Original subtitles

Jean-Luc Godard interviewed by Serge Daney

Tell us 10 seconds before.

When you're ready.

(Hi)stories of cinema and television.

So: "(hi)stories" in the plural, and both cinema and television.

That's your project.

There are, of course, lots of reasons - we'll come back to these -

why you were the best person to write this (hi)story.

But before we get to that...

What strikes me is: it had to be done by someone of your generation.

That is, the New Wave generation.

"(Hi)stories" with an "s"... Because...

Right.

Because now there are lots of ways of telling lots of (hi)stories, perhaps.

The New Wave is maybe the only generation

that began making films in the 50s and 60s -

that is, both in the middle of the century and, perhaps, in the 'middle' of cinema.

In other words, you had a remarkable privilege.

I'm pleased that you say �50s and 60s,� because...

Right. I'm thinking of short films, preparations... and film criticism.

Well, yes... and even before... It was more or less 1950.

So this was the middle of the century.

And if we go with the convenient hypothesis that

the 20th century was the century of cinema,

then it was also the "middle of cinema".

And, you had the tremendous privilege...

Actually, I'd say... Though, we'll come back to it...

I'd say cinema's a 19th-century phenomenon, that was "settled" in the 20th century -

with a gap of 50 years, because the 20th-century part began in the 50s too.

Right. Hence �(hi)stories� in the plural.

Right.

You were lucky enough to have got there in time

to pick up a (hi)story that was already rich, complicated and turbulent.

You'd also seen enough films - or had taken the time to see them,

as film lovers, first, then as critics -

to get together your own conception

of what was and wasn't so important in this (hi)story;

and to have had a linear, albeit imperfect, timeline

- you knew, for instance, that Griffith came before Rossellini

and that Renoir came before Visconti.

So you had a linear timeline and you could pinpoint your entry

into a (hi)story that could already

be told, that was still tell-able.

Plus you were lucky enough to have immediately...

But a (hi)story that...

that had, so to speak, been �reeled off� but not really told.

Right, but there was already enough,

or still little enough,

enough gaps, but also enough knowledge and enough passion,

to be able, roughly speaking, to say what came before and after.

And to know that there was

a �before� and an �after� you arrived.

You'd come before something and after something else.

The fact that you arrived mid-century,

that you knew what you were inheriting more or less - both good and bad,

what you liked and didn't like...

I think it took us a while...

To get back to the idea of coming in before or after.

I think I caught on to that very late. Sorry to...

We might say that Truffaut, say, had a greater sense of that.

I'm talking about a whole generation. The Cahiers Du Cin�ma group of the time.

I think you definitely caught on to that later than the others.

You theorised about it more, but you did so later.

So it maybe took longer to...

...to ripen,

but out of everyone you're perhaps, deep down, the closest to a historian.

But that's another matter.

I think it didn't happen before

because of the war,

because people didn't have

the opportunity to see films,

or because film criticism wasn't ready, say.

And then it didn't really happen afterwards for a very simple reason:

all of a sudden there were too many films

to see, or to catch up on,

that had formed an enormous heritage: the (hi)story of cinema.

Because from the 60s onwards we saw films

not only by four or five big filmmaking countries

but from all over the world.

Nowadays it's impossible for someone in their early 20s

- short of spending, say, ten or fifteen years in the Cin�math�que -

to watch all the films they haven't seen, first,

but also to have an axis

around which they can build their own (hi)story:

to know, for instance, that they come after you

and that they need...

to be aware of that.

And so, something that was taken simply to be a sort

of brilliant anecdote

in the (hi)story of French cinema,

rich in controversy

and panache,

now seems,

with hindsight, almost 30 years later,

to be the only opportunity to do some history.

You got this opportunity, as did, perhaps,

those of the generation, or half-generation...

up to, I'd say, Wenders.

The only way of doing history.

I'd argue.

It's not because there were too many films.

There are fewer and fewer. Plus, at some point,

the literary historian says, "Well, there was Homer,

Cervantes,

Joyce,

even Flaubert...

and Faulkner."

