"Journey of a "Cine-Son"" "The "Cahiers" Days" "It's childhood, cinema." "It's not adolescence." "It's childhood." "It's a much more intense, much more care-free feeling, and much more serious, of not being part of the world." "Or to only just be tolerated by the world as it is." "And you know by the age of 5, like Duras quoting Queneau saying that a writer knows he is one by the age of 7." "If he hasn't written by the age of 7 it's not worth pushing it." "It's excessive, but true." "It means you know from the first time you go into the courtyard, on the first day of primary school, that there are people with whom you won't be friends, and that there'll be a group of 3 or 4 in a corner, the introverts," "maybe later, as for me, the homosexuals." "In any case the cinephiles, and they won't share their treasure, they know they belong to another version of the world, or of humanity." "It's not escaping." "I've never escaped, I have no imagination." "So people who escaped: teen-agers, kids... there are lots of ways of escaping." "In fantasy, in science-fiction, in a better world: utopias." "Political utopias, or religious." "It never interested me much because I have no imagination," "I always find the world as it is wonderful, and I find wonderful that I was able to inhabit it, in the end, without losing too many feathers since I more or less did what I wanted." "But the idea was:" "we will have this world, but we will inhabit it at last." "That's the essence of my cinephilia: we will inhabit it at last, and it will be the world, never society." "From society, only horrible things are to be expected." "Well, that is something that may come back, because I think about it a lot at the moment, and I think the situation in France at the moment, this Vichy-like climate which is with us again," "gives me a strange feeling." "I have the feeling of living through what existed before I was born, really just before, that I, who was born in 1944, am closing the loop with 1940-44, with a familiar feeling of French spinelessness," "to which all of the French 20th century is more or less..." "France, nothing to write home about, is not the greatest country of the century." "Am I exaggerating now, after the facts?" "Have I ever had the feeling, as a child might, that I will never be a part of this world that wants to make me believe that Pierre Fresnay is the absolute ideal of masculinity, of heroism, of moral grandeur" "with which a 10 year-old child might identify?" "For that's what was going on, in the 50s:" "Gabin, Fresnay or Fernandel, they were offered to us as monsters of humanity, of complexity, of frenchness," "of great actors." "Still, they were very reactionary, violently anti-youth:" "French society in the 50s when you see the films" "I'm not sure about literature, but it can't have been much better- it stank." "It stank for a long time." "Some things had become unbearable:" "a certain vanity in the language, which carried on in the cinema of "French quality", very literary, full of admiration for literature but not enough for cinema." "A cinema that I didn't like, because I had my childhood interests." "I would have preferred, like any child, identifying with attractive people." "So yes, attractive people existed, they were called Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda." "They were all American." "And they were attractive." "Even today, when I see lt;igt;" "North by Northwestlt;/igt;," "I think that Cary Grant is still an ideal for the Ego ...even having lived a lot." "It's a beautiful story, Cary Grant." "You'd rather look like Cary Grant than Raimu, even if you think Raimu is a monument, or Michel Simon, who is a breath-taking actor." "We were presented as children" "not yet cinephiles but children of cinema- with monsters with which to identify." "I'm not talking about the auteurs, but about the actors, it's much more interesting." "To say, at the age of 10:" ""Michel Simon is a great actor!", are you nuts!" "At the age of 10, you say:" ""How I would like to look like James Stewart!" "He's tall and thin, too, but he knows how to use his fists, and he can dance, so he's better than me in every way."" "Jimmy Stewart was American!" "I didn't see that he was of the people, that he was a very popular character." "I loved these people, without, for all that, loving America." "America is something else." "I was fine with being in France." "I haven't had a miserable childhood." "I was poor, but loved, so protected." "I'm trying to see the implicit landscape that was in me as a child." "I think that children think a lot, they understand everything, but they don't have yet the structures, and nobody listens to them." "And I'm trying to rebuild what must have happened then, when I wasn't particularly cinephile, rather I'd read an incredible amount of books, as all children do at that age." "And literature has always seemed to me greater than everything, even now." "And I realize that somehow, it's not possible to tremble, as a child, in front of Danielle Darrieux." "I like her now, Danielle Darrieux, because I'm old enough." "But she already terrified us when she did lt;igt;" "Marie-Octobrelt;/igt;." "And we could sense that she'd made film with the Germans, that there was something fishy, that they didn't tell us." "And that poor Harry Baur, who got forgotten after the war, even though he was a very popular actor, who ended up in a camp." "Harry Baur, when you see his films today" "unfortunately he didn't work with the great auteurs- he's a deeply moving actor." "So I think that a child always knows everything." "Always." "That's why I liked psycho-analysis, later, because it supposes that you always know everything there is to know." "The problem is that you don't know how to say it." "So there is a moment when I become a cinephile." "We can go forward a bit, it was in 1959, you can put a date on it, it's an important moment of my life." "And maybe at that moment, France has really entered its economic boom." "De Gaulle, whatever you may say, is not the IVth Republic." "Maybe the modern world is arriving." "After all, the country's getting richer, even if we don't realize." "All that probably played a part." "And there was the New Wave." "And the New Wave... appears to be a young movement, whereas in fact it's made by people who are a bit "oldies"" "from a psychological standpoint, they're not "yé-yés"." "Nevertheless, they have this utterly simple idea:" "we'll film our friends, and we'll film Paris as it is." "And filming Paris as it is, when your name is Godard in 1960, gives you lt;igt;" "Breathlesslt;/igt;." "He saw that there were glass doors, and that a lot of things were white, and that you shouldn't go for a dark picture just because art is dark." "So obviously, everyone yelled about "the bad editing", all of that." "But what he was aiming for was realism." "Cinema is a realistic art or nothing." "It is an art destined to realism, and will have the limits of realism." "So at some point, these people, from the generation just before mine, who wrote at the Cahiers, only yesterday they were writing there, they make their first film." "They're against all the idiots who are those we always identified and they simply film their generation." "For all that, they don't become politicized." "They don't become what people hoped: not only good filmmakers but sublime political and social consciences." "Those consciences existed, but they had no talent for cinema." "They existed next door, at Positif." "That's how it happened." "I was completely synchronous with it." "It's now that I wonder about the cinema I imagined as a child with the regular movies I saw and the image of France they carried, and I realize that I didn't know what to do with that image of France." "I'm someone who talks softly, I hate people who shout." "So I've spent my life avoiding them or trying to beat them in some way so that they wouldn't make a din." "I was very sensitive to that: that's the fear of society." "The world is a rumor, it's a rustling, it's a symphony." "The music of the times also promised the world." "The other revelation is that cinema is something extraordinary:" "it can film things, it can bear witness." "The only trouble is that it bore witness between 1914-18" "great testimony, unforgettable:" "the beginnings of cinema- and the 2nd World War." "I'm afraid that it doesn't bear witness to anything much after that." "As for the 2nd World War and its true metaphysical accident, which wasn't the war itself, -there have always been wars- but the history of the camps." "Seeing lt;igt;" "Night and Fog lt;/igt;at the Lycée Voltaire ciné-club at the age of 10, is not falling under the charm of:" ""So, Mr Cinema, you were a little cinephile and you jacked off to Ava Gardner!"." "Yes, but afterwards!" "And not in the same world!" "In fact, I find Ava Gardner more moving now than I did then." "I chanced upon cinema's capacity to say: this happened." "And it's so monstrous, that in a way, we're fine:" ""It can't happen again"." "I don't think so anymore." "I think it will happen again." "A lot of people have always thought so." "Brecht's phrase, we would recite it stupidly like a catechism:" "It;igt;"the vile beast"lt;/igt; and bla-dee-bla." "Actually Brecht had seen nothing, he would have done better to shut up." "It's not the best example." "And secondly we said it, but we didn't believe it." "Just as when we cried "Fascism will not pass!" in the 60s/70s, it didn't pass anywhere, there wasn't any." "It only existed in China, where we thought that it was good." "Today, it's everywhere, but no-one is demonstrating anymore." "So I have the feeling that an old map of the world is coming back, and that maybe we will miss cinema because cinema promised a world." "Of course, this world wasn't complete, it was 70% American." "But America was world-wide." "America was..." "It was quite a hodge-podge, in terms of peoples and immigration." "Furthermore, it was Hollywood's cinema that made us." "For what other cinema could have made us, after the war, if not American cinema, which was at its peak of... of happiness, of the capacity for happiness, of grace." "Of grace in that boorish culture that ended up producing lt;igt;" "Dallaslt;/igt; 15 years later." "But at the time, in the films of Douglas Sirk," "America is beautiful to behold." "When Fred Astaire dances, it's beautiful." "And they only danced over there." "They didn't dance in Europe." "All this, we knew it with certainty." "It was a promise of a world, even if the world was very americanized." "For Americans have been the only people that, for a long time, used the mythologies of other populations, told stories that weren't theirs:" "King Arthur, the French Revolution... with their ideological interests and their American bumpkin idiocy." "But they did what nobody else did." "No-one's ever seen... a French western." "It would be a cultural parody, instantly." "So Americans have always had -thankfully or not, I can't decide- an absolutely unique place in the world." "The problem is that they don't have the means to keep that promise anymore, or to keep the promise of the promise of the world." "So much so that today they are quite despised, while being totally dominant culturally." "Which is a very bad..." "A very unhealthy situation." "But at the time, in the 50s, Americans had all the reasons they needed to have finally decided to liberate the free world, didn't understand that much about Nazism, give chocolate to everybody, and poured out their films." "The studio system was on its last legs but still produced magnificent films." "Our great naivety was that we took terminal things, like lt;igt;" "Rio Bravolt;/igt;, lt;igt;" "North by Northwestlt;/igt; or lt;igt;" "Anatomy of a Murder" "formative films for me, founding films- we took them for the normal routine of cinema" "of cinema, not of American cinema- when in fact it was the end." "Régis Debray:" "It;igt;" "To come back to you, Serge Daney..." "It;/igt;" "It;igt;you studied literature.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "How does one become a film critic?" "I guess you weren't happy with texts,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;with literature, you wanted something else..." "It;/igt;" "As for that..." "To answer the most concrete question:" "you don't become a film critic." "It can't be a vocation, it's barely a job." "I've managed to live from it but without wanting to." "Apart from the fact that it's dead, in my opinion, the question's not worth asking." "Even when there really were film critics, the few who counted had a funny course." "As if they had forgotten to do something else and they found themselves enjoying their position as mediators, or transmitters of something." "So there was something to transmit." "André Bazin had something to transmit," "Jean-Louis Bory had something to transmit, or even, for a while, Michel Cournot." "They weren't people with sure taste, but they were borne by the times." "And film criticism, like all mediation, there is the love of cinema, but you can't explain it." "You see billions of films, and so you have a certain culture." "There are those who keep it all to themselves, they exist, even among the most serious cinephiles." "There are those who make films: who transfer." "And there are those who end up like me, having to tell the story of someone who spent his life watching what others had done." "So what the others had done at the time must have been worth it, to use it to produce little written objects -still, quite well written- or to belong to this turbulent but unique thing called the Cahiers du Cinéma," "still one of the greatest periodicals of the century, even though I'm in a good position to know that it's also only a poor little magazine." "There was something to transmit." "For me, the choice wasn't between literature and cinema." "I think that the choice of cinema was, like you suggested earlier, a way lt;igt;stilllt;/igt; to live in society." ""Still" because you can't exist outside of it." "That way, if you're going to be part of society, you might as well be part of the basis, and the basis goes to the movies." "Luckily, it so happens that cinema was born on 2 legs." "A popular leg: basic, trivial, imaginary." "And a cultivated leg: complicated, philosophical, elitist, that called for criticism." "And so choosing cinema was, without realizing, from an intellectual, theoretical point of view, was choosing a house with 2 doors:" "a door that everyone uses and that you have to use, or else you understand nothing about cinema, and a hidden door, through which people, from the beginning, asked absolutely extravagant things of cinema." "All you need to is read the texts Abel Gance wrote as a young man." "He was, after all, an intellectual." "Well, I didn't realize it then, but I think it was the right choice." "Because choosing literature, or another art," "but for me it would have been literature- maybe I didn't have the courage." "I was a man of communication, like many people from my generation, and I preferred communication in society -which is quite something for an asocial- to isolation and maybe to the courage needed to produce a work by yourself." "Producing a work in painting, literature, music from 1945 onwards, it's choosing either a chic deception, or a somewhat true solitude, almost intransitive which I'm not sure I wanted." "That's what I tell myself now." "All this to say that it was wonderful and that I don't regret having chosen cinema, since you could go in with everyone else or by yourself." "It;igt;" "Perhaps you have defined the Cahiers du Cinéma as much as cinemalt;/igt;" "It;igt;by talking of elitism and populism, that bizarre mixture.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "Let's say by elitism: the respect of writing,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;and by populism: the American B movie aspect.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "Would you agree to say:" "It;/igt;" "It;igt;" "Chateaubriand + Samuel Fuller = New Wavelt;/igt;" "It;igt;or = Cahiers du Cinéma?" "It;/igt;" "It;igt;" "How would you now define the Cahiers du Cinéma from that era?" "It;/igt;" "The Cahiers that I started reading," "I started reading the Cahiers like a bible, in 1959." "But I didn't understand a thing that was going on." "I've reconstituted the history by reading the recent books written on the Cahiers." "It was more complicated and interesting than what I imagined at the time." "I wasn't a child anymore then, so I had less of an excuse," "I was a teen-ager, and what didn't interest me..." "I wasn't curious." "So, the fetish of the yellow Cahiers, those ukases that the Cahiers would produce with a phenomenal nerve." "I didn't realize it at the time, but you could sense it was problematic:" "I started reading the Cahiers when they almost became right-wing, and even far right, because of Eric Rohmer and the people he'd let into the editorial staff." "That famous Mac-Mahonian school, about which we're talking again now." "People who were all on the far right politically, even though none of them had a political career, and none of them was a creator, either." "But they gave us a few strong texts, that had a great impact on me, and part of which, I would still say, is correct." "For example: cinema is realist." "Cinema is of a realist essence." "Every time we took a filmmaker to be a visionary, a creator of lyrical spaces, etc, and 20 years later we saw that his films held fast, we realized that his films were an absolutely banal description" "of what he was faced with at the time but that only he saw." "Fellini, for example, a filmmaker who was often credited with a sort of imaginary baroque and a gut vision..." "It's not true!" "And his films that were made that way are the bad ones." "On the other hand, lt;igt;" "Ginger and Fredlt;/igt;, magnificent film, slightly under-rated I would say, deeply moving film on media, and television..." "That's Rome as it is today." "It's very inferior to what Berlusconi's TV is today, in realism." "So I think that cinema is realist." "The difference is that when I started reading the Cahiers, there were people who wrote in it who weren't Cahiers, fundamentally, but who occupied the space and said, for example:" ""Fellini films Giulietta Masina: she's ugly!" "It;igt;" "So..." "It;/igt;"" "They had a racial conception of that." "I thought, are we going to discredit someone just because he's ugly?" "I thought that wasn't nice." "It's the precise moment when I started reading the Cahiers, 59-60." "In 1961 it was already less." "Now I can reconstitute it because we know the whole story." "For sure there was a putsch and some pushed for modernity, for avant-garde, for openness, for what was simmering in French culture, in that France of the 60s which was also coming out of its post-war period." "It was the first texts of Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez, and Roland Barthes." "And Rivette is the one who said: "I don't understand a thing, but let's do it!"" "We'll talk to Boulez or Barthes about cinema!"" "They didn't say anything interesting, because it wasn't their thing, but they started making us more world-wise." "And I followed all of this passively." "I was in love with that yellow thing that was the Cahiers, and I could feel that they were already an institution, already a long story." "And I saw, with satisfaction, the old critics becoming good filmmakers:" "2 of them at least, 3 with Chabrol:" "Truffaut and Godard were a hit, were successful." "And 2 others had more problems:" "Rivette and Rohmer." "I found that absolutely normal:" "it's amazing how adolescence is not curious, whereas childhood is curious." "It lasted until 1964, after years which for me were absolutely stupefying, where I can't remember what I thought or lived through at the time." "I've got a black hole of a few years in my life." "I know that my day started at the cinémathèque, at 6pm." "We would watch films one after the other, and since we didn't have a penny to spare, we would eat sandwiches." "We would miss the last metro and cross Paris talking about the films with 3 or 4 friends, alter egos." "We lived as absolute zombies." "And then the idea of going into the Cahiers made its way, but it came slowly, very slowly." "I think now that I was so certain it was my magazine that I didn't hurry." "It;igt;" "There's a man who counted for a lot, who died in 1958,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;with whom you've sometimes been compared:" "André Bazin.