"Jean Renoir, we have just finished watching projections of a certain number of Lumière films." "Were you already familiar with them?" "When I was a young boy I saw some of Lumière's films, but I'm not sure they were the same ones we just saw." "In other words, I knew what to expect, but it's entirely possible that I was watching these for the first time." "In fact, I find them that much more interesting because at the moment, and I'm not sure exactly why, other than personal interest, I'm re-reading a rather exhaustive history of France at the end of the 19th century." "And this book on the history of France, which is also about world history, is full of illustrations." "There are many excellent photographs." "This includes photographs of everything that was part of painting and the plastic arts over the second half of the 19th century." "I must say that the "impression of the era"" "that I have felt just now is much greater than everything I've experienced through reading this history text." "I'm under the impression that the cinema, and especially a cinema conceived by a man with a very broad vision like Lumière, a vision that may very well have been unconscious, but that's another issue," "but conceived by a visionary like Lumière, gives us an impression of history that is irreplaceable." "ROME Wedding Procession of the Prince of Naples" "So you are basically in agreement with Lumière's contemporaries who thought that cinema was first and foremost a means of reproduction, of transmission, of creating consciousness, as it were." "No, I believe that my idea goes much further than that." "I have to say that I, too, was almost born at the same time as the cinematograph." "I was born in 1894, and Louis Lumière built his first machine for recording moving pictures in 1895." "So I was basically born with the cinematograph, and I understood very well what it was going to be, from the start." "I will always remember when I was seven or eight years old, going to school." "And at this school, a religious school, Catholic, the headmaster of the school projected films for us on Sundays." "And I'll never forget one in particular, Automaboule." "Automaboule was a comedian." "He had a car that would never start, and when it finally started, there would be explosions." "And then he had a goat skin that had been starched so that it looked like a hedgehog." "And it was very funny." "It made us laugh a lot." "But personally, I was amazed." "I was very impressed." "I was really convinced that I was witnessing a great change in the history of the transmission of human thought." "And so I never thought that the cinematograph's use was limited to a simple recording of the present for the future." "I believe I'm going further than that." "Even in cases where the filming is purely documentary, as in Lumière's case, there is a sort of recreation of the atmosphere of the period that seems to fit the description of what today we call a work of art." "Bowls Competition" "Game of Bowls" "Bathing in the Sea" "Shower After the Bath" "Sack Race" "LONDON" " Negroes Dancing in the Streets" "LONDON" " Women Street Dancers" "MEXICO" " Spanish Street Dance" "Take the Greek civilisation long before the advent of Jesus Christ, and look at the objects found at Mycenae." "They're all magnificent." "Genius." "But no one will convince me that the least of the Mycenaean potters was a genius." "I'm sure some potters were skilled, some not, some were idiots and others were prodigies." "Nonetheless, everything they made was exceptional." "If you look at something a little closer to us, the first films, when you look at the first silent films in the history of cinema, they're almost all amazing." "They're almost all ..." "One is tempted to use the word "genius" when watching them." "But it can't be said that all the directors of those films were geniuses." "No, I simply believe that they were aided by the fact that the technology was still difficult to use." "The Little Girl and Her Cat" "There is genius in cinema, and it is very hard to define." "There are many definitions." "I know that, personally, I wake up each morning with a different definition." "One moment I say to myself that it is simply an extraordinary means for representing the life of our times." "Sometimes I believe the opposite, that it's a means of expressing what we have in our imagination." "In the end, I believe cinema is a little bit of everything." "You very clearly defined the two possible approaches in cinema." "The Lumière approach, which would be a way of expressing our time, and on the other hand, the fictional art film approach, which seeks to express our feelings and who we are inside." "Yes, but what seems interesting to me is that the Lumière approach, though it seeks to simply reproduce reality, nevertheless leaves the door open to the wildest imagination." "I believe that there is more fantasy in