Once they've said the first three they add Faulkner...

and Flaubert. So let's go with that.

So...

I'd say there have been very few films - ten, let's say,

since we have ten fingers: ten films.

Cinema...

or rather my idea, or my desire

and unconscious feeling, which can now be expressed consciously,

is that cinema is the only way...

to do, to tell, and to gain awareness...

Say, to know that as an individual I have my own story,

but that I wouldn't be me without cinema.

I have a (hi)story as �myself�.

It was, if you will, the only way,

and I owed it that.

Say there's a Calvinist or a Lutheran -

they always have a sense of being guilty

or �cursed�, as Marguerite says.

She says I'm cursed.

I... Well, it's worrying.

But it was the only way - if it is ever possible to tell a story

or to do history.

And actually it's never been done. There's never been a history of letters.

Maybe a handful of Egyptologists...

a bit of history of art, but, I hastily add,

only visual art -

cinema being partly visual.

We have some bits of history of painting -

done...

(I'll come back to this)

by the French.

Not by anyone else - by the French.

I'm not saying there were no other art historians out there.

But only the French did it. Basically: Diderot, Baudelaire, Malraux

and personally I'd add Truffaut straight after.

They follow a direct line.

Baudelaire on...

on Edgar Poe.

And likewise Malraux on Faulkner.

And Truffaut on...

well, say, Edgar Ulmer or...

Hawks.

There's something there. And it's typically French.

Almost no one has done history apart from the French.

There's something in that.

The people you name all have something in common:

they knew they were positioned in a (hi)story...

- They suspected they were. - Yes, straight off.

They wanted to know.

They wanted to know which (hi)story:

their own in the big (hi)story,

but with the big (hi)story in their own.

They also decided not to inherit passively

what had been left to them in their art,

but to find their own precursors.

Take, for example, Baudelaire translating Edgar Poe.

I'd say the big (hi)story is the (hi)story of cinema.

It's bigger than the others because it's projected.

The others, on the contrary, tend to be reduced.

In writing the (hi)story of madness,

Foucault reduced madness to that.

When Langlois

projects Nosferatu,

and you can see, in the little town

where Nosferatu was,

the ruins of Berlin

in '44...

That's projection.

In simple terms, it's the big (hi)story

because it can be projected.

Other (hi)stories can only be reduced.

But the big (hi)story can be projected.

So my aim...

There's a little poem by Brecht that goes:

"I carefully consider...

I carefully consider my plan:

it can't be done."

Why can't it be done?

Because it can only be done on TV, which reduces.

Or which projects... but which projects you.

But we lose consciousness in that case, because TV projects the viewer,

whereas those in cinemas were attracted.

A person watching TV is cast off.

But we can make a memory out of a (hi)story that can be projected.

That's all we can do.

But it's, let's say, the big (hi)story.

What's now happening with this big (hi)story is this.

If we take the (hi)story of cinema,

which is much longer in the past -

naturally, since lots of films have been made

since your generation first started out,

including your own films...

then we realise that we will soon have no choice but to speak of cinema...

Though I'd say that generally there are fewer films.

We make fewer nowadays. Let's be clear.

Because there were plenty made in Mack Sennett's day.

- Right, but there are more to see and... - Because they're similar...

... there are more that seem different.

Because they're like double entendres, or clones, in the biological sense.

So like imitations.

I mean, if you take Mack Sennett and...

James Cruze,

there you have two films.

But if you take Lelouche and Jean-Jacques Annaud - it's the same film.

Even if you take myself and Stroheim, nowadays it's the same thing.

- Hence why we're a bit gloomy. - Of course.

It's something you notice when you watch a film on TV

It's a good microscope rather than a telescope.

If I'm interrupting too much just tell me, OK?

It's... We can see that...

what we called �cinema�, or what we liked and called �cinema� at the time

is beginning to look awfully similar in the past and the present,

and to seem fairly distinct from something...

something that doesn't yet have a name;

for want of a better word we'll say �audiovisual�.

