BORIS VIAN, FORWARD THE SONG

Boris Vian in front of a Lyre guitar, in 1956, in Montmartre. WILLY RONIS / MAP / GRAND PALAIS NMR

MUSIC

And vlan, come back to Vian! Since 2017, photos of his pale face knife-edge are broadcast virally on the Net, for resemblance to the face of a President of the Republic born eighteen years after his death. What earned the eternal young man a strange posthumous honor, his trombine published opposite Emmanuel Macron's in the magazine people Closer …

Like an absurd teaser the double anniversary that is looming: 60 years since the death of Boris Vian, whose heart as generous as fragile did not resist, on June 23, 1959, in a cinema of the Champs-Elysées, to the adaptation of I'll go spit on your graves ; Patrick Vian, his son, and Nicole Bertolt, head of the Cohérie Boris Vian and agent of the work, however preferred to favor a closer and less sad date: the centenary of his birth (March 10, 1920).

Biennial, the tribute was inaugurated in November 2018 by the augmented reissue of a precious box that can not be found, published in 1965 by the producer Jacques Canetti, patron of the Théâtre des Trois Baudets. Either the verb virevoltant or serious of Vian carried by a dozen performers including himself and two beginners in the world of the song, Serge Reggiani and Jacques Higelin.

While posterity has mostly retained the brilliant engineer the novelist – with the head of gondola The foam of days, brought to the screen by Michel Gondry in 2013 -, this delivery allows to (re) discover one of the most talented French lyricists of the post-war period. The reading of his prose is self-sufficient, no doubt because the form, song or poem, remains indeterminate.

Read also "The foam of days": linguistic inventions of Boris Vian passed to the machine of professor Gondry

A very French way of "disillusion"

It is that the fan, who knows that his time on Earth is counted, has things to say: The deserter, to quote the most famous and controversial, is only one of about 600 songs (including about 150 adaptations, including Brecht and Weill) that he left.

This plethoric production occurs after a renunciation of the literature following the failure of a work that Gallimard – who made it to La Pléiade in 2010 – neglects. With his libertine wit and fantasy, Vian will become a cult writer in a decade, the 1960s, at the threshold of which his life stops.

Before Michel Houellebecq, he also offers the rare example of a writer venturing to the test of the stage and recording. "He made his debut as a performer at the Trois Baudets in January 1955 because nobody wants to sing his songs, recalls Françoise Canetti, who manages her father's phonographic heritage and led the re-edition of this box. I saw him as a little girl, he was very tall in his mao costume and occupied all the space of the theater. We were not in seduction: he sang in a minimalist style, and a malaise settled. "

https://www.archyworldys.com/boris-vian-forward-the-song/