The Shock of the Future, aka Le Choc Du Futur, is a 2009 French language film set in 1978 which is centred around the birth of electro-pop and a female electronic musician called Ana, who creates related music. It was written, directed and part scored by Marc Collin, who is best known as the co-founder of the band Nouvelle Vague, which released covers of new wave, punk, etc songs in a bossa nova style (think Astrud Gilberto singing a breezy version of a Joy Division in the 1960s and you’re not a million miles off).
The film was intended in part as a tribute to the sometimes unsung or overshadowed female pioneers in electronic music, including, amongst others, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Suzanne Ciani and Elaine Radique, who are namechecked in a dedication at the end of the film. Accompanying this, it could be seen as a love letter to analogue synthesisers and older physical media formats, which seem at times to fill almost every nook, cranny and corner of Ana’s flat and are shot and portrayed at points with an almost fetishistic affection and perhaps even reverence. Although perhaps due to some form of licensing issues, this appreciation of physical media formats is further added to by, at the time of writing and in the UK, The Shock of the Future has not been released digitally and can only be watched via a limited-edition DVD which is available exclusively at 606 Distribution’s website.
A press quote on the back cover of the DVD describes the film as having “a near-numinous belief in the transformative power of music”, i.e., a near-religious or spiritual belief in such things, but that belief seems to be reflected in the film more in or through the process of creating music along with an accompanying sense of discovering new sounds, ways of making music etc, related technological innovations etc rather than the actual music which is created. In turn, its title refers to the main character Ana seeing the electronic and synthesizer-led future of music and its creation and the shock and change this will cause, which although she seems to embrace it, is resisted by some of those in the music industry who she meets.
At one point she makes an impassioned near rant about this coming future and its new way of doing things during which she says there will and needs to be a rejection of the current way of taking music to audiences such as in “beer and piss stinking” rock music venues and instead it will be taken out to and performed in beautiful places amongst nature and feature music made by machines, dancing robots, beams of light, lasers etc.
In this speech, she seems to foretell the widespread uptake and popularity of electronic music in outdoor raves and also the work of some of its high-profile commercially successful French practitioners including the composer Jean-Michel Jarre whose live performances have featured him playing synthesisers by manipulating beams of light and the robot personas that the electronic music duo Daft Punk adopted.
Ana is shown having to deal with a succession of men involved in the music industry who variously lech over her and/or don’t understand or belittle her work and abilities, although equally there are a number of male characters who do respect and support her and her work.
She herself is not a character who is always sympathetically portrayed, although it is difficult to know if this was the intention in the film or whether she is intended to be shown as being merely highly focused, driven and passionate about her “cause” and work. She seems to expect everybody else to support her financially, doesn’t create the music for a commercial which she has already received part payment for and generally acts like a self-absorbed “creative” or artist who just wants to make music without involving herself in any of the less “fun” practicalities of putting her music out into the world nor supporting herself while she does so.
Filmed on location, the film is largely a chamber piece and is mostly set in the flat where Ana has been living and uses, with his permission, the real-world tenant of the flat’s collectable and expensive analogue synthesisers, sequencer etc. The curtains in the flat remain drawn throughout the film and it is as though it is a place which is both separate from and holds the real world at bay, with some of the only other fairly briefly seen locations being a windowless recording studio and the streets of Paris. The latter of these are shot with a narrow depth of field that blurs their backgrounds, possibly in part to obscure any signs of the modern world but it also has the effect of showing Ana, whose only focus and topic of conversation during these scenes are her music, and/ or her companion as still being in an almost dreamscape enclosed world where the only thing that matters is, again, her music.
This sense of Ana escaping from the real world via a pure form of “new” electronic music is heightened when a passionate older music collector visits her with a selection of the electronic and experimental music that he intends to bring to her party later, all of which are records which had real-world releases. He plays her a selection from these which she’s mostly impressed by, though she doesn’t like iconic synthesiser duo Suicide’s music and its then pioneering and radical darkly visioned reimagining of rock music via electronics and dismisses it as being too rock and too fifties. This implies a certain blinkered attitude in her which is so focused on the “new” ways of making and styles of music that she rejects all that has gone before.
Accompanying this, when the collector tries to get her to appreciate Suicide’s music by saying listen to the lyrics and that they’re about life she responds that if she wants to know about life, she’ll watch the news. The lyrics, which Ana greatly appreciates, to the electro-pop song she subsequently records with a female vocalist who has written them have a dreamlike almost abstractly ambiguous distance and meaning to them.
Further reflecting and layering the film’s creation and presentation of a world unto itself, as in part referred to above, the scenes in Ana’s flat were shot in the real-world flat of a vintage synth collector, which in the booklet that accompanies the 606 Distribution DVD release Marc Collin says that they didn’t need to move things around in the flat much at all nor redo the décor in a period style as the collector essentially still:
“lives in the 1970s… [and] he already had the [period] turntables, speakers, wallpaper… He just had to hide his CDs!”
The translation in the English subtitles for the film are quite often a little off and so “synthesisers” becomes “synthetizors”, “on mushrooms” becomes “under mushrooms” and so on. This adds a certain charm and additional layering to the film, including during a scene where a more famous and successful female musician is shown recording an electro-pop-esque song with a hybrid of traditional and electronic instruments and musicians and the slightly off translation of lyrics of the song appear, rather than being mistranslated, to be deliberately clunkily stylised which in turn brings to mind similar deliberate aspects in electroclash related music from the early 2000s, a genre and subculture which in part drew inspiration from early electro-pop.
The film ends with Ana suddenly “Having to get back to work” after refinding her inspiration and the final scene shows her sat at the bank of synthesisers in the flat playing one of the keyboards, seemingly content to once again be lost in her explorations of these new electronic worlds and soundscapes.
This in turn connects with comments by electronic instrument designer Bob Moog that when he created his pioneering iconic Moog synthesiser that:
“I think it would be egotistical of me to say that I thought of it… what happened was, I opened my mind up and the idea came through me and into my head… It’s something between discovering and witnessing.”
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