When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories

59 min, 2022
︎︎︎ PRESS KITTEASER

Underneath the lengthy title of Éric Baudelaire’s new film, three films are hiding, separated by three credit rolls and three titles (Four Flat Tires, The Lost Score, and When There Is No More Music to Write). They evoke the figure of avant-garde composer Alvin Curran in his relationship to Rome, where he settled in the mid-1960s, and the music he created there, mainly within the famous Musica Elettronica Viva collective. But as the sub-title of the last of these films indicates “of about Alvin Curran”, the project is no less a portrait than a collaboration: Baudelaire’s collaboration with the composer, whom he never films in person, but whose thoughts and sounds he borrows; with his long-time editor, Claire Atherton; and with Maxime Guitton, a researcher involved in the project right from the start and who unearths priceless material. But Baudelaire also draws on Alvin Curran’s collaborations with his own companions, such as the underground filmmaker Annabella Miscuglio, of whom Baudelaire includes several films; with his city and his times, marked by the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and the revolutionary struggle. For it was in reaction to the discourses on the end of history and to the Years of Lead that Alvin Curran justified a musical art free from scored music and focussed on collaborative and performative processes. And to oppose political deadlocks and the death of cinema, Éric Baudelaire, in league with the oeuvre he documents, plays down the figure of the author and the pretension to an art as a single unit. Three times over the film ends and restarts, with the certainty that by replaying the end, everything can begin again • Antoine Thirion, Cinéma du Réel catalogue
A film by
Éric Baudelaire
Based on research by
Maxime Guitton
Music
Alvin Curran
Musica Elettronica Viva
Image
Éric Baudelaire and archives 
Editing
Claire Atherton
Graphic Design
Pierre-François Letué
Mix
Éric Lesachet
Production
Poulet-Malassis Films・Éric Baudelaire
With support from
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
La Fondation des Artistes
Villa Médicis
Crac Occitanie
Bergen Kunsthall
Spike Island
DCP
4:3
Super 8 and found footage
Stereo sound
Italian and English with English/Italian subtitles 
DISTRIBUTION
LUX (UK)
FESTIVALS
Cinéma du Réel
CPH:DOX
Art of The Real・Lincoln Center
Viennale
DocumentaMadrid
Curtas Vila do Conde
DocLisboa
Villa Medici Film Festival
DMZ Docs
DOK Leipzig
Viennale
Filmmaker Festival Milano
REVIEWS
On Screen, The Wire, June 2022
Conversation Pieces, Colin Perry, Art Monthly, May 2022
When There Is No More Music To Write, M. G. Mailloux, In Review, April 2022

Cinéma du Réel. Entretien, Clarisse Pillard, Mediapart, March 2022
MORE RESOURCES
When There is no More Music to Write, Spike Island (Bristol), 2022

Faire Avec, CRAC Occitanie (Sète), 2020

The Birth of a New Ritual, Robert Barry, VAN Magazine, June 2022