The Premiere and Music of Amélie, the movie.
Article of Interview with The Independent on Yann Tiersen: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/yann-tiersen-interview-all-album-amelie-soundtrack-tour-dates-a8789851.html%3famp
In finding a premiere that felt true to me, I always came back to the film, Amélie. It is unequivocally one of my favorite films of all time in my heart, alongside the miraculous and unique soundtrack that the film displays throughout it and as a separate CD. I as a whole, admire how much thought and work was put into this film and soundtrack.
More specifically, in researching more about the premiere of the film, there is really not an actual premiere for the film but it was released to the public and more specifically in the United States on November 16th, 2001. The story of Amélie takes place in the streets of Paris, the quiet and mischievous girl who simply lived in her own separate reality from life itself and always simply did good to make others happy. As the story continues, she finds herself in this situation of new love and interest in a man she has an encounter with. As with that being said, she then has a spark of interest for him and admires him from afar, in the most peculiar ways.
The film was set and budgeted at 10 million dollars, but as a whole in taking its premiere in the US, it made double the budget and became incredibly successful as a French movie as a whole.
In speaking more about the soundtrack and the composer Yann Tiersen himself, he was just a regular composer who did music for many other famous French films but had since been famously known for the music he had created with Amélie. Yann Tiersen was born in 1970, and plays a variety of many different instruments, alongside the violin, piano, and so fourth.
Here is a link to a piano piece composed by Tiersen named Comptine d’un Autre été l’après-midi.
In an interview he had with The Independent, he had expressed that “the Amélie soundtrack had a negative impact” on him. In speaking beyond this, he didn’t like the idea that he has a composer was so heavily “tied” to the film itself, and how he felt that there was no purpose for him creating more music throughout the process because it didn’t feel like a passion anymore and it felt more like a “business”, which he was not fond of. When reading more about this, as a reader, I was intrigued and also gravitated over the idea that usually great pieces of work are usually made when a composer or even person who creates that said work is in a dark or even troubling space or time in their life, which is crazy. I wonder, and I ask if Tiersen has since felt healed from this, and if he could ever revisit or think about the music of Amélie in a more positive and reconstructed way?
He also lets you know in details that the music within the soundtrack there had and “there has always been a context of where it’s naïve, but also dark and linked to death”. He also mentions the instrumentation of the accordion and how he didn’t find desire in playing it anymore after creating the soundtrack for Amélie because he thought the sound “was disgusting”. Again, as a reader and also admirer, it is eye opening to learn the truth behind closed doors and in some way I knew that he was emotional when making this music but I didn’t know how much it potentially took away from him and also how much it changed him as well negatively. In the video that I provide, in timestamp (0:26) it is introduced as a dark but vibrant melody on piano. In every way, you could hear and imagine how Tiersen might of felt in that said moment and how this was reflected in the storyline of the character. Beauty exists and is rooted within pain and also reality, and this soundtrack deeply resembles not only the character of Amélie’s naïve, and optimistic way of life, but of Tiersen’s state of mind and perspective.
By Ethan Encinas
