Original subtitles

CINEMA OF OUR TIME

JACQUES RIVETTE The Watchman

Jacques, we had an ulterior motive in showing you Fautrier's paintings.

Much has been written about Fautrier, especially by Paulan,

and what he found important was the issue of the human face.

Fautrier painted hostages before and after the war

and about painting, he was the one who said

we can't paint like we did before.

And at the same time, in cinema,

people like Rossellini whom you greatly admired,

were saying the same thing: they can't film like they used to.

The difference between painting and cinema

is that with Fautrier, it was focused on the face,

on the human face, quite literally disfigured.

In cinema, we went on showing faces and characters, actors.

In watching your films again, one after the other,

one thing is striking, and this may surprise you.

You are not a filmmaker who concentrates on faces.

You're not the kind of filmmaker

who during an action, at a moment of pathos or a fateful moment

or a dramatically important moment

says, right, we'll have a close-up on the actress or the actor.

And it's so systematic,

so blatant, whether consciously or not,

that I'd like to put a question to you bluntly.

As a filmmaker, what does the human face mean to you?

You've admired this aspect of other director's work,

people like Dreyer or Bresson or Godard, for example,

who continues filming faces.

What is a face to you?

Is it something that demands respect because it's too intimate

or can we no longer film faces like Griffith did

and we have to do it differently?

I don't think it's a question of having the right...

It's more that I don't want to separate... to split things up...

I know that a lot of filmmakers, whether consciously or not,

who have this notion of splitting the body into bits.

Not just the face, it can be the hand or any part of the body.

But obviously the face is the main focus of the body.

But I know that, when I stand behind the camera and look into the eyepiece

I always have a tendency that I sometimes regret

of stepping back somewhat,

because when I have just the face I want to see the hands

and when I have the hands I want to see the body.

I always want to see the body in its entirety.

And then the person or the backdrop...

the elements in relation to which this body acts, reacts, moves, etc.

I think it's simply linked to the fact that

I don't have the temperament, the taste or the talent

to make heavily edited films.

My films focus more on the continuity of events

taken as a whole.

It's not a refusal to show faces, but sometimes...

I often want to force myself to concentrate on faces

and sometimes I try. I can be proud of myself

when it suddenly works and I say, we'll have a close-up here.

Sometimes I film close-ups then reject them in the cutting room

because they turn out to be incongruous

and have nothing to do with the rest of the scene or the film.

Perhaps the only film that's a slight exception to this is The Nun.

Weren't you tempted to do this, with Karina?

No, because with Anna, as with Juliet or Bulle,

- to name just three when I could name others -

what I like about these actresses and indeed other actors

like Jean-Pierre Léaud or Jean-Pierre Kalfon,

is their entire body,

the overall way the body moves and reacts from head to toe.

And that's what I want to capture on film.

I know what I'm saying is only half true.

Because a filmmaker like Jean-Luc, who films very close in,

knows that as he's filming a particular detail,

what he's not filming will come across.

If he's filming the face or another part of the body,

you can feel the parts of the body that you can't see.

I don't have that confidence. I'm rather timid in that respect.

I prefer to keep a certain distance.

But about Fautrier, I was struck when I read...

- because I didn't know it - a short text by Malraux.

I didn't know Malraux had written about Fautrier.

So I read it in the catalogue, where he says that

what interested Fautrier, and I think he's right,

wasn't the...

When he paints faces, or women or nudes,

it's not the body, it's the flesh.

When he paints landscapes it's not the landscape

it's the human idea of vegetation...

It's strictly the matter that counts.

His hostages aren't portraits,

they are flesh with a sign that says "Hostages".

Don't you feel that, in a way, you've carried on from Fautrier?

In that, in your films one often feels that...

if you were to truly film the body, you'd film the flesh.

For example, one thing that's very striking is that in your films

- which aren't particularly modest or puritanical -

there's a great frankness in the sex scenes whenever they crop up.

What you do film is sexuality.

Sexuality and nothing else.

Not the spadework or the preliminaries,

nor the seduction or the anticipation...

Hence my question about faces.

We don't see love sparked by a look.

We see bodies acting against each other

and from time to time, something...