certain of the images we've seen projected than in certain paintings that claim to be works of fantasy." "I find that Lumière's images somehow remind me of what Le Douanier Rousseau represents in painting." "That is, they share a very sincere desire to copy reality, without adding or removing anything, but in fact, the end result is the creation of a world, a world that exists in reality, but which also exists, perhaps with even greater power," "in the imagination of Le Douanier Rousseau or in the imagination of the operators who went to film the Tsar in Saint Petersburg or the Pope in Rome." "And yet, in these films, there are no elements of what we would usually call the language of film." "Definitely not." "But isn't the language of film a convenient invention that helps us explain our desires and dreams?" "But, for example, there is no choice involved in the framing of a close-up or a long shot." "Everything is from a single perspective." " How can we be sure of that?" " I don't agree." "How can we be sure?" "Just because the operator, who seeks to humbly serve reality, set up his camera without a list of shots doesn't mean that his choice of angle wasn't the result of his talent, albeit unconsciously." "In the history of art, it seems to me very important to realise that many masterpieces were created without foreknowledge of their greatness." "I'll go a step further." "Today, when you or I shoot a film, if we succeed, if the film is acceptable, it's in spite of ourselves." "I'll play the devil's advocate." "When I was little, I read Le Sapeur Camember by Christophe." "And at the end of Le Sapeur Camember, there's a comic strip called "The Sprinkler Sprinkled"." "I don't know if it came before or after Lumière's film, but it doesn't matter." "This comic strip is divided into frames like a contemporary film, and it's sort of composed of shots." "But we can criticise Lumière's film, both versions of it, since there are two," "The Sprinkler Sprinkled for not using these different shots." "The Sprinkler and the Sprinkled" "Yes, but personally it doesn't bother me." "This lack of multiple shots doesn't bother me at all." "It's simply a result of the artist's submission to the facts, the circumstances." "Lumière's The Sprinkler Sprinkled had to be filmed in one shot because at that time it was very impractical to reload the film, to change the shot, because no one had thought of cutting and saying, "We'll start again from this spot" ""to continue the story,"" "whereas in comics, it was so much simpler technically because all you needed was a pen or pencil and a piece of paper to do it." "But I believe that this ..." "In this case I would choose Lumière's version because the technique was more difficult and complicated, so he was obliged to try harder to make it work." "He is less free." "Freedom in art is very dangerous." "But really, cinema began developing historically from the moment we discovered that the close-up was more expressive than the long shot, or at least meant something different, and it was decided that the art of cinema was essentially a sequence of shots." "Of course, because the world evolves, grows older." "We've been having a very pleasant conversation for the last 15 minutes." "Neither of us is the same as we were 15 minutes ago." "We've learnt a lot of things about each other." "We know each other much better." "The Earth has turned, and the world has progressed." "And it's the same thing in every field." "It's impossible to create a film today using the same technique as Lumière." "Louis Lumière used a technique, I'm sorry for repeating myself, which corresponded to the time of horse-drawn busses and women in long skirts and corsets." "I see Henri Langlois protesting what I said to Jean Renoir, what I stated to Jean Renoir about Louis Lumière not thinking about composition." "I think it's simply an illusion." "An illusion based on the fact that, currently, films are 1,500 metres in length, or 100 metres, 250 metres, and we connect pieces end to end." "The problem faced when cinema was first discovered was that they only had a certain length of film." "And so you had to compose something using only a certain number of metres of film." "When you study Lumière's films very closely, they look very spontaneous." "The camera is set up on the street, we see everyone going by, and if there's anything touching or impressive in the film, we say it must be chance." "But it is not the product of chance, because, for example, there are takes by Lumière where it is obvious." "When you see, for example, in one of Lumière's films, by chance ..." "There's the question of timing." "The film has to be a certain length because that is how long the take is." "And so at the beginning, seemingly by chance, a tram enters the frame from the right." "Then there's a lot of movement." "And then it ends with a tram entering the shot from