Listen to radio broadcast featuring French composers Georges Auric, Georges Delerue, Frances Lai and Yann Tierson

By Wayne Cresser and Michael Stevenson

Yann Tiersen
“Let’s play with sound, forget all knowledge and instrumental skills, and just use instinct – the same way Punk did” – Yann Tiersen
PICTURE THIS – FILM MUSIC ON THE RADIO : WRIU 90.3 FM 9/21/25

Georges Auric (1899–1983)

Auric was a versatile and significant figure in 20th-century French music and culture. 

  • A member of Les Six: As one of the prominent members of the group of avant-garde composers known as Les Six, he rebelled against late-Romanticism and Impressionism, advocating for a more modern, populist, and distinctively French style.
  • Major film scores: He composed over 100 film scores, many for prominent directors, including his longtime collaborator Jean Cocteau. His famous film scores include:
    • Beauty and the Beast (1946)
    • Moulin Rouge (1952), which produced the popular song “Where Is Your Heart?”
    • The Wages of Fear (1953)
    • Roman Holiday (1953)
  • Administrator of French music: Auric also held significant administrative positions, including director of the Paris Opéra and chairman of the French performing rights society, SACEM. 

Georges Delerue (1925–1992)

Dubbed “The Mozart of Cinema” by the newspaper Le Figaro, Delerue was one of the most prolific and influential film composers of his generation. 

  • Prolific career: He wrote more than 350 scores for film and television, with his signature style blending classical orchestration with romantic, lyrical melodies.
  • French New Wave collaborator: His distinctive style shaped the sound of the French New Wave, notably through his collaborations with director François Truffaut on films such as Jules and Jim (1962) and Day for Night (1973).
  • Hollywood success: His success extended to Hollywood, where he scored notable films, including:
    • A Little Romance (1979), for which he won an Academy Award
    • Platoon (1986)
    • Steel Magnolias (1989) 

Francis Lai (1932–2018)

Lai was an Oscar-winning composer whose work helped define the “easy listening” and popular instrumental music of his era. 

  • Popular melodies: He was a gifted melodist known for his emotionally expressive themes. His music gained massive global recognition through his collaboration with director Claude Lelouch, for whom he scored almost 40 films.
  • Global hits: His most famous and influential works include:
    • The romantic theme from A Man and a Woman (1966), which earned him a Golden Globe nomination.
    • The iconic, Oscar-winning score for Love Story (1970). The theme, “Where Do I Begin?”, became an international pop standard.
  • Classical crossover influence: Lai’s success demonstrated that a film score could become a hit in its own right, influencing the popular music charts and inspiring a new generation of “classical crossover” artists

Seduced by Bonjour Tristesse 

Otto Preminger’s classic ushered in a new wave of vibrant, Technicolour film-making

By John Patterson 

Renewed acquaintance with Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse, after 30 years, compels me now to re-rank it above Anatomy of a Murder as the Austrian exile’s supreme masterpiece. Based on Francoise Sagan’s scandalous novel about an enfant terrible and her forbidden games on the sun-drenched French Riviera, it offers the most compelling performance the brittle and tragic Jean Seberg ever gave; and it showcases all of Preminger’s virtuosity with CinemaScope framing and three-strip Technicolor.

Seberg is Cecile, half jaded sophisticate and seasoned casino denizen, half teenage naif and plotter, the over-indulged daughter of meretricious playboy Raymond (David Niven). Their emotional intimacy borders on the incestuous: they have “the perfect marriage,” says Raymond’s blowzy mistress Elsa, a remark humming with possibilities. The arrival of Raymond’s new lover, Anne (Deborah Kerr), who clearly sees herself as a replacement for Cecile’s dead mother, stirs up an intense and tragic sexual jealousy on Cecile’s part. Where this will all lead we can only imagine, but from the film’s wintry black-&-white framing sequences, set half a year after that Technicolor summer, we know it can’t be good (look out for the first, shocking dissolve to colour – it burns).

Preminger’s artistry came into full flower with the arrival of widescreen and blazing colour in the early fifties. His metier was always mise-en-scene over cutting, and the wide frame allowed him to depict his stories and relationships spatially, rather than through coercive editing – there are few full close-ups in Bonjour Tristesse. The arrival of Anne pushes Cecile out of the central space she has occupied so happily with her father, and suddenly, doorways, curtains and other visual obstructions exile her to the margins of the frame, her place cruelly usurped. In terms of colour, this is the war of the reds and the blues, their complex interplay telling us much about the strength or weakness of characters in any given moment; watch for Cecile, hungover in a blue shirt, a fiery red ice-bag on her sore, angry, scheming head. It’s amplified in the Mediterranean landscape of eternal, immovable red coastal rocks and the ever mutable blue seas and skies.

The casting hews closely to the performers’ abilities and personalities: Niven rakish and inch-deep, Kerr prim and wide-eyed, burning with suppressed sexual hunger, and Seberg the scorned child-woman, still recognisably the Iowa high-schoolgirl she’d been a year earlier, but also now a movie star and new-minted faux-Parisienne sophisticate – her thespian shortcomings, hesitancy and natural Midwestern diffidence all become advantages here. She’s magnificent – and her short-cropped bob foretells Mia by Sassoon in Rosemary’s Baby a decade later.

America hated Bonjour Tristesse, but the French went crazy for it. It’s a key wellspring-movie of the French New Wave – it gave Godard his iconic Patricia for Breathless and a visual scheme for Contempt; Rivette was an aficionado, and Truffaut an almost rabid fan – he originally wanted Seberg for Day for Night.

As usual, the French were right.

 

Source (Aug 2013): Seduced by Bonjour Tristesse | Film | The Guardian