I sometimes wonder, not whether it's a premeditated decision,

but whether it's one of your firm principles

to fight for sexual desires to be established,

as in The Nun, for example,

but there's no need to enter into the seduction between bodies.

How can I answer that?

Isn't this all part of the same idea

that you can't just slice into people's lives?

I mean in terms of looks, faces, sexuality...

There's a kind of law, the law of environment,

people are cocooned in something that is beyond them

and they react as best they can, using their human resources.

It's more that the scenes you're referring to

- in L'Amour Fou, in Wuthering Heights, -

are scenes I filmed without any particular pleasure

because I felt they were quite necessary to the logic

of interplay between the characters.

I didn't want to film these scenes,

I filmed them because they needed to be there.

So I didn't derive any pleasure from them.

Which perhaps gives them an aspect...

of being purely physical, as you say.

I don't know whether I'll ever do it but for a long time

I have wanted to make a film about bodies,

the way people see bodies and all that that implies.

But at the same time I'm very scared of doing that

because it's very difficult.

It's something I'd like to force myself to do at least once.

But I still haven't found the method that would allow me to do that

in a way that would seem correct.

For example, in an article some time ago for Les Cahiers

you wrote about Rossellini.

You said you'd like to see a photo of a Rossellini film

showing the painter facing his model.

Isn't that the backdrop? Tintoretto, Suzanne et les Vieillards, etc...?

... Behind the primitive scene the fairly repressed scene?

Absolutely. That's it exactly.

What prevents you doing that now?

It's knowing what the status of the painter should be.

Should he be part of the fiction?

That's what I can't work out.

You feel the painter should be in the fiction otherwise he's a voyeur...

Yes, but on the other hand, what is he doing?

Is he really a painter? Is he an actor playing a painter?

Do we see his painting or not?

Do we focus on his face and tell ourselves the painting is off camera?

At the same time it requires an immodesty

that up till now I've hesitated to apply.

I'd have to find the...

... not the modesty of immodesty,

but the right approach for immodesty.

Otherwise it's pornography, or it could become pornography.

DAY

When do you know that a film has the ingredients for success,

a sure-fire storyline, do you ever know that?

For example, L'Amour Fou.

Right from the start you know it's a winner.

From the first day of the shoot things seemed to go naturally.

Straight away Jean-Pierre was rehearsing with the actors

and we started filming the reportage footage for two days

and we gradually slipped the fiction into all that.

Afterwards we made the most of our good start.

It's great when that happens.

In the interview for L'Amour Fou, you said something that sounded strange.

You said, you have to do the easy things

and leave the difficult things to the pedants.

I still think that, but it's sometimes hard to find the easy things!

The thing is, what you find easy others find hard.

Does it mean easy for oneself?

If it's easy for everyone then it's not a good thing.

No, easy can mean what we were talking about yesterday:

working with a certain person at a certain time...

Five years before it would have been difficult,

five years later it'd be impossible.

For example, Piazzola and the lions in Pont du Nord

which remains, according to your criteria,

one of the rare facilities you allowed yourself.

I think it's incredibly profitable and euphoric and magnificent.

It was easy afterwards because we had blanks...

We hadn't recorded any sound of the traffic noise.

So we had blanks in our work copy, which was a nuisance.

We took the first record that Catherine, the assistant, had brought,

the first track on side one,

we laid it down and it fitted so we left it.

You're from Rouen, do you say "go up" or "go down" to Paris?

Neither. We just say "go to Paris".

It's so flat between Rouen and Paris.

Couldn't you stand Rouen, or did you see Paris as the city of light?

No, if you wanted to make films it was the only way.

And it's still the only way thirty years later.

It was a fact of life.

You were in Rouen, you wanted to make films...

It was 1949.

And you went, armed with what? An address, a phone number...?

I had nothing.

There was a guy I knew from Rouen with whom I lost touch soon after...

... and he arranged to meet me in a bookshop, place St Sulpice.

So I arrived in Paris in the morning.

A friend who lived in the suburbs offered to put me up

so I went and left my bag at her place in Noisy le Sec or somewhere like that

and returned to Paris for this meeting at 3 o'clock.

The bookshop manager was in fact a young actor

called Jean Gruault who earned his living running the shop.

