Composer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before Surrealism and a conceptual artist before Conceptual Art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There’s scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn’t anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre’s Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demi-monde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman’s masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie’s death.
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite
French paperback with flaps, 224 pages
Published 24 April 2025
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite
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SATIE ESSAY
1.
It all begins with a photo I found one day of three men on a roof.
They’re sporting great big smiles and obviously having outrageous fun together. It’s a century old, this image: a snapshot of a bygone world, and several yet to come.
It is November 1924 and the three men are René Clair, Francis Picabia and Erik Satie.
Satie is clad in his signature get-up of bowler hat, brolly, pince-nez glasses and sober suit: a banker with mischief in his eyes. At 58 he is older than his two friends – Clair is 26, Picabia 45 – and will be gone in six months, dead from cirrhosis of the liver. He may dress like one of their uncles, but he is not a king anyone wants to kill. This should be borne in mind when we read about Satie falling out with everyone. There seems to have been massive affection for him, especially among younger artists. Satie has had a see-saw life – from near indigence to society lionization and everything in-between – but he is, if anything, more playful than ever: open to new ideas, collaborations, possibilities.
One – two – three… here they are. Side by side with their heads in the clouds, on top of the world or at least the roof of the venerable Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. In the background is the Eiffel Tower, looming in the silvery grey distance like the beginning of an RKO movie. They are making a film together, in the days before making a film had anything like a settled recipe or routine. When it was more like overgrown children going wild in a just-opened amusement park. Someone gives you a camera and you think: What kind of crazy fun can we have with this? It seems we can do anything we want! Any objection that something shouldn’t be done because it’s never been done before simply evaporates, because none of this has been done before.
The advent of any new technology invites fruitful misapplication. Gramophone, microphone, movie camera: a hatful of spooky new magic tricks. Time slowed down and speeded up. Dreams replayed in broad daylight. Things that don’t belong together made to meet and marry. Montage is a whole new way of thinking, just waiting to be exploited. Cuts and dissolves and musical italics. Among other things, the film they are making will feature one of the first instances of ‘sound-to-film’ synchronization: film music composed frame by frame. Satie is punctilious matching up image and sound. He calls his soundtrack Cinema.
In the autumn of 1924 Clair, Picabia and Satie are making a film called Entr’acte; the idea is that it will be inserted at the beginning and in the middle of the new ballet Relâche. ‘Entr’acte’ means between the acts and signifies an intermission or a piece of music performed in that intermission: an in-between time in which to pause, catch your breath, reflect. Entr’acte does none of these things: it doesn’t pause, or catch its breath, or reflect. It explodes.
Ballet, comedy, film, music – all jostle and mingle in Entr’acte like the throng of the city below. Satie washes echoes of popular tunes of the time into his score. This is taken to be a ‘deliberate provocation’ and is also what we might now call – not without a bit of a wince – quite postmodern. High art with low tastes. Classical music which doesn’t turn its back on the pleasures of the wider world. At the height of modernism, Satie is already a few steps on from everyone else. As critic and composer Constant Lambert puts it in 1934: ‘What distinguishes Satie from the other representatives of post-war Parisian mentality is the fact that while they were catching up with the times he had the no doubt gratifying sensation of seeing the times catch up with him.’ In fact, there’s scarcely a turn in post-war music, both classical and popular, that Erik Satie doesn’t anticipate or invent or suggest.
Satie, said Picabia, liked Relâche ‘in the same way he liked kirsch, a leg of lamb, the way he liked his umbrella! Relâche does not mean anything, it is the pollen of our epoch.’ Entr’acte is an anti-manifesto made up of punchlines, not proscriptions. It is bricolage at breakneck speed, a bunch of pals having a ball, seat-of-the-pants surrealism. (Don’t forget: this is before Surrealism proper was even officially born.) Things zoom and stutter and levitate and vanish at the drop of a hat. Unselfconscious buffoonery vying with obstreperous protest. Acting the giddy goat pitted against high seriousness. Popular art with arcane underpinnings. The same spirit, or something very like it, will later animate a whole circus troupe of diverse phenomena: The Goons; the Situationists; the Nouvelle Vague; Beyond the Fringe; the Yippies; Stonewall; Monty Python; Punk.
Entr’acte is both séance and clairvoyance.
2.
What exactly happens in Entr’acte?
The prologue opens with a huge cannon rolling and spinning as if it had a locomotive will of its own. Satie and Picabia enter the frame as if parachuted in under heavy sedation. They leap up and down in what might be some kind of ritual exorcism to dispel the spirit of gravity.
Everything is slowed to the pulse of a lazy river. The two men gesture towards the cannon as if they’ve never seen such a thing before, as if it has just landed out of the wide blue yonder and they each have an entirely different idea of what it might be or do or allow. Satie loads it with a great big shell and the two pals jump backwards out of frame, straight back to wherever it was they first arrived from.
