In a hushed voice
in a gentle, soft voice,
saying great things
important, surprising, profound,
just things,
in a gentle, soft voice
the threat of thunder,
the presence of absolutes in a robin's voice,
in the fine detail of a flute
and the delicacy of pure sound.
The whole sun evoked in a half smile.
O hushed voice
and a sort of murmur
in infinitely pure French.
He who heard not the words would have thought they were nothing.
They were nothing for the reassured ear.
But this contrast and this music,
this voice barely rippling the air,
this whispering strength,
these perspectives,
these discoveries,
these abysses,
and these maneuvers, hinted at,
this smile
dismissing the universe.
Also, the sound of silk, lonely and discreet,
of a fire which burns
creating the room around it
and which speaks to itself,
or to me,
almost for itself.
Spirit is true only when it manifests itself.
The root of "manifest" is the word "hand".
Love is the epitome of spirit.
Loving others is an act.
A hand reaching out, not a draped sentiment,
an ideal on the way to Jericho passing by a bandits' victim.
Police.
Propaganda. State.
This is the hand,
the name of the tyrant God created by man's proud reason.
When speech breaks down,
when it is no longer a gift which commits something of itself,
human friendship breaks down.
This is the worry of the people.
It is not material at first.
It is a worry of heart and spirit,
born of the death of friendship.
I do not believe in mysterious voices
but in the call of facts.
Let us consider the time, the places we live,
our precise situations and their resulting call.
After that, let us judge.
The Europe of today.
In this Europe, two kinds of nations.
Those considered old
and those considered rejuvenated.
Those with possibilities
but not knowing what to do with their freedom,
and those which have undergone revolution
and have freedom of opinion,
that is, the right to complain, but without deep-felt passion,
where misery is at the door and all one can do is wait.
Misery.
Last argument. Last basis of modern community.
The backdrop of all our dramas, thoughts and action,
and even our utopias.
The essential is not what a dictator thinks.
It is not material necessity.
It is a higher truth.
At the level of man
and, I might add, within man's reach.
It is time that thought becomes what it truly is:
Dangerous for the thinker
and able to transform reality.
"Where I create is where I am true": Rilke.
Some think, others act.
But man's true condition
is to think with his hands.
I will not denigrate our tools
but I'd like them usable.
If it is true that the danger is not in our tools
but in the weakness of our hands.
A thought which abandons itself to the rhythm of its own mechanisms
proletarianizes itself.
Such a thought no longer lives of its own creation.
Man is formed by others.
I recite this.
Who are these others?
We know now.
They are the laws born of the abandonment of thought.
Who is responsible?
Not the parties. Not the classes. Not the governments.
It is men, one by one.
In anger I am torn by insurmountable irony.
Otherwise I would not shout.
But silence is not given to man through effort.
Silence and pitiful intelligence are the work of forgiveness.
"It is your business, not mine, to rule over absence,"
said a poet.
True violence is the work of the spirit.
Every creative act contains a real threat
for the person who dares it.
This is how art moves the viewer or reader.
If thought refuses to do violence,
it exposes itself in vain
to all the brutalities which its absence released.
We sometimes hope that thinking in France
becomes punishable by prison.
Free thinkers would be taken seriously again.
The place of all creative thinking
is the person.
The world's agitation is no more than a question
which is put to me and which takes form
only when it forces me to act.
Partisans of "we" have mistaken the person.
The world's contradictions figure in the equation of all existence.
X is a person, a creative element,
an incalculable liberty.
Man,
as man, is a creator,
but a created creator.
It is in hope that we are saved.
But this hope is true
because time destroys the act,
but the act is the judge of time.
When the acrobat falls prey
to his own precarious balance,
we make a wish.
This wish is two-fold
and empty.
We hope he falls
and we hope he holds on.
This wish is necessary. We can't help forming it
in all its contradiction, in all sincerity.
It naively paints our soul
at that moment.
It feels that the man will fall,
must fall,
is going to fall.
It confirms his fall and refrains
from any emotion, desiring what it foresees.
For it, he has already fallen.
It doesn't believe its eyes. It wouldn't watch him on the rope,
wouldn't push him down at every moment
if he hadn't already fallen.