Suzanne Schiffman was a regular customer at the shop.

And Jean said, the local cinema club

is showing Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne

and Maurice Scherrer is presenting it.

So at 6 o'clock I was at the Latin quarter film club

to see this film that I'd seen once before while on holiday in Millau.

As there was a storm that night,

the projection kept being interrupted because of the electricity cuts.

It was nice, it added to the film's suspense.

So I watched Les Dames again.

It was the first time in my life I'd seen the very first version.

People complained about two passages that Bresson then cut out.

This was a remaining copy of that first version

that I only knew about from reading the critiques of that time.

I never saw those two provocative scenes again.

You already knew Maurice Scherrer?

I knew him because he wrote articles.

He'd written two or three articles in Les Temps Modernes,

which might sound strange

but Les Temps Modernes was the only real magazine at that time...

And he wrote every week for Combat...

there was a weekly cinema page every Saturday.

There was Objectif '49,

in which there were articles by Bazin, Lennhart, Doniol Valcroze...

And Scherrer had written a few articles that had struck me

as being fairly different from what Bazin was writing,

though he was deservedly seen as the great critic of that era.

So Scherrer was in fact Rohmer.

Yes, he became Rohmer the following year.

I think Rohmer came into existence during the Gazette du Cinéma.

How long did it take for...

- even before the Cahiers du Cinéma existed -

for there to be a Gang of Four? Truffaut, Rohmer, Godard and you.

It happened fairly quickly, because...

I met Scherrer-Rohmer just to say hello that day.

But Jean-Luc, François and I met some months later.

Gruault knew François slightly.

I remember going to see La Règle du Jeu at Studio Parnasse

2 or 3 weeks later on a Tuesday.

Every Tuesday there was a film followed by a debate.

So I went there with Gruault...

And this ragamuffin arrived

and Gruault said, "Oh, you're wearing a tie."

And he said, "Yes, in Renoir's honor." And it was François.

But I saw him later at the Cinémathèque,

where I also met Jean-Luc, who already knew Suzanne.

Suzanne Schiffman, whom I'd met at the Palmes bookshop,

knew Jean-Luc from the Sorbonne, the Filmologie,

the sort of thing that was brand new at that time.

Jean-Luc was pretending to do a degree to please his parents.

I think Suzanne went on to get her degree.

You had a literary degree.

I'd started a degree course in Rouen just to keep me occupied.

But I'd no intention of reading Latin and Greek!

As you wanted to make films...

I regret it now because I'd like to be able to read Latin and Greek

but at the time I was too focused on films.

But the IDHEC school existed then. Did you consider going there?

I thought about it, especially as it was a reassuring option.

It was the kind of thing that would have pleased my parents

because it was a serious school with an entrance exam.

So I applied, I prepared for the exam over a year at the library in Rouen.

It meant I had to read lots of interesting books.

So I passed the written exam but I failed the oral

because I couldn't answer some weird questions.

I told myself it'd be different, though I didn't know how.

I'll turn out differently

but in the meantime, get on with life.

Go and see films, go to the Cinemathèque...

Then when the Gazette du Cinéma came out, and the Cahiers...

Let's write about our views, not to become a film critic,

that was never my aim, I wasn't a critic...

François was, in a big way, but I wasn't.

But from time to time it was a good exercise.

The difficult task of writing down what we thought of a certain director

or a certain problem that related to such and such a film.

God knows it wasn't for the money because the Cahiers paid badly

if they paid at all!

The Cahiers took off afterwards, around 1952-1953,

and became the place we'd meet up every day.

That was several years later.

We formed a little group...

"the HitchcockHawkesians" as Bazin called us.

That was in '53, '54.

So when you arrived in Paris

the intellectual and critical landscape was very structured.

Post-war left wing and right wing, Marxists and Christians...

And among the critics there's Scherrer, a little older than you,

who is a driving force, and the figure of Bazin.

How did you position yourself with regard to all that?

To start with, were you left or right?

To be honest, that wasn't a distinction I made at the time.

It was a period when I tended to read Combat,

which was a left-wing daily.

It's hard to describe...

