La Voix Humaine - Opera Film

Our film adaptation of Francis Poulenc's mono-opera La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice) is based on the play by Jean Cocteau. It is about Elle, who speaks to her beloved on the phone for the last time. Over the course of the 46-minute film, she goes through various phases of the break-up: from denial, nostalgia and deception to aggression, self-accusation and resolution. We can only guess the other person's answers from Elle's reactions and the different nuances in the music. The physical distance, the unstable telephone connection and dishonesty on both sides distort the dialogue. Elle loses herself in a telecommunicative no-where, in which the telephone line connects and separates, is both a lifeline and a gallows cord.
We, Iphigenie and Andreas, have studied Poulenc and Cocteau as well as the play and its reception in detail and searched for a personal and contemporary translation. We were particularly inspired by Cocteau's visual and dramatic understanding, which is related to surrealism and expressionism. In our film, we have deliberately removed the historical context, instead showing a psychological space and concentrating particularly on the facial expressions and gestures of Elle, played and sung by Iphigenie Worbes. The few props emphasise the psychological moments that Elle goes through in the course of the phone call. In this way, we created a personal portrait of a person who is trying to free herself from despair and longing, emotional dependency and dishonesty.

We would like to bring our interdisciplinary opera film project to national and international film festivals and hope to make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible. As our film is rather unusual, we think that it can also appeal to and touch people who are not necessarily classical opera-goers, and at the same time inspire those classical opera-goers for an artistic-philosophical interpretation from the world of the visual arts. The work is aimed at young and old and anyone who wants to immerse themselves musically and artistically in the idiosyncratic inner world of a young woman.

At a time when communication is becoming more and more impersonal and alienating, Poulenc's opera "The Human Voice" is deeply moving. It deals with the particular difficulty of expressing the most intimate matters via a telephone call without the real presence of the other person in the same room. The themes of mental health, loneliness, separations, toxic dependencies and suicidal tendencies are sensitively and movingly composed in this opera. Inspired by Cocteau's surrealist imagery and Poulenc's musical themes, we have sought our very own cinematic interpretation of this material.

With your support, we would like to apply to as many national and international film festivals as possible. We have to pay fees of around €50-80 per festival, which means that the more we raise, the more applications we can submit. If we are invited, we could also cover our travelling expenses.

We would also like to rent a small cinema in Leipzig for an unofficial premiere in a private setting. This would allow us to test the effect of our film in front of a selected audience on a large screen and then make any necessary adjustments. We are also planning a DVD production.