11.25.06
Paris November 2006
The trip to film and photograph Debussy sites in Paris went very well. The weather was sunny, rainy, brilliant, and misty, so it allowed me to capture many evocative impressions. Pierre Jacquard was very helpful and his knowledge of French enabled us to go into homes close to Debussy’s residences, learn more information, and capture unique images.
I found some unique books with photos, accounts of Debussy interviews in English given during 1909 and 1911, and the complete letters in French which were published in 2005. I found some items that would be difficult to find in the US.
I have over 1 gig of photos and 5 hours of video I will sort and edit. I hope to give a presentation in Paris in April with my piano playing and video and to have a rough cut of the film completed. My goal is to submit it to film festivals.
I will relate my impressions in another post. I am still processing what I experienced each day, and people tell me it seems I am not quite back from Paris, that part of my spirit remains there. I think that may well be true.
The light was special, and the many changes of weather and the many locations I visited created a fluid reality, and one which transported me to a sense of the impressions, imagination, and time of Debussy. The streets that Debussy knew are much the same today, the shutters, white-wash, baclonies, and the changing sky and horizon.
Avenue Foch, aka the Bois du Bologne and the little courtyard which contains Debussy’s house still has shrubs, borders on a parklike strip of land, and overlooks the large pard the Bois du Bologne. I read how Debussy loved his garden, tended it, and did not venture far from it from 1905-1918. He talked about how he did not see what other people saw when he looked at nature, at the plants, the sky, the light. The inner workings of his imagination came through in his compositions. He was a unique filter for impressions of nature, of his daughter Chouchou, of the noisy train that went under his window, and of the cars on the wider Bois du Bologne.
I want to meld his written impressions, accounts of him during the time he wrote specific piano works, namely Book II Preludes and Images Book II, period photos of his house at 24 Courtyard Bois du Bologne, and images I took this last week in Paris. I believe the combination of these media and impressions will frame his compositions in a way that hints at the forces that led to their creation.