the left." "Do you think that's by chance?" "Not at all." "They scouted it out, watched for a while to see how things happened, they chose the best angle for the take, and they achieved something so extraordinary, something we have forgotten, that in those few seconds" "they managed, without moving the camera, to fit into a single take the greatest number of types of shots." "There are long shots, close-ups, American shots, distant shots and movement to bring them all together." "And that is not chance, it's science." "Another take to explain this to you." "They set up the camera." "There's a carriage." "It's an inauguration." "The carriage stops." "And all of a sudden the operator noticed that the scene was not framed correctly, that the angle was not good." "He stopped filming, stopped the take, changed the position of his camera and started up again." "TURIN" " The Duchess of Aosta at the Exposition (1899)" "You understand?" "Now, fundamentally, and this is the main difference between Lumière and the others ..." "You talked about history." "There is nothing as boring as the inauguration of monuments, kings and queens and such." "The amazing thing about Lumière's films is that he did not show history, he showed life." "What I mean by life isn't what everyone thinks of first, meaning you set up a camera on the street and showed people walking by." "Life is something deeper, and that's why Lumière's films are so important." "Life is not only the exterior elements, it's the deeper things, the philosophy of the period, the art of the period, the thinking of the period, the way of living in that period." "Everything is around his films." "You see two little girls playing in the street on the Champs Élysées." "It's just two little girls playing in the street, but in reality, it transcends that." "The proof is that it makes us think of Proust and Renoir and so many other things." "The strength of life, of this quality of life Lumière had a grasp of, is that it's the atmosphere and ambience of life, the philosophy of the time." "Everything is there." "Monet filmed the Gare Saint-Lazare." "And so at the Gare Saint-Lazare there's a sort of transfer of power from painting, a plastic art ..." "From painted plastic arts to filmed plastic arts, from photographic plastic arts to cinematic plastic arts." "Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare marks the arrival of Cézanne, I mean, of Louis Lumière." "And after that moment, there's no longer any need to record, to create scenes of trains arriving." "The whole evolution of art from the mid-19th century onward comes together in Louis Lumière." "And that's why, perhaps in spite of all the family traditions and all the friendships and such, and the sort of provincial aspect this family might have had, it is totally obvious that in spite of themselves," "because as Jean Renoir said earlier, since cinema was a primitive art form, it encompasses all of Impressionist painting." "It's all of the greatest art of the period, all that was alive and new that came out and passed through cinema through them." "And that's what gives it this incredible life." "But what we praise in Monet's painting Gare Saint-Lazare and what the first viewers of" "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat were amazed by are not at all the same." "What so impressed and even shocked the first viewers of Lumière's film was the fact that they believed the train was going to run them over." "But listen, honestly, from a certain period onward, all art evolves." "All the plastic arts of the 19th century, from the Romantic period onward, and from the end of the Romantic period, all the plastic arts of the 19th century evolved, and there was a sort of race" "between photography and painting, and I may be wrong in saying this, towards capturing a sense of the immediacy of life." "Isn't the essence of Impressionism the intangible elements of life captured on a canvas, with no judgement made as to the value of the subject matter?" "But what they were searching for on a spiritual level was to represent the intangible elements of life on their canvases." "And what do we find in Louis Lumière's films if not the intangible elements of life?" "And that's why, because it's the intangible elements of life that Louis Lumière was trying to capture, and it's the intangible elements of life that the great Impressionists were trying to capture, there is a juncture between the two." "Correct me if I'm wrong." "Pond in the Tuileries Gardens" "Returning from a Boating Expedition" "How much is planned and how much is improvised in Lumière's films?" "The part that is planned is when I'm speaking about ..." "Let's not call them Louis Lumière's films, but rather films made by Lumière's operators." "The part that is planned is when he arrives in a city and looks for what he wants to film." "You know that anecdotally, you go in front