A kind of watered-down Libération of that era,

less devoted to left-wing politics,

not really matching any party.

And it must be said, that was a time when things were getting tougher.

There was the Stockholm decree... that must have been around 1950,

same time as the Korean War.

So it was a period when I would go fairly often

to see film that were banned by the censors.

They showed them at Communist Party meetings.

They drummed up business by showing banned films.

It only lasted a while, but I saw Mitchurim several times.

Usually Ivens' films and things like that.

I wouldn't say I was tempted by the Communist Party

but I talked to Gruault about it and he said don't be so silly.

He had been a seminarian before and after the Communist Party.

He became an actor...

But we made a screenwriter out of him!

Even if he was a very good actor!

I'm sorry he didn't continue but he lost the taste for it

after he got married and had kids

the idea of acting the fool every night lost its appeal!

And then politics became the authors' politics, it's true.

There were disputes with Positif.

Positif saw itself as a left-wing magazine

while the Cahiers lean more to the right.

Once again, I think that Kast, Bazin and Doniol

need not to be ashamed of their showing against the firebrands of Positif

but all this rather made François and I laugh.

How did you see Bazin?

- You mean... - What did he represent?

You mean knowing his writing or knowing the person?

When you knew him it's hard to talk about him.

I saw him as the only person I'd met

who gave me a feeling of sainthood,

though the word might sound silly.

He was a lay saint.

Firstly in the way he was with people,

the way he received anyone who came to see him.

His time was taken up by seeing almost everyone.

Perhaps not everyone, but still...

And then the way he had

of always supporting the person he was speaking to...

It was fundamental to him, it wasn't just an attitude,

it genuinely was the way he was,

the way he lived his life.

You could only ever respect and love someone like him.

Bazin remains a reference that really means something

because he was the first to truly examine the ontology of cinema,

to use his term, and what he said holds true.

You say you didn't want to be a critic

but yet you wrote in a style

that was by far the most forceful of anyone writing at that time.

Where did this sharp edge come from?

Was it a desire to separate the wheat from the chaff

or to seek a definition?

You did tend to say "Cinema is like this!"...

Seeking a definition, yes,

and the assertive aspect matched my character at the time.

I had a reputation, rightly or wrongly,

of being the St Just of the group.

I preferred the idea of being an éminence grise rather than St Just.

But I suppose St Just was Robespierre's éminence grise.

- Who was your Robespierre, then? - Oh, that was François.

And was there a Danton?

I think we were lacking a Danton.

We had to make cheap versions but they collapsed under fire!

And who would Jean-Luc have been in the French Revolution?

I don't know... perhaps Camille Desmoulins!

No, that's not very nice!

But he was a journalist too!

I think the New Wave in cinema

was rather like Impressionism in painting in every way.

First because of the readiness to go outdoors...

- in fact, Renoir was among the first to use this allegory -

to suddenly simplify everything,

to make the most of technical advances...

As Renoir said, and he was talking about his father,

because paint was suddenly available in tubes

you could go out, stand in front of your subject, and paint.

We were the same. We used new resources...

They weren't really perfected in '58-59 but progress had been made.

The techniques were perfected 3 or 4 years later.

Fast-action film came in around '61-62.

We didn't have them for Paris Belongs to Us.

The Nagra lightweight sound recorders came out in '60-61.

That's why our first films were all looped in post-production

because you'd pick up sounds of trucks passing, which was horrible.

We couldn't do that.

But it's true, there is this point in common...

But all things considered, our films - I say our quite pretentiously -

the New Wave films brought the same fresh approach

in their stories and anecdotes as did Impressionism...

- this way of cleansing the regard -

... compared to conventional films made in studios,

both in terms of the stories that were told

and from the visual point of view, the picture was cleaned up.

My life was quite different before I got into films.

I was wrapped up in parents, school and so on.

Then I jumped into films and found Rivette, Truffaut and so on

among the guides, the natural adoptive fathers.

Back then I thought Truffaut would be too wrapped up in detail,

Rivette would get upset for nothing and I waited to make real films.

Life went on...

and on...

And when I think back to all that,

to Rivette, when I hear his name mentioned,

I think to myself I was most impolite.

