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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 North by Northwest,
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 Marie-Octobre.
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 Breathless.
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 Night and Fog 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:
“the vile beast” 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 Dallas 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 Rio Bravo, North by Northwest or Anatomy of a ***
-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: To come back to you, Serge Daney...
you studied literature.
How does one become a film critic? I guess you weren’t happy with texts,
with literature, you wanted something else…
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 ***.
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 still 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.
Perhaps you have defined the Cahiers du Cinéma as much as cinema
by talking of elitism and populism, that bizarre mixture.
Let’s say by elitism: the respect of writing,
and by populism: the American B movie aspect.
Would you agree to say:
Chateaubriand + Samuel Fuller = New Wave
or = Cahiers du Cinéma?
How would you now define the Cahiers du Cinéma from that era?
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, Ginger and Fred,
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! So…”
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.
There’s a man who counted for a lot, who died in 1958,
with whom you’ve sometimes been compared: André Bazin.
André Bazin was a catholic. And by the way,
someone should tell why so many catholics got involved in cinema.
But anyway, who is André Bazin for you, today?
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.
On popular myth level, cinema is America.
So I suppose that you went to America.
What was your discovery of Hollywood like?
When was it?
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 Rio Bravo, 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.
1968...
The revolution, the confusion, the commotion let us say,
starts at the Cinémathèque.
The Henri Langlois case...
Where are you, at that point? Because before Cohn-Bendit,
there was this curious file: Truffaut versus De Gaulle.
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.
- After La Religieuse was banned? - After La Religieuse.
The first time we got politicized was with Rivette’s La Religieuse.
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
...La Religieuse.
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 La Religieuse, 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 ***-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, Fahrenheit 451,
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 *** 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.
Le Pont du Nord, 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 “Le Rayon Vert, 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 fait accompli, 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