It's more and more striking.

There are more and more audiovisual products.

And among them the �cinema� part

is easier and easier to identify.

It's something that strikes me in the films I see again on television.

It's no great mystery.

There's something you discuss

in your proposal

that touches on two or three big hypotheses -

hypotheses focusing on, I'd say, civilisation or culture in the broad sense.

That is on the very forms of people's perception

of the world,

and that is based on light and shadow,

time, editing and so on.

One sometimes sees types of image

that are cinema-like:

that are recorded, that are still filmed with cameras,

and that are still watched by people.

And in these cases one wonders

- hence why I agree with your �(hi)stories� in the plural -

if we hadn't better...

rather than always despising these films in the name of the cinema we loved,

put them in a different category, albeit one that interests us less.

In any case, it's a question I often pose concerning

recent films we've seen that have been very successful

and that we agree are either not good or else frankly dreadful.

We spoke about The Bear.

I said, "What's it even got to do with cinema?"

Even if it's being shown in cinemas, even if it attracts an audience...

of more or less zombified viewers.

That's the same as asking what the Nazis kept wanting from the Jews.

After a while, the more they destroyed them the less they could shake them off.

Do you mean that the audiovisual might have regrets over cinema?

Yes, that's true at the moment.

Cinema is the slave and remorse of the audiovisual. But that's...

doubtless a twist in the road.

I don't know what it was

and what I did in that respect.

And so one gets thinking at the end of one's...

that is, at the first light of the eve

of one's life.

But it's a matter of first light giving way to dawn.

So you get thinking about this dawn.

- 20 minutes already. - Already?

You don't notice.

But were you going somewhere with this?

Yes, I wanted to ask you

about this idea of linearity that became impossible.

OK?

Sure, good idea.

So even if you had ten films because you have ten fingers,

you knew who came before, who came after, who drew on whom, who betrayed whom,

who kept the flame alive, who scrambled things.

There's a (hi)story of cinema specific to the Cahiers...

I'm not so sure that... Even Rohmer, who was an academic...

Or Sch�rer.

I'm not sure they had a conception...

of history in the sense...

I think that Sch�rer, say, who was a university lecturer,

and who knew that,

chronologically, Flaubert came after

Homer and Thomas Aquinas.

I'm not sure he'd think, if he saw,

for example Nicholas Ray's "Bigger than Life",

(since he wrote about it),

and, say, Murnau

who he helped introduce in France after the war...

I'm not sure

there was anything when he spoke about it

that implied that

...Ray came after Murnau.

That's not what I mean.

Maybe he thought he came after, and so it wasn't something...

That's not what I mean.

...there was something else

because it's a place, a territory, that we had...

The thing I remember from the Avenue de Messine screenings?

It was a place that had no (hi)stories.

I think that's why...

we were so completely

...completely overwhelmed.

It wasn't even, as they say, the discovery of a new continent.

Foucault and others have said that:

the discovery of a new continent.

Suddenly (hi)story is being told differently -

not like Renan tells it, not like T�nes,

not like Spengler.

There was an unknown feeling -

in the literal sense

of the word.

We'd never seen a world

that had no (hi)story

but that was constantly...

telling stories.

Whereas the first time I read Gide I knew

right away, the first time I read him

and felt the effect,

that he came after, say, Mozart -

chronologically speaking.

I don't remember feeling...

It all happened automatically.

No, but that's your own experience of it.

In any case,

you could still have in mind, say, Sadoul's history of cinema.

That's what I read as a kid.

I've never read it.

Well, a lot of people have.

- And Sadoul had a �before� and �after�. - But he was read...

Ah, but he was read, not seen.

Something very important: what we saw was not written.

And we never had the feeling - which, by the way, spared us,

since we all wanted to write a novel;

it's what everyone was doing at the time.

Astruc did it.

