Editor

A workshop with musician and composer Robert Marcel Lepage

The art of documentary relies on artists and craftspeople from many fields, not least on the musician whose job it is to compose a soundtrack for the images a director has assembled. How a composer goes about creating this music is the topic at the next Docu-Monday, with special guest Robert Marcel Lepage, composer of more than 100 original film scores. The evening will be organized as a workshop featuring illustrations from a selection of film clips, and begins at 8 pm, April 11 at the NFB Cinema.
Scoring for documentary film carries a particular kind of ambiguity and raises many questions. While it seems perfectly natural to put music to a fiction film as simply one more device used to create emotion, we are left wondering if that is the role of the film score in documentary. How does the cinema of reality accommodate the artifice of a soundtrack, which is usually added for dramatic effect? Isn’t it always better to “be” true than to “make” the truth where documentary is concerned?

Paradoxically, the mark of a good score is that it goes unnoticed by the viewer. How then does the composer decide what type of music or instrumentation best suits a film or a particular scene, and which moments demand silence? Composing for documentary is demanding in another way, in that the composer is often working on the score as the documentary is being edited. The task then becomes to intuit the feeling and even the final shape the film will take, remaining aware of the filmmaker’s vision and collaborating with film and sound editors along the way. These are all aspects of a fascinating and little known artform to be explored in greater depth at the Docu-Monday workshop.

Edgy, prolific, Robert Marcel Lepage has a style all his own, yet moves easily between projects in a wide range of genres. A virtuoso on the clarinet, Lepage has attained the recognition of his peers over a lengthy career and won several awards. His film credits include Roger Toupin, épicier variété, Les Enfants du Refus Global, Westray, Le Bien commun, Des marelles et des filles, La Vie à Ducharme, and Alias Will James.


Docu-Mondays is a screening and discussion series designed to encourage reflection on the creative process in documentary cinema. It is organized by the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) in partnership with the National Film Board of Canada.

“Documentary Music: Writing soundtracks for reality” begins at 8 pm on Monday, April 11 at the NFB Cinema (1564 Saint-Denis Street). The discussion will be led by Magnus Isacsson, a filmmaker actively engaged in his art and the issues of his time (The Choir Boys, View from the Summit, Maxime, McDuff & McDo).