Club d'Essai

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The Club d'Essai was a cultural program on French radio ( radio ) in the early post-war period, which was broadcast under the direction of the writer and poet Jean Tardieu from 1946. The program editorial team was divided into the areas of music, radio play , literature and entertainment. Jean Tardieu introduced numerous artists to the acoustic medium and promoted the development of innovative broadcast formats that combined language, sounds and music. The feature developed by the BBC , a broadcast format that was based on (tape) assembly , among other things, served as a model .

The German writer and radio editor Alfred Andersch oriented himself in the 1950s with the concept of the radio essay developed for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) on the model of the Club d'Essai.

History of origin

Numerous French artists came into contact with the new medium of radio during the German occupation. In 1942 writers, actors and singers took part in a workshop organized by the engineer Pierre Schaeffer (“Stage de Beaune”) to familiarize themselves with the new medium. In July 1943, a “Studio d'Essai” began broadcasting on behalf of the Vichy government in Paris. The first programs include radio plays with musical accompaniment specially produced for radio, but also staged readings by Marcel Proust or Henry de Montherlant, for example .

At that time, Jean Tardieu belonged to a group of Resistance -related writers around Paul Éluard . At Eluard's suggestion, in August 1944 he became head of the radio play department of the “Studio d'Essai”. In 1946, Tardieu was appointed head of the program renamed “Club d'Essai” (the same year the BBC's “Third Program” was founded), which was to exist in this form until 1960.

Even at this early point in time, he assumed a similar mediating position between literature and radio as Alfred Andersch later did at SDR: “This is the installation, Jean Tardieu fait appel à des écrivains connus pour leur demander d'écrire pour la radio. […] Grace à lui, des écrivains aussi prestigieux que Camus , Gide , Ponge ou Queneau ont franchi la porte des studios de radiodiffusions, ce que leurs ainés n'avaient pas voulu osé faire. ”(ÜS: As soon as Jean Tardieu started his work , he urged well-known writers to write for the radio. [...] Thanks to him, such famous authors as Camus, Gide, Ponge or Queneau have crossed the threshold to the radio studio, which their predecessors had not dared.) (Prot 2006 : 51)

Development of broadcast formats

Right from the start, Tardieu saw the Club d'Essai as an experimental laboratory for radio art that was looking for contemporary forms of expression for all areas of life. In an interview with the weekly Radio 46, the newly appointed program director announced: “Nous continuerons comme par le passé à rechercher un style particulièrement radiophonique, tant dans l'écriture des textes que dans l'utilisation des moyens techniques. Mais nous voudrions aussi rendre assimilable les plus grandes richesses scientifiques, littéraires ou musicales. Ceci donnera lieu tantot aux tentatives techniques les plus hardies, tantot à l'emploi des moyens les plus simples et les plus directs. ” (ÜS: We will continue to look for a special broadcasting style , both when writing the texts and when using the Technology. But at the same time we want to make the greatest scientific, literary or musical riches available for broadcasting. That will lead to daring technical solutions as well as to the simplest and most direct means.) (Prot 2006: 55)

The connection between art and technology demanded by Tardieu was raised to a very practical principle: in the production of programs, (manuscript) author, composer and director worked closely together from the start.

In addition to the word program, Tardieu was particularly committed to the music program - and was therefore open to the emerging VHF technology. Tardieu not only dreamed of a pure music station - a dream that would soon be fulfilled even in FM quality - but of a "bibliothèque sonore" in the ether that would make all kinds of music accessible to a broad audience.

The changed relationship between radio and audience was taken further by Tardieu until the boundary between producer and recipient was dissolved. The particular willingness to experiment is shown by another special feature: the experimental "radio clubs" of the forties and fifties, which Jean Tardieu saw as a link between audience and producers. The members of student associations, youth clubs or the trade unionists of the SNCF were able to gain practical experience of the production conditions of broadcasting. Selected productions of the radio clubs were made known to a wider audience by the Paris Inter broadcaster via a separate broadcast window called “Les apprentis du micro” .

Medial transitions between literature and radio

Similar to Alfred Andersch later with the magazine Texte undzeichen, Tardieu already tried to build a bridge between the media with a parallel magazine publication. The first and only number of the publication “La chambre d'écho” (subtitle: “Cahiers du Club d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion Francaise”) contains texts by prominent contributors from the Club d'Essai editorial team, such as Jean Cocteau , Jacques Prévert and others.

Tardieu himself opened the volume with a text that, in view of the media upheaval, becomes aware of both the artist's fascination and discomfort with the power of the mass media: “Or, il est fabuleux de penser que les moyens mécaniques ont ainsi arraché les paroles aux bouches qui les profèrent, les images à la vie, les sons aux musiciens, et que tous ces fantomes captés par le disque, le film, la radio, demain par la télévision, sont lachés sur le monde, où il ya tout lieu de croire qu 'ils continuent leur vie propre. “It sounds like a fairy tale that technology tears the words out of the mouths of the speakers, the images from life, the sound from the musicians, and that all these phantoms are captured by records, film, radio , tomorrow from television, and let loose in the world, where they then carry on their own lives. (Prot 2006: 162)

But precisely in view of the media epoch break from the “age of book printing” (l'age de l'imprimerie) to that of “mechanical communication”, intellectuals would have to deal with the new media: “il ne faut pas que les intelligences les plus nécessaires à notre temps se détournent de 'la Radio', sous prétetxte que le pur divertissements, pourtant indispensable, parle ou chante à trop haut voix et empeche d'entendre le bruit profond de l'époque. ” (ÜS: The most important spirits of our time are not allowed to turn away from the radio, under the pretext that pure entertainment, even if it is necessary, has a voice that is too loud or a song that is too loud, so that one cannot understand the more profound tones of our epoch. (Prot 2006: 163 )

literature

  • Jean Tardieu (ed.): La Chambre d'écho . (Cahiers du Club d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion Francaise). Paris 1947
  • Bruno Berger: The essay. Form and history . Bern / Munich 1964
  • Eliane Clancier: Monograph du club d'essai de la radiodiffusion française (1946-1960) . Paris 2002 (diss.)
  • Robert Prot: Jean Tardieu et la nouvelle radio , Paris [a. a.]: L'Harmattan, 2006, ISBN 978-2-29600-336-1

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