To me, everything seemed natural when we worked with Rivette

or Rozier or Truffaut or Godard.

It all sounds very New Wave, which is a bore,

it sounds like film buff stuff, but in 1990 we come back to all that.

Suddenly when I think of Rivette he's like the commander,

the lonely cowboy, the Clint Eastwood of the cinema.

He shows up, surrounded by an army of people,

who... it's funny, but as I'm speaking I can see him over there.

He's dressed in his usual blazer and things...

At the time I saw him as an intellectual

but since I think he's one of the most sensual guys I've met.

It's not because he sees a lot of films but because he eats!

I remember him stuffing himself with crayfish

and I couldn't get over the fact that Rivette ate!

Since then I've met lots of folks who eat but few who make films.

People who I thought didn't care about actors...

Truffaut's in there too, Godard too, Rivette...

Rozier...

These are people who gave you direction.

Not by giving you set orders, by pointing you in a direction.

It's another way of directing, and Jacques had that off to a tee.

Actors often feel frustrated when they're shooting

because they always want to do better, but that's their problem.

They were on unknown territory.

They surfed on a kind of fragility of when the shot was filmed...

that was out there...

trying to catch what Jacques wanted.

Remember your first appearance in Out 1? It was pretty heavy...

For me, it was the day the earth started spinning the other way.

It was a small scene at the Nation café at the Bastille...

I had a scene with Juliet Berto

who thought I looked like Brando.

So there I was in a cap wearing Wild Bunch sunglasses.

I was so crap I couldn't even ride a motorbike.

I rode pillion with a guy named Valézy

who later died in a freak accident in Montparnasse

and whose brother was an amazing poet-electrician...

So it was... you get on this bike, you go in...

I was riding pillion, I went into the café,

and the lights were blazing, it was a non-stop take

with big Glenn holding the camera...

I thought, either life stops as I pass this door or it goes on.

It went on, and that stayed on the film.

And I was astonished... not that no-one said it was good

but that they kept on talking to me!

That was the day I really broke out in a new direction.

Hi, Marlon.

Want a drink?

So you're out of prison. How was it?

So you're a regular here.

Looks like you're doing well for yourself!

Nice machine. Wanna take me for a spin?

With the Indian too. Is that your Indian?

Now you're showing off!

Listen, I'm serious!

Stop messing around. I need some money.

You hear? I need some money now!

- You need money? - Yeah, and quick.

- There's money all over. - I know that.

- So take the money. - A quick scam.

You can find some.

Want me to show you how?

You call a cab, tell the driver to take you here...! Look!

There's money in the till. When the boss is gone, help yourself!

Be cool!

Or you find an old lady coming back from the market,

you help her up the stairs, you see what I mean?

It's not hard, I do it every day, see?

Yeah, but what about after?

You're very tense, Marlon.

Wait, I've got it.

Bitch, there are loads of slags like you round here.

You're not the first.

What do you take yourself for?

So you're looking to beat me up, eh?

Bastard!

A scotch, barman.

He's crazy!

Jacques is just like Clint Eastwood.

He's got this kind of weird Corsican walk.

The upper body doesn't move, just the legs...

9... 5... 3... 6...

2...

We have unfinished business, Pierrot.

You'll get what you want, but I need it.

Give in, and you'll get it all.

In the name of the Salamander...

You know what Deleuze wrote about Godard?

He's a man alone but highly populated inside.

That description was a hit, because it sums it up well.

It describes us all a little bit, and the state of filmmaking.

It could be applied to you, you watch films, you're highly populated

with all the characters from other people's films.

You prefer the company of films to the world of films.

But you're also somewhat of a loner...

It's by choice or imposition? It's hard to say.

Did you always know it would be like this, or did you say

I'll just go my own way even if I go alone?

I don't feel as alone as you're making me out to be!

At first, there were my first films...

The first was Paris Belongs to Us.

I only made that because François

and later Claude Chabrol really pushed me into doing it.

Especially François.

And they carried on until it was finished

otherwise the film wouldn't have been made.

Afterwards we - each one of the Cahiers du Cinéma crew -

more or less went our own ways

... even through the disputes and the misunderstandings

without losing contact with each other.