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "André Bazin was a catholic." "And by the way,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;someone should tell why so many catholics got involved in cinema.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "But anyway, who is André Bazin for you, today?" "It;/igt;" "It's strange, because Bazin..." "I never knew him, he died in 58." "His name obviously inspired of lot of respect and emotion, and he had a nice face..." "Bazin's texts, I read them very late." "I didn't read them as a young cinephile, even though it was part of a sort of household cannon." "I could feel he wasn't like the others." "Firstly, he was a bit older." "Then there was that thing with religion that was bothering us..." ""Yes, but he's a left-wing catholic..."" "And then strangely, I read Bazin" "seriously, as you read to study or write- much later, in the 70s, when we'd become very politicized and we wanted to wring the neck of idealist conceptions of cinema, which at heart were Bazin's." "That was when we unearthed in the Cahiers, after 68," "a sort of very violent theoreticism- that other aspect of the Cahiers du Cinéma culture which wasn't mine either, but the other fellow aspect, the Russians:" "Eisenstein, Vertov." "It was Godard who forced us to watch Vertov, who for us was only a name in Sadoul's history of cinema, and like everything "Sadoul-ized", was slightly suspicious." "And Eisenstein, yes, he was overwhelming, but apart from that, he didn't speak to us that much." "So the 2 traditions were:" "Bazin's" "problematic, because of the religion which we weren't ready to take up- and the Russian's heritage." "And Bazin himself had his tug-of-war with that." "It was a good period, intellectually, now that I think of it:" "the debate about depth of field and continuity on the one hand, montage and heterogeneity on the other." "When you see the smartest people of the century, like Godard: he didn't reconcile the two." "He's always going to and fro." "He's a great editor, and also a great musician, because he's a true artist." "Now I can live with the idea that both exist." "However, we didn't start with the montage aspect, otherwise we would have ended up with semiology and advertising." "We would have been dead." "When we talk about the procedures of mastering, and the smart-alec aspect of things, and Eisenstein was more than a smart-alec:" "he was a genius at manipulation." "He was only interested in manipulation." "Eisenstein died relatively young and castrated, i.e. broken." ""Eisensteinism", if it had existed, and it did exist, in cinema, it gives masters, little masters." "And there's nothing worse in cinema than mastery." "Cinema is something which obviously needs a bit of mastery, but not too much." "Perhaps in other arts, mastery could have a meaning, maybe in painting," "I don't know." "But I wouldn't say it of cinema." "That says just how much cinema is an art from below." "An art of life." "I hated theater as soon as I went." "When I was brought to the Comédie Française, and ended up in the children matinees, all of a sudden seeing the soubrettes arriving from the back and who howled supposedly natural dialogue that was supposed to make us laugh," "Molière's comedies which weren't funny anymore" "I had a real panic." "And the noise of the boards, the noise of people on the boards is a traumatic sound for me." "Today, I'm reconciled with the idea of theater, the idea of theater is deeply moving and a good deal of cinema is endlessly paying homage to theater but the praxis of theater, maybe because the rooms hadn't been rebuilt" "for a new generation of French, who were slightly taller, so it's unbelievable how uncomfortable the theater was." "For me it was society, theater was society." "Well I didn't see it that clearly, now I do:" "theater was society, cinema was the world." "So, like a few other people" "maybe I was more conscious of it and very determined" "I said "no to theater equals no to society"." "Which wasn't smart because when society re-claimed me..." "When society cornered me, in 1968, of course I was part of the group that took the Odeon." "I, who didn't give a damn about the Odeon, I never went." "These Italian-style theaters scared me, and I even occupied the Odeon, so we even went through being trapped in a claustrophobic place." "May 1968 was an absolutely theatrical event, absolutely not filmic." "But keeping 68 for later, so now let's say in 58, cinema is my home because people don't yell." "The music yells, but we're used to that..." "The people don't yell, you can murmur at the cinema, and there's no recitation." "It's a popular art, an art from below." "It;igt;" "On popular myth level, cinema is America.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "So I suppose that you went to America.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "What was your discovery of Hollywood like?" "It;/igt;" "It;igt;" "When was it?" "It;/igt;" "It was in 1964, I was 20." "I left with someone who at the time was very close:" "Louis Skorecki." "We really left like neophytes, penniless ragged kids, on a charter that took 20 hours to cross the Atlantic, that nobody wanted to insure, and we ended up in Hollywood" "in the home of the Cahiers correspondent:" "Axel Madsen, who kindly hosted us, he wasn't that rich either." "And -now that I think of it, I find it quite moving- we had a list of people to see, with the idea that some of them had never been approached, that there was no interviews of them, and that it could be a good way" "to bargain our way into the Cahiers, to publish in the Cahiers." "I was very shy, my English was bad." "Skorecki was more outgoing, he wanted a piece of the action." "He was the motor." "I was slightly zombie-like, I think." "I was 20." "What is amazing is that we were carried by our certainties." "Our certainties came from a very deep immaturity:" "we thought that what we had loved in American cinema in the last 5-6 years was part of an eternal essence." "We didn't see that Hitchcock or Hawks were old." "So we'd say "they're going to make their last films, which are going to be as beautiful as Beethoven's last quartets or the Titian's last paintings."" "We were in awe of old-timers." "It was a slightly strange period." "And we were certain that they were, of course, enchanted to see us." "Actually it was a period when the studio system was still there." "Each had its Foreign Press department where there'd be someone saying:" ""Listen, there are 2 weird guys who come from the Cahiers du Cinéma."" "It had made its way to Hollywood that there was a loony group of French who had twisted tastes and preferred Samuel Fuller to Robert Wise" "which of course they were right to, but at the time it was scandalous." "So the Americans did their job, they'd say "No skin off our back"." "They had the means to ask this or that filmmaker if he would kindly receive 2 young French journalists for an hour." "Everybody said yes." "So we ended up all proud, with our completely misplaced questions, completely intellectual and foundational, seeing Howard Hawks." "Hawks had directed lt;igt;" "Rio Bravolt;/igt;, the first film I'd written about and its stayed an essential film all my life." "It's a film I could talk about for hours because it has accompanied me." "There is a film that looked at me, that saw me as I was," "I, as a teenager, and that knew a lot about me, much more than I thought I knew about it." "So Howard Hawks was my favorite filmmaker." "We had hierarchies, lists we'd tear to shreds if they didn't match." "We had all the defects of party members, even if we weren't part of any party." "So we ended up in front of Howard Hawks who completely recited his lesson, what he had always said in interviews with the French" "the one with Jacques Becker and Rivette, where their microphone didn't work," "They weren't that much better, 10 years earlier- he said "I shoot comedy scenes as drama, and drama scenes as comedy, that's my secret"." "And we'd say "Say it once more!", whereas it had been published 20 times." "But it was Howard Hawks." "And I even remember that our little tape recorder" "they didn't have transistors yet- broke down half-way through." "We could have cried." "Hawks tried to repair it, he knocked himself, it didn't work, we had to get a big machine from the studios so that the people from the Foreign Press could get their interview with Howard Hawks." "But we saw Buster Keaton." "We didn't think: "Keaton is old, he's going to die, nobody wants him."" "We said "Keaton is a genius!" "Genius?" "Genius!" "One of the greatest auteurs of cinema."" "We went to see him on a scorching hot day in the Californian valley, he was going to die 2 years later." "He was having a ball of a time -he had a governess taking care of him- and didn't understand the first thing about our questions." "We'd say, "What about solitude?" "Ahhhh", he'd answer." "We'd ask him to tell us about a gag in a 1910 film with Fatty." "He remembered everything." "He could have drawn the gag." "We were silly, but we had the strength of silliness:" "we really thought that those people were brilliant, and I still do." "We had stupid questions but they were kind, because there was still a real professionalism," "not what it became afterwards- and they let us do our thing." "Only Sternberg said: "Tell me your questions on the phone, if they're worthless, I'm not accepting you."" "We ask some stupid questions: "the theme of the woman..."" "Miserable things about Sternberg." "Sternberg replies "Not that brilliant, but come over anyway."" "He must have wanted to talk." "We go to his place." "He says "No tape recorder!" and gives us a whole lesson about how he's brilliant, and only he is brilliant." "We rush to the drugstore and write everything down from memory, and we publish it in the Cahiers, thinking "he treated us like dogs, let's have our revenge."" "That's how we saw people who all died later." "We were the only ones to have seen McCarey, for example," "Leo McCarey is not so famous, but he's one of the greatest" "American filmmakers, one of the greatest inventors in cinema." "And we went through all that absolutely like zombies." "We could feel that we weren't adequate, that it wasn't quite right, but it worked." "That's maybe the surprising aspect of that period, more than our youth, it was that between Hollywood, which after all is sinking, or at least starting to have a fair amount of problems, because it's the end of the B movie, television is going to take over..." "There are people we met there, like Samuel Fuller, who never make more film in America." "They move to France 20 years later, and we become friends." "So we didn't see that, we didn't understand it." "But that's what was happening, objectively." "And when I think of that again, when I see us, imagine us, arriving on Sunset Boulevard," "we didn't have a car, we didn't drive, in Los Angeles we took the bus: completely ridiculous," "I tell myself that we were extraordinarily naïve." "It;igt;1968..." "It;/igt;" "It;igt;" "The revolution, the confusion, the commotion let us say,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;starts at the Cinémathèque.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "The Henri Langlois case..." "It;/igt;" "It;igt;" "Where are you, at that point?" "Because before Cohn-Bendit,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;there was this curious file:" "Truffaut versus De Gaulle.lt;/igt;" "It's Truffaut vs. De Gaulle, but rather it's Godard vs. Malraux." "For Godard had written a beautiful letter to Malraux, whom he admired a lot, and still admires a lot." " lt;igt;" "After La Religieuse was banned?" "It;/igt;" " After lt;igt;" "La Religieuselt;/igt;." "The first time we got politicized was with Rivette's lt;igt;" "La Religieuselt;/igt;." "And we entered into a state of wrath, because it was a household product." "We didn't have much power, but all of a sudden the people from the Cahiers woke up, in 64 or 65 ...lt;igt;" "La Religieuselt;/igt;." "In the same way, the Langlois case was for us a trailer for May 68." "I haven't mentioned Langlois earlier because I think the myth is complete," "I have nothing to add, other than I consider myself one of his children, if we remember that he was a pelican-mother-like figure..." "Crazy." "But it was unforgettable for those who lived it." "Even if with hindsight we can say that in the Langlois case itself, there was also a case for the anti-Langlois side, but it was unacceptable, considering the way it had been instructed." "Maybe also the climate, the fact that there were so many of Langlois's children." "The whole New Wave was there." "So we marched off to war, as absolute neophytes." "And I remember, because it was very funny, that in Courcelles street, at a demonstration, we did a sit-in." "It was the first one in my life." "We sat down on the ground, very excited at the idea that we were doing what the others did." "That we were capable of doing what the others did, the things you saw in films: demonstrations, shouting." "I was incapable of shouting in a demo, it seemed to me the most vulgar thing, and also incapable due to shyness." "And we realized that no, we could." "So that was the Langlois case, our case: the cinephile's case." "And during this sit-in, there was a guy who was always taking the stand, who monopolized everything, and visibly was good at organizing things: it was Cohn-Bendit." "I remember we hated him for a while: "Who's this guy?"" ""We don't know him..." "He doesn't come every night."" ""He's not part of such and such a group."" ""He hasn't seen Murnau's films!"" "There was an element of that. "Who is this efficient red-head?"" "And pretty soon we understood." "We also understood what was a mass movement, that some people were good at that, whereas we were rather very bad, but completely devoted." "So the Langlois case, we didn't at all worry about the actual contents of the case." "It was settled: "No one touches Langlois."" "Earlier I said that Godard, who had always admired Malraux, but attacked him about lt;igt;" "La Religieuselt;/igt;, by writing this beautiful letter that ends with "I write to you from an occupied country, France"" "He started again with the Langlois case." "It was quite painful to him, because when you know Godard well, you realize he's a direct heir to the conception of Art that Malraux had." "And all of us, I would say." "All of us, me first." "But without being very honest with Malraux, because the De Gaulle minister figure got on our nerves, and he'd become quite erratic and cocaine-addicted." "We didn't know that yet, but we realized." "Letter to André Malraux, by Jean-Luc Godard." "How then could you hear me, André Malraux," "I who am calling you from outside, from a far-away country, free France." "Read and approved by François Truffaut, forced to shoot in London, far from Paris, lt;igt;" "Fahrenheit 451lt;/igt;, the temperature at which books burn." "Enough with the Malraux myth." "That's how we went from a completely apolitical zombie-ness, which was often held against us" "not against me, but the people before me at the Cahiers- to an absolutely demented politicization." "So to answer your question a little late, about Bazin." "Bazin was the man of that node." "Bazin was the man who wrote every day for Le Parisien Libéré, so really for the consumers of film, who also wrote for Esprit and for the Cahiers: who didn't stop." "But who, at the same time, had absolutely no populism, no smutty sentiment, of those anti-elitist or anti-intellectual feelings that drape themselves in a so-called love of the people, just to finally set everyone against each other." "That's what I hated so much with the Autant-Laras, the Duviviers, with the Clouzots and it's coming back, it's coming back now with the Claude Berris, all of that." "Their way of saying "We're smart, we've got no illusions, we're professionals."" ""No-one pulls a quick one on us."" ""We'll shed a tear for poor childhood, trampled underfoot, the poor illusions, trampled underfoot." "Yeah, that's funny, that makes us laugh."" "I've always hated that." "I was never cynical." "Never." "And I think, without taking too big a risk, it helps understand the longevity of the Cahiers, with the ups and downs: no cynicism!" "There was never any cynicism at the Cahiers." "The cynics quickly went over somewhere else, or they found themselves a career." "Why didn't you take the step of directing?" "Like the others, at the Cahiers." ""Like the others", let's not be too hasty." "There's one absolutely extraordinary generation at the Cahiers, which weighed on us terribly heavily, which definitely inhibited us a lot" "that's to answer about "Cine-Son", because that's what we are: cine-sons." "That generation is truly exceptional in the history of cinema." "Apart from a few German filmmakers 10 years later, and the people from the Popular Front in the 30s..." "The studio system didn't allow that kind of group, so Hollywood: out." "Maybe the Russians in the 20s..." "There must have been, 5 or 6 times in the history of cinema, a pack