Brunhild Ferrari

“Like most of my fellow human beings, I was born, I grew up, I attended schools, I passed exams, I failed, I loved, I worked hard sometimes, I enjoyed life;
I continue. I worked with Pierre Schaeffer in the ORTF research department on the relationship between sound and image. Of German origin, I have had an activity as an interpreter and translator. Following Luc Ferrari's advice in matters of life, music, and composition, and working with him over the course of our 40 years together, I made my own Hörspiele and radio plays broadcast on France Culture, in the United States, and the main German radio stations. Since Luc left us in 2005, I have taken care of the preservation of his vast archives; founded the "Association Presque Rien - Friends of Luc Ferrari"; initiated and organized the biennial competition PRESQUE RIEN Prize by providing artists with original sound material from Luc's sound recordings; and edited a book of his writings and documents (Musiques dans les spasmes, published by les Presses du Réel, France) as well as one more book in English together with Catherine Marcangeli (Luc Ferrari: Complete Works, published by Ecstatic Peace library). I composed music; I continue.”

Brunhild Ferrari

Luke Fowler

Luke Fowler is an artist, filmmaker, and musician based in Glasgow. His para-documentary films have explored counter-cultural figures including Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, English composer Cornelius Cardew, and Marxist-Historian E. P. Thompson. With an emphasis on communities of people, outward thinkers, and the history of the left, his 16mm films tell the stories of alternative movements in Britain, from psychiatry to photography to music to education. Whilst some of his early films dealt with music and musicians as subjects, his later works deal with the nature of sound itself.

David Grubbs

David Grubbs is a musician and writer based in Brooklyn. He was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Loren Connors, Susan Howe, and many others. His books include Good night the pleasure was ours, The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press). Grubbs is a 2024-25 Berlin Prize recipient from the American Academy in Berlin as well as Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. 

Photo by Taku Unami

N’Importe Quoi (for Brunhild) (2023, 9min.)

The film N'Importe Quoi (for Brunhild) in many ways stands in the tradition of Fowler’s impressionist portraits of persons who have made an impact on his personal and artistic life. Quite often, the person being portrayed remains unseen, with Fowler concentrating instead on their voice and traces of their presence in the form of personal ephemera or the atmosphere of their room. Yet, in this new film, the performativity of his subject Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari is self-evident. Composer Brunhild Ferrari, born 1937 in Frankfurt a.M., Germany moved to Paris in 1959 where she would meet and marry the composer Luc Ferrari. Brunhild Meyer, who produced a number of works of radio art in the 70’s and 80’s for SWF, slowly began to emerge as a composer in the last decade (adopting her husband's surname only after his death). Luc Ferrari, was a pioneer of ‘Musique concrète’ and a founding member of Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) with Pierre Schaeffer in Paris. Fowler’s film provides peripheral glimpses into their collaborative life and work but resists a traditional biographic narrative.

N’Importe Quoi (Extérieur-Jour) (2024, 11min.)

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.

Cinema didn’t quite begin with the face, but its role quickly became central. From as early as the research of Vertov and Epstein, the face in motion was understood as uniquely compelling, capable of betraying a whole new range of expressive possibilities too subtle for stillness to capture. It’s odd, then, how rarely artists have produced filmed portraits free of any narrative framework. There are, of course, by now thousands of biographical documentaries—many based around the oft-derided ‘talking head’—but with the towering exception of Warhol’s Screen Tests, cinema’s most sophisticated and accomplished pure portraits have tended to work obliquely, drawing together fragments around the empty centre of their subject, whose face appears rarely, if at all.

Luke Fowler’s two decades of work comprise, I think, the most significant body of cinematic portraiture produced to date. He has fashioned a canon of eccentric, obscure, or under-recognized artists and thinkers out of the sediment of their lives, the documents of their archives, the places they passed through. Biography is absent; anecdote, even, is minimal. If classical portraiture attempts to pluck its subject from the world and refashion them as a symbol of it (Goldin’s work depends on showing just how unwilling the world is to let go of its subjects), Fowler works by the inverse, beginning with the world at large and searching out the tiniest traces that might speak to a single, specific path through it.

N’importe quoi. Anything goes, it’s all game, as the world forever is before the camera. And so finally we arrive at his remarkable new film, N’Importe Quoi (for Brunhild), 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.”

The final image we see of the studio in this opening passage is a tape box labeled presque rien—next to nothing—then, after a rhythmic cut to black, Meyer-Ferrari alone in the dusty bowl of a park as urban ambience fills the soundtrack. Fowler holds on this medium shot for 10 seconds or so, before moving into one of his typical series of quick reframings, culminating in another cut to black which leads on to an instance of his other recurring gesture: rotating the Bolex’s turret mid-shot, drawing a curved image down as the lens pops into place. The sound, previously continuous, changes abruptly at this last cut; where we heard chatter and sporting thwacks that might have seemed appropriate to a park on a sunny day, there is only sparse birdsong and the rustle of leaves. This layering of potential realities is, I’ll suggest, the ground of Fowler’s practice. (Text by Phil Coldiron)