"Whenever you're ready..." "Histories of cinema and television." "They could only be told by someone from the New Wave." "The New Wave is perhaps the only generation" "which came to the fore mid-century and perhaps mid-cinema." "Cinema is a 20th-century enterprise." "A 19th-century enterprise resolved in the 20th century." "You were lucky to arrive early enough to inherit a history already rich and complicated and eventful." "To have taken enough time to see enough films and decide for yourself what was more or less important in this history." "To have a time-line..." "We know that Griffith comes before Rossellini," "Renoir before Visconti." "And your arrival in a history that could already be told, could still be told." "Told as a tale, but the story remained untold." "But there was already enough... enough knowledge and passion to be able to say... to know that we come" "before one thing and after something else." "Coming to the fore mid-century..." "To constitute your own history." "To know who comes after you." "The only occasion to make history..." "Not because there are too many films." "There are very few." "Fewer and fewer." "Historians of literature say there was Homer" "Cervantes" "Joyce." "After these three, they add Faulkner and Flaubert." "There were very few." "Ten films." "Ten fingers." "Ten films." "The cinema." "My idea that I can now express is that it was the only way" "of bringing about, of telling, of realizing that I have my own history." "Without cinema, I wouldn't have known this." "It was the only way." "It was my duty." "The guilty, accursed side." "Marguerite said I was accursed." "The only way, if we can ever tell a story or make history." "And it never occurred." "There was no history..." "History of art, a little." "By the French." "Not the others." "Diderot, Baudelaire, Malraux." "I place Truffaut after them." "A straight line." "Baudelaire... on Edgar Poe" "is the same as Malraux on Faulkner, the same as Truffaut" "on Edgar Ulmer or on Hawks." "Only the French related this history." "They suspected they were in a history." "They wanted to know what it was." "Their history in History." "History in their history." "History with a big "H" is the history of cinema." "Bigger than the others because it projects itself." "In a Moscow jail, Poncelet, engineer in Napoleon's army, reconstructed by memory the geometry he learned from Monge and Carnot." "His Treaty on the Projective Properties of Figures, published in 1822, makes a general method of the principle of projection used by Desargue to extend the properties of the circle to the conics and by Pascal in his proof of the mystic hexagram." "It took a Frenchman going round in circles in a Russian prison for the application of the idea of projecting figures onto a screen to take flight practically with the invention of cinematic projection." "For the child," "in love with maps and engravings, the universe is equal to his vast appetite." "How great the world is by lamplight!" "In the eyes of memory how the world is small!" "One morning we set off, our brains full of ardor" "our hearts swollen with rancor and with bitter desires," "and we go, following the rhythm of the waves, rocking our infinity" "on the finite seas." "Some, happy to leave an infamous homeland;" "others, the horrors of their cradles," "and some, astrologers drowned in the eyes of a woman," "tyrannical Circe with her dangerous perfumes." "So as not to be changed into beasts, they get drunk on space and light and skies ablaze." "The ice that bites them, the suns that bronze them, slowly efface" "the trace of kisses." "Strange destiny in which the goal moves," "and being nowhere, may be anywhere!" "In which Man, for whom" "hope is never wearied, to find a moment's rest," "runs, always, like a madman." "We want to travel without steam and without sail!" "Project, to enliven the boredom of our prisons," "project over our minds stretched out like a canvas" "your memories with horizons for their frame." "What have you seen?" "We have seen stars and waves;" "we have seen sand dunes too;" "and despite many shocks and unforeseen disasters we were often as bored as we were here." "The glory of the sun on the violet sea, the glory of cities in the sunset," "kindled in our hearts an unsettling ardor to plunge into a sky whose reflection was alluring." "The richest cities, the grandest landscapes never contained the mysterious attraction of those which chance creates with clouds." "And always, desire made us anxious." "We bowed before idols with elephant trunks;" "thrones studded with luminous gems;" "elaborate palaces whose fairytale pomp" "would be a ruinous dream for your bankers;" "costumes that intoxicate the eyes;" "women whose teeth and nails are dyed," "and skillful jugglers caressed by snakes." "And then, and then what else?" "There is a projection:" "History with a capital "H", because it can project itself." "The other histories can only be reduced." "That little poem by Brecht." ""I examine with care my plan." ""It is unrealizable."" "Because television reduces." "Or it projects you, but you lose consciousness." "It projects the spectator, whereas the moviegoer is attracted." "The TV viewer is rejected." "But we can make a memory of this history." "History with a capital H." "Not to forget the capital thing," "we saw everywhere, and without having sought it," "from the top to the bottom" "of the fatal ladder, the tedious spectacle of immortal sin." "What bitter knowledge we gain from travelling!" "The world, monotonous and small," "today, yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our own image:" "An oasis of horror in a desert of tedium!" "Should we go?" "Stay?" "If you can stay, stay." "Leave, if you must." "O Death, old captain it is time." "Let us raise the anchor!" "This country bores us," "O Death!" "Let us set sail." "If the sky and sea are black as ink, our hearts which you know are filled with light."