CUT to a POV like a poke in the eye – this artillery is aimed straight at you! – and a big shell exits the big cannon like old toothpaste from a metal tube. Plop. End of prologue.
In Entr’acte proper, so to speak:
Balloon heads inflate and deflate in a creepy-carnal manner.
A female ballet dancer is seen from an angle no audience ever saw a ballet dancer from before.
Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp are caught in an al fresco game of chess… until rain stops play.
The ballet dancer returns and is revealed to be sporting pince-nez and a fake beard. (In other words, she is in Satie drag.)
There is a runaway hearse led by a camel, plus roller coasters, bicycles and cars.
There are dancing matchsticks and levitating boxing gloves.
An egg is shot and becomes a bird.
Heavy objects fly all over the place like stray feathers.
The world turns upside down.
Time goes both ways.
A man pokes a hole in the end title card – ‘FIN’ – and jumps through. A foot kicks him in the face sending him back through THE END. The footage is reversed and everything pulls itself together again. The end turns into a beginning, and we all look forward avidly to this riotous past.
(…)
‘Ian Penman is an ideal critic, one who invites you in, takes your coat and hands you a drink as he sidles up to his topic. He has a modest mien, a feathery way with a sentence, a century’s worth of adroit cultural connections at the ready, and a great well of genuine passion, which quickly raises the temperature.’
— Lucy Sante, author of The Other Paris
‘Ian Penman – critic, essayist, mystical hack and charmer of sentences like they’re snakes – is the writer I have hardly gone a week without reading, reciting, summoning to mind. The writer without whom, etc.’
— Brian Dillon, author of Affinities
Praise for Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors
‘Stendahl once described the novel as “a mirror being carried up the street”, but Ian Penman’s extraordinary critical memoir is more like a whole convoy of the things. The book captures not only scenes both gross and beautiful from the 1970s life of the workaholic Fassbinder, but a glittering array of thoughts and moments from his own long fascination with Fassbinder’s place and time and historical moment – which was also the time of Penman’s youth, not as a German film director but as a London music journalist, hungry for Europe and all that it then represented to England, assembling a wider world for his imagination from clues and scraps and cherished frames of German movies.’
— Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill
‘[Fassbinder] Thousands of Mirrors is not a sorrowful kill-your-heroes recanting. It’s much more interesting than that – a freewheeling, hopscotching study of the Fassbinder allure and an investigation of Penman’s younger self…. It’s a book about a film-maker but also, hauntingly, about the way our tastes and passions change over time.’
— Anthony Quinn, Observer
‘I’m so keen for more readers to discover this incredible little book. Every sentence is explosive. Every page left me reaching for my notebook to jot down things which required further thought. There are so many ideas, perspectives and tiny nuggets of deep insight contained within this book, I’d struggle to put a label on it. It’s biography. It’s philosophy. It’s critique. It’s flighty enough to read like fiction and yet it’s one of the most grounded books I’ve read in years. Yes, it’s about German cinema, but German cinema’s simply the mirror Penman’s holding up to force his readers to look long and hard at themselves.’
— Jan Carson, author of The Raptures
‘This is the only book I have read twice this year. Truly it is thousands of mirrors in terms of the thoughts, images and references running through this reflective and wonderfully interior work. The world of European cinema, especially Fassbinder’s film seen through Ian Penman’s eyes, has transported me to a tantalizing place called post-war Europe. The book brings me back to my youth and my film school years in the east and west, and it reminds me of how powerful images have shaped our very understanding of love and life.’
— Xialuo Guo, author of My Battle of Hastings
‘Do Penman’s flurries of quickfire erudition add up to a dazzling kaleidoscope overall, or a labyrinth of aborted pathways? The answer is “both”. He’s boldly querying his subject’s genius from every vantage point – angry and young; older and (maybe) wiser.’
— Tim Robey, Telegraph
‘Approached from all angles, Fassbinder is by turns a figure of intense corporeality, glistening with sweat, and an overblown mass of meaning.’
— Georgie Carr, Times Literary Supplement
‘The book is many things, but above all it is a reckoning with the idea that art might enter the commodity world and awaken its inhabitants…. [T]he late 1970s/early 1980s, in which Penman was a shadowy but vital presence – post-punk, new pop, new romanticism – is remembered similarly as a moment where a sudden societal switch led to an efflorescence of radical popular culture. Writing his book in 2022, Penman was remembering Penman in 1982 remembering the just-dead Fassbinder marking one historical moment of transition by making reference to another that took place decades earlier. To read Penman doing this in what feels like another moment of passage into something unknown and frightening is rather eerie.’
— Owen Hatherley, London Review of Books
Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Harper’s and City Journal. He is the author of the collections Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent’s Tail, 1998) and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019). His first original book, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize for Literature and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography in 2024.
