Change nothing so that everything is different.
Don't show every side of things.
Allow yourself a margin of indefiniteness.
Histories of cinema, in the plural.
All the stories
that will be
that have been.
To tell the story of the last tycoon
Irving Thalberg.
A TV executive has, at most, 200 films a year in his head.
Thalberg was the only person who,
every day, had 52 films in his head.
The foundation.
The founding father.
The only son.
This story had to pass by this:
A young body, fragile and beautiful,
as described F. Scott Fitzgerald -
so that this could exist:
The power of Hollywood.
The power of Babylon.
A dream factory.
History of cinema.
Newness of history. History of news.
What has gone through cinema and is still marked by it
can no longer enter anywhere else.
A dream factory.
Communism wore itself out trying to dream up such factories.
Married to one of the prettiest women alive.
Or to tell the story of Howard Hughes.
Braver than Mermoz,
richer than Rockefeller.
Producer of Citizen Kane, president of TWA.
As if Meliès ran Gallimard and the SNCF.
And before Hughes Aircraft
began fishing up CIA submarines from the bottom of the Pacific,
he forced RKO starlets to go on weekly limousine rides
at one mile an hour
so their breasts wouldn't bounce up and down.
His death, worse than anything
Defoe had imagined for Robinson.
To tell the stories of all the films never made...
To tell the stories of all the films never made,
rather than those that were.
Those that were can be seen on TV.
Let's not exaggerate:
They're not even copies of reproductions.
1940. Geneva. L'Ecole des femmes. Max Ophuls.
He fell on Madeleine Ozeray's ass,
while the Germans were taking the French from behind
and while Louis Jouvet was giving up.
Theater is something too much known.
The cinématographe, too unknown...
up to now.
History of cinema newness of history.
History of news.
Histories of cinema, with "s".
With SS.
1939, 1940, 1941...
Betrayal by radio,
but cinema keeps its word.
Because from Siegfried and M to the dictator and Lubitsch,
films were made.
1940, 1941.
Even scratched to death, a simple 35-millimeter rectangle
saves the honor of reality.
1941, 1942.
If poor images still strike
without anger or hatred, like a butcher,
it is because cinema is there: Silent film,
with its humble and formidable power of transfiguration.
1942, 1943, 1944.
That which plunges into the night
is the echo of what silence submerges.
What silence submerges
sustains in light that which plunges into the night.
Images and sounds,
like travelers whose paths cross
and who can no longer part ways.
To prove it, the masses like myths.
Cinema speaks to the masses.
But if the myth begins with Fantomas,
it ends with Christ.
What did those who listened to St. Bernard hear?
Not what he was saying?
Maybe. Probably.
How can we neglect what we learn
when that unknown voice plunges deep into our hearts?
What the news can teach us:
The birth of a nation, of hope,
of Rome, Open City.
The cinématographe never meant to create an event,
but a vision.
Because the screen
is the same white canvas
as the Samaritan's shirt.
What Arnold and Richter's cameras preserve,
so as not to be outdone by nightmares and dreams,
will not be shown on a screen, but on a shroud.
If the deaths of Puig and the Négus,
of Captain Boïeldieu,
and of the little bunny were inaudible,
it is because life never rendered what it stole from film.
Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.
Histories of cinema,
stories without speech,
stories of the night.
For nearly 50 years, in the dark,
moviegoers burn imagination to heat up reality.
Now reality is seeking revenge.
It wants real tears, real blood.
From Vienna to Madrid,
from Siodmak to Capra,
from Paris to Los Angeles and Moscow,
from Renoir to Malraux and Dovjenko -
great fiction directors couldn't control the vengeance
which they had directed over and over.
The poor cinema of news
must clear the blood and tears of all suspicion
as streets are cleaned too late,
after the army has fired at the masses.
What there is of cinema
in wartime newsreels says nothing.
It does not judge.
No close-ups.
Suffering is not a star.
Nor is the burned-down church or the bombed-out countryside.
The spirits of Flaherty and Epstein took over.
Daumier and Rembrandt, with his terrifying black and white.
A few pans,
an occasional high angle, for a mother mourning her murdered child.
It is because this time alone
the only veritable popular art form rejoins painting,
that is: Art.
That is: What is reborn from what was burned.
We've forgotten that village, its white walls and olive trees,
but we remember Picasso,
that is: Guernica.
We've forgotten Valentin Feldman, killed in '43,
but we remember at least one other prisoner,
that is: Goya.
And if George Stevens hadn't used the first 16-mm color film
in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck,
Elizabeth Taylor would never have found a place in the sun.
1939, 1944.
Martyrdom and resurrection of the documentary.
How marvelous to be able to look at what we cannot see.
What a miracle for our blind eyes.
Besides that,
cinema is an industry.
And if World War I allowed
American cinema to ruin French cinema,
with the advent of television,
World War II allowed it to finance,
that is, to ruin, European cinema.
"Do you have two hands?" Asks the blind man.
But looking won't reassure me.
Why trust my eyes, if I have doubts?
Why check my eyes
to see whether I see my hands?
Help!