I was in awe of Astruc,

who'd been published by Gallimard,

of Sch�rer, when he published his first novel.

and of, Elisabeth, published by Gallimard,

and, of course, G�gauff, who'd been published by Editions de Minuit.

At the same time, it was a sort of delivery.

Because we felt,

when watching those screenings,

that we no longer had to write.

I think it was afterwards... People left, came back...

Apart from, I'd say, for certain,

Rivette and myself.

And perhaps Straub.

And then a few people who we liked much more in cinema than others -

their films were perhaps less good,

but no matter.

We had the feeling that we didn't need to write.

Writing was terrifying.

How could you expect to write better than Joyce or...?

...or Rilke?

Whereas in cinema you were allowed...

if you will...

you were allowed to do

things without class,

and that made no sense.

The simple fact that they'd been made like that...

gave them value.

Whereas in literature and elsewhere - even in the paintings you saw -

it just wasn't possible.

There was a sort of justice - judges who judged you.

Impossible.

I think there was a feeling of freedom.

A man and a woman in a car.

As I've often said, once I'd seen "Journey to Italy"

- a man and a woman, even if I'd never made a film then,

I knew I could do it.

And I didn't care if I didn't measure up to the �greats�. It wasn't an issue.

And the fact that you could do it gave you...

a certain dignity, or something like that.

I think you'd better ask me questions yourself.

No, but there's perhaps something we disagree on in matters like this,

and that intrigues me:

how can you write for the cinema?

- You didn't let me ask my question. - Right, go ahead.

No, no, it's just a matter of principle.

I'll pick up what you were saying - the last part of your sentence...

- No, no, go back to where you left off. - It's easier...

Since I'm no good at keeping the thread, it's OK if you keep interrupting.

I like to grab the ball and run with it.

It's just on principle, because we're already touching on things...

- No, no, we'd better get back on track. - ... things I thought we'd discuss later.

If you remember?

Right. I'll ask you the question straight off.

Even if you experienced things as you just said,

that is, with a feeling of possible freedom

and of possible liberation...

Plus it was after the Liberation -

an important time for European cinema.

Even if it's understandable now,

the fact remains that...

the films available and on show

were rather similar.

That is, the (hi)story of cinema did not stretch back...

50 or 100 years.

I think that nowadays a person drawn to cinema,

interested in cinema

would be in a position similar to where...

we are today with literature and painting.

That is, we speak of, for example, the Venetian school...

Not exactly...

...and so we forget that Tintoretto was born

some 30 or 50 years, say, after Titian,

because both are Venetians.

And we can easily say: "I'll take Tintoretto

and I'll put him alongside a contemporary painter."

And I'm allowed to. Because apart from intellectuals

and art history teachers,

chronological order

and distinguishing between generations -

that is, knowing who came before and after,

is no longer really a concern.

I think cinema got to that stage some time ago -

perhaps after you,

which is why I say you are the first,

and probably the only and the last person

to be able to to tell the (hi)story - even in the plural - of cinema.

It's because you lived it - in the present

then digested, steeped and theorised it in your work,

and now you think it's worth adding some history.

That is, that it's worth adding a chronology other than Sadoul's:

first lesson on Griffith, second...

I see.

But in the style: �we are allowed�. That, too, could perhaps be liberating

for people who don't want to give up the best aspects of cinema,

since they can say, for instance: "I'll take silent films".

We're seeing a movement among the young,

for whom silent films are suddenly in favour.

Whereas for people like me, say, silent films are associated

only with films made by silent filmmakers

because we're just terrified of the practice of authors.

I don't want to tell them -

I say this as a film critic -

"You can't take, on the one hand,

say, Wim Wenders,

who is a contemporary of yours,

and then, say,

Murnau, who's different, although there's some common ground...

without knowing what came between."

At most I'd say: "Work with what you want, but do so properly."

I think that's how it's going to be from now on for the (hi)story of cinema.

It's going to be a bit like, unfortunately...

You said you had to take the history of literature

or painting - that is, of arts with a very, very long history.

Absolutely.