with all the flaws and the qualities of a pack." "But a pack, mind you, not a clique, not a group, not a school." "It so happened that just before us, there had been:" "Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer." "At least those 4, plus the fellow travelers, who counted for a lot:" "Demy, Resnais, Rouch, Franju." "Some uncles:" "Melville..." "Many brilliant uncles, very marginal." "That's a lot." "Those people stepped into action after having written, which was already exceptional." "In general, it was frowned upon, and considered impossible that a good critic could become a good filmmaker." "But the New Wave proved the opposite." "Truffaut was a good director from the outset, and he was a great critic." "We came just after that, and firstly, we were inhibited by it." "Secondly, in my generation of people from the Cahiers, it's not true that everyone went on to directing." "Only a few of us, with results that weren't very convincing." "No great filmmakers in my generation." "Except one:" "Philippe Garrel." "Distant fellow traveler, but the Cahiers' little brother, because we're the ones who discovered him in 1968." "To my mind the only great filmmaker, who made a body of work that someone can today study in a university, as you would study a serious artistic work." "A lot of good filmmakers" "I won't give names, these people are too close to me- but nothing comparable to Godard, even to Truffaut, who with time is taking on an importance which people didn't grant him when he was alive." "That's the vagaries of history." "The second reason for which the people of my generation became less often and less good filmmakers, is that it befell us to re-politicize, i.e. to take up this rather thankless thing" "which had already happened before when cinema was stronger- of the relations between cinema and politics, therefore of commitment: can cinema be useful?" "This question is ridiculous again now, but at the time it was very strong, and we found ourselves quite helpless." "Which is why we became interested in Eisenstein and people like that, we started reading Brecht and we discovered Benjamin." "We were great late beginners." "It took us a lot of energy, because we had to manage the magazine as you would manage a bulletin that gives regular news from the frontline." "And even if all this is derisory, it's not an energy that went towards cinema." "Another reason, is that in the meantime, cinema had become somewhat obsolete." "I now think that the people from the New Wave" "not only in France: the new waves in the whole world, there were some everywhere, for about 10 years, but it started in France- they weren't the iconoclasts that we believed, but the first and last generation" "to have remained film critics and film historians, to watch films by others, and to, strangely, still have the ability to make them themselves." "I think that after them, we didn't have enough energy to maintain that balance and besides, the social demand was weaker." "That's important." "TV had already grown very strong, and actually it's not so much TV as advertising." "Advertising became, in the 70s and 80s, the great aesthetic matrix for everything, cutting through all the forms." "And a fair share of cinema, as arrogant as it thought itself and sold itself, was in fact applied television." "We howled like madmen against that." "The whole story of the Cahiers is:" ""let's not mix up advertising procedures in Louis Malle or Bertolucci," "to take examples that aren't worthless- and what is cinema."" "The final reason is that I've been on some film shoots, for little roles, or for a report, but it's a type of energy I don't have at all." "That's why I was resenting the word "image", at the beginning." "Because if, in the scenario in which you try and fit people, my passion had been images, nobody would understand that I didn't want to make any." "But my passion is also speaking, writing a little, it's the fact that in cinema there's something to listen to and to watch at the same time." "It's lots of impure things in relation to the idea of image, of pure image." "The idea of pure image comes from advertising." "Advertising has created, especially amongst young people, the idea that there's a sphere, a realm, called that of the images, that it's a question of technique, of "creativity", what a horrible word," "of invention, of money, and that there are people who pay for that." "It's a worthy conception, it exists throughout the history of the West:" "there are images that are sold and exploited, some of them are sublime." "Only there's not only that in cinema, painting or in the other arts, there has also been something else." "Some filmmakers make images that don't sell anything." "When you see a film by Rivette, maybe not the last one..." "But let's say the Rivette films no-one has seen." "Rivette, it's beyond him, he lives outside of consumerism, as a sort of peripheral saint." "He's a guy who observes, with an intense curiosity, the life of his contemporaries." "He's not angry at all." "He's a pure cinephile." "What I said earlier, "we'll never be part of..."" "Rivette is the purest example." "It;igt;" "Le Pont du Nordlt;/igt;, to take one of Rivette's most beautiful films, there isn't a single shot in it that could sell anything:" "that could sell the actress, or the quality of the sun..." "No, it's used for something else." "It's used for building what?" "For building time." "I was very liberated, personally very liberated, the day I realized that what I had expected from cinema, what I had loved in cinema, and what it gave me, was the invention of time, starting with mine." "Inventing a time in which I might live, but which is also somebody else's time ...and not the image." "In fact, I'm not very good with images." "For example, the last thing I see in a film is the Director of Photography." "There are people who say "lt;igt;" "Le Rayon Vertlt;/igt;, it's wonderful, but why is it shot in 16mm?" "Rohmer's crazy: it's not professional!"" "I want to slap them." "I tell them, "Go back home." "Cinema isn't that." "Cinema is time." "If you're not sensitive to the fact that Rohmer invents times that only he invents..."" "Obviously, he also does it with images, and he's got a rather good imaginary." "But it took me 30 years to understand that." "The simplest things are the ones you take longest to understand." "The filmmakers who are pure image-makers, pure imagists" "there are some great ones- bore me to tears." "everything that is decorative in cinema bores me to tears." "All of this to say, my energy is very linked to speech, I speak a lot, to writing, I like to write quite quickly, and really thrived, strangely enough, in journalism, to anticipate on the "Libé" chapter." "To write quickly, under the impulse of images and sounds together." "I've always liked that, it makes me generate time:" "life time, often survival time." "It's got little to do with procedures of how to make a professional image." "I leave that to television, you can see what it does with it." "If there's no money it won't do it." "I watch music videos a lot on TV, it gives me a sociological information." "I switch off the music, that doesn't interest me, but I look at the bodies, the eroticism: that's all there is." "On TV, it's only in music videos that there's any eroticism, otherwise, it's compulsory ugliness." "We can wonder why by the way." "Then I say, all right, now I'm looking at visuals." "I'm looking at images." "All this to say that I don't have the patience needed to make an image." "To make images you need an angelic patience." "When you're on a shoot, there's a little man who sometimes talks to no-one and looks as if he's drowning, it's the director." "He has the time to give birth to an image." "With the others, with their presence, with the vagaries, etc." "When I went on a shoot, to write a report for the paper," "I wasn't a good observer, because I knew that on a shoot you don't see a thing, or only anecdotal stuff, funny stuff, on a technician or an actor, but which tell you nothing about what the film will look like later." "And I was bored." "It was a chore for me, to go on a shoot." "Firstly because you shouldn't bother people who are working." "Secondly, you see nothing." "Thirdly, all the papers or reports on a film shoot are the same." "It's not going well." "If something happens, we don't see it." "It's between the actor and the director, and it's a tiny thing." "I'm used to seeing it when it's done." "It doesn't bother me to see the lt;igt;fait accomplilt;/igt;, I can see it quite well." "When it's finished, when it's up to me." "According to me, to make films, you have to like that." "You have to like that wasted time on the film set, you have to like that thing that looks enormous but is actually tiny, or let's shoot lots of scenes and then scrap them when editing, even though we went to such pains." "It doesn't correspond to me." "Yes, sometimes I've asked myself:" "where's your energy?" "Everyone's making films, why not you?" "But it's not my thing." "My thing is to watch the images that others have made, and say" ""There, there's a true time, there it doesn't work", because I'm a good topographer." "It's like tennis, which I like a lot, I write about it." "I can see straight away what's going on on a court." "Same for films, I see what's going on straight away:" "in a Fritz Lang film, I see the empty space, behind, which calls for the next shot." "I see it since I was small, I was born like that, but I'm not capable of making it." "To create that space, you need the amazing patience that Lang had." "Moreover, my hatred of anything social turns against me:" "to make films is to deal with things social." "It's to deal with others." "And I'm in a situation a bit hypocritical since one of the reasons why I loved cinema -and I've known it very early- was that it also protected me from, let us say, modern art." "Modern art in the sense that you end up 4 of you in a chapel." "Cinema still kept me connected with my contemporaries." "And for that, I found wonderful that cinema, which might be an art, not sure, and that dealt with money, with narcissism, with betrayal, with time, shooting delays..." "All those basic things of humankind, of society." "Even if I don't have strong social skills, I have read Flaubert and Balzac." "I know that most great films are based on sex stories not necessarily, but also." "Or incredible love stories, and that it shook up all the rest, and thank God that it came through." "And I was saying, in cinema, you need a crazy energy." "It's a young art for young people, you need lots of physical energy." "You can't doze off." "There are things that you don't do, past a certain age." "You film." "English translation  subtitles created by nletore  newland @ KG" "Journey of a "Cine-Son"" "From "Cahiers" to "Libé"" "Régis Debray:" "It;igt;" "You become editor of the Cahiers in 1974,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;at a time of particularly acute theoretical and political deliria.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "Roughly speaking, Maoism, theoreticism, all those "-isms"lt;/igt;" "It;igt;that have become, maybe not history, but let's say of the past.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "How do you land again when you're on such a UFO?" "It;/igt;" "Landing is slow and painful, as slow and painful as taking off had been care-free and light." "But I lived through 1968 differently from the Cahiers people." "To make it short, it played like reality truly hitting me in the face." "So after the events, which I lived through on a very literal plane..." "It's a good memory for me:" "May-June." "A wonderful memory, but slightly solitary, slightly..." "After, I left for India, inaugurating the great Third-World travels where I had, one after the other: the shocks of illness" "I came back with tuberculosis, badly hit- and the shock of the third world, which I had never seen." "And there, I did have the feeling of being more world-wise, but very late, really very late." "After, for years..." "Well, there was the sanitorium, all of that, I got better." "I travelled again, I spent almost a year in Africa, on the road." "I was really disconnected, without any plan." "It was really like Rimbaud:" "I went to Harar." "I did it all." "I didn't take any pictures, but I sent postcards." "It's something I should have said at the beginning:" "for me, the absolute image is the postcard, it's not cinema." "I have a love of postcards that has never slackened." "I've sent tons to everybody throughout my whole life." "The postcard is my true..." "It's my true relationship to the image." "For deeper reasons, more deeply buried, than cinema." "I already found that cinema was very basic, very popular, postcards are even lower." "They're on their stalls and everyone sends them and writes on the back." "And you can write postcards in very coded language, you can write poems, write love stuff." "All you need to do is write it in a way that even those who read it won't understand it." "So it was the maximum possible elitism, possible singularity, and the maximum" ""let's do with the normal material people use." "We're not using great culture."" "There, that's a disgression on postcards." "I came back, somewhat calmed down, from the far-away countries around 1970-71." "And maybe that's when" "I realize that I have only one family, that of the Cahiers." "Even if I had abandoned it, forgotten it, or thought of something else for all these years." "I came back a bit..." "I thought, slightly sobered up by my travels, but in fact still as naive and suicidal with regards to society." "We lived with the idea that everything was going to blow up, in those years." "That's been forgotten." "The Cahiers seemed heading" "after a period of flirting with Tel Quel and the Communist Party- the Cahiers seemed heading for an even more radical way, which was called maoism, roughly speaking, pro-chinese." "One day, Jean Narboni, who was a very important character" "I haven't talked of the Cahiers people one by one, but God knows if there are stories..." "But one can't do everything." "Narboni, who was by far the most important person in the Cahiers, who had the most affective and intellectual impact, who was a bit older than us, etc." "One day Narboni told me "come on, let's have a drink"." "I would have cried for joy, because he never spoke to me that's sects, groups for you!" "And he told me, "I do think it's wrong, the CP is a sidetrack, we have to be more resolute."" "Roughly speaking, he was in, slightly admiring of Sollers and Tel Quel." "The Cahiers had an evolution absolutely parallel to Tel Quel at the time." "So we pretty quickly found ourselves Marxist-Leninist." "And I said yes, in a way about which I think a lot at the moment, because I've become rather a man of goodwill and a sincere humanist with age, but at the time all those discourses bored us to tears," "it wasn't worth much." "So we must have been quite desperate, individually, to opt for something as obviously screwed up." "And on top of that," "I didn't give a damn about better tomorrows," "I never believed, out of a total incapacity to imagine anything other than what is going on." "But I liked this situation where we found ourselves hated and feared by everybody." "Because people were scared, at the time, you mustn't forget that people... not everyone, but in the intelligentsia people had been shaken by 1968." "And I told myself, why not go on with the Cahiers, of course with something... already condemned by history, already ridiculous to many people, very dislikeable, for sure, seen from the outside, but which fitted quite well with our maverick side." "So it didn't last very long." "It lasted 2 years, the delirium." "Obviously, we went pretty far with the auto-maceration, since the idea was: "we won't be filmmakers", which was fine with us, because none of us was a born filmmaker." "So we'd found a justification:" "we won't be filmmakers because there are more important things to do like creating a great chinese-style cultural front, with a mass line, etc." "As soon as reality entered the picture, it fell apart." "I'll only note -without knowing if it's in our honor or, on the contrary, a sign of absolute collective baseness- that we plunged politically, collectively." "Which enabled us not to belong to any group since we became our own group." "And to go on washing a lot of our dirty laundry in private, all of our heritage, etc." "We did it with a lot of naivety, we did go pretty far, up to where afterwards it's pathology, but we stopped in time." "We didn't do anything base in relation to cinema." "Which is to say we never said anything good about," "I don't know, an Elio Petri film, or "left-wing-italian-committed" film, as all the leftists liked them." "We always said good stuff about Straub and Godard and everyone told us off, because they were films considered indigestible by everyone" "and which were indeed quite difficult films." "Absolute fidelity to our tastes in cinema, our Cahiers tastes, even if reduced to a very Jansenist base:" "Straub, Godard." "Godard, at the time, was also very naive, very mao." "He was more active than us, he did lots of stuff and we followed him a bit." "As for Straub, he was a very important filmmaker to us and still very important to me, even if we're all 20 years older." "We went on, on a minuscule line that should have broken down a hundred times, but didn't break, which just goes to show it was solid after all." "Anyway, when we tried to form a great cultural front in Avignon, it was absolutely disastrous." "We realized we weren't capable of animating 3 ants." "And that anyway, we were going to form an alliance with people we didn't like much, who were the cultural animators," "who needed dogma, and we were the little Parisians who provided the dogma." "Always the same thing." "And it broke." "It broke, meaning that the people who had backed this kind of passage to a more than chic radicalism, forst of all chic, then lumpen chic." "We had arrived to a state of complete hatred, we were cut off from the whole world, and it was very unpleasant." "We found ourselves back on square one, and the people who had backed that, Comolli and Narboni, who had followed that movement, at some point..." "They split, they made their films, they left." "And there was an unforgettable meeting at the Cahiers du Cinéma" "there were about 10 of us to have lived through that from A to Z, not many, we were always together- we said, does someone have a bit of time to do the editing on a part-time basis," "because everyone's leaving." "And I said, me." "There was only me." "There was only me who had nothing to do with my life." "I said yes, I'll do that." "It was payed 700 francs a month, which even at the time, in 1974, was very