of the church to film the people of the town, and that way they all come to watch themselves on film." "That's on an anecdotal level." "But when I say "what to film"," "I mean the street, the square, or the place best suited to be filmed." "They arrive and do their research." "They have all the time they want for research, because I believe, at the time, you had to film during a specific time of day." " Yes, of course." " There was the issue of using sunlight." "So they had all the time in the world for research." "They didn't just randomly set up their camera." "They chose a camera angle, chose their object based on everyday things, and then once they were ready, then the rest was improvised." "Real improvisation." "They didn't do all this with centimetres or millimetres or statistics or numbers." "It was in them." "It was in them." "It was a science they possessed internally." "MILAN" " The Dome Square" "When a painter expresses or paints, for example, or a writer describes society, he describes society as it is not." "He describes an imaginary society." "He describes society as it sees itself." "As it sees itself." "But he doesn't describe society as it is." "And that is the power of cinema, that for the first time, we see society as it is." "Because it's not possible to cheat, to make changes." "There's the general ambience that makes it excellent artistically, but ..." "You find in the Lumière films a host of amazing observations." "It's as if all of a sudden, you enter a time machine which transports you from the 20th century to the 19th, and all of a sudden you see reality." "So you can make all kinds of observations." "For example, each time I see a Lumière film, I'm astonished." "What is out-of-date in Lumière films?" "The bourgeoisie." "What is modern in Lumière films?" "The common people." "Why?" "So, when we start to study this problem ..." "It's because there has been so much social change since the 1900s that we have become like ..." "We have become more similar to these common people than to the bourgeois." "Thousands of little details." "Leaving by Carriage" "Carpenters" "Ploughing" "If you see, for example, a woman walking down the street, in one there's two bourgeois women walking at the traffic circle of the Champs Élysées." "Not at the circle, but between the two great palaces." "They aren't elegant or beautiful." "If they had been painted by a painter from that period, he would have seen them according to the fashion of the time, the eyes of the time, and the clothes would have taken an imagined form" "that people of that time wanted them to take." "Whereas in the Lumière film, the clothes are as they were and as we are obliged to see them with our eyes." "The exploration of history through cinema will be a marvellous thing." "Arrival" "Wedding Procession Entering a Church" "Consider some other things, like New York in the Lumière films." "What is the relationship between the New York of the Lumière films and the great American films about the '90s?" "In reality, the real New York is this business world" "you see in the Lumière film, where people are neither beautiful nor ugly." "There are trams and people running." "Paris Grand Prix (June 1899)" "And look at Paris in Lumière films in comparison." "Then we understand everything, because Paris is really Proust, it's really the 19th century the way we imagined it, and that's how the Americans portray America." "Paris at that time really was about elegance." "It's not a joke or a trick." "Paris really was this elegant." "When you look at German takes, filmed in Germany, all of a sudden you can see all the power of Germany represented in the take." "You discover that William II's German Empire had in fact already entered the 20th century, while we were the flower of the 19th century." "There are thousands of little observations like that." "DRESDEN" " Augustus Bridge" "LONDON" " Westminster Bridge" "MOSCOW" " Tverskaya Street" "Obviously, this gives the films, the real-life scenes of Lumière, a value, an incredible depth of observation." "It broadens all sorts of horizons." "Each time I see a woman walk by in a Lumière film, or any human being, it's a marvellous thing." "It's all of their psychology, their entire life written in their face." "It reveals and broadens incredible horizons." "But in the acted films, it's different." "Card Players Sprinkled" "It's obvious that the short acted scenes seem to have been made quite naively." "We can tell that it's Lumière's family, that it's his gardener, that someone has instructed some of his employees," ""You pretend to be angry." "You pretend to beat up your friend."" "And all this is done in a style we might call "pretend"." "It's totally external, so we could conclude that it's bad acting." "In reality, it's not bad acting, it's not bad acting because it's not ..." "Because these few characters on screen are not what's