So my question was: when you make your (Hi)stoires du Cinema,

which you're doing with a transitive, let's say, or educational, aim,

and if you think of someone who is, say,

forty years younger than you...

Do you want to give that person the desire

to go after something (that is, cinema),

which is practically an essence

that was achieved straight off

and that has been celebrated, with varying success, ever since?

Or do you want to say:

"Here's what I experienced in all of this,

here's what was seen,

what was visible,

here's something of which

here's something of which I am the last

the last remaining custodian."

I wouldn't say that. Others can say it if they choose.

It would be more...

It would be more like the second thing you said.

I have a strong feeling...

I mean, I believe...

I believe in humankind

In the sense...

that people produce "works".

People should be respected because they produce works -

be it...

an ashtray, a zapper...,

a car, a film or ...

or a painting.

From that perspective, I'm not at all

humanist

And then, as for this politics business...

When we... when Fran�ois talked about �authors politics�...

I mean, nowadays we only retain the word �author�.

It was the word �politics� that was interesting

The authors aren't very important.

If Hitchcock had made "Rebel Without a Cause",

we'd all be praising Hitchcock.

It just doesn't matter.

Nowadays all that's... well, I don't know.

Consequently there's no...

We have such - or so we say - respect for the author

that we no longer respect the work

and our respect for the person

is restricted to words -

and we don't even respect

the words anymore.

Serious people excepted.

Dolto - to name someone well known.

Though there are doubtless many who are unknown -

ordinary people.

The only person I know

who respects the work as much as they respect author...

Actually, it's women rather than men.

Since women have children,

the work and its author... well...

There's a balance, justice, a democracy.

Men don't have that,

other than through constant backs and forths.

In cinema there was such a...

We spoke freely of works,

but we never insulted the authors.

We always insulted the works.

It was the authors who took it upon themselves to feel insulted.

Instead I'd say:

"OK, there's something that existed, but that we don't see."

And this thing was nonetheless relatively...

I unique. It belongs, rather...

Something like that must have happened during the...

recently...

give or take two or three thousand years,

when Misenum was destroyed.

And before,

some 400 million years ago,

with the extinction of certain types of plant and animal.

In this case there was something...

Simply because it was

what we call the �image�.

But an image in itself

is just an image, if you will.

It's just a more or less large movement.

The image in question was telling us something

but we didn't want to listen.

We preferred to speak rather than listen and didn't...

In this sense, for me a work is a child,

and the author is the adult - the parent.

The parents... it was quite something.

The child showed the parent

who they were,

while also speaking

of itself. But the parents wanted

...wanted none of it

and were even

a bit scared by it.

It's this notion, then:

it was the only possible (hi)story of humankind -

if there is one.

Maybe this will change later, but up till now,

chronologically, for some 400 million years

From 1700 and 1900...

and up until 1990-2000,

a certain way of telling stories

has been considered history.

The only history. And we see it clearly.

Though of course it needs

to be proclaimed.

That is, you need to do like L�vi-Strauss, Einstein or Copernicus

If you say,

Copernicus...

In around 1700,

or 1540 - I'm not sure of the dates -

the earth...

the sun stopped going round the earth...

Well, that's Copernicus.

And another book tells you

that around 1540

Vesalius published his first �corch�s,

and we saw the insides of the human body.

And then... Has it run out?

Has the film run out?

We'll start over, then.

Sorry... Do you want us to...?

No, no. You should say - so we can take a break.

No, at one point... But then you got going, you see.

Oh but... just stop me.

Yes, I think...

At some point,

around 1540: Copernicus.

Suddenly, around that date, the sun stopped going round the earth.

It was Copernicus who gave us the idea.

Or the fact, rather.

And then in more or less the same year - give or take a few years,

we saw the insides of a human body and

Vesalius published

De humani corporis fabrica - or something like that,

which contains his �corch�s - the skeleton and �corch�s,

which were a type of painting

that was not part of painting at the time.

So history tells you...

You've got Copernicus in one book, then in another you've got...