little." "And I started doing the Cahiers like a sleep-walker." "I didn't know anything about page layout, or how to compose a text." "In the maoism of the time, we'd got hold of a couple of young people who were very politicized students, who didn't know much about cinema, but who were sharp and intelligent." "One of them was Serge Toubiana." "He learned to read, to write, and to watch films:" "he learned everything at the Cahiers." "He unlearned, without great difficulty, his political culture which was useless, because he'd understood that the era was ending." "And he was the only one with whom I could talk." ""This is not a just image, this is just an image."" "It;igt;" "What was the film critic most like:" "It;/igt;" "It;igt;a poet,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;a psychologist, a psychoanalyst,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;a philosopher?" "It;/igt;" "It's sad to say, because these are harsh words, but it's a failed priest." "It's a guy who is between:" "a film critic is someone who is between an experience which he absolutely doesn't want to give up and a certain idea that it's his duty." "So that it goes through him and it reaches people:" "so it's the problem of any mediator." "I used the word priest, because in our culture, it's the image that for a long time..." "But you could say he's a psychoanalyst, a para-psychoanalyst, a para..." "For example, Godard had attacked me one day, nicely, in public, by telling me that I was like a lawyer." "It was the moment when I wrote a lot," "I was starting to perorate about cinema," "I was getting a bit too comfortable." "And I took it badly, because well, I was touchy, but afterwards I thought he was absolutely right." "And even today I take it in my stride." "I've had the feeling, for a little while, that when people come and ask me questions, like today, it's not really me who interests them, or they would have come earlier, so it's what I represent." "And what I represent is a certain fidelity to a fixed idea: it's that cinema is good." "So you start by saying it's good and you end up saying it's on the side of Good." "Which is where I'm at today," "I tell myself "there is something in cinema that is worth something, that has a moral or ethical value,"" "which is why the world without cinema worries me." "Because I don't see what could play a comparable role, because public space... public space was anonymously, simply, occupied by films and people who watched them, slightly on the sly, from the top to the bottom of society," "and that I loved that anonymity." "In the end, cinema made of me, despite my fears, an acceptable citizen of France." "So I say yes, I'm the advocate of cinema," "I go on telling what a wonderful thing it was." "My own specific problem, it's the Minerva's owl aspect, which is to say that I'm incapable of telling you what tomorrow will be like and I dread the worst, and I can tell you," "maybe by embellishing a lot, how great it was yesterday." "And that, I wonder..." "it must partly be due to me, some people have a melancholic character" ""It was always better before..." Not nostalgic, I have no nostalgia, but melancholic, which isn't the same." "Secondly, isn't this melancholy inherent to cinema?" "It's a question I ask myself all the time." "For example, people who like theater..." "If theater was stronger today, if it had the strength that everyone would like it to have, the strength it had at certain moments in history, in the XVIIth century, in Greece or in England..." "That's the true public space." "People go to the theater to purge themselves, to purge passions, to play out violent antagonisms:" "Gods against men, classes against classes, and I've never lived that." "A bit, at the National Popular Theater, when I was small." "I've never lived it, but somehow I miss that public space, absolutely occupied by people whose function is to give themselves, to belong to others: the actors, but the public has its own role: the public." "That, in my opinion, has trouble existing in theater, because it's going through the same, the same attacks, as all the traditional arts." "Media kill." "Or rather, they devitalize, like teeth." "There, it's a devitalization of everything, but the corpse is a good likeness." "There's the "boulevard" theater, even filmed operas with people on play-back on TV." "There are also lots of films on TV: but it's devitalized, which is to say it's not on the grounds of passion ...and collective." "I may be very individualistic, it's always the collective that I hoped for from cinema." "Today, I'm the advocate of that." "Yet I feel it's not reasonable:" "in cinema, there is something that's always already lost." "The image that has affected humanity the most deeply, it's lt;igt;" "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Stationlt;/igt;." "Since then, they all affect us a little less deeply." "Each and every day... it's an hourglass:" "cinema images lose their capacity for wonder, their capacity to dazzle us." "So people have thought that way for a long time:" "actually since the New Wave, because the New Wave arrived with that consciousness." "And I would say that the father of them all, Rossellini, had it before everyone else." "And even that Renoir had it." "Which means, in fact, that this consciousness is very old, that perception was going to..." "That you will have to work a lot, sweat a lot, invent a lot, to create simple effects to wonder at, magic lantern effects, as strong as what cinema has produced, very quickly, in the whole world and in the space of a few years," "with those first films... lt;igt;" "Baby's Dinnerlt;/igt;, lt;igt;" "The Passion of Christlt;/igt;, lt;igt;" "The Coronation of the Czarlt;/igt;... because cinema started with that." "And straight away!" "It's extraordinary." "It started straight away." "It didn't wait, Lumière sent people everywhere:" "that's an extraordinary reflex." "Anyway, so... that's being lost." "So at one point, we said, and it was Bazin's naivety, it was his strong and naive idea at the same time," "Bazin said: "Long live Cinemascope, long live color films, long live 3-D films!"" "Because each time man will face again the problem of realism that is inherent to Western art, even to art full stop." "He will face this problem again, and he will redefine it within changing parameters:" ""don't be old school!"" "So we were very Bazinian: we were for Cinemascope, which is a ridiculous format that didn't hold up to history and now causes enormous problems." "We said, it's more reality!" "Of course the quality is less good, we'll have to learn how to make the great films of Cinemascope." "And one day we'll be able to make the great films, the great artistic problematics of Panavision, which is more beautiful, and why not of 3-D cinema, and why not..." "And you end up with the Géode, you end up with Trumbull's 60 frames-per-second things which are extraordinary to watch, but it costs insane amounts of money and nobody commercializes them." "It's been about 30, 40 years now that the lazy discourse on cinema consists of saying..." "It's true that cinema will have trouble finding its charm again." "In my opinion, the last film that had the effect of child-like wonder" "and that's why I place its author higher and higher in my hierarchy- it's Kubrick." "It's lt;igt;2001:" "A Space Odysseylt;/igt;." "It;igt;2001lt;/igt; is from 1968." "And lt;igt;" "Playtimelt;/igt;, 1967." "But lt;igt;" "Playtimelt;/igt; wasn't a success." "It;igt;2001lt;/igt; was a success." "It;igt;2001lt;/igt; is the last encounter between art and serious art!" "I mean, who can say they've understood lt;igt;2001lt;/igt;?" "I didn't understand the ending." "The kids loved it." "Loved it." "The guy saw more or less what was going to happen in 10 years time, what a space shuttle was going to look like." "Not 50 years: 10 years." "Realist: he saw, he extrapolated from 3 or 4 things." "Gutsy: creation of the world, the apes." "And..." "The film critics, the kids, George Lucas, Coppola, when they saw that, aged 10, they said:" ""I'll redo that one day", and they did." "It seems to me that since then," "I'm thinking but I can't find anything as spontaneously ravishing, whatever the aesthetic tastes." "No need to draw you a map:" ""Good God, we're going to live that."" "With Kubrick we had that feeling." "That's for sure." "And he's right, we're living that." "It's almost already behind us: the computers..." "The first computer to talk and die in cinema, it's Kubrick." "There's never been a better one after." "In fact, things are born very strong and then subside." "I didn't think that before but now I do." "So it's always at the beginning that you have to see something." "So I've participated, half-heartedly, because I didn't believe in it too much, for the last 30 years, in that idea:" "admittedly, the cinema we so loved won't be the spontaneous wonderment it once was, but so what, since anyway, technically, this story will continue, it will continue in an extraordinary fashion." "You shouldn't be on the side of the old farts who say "No, I only love my black and white" etc." "So we said like Bazin: "On with!"" "And that's the great difference with the "French quality"" "and people like René Clair and Co, who thought that cinema would never be as good as in the silent era, which by the way is defensible, but prompted them to make completely worthless films." "You should believe in the future of your tool, when you're an artist, not that it's condemned tomorrow because the market doesn't want it." "Or else it's not an artistic tool, and we were daydreaming, and that's a bit hard!" "It;igt;" "You made your name with pertinent attacks, or amusing,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;in any case, the target was the "French quality" cinema.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "Let us say, the chow,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;the national grub.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "To give names:" "Delannoy, Tavernier, Berri etc.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "So I'd like to know, why this grudgelt;/igt;" "It;igt;against this kind of cinema?" "It;/igt;" "It's not a kind of cinema, it's a part of the portrait of France which I don't accept." "It's the part..." "It's the academic part, artistically you can call it academic, it's the least inventive part of cinema." "But above all, it's obviously..." "There is a grudge, effectively, so perhaps a certain excess, but considering how often we've broached the subject, by association, you understand a bit better." "I haven't digested stuff that I found at my birth, in France and still today, no." "So I think that the "French quality" cinema is absolutely contemporary with a certain period that lasted from 1940 to... until late in the 50s." "which was a stifling period, absolutely stifling, a continuation of the Collaboration." "I'm not at all saying that the filmmakers I don't like were collaborators." "I'm not vindictive." "It's just very annoying..." "In fact Autant-Lara himself used to say" "Autant-Lara used to complain, and God knows that he complained a lot- that the golden age of French cinema was 1940-45." "And it was true for him: it was a very good period, he made many movies, some of them very good." "It was the time when they gave Marcel Carné huge resources to make one of the only very big, very ambitious films, that took a long time to shoot, which was lt;igt;" "Children of Paradiselt;/igt;." "All these films have something in common:" "they were shot in studios." "France is occupied and the studio, the studio represents for me the Occupation in the field of cinema." "The Occupation, of course..." "I mean the studio creates a certain aesthetic which is only interesting, in my opinion, if you're in the question of true and fake." "Which means that there's nothing as beautiful as a film that's obstinately fake:" "a film made in studio settings but mimes that there's no setting." "There's something very poignant that takes place, in certain Orson Welles films, or Josef von Sternberg, or Jean Grémillon, to pick a filmmaker I admire a lot, and which I absolutely wouldn't place in the "French quality"." "Great filmmaker." "It's because I love Grémillon so much, and not for that long, he's a filmmaker I discovered late, that I have the feeling that a guy like him was somewhat the victim and the loser in the game where all the others" "unashamedly won." "And not Grémillon because he was very vulnerable, as a man." "He's a much greater filmmaker." "There, it's interesting to see through him all the contradictions of the time, including the political contradictions." "It;igt;" "The Sky Is Yourslt;/igt; is an extraordinary film, that is still very surprising today." "So it's not at all me saying" ""Hooray to the sublime resistance!" -which by the way didn't film anything- and "Down with the skivers!"" "It's that, sorry, but Vichy cinema looks like Vichy France and France has had greater periods in its history." "It seems so obvious that I feel a bit ashamed to have to say this." "Because it's coming back very strongly." "On things which are closer" "to the Cahiers aesthetics, it's something I've already said, all these filmmakers are in wrapping effects, in pre-TV-drama effects, which means they're always talking about stories which are already inscribed in culture, in literature." "The problem is how to make the nth lt;igt;" "Pot-Bouillelt;/igt;, the nth lt;igt;" "Germinallt;/igt; etc." "All of XIXth century literature was run through it, as if there was a nostalgia for this period." "This very strong, terrifying, and very harsh period." "Whereas this cinema was made in a much more spineless period, and continually gave itself images of Balzac... of Zola, a lot." "It's a cinema that's already in the digestion of its loss of illusions." "The theme of the loss of illusions is more or less the one running through all these people:" "Autant-Lara, Allégret, Delannoy, Clouzot..." "And the problem isn't the loss of illusions." "Flaubert has a terrible quote in his letters where he says," ""Poor people are those who say they've lost their illusions"" "...as if it were interesting!" "What's interesting, it's that precisely, from then on, there are people who go on believing in things without any illusions, and it's... the difference between beliefs and illusions." "So that's more a cinema of great decorators great costume-makers, with some beautiful things." "I have no taste for that." "I have no taste for the French cinema of the 40s." "I'm like Godard." "I copy him and I say the same thing:" "when I hear, in lt;igt;" "Les Dames du Bois de Boulognelt;/igt;," "Elina Labourdette, say at the end of the film, she's about to die, and Paul Bernard tells her "Stay", and she says "I stay", and she says "I fight"." "Godard, who always interprets everything his own way, says it's the only word of resistance we have heard in all of French cinema during the war." "The way Elina Labourdette says "I fight"." "She says it with a blank voice, no one talks about Bressonian neutral voices yet." "And it moves me deeply, because at that moment I feel that Bresson is inventing a cinema." "And Bresson is neither a resistance fighter, nor a leftist." "It's not in ideological terms." "He's inventing with lt;igt;" "Les Dames du Bois de Boulognelt;/igt;, one of the most extraordinary French films ever made, something which, for me, ridicules for ever all of Autant-Lara." "Because it's not the same nature." "It's not the same nature." "You can hear the sound of a voice." "For me it wasn't this movie, because I saw lt;igt;" "Les Dames du Bois de Boulognelt;/igt; much later, when I was already an official film critic, but it was lt;igt;" "Pickpocketlt;/igt;, when I was 15." "It;igt;" "Pickpocket lt;/igt;was made in 58, released in 59, it's not that far." "I've never gotten over lt;igt;" "Pickpocketlt;/igt;." "There, I think there's no need to draw you a map, you won't find anyone to tell you" ""I really hesitate between lt;igt;" "Le Mariage de Chiffonlt;/igt; and lt;igt;" "Pickpocketlt;/igt;"," "They are two different kinds." "I'm not trying to say that I would have been virtuous and resistant etc," "I honestly don't know." "But I am surprised that French cinema continues to crow about an absolutely minor, decorative, and rather spineless, in terms of ideology, of its history." "There were some very talented filmmakers like Autant-Lara, Clouzot, René Clément, and in my opinion, something rather sad happened to them, but they also were foolish not to see what was happening." "When the New Wave arrived, they thought it was a revolt by underlings, as in lt;igt;" "Zéro de Conduitelt;/igt;." "They forgot that they were squatting French cinema, that they had prevented, by excessive unionization, and a very ideological corporatism, they had prevented French cinema from renewing itself." "So for 10 years, you have people rebelling on the side bench, called Franju, Melville, Leenhardt, Rouch, who were never within the normal circuits." "Astruc too." "All those considerable people had somewhat aborted careers." "And then the small group from the Cahiers got strong enough, and the times suddenly pushed for a change." "It's true that I'm not reconciled with those people, because when the situation got beyond their control they were incapable of adapting to smaller budgets, to start again." "Some of them were still very creative, a guy like Clément, he's making lt;igt;" "Purple Noonlt;/igt;." "It;igt;" "Purple Noonlt;/igt; is an old film, but it's a wonderful film." "It's a film which still today, because Alain Delon..." "Obviously Clément saw Delon, just as Roger Vadim saw Brigitte Bardot." "It's the problem of vision, the problem of the visual." "There, that's how I'll answer you: with the visual." "What happened, at one point, in 1955-60?" "You have filmmakers, who aren't necessarily great ones, who see something happening before their eyes." "For example, Roger Vadim -very bad filmmaker as time confirmed, but at the beginning it wasn't that bad- he sees Brigitte Bardot." "And Bardot is the most important thing to happen in French cinema in 1954-55." "Lots of people miss that, starting with me" "I was 10, but I could have been a bit sharper!" "It doesn't interest me, I found her stupid." "And today..." "I again have no sympathy for Bardot, for what she's become, so there we're really in a sort of tail-end of history." "But Vadim sees Bardot and he films her, badly, but it's genius." "He falls in love with her, obviously, but he has the intelligence not to make an artist's film but a teensy little film" "that doesn't go down in any history." "Nevertheless, there's something wonderful in lt;igt;" "And God Created Womanlt;/igt;." "You have" "Curd Jürgens, experienced