Be sure to have used
all that is communicated
by immobility and silence.
What has passed by the cinema and is still marked by it
can no longer enter elsewhere.
But concerning me, first of all. Concerning my story:
What do I have to do with all this?
All this light?
All this darkness?
Sometimes at night someone whispers in my room.
I shut off the television,
but the whispering continues.
Is it the wind or is it my ancestors?
History of solitude, solitude of history.
Cinema projected
and people saw that the world was there.
A world still almost without a history,
but a world that tells stories.
But instead of uncertainty,
in order to establish idea and sensation,
the two great stories were sex and death.
Stories of beauty, in short.
Beauty, make-up...
Cinema is not part of the communications industry
or entertainment.
It is part of cosmetics, the industry of masks.
A minor branch of the industry of lies.
Histories of cinema.
It boils down to entertainment.
It can't be explained otherwise.
Succeeding photography,
cinema always wanted to be realer than real life.
Neither art, nor technique...
Murderers and Thieves,
Guitry's last film.
Soon, every morning,
he'll no longer have to go
to the markets of lies.
Soon, he'll no longer happily take sides
with the vendors.
I recorded this sentence of Brecht's.
I asked Lang to say it to Bardot.
I called the film Contempt.
The story begins with two brothers.
Their name could have been Lampshade,
but it was Lumière.
Each the spitting image of the other.
Since then, you need two reels to make movies.
One fills up as the other empties.
As if by chance, in video,
the left reel is called the "slave"
and the right, the "master".
For one last time, the dark gathers its strength
to conquer the light.
But it is in the back that light will strike dark.
A movie projector
is forced to remember the camera.
Cinema is only an industry of escapism
because it is the only place
where memory is slave.
Successor of photography, yes.
But by succeeding this history,
cinema inherited not only its rights to reproduce a piece of reality,
but also its duties.
It succeeded Zola,
but not L'Assommoir or La Bête Humaine.
A family album, first of all: Proust and Manet.
From the beginning to the end of this book
in which men desperately raped Nature
to sow the seeds of the power of their fiction,
to go from Giotto to Matisse, from Madame de la Fayette to Faulkner,
took one fifth of the time that the first train needed
to become the TGV.
Cinema, like Christianity, is not founded on historical truth.
It supplies us with a story and says:
Now, believe!
Not: Have faith in this story as you do in History,
but: Believe, come what may.
It is a life-Iong task.
You have a story here. Don't treat it like history.
Give it a place of its own in your life.
Cinema has never been an art,
and even less a technique.
From L'Arrivée du train en gare to Rio Bravo,
the camera hasn't changed much.
The Platinum Panavision is less perfect than the Debrie 7
which Gide's nephew took to Congo.
White Shadows
Technicians will say it's not true,
but remember that the 19th century
which invented every technique
also invented stupidity.
And that Madame Bovary, before becoming a porn cassette,
grew up with the telegraph.
Not a technique, not even an art.
An art without a future
kindly warned the two brothers.
Less than 100 years later, we see that they were right.
Television has made Léon Gaumont's dream come true
- bringing the world into the poorest bedrooms -
by reducing the giant sky of the shepherds
to the level of Tom Thumb.
Afterwards, we misunderstood them.
They said "no future".
That is, an art in the present.
An art which gives
and which receives before giving.
Let us say: Child's play.
The disciples of Saint-Simon.
Who was their master?
Enfantin.
Baron Enfantin.
They dreamt of the Orient,
but didn't call it Silk Road or Rum Route.
They called it the rail road
because, en route, the dream hardened and became mechanized.
The twilight of the 19th century.
The beginning of public transport.
The dawn of the 20th century.
The beginning of the treatment of hysteria.
Charcot opening the door to dreams to Freud.
But finding the key was up to him.
But what is the difference between Lilian Gish on her ice floe
and Augustine at Salpetrière?
Something even worse
is presaged by the default of God.
Not only have the gods and the god fled,
but the divine radiance
has gone out in the world's history.
The time of the world's night is the time of distress
because it becomes ever narrower.
Afterwards, all it will take is a world war or two
to pervert this child's play...
...It has become so narrow
that it can no longer discern the default of God
as a default.
...and for television to become
this stupid, sad adult
who refuses to see the hole which bore it
and which confines itself to childishness.
Because...
this is what happened:
At the dawn of the 20th century
techniques decided to reproduce life.
So photography and cinema were invented.
But morality was still strong
and they were preparing to strip reality of its identity,
so they began mourning this murder.
It is with the colors of mourning, black and white,
that the cinématographe came into existence.
Poets are mortals who,
singing earnestly,
sense the trace of the fugitive gods,
stay in these tracks
and trace for the mortals,
their brothers, the way toward the turning.
But who among mortals can trace such a track?
Traces are often hard to behold
and are always
the legacy of an assignation that is barely felt.
To be a poet in times of distress
means: Singing,
to attend to the trace of the fugitive gods.