A Paris-based label has made it a mission to bring the work of homegrown film composers to the masses. Jocelyn Clarke finds out the score from Amelie de Chassey
Amélie de Chassey loves film. Or more precisely, film music. If you have any doubts about her grande passion, then a quick glance at the name of her small French independent record label quickly dispels them: Amélie Aime le Cinéma (AAC).
The 30-something, livewire Parisienne solicitor turned record producer turned music maven has found two different but complementary ways to channel her passion. AIM Productions is de Chassey's business side, a music publishing and production company which represents film composers as agent and producer. The other is AAC (www.amelieaimelecinema. com), with its astonishingly diverse roster of composers and scores from the last four years - from Krishna Levy's Je Suis un Assassin and Philip Eidel's Imuhar, Une Légende to Alexandre Desplat's Les Corps Impatient. De Chassey's luck and knack is to combine both business and pleasure.
"I love music and I love film," she says. "Particularly, after working in both the music and the film industries, it seemed like the logical next step. AIM looks after the publishing and producing of soundtracks for film companies - we started with Krishna Levy's score for François Ozon's Huit Femmes - while Amélie Aime le Cinéma is a collective, a concept for particular film scores that we also produce."
Most international record labels release film soundtracks (combining both songs and score extracts) and, occasionally, scores on their classical imprints, such as John Williams on Sony Classics and Hans Zimmer on Decca Classics. But there are very few labels exclusively devoted to film scores. The biggest are Varese Sarabande and Milan Records in the US and Silva Screen in the UK. Of those, even fewer actively promote and distribute indigenous film composers.
France has Europe's largest indigenous film industry as well as an impressive roster of internationally successful native film composers, from George Delerue and Maurice Jarre to Eric Serra and Alexandre Desplat. There are two labels: AAC and CinéFonia Records (www.cinefonia. com), which specialises in recordings of classic scorers such as Delerue and Vladimir Cosma, and has its own subscription magazine.
De Chassey's mission for both her label and her agency is very simple. "I want to create a veritable catalogue with full scores by both established and new composers, unknown or poorly known by the general public. I wanted to work with film composers - as opposed to other film creatives - because music is not only a complete work within a film but it is a complete work in itself, and because the connections [between film producer and composer] aren't automatically there.
I wanted to make those connections happen." The financial rewards of writing and recording film music are small compared to other forms of contemporary or classical music. This can prove both an advantage and a disadvantage to producing and publishing scores. The advantage is that the average independent film score budget of €20,000 includes both the composer's fee and his or her recording costs, including orchestration and performers.
European composers receive royalties from public screenings, while their American colleagues only receive royalties if the film plays on TV. The disadvantage is that film music remains a niche, although it is growing. Also, CD soundtrack sales are traditionally very modest.
And yet there is a developing public appetite for film music. Much to the chagrin of classical music fans, film music increasingly dominates the classical music charts and sections of most record shops, as well as the classical programmes of concert halls. Post-minimalist Michael Nyman famously sells out concerts because of his music for Peter Greenaway's films, while next year sees the opera of The Fly, with libretto by David Cronenberg and music by Howard Shore.
With recent stratospheric sales of individual scores, from James Horner's Titanic (more than 11 million copies) and Zimmer's Gladiator (more than two million) to Williams's Revenge of the Sith (more than one million) and Klaus Badelt's Pirates of the Caribbean (more than 500,000), mainstream labels have discovered just how lucrative film music can be. For example, Zimmer's score for The Da Vinci Code (currently north of 100,000 copies) is getting an unprecedented push in both the classical and pop markets.
Keenly aware of these trends, de Chassey has also begun to license international soundtracks - recently Tony Scott's Domino - and to invite artists from different backgrounds to create their own musical soundcapes. Negresses Vertes'
Stéfane Mellino has just released Variations Ibériques, a fusion of North African, South American and Mediterranean influences.
Each stylishly designed and packaged release (there are nine so far) contains a biography of the composer and a brief interview with him or her, underlining de Chassey's proselytising impulses: listen to the music, learn about the composer, become a fan.
AAC is less a business than a vocation, and its founder an advocate for a cause. "We have just recorded all of the comedy sketches of Les Deschiens [a hugely popular French TV show from the 1990s], which is very well known here but not anywhere else. I want to sell our soundtracks and scores around the world."