actor, Trintignant, rising young lead, and Vadim recorded their astonishment at acting with this young girl who breaks all the known acting modules and who visibly invents a dialogue of her own, which is profoundly stupid, but unforgettable:" ""What a nitwit this rabbit!"" "no man from the "French quality" could write anything like that," "And at the time Bardot is right since France is going to look like her." "So she's brilliant, at that moment." "I didn't see it then, but she's brilliant." "3 years later, Marcel Carné, who's not that old, still a great, very much idolized filmmaker, announces that he will make a film about youth:" "It;igt;" "Les Tricheurslt;/igt;, a long forgotten movie." "It was a gigantic event: everyone talked only about that." "It came out in 1958, so made in 1957," "2 years before the New Wave, so really just-just." "People were saying "It's terrible, Carné shows us a horribly cynical world, young people are no longer humans, they're monstrous, they sleep together, they play truth or dare, are they really our children?"" "And others would answer: "But you're silly, don't you realize, it's full of humanity, they need love, we must talk to them."" "It was a pre-Menie Grégoire style debate, atrocious, in the very backward France of the late 1950s, which is ridiculous today when you see the film which is completely insignificant." "The movie is of no interest whatsoever except that it was talked about a lot at the time." "And when I say, Carné saw nothing, it's not even worth saying his conception of youth is dated, after all, old people aren't always wrong." "But Carné had auditions he saw Belmondo, he hesitated, he didn't take him, he took Charrier." "There!" "I mean, a year later" "Godard or Truffaut, which one, sees Belmondo..." "There, like Bardot!" "So I would say the answer through actors." "You have to see." "Filmmaker is a job where it's better to see than to not see, and among the things to see, it's something of a riddle, there's the actors." "I don't know what people who went on watching" "Gabrielle Dorziat and Saturnin Fabre could see of France." "Sacha Guitry is wonderful: he didn't compromise." "But the others, no." "Guitry only wanted to see himself so he didn't go wrong, he said what the deal was." "And sometimes Michel Simon." "So there, it's through realism." "I think there's a line beyond which cinema doesn't go, beyond realism." "I didn't always think so in such a definite way, but as far as I'm concerned that's what it is." "And I'm quite doubtful as to whether there are other possibilities." ""A certain tendency of French cinema."" ""What bothers me..."" ""One misses Prévert..."" ""Bourgeois, all of them"" ""Autant-Lara is (really) not a marvel"" ""Of course, what Autant-Lara says isn't nice, but before leaving that great bunch of symptoms to political analysts, let's use the fact that the man was a filmmaker to bring back the eternal question of French cinema and to say that, really, Truffaut was right."" "It;igt;" "New images: it's something of the same story,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;it's a tool without a creator, without a producer.lt;/igt;" "Yes." "New images are the best example, people keep talking about them but we don't see a thing, and when we do it's not interesting because what's wonderful with new images, is that there are people who have a technique to make a nail out of..." "To represent a nail from software." "From their point of view, it might be sublime," "I can't imagine, but I know how to film nails with a 16 mm camera." "So at one point we have to ask when does it become really interesting for others?" "And really staggering." "It has to be really staggering, in terms of the image, for all your inventions to be useful, at least artistically." "And as, in general, they're technicians, they have scientists' imaginations:" "quite trivial, or very playful, med students, not very far-reaching." "And I don't know how it'll end up, it's something that no-one can anticipate." "There will of course be stupefying uses," "I think they will enter domestic life directly, and there won't be any mediation of art." "And there's something very simple with cinema, that cinema represents, let's say, in the universal history..." "It's that cinema is maybe one of the moments" "so here I'm going for it- when human beings are in the position of being a spectator, the one who comes afterwards and watches." "And who's faced with the finished fact, that's very important." "He's not interacting." "Maybe he is, socially, on another level but he's the one in front of whom something is presented, the one to whom something is shown." "It's very important, because the act of showing is certainly the essence of cinema, and not of images." "Images are maybe the essence of media and TV." "But the act of showing, as an act, in the sense that if it's an act a morality becomes possible." "If there's no act there's no morality possible." "Well, maybe cinema is a very important moment, that we were quite right to love, and maybe wrong to under-estimate, let's say philosophically, in a history..." "There are moments, in the histories of civilizations, where there was a good ecology of questions and answers, where people made good serves and there were good come-backs." "Maybe I was good at giving back, with regards to cinema, but I never served, I didn't make any films." "So I was taken up in this story and happy to have been part of it." "It's this story I'm afraid to see disappear." "To serve: that's a beautiful word, in tennis." "It's to help out." "People ask what public service is, think of tennis, see what a service is:" "it's someone who's of help to you, it's simple." "Don't look for anything complicated, don't ask Pascal Josèphe or Michèle Cotta, they don't know." "Ask the dictionary, do what Godard does." "Serving means there is someone who'll receive, who'll give back." "I was able to give back with words, but some people gave back with their lives, cinema enabled some people to give back with their lives, with their stars, those they wanted to look like, their dreams," "we're not going to judge that, that's people's lives." "Maybe that didn't always exist, maybe it existed in the XIXth century, in theater, in farce," "I don't know the popular culture of that century very well." "It's for certain that cinema is the absolute follow-up to it." "It lasted 50 years." "From 1900 to 1950, cinema kept our childhood interests alive, but not only biological children, children in relation to a civilization." "I.e. we want to be flattered about our face, our existence, our identifications etc;" "and the other arts didn't do that anymore, they'd become something else." "Cinema went on like that until the 2nd World War." "It woke up in 1945, with the hangover from lt;igt;" "Rome Open Citylt;/igt;, and soon after that, lt;igt;" "Night and Foglt;/igt;." "It didn't prevent people from making literary adaptations of Radiguet, with contrasted shadows for the good bourgeois people of France, but it was over, the worm was in the fruit..." "And from then on, cinema lived its adult years:" "40 years." "Now it's senile, or it's infantile." "In America it's infantile, here it's senile." "We have Berri, for the elderly, they have lt;igt;" "Terminatorlt;/igt;, for infants." "There's no adulthood in cinema:" "it's past, so of course I'm in trouble." "But it did happen that cinema was, if I show you something, you tell me something." "You tell me something: it's good, it's no good." "It's maybe that fundamental thing that being blown away." "Showing..." "You think they show on TV?" "On TV you programme stuff." "It's not showing, so people don't see it." "How to see what's not showing?" "If you tell me, this is a lighter, you show it to me, I'll say I don't like the orange, but it reminds me of a lighter I had, actually maybe you stole it from me..." "And we make a story, from an action." "It's not the visual, it's the action." "It's the action that counts." "Afterwards there's the visual." "and there are 36 ways of visualizing this lighter, including that strange way we call cinema, which consists of placing a camera, setting the lights and making sure that that lighter is the one that will be filmed." "But the day when it's a computer-animated image, how do you show it?" "We will face the question." "If we don't face it the computer-animated image won't participate in art." "After all, maybe art will pass somewhere else, or nowhere, or it will disappear." "But, I mean, the act of showing, in cinema, was..." "Where cinema and theater were never really differentiated, in the end." "Whereas cinema and photography..." "In great photos, the act of showing is more important than what's shown." "There's still someone saying: watch that, I saw that." "And it's in this sense that cinema is impure, because the act of showing is impure." "Because by showing, you're sticking your neck out." "You can show something and have people laugh at you." "On TV you never get laughed at because they don't show anything." "They throw out stuff that ends up directly in the bin." "Or they show people for so long you're sick of seeing them." "It's ridiculous: there's no possible morality." "There's no possible morality of images with TV, so no possible criticism of TV." "That was my idea." "On the other hand, criticism of cinema has been possible." "But it was possible because cinema was possible, because cinema was the art of inventing transitional objects and inventing distances." "So when I watch the way Fritz Lang organizes around Glenn Ford, in lt;igt;" "The Big Heatlt;/igt;, an interlocking of spaces that is incredibly sophisticated for a fairly low-budget film noir," "I know, then, whether I'm 10 or 20 years old or my current age," "I know that I'm there, in this... in this mesh of spaces, in time, in this time, in this very space-time." "I know where I am," "I can only be where Lang put me." "Because Lang is a true filmmaker who won't put me just anywhere." "And I'll say that cinema, fundamentally..." "That's why you shouldn't bad-mouth auteur theory too much" "even though it had huge flaws- in favor of the culturalist conception of cinema, which prefers anonymous art, because it enables it to rule through statistics." "Yes, there has to be someone, who at some point, takes us by the hand, and tells us:" ""There, you're going to watch this scene, which is horrible," "I'm called Hitchcock: you're going to be very scared." "But you'll see this scene from a place that is your own, and this place will be built through mise-en-scène." "You won't be alternately here with the camera, then up there, then there..." "No, you're a specific height, and you're with the camera there." "And the camera has its rules and it follows them, and space is vectorized." "And you'll see and understand, and you'll be scared, or not, from a single position in the world."" "There's a thing I recount very often, so I'll repeat myself, but never mind:" "the article that made me understand, not cinema, but where I was in cinema" "and I knew it very well, but I hadn't understood it- it's an article by Rivette." "I must have told you this story, because for me... it's the matrix for everything." "It was about lt;igt;" "Kapòlt;/igt; by Gillo Pontecorvo, a film about the concentration camps made in 1960-61. [1959]" "Pontecorvo is a left-wing Italian filmmaker, bad filmmaker, but good guy" "against the Algerian war and everything- but really a bad filmmaker." "And Rivette writes an extraordinary article." "Rivette was 30 at the time, and I must have been 15 or 16." "He tells the ending of the film and he says:" "On Emmanuelle Riva's corpse" "who's dead, she dies on the" "I haven't even seen the film but it's as if I'd seen it, and there was this image in the Cahiers, but you see it in so many films, that visual cliché, that visual," "that it's as if I'd seen it." "So she dies, and the camera reframes her face so that the shot is more balanced." "But she's a Kapo in a camp, wearing the striped pajamas and certainly a bit too chubby for the role." "There." "And Rivette says: "The man who" "at that precise moment, when she dies- does a tracking shot to fit her more nicely in the frame is worthy of the deepest contempt."" "Rivette wrote that, as Rivette can write, very jansenist, and I remember, I told myself" ""Obviously!" "He's right, you don't do that!" "You just don't do that!"" "For me it's the absolute crime." "So you say it's really the interests of a cinephile gone crazy." "It's the absolute crime!" "For years, I forgot about that, because it seemed to be the obvious truth, and the idea that it wasn't quite done came back to me, first, when I saw some filmmakers redo the lt;igt;" "Kapòlt;/igt; tracking shot, without people yelling." "So I realized I was the one being hyper-moral about this, who doesn't tolerate it, who might even be personally blocked on this, on this scene, on this primeval scene." "That's maybe my primeval scene, something that happens in the camps, and for many of my generation too, even if they don't realize it." "But after, for the younger people, we don't know." "They don't talk or produce enough, so it becomes a problem." "I don't have any information on the historic imagination of a 25 year old boy." "When they make films, even good ones, they talk about their friends, about manners." "That's fine, that's what you do in general at that age." "But not much information on the original scenes: are they still in history, or does it apply to me and already not for them anymore?" "The fact remains that the question of lt;igt;" "Kapòlt;/igt;" "came back with other types of images, like computer-generated images." "For example I saw on TV all the charity things," "Band Aid, all the first things on... singers who passionately listen to themselves singing with eyes closed and smiling to the angels, so that we don't see instead the little children with the big tummies." "I.e. the swapping of the market for charity." "And of course that disgusts me, even if..." "I like Stevie Wonder a lot." "But I find it a bit sad that we're reduced to charity, with the type of images, of aesthetics, that goes with charity, which, precisely, isn't cinema." "Maybe cinema, from a Christian point of view, was in relation with compassion, at least with empathy." "I have a lot of compassion for the Japanese middle-age peasants who get killed in Mizoguchi's films." "Because he has a way of filming them" "in the XIIth century, I don't understand Japanese- so that I know that it's true." "There, I know that this is how it happened." "That the movement is true." "Not the scene, not the costumes, that the movement was true." "That the camera movement Mizoguchi does then" "a sort of slightly sad Buddhist, cynical, Mizoguchi- that movement is correct." "As long as cinema does that, I'm a citizen of the world even of the world that's past, of history." "The day I don't have that anymore, not just in Japan: at home, in my culture." "The day when I get the singer showing himself singing so that we don't see the horrible sight of misery," "I ask myself: do I want to watch him?" "I'm willing to pay to not see him." "I'm very generous." "I'm willing to pay to not see this worthless singer singing a song, pretending to believe in it, so that I don't see..." "I.e. we're already in a sort of third non-image:" "we no longer want to see the state of the world," "yet we have the means to see it as never before- the state of the world, meaning a lot of ugly things." "We replace the world with the charity of the world, it makes show-biz work, it makes TVs work." "I say:" "I don't want to see that." "Maybe I don't have the courage either to see the world as it is today." "Children dying of hunger is very sad: they all look alike, it's a bad show, it's very monotonous." "The first who does it: wonderful, it's an act of courage." "The 23rd to do it is some poor chap on TV saying "Oh, man!" "Enough, let's go home!"" "You can't resent him, you'd do the same." "And the one who edits doesn't even watch." "And the one who shows, doesn't even show." "Well, all this is a finished economy." "It's an economy of, there's still a fellow man, still an Other." "It;igt;" "Ultimately, what you call "the visual",lt;/igt;" "It;igt;it's what is used to not watch the world.lt;/igt;" "There." "I call "the visual" the image of the singer instead of the children." "I call the visual" "for me, I'm trying to put a little bit of order into this- the image that comes instead of another that you don't want to see anymore" "and I'm no better, neither do I" "Because it wouldn't be effective any more." "It has lost..." "Just like the Ciotat train." "Today trains are less scary, and the TGV doesn't look like the Ciotat train." "Sadly, children dying of hunger or illness looks a lot like what it was a century ago, it doesn't change." "So it's lost a lot of its strength." "And cameras are everywhere, you can now film death in close-up, and it's disgusting because obviously it's worthless, it's a bad show." "Even death, you had to deal with it, people in the Middle Ages made a show out of it, they lived with it and they had more courage than us because weren't scared." "At the same time, they laughed because they knew it was part of life." "Today, we're forced to tell our kids who saw lt;igt;" "The Big Bluelt;/igt;" "and, to our great dismay, find it good, because we find it not good, that death exists: we'd completely forgotten to tell you!" "It exists, it's even desirable." "That's why a child can understand that it exists." "The child doesn't understand death, but he understands suicide." "One day he understands that you can want to die, any child has been through that, and that's when he understands death." "It;igt;" "The Big Bluelt;/igt; is a kind of praise of suicide, what's more enticing, and modern." "Cinephile parents say" "I don't have any children, but I would have been no better" ""It's not a good film, you're rebelling against society, then go and see lt;igt;" "Zéro de Conduitelt;/igt;."" "But now it's a classic, it shows in film clubs!" "Vigo's force is lost, it's a real shame." "And the kid isn't rebelling, he's saying: death exists." "There is the Other, a great one, with a capital O." "You want to tell him, yes, there is an Other, but anyway it's non-negotiable, everyone will die sooner or later." "And there's also a smaller Other:" "your friend, who is also your worst enemy, your parents, very important, but you'll spend your life fighting with them, and there are the Belgians, our neighbours, but we could stop despising them." "And then there's Ethiopia," "China..." "It's to wrap up my "citizen of the world" thing, it was not reasonable to say, everywhere I go..." "When I travelled, I tried not to disturb," "I really wasn't a bothersome traveller, I travelled in 4th class and I said there," "I