The big quarrel or dispute, however I should put it,

between Jean-Luc and François

was a sign of mutual respect.

Mutual indifference would have been far more serious.

I've never felt alone, even in terms of backing.

I've worked with few producers.

First I did two films with Beauregard

then four or five with Stéphane Tchalgadjieff.

In between there was Barbet for Céline and Pont du Nord

and Martine Marignac for all the recent ones.

Each time, they've been people with whom...

- whether Beauregard, Stéphane or Martine -

we're not that close...

We don't see each other all the time, but...

I think there's a real... I've always felt they have

the right approach to what we were trying to do.

So you see people when you're working with them?

When work's over, nobody knows where you are,

you don't especially want to see them, there isn't that conviviality...

When we've finished work... it happens fairly often

but I don't think it's particular to me

or especially particular to the film industry. It happens to novelists,

people who have worked on something over a long period,

there's a time of...

A kind of intermission.

There are two kinds of filmmakers:

the ones I envy, who are able to line up projects

one after the other, as François did,

who always have subjects more or less prepared

in various stages of advancement...

just waiting for the right time to shoot.

But for me, one project takes everything out of me

and then there's a time of emptiness

which isn't always linked to worry.

It's just a vacuum period.

Talking of loneliness, I find that for film directors

it's something rather particular

as cinema is an art that uses a lot of society's resources:

machines, people, money, time and especially social contact.

In your case, when you make a film you are in the real world

and when the film's over you've no car, you have few possessions...

You have books and records...

It's as if you deliberately step outside society,

what people see as the social whirl.

And I find that, for a filmmaker,

especially as you're not someone who makes films about loners

- there are hardly any lonely people in your films -

it's as if you mix up life and the work,

as if your work was everything that we don't experience in life.

Don't you feel that's fairly dangerous?

That's the feeling you get around three in the morning

and it's hard to go back to sleep!

But during the day, when you go out and see...

That's why you shouldn't stay home too much, and I don't.

I go out to see films...

I like taking the metro for the superficial contact you get

with society, with the city.

But it is a kind of contact.

You can't take the metro without looking at people.

Sometimes people...

talk or behave in a way that invites you to watch them.

There's a lot of eccentric behavior in the metro.

It's a place that's absolutely full of drama

that I think is hard to...

Nobody has yet managed to show that in a film.

Vecchiali, slightly, in the metro sequence in Once More.

And that obviously doesn't show a deep knowledge of social life.

And there are others.

I'm more a believer in diagonal consciousness, in permeation,

in newspapers, because I like to read the papers.

I spend a lot of time doing that.

The world of filmmakers

is a bit like a secret society.

You know there are people in the world who have seen your films

and found them important, people in the USA, Russia...

They become part of their make-up, they're affected by them.

Do you ever think that, after all, there's a kind of Rivette Effect?

That's sounds a little too overblown.

No, but what does happen, as it happens to other filmmakers,

is that I receive letters from the ends of the earth

that are very surprising, sometimes long after the film came out at home.

Obviously that's very enjoyable.

It's a proof that the film has been seen.

Irrespective of what people write,

it's the fact they felt moved to write from the antipodes...

I was very glad to receive a letter from a young girl

- there were only letters from girls for that film -

that came from California, Berkeley or somewhere,

and on the back of the letter was the print of her hand in red.

I didn't need to open it to know it was about Céline and Julie.

My feeling is that these people who have been affected

and who have these individual ways of showing that...

They constitute a kind of widespread secret society.

We're obviously not talking about lots of people,

unfortunately for the film producers!

But that still shows the positive aspect of the plot.

Out was a film about a positive plot...

It was utopian, entirely dreamed up by Jean-Pierre Léaud.

But it wasn't... plots aren't necessarily negative.

Films are always... Perhaps this had already been said, but

every film is a little plot involving people

that either works or doesn't work.

It has an aspect... - wait for a good sound -

every film has this secret society aspect.

Directors are obsessed with the idea that you never film what you see.

This landscape is full of things, it's very nice, very "Rivette"...

It recalls Pont du Nord and at the same time

when you see it, you're gripped - as we were saying -

both by admiration and angst and you wonder:

do you follow a character here

or do you look for a line or a landmark?

