Whenever you're ready...
Histories of cinema and television.
They could only be told by someone from the New Wave.
The New Wave is perhaps the only generation
which came to the fore mid-century and perhaps mid-cinema.
Cinema is a 20th-century enterprise.
A 19th-century enterprise resolved in the 20th century.
You were lucky to arrive early enough
to inherit a history already rich and complicated
and eventful.
To have taken enough time to see enough films
and decide for yourself
what was more or less important in this history.
To have a time-line...
We know that Griffith comes before Rossellini,
Renoir before Visconti.
And your arrival in a history
that could already be told, could still be told.
Told as a tale, but the story remained untold.
But there was already enough...
enough knowledge and passion
to be able to say...
to know that we come
before one thing and after something else.
Coming to the fore mid-century...
To constitute your own history.
To know who comes after you.
The only occasion to make history...
Not because there are too many films.
There are very few. Fewer and fewer.
Historians of literature say
there was Homer
Cervantes
Joyce.
After these three, they add Faulkner
and Flaubert.
There were very few. Ten films.
Ten fingers. Ten films.
The cinema. My idea
that I can now express
is that it was the only way
of bringing about, of telling, of realizing
that I have my own history.
Without cinema, I wouldn't have known this.
It was the only way.
It was my duty.
The guilty, accursed side.
Marguerite said I was accursed.
The only way, if we can ever tell a story
or make history.
And it never occurred. There was no history...
History of art, a little.
By the French. Not the others.
Diderot, Baudelaire, Malraux.
I place Truffaut after them.
A straight line.
Baudelaire...
on Edgar Poe
is the same as Malraux on Faulkner,
the same as Truffaut
on Edgar Ulmer
or on Hawks.
Only the French related this history.
They suspected they were in a history.
They wanted to know what it was.
Their history in History. History in their history.
History with a big "H" is the history of cinema.
Bigger than the others
because it projects itself.
In a Moscow jail, Poncelet, engineer in Napoleon's army,
reconstructed by memory
the geometry he learned from Monge and Carnot.
His Treaty on the Projective Properties of Figures,
published in 1822,
makes a general method of the principle of projection used by Desargue
to extend the properties of the circle to the conics
and by Pascal in his proof of the mystic hexagram.
It took a Frenchman going round in circles in a Russian prison
for the application of the idea of projecting figures onto a screen
to take flight practically
with the invention of cinematic projection.
For the child,
in love with maps and engravings,
the universe is equal to his vast appetite.
How great the world is
by lamplight!
In the eyes of memory
how the world is small!
One morning we set off,
our brains full of ardor
our hearts swollen with rancor
and with bitter desires,
and we go, following the rhythm of the waves,
rocking our infinity
on the finite seas.
Some, happy to leave
an infamous homeland;
others,
the horrors of their cradles,
and some,
astrologers
drowned in the eyes of a woman,
tyrannical Circe with her dangerous perfumes.
So as not to be changed into beasts,
they get drunk
on space and light and skies ablaze.
The ice that bites them,
the suns that bronze them,
slowly efface
the trace of kisses.
Strange destiny
in which the goal moves,
and being nowhere,
may be anywhere!
In which Man,
for whom
hope is never wearied,
to find a moment's rest,
runs,
always,
like a madman.
We want to travel
without steam
and without sail!
Project,
to enliven the boredom of our prisons,
project over our minds
stretched out like a canvas
your memories with horizons for their frame.
What have you seen?
We have seen stars and waves;
we have seen sand dunes too;
and despite many shocks and unforeseen disasters
we were often as bored as we were here.
The glory of the sun on the violet sea,
the glory of cities in the sunset,
kindled in our hearts an unsettling ardor
to plunge into a sky
whose reflection was alluring.
The richest cities,
the grandest landscapes
never contained
the mysterious attraction
of those which chance creates with clouds.
And always,
desire made us anxious.
We bowed before idols with elephant trunks;
thrones
studded with luminous gems;
elaborate palaces
whose fairytale pomp
would be a ruinous dream for your bankers;
costumes
that intoxicate the eyes;
women
whose teeth and nails
are dyed,
and skillful jugglers
caressed by snakes.
And then, and then what else?
There is a projection:
History with a capital "H",
because it can project itself.
The other histories can only be reduced.
That little poem by Brecht.
"I examine with care my plan.
"It is unrealizable."
Because television reduces.
Or it projects you, but you lose consciousness.
It projects the spectator,
whereas the moviegoer is attracted.
The TV viewer is rejected.
But we can make a memory of this history.
History with a capital H.
Not to forget the capital thing,
we saw everywhere,
and without having sought it,
from the top
to the bottom
of the fatal ladder,
the tedious spectacle
of immortal sin.
What bitter knowledge
we gain from travelling!
The world,
monotonous and small,
today, yesterday, tomorrow, always,
shows us our own image:
An oasis of horror
in a desert of tedium!
Should we go?
Stay?
If you can stay, stay.
Leave, if you must.
O Death, old captain
it is time.
Let us raise the anchor!
This country bores us,
O Death! Let us set sail.
If the sky and sea are black as ink,
our hearts which you know are filled with light.