made them a gift of my plain humanity, of someone who's trying to expiate his parents' colonial crimes." "We did what we could, it didn't impress them too much." "Afterwards they also went insane." "But it's the "Other" aspect." "And today, I call "visual" when you can't stand to see the Other because you know him too well." "It's true that we've had the time, for a century, maybe even thanks to cinema, to see him, and to see what he looks like, it's true that, at one point," "we had a lot of cheek, in cinema, to play with fire." "We showed very ill people, people dying, corpses, we trampled Hollywood's code, which was very puritanical." "We showed sex in close-ups, then realized it was very boring, yet we couldn't stop watching." "I mean, now we have to assess all of that." "Well, in all this, the Other has disappeared a bit." "And there's an enormous enterprise, which goes through TV a lot, but may even go beyond, which will tell you:" "there's a market for replacement images." "For example you like such and such a singer, he's nice and on top of it he's like you, he cries when he sees the children dying of hunger." "Look at him." "And it's free!" "And all the ads will come." "I want to say, it's disgusting." "Let him sing alone in his bath, and let him..." "And, when he sings for TV, let him be filmed well." "Obviously, it seems trivial, in the context of this emotional blackmail." "I want to say, I have AIDS, you could do an AIDS rally, but no, I'd rather pay so that you don't do it." "Because I don't want to see Poivre d'Arvor." "I've seen him enough as it is, I don't want to see a flunkey." "So I'm faced with these images:" "the visual." "We could temporarily call "visual", the sum of the replacement images for very precise reasons." "No replacement because we would have the choice and the fun, for playful reasons, it would be wonderful if we could know, in any situation, that we can make this image, but also this, and this..." "That's not what happens." "In all the events that happen in the world, there's an image that quickly comes to cover up all the others:" "this is what happens on the TV news, when suddenly one image..." "Even the most beautiful image we've seen recently:" "the little man in front of the tanks in China, which makes me cry." "For once, there was an image of liberty!" "But even that image ended up preventing all the others from China." "Now China is that." "It could have been worse:" "when it's Yugoslavia, we can't even manage to make one." "So then, there's none at all." "There you want to say that cinema has been useless because we have people close to us, we have a powerful TV:" "it's there, under fire, it gets killed, it's very heroic..." "There's Dubrovnik, which is also beautiful, so we could also invest in the tourism yet to come." "But no, suddenly you don't understand anything anymore:" "when there's no conception of where the Other is and where I am as an Other -because I am the Other of the Other- when the question of the Other is gone, all the images are gone" "and all that's left is the visual." "So the visual can be anything." "So you zoom." "The zoom is masturbation, what masturbation is to love." "So a bit of masturbation is good, I'm really not... but when it's all what's left, it's a little bit Big Brother." "So the cameramen zoom." "They zoom." "The Pope, they zoom." "The Panzani pasta... no, Panzani no, because they've paid a lot, there someone knows one mustn't zoom, because it was written somewhere." "The holy scriptures, the only ones left, are advertising storyboards." "To sell Panzani!" "How could we be proud?" "English translation  subtitles created by nletore  newland @ KG" "Journey of a "Cine-Son"" "The Channel-Surfer's Gaze" "Régis Debray:" "It;igt;" "The move to Libération is, I imagine, the return to reality for you.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "I mean, living among the non-cinephiles.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "You can't just enjoy yourself, you have to make yourself understood.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "Did you live through it as something pleasing,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;the public, News, travel, or as something ascetic?" "It;/igt;" "Oh no, for me it..." "I was very..." "At first I was very scared, because" "I'd never in my whole life thought that I could be on a daily paper." "It hadn't occurred to me, but equally, Libération was my newspaper, in the sense that I read it every day." "I'd even written a bit, in 1974-75, very dogmatic things, it wasn't a good period." "But "Libé", traditionally, had no-one for cinema, had left cinema up for grabs, for whoever wanted to pick it up." "In 1981, Serge July must have done a putsch, now I really see how much this putsch headed towards:" "let's become acceptable, let's become presentable, let's have some art critics worthy of that name." "So there had to be cinema, enough kidding around." "And he knew that I was fed up with the Cahiers," "I had reached a point" "I couldn't bear it anymore." "I'd decided to stop before, and he suggested it, and it happened quickly and quite well." "I wrote insane amounts." "It liberated me." "It's not a pun:" "Libération liberated me." "But it wasn't at all "Before I enjoyed myself, now I'll make myself understood."" "I never really enjoyed myself writing for the yellow Cahiers." "It was a relation to pleasure, which has nothing to do with enjoyment:" "pleasure is something else, it's stronger but it's more dangerous." "You stand to lose a lot." "Enjoyment came at "Libé", because enjoyment meant realizing that, if I said "I" and I stopped saying "we", if I dropped the Cahiers thing," "I was capable -which no one had told me, which I hadn't guessed myself, which I'd repressed, etc" "I was capable of entertaining people, by making quite complicated texts, with exactly the same content as in the Cahiers texts" "I didn't compromise on that at all." "I had an enormous head start of culture, of thoughts..." "I had all the texts not written because of the Cahiers;" "the Cahiers were terrifying: you wrote one paper a month, you had no feedback from anybody, it was terrible." "You wrote for the Cahiers, not for the Cahiers people who didn't say anything." "There were secret rivalries, terribly narcissistic writing, just like anywhere." "After 5 years, you say no!" "I need someone to tell me that I exist, I'm dying!" "It happened in "Libé"." "But I had the feeling of having a huge head start of unwritten texts, of non-communicated emotions, of little stories, which had been left stranded, which hadn't been written." "So I had the cheek, for the first time in my life, to say I exist, and the proof is, I write." "But fundamentally, I didn't adapt anything to anything." "It just so happens that at the time," "Serge July simply wanted there to be a cinema section." "His dream was that on movie theater facades there would be the Libé critic." "And at the time, we were far from it." "Afterwards, it became the rule." "So that's what I had to bring him." "No matter how." "It just so happened that what I wrote moved some people, or surprised a bit." "And so, for 5 or 6 years, I recycled like mad" "well, not only recycling, there are also things that I figured out" "I liberated myself." "And I wrote a lot." "After all, it was 5/6 page articles, we didn't have any advertising yet, we did the whole page." "I've even had that extraordinary pleasure of writing an article, spending almost the whole night on it, of bringing it the next day to the paper, following it through to the press, of leaving, at the time at 1 a.m.," "and I saw it composed, and I even helped the editor to put on a title, a caption etc." "When you've known that, you can't really complain about journalism." "Personally, I mean." "Because it might be every journalist's dream which is to: 1) do something he believes in," "2) it's gratifying, because people read it and like it." "3) he's the absolute master of his page." "For me, my page was like a film." "I did the captions, I did the title, I did everything." "Also because I hadn't learnt otherwise, at the Cahiers I also did everything, the cooking, the grub..." "And it was very liberating for me." "But it really wasn't for a wide public:" "Libé was a marginal paper, with strange tastes about lots of things, and my whims about cinema were accepted just as Bayon's on rock music were." "Because it was still XIXth century art criticism, with quills." "And that's what was missing so cruelly at Libé, and what Serge wanted." "Not by any love of quills, but because he thought, that at that moment" "Libé needed to start existing in art criticism, and in bourgeois art criticism, even if cinema isn't only bourgeois, but for example, the failure of classical music at Libé" "because it was truly a very elitist sector, very protected- we weren't lucky enough to have someone tell us" ""Well, that's my thing, and I'll do it for you, Libé-style"" "In the right time, in real time." "And many other critics..." "I know that thanks to Hervé Gauville, I started going to see dance, and I realized I should have gone earlier because it really did me good." "For me that's the golden age of Libé." "I feel I've known a golden age of Libé that I would date until 1985-86, in 1986." "There." "So for me it's a lot of work, a lot of anxiety, always late, the usual things... but absolutely, the feeling of having access to enjoyment at last, and not simply being the slave of pleasure anymore," "to stay slightly Lacanian." "It;igt;" "You've said, "The evolution of medialt;/igt;" "It;igt;sounds the death knell of smugglers such as me".lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "How do you see the future, say of Libé,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;the paper, its network, Serge July,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;and cinema's place in all that?" "It;/igt;" "It;igt;" "In a newspaper of the new era, the audiovisual era.lt;/igt;" "I admit I don't know." "Because when you're pessimistic -and I am a bit, by nature," "I always tend to see things in black." "But I'm also very care free, so you mix the two and in the end it's ok." "It's that I had the feeling, in 1985-86," "that I was going to start repeating myself." "And I was beginning to see the cinema that had made me, and the films that had seen me." "I was able to put a name, like in a psychoanalysis." "If cinema is the century's psychoanalysis, as Guattari said, the century's mass psychoanalysis," "I've done mine." "And it maybe hasn't cured me" "anyway you always die cured- but still, much more slowly than a normal psychoanalysis, it taught me things about myself, like what I said earlier: for me cinema will always be about time, not about the image." "And it's too late, that's the way it is:" "I'm not going to fight with people who think that lt;igt;" "Children of Paradiselt;/igt;" "is the most beautiful French film, because for me, if that's all there'd been in cinema, I would have chosen... watercolors!" "But there's lt;igt;" "The Rules of the Gamelt;/igt;, and that, for me, remains unforgettable." "So there's a time when you stop..." "The better you know what makes you tick, deeply, the less you want to impose it on others, because it's not fair." "All you can do is explain as best you can, for me, and for people like me, that was cinema." "But there's more to it..." "There are people for whom cinema is the Marilyn fan-club to die for." "I respect their wish to die for it, I almost died for it." "But it's not me, I'm not them..." "For some people the love of cinema is to have the same boots as Monty Clift in a western." "It makes me laugh." "But I like Monty Clift a lot." "I mean, there are many houses." "There are many rooms in the Father's house, in cinema too." "Not that many, but many." "There's a lt;igt;" "Children of Paradiselt;/igt; room." "People who don't like cinema usually adore it." "Well, at some point I said I'll stop fighting." "Otherwise, if I take the front page of the paper to say, Manoel de Oliveira's film is great, he's one of the last great living filmmakers today, but he's Portuguese, his films will bring in 5000 people," "July will give me the front page, or he won't stop me." "So in a sense, I had the privilege of having the crisis of cinema all to myself," "I had the beauty of it all to myself!" "Only sons are quite harsh, they don't share!" "No, there's something that doesn't have a grip on reality anymore." "I see it around me, what I'm told about films at Libé is worthless." "One day, I woke up and..." "I'd written a very enthusiastic text about lt;igt;" "Fanny and Alexanderlt;/igt;, which I consider to be one of Bergman's most beautiful films, even if it's his testament and if it looks academic." "Our culture would rather be to say: give us the little unknown Bergman." "There are some." "It's still an absolutely magnificent film." "The people in the paper..." "It came out in 1984-85, to give a date." "And the same for lt;igt;" "Ginger and Fredlt;/igt;." "It was the thing about Fellini and Bergman:" "two typical filmmakers for people who only have literary emotions for cinema." "This is why at the Cahiers we were never really Fellinian or Bergmanian:" "there were always people, Jesuits, critics from Télérama, to come up with literary emotions for those films which happened to be great films." "And suddenly I hear people saying "Oh, no, Bergman, it's always the same," "I've had enough, I'm bored." "Oh, really, you think it's good?"" "And I say "Are you nuts?" "Go and see it right now!"" "Something is wrong." "In 1980, you still want to fight for very difficult filmmakers, in 1985 you realize that even Bergman and Fellini, you have to shake your best friends up for them to go and see lt;igt;" "Ginger and Fredlt;/igt;, because they're already watching video, but they're offended when you tell them they don't go to the cinema anymore." "Because they think that..." "And they're two absolutely... almost academic filmmakers." "And recently, what, a year ago," "I saw lt;igt;" "The Godfather IIIlt;/igt;, by Coppola, which I found absolutely wonderful." "In my opinion, it's the best of the 3, and it's fascinating today etc." "The Cahiers didn't mention it..." "No: the Cahiers talked about it, it's Libé which didn't do anything, thinking that Coppola is over, it's out of fashion, you can..." "No one was going to stand up and say "Hey, you're forgetting Coppola"." "Coppola isn't fashionable any more, he's paying his debts: off with his head." "Even Libé!" "It does piss me off quite a bit." "And I said, if today I wrote at Libé about cinema, well maybe I would have done it in a rage, and it would have made a good text," "I would have said: "You, absolute idiots, now it's Coppola you don't even see." "So, we started with Straub and we end up with Coppola!"" "It means that in 10 years, it's the whole of cinema you have to promote." "And that's too much for me." "I'm not used to promoting all of cinema." "It's what I'm doing now, I'm praising cinema in general." "That's because, well, it's the whole century, my whole life, ok." "I have reasons to like what I like and everyone has them ...I hope." "But, before, you said, "in cinema I prefer this", and some people would prefer that." "Today, I've got the impression that it's the whole of cinema that's swinging over into something else." "So maybe I'm not the one -maybe I'm the smuggler for all that, but not the one who can find the way to say, ok, enough kidding around, media is the pits," "or at least it's something else -let's be nice- it's something deeply different." "Cinema goes from Lumière to, let's say Coppola, and up to you:" "everything is for grabs, almost equally." "There's no modernity of Coppola and archaism of Méliès, it's not true." "In fact Méliès and Jean-Christophe Averty, they interact:" "video interacts with the beginning of cinema." "Who are the sublime teachers?" "Who are the Jean Douchets of today, or the mes of tomorrow?" "I'm fine with having been a smuggler, but at a definite moment, and that moment has tipped over, already." "The Cahiers, of which we still hope that they'll have a good period in their life." "Who'll say and who'll find the right words to say it, the natural words, knowing that the kids are going to watch TV and video, they won't go to the Cinémathèque -and I'd rather they watched TV or video:" "they're emotional things..." "Long live the sect, long live the group, long live the clique:" "enough of that democratism that brings... that leads to the junk you see now on TV lt;igt;" "La Nuit des Héroslt;/igt;!" "Well, you'll rebuild an elitist culture for yourself, a film culture." "Elitist, but since it's cinema it'll never be profoundly elitist, because cinema will always keep that side that comes from circus, from cabaret, from Muscle Man, from the local vamp, but it comes from the avant-garde as well." "The avant-garde, it's the little chemist who, on his own, tinkers..." "Alain Resnais isn't..." "He's not an intellectual, Resnais, he's a little chemist:" "he does experiments since he's small, so people say: how complicated!" "Yes, but it's as much part of cinema as Ava Gardner." "So I have a tendency, at the moment, today, to say, stop shaming us with the spiel:" ""Oh, cinema, what a wonderful culture, but I don't know it, I'm not a cinephile, I haven't seen..."" "Well, it's something with a lot of value and up to you to go and see." "I only hope that there will be smugglers." "And I don't know what they'll be like, they won't be like what I was, for a while, and I'm not ashamed of it, on the contrary." "But for me it's over." "And they won't be like Poivre d'Arvor, or Claude-Jean Philippe..." "What else can I say..." "They won't be like the weatherman." "Maybe they won't be in the media, maybe they'll write and make magazines." "Otherwise, cinema will disappear." "It'll be recycled." "It'll be recycled like many things in the XXth century." "It;igt;" "A world without cinema, is that possible?" "It;/igt;" "It;igt;" "Should we talk about of cinema in the past?" "It;/igt;" "It;igt;" "For example, in 10 years it's lost 30% of its audience in France.