What does cinema do?

Incidentally, Fran�ois Jacob did it - that's where I got the idea.

When he says: "In the same year were published..."

What's he doing there? Not biology but cinema.

History is elsewhere, too.

Take Cocteau, when he said:

"If Rimbaud had lived to see the day,

he'd have died the same year as Marshal P�tain."

So you see the portrait of the young Rimbaud

and you see the portrait of P�tain

in '48 or '49,

and you put the two together.

That gives you a story.

I'd even say, you have history.

A story plus history - that's cinema.

That's cinema.

Only cinema -

all I'd like to tell people is:

only cinema can do that.

In fact, the beginning of my work is called All the (Hi)stories,

Then - look at the titles:

the second part is called A Single (Hi)story -

all the (hi)stories, but a single (Hi)story.

And then you have: Only Cinema -

which means that only cinema did that but that cinema was alone.

So alone that... Well, there it is.

You can of course add something here or there.

But that's the basis of it all.

Of course. This is your characteristic mindset -

you always have one foot in science

and even a tendency to assimilate art and science a bit too readily.

- Take Vesalius's pictures, for example... - Ah... but how...?

No one but specialists look at Vesalius's pictures nowadays.

Nobody's going to go and read Copernicus in Latin...

Fran�ois Jacob saw them, and he was given the Nobel Prize.

If he didn't, he wouldn't have had the Nobel Prize.

OK, but say you take a big name in editing

Vertov, say...

Wait, let's discuss this, because...

Well, there's the classic concept of history:

cinema as the only way of telling a (hi)story.

It's even downright ambitious.

History is always alone -

that's an idea Michelet didn't have when he wrote the history of France,

and that I picked up indirectly.

History is alone.

It's alone - outside,

far from people.

There's something in that...

And then there's something

that's more closely related to the (hi)story of film editing.

Because nowadays when I go to buy a newspaper

in this tiny little town,

the doctor, or the tobacconist asks me:

"Well? Is the editing coming along?"

I find it just...

They couldn't say that to Einstein.

They wouldn't dare ask, "Is the equation coming along?"

Even the word �editing�...

My idea, as a cinema practitioner or gardener,

is that one of the aims of cinema

was to invent the editing I've described.

That is, simply put: Copernicus and Vesalius.

That's film editing.

It can't be done straight off. It has to produce an idea.

Like Rimbaud...

Like Rimbaud and Marshal P�tain.

Or, another example:

let's say someone asked me what the difference is between

the current president of France, Fran�ois Mitterrand,

and Charles De Gaulle.

Some people would say this, others would say that...

I'd say that cinema...

if it wants, as a scientific tool,

to show the difference,

I'd say: these were two Frenchmen who controlled some territory.

There was a war.

There was an invader.

At some point one of the Frenchmen was captured.

And he began his ascent to power

by coming back to France:

by escaping and getting back to France.

The other one,

by contrast, escaped from France and went abroad.

There you have it. In a word. The real difference.

That's editing in the most general sense of the term.

Yes, but also the most practical.

And cinema, or what we called cinema when... -

technically, as part of its work process -

has always been after something of that sort.

We - at least those of us who believed - used the term:

not Griffith, but Eisenstein, Orson Welles and others.

Nowadays we talk of the editing of Orson Welles, Eisenstein, Bergman...

Or the absence of editing in Rossellini.

But cinema has never found...

Something disappeared when talkies arrived.

Language, or words, or the mode of expression

(I'm not sure what the difference is)

have been somewhat circumscribed.

Cinema was seeking that: it wanted things to be obvious.

So that...

when so-and-so presents the news on TV,

this activity of thinking... This was the aim, that is...

I believe in works, in art and in nature,

and so I believe that a work of art has an aim - independently so.

People help it along - they participate; but it has an aim.

The aim of painting is one thing.

Picasso tried to find it.

These are all classics - in a sense I'm very classical.

