03Il pleut

Every line is the trail of a raindrop.

In December 1916, in the review SIC, Apollinaire set Il pleut as five slanting streams of letters — rain, frozen in lead type. Here the page gets wet: the paper turns to glass, the ink to water, and the water dries into stains, the memory of the letters. Then each line is written again by a single raindrop running down the window, leaving every letter exactly where the compositor placed it in 1916 — surveyed on the page of the review, blot by blot.

Five women’s voices, made by AI, say what the water writes — « des voix de femmes comme si elles étaient mortes même dans le souvenir ». The drop writes each phrase as it is spoken, stops at every pause, and the camera frames each phrase as a shot. The words do what they say: mortes evaporates, rencontres merge, the clouds rear up and the lightning neighs, focus shifts to the city behind the glass when it becomes an ear, écoute silences the rain, pleurent weeps. After une ancienne musique the camera turns a quarter: four streams make a four-line staff of plainchant, read by a passing light; every word it touches is spoken again by its voice, over a distant plainchant of women — it rains women’s voices. Then the bonds fall, the five voices fall with them, and the poem becomes rain.

Gestures: Move — wipe the fog · Click — a drop; at the end, a drop that writes a line
Tools: Sound (S) · Pause (Space) · Replay (R) · Page, I to V — jump to a line (0–5)
Text: Guillaume Apollinaire, « Il pleut », SIC no. 12, December 1916; later in Calligrammes (1918). Letter positions surveyed on the review’s page (Wikimedia Commons, public domain).
Typeface: Besley by indestructible type (SIL OFL), a slab serif after Robert Besley’s Clarendon of 1845 — close to the égyptienne the poem was first printed in
Technique: WebGL 2: letters as distance fields turned into water — height map, the city refracted through every drop, condensation, drops that merge and slide. The city is painted in code, at the blue hour. Voices: ElevenLabs (eleven_v3), one voice per line, aligned word by word on the page; rain, storm, thunder and the ancient chant generated with ElevenLabs. Everything else live; nothing filmed.
Status: In progress — 2026