The Tiger’s Mind is a crime thriller set against the backdrop of a Brutalist villa. In it, six characters – Tiger, Mind, Tree, Wind, Circle and a girl called Amy battle one another for the control over the film, which explores the unfolding of their relationships. The film's elements were produced by Alex Waterman as the Tree (the foley), Jesse Ash as the Wind (the special effects), John Tilbury as the Mind (the soundtrack), Céline Condorelli as the Tiger (the props), Will Holder as Amy (the narrator) and Beatrice Gibson as the Circle (the author). The film employs a character-driven improvisational score for a sexted, conceived by the British composer Cornelius Cardew and entitled The Tiger’s Mind.

“The circle is perfect and outside time. The wind blows dust in tiger's eyes. Amy reflects, relaxes with her mind, which puts out buds (emulates the tree). Amy jumps through the circle and comforts the tiger. The tiger sleeps in the tree. High wind. Amy climbs the tree. The tiger sleeps in the tree. High wind. Amy climbs the tree, which groans in the wind and succumbs. The tiger burns.” Cornelius Cardew, The Tiger’s Mind, 1967

“Every film is a documentary of its own making.”

This axiom, laid out by Jacques Rivette in the Fifties when he was a critic for the renowned Cahiers du Cinéma, completely revolutionizes the standpoint that a new generation – the Nouvelle Vague – meant to adopt towards the cinema of entertainment, which had become an insidious vehicle for the ideological and commercial interests of the post-war period. As a piece of fiction, B-movie or propaganda reel vies to hold our attention, it incidentally also records the context in which it was produced and the forces involved in its shooting. In the phase of its projection, could a film be inhabited by something other than those phantoms we passively sit down to watch, or at most, are invited to imitate?

It is unquestionably François Truffaut in Day for Night (La nuit Américaine, 1973) – ten years after Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le mépris, 1963), whose Brechtian actors already incarnated key figures in the film industry – that best reiterates in fictional form the personal and social passions at work during the making of a film. Ten years later, in 1982, Jean-Luc Godard would again put his cast into roles of a Brechtian slant (the lighting technician) in his last film, Passion.

Truffaut thus punctuates his film with acts of transgression generated by the shifts between his real-world role and the role of the fictional director, between the action on-screen and off. A transgression that is underscored by his assistant, played by actor Jean-François Stévenin, who really did perform that job, as we can see from his name in the closing production credits.

Day for Night presents the forces in play during the making of a film without disowning them in favor of the fiction; on the contrary, François Truffaut, just as Bertolt Brecht did in the theater with The Messingkauf Dialogues, writes for the actor, the philosopher, the dramaturg and even the lighting technician, grounding them in the performance of their jobs in order to strengthen the drama. The film is shot at the Victorine in Nice, in a period when the staff is undergoing waves of firings in view of the studios being converted for television and advertising. Its title comes from the name of a technique that makes it possible to film a nighttime scene in broad daylight. By naming his work of fiction after an illusory effect, Truffaut turns the principle of it around to highlight the obscurantism that surrounded working conditions in the emerging media industry. While Rivette’s axiom captures the “revolution” – in the physical sense of a turnaround - of the camera in the Nouvelle Vague, as regards the question of work, it also echoes the paradigm shift in the scores by English composer Cornelius Cardew, who proposes a guided improvisation and changes the status of the player, or, in some cases, the worker, by including non-musicians in the production of the collaborative piece. Every piece of music stems from the immanent production of its context of execution, Cornelius Cardew would say, and to make this tangible, in 1967 he composed a score in prose, The Tiger’s Mind, that would be accessible to everyone, professionals and non-musicians alike.

Beatrice Gibson, whose first film, A Necessary Music, was made in 2008 in collaboration with American musician Alex Waterman (just as The Tiger’s Mind was made in collaboration with typographer Will Holder), won the prize for best short at that year’s Rotterdam Festival. Gibson has gathered around herself - in some ways following the example of Truffaut’s writing, Godard’s cinema or Brecht’s theater - a group of creative figures (Will Holder), artists (Jesse Ash, Celine Condorelli) and musicians (John Tilbury, Alex Waterman) to repeat an experiment that does not stop at the deconstruction of the film and its distribution, but also touches on the model of coproduction and diffusion of exhibition spaces [1].
An experiment which could be called the final stage of institutional critique, if one sees Truffaut’s Day for Night as one of the first manifestations of this art form.

Indeed, it is the establishment of a cultural and collective undertaking that imprisons us in the role of viewers, the element that Gibson tackles in this film, backing up Cardew’s revolutionary score by overturning orders and hierarchies in its distribution of characters, roles and functions, places and genres. A collective undertaking, aimed precisely at engendering a work in which we do not know if the image composing it is subordinate to the music or vice-versa.
It is a work that makes us ask whether it is itself the reproduction of a piece of music, or the score that is left to us to play, once the viewer has been murdered on the rubble of a freshly captured fortress.

1. www.cacbretigny.com: Sextet The Tiger’s Mind Re-itereted

Credits

The Tiger’s Mind has been co-commissioned by The Showroom, London, CAC Brétigny, Greater Paris and produced in partnership with Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm and the London based production company Somesuch & Co.