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Journey of a "Cine-Son"
The Channel-Surfer's Gaze
Régis Debray: The move to Libération is, I imagine, the return to reality for you.
I mean, living among the non-cinephiles.
You can't just enjoy yourself, you have to make yourself understood.
Did you live through it as something pleasing,
the public, News, travel, or as something ascetic?
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.
You've said, "The evolution of media
sounds the death knell of smugglers such as me".
How do you see the future, say of Libé,
the paper, its network, Serge July,
and cinema's place in all that?
In a newspaper of the new era, the audiovisual era.
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 Children of Paradise
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 The Rules of the Game,
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 Children of Paradise 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 *** and Alexander,
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 Ginger and Fred. 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 Ginger and Fred,
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 The Godfather III, 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 *** 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...
...La Nuit des Héros!
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.
A world without cinema, is that possible?
Should we talk about of cinema in the past?
For example, in 10 years it's lost 30% of its audience in France.
What is a world without cinema?
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 Terminator 2 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.
You walked a tightrope between cinema and TV.
Did one teach you something about the other?
Does one understand cinema better from TV?
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.
Which is to say that you can't criticize TV without criticizing its audience?
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 Nuit des Héros 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: Grand Illusion. 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 *** films: what do you want to pick up?
Even if you film the *** 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.
You have said, we're not in the civilization of the image,
but in the civilization of the screen.
What does it mean?
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 J&B'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's the question I would have liked to ask you:
ultimately, literature will have made the XIXth century,
it made the imaginary, the ideals for identification of the XIXth century.
Cinema did it for the XXth.
End of cinema: where will it happen, now?
The role model?
The James Stewart of your childhood?
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 Terminator 2,
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 Dallas, 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 Dallas?
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