It sees him holding on
and admits there are reasons for his holding on,
invoking these reasons, begging them to last.
The existence of everything
and of ourselves...
We forget why Joan Fontaine leans over the cliff.
Why was Joel McCrea in Holland?
What confession did Montgomery Clift keep secret?
Why did Janet Leigh stop at the Motel?
Why does Theresa Wright still love Uncle Charlie?
What isn't Henry Fonda entirely guilty of?
Why did the American government
hire Ingrid Bergman?
But we remember a handbag.
But we remember
a bus in the desert.
But we remember
a glass of milk, a windmill,
a hairbrush.
But we remember a row of bottles,
a pair of glasses,
a musical score,
a key chain.
Because with them and through them, Alfred Hitchcock
succeeded where Alexander, Caesar, Hitler and Napoleon failed:
In taking control of the universe.
Maybe 10,000 people
haven't forgot C�zanne's apple,
but a billion remember the lighter in Strangers on a Train.
Hitchcock, the only accursed poet
to meet with success.
Our century's greatest creator of forms.
Forms tell us what is at the bottom of things.
What is art,
if not the way forms become style?
What is style...
What is style, if not man?
So it is a bra-less blonde
tailed by a detective scared of heights
who proves that it's all cinema, that is,
child's play.
In the beginning
it felt very little
and thought it knew everything.
Later,
filled solely with doubt, pain,
dread before the mystery of life,
it all began floating.
And now that it feels everything
it believes it knows nothing.
And yet
from insouciance
to worry,
from the loving recording of beginnings
to the hesitant but essential form of the end,
the same central force governs
cinema.
We follow it from within,
from form to form
with the prowling shadow and beam,
illuminating one thing, hiding another.
Making a shoulder appear,
a face,
a raised finger,
an open window,
a forehead,
a child
in a nursery.
That which plunges into light
is the echo of what the night submerges.
What the night submerges
sustains in the invisible that which plunges into light.
The thought,
the look, the word,
the action
link this forehead, this eye
this mouth,
this hand,
their size
barely noticed in the dark,
heads and bodies
bending over a birth, an agony
or a death.
Even,
and maybe especially,
when its only tool
is black and white,
even then
it works the world
like a constant drama
that daylight and darkness sculpt,
dig,
convulse,
calm
and let live and die according to its passion,
its sadness,
its desperate desire
for eternity and absolutes
which overwhelm its heart.
A headlight,
a face asleep,
shadows coming to life,
bodies leaning
over a cradle
when all light falls,
someone executed against a wall,
a muddy path by the sea,
a street corner,
a dark sky,
a ray of light on a prairie,
the empire of wind in a flying cloud.
There are only black lines crossing a blond painting
and the tragedy of space and the tragedy of life
twist the screen in their fire.
Only the cinema saw
that if everyone does his job,
the masses organize themselves alone
according to an irreproachable balance.
Light falls where it must, neglecting what it must
because it is useful that it illuminate part of the scene,
shadows ruling elsewhere.
It is alone to have been constantly present
in everything it looked at.
Alone to have been able
to mix mud with the gleam of eyes,
to introduce fire into ashes,
to make shine, in a shroud,
a rose,
or a light blue as fresh as a rose.
Its humanity
is truly formidable.
Fatal like moaning,
devastating like love,
dramatic like exchange, indifferent
and continuous
between all that is born
and all that dies.
Following our march toward death on the trace of its blood,
cinema does not cry,
does not cry over us.
It does not comfort us
because it is with us, because it is us.
It is there when the cradle is lit.
It is there
when the girl appears to us,
leaning out the window with her unknowing eyes
and a pearl between her breasts.
There when we've undressed her,
when her hard chest trembles to our throbbing fever.
It is there
when the woman opens her knees to us
with the same maternal emotion
as when she opens her arms to the child.
It is there when the fruit falls from her.
How many times in her life!
It is there, afterwards,
when she is old,
when her face is wrinkled
when her rough hands tell us,
that she does not resent life for having hurt her.
It is there when we are old,
when we stare
at the approaching night.
And it is there
when we die
and our cadaver offers the shroud to our children's arms.
There.
I am yours.