important." "The important part is Mr Lumière's spirit." "He got them together and had the idea." "Through the improvising of these actors, Mr Lumière expresses a sort of wonderful naiveté that is often characteristic of French artists." "Basically, what we are filming is not these artists, what Lumière is filming is not these artists, but himself." "So then we get to the question of ..." "In reality ..." "Let me go a step further." "These artists who are "pretending", who are not really acting, are not much worse as actors than many of our actors who are fully acting and come across just as false." "They are just as false because they are following traditions in theatre or film that have nothing to do with reality." "Having said that, I don't want to claim that reality or copying reality is necessary." "In any case, it is very dangerous to copy a false reality." "I'll give you an example." "In films that are supposedly realistic, they will try to represent, for example, a miner in a coal mine." "The actor will have real coal dust smeared on his face, a real pickaxe, and maybe the scene will be shot in a real mine to get a realistic setting." "If the actor is not expressing the soul of a miner in a deep way, it will be a failure onscreen and it won't be a real miner." "And it will be bad acting, but not worse or better than Lumière's amateur actors." "No, what's important in these takes is Mr Lumière himself." "The Fake Legless Cripple" "Women Fighting" "The Nanny and the Soldier" "It was one of Lumière's operators who had the idea to move the camera while filming." "Yes, but it isn't ..." "He didn't have the idea to move the camera while filming." "If you will, it's we who have this concept of moving the camera while filming." "He was in a gondola, and he wanted to take the camera with him in the gondola so that the movement of the gondola ..." "It was a man who was travelling around in a gondola who took the camera along and filmed what his eyes saw." "That's the essential nuance that marks the difference." "When Louis Lumière or his operators were filming, it was the view from a tram, or the Liverpool train from such and such station to another." "For them, it was like filming life." "You filmed people walking, and then you got on a means of transportation and you filmed." "VENICE Panoramic View of the Grand Canal from a Boat" "Because today, we discovered looking through the prints that Louis Lumière ..." "In 1900, all travelling shots, all camera movements existed, and people like Fritz Lang, for example, have said that if they had seen these films in 1920, they could have added 20 years to their lives." "How is it possible that no history of cinema, no person alive at the time has said that travelling shots were invented by Louis Lumière, that panoramic shots were invented by Louis Lumière," "Panoramic View of Aix-les-Bains from the Train that the moving camera was invented by his operators?" "Because they couldn't see it." "When they saw a travelling shot, they would say, "Shot from a moving tram."" "Today, we see the genius of cinema brilliantly demonstrated by these Lumière operators, but the audience at the time did not have the necessary training." "And so for the audience's sake, they had to start from scratch to finally arrive at what we call the language of film." "But beyond this language of film of the '20s, we're moving towards a type of cinematic art" "Going Through a Tunnel that will be much closer to the art of Louis Lumière, which is the absolute in cinema." "LIVERPOOL" " Panoramic View from the Electric Train" "What characterises the technique or the art of the take for a Lumière operator?" "When it comes to technique or the art of filming, I don't know anything, I just have impressions." "For me, the fundamental thing that stands out in takes by Louis Lumière is light." "It's the quality of the light, its softness, and the sunny element of Lumière's films." "It also has depth." "There are different planes." "It's not a flat surface." "For example, in the French films of Feuillade, which have very admirable composition, there is definitely depth of field, because depth of field existed before 1814." "But it is still a surface." "It's flat, something that comes from painting and not from ..." "There's something stereoscopic in Louis Lumière's films that comes from the light." "Goldfish Bowl" "The Blacksmith" "Unloading a Ship" "And that's why printing the films ..." "I mean, the question of Louis Lumière films is very serious, because, for example, years and years ago, it cost 2,000 francs a metre to print a Lumière film optically." "So you think that was easy?" "Because of certain films, for example, The Century Is Fifty by Mrs Dual, one or two Lumière takes were printed optically." "A few takes were printed optically." "It was interesting, it was ..." "There was the train, the object, but in the end, it was ..." "It was just ..." "It was a picture." "In '53, I had to prepare the retrospective in Venice." "I knew of one of the inventors of 3-D cinema who was miserably poor and had sold everything, including his furniture, and was in a terrible situation." "He had discovered a process ..." "It was at the time of 3-D cinema and we were wondering which way to go," "Cinemascope or 3-D, and we were worried that all of a sudden the arrival of 3-D would, as with talking films, render obsolete all previous French films, older films, as had happened at the end of the silent film era." "And this man showed me ..." "It was a relatively simple thing, not an extraordinary invention, the application of an older principle." "I watched silent films in 3-D." "At his house, I saw French films in 3-D, with the glasses, obviously, using a stereoscopic process." "So cinema was saved." "If 3-D had taken over, it would have allowed all the old films to be shown in 3-D." "He offered to print the Lumière films." "I gave him the film strips and in his kitchen, he asked me for the book that we have in the library, one of many technical books from the collections of Nadar, Lumière and others." "And he started to develop the Lumière films using the processes of the period." "That is, using the baths of the period with the slowness of that bath development." "And when we showed the Lumière films in Venice, they were unrecognisable." "They were full of sunshine." "They were as refined as the most refined films of our day." "But we never succeeded in duplicating them." "With each reproduction, there is a loss of light." "Because it's intangible." "It's something intangible." "I don't know what it stems from, but it's intangible." "We were never able to ..." "There's always a loss." "That is the difficulty, if you will, of preserving cinematic art, that cinematic art is one of the plastic arts." "We always forget that it's a plastic art." "We think because there's sound ..." "There's sound." "There's sound, sure, but it's not a dramatic art, it's essentially a plastic art." "VENICE" " Pigeons in Saint Mark's Square" "We do find, however, that Lumière structures movement using depth of field diagonally." "No, it's not that movement is structured in depth diagonally." "But Lumière's composition from the start, from Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, is not diagonal, but triangular." "It's one of the great principles that was used to set up shots during an entire period of silent film." "There's always a main character or the action that moves from left to right or right to left in the composition." "If you have, for example, Arrival of a Train, everything is diagonal, not towards the middle, but towards the outside." "That is the triangle, more than the diagonal." "It allows ..." "It's the whole composition." "All silent films up to, be it Feuillade, or ..." "I don't know, Capellani, anyone." "During that era it was the overriding principle." "If you take a film from the '10s where there's a character speaking, the main character is on the left and the scene forms a triangle." "The scene was never centred." "The centred shot started, basically, when the American shot began to be used, or the long shot." "But in all of the old techniques, the main scene was left or right, and the secondary scenes were deeper in the background, always forming a triangle, and therefore along a diagonal because it was deeper in the frame." "The Transportation of a Turret by a Team of Sixty Horses" "Team Pulling a Truck" "In conclusion, I would like to ask Jean Renoir to summarise his impressions after this viewing of Lumière's films." "Well, as I said earlier when we started this conversation, my first impression is to have viewed an enormous moving picture of history." "Then I had a second thought." "And this thought is in contradiction to my friend Langlois' thinking." "It goes as follows." "Langlois told us that the precision of the images that are shown, their authenticity, the fact that we don't only read the story of a lady crossing the street in Proust, but we actually see this woman, with her real corsage, her real shoes, her real face ..." "And Henri Langlois believes that this ease makes the cinema, and especially Lumière's cinema, a sort of summary of the other arts." "Personally, I have a slightly different opinion." "In my opinion, the cinema is an art in its own right, not the sum of the other arts." "I believe the cinema exists on its own, just as painting exists on its own, just as literature exists on its own." "Naturally, all of these are connected, as I'm always saying, and I'm sorry for repeating myself, the world is one." "And so Lumière's world must also be one." "This makes me say that, undeniably," "Lumière's takes have a great spiritual value," "and I think this was not Langlois' point, that they leave, contrary to what we might think, complete freedom