Service de la Recherche de l'ORTF

1967 documentary film originally aired on French television about Hermann Scherchen.

"Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum", the work by Olivier Messiaen, was a commission by the Minister of Cultural Affairs André Malraux and was to be performed on the 20 June 1965 at Chartres Cathedral, in the presence of President Charles de Gaulle. This documentary takes place during the rehearsal on the prior day.

In the ark, which has been perched for millennia on a snowy mountain top, an old hermit waits for a new flood. A scientific expedition approaches, just when the rain begins to fall.

This thoughtful French film tells of the events leading to a young man's attempt at suicide. As Raymond (Richard Bohringer) sits on a ledge of his apartment building, and people try to talk him back inside, he remembers the events of his day and his life before this moment. Things seemed to be going along well enough until something triggered his revulsion at the pettiness and falseness that is the everyday currency of life.

A cellist attempts to rescue a woman swept out to sea, only to find he must battle a series of overly possesive sea creatures.

Edgard Varèse died on 6 November 1965, a few days before the filming of the rehearsal of his work "Déserts" which he had to attend.

Conceived, drawn and animated live by a team of patients from a psychiatric clinic, this achievement presents, in the eyes of its author, less interest on a purely cinematographic level than on that of human experience. It is the disturbing wordless story of a woman and a man living in a strange setting where objects are endowed with life that they have chosen to tell us through this theater of shadow puppets in cut out figurines. Their characters will know a tragic fate since carried in the air by balloons, they will finally be devoured by a horrible dragon.