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Whenever you're ready...

Histories of cinema and television.

They could only be told by someone from the New Wave.

The New Wave is perhaps the only generation

which came to the fore mid-century and perhaps mid-cinema.

Cinema is a 20th-century enterprise.

A 19th-century enterprise resolved in the 20th century.

You were lucky to arrive early enough

to inherit a history already rich and complicated

and eventful.

To have taken enough time to see enough films

and decide for yourself

what was more or less important in this history.

To have a time-line...

We know that Griffith comes before Rossellini,

Renoir before Visconti.

And your arrival in a history

that could already be told, could still be told.

Told as a tale, but the story remained untold.

But there was already enough...

enough knowledge and passion

to be able to say...

to know that we come

before one thing and after something else.

Coming to the fore mid-century...

To constitute your own history.

To know who comes after you.

The only occasion to make history...

Not because there are too many films.

There are very few. Fewer and fewer.

Historians of literature say

there was Homer

Cervantes

Joyce.

After these three, they add Faulkner

and Flaubert.

There were very few. Ten films.

Ten fingers. Ten films.

The cinema. My idea

that I can now express

is that it was the only way

of bringing about, of telling, of realizing

that I have my own history.

Without cinema, I wouldn't have known this.

It was the only way.

It was my duty.

The guilty, accursed side.

Marguerite said I was accursed.

The only way, if we can ever tell a story

or make history.

And it never occurred. There was no history...

History of art, a little.

By the French. Not the others.

Diderot, Baudelaire, Malraux.

I place Truffaut after them.

A straight line.

Baudelaire...

on Edgar Poe

is the same as Malraux on Faulkner,

the same as Truffaut

on Edgar Ulmer

or on Hawks.

Only the French related this history.

They suspected they were in a history.

They wanted to know what it was.

Their history in History. History in their history.

History with a big "H" is the history of cinema.

Bigger than the others

because it projects itself.

In a Moscow jail, Poncelet, engineer in Napoleon's army,

reconstructed by memory

the geometry he learned from Monge and Carnot.

His Treaty on the Projective Properties of Figures,

published in 1822,

makes a general method of the principle of projection used by Desargue

to extend the properties of the circle to the conics

and by Pascal in his proof of the mystic hexagram.

It took a Frenchman going round in circles in a Russian prison

for the application of the idea of projecting figures onto a screen

to take flight practically

with the invention of cinematic projection.

For the child,

in love with maps and engravings,

the universe is equal to his vast appetite.

How great the world is

by lamplight!

In the eyes of memory

how the world is small!

One morning we set off,

our brains full of ardor

our hearts swollen with rancor

and with bitter desires,

and we go, following the rhythm of the waves,

rocking our infinity

on the finite seas.

Some, happy to leave

an infamous homeland;

others,

the horrors of their cradles,

and some,

astrologers

drowned in the eyes of a woman,

tyrannical Circe with her dangerous perfumes.

So as not to be changed into beasts,

they get drunk

on space and light and skies ablaze.

The ice that bites them,

the suns that bronze them,

slowly efface

the trace of kisses.

Strange destiny

in which the goal moves,

and being nowhere,

may be anywhere!

In which Man,

for whom

hope is never wearied,

to find a moment's rest,

runs,

always,

like a madman.

We want to travel

without steam

and without sail!

Project,

to enliven the boredom of our prisons,

project over our minds

stretched out like a canvas

your memories with horizons for their frame.

What have you seen?

We have seen stars and waves;

we have seen sand dunes too;

and despite many shocks and unforeseen disasters

we were often as bored as we were here.

The glory of the sun on the violet sea,

the glory of cities in the sunset,

kindled in our hearts an unsettling ardor

to plunge into a sky

whose reflection was alluring.

The richest cities,

the grandest landscapes

never contained

the mysterious attraction

of those which chance creates with clouds.

And always,

desire made us anxious.

We bowed before idols with elephant trunks;

thrones

studded with luminous gems;

elaborate palaces

whose fairytale pomp

would be a ruinous dream for your bankers;

costumes

that intoxicate the eyes;

women

whose teeth and nails

are dyed,

and skillful jugglers

caressed by snakes.

And then, and then what else?

There is a projection:

History with a capital "H",

because it can project itself.

The other histories can only be reduced.

That little poem by Brecht.

"I examine with care my plan.

"It is unrealizable."

Because television reduces.

Or it projects you, but you lose consciousness.

It projects the spectator,

whereas the moviegoer is attracted.

The TV viewer is rejected.

But we can make a memory of this history.

History with a capital H.

Not to forget the capital thing,

we saw everywhere,

and without having sought it,

from the top

to the bottom

of the fatal ladder,

the tedious spectacle

of immortal sin.

What bitter knowledge

we gain from travelling!

The world,

monotonous and small,

today, yesterday, tomorrow, always,

shows us our own image:

An oasis of horror

in a desert of tedium!

Should we go?

Stay?

If you can stay, stay.

Leave, if you must.

O Death, old captain

it is time.

Let us raise the anchor!

This country bores us,

O Death! Let us set sail.

If the sky and sea are black as ink,

our hearts which you know are filled with light.