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "What is a world without cinema?" "It;/igt;" "I think we're beginning to see it," "I've been scared of it for a long time, but there was still cinema." "There are still beautiful films, they're rarely the ones people see, but there are still good films." "So there still is cinema." "But much stronger than concrete cinema, there's its extraordinary funerary status which was elevated, especially in France, by all governments..." "French governments protect cinema, since Vichy, since Vichy." "It's a paradoxical situation, and troublesome, because you can't resent the state too much for keeping cinema's head above water, but if it were left to the free-market system, like some things on TV are, it wouldn't keep up:" "it would be squashed by America, which has the advantage of making films for the only public left: the kids." "American cinema hasn't made films for adults for a long time." "It's a cinema that has lots of qualities, there are good things, even lt;igt;" "Terminator 2lt;/igt; isn't the worst thing ever." "The problem is that you can't make a whole world and you can't build a civilization on the desires of an 8 year old child." "God knows it's precious, because we've all been that child" "I've talked about it a lot- but cinema also promised that I would become an adult." "Thankfully, it didn't keep that, but I believed in it very strongly." "It;igt;" "You walked a tightrope between cinema and TV.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "Did one teach you something about the other?" "It;/igt;" "It;igt;" "Does one understand cinema better from TV?" "It;/igt;" "No, you understand TV wonderfully well from cinema." "To understand TV, I think you need a distance that I don't have, that no one has." "McLuhan had a few wonderful intuitions, but he's not translated or cited in France." "Because visibly, in the slightly crazy things he said, some of them are unremittingly true." "No, I think that to measure the scale of what television is or represents" "since it's only the trailer for something" "I think that, in its actual form, TV will disappear." "But what it's putting in place, what it's setting up at the moment, as we watch, it's maybe considerable and enormous, in terms of its amplitude, and maybe it doesn't concern the zones that cinema covered." "So inversely, having a cinema culture, it's a bit like having done Latin for 6 years, you wonder what it's for, and one day, you read something and you say," ""these people don't know how to write French"." "6 years of Latin help me to understand the mistakes in French grammar:" "it's that kind of discrepancy." "And I don't say "6 years of Latin" to play an elitist card:" "I'm saying, the directing... the setting up of a gag by Buster Keaton" "who barely knew how to read and write and came from the circus- or of an Robert Aldrich film noir is today much, much too complicated, and I would say, much too elitist, for the average perception: the one that comes from TV," "which has reduced the basic grammar of cinema" "which wasn't very developed, but already had some fine structures" "TV has reduced that to 3 or 4 possible cases." "That can be explained by the fact that it's a broadcast machine, and so its problem is obviously not to refine procedures or language, but to be sure to reach everybody." "TV is of the family of the telephone, and it has more or less its problems, it's only worth what the communications are worth, and they're all private." "When Poivre d'Arvor tells the news, he's showing his boss that he's doing a good job:" "it's a private conversation." "He's not speaking to me." "When the people on Channel 5 make the News, it's funny:" "suddenly, they're good, they get experts to explain to them what a compulsory liquidation is, and they go on and on..." "They forget to face the camera and to read the prompt, it's funny, and they're suddenly very interested because their daily bread is at stake, and they're right, I'm on their side." "I would have liked them to have done that all the time, on all of everyone's news." "But they don't." "I think, quite simply, that it's become impossible for TV to take the individual into account." "So it works on the basis of the individualist ideology, but it's only ever an ideology, it can't take the individual into account, it's the individual that takes it into account in a perverse way:" "I switch channels, I follow my own whims," "I do my own edits and I despise it." "Which isn't good either, it's wearisome." "I was the first "official" channel-switcher," "I chronicled it." "I found it fun to... yes, to make fun of TV a bit, but there was still a lot of goodwill in my reviews." "Every day, I had to sketch a little something of TV." "Something domestic." "And at some point, I got scared: scared for me." "I thought I was developing a ridiculous sense of superiority in relation to TV." "TV doesn't care about being superior or inferior to me," "I'm not in its world," "I only exist because I put myself there by force, by saying "I'll write every day, it amuses me."" "And it amuses people like me." "After..." "It's not even understood, beyond that." "It;igt;" "Which is to say that you can't criticize TV without criticizing its audience?" "It;/igt;" "There." "I'd always balked at that because I didn't like the idea of criticizing the public." "But today, we have to, because of the recent evolution of TV." "It seems that, since the last few months, because there have been economic crises, because the advertising boom is over, there's a page turning, so TV is discovering not only that it's no better than the telephone," "but on top of that it discovers that it didn't learn to work much during this quite euphoric period, when nothing was happening and yet... it was flexing its muscles." "So there's an acceleration... a sort of uneasiness in TV which, on the one hand, pleases me, because I saw it coming slightly before the others, but is becoming to bother me a lot." "One shouldn't claim victory because public space is turning into a garbage can." "It will never be replaced by peer to peer private space, so we'll have that problem of the public space, which is the problem I'd wanted to evade in my hatred of theater by cinema, and then from cinema to TV, so which follows me:" "how to belong to a society through what that society produces, and not through the group affects that we'll leave to the son, it's not too far off." "When you're too abandoned and too lonely, what are the transitional objects?" "Is that lighter good?" "Is that film good?" "Is that TV programme good?" "Can I read the other?" "There." "It's my question: it traverses the whole century." "Today I have the feeling that TV is a trial version, or is itself trying to be, something it doesn't measure, because it doesn't measure anything, it's a blind machine." "I mean TV is like society: it has no knowledge about itself, it needs sociologists who are its parasites, who don't see any better than it does." "So it's true that you can't ask TV people to have the awareness of something that passes through them and of which they're unaware." "And me, maybe I can a bit because I have the memory of cinema and I look beyond cinema." "There, that's my little niche." "Also maybe because I come from that tradition of the Cahiers, a tradition quite religious, in the end." "We think that something connects things and people." "It's the absolutely minimal definition of religion and in that sense, I'm religious." "But I'm really not a believer." "And religion went with cinema." "People in communication always have a foot in religion." "But people who make the communication machine work, without having any discourse on it, are in general miscreants." "There's no one more miscreant than advertising or creative people, because they know very well how to create the illusion." "They're in exactly the same situation as the high clergy of the Middle Ages, the one that had studied, and as Lacan says, only theologists can say that they don't believe in God:" "they're well placed... they're well paid to know." "The others, they vaguely believe, and anyway they don't care." "And so there's something that worries me today about TV..." "McLuhan wrote about media, and McLuhan is a rather twisted Canadian Catholic, if I've got it right." "In cinema, it interested Rossellini, who had a religious past, even if he tried to secularize it, or rather to make a secular religion, in the second half of his life, not very convincing but totally heroic," "totally kamikaze." "And Godard, well, he's someone who, he's a good Lutheran." "I mean, he's someone who knows what a holy scripture is." "And why not the Cahiers, and myself within that." "It worries me because those people tended to be imprecators, they were people who said, well..." "And me too, I've said: we'll get our hands dirty!" "I told you already how much I loved, in cinema, the money aspect of things, the power, all these things at which I'm not very good, but never mind, what counts is that it's not forced on me personally," "I'm willing to be the careful spectator of it, when it settles into those film-objects that I like." "I'm not prudish," "I don't do my little experimental cinema universe with my 4 masterworks under my bed, I hate that." "On TV, I select at random, I switch channels, and I wait for something to speak to me, so I'm really in need, I'm really a man of communication." "Not like those who do it:" "I need it." "And TV is the idle, the sick, the elderly, it's the completely dead part of the population." "So it weighs a lot all these people, it's the weight of the dead already on the living." "The living, active people, they do other stuff than TV." "They watch the News and 3 or 4 talk-shows." "So you have to see what TV is:" "it's a big hospital telephone." "So I got interested in TV at some point, much to everybody's surprise: a lot of people..." "And I can't prove them wrong, they're sorry for me, they think "He's crazy, TV isn't an art", some people never hesitated on that:" "TV isn't an art!" "It never will be." "If it had been an art we would have realized, it's existed for 50 years: it hasn't created anything." "It leeched everything, destroyed everything, it saved a few things... ok, but it's no art." "I'd say, I don't care if it's not an art, as long as it communicates." "I'd rather it communicated badly on TV, but it can be made better, than have it communicate very well in Claude-Jean Philippe's ciné-clubs." "Nobody's interested anymore." "Or Michel Ciment, stuff like that..." "Old administrators..." "Well it's my culture, I'm like them." "But there's a "after me, come what may" side, because people like that only come once." "And now I tell myself, yes," "TV is a question of communication, so, in the final analysis, a question of religion, or of interested, religious people." "But then the enemy's taken power, because in religion there's lots of room, lots of roles: it's a little theater." "Catechism has won." "Not the imprecators..." "Godard once said:" "let me do all that you don't like doing." "For example, you don't like filming sports, you do it badly." "You think you do, but you do it badly." "I like football:" "I can film it!" "Of course, they never gave him a football match to film, he would have been capable of not filming the goal, and France would have had a collective collapse." "Or the variety shows..." "I don't know if Godard said that, but it would be funny to see if you could film a popular singer as they filmed Charles Trénet in 1930:" "in close-up, no playback, a real sound, the camera doesn't move, so that we can see what the guy has got." "You'll realize they don't know how to move any more." "Which is normal, since the camera moves faster than them." "Someone who's under a Louma crane is protected." "Guillaume Durand's show is interesting, they invite lots of people and tell them: you're gorgeous, stand up!" "So you see Jean d'Ormesson stand up, saying "I will die for Dubrovnik!"" "And then Piccoli stands up saying "let's have a civil war, it's loads of fun!"" "They're very moving, especially Piccoli, but were they told that there was a crane swishing past at 800mph, and they looked absolutely grotesque?" "You're not responsible for your own body on TV, so it's not worth having someone who can film people's bodies better, it's beside the point." "We are already, with our own bodies," "because it's still our bodies, not computer-generated images- we're lightened..." "We're freed from this question of knowing that you can maybe film a sportsman better," "because a sportsman has his body, and his technique- or even a singer, because in cabaret, for a long time, there was a real gift, a real physical thing, and it's got nothing to do with aesthetic tastes or noble culture." "I mean, Channel 7 obviously doesn't film a modern dance show any better than Channel 1 does Patricia Kaas." "Simply, they don't have the same audience." "One puts on a bit more airs and the other is a bit more lower quality." "It's a very difficult question." "It seems to me that not too long ago" "and it went through cinema a lot, through musicals, for example- not too long ago someone could understand that." "Could understand that there are different ways of making a body exist on screen." "So I say all this, to come back to catechism which is bugging me at the moment," "I have the feeling that in catechism, the question of the body isn't asked." "In catechism, what's at stake is the question of attitudes." "What do you do?" "When do you teach kids to get up, to kneel, to get down..." "Mass:" "I've known that, I went to catechism." "What do you teach them as the minimum basic religious knowledge, generally absolutely unusable and stupid, because theology, which is much more interesting, is kept for the brightest kids." "And the priests often weren't very bright themselves..." "So the question is:" "will television find the formatting and the aesthetic of training necessary to make individuals, determined by the market, learn at last to move together, make movements together, in relation to television, with television." "With it, because they're full of goodwill." "So, degree zero: games." "Games are: come and learn to shout for joy because you've won a slipper, or else." "People go to these games, they win things and they're disgraceful, I find them disgraceful:" "they behave very badly." "As you would when you're at home and you're really not careful, when you're in front of your wife you've just beaten or your kids that you're not helping with their homework." "Games, well, ok, but things like "reality shows"" "we're so ashamed of them we've kept the English word- that are coming from America where they've had huge success:" "still that perpetual thing, that runner-up's bragging recognition that television is integrally an American culture." "Just as cinema was shared among different peoples, so TV is born american." "It could have been born Nazi, it was close, but they lost." "And so it was always American, and still today, the programmes that are copied in France, and they boast of copying, it's amazing: "I'm the one who will adapt to France this programme" "that had a huge success in Phoenix, Ohio"" "...Arizona, not Ohio!" "They really have a low degree of pride, but anyway, moving on." "The games, why not." "But reality show stuff, isn't it:" "TV is teaching you how to at last sell your experience?" "What it's worth, how it should be sold, how it should be shown, how it should be told, how it must be relived, and on what conditions?" "And if you don't learn, thanks to us" "TV is a good daughter, it's really democratic- if you don't learn, thanks to us, to say tomorrow on TV how having been saved from a mortal accident" "15 years ago by a nice neighbour made you reborn." ""Reborn"." "All the lt;igt;" "Nuit des Héroslt;/igt; scenarios are about that:" "I was reborn, and great:" "TV was there!" "Or TV's here today, so I can have my baptism certificate." "We're entering american culture where you're always being reborn." "But it's more sincere with them, deeper, it's their religious streak:" "born-again Christian, all of that." "You say on which conditions there's a rebirth, and on which conditions there's no more transmittable experience." "In general, when people live through a great experience, what do they say?" "They say, "I can't describe it."" "They all say that." "War, they say "It's not what you think, I did it, we had a lot of fun!"" ""...but it was also horrible!" "...we were very bored!"" "I haven't been in any war, but I guess that's what it's like." "The great writers have talked about it well," "I've read "The Applied Warrior"," "I've read books." "It seems to me that the great books also had this function." "And the great films:" "It;igt;" "Grand Illusionlt;/igt;." "I've understood things." "They're things I've always known I would never live through, but the experience had passed into certain objects, which had themselves passed on, been passed on to me, and I'd said, Roger that." "Of course, if there's war tomorrow, it'll be useless," "I'll discover my experience of war, but never mind, it makes me the imaginary Other or the real Other, the partner of the people who lived through that, including before me." "Here..." "In general, you really have to work a lot to transmit an experience, to tell it." "If there has been art, at least in modern, recent times, it's because certain people had the courage to go, to go and bring back experience, and experience is always human." "In the final analysis, it can't be only one person's, it's not possible." "Only one had it, but if he managed to transcribe it, this experience can be shared." "Not entirely, a bit." "In cinema, it was a bit." "In TV, not at all." "So what comes in its place?" "In its place, you tell people, don't give us the" ""I'm still thinking about it..." "I can't tell..." "It happened so quickly..." spiel." "I find it very moving." "Well, it's like porn films: what do you want to pick up?" "Even if you film the sperm coming out, you can't pick up anything." "Everyone knows it, yet mankind eternally starts over with the same..." "It's our destiny: you shouldn't be too stupid in relation to that." "And you shouldn't let people manage it, you have to live it as... our graceful load." "Not as something you'll let Laurent Cabrol manage for you." "So, it seems to me that TV is saying:" ""No, we don't want people's real experiences anymore, because they don't know how to express it"" "and it's true, we're very bad actors of our strongest experiences." "Of course, afterwards you redo them, tell them, write them, you make them into legends." "Especially us, who have access..." "But, when you're honest, sometimes you wonder:" ""What did I really think at the time?"" "What did I think at that moment?" "Did I think of anything?" "Why was I so calm?" "Why did I lose my head?"" "Well, you're entering psychoanalysis, you're entering into a problem that sometimes art can touch." "But not TV, in any case, you need more time, and more honesty." "Sometimes, by chance, someone's experience passes through TV." "One thing that struck me a lot, recently, is d'Aboville." "Gérard d'Aboville reaches America, he's in a frightful state, and incapable of lining up 2 words." "But it's very good, the images, which aren't pretty, speak for themselves." "In media terms, it's a failure." "But it's not important." "D'Aboville mumbles." "And it's very good," "I find it wonderful that