The feeling I often got when we were shooting Pont du Nord

was that we'd arrived in these places, you can't call them sets,

which were sometimes not as amazing as this one

where you can turn 360 degrees, there is a vastness,

a richness to whatever happens here and a certain unity

in the decor, in the feelings...

And what can you fit into this space?

How can you capture this vast space,

not to mention the story's characters and what they do,

in a little rectangle?

We used to use wide-angles lenses...

Even then I felt someone had put a telephoto lens on the camera!

Some sets have their own directions, their own lines.

Here the lines are given by the railway.

But sometimes when we'd film...

one time at the demolished Vaugirard abattoirs,

I spent over an hour plotting arbitrary lines

on a vast wasteland where there's a tower,

a kind of lighthouse that's still there.

But there was no need

to film it from any particular angle, it was completely arbitrary.

After the first shot the others follow naturally.

But is cinema a machine that's supposed to

transmit the idea of landscape? I don't think so.

It's hard to imagine a film where you settle into a landscape

as a painter would sit in front of a hill

or Mount St Victoire or a wall of trees...

Something you often wrote when you were a critic

was: Good God, cinema is not a language!

No, cinema is not a language.

We were talking about this a few days ago.

That was something that struck me when I suddenly saw

the great silent films, the ones from 1915-20, not the later ones.

Griffith and Stiller rather than Lang and Murnau.

They showed such a strong view of reality

which seemed possible then but later...

As if there was a state of innocence that subsequently disappeared.

That was the first text I ever wrote.

The title was, "We are no longer innocent", which I felt strongly.

The more time goes on, the less innocent we become.

Here we should use Kleist's famous quote:

"The only way to Innocence is the long road via Knowledge."

Have you seen any films recently that gave you the feeling

that we're seeing good, strong, unexpected things again?

Yes, I've seen several.

A film that impressed me...

It was a film I wanted to see

so I was scared of being...

I wanted to like it.

It was Peau de Vache by Patricia Mazuy.

I wanted to like it simply because of the actors playing in it.

I've never met her.

I was moved by the film for a number of reasons.

The relationship between people...

From the start, you feel like the film is leading somewhere

and the more it goes on, the better it gets,

the more the relationships become

both more intense and also more mysterious.

And we suddenly come to a scene

which I found extraordinary,

so shattering I went to see it again the following week

both for the pleasure and also to check on that scene

and see what happened and how it was filmed.

The first time I almost had the feeling

of those scenes that you dream, I often do that.

I dream I'm in a cinema watching a film

and seeing wonderful things but then I wake up

and it's gone. But here, it was on screen, I hadn't dreamed it!

It's Jean-François' final scene... I can't remember the character's name.

Like everyone else, I talk about films using the actors' names!

Jean-François sets off on the road.

That's the first shot of the scene.

In the next shot...

we see Sandrine Bonnaire running towards him.

She catches him up, tries to stop him,

and they carry on walking and talking for a while

until they fall into each other's arms and kiss.

And Jean-François turns to Sandrine Bonnaire and says:

"Bring the girl and come away with me."

That's all one take, hand-held I think,

fairly bumpy but following the movement.

It looks good, the camera accompanies the characters.

Suddenly there's this close-up on Jean-François

which shocked me the first time I saw the film.

Because it cuts into this wonderful long shot

and shows him watching Sandrine Bonnaire after asking her.

It's a short shot,

followed by a reverse angle close-up on Sandrine Bonnaire

who doesn't answer, she just looks at him.

Then her face begins to move,

she begins to move

and we understand by her movement

that she's going to him but he's no longer there.

The camera continues following her from behind.

We follow, the camera moves behind her

and we see Jean-François heading up the road, stopping a truck

that's coming towards us and climbing aboard,

all in this shot that started on her face.

It all happened, from Jean-François' reaction

to the fact she didn't reply

and his leaving, all happened off camera,

we only saw Sandrine Bonnaire's face

then her movement, and that's it, it's over, he's gone.

It's virtually the last shot of the film.

I thought it was a magical shot,

very well filmed and at the same time

it conveys emotion

through the inventive use of the camera.

You almost have to be a filmmaker to appreciate it.

It was very simply done.