There was a short film narrated
by Jean Cocteau.
He spoke about how a film was made.
The voice said:
Red light. I entered
illicitly.
When I was born,
did I also pass through my mother illicitly?
I wanted to be an engineer.
Have I even managed to be ingenious?
All these stories, now mine, how can I tell them?
Show them, maybe.
The screenplay was invented.
A minor Mafia accountant
had to put some order in the brainwaves of Sennet.
And Friedrich Murnau and Karl Freund.
They invented the Nuremberg lighting.
While Hitler couldn't even afford a beer in a Munich café.
Dirty Hands.
To Have or Have Not.
The medium close shot, framed at the belt.
For the revolver:
The genitals.
Male genitals. Women were framed
at the breast.
Beneath every love story
lurks a wet nurse.
It was a director, not a historian, Marcel Pagnol,
who cracked the secret of the iron mask
and simultaneously, the origin of the close-up:
The king's face on the coin.
And the camera-pen.
Sartre gave the idea to Alexandre Astruc.
The camera fell under the guillotine of meaning
and never got back up.
Strangest of all,
the living dead of this world are constructed on the former world.
Their reflections and sensations are from before.
The thing exists only by the name that I give it
- poor thing -
and that I am.
Albertine!
Albertine...
Iost.
"For a long time, I went to bed early..."
I say that
and suddenly Albertine disappears.
And time is regained.
For the novelist is speaking.
And the director? If we had to speak without saying anything.
For example: "I woke up surly."
Cinema must exist for words stuck in the throat
and for the truth to be unearthed.
Neither an art, nor a technique. A mystery.
Be sure to have used...
all that is communicated by immobility
and silence.
Ah, my homeland! Is it true?
This is how I imagined you for a long time.
Happy country,
magic, dazzling.
O beloved land,
where are you?
If it involves an interpretation
it will not be transformed on contact with other images.
Other images will have no power over it.
It will have no power over other images.
Neither action nor reaction.
It is definitive and unusable
in the system of the cinématographe.
Films are merchandise
and we must burn films.
I told Langlois.
But beware: With the fire within.
Matter and Memory.
Art is like fire. Born from what it burns.
Can time be told?
Time in itself, as itself, of itself.
No, it would be a crazy undertaking.
A story in which it is said: Time passed, followed its course...
History of cinema.
When,
oh when?
When was there creation delivered from form?
When, oh when without fate?
It was,
without dream it was, neither waking nor sleep.
Only an instant, a song, the unique voice, unevocable,
a smiling call.
Once there was the child. Once there was creation.
Once again it will come to be, miracle delivered from chance.
Magical evocation
of a faraway, remote world.
Beauty.
Such is beauty.
This is why it is also
a relapse into pre-divinity.
This is why for man it is a recollection
of something.
O homecoming!
Homecoming of him who need no longer be a guest.
Impossible to retrieve that smile
in which we were once quietly huddled.
Impossible to retrieve the smiling embrace,
that fullness of being on awakening
or just before awakening.
Impossible to retrieve the sweetness in which we buried our face
so that our vision would not prove to be simple chance.
Where everything was ours when all was rendered to us.
O homecoming!
O universal time
where nothing was mute to the child's mute eyes
and everything was a new creation.
O music
inside us and outside us.
Beauty, game in itself.
Game man plays with his own symbol.
His only chance to escape, at least symbolically,
his fear of loneliness,
repeating again and again
the beautiful autosuggestion,
the flight into beauty
the game of flight.
Art's despair,
its desperate attempt
to create the imperishable from what perishes.
From words, sounds, stones, colors
so that the space formed might outlast time.
Although the mighty build halls,
filling them with torches and music,
surrounding themselves with bodies, and more bodies,
and faces, and more faces.
That too was but a kind of sleep.
Neither an art, nor a technique. A mystery.
To solve it, a simple magic potion.
To illuminate our lantern, magic too.
The history of cinema is first linked to that of medicine.
Eisenstein's tortured bodies,
beyond Caravaggio and El Greco
speak to Vesalius' dissections.
Joan Fontaine staring at the glass of milk
does not respond to a Delacroix heroine
but to Pasteur's dog.
Kodak made his fortune with X-rays,
not with Snow White.
Since it wanted to imitate the movement of life,
it was normal, logical
that the film industry first sell itself
to the death industry.
Oh, how many screenplays about babies,
about flowers...
But how many about bursts of gunfire?
Because this is what happened:
Photography could have been invented in color.
Color already existed.
At the dawn of the 20th century,
techniques decided to reproduce life.
So they invented photography.
But morality was still strong
and they were preparing to strip life of its identity.
So they began mourning this murder.
It is with the colors of mourning, black and white,
that photography came into existence.
Not because of engraving.
Nadar's flowers do not recopy a Doré lithography.
They annihilate it.
Soon after, to mask the mourning,
Technicolor films will use the same dominants as funeral wreaths.
And Scarlett O'Hara will vow once again
to think about it tomorrow.
About what? Happiness.
Because one must go into mourning. But forgetting about it.
But Madame de Stael told us how.
She wrote to Napoleon: "Glory, Sire,
"is the dazzling mourning of happiness."
Glory, sunlights, Oscars, festivals.
For fifty Cecil B. De Milles, how many Dreyers?
Everything I say can be said of music hall.
All I am is a song-and-dance man!