L'ASSASSINAT
DU DUC DE GUISE

L'Assassinat du duc de Guise is a 1908 silent film directed by André Calmettes, considered a pioneering work both for its use of a cinematic language remarkably advanced for its time and for being the first film in history to be accompanied by an original score, composed by Camille Saint-Saëns.

Over the years, the final minutes of the film were lost, most likely due to the flammable nature of nitrate stock. In 2017, the Cognimus Association and Ensemble commissioned me to create a new ending to replace the three missing minutes.

I worked with a painting by Paul Delaroche depicting the historical assassination of the Duke of Guise, with fire — an evocation of the material loss of the film itself — and with fragments of the original screenplay. In its new version, the film was presented in concert, with a live performance of the original score alongside a new composition by Martin Brenne, giving the work an ending suspended between reconstruction, memory and invention.