on something as considerable as what he did, the least he could do is to not, on arrival, have the sublime quote." "3 or 4 days later, somewhat better, he goes to a TV channel, and someone asks him, looking ecstatic and deeply moved:" ""Gérard d'Aboville, what made you hold on?"" "And he has an answer that I like:" ""In the end, pride." "I didn't want to be defeated." "So, pride."" "Pride is a fault, it's a sin, but still, you shouldn't forget that pride can help a lot, in life, to make you hold on." "Even if it's not only good." "I say, this guy is good, he's not media-conscious, he's got an independent streak," "I'll do what I want, which I don't find very nice, but I'm so fed up with nice people on TV that I now look with love upon anyone slightly disagreeable." "Because you're so fed up with this or that person's frozen smile." "A month goes by, d'Aboville comes back, this time on Guillaume Durand's show." "This time we're deep in catechism." "Of course, catechism is always made by a total adventurer." "And... same question, "Gérard d'Aboville, how did you get the strength?"" "And there, he did give the television speech:" ""it was my dream...", "I wanted to be true to my dream...", and he made an implicit speech, saying that every morning little French kids should wake up with a dream, a child's dream," "and of course it's useless, but that's the beauty of it, and clearly it doesn't save lives, it's slightly sterile, but if everyone..." "And suddenly you end up with an almost Cressonian discourse, about France which, because it has 2 absolute weirdos, in tennis and there, who've won stuff, imagines itself pushing back the borders of its Frenchness." "Well, I think it's exaggerating, and it should be careful." "But it's to say how, in 2 months, someone who tended to resist media and not very good at them, learnt the language: what I call the catechism." "D'Aboville learned to behave, and he learned to shut up, and even he learnt to say what you're supposed to say." "So he didn't talk about his experience anymore." "Because experience is hard to describe to those who haven't live through it..." "So he talked about the meaning of his experience, about how it should be interpreted and lived through." "And he put himself, after his body had recovered, he put himself in the position of the mediator of his own life." "So I think that what TV will try to do, and it's not sure that it'll succeed, in which case it's other things, more sophisticated, which will do it, maybe through advertising," "or much more Big Brother-izing modes of social communication, it's the aspect:" "learn how to sell yourself." "How to sell yourself according to the rules of the market represented by TV." "How to sell your experience." "Don't let others tell it for you, which means, don't let actors act it, no wonder that there's a crisis of cinema, of stories." "Actors are very bothered, they've had their livelihood taken away." "It was their passion, to say, "I will be d'Aboville!"" "D'Aboville says no:" "I'll do it the TV way." "And TV says "aahhh, we love you!"" ""You're a true moral example!"" "So individualism, and catechism." ""The market of the individual, and the disappearance of experience."" "The success of reality shows maybe marks the double trend of the appropriation of TV by society and the formatting of the conformist individual." "The price is to pay is nevertheless immense:" "no less than the erasure of the idea of human experience." ""Audio-visual catechism."" "In the programme, "Mediation", Roger Bambuck suggested wearing an anti-doping badge on jackets." "This wave of desultory objects is worrying." "This minimal way to signal your "convictions"" "shows just how little time there is left to question them." ""Beauty of the telephone."" ""Live war" is a fantasy." "What is "live" is the mise-en-scène of all information: true, false, and missing." ""Fear of the dark."" "First assessment of a world "without Channel 5"." "For the protagonists involved, futility of the spectacle provided by "Television people"." "For the consumers, popular fascination for this euthanasia of a new kind:" "fear of the dark and desire to be part of the decision to unplug the channel." "It;igt;" "You have said, we're not in the civilization of the image,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;but in the civilization of the screen.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "What does it mean?" "It;/igt;" "That's something that I probably took from Virilio or someone else, because it's an idea that's been around." "What's for sure is that..." "To take TV, which is the latest known image system, which vast masses of people take part in..." "It's difficult to talk about TV now as you did before, as if there was a conscience behind it, a black box, or people who decided, who offered things to us, who wanted our wellbeing, who were producers." "There's still a bit of producing on TV." "Variety shows is still producing." "As long as that was there it was like cinema." "So we thought that behind the programmes, there were people who thought the programme through, which is difficult, and different from cinema." "Thinking through a programme and an object are different." "But you can conceive a programme intelligently, the people from Canal+ have proved there's a talent for programming." "Which is an absolute novelty, we didn't know what talent for programming was." "But it's not indispensable, since Canal+ managed to score some points, deservedly so, by thinking just a bit about... about their public." "I.e., by being somewhat appropriate to the way people live." "Actually, by breaking with the mass, to go back to the religious metaphor." "It's because Canal+, at one point, thought that breaking with the mass wasn't a suicidal idea, economically, that they gradually unlocked 2, 3 million subscribers." "I was one of the first." "I wasn't affiliated with the mass and I was glad to find a TV channel like me." "As long as the idea of programming is there, the idea of production, of people who want our well-being -even if they line their pockets- all of that was like cinema." "And then, the emptier it gets on the other side of the screen, i.e. behind the images, the people who make them, the waltz of responsibilities, "it's not my fault... we didn't see it coming":" "it's ridiculous on Channel 5." "Those are people who would get thrown out of any packaging company, but they last for years on TV and everyone watches them tearfully." "Clearly, it's really not the market law of the jungle that operates here, it's something else." "There's a sumptuary economy in TV, which means that Lagardère can risk ruining Hachette not having thought of anything, or having surrounded himself with people who don't think of anything." "Because it's obvious, even from a commercial standpoint, that he didn't stand a chance." "So it makes the question of what moves people interesting." "What is it that today there are people who can't stand to see Channel 5 disappear, people from the public." "Just like not too long ago they'd gone out to defend NRJ." "One of the last big demonstrations." "It's very strange, this evolution..." "So that, it's not my thing, it's politics or sociology, but you can see that all these evolutions are heading the same way:" "the center of gravity is moving towards the viewer." "Which is to say that TV will be more and more on the spot." "It will be indexed to its whims and fancies, and the exchange will be:" "you come and do your own TV, and in exchange TV will" "what I said it did earlier- will give you a few lessons in manners, which you badly need." "I think there's a sort of really basic exchange happening, at the expense of everything TV was when it tried for quality." "But when I say quality, I don't like that word..." "To answer your question, are competent people condemned?" "Yes, of course." "Because it's a completely useless skill, and even discrediting one, since it forces you to sell your singularity." "If I sell myself as Mr Cinema on TV -they won't want me anymore" "I'm selling a singularity." "And that's unacceptable." "Unacceptable!" "It's in that sense that one becomes American." "Because Americans love individuality, love personality," "everything must be very personal- but only like clichés:" "so you have to be personally like everyone else." "And that, only Americans manage it quite well." "How to be personally average." "Above all, how to never be in the minority." "But Americans have a rather strong culture of democracy, and us, much weaker." "So you don't want to be in the minority." "And you don't know what it means." "So you want to be part of the winners' group, and the winners' group is society." "So when society is the winners' group, with the means to test it night and day, with opinion polls..." "Satisfaction polls don't cost anything." "It means nothing." "I mean, they don't even ask people to say "I liked it", they ask them to say "I'm rather satisfied"." "So, I'm rather satisfied of JB's whisky." "Even if I know it's very inferior to the whisky..." "There." "Such and such a whisky with a sublime peat taste." "But I'll be judged based on my "rather satisfied", which represents no particular love." "Ultimately, it sounds pretentious, but lack of love has a cost." "It means that channels disappear and there's no one to say:" ""It's me!" "I loved it, I made it." "I watched it."" "The people who defend it are those who didn't watch it, they don't want it to disappear, but they didn't watch it." "They say, "a channel without News isn't a real channel"." "But News never was a commercial factor," "News is a ruin for all TV channels." ""Fellini-quitous."" ""Fell-unique."" "Or the first, at least, to have understood the "exchange of courtesies"" "between cinema and TV..." ""A little moral, blast it!"" "(...) For what, in the final analysis, differentiates cinema and TV is that great filmmakers are necessarily moralists whereas TV, in the best of cases, wonders about deontology." "About the screen, I think... it's the only reality we are absolutely sure about today." "Between us and the place which, before was the place of the Other" "one of the places of the Other, big or small- there is, for sure, a screen." "And this screen can either connect us to people who want our well-being, who would be the people making TV, so who still broadcast something, who produce and broadcast, but I think it's..." "That's what TV was until now but it's not obvious that it'll be that way for ever." "And then you can use a screen because you have a VCR and the possibilities for domestic uses of images are incredible, total, and that we're only beginning." "So now, when I see the screen..." "everybody's probably like me and in fact I'm rather late, because I'm still watching TV almost in the situation of someone waiting for the serve to send the ball back." "So often I wait a very long time." "So, do you use it for tapes or rather to see if, by chance, on the Hertzian networks, there is something interesting, fun, or unexpected." "Information is what keeps us in that idea of the global village." "That's why, even badly done, we value it a lot." "Because we tell ourselves, today, the world will have been like that." "It's TV telling you." "It's obviously not true, but it's the images of the day." "We know they're tampered with but now we're more careful, we mention "archive"..." "And that's it." "We'll have to make our feeling for the present differently." "We'll have to make it ourselves." "Will it be through screens, I don't know." "It;igt;" "It's the question I would have liked to ask you:" "It;/igt;" "It;igt;ultimately, literature will have made the XIXth century,lt;/igt;" "It;igt;it made the imaginary, the ideals for identification of the XIXth century.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "Cinema did it for the XXth.lt;/igt;" "It;igt;" "End of cinema: where will it happen, now?" "It;/igt;" "It;igt;" "The role model?" "It;/igt;" "It;igt;" "The James Stewart of your childhood?" "It;/igt;" "I have no idea." "I think the weight of the imaginary of which we are the sons, or the "cine-sons", is so huge that..." "I don't have much imagination, I don't know." "When you see lt;igt;" "Terminator 2lt;/igt;, it's a lovely script, it's a shame that the film is lazy, because you see a machine arrive that's simply stronger." "The machine is the stronger one." "Schwarzenegger is weaker." "And this machine is perfectly unpleasant, it's a real machine." "There's no more anthropomorphism." "The bad Terminator is really not someone you would hang out with." "So you look at Schwarzenegger, with sadness, as something still..." "It's a machine capable of making itself human." "So the film, with its huge success with the kids and everything, it does say that we're at a loss there:" "with myths." "But I'm pessimistic all the way because I think that there are myths being patched up," "but that they're real myths, like in primitive societies, or African tales:" "cosmogonic myths." "I think we should..." "so for better or for worse, I think it's out of our hands" "I think Man needs to tell himself again under what conditions there is the human and the non-human." "I thought that the human was a battle we'd won, since I came after inhumanity." "And many of us had this kind of illusion." "So humanity had been won." "The unity of mankind had been won." "Racism was ridiculous." "Today I think all that will be asked all over again." "For example, the question of knowing whether we are the sons of our parents or of the dolphins, which is a serious question, in the children's unconscious, is a mythological question." "When it's told by the Fula or Bambara griots, we say, "what sublime stories!"" "To think that we'll be stuck with them..." "Not me," "I'll really be a posthumous child of history." "The only myth we had, probably you too, was History with a big H." "We were ready to do the craziest things for that myth." "It held us together, and cinema was in History." "In History." "You lived in cinema as in History." "Of course, you wake up one day: it was Yalta, now it's over." "Now you don't understand a thing, you're like everybody else." "Too bad, it was a nice story!" "It lasted 50 years." "So I'm not ahead." "You wake up, at the foot of a world where you'd again need mythology, without bigotry, without religion, wow..." "That seems somewhat hard." "Anyway, what's rearing its head is somewhat worrying," "The first mythology that appears is of course the vitalist earthly mythology, the one that's been used a few times already in history, including once recently under Nazism, and I don't think much of it." "Recently, I was very shocked, there was, in Libé and Le Monde, an ad for a Yoplait foundation, did you see it?" "It was in the papers, it was written in a kitchen-sink French, with a Moon sect aspect to it, manipulated..." "A Yoplait foundation for young sportsmen with Olympic ideals." "I don't know what the link with yoghurts is." "The text was terrifying but it went through, Libé included." "It was terrifying, either in its thoughtlessness, or in its clumsiness: a thought clumsily expressed." "It was, Article 1:" "Earth is naturally beautiful." "Article 2:" "Earth belongs to all men." "It was Earth, the planet." "She was the star." "There was never the word "man", in the 15, 20..." "There were problems between men but the world government was on it." "Moral values needed to be respected, and the slackening..." "And I said, how quickly do you move from that to Leni Riefenstahl?" "I was scared." "Because the ecological ideal, on that side..." "I'm not talking of environmentalism, which seems to be a good thing, at least hard to oppose today, but ecology, in the sense that the first measure that Hitler took was to declare the Black Forest sacred." "That ecology, which has already had its go in the limelight, in modern history, and I don't see why... it wouldn't just be a first go." "Even if we always lived it as "never again!"," ""it can't come back!", and anyway "we'll fight it!"" "We yelled "fascism will not pass!"..." "We studies how Reich had seen fascism rise, how Brecht had seen it, how Thomas Mann had seen it, how the communists hadn't seen it..." "You won't catch me out on how fascism rose everywhere..." "But it's rising now and we're very weak, there are few of us, our ideas are jumbled, and we whine." "But it's rising:" "30% less cinema in one decade, 30% more of Le Pen's ideas." "No doomwatching, but it should inflect what we say differently from what we said 5, 10, 15 years ago," "I mean we, we who speak through..." "That's all we do." "I think that within that, cinema is the beautiful part of the heritage, but slightly thrown out." "There." "Now, mythologies..." "I'm in a fix because I never approached cinema from its mythological side, it doesn't interest me." "For me it was a way to inhabit history and the geography map." "And it seemed possible, and it made me live, and I travelled the world thanks to that, so I at least inhabited it." "But I'm not interested in mythologies." "There were sociologists who wrote the myth of Bambi in 15 volumes, or oafs who will say:" ""Ha ha, you rancid intellectuals, absolutely incorrigible clerks, you make fun of lt;igt;" "Dallaslt;/igt;, whereas it's exactly like The Odyssey!"" "You're ashamed for them, because yes, there are 4 or 5 stories on earth, we've known that for a very long time." "There are very few stories going round." "How come The Odyssey isn't lt;igt;" "Dallaslt;/igt;?" "If people don't know anymore we're in a fix!" "Do we know it ourselves?" "Do we know it well, can we talk about it?" "Have we reread The Odyssey, recently?" "That's where we're at, if we're somewhat honest." "So I tell myself," "I don't think much of the first mythology coming up." "It's, our mother Earth, little sister Earth, our little sister." "And she has all the rights." "And we have none." "And mankind it's debatable, it's negotiable." "There are human populations, they scare us, we're stronger, they're, in many ways, also stronger, in other fields," "it could go wrong." "So will it go wrong because cinema will be dead?" "No, it's a symptom." "Will it go wrong because we won't have created sublime myths?" "But nobody at the UN will make up 2 or 3 myths and save the world." "We should be careful when talking about mythology, it's been a very long time since any new myths have been created." "Literature created 3 or 4." "Since Faust, Don Quixote, ...that's it." "You can tell hundreds of stories, and as long as you tell them you're alive, as long as there's someone to listen to them." "That's a question of hygiene: telling stories." "Putting oneself in the other's place." "But myths, that's something else." "I feel very helpless in relation to that." "English translation  subtitles created by nletore  newland @ KG"