Voilà la vérité

Details

Foley and sound design for Ed Atkin’s video work “Voilà la vérité” (2022)

Premiered during Berlin Art Week 2022 at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

Currently showing at TATE Britain

Ed Atkins in the TATE exhibition guide: “Voilà la vérité is a short video that reworks a single sequence from the 1926 silent film Ménilmontant, directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff. It was digitised from a knackered, toned print lent to me by an archive. I’ve been obsessed with this scene for years – its unaffectedness, the perfect combination of acting and the impossibly real.

I cleaned, colourised, upscaled, smoothed, frame-interpolated, focus-pulled, and re-rendered the footage using a raft of artificial intelligence-employing software. I feel like the resulting video is haunted. It’s a short essay on the history of the moving image as illusion. The title, Voilà la vérité (This is the truth), is the only discernible text in the film: a fragment of a headline on the newspaper that wraps the food.

The foley artist David Kamp performed and recorded a new soundtrack of naturalistic sound – along with less naturalistic elements from me. Two voice actors, Rivka Rothstein and Héctor Miguel Santana, provide the screen characters with new voices. They don’t speak but do sob and sigh and eat. Of course it’s sacrilegious, this forensic, compensatory, fake restoration. It’s a dupe, even if the dupe is a sincere attempt at reanimation.”

“The video stands as a virtuosic play on the excesses of realist technique, as in the early colorizations of postcards, with their sometimes outrageous sentimentality. On the soundtrack—heavy breath, running tap water, bread crunching—Atkins and David Kamp make overexpressive use of Foley, without deference to the original images.”

-Oli Surel screenslate.com