film and images the way we did ten years ago in the home studio with electronic music. We tried to take no rules into consideration and [to] redefine and explore formats that take elements from the past and the future, to mix stuff that had been done in a way [that] hadn’t been done before.
I was really interested in photography and cinematography, so for the three years I read any technical material I could put my hands on. I got twenty years of archives of American Cinematographer and got into a very technical yet artistic approach to light, emulsion and film. It was a hands on experience with the camera as much as the music has always been hands on with the drum machines, sampler or synthesizer. It’s like what we’ve been doing with music, which is a combination of technique, reading manuals…then forget all the rules, technique and technology.
Who did you kill to get the 60’s film stock?
Unfortunately the 60’s stock don’t exist any more but that’s definitely the question we were asking ourselves: how to achieve the looks we wanted? You could think that some of these images are stock footage from 1967 but it’s all been custom made in 2006. It’s a combination of retrofuturism by trying to get a 1960s or 70s look yet with ideas that were introduced artistically after that. Almost like creating fake samples, which we have done, especially in Discovery, where people think there are samples from disco records or funk records—there are no samples at all.
I’ve stumbles upon those posts online where they are like, “look at all these samples,” and half of this list is not true. The samples that were used have always been cleared and it’s very blatant. There [are] hardly any credits on Human After All, except in the case of Robot Rock there is a sample of Breakwater. I think that sampling is always something that we’ve completely legitimately done. It’s not something we’ve hidden, it’s almost a partisan or ideological way of making music, sampling things and being sampled.
On my label we’ve been doing records that are 9 minutes with only [a single] one second loop, with even less foundation than there is on Robot Rock. It’s always been a way to reinterpret things—sometimes it’s using [an] element from the past, or sometimes recreating them and fooling the eyes or the ears, which is just a fun thing to do.
How do feel about people like Swiss Beats and Kayne West sampling Daft Punk?
I think it comes full circle and I think that’s what’s fun about music. It’s good to see, not only sampling but also people acknowledging our music because we are really music and art lovers. So many people have influenced us. We [are] just two white kids from Paris making this connection, so being reconnected back to American culture, to urban culture and African-American music, it’s really cool because we’ve been extremely influenced by it. It’s this continuation of art and creation. We feel really humble and happy about the unlikely connection.
You called out some of those influences when you named the best producers of the time on the track Teachers. Did you ever get a hear back from any of them?
One day in LA, the phone rang and it was Nile Rogers from Chic, and he said “yeah, I really like your stuff.” One funny thing is we were doing this song live ten years ago on our ‘97 tour. We were in the UK and while I was singing it live we were triggering with the keyboard pictures of all the producers on the screen. On the night of Halloween we changed everything and we replaced it with horror movie heroes and had some halloween synth lines ….“Michael Myers, Freddy Crugar.”
I watched Electroma with Human After All and it’s obviously paced to work with the album.
Ohhh, well you know a lot of people watch Darkside of the Moon with Wizard of Oz and it’s working fine too but I don’t know?
But this fits too well the song breaks coincide so nicely with the scene breaks and the mood shifts, it has to be more than just coincidence.
No, I don’t know if I would to say that. It’s part of the same creative cycle and one can say that. Despite the fact that there is no Daft Punk music in Electroma that this is definitely the subtext even though we are really into abstract world here but the two works are really responding to one another.
Were they being conceptualized at the same time?
No, not at all. This film was done in a much more spontaneous way, an almost subconscious way. I’m very interested how you can express ideas, and analyzing them afterwards. Primarily it was done much like the music, without using the brain at all or the thinking part of the brain, which obviously is not usually the way you do films. The movie is inaccessible on many points but at the same time it’s not a “brain” movie [but] rather an “eye” movie, something that speaks to the body.
It reminded me a lot of films like Baraka or Koyaniskazi.
Yeah well obviously at the time of Human After All we were completely plunged into those kinds of films, though we didn’t try and do something similar. It’s more like we tried to do music for the eye. Paintings can be similar to music—when you see some Dali or Magritte painting there is this sense, some images really strike you physically like harmonies can do. It just short circuits your brain because it’s linked to some emotions.
The way you edited Electroma also has a musical feel to it, more so than traditional film edits.
It’s true. It was either a very old way of editing or maybe a different way. I really like fast editing, beginning with Sam Peckinpah to blockbusters that have 6 frame shots, but in terms of raw power, I always thought that long takes have a much more dramatic sense of power.
I mean like in your music, there are a lot of repeated shots almost like rhythms.
I think that that would be more subconscious than deliberate. At the same time, this is what this film is: one personal experience being shared with other people that are appropriating it and making it their own. We always said about Electroma that the only actor in the film is the spectator himself. It is some kind of a film/ environment created for the spectator that lacks everything that a film has, which is a script or dialogue. The story also lacks characters, lacks human beings, warmth and emotion and if you can see the smallest hint of story you are just projecting.
