It has become necessary
to inform European governments
of a fact so small
they don't seem aware of it.
A population is being assassinated.
Where? In Europe. Are there witnesses?
One witness: The world.
Do the governments see this? No.
Nations have something above them which is beneath them: Governments.
Sometimes this contradiction is blatant.
Civilization is in the people. Barbarity is in the leaders.
Is this barbarity intentional? No.
Simply professional.
Governments ignore what humanity knows.
Governments can only be shortsighted:
Reason of State.
Humanity sees with another eye:
Conscience.
European governments will be surprised
to learn this: Crimes are crimes.
Governments have no more right than people
to murder.
Europe shows solidarity.
Everything done in Europe is done by Europe.
A government of beasts
must be treated like a beast.
At this moment, not far,
people are slaughtering, setting fires, pillaging,
slitting parents' throats
selling girls and boys.
The youngest
are felled with swords.
Families are burnt in their homes.
In a few hours, Balak's 9000 inhabitants
were reduced to 1300.
Cemeteries are so full, bodies cannot be buried.
The dead send the plague to the living
who sent them to slaughter.
We inform European governments
the bellies of pregnant woman are being ripped open.
In public places are skeletons of women's bodies, torn asunder.
Dogs gnaw at the skulls of raped girls.
All this is horrible.
A gesture from European governments could stop it.
Those who commit these crimes are terrifying.
Those who let them be committed are vile.
Governments stammer. They've tried stuttering before.
They say we are exaggerating.
Yes, we are.
Balak wasn't exterminated in a few hours, but in a few days.
Two hundred villages weren't burned. Only ninety-nine were.
It's not the plague, just typhoid fever.
Not all the women were raped. Not all the girls were sold.
Some escaped.
Castrated prisoners were beheaded first,
making it a lesser evil.
The boy thrown from spike to spike
was just speared with a bayonet.
Et cetera, et cetera.
And why did those people revolt?
Why can't a flock of men be owned like a flock of cattle?
Et cetera, et cetera.
Speaking this way adds to the horror.
Haggling over public indignation is pathetic.
Toning down makes things worse: Subtlety pleading in favor of barbarity.
Let's call a spade a spade: Killing a man
in Bondy Forest or the Black Forest is a crime.
Killing a race in the forest of diplomacy
is a crime too. A bigger one. That's all.
Where will it end?
When will that heroic nation's ordeal be over?
We're told we forget certain questions.
Killing a man is a crime. Killing a race is a question.
Each government has its question.
We answer:
Humanity has its question too.
Bigger than India, England, Russia.
It is the baby in its mother's belly.
The Holy Book tells us that before leaving,
Lot's daughters wanted one last look back.
They were turned into salt.
We only film the past.
That is, what passes.
And silver salts fix the light.
No stories...
when I was inventing.
Stories...
when I invent nothing.
What stories, exactly?
The battle of Borodino
and the end of the French domination, as told by Tolstoy.
The battle of Baghdad, as told by CNN.
The triumph of American television and its groupies.
A German, Erich Pommer,
founder of Universal
- Matsushita Electronics, today -
exclaimed: "I'll make the world cry in their seats!"
Maybe he did.
Newspapers and TV stations
show only death and tears.
On the other hand, people who watch television all day
have no more tears to cry.
They've unlearned how to look.
What story do we want?
Supposing we are still worthy of The Charterhouse
and of crimes and punishment.
David O. Selznick demanded:
"I want Del Rio and Tyrone Power in a South Seas romance.
"Any story will do, as long as it's called Birds of Paradise
"and it ends with Del Rio jumping into a volcano!"
I was alone, lost,
in my thoughts.
I was holding a book: Manet by Bataille.
Manet's women seem to say: "I know what you're thinking."
Probably because until Manet - Malraux taught me this -
inner reality was more subtle than the cosmos.
The famous, pale smiles of da Vinci and Vermeer
first say: "Me, me."
The world comes after.
Even Corot's woman in pink doesn't think
the thoughts of Olympia,
of Berthe Morisot,
of the Folies-Bergère barmaid.
Because finally, the world within
has opened out to the cosmos.
With Manet begins modern painting: That is,
the cinématographe.
Forms making their way toward speech.
Precisely: A form which thinks.
Cinema was first made for thinking. This would soon be forgotten.
But that's another story.
The flame went out for good in Auschwitz.
This thought is worth at least a farthing.
I was alone, lost in my thoughts.
Then Zola came along with his eternal camera.
He ended Nana with these words: "To Berlin! To Berlin!"
Then Catherine Hessling arrived.
Forty years and two wars after Zola,
she took the train to Berlin.
The first co-production with the UFA.
The last was Quai des Brumes.
But Goebbels upset everything.
He disliked Michèle Morgan's eyes.
Alas, I was alone in thinking
that she wasn't alone on that train in 1942,
one year before the Liberation
- Albert, Danielle, Junie, Suzy, Viviane -
just before the Glières maquis fell
despite the help Bresson's youngest dame brought in a whisper.
And I am probably still alone...
in thinking that one of the visitors on that night in '42,
that Gilles - no, not the one in Drieu -
goes to visit Dominique
and asks: "So, do we or don't we take this train?"
And that their hearts thumped and thumped...
I was alone that night, with my dreams.
Fifty years later, we celebrate the Liberation.
Television, because power has become spectacle,
is organizing a huge show.
No decoration for Guy Debord.
French cinema never shook off the Germans or Americans,
so no one will be there to film Claude Roy, who is seizing the CNC
that citadel built by Vichy.
The waves reconstituted by Japanese cameras
will again forget to bury the dead...
as the poet did.
Poetry is resistance.
Ossip Mandelstam knew this.
But these days, everyone ignores Russians.
Why is it that from '40 to '45 there was no resistance cinema?
There were resistance films. Left and right, here and there,
but the only film, in the true sense,
to resist America's occupation of cinema
and a uniform way of making films
was an Italian film.
It is not by chance.
Italy fought the least.
It suffered greatly. But having betrayed twice,
it suffered to have lost its identity.
It found it with Rome, Open City
because the film was made by men without uniform.
It was the only time.
The Russians made martyr films. The Americans made commercials.
The English made what they always make: Nothing.
The Germans had no cinema.
No more cinema.
And the French made Sylvia and the Ghost.
The Poles made two expiatory films, The Passenger and The Last Step,
and a nostalgic film, Kanal.
Then they welcomed Spielberg.
"Never again" became "It's better than nothing".
But with Rome, Open City, Italy regained the right
for a nation to look itself in the eye.
Then came the crop of great Italian cinema.
But there is something strange.
How did Italian cinema become so great
if no one - Rossellini, Visconti, Antonioni, Fellini -
recorded sound with image?
Only one answer.
The language of Ovid and Virgil, of Dante and Leopardi
made its way into the image.