of interpretation." "I find that while viewing these takes," "I am free to imagine almost whatever I want." "I can imagine the story of this woman." "I can imagine that these horses are tired, even if they're not." "I can finish the story." "In my opinion, something is a work of art only if the audience participates in it." "A work of art must not define everything for the viewers, but must also allow them to imagine a part of the action, a part of the emotions." "With silent films it was easier, because no one spoke." "So we at least had to imagine the voices and the sounds." "But I consider that what is great, perhaps greatest, in my opinion, in Lumière's work, is that the result of his work opens the door to our imagination and allows us to invent a part of what we see or don't see on the screen." "This audience participation in art, is it more important in cinema or in the other arts?" "It's important in every important work." "If the work is extremely important, the participation is greater, and this is true for all art forms." "In fact, I'm beginning to think that the way we express ourselves is nothing more than a choice of tools, and that in reality, the artist who happens to be born, for example, in 18th century Germany" "will express himself more easily through music because everyone was a musician." "An artist born around 1870, or who was a young person then in Paris, had a good chance of being a painter because there was a climate for painting." "But I think what is essential is what this artist has within himself and that he expresses it through painting, literature, photography, or any way he can." "The artist's goal, since you're talking about art, is to create an enduring work." "Are cinematic works as enduring as works produced by other forms of art?" "Absolutely not, and for material reasons that Langlois will be able to explain to you much better than I, since it is his speciality." "Films are fragile and are stored on a medium that disappears." "That's why we need a film library, many film libraries." "With a book, there's always a chance that a copy will show up in a small library in some forgotten corner of the countryside, and then regain popularity." "In painting, Vermeer was forgotten, then rediscovered." "Canvases aren't as easily damaged and are fairly solid." "Film is fragile." "And that's why, like I said, I'm a film library enthusiast." "A film library gives us the possibility of preserving films." "Langlois allowed us to rediscover Lumière." "Yes, well, I mean, we have to be up front about things." "When we tried to found the film library in 1935, they said, "What for?" "Lumière's films, for example," ""shot in 1895, will be dead within a few months." ""The film stock will disintegrate and it will be dead."" "Now, in 1968," "Lumière's films exist." "We've made the copies that you are familiar with," "and I have no reason to doubt that Lumière's films will still exist in 10 years." "Accidents can happen, of course." "In reality, there are two things." "We have never put any effort into preserving film." "The people who have tried, have tried to rescue films." "We have never tried to preserve them." "Those who rescued films, they were seen as crazy." "They saved silent film at a time when people wondered why they were trying to save it." "Today, everyone knows that silent film exists." "No one has really studied the problem of film preservation." "By no one, I don't mean the people who have the desire to save them, to preserve them, and who, my God, housewives, for example, tried to save them in the best possible conditions," "preserve them in the best conditions." "I'm talking about educated people." "There are small volumes published by various publishing houses, but in reality, they're talking about preserving unused film stock." "But the true preservation of a cinematic work of art, which we can talk about now ..." "Because in 1929, 1935, people said that cinematic works of art are mortal because though they have a huge audience worldwide when they are released, they are fragile and won't stand the test of time." "And I mean they won't last materially and spiritually." "They will not stand the test of time." "They will go out of fashion, and people will stop going to see them." "But now, after 30 years, cinematic art has the same enduring quality as all works of art." "And I mean great works of art." "But no one has really been concerned with their preservation." "How can that be?" "Because these works will last." "As time goes by, certain films will be seen as amazing, as it is with certain paintings." "How do we preserve them?" "Since, apparently, and everyone knows it, they are stored on a fragile medium." "They are on emulsions that cause all sorts of problems." "Never has an educated person really concerned himself with this problem." "Never has a great chemist concerned himself with this problem."