Ascenseur Pour L’Échafaud – Miles Davis meets French Film Noir
At a glance
About this event
100 MILES – CELEBRATING THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF JAZZ LEGEND MILES DAVIS
Femme fatale Florence (a luminous Jeanne Moreau) persuades lover Julien (Maurice Ronet) to murder her wealthy husband. Everything unravels, though, when Julien returns to the crime scene to retrieve an incriminating rope and gets trapped in an elevator.
Beautifully filmed in B&W, Louis Malle’s 1958 thriller is set in a seedy night-time Paris with Moreau memorably wandering the Champs Elysees. Combining a film noir plot with innovative cinematography and editing techniques, it paved the way for French new wave movies such as Breathless.
But taking the film to another level is Miles Davis’s improvised trumpet score. Recorded in just four inspired hours, this is cool jazz at its most melancholy – described by jazz critic Phil Johnson as “The loneliest trumpet sound you will ever hear.”
This soundtrack established moody horn solos as the natural music for the crime/thriller genre. And offered a foretaste of the modal explorations in Kind of Blue, Miles’s landmark album that was recorded just over a year later. In French with English subtitles.
Location
16 Quay St, Bangor BT20 5ED