So, for example, when a news presenter

talks about this or that -

be it Afghanistan, or a strike

(since there's an RER strike today) -

well, quite naturally, since she's there visually,

if cinema had been able to grow up

and become an adult

(whereas in fact it has remained a child supervised by adults)

but if it had grown up,

then the presenter would speak about it as of Copernicus and Vesalius.

And this would be clear.

The solution, perhaps, would not be clear.

Because, sure, Copernicus and Vesalius...

but Fran�ois Jacob got his Nobel Prize 400 years later.

That's not the issue.

We developed the polio vaccine

400 years later.

So what remains of cinema is not really

big...cross-cutting, let's say, ideas, like editing,

but, rather, movement towards editing?

OK.

- Well it was after, since we're critics... - A �searching� for something.

They were looking for editing.

Griffith, say - and I'll prove it,

because it can be shown using his own material...

In inventing the close-up,

Griffith was not trying, as legend has it,

to get closer to some actress.

Though legends, like myths, do tell us something.

He was trying...

to get closer to something, both from nearby and from afar.

Eisenstein discovered camera angles.

All his best-known films -

think of "Battleship Potemkin", "October", and "The General Line" -

had these camera angles.

Think of the famous image of the three lions.

The lions produce an effect that looks like editing.

But that's because of the three angles. It's not because of editing.

It's because there are three camera angles.

The Germans ignored editing.

They went further:

sets and the philosophy of the world -

so basically sets and lighting.

When you read how Murnau and...

I don't remember the name of his cinematographer...

or his art director... But the way they put together "The Last Laugh",

meant that the story came afterwards.

Yes, there were a few components... But that's the only way.

He was looking for something he could edit.

And today we can't say what that is.

But that was there, and so... And it had never been before. Anywhere.

And that, so to speak, went without saying.

This was the great power of cinema -

silent but so very powerful.

There's something that's always intrigued me:

How come it's the only art...

aimed at a large audience

that was based on visuals?

Because the other art �of the people� - painting -

has always been �anti� the people, somehow.

I mean, painting was always for royalty and rich people.

So my idea was to say: "OK, this was it..."

It's a fact, since we can see it

and can project it - albeit in imperfect or �flimsy� ways...

But it's a fact. Say what you will.

Like when Schliemann found something and thought:

"Well, Troy must have been around at this or that time."

- So you... - That's how it goes.

So you started on the (hi)story of cinema when it was clear for you that the �search�

had been unsuccessful, or else was complete.

And so the concrete lessons it might have provided on the lives

of individuals, peoples and cultures

have not been learned.

Because at one time we thought - back when you had a more didactic approach

and believed in passing on knowledge

in a more direct and active way...

Back then I said to myself:

"Godard always tries to force a film's message onto people's lives -

he imposes it in a very tough way."

That is: "Deal with it. Do something with it."

Now you'd say: "In any case, nothing can be done.

We tried. Cinema tried."

So why produce a (hi)story of cinema if it's the (hi)story of a failure?

Or is the failure so spectacular that it's worth telling the story?

Well, happiness has no story.

And is no more cheerful for it.

It's just that evil... But it's not unhappiness, no...

It's a (hi)story...

But you see nowadays... Take a film by Vertov.

In Vertov you had some very original, very unusual hypotheses.

That made him a rarity as a filmmaker.

Sure, all that was covered up -

by Stalin, by the script...

- Even by... - But when you're watching a Vertov film...

Even an Eisenstein.

The others... with their arguments -

but healthy arguments...

Those who weren't so healthy are those who reported it all.

We can no longer understand how it was. At the time it must have been...

It must have been...

Vertov...

Each tried in his own way. But the language came,

as did a means of expression, and the press, and so on.

And there was some set-up whereby

if you said something that expressed your point of view -

unless you were very unwell when you said it

and you needed to see an analyst,

and the analyst was a good one

(and there aren't hundreds of thousands of good doctors,

just as there aren't hundreds of thousands of good scholars and so on),

and you weren't �cured� of language...

And so language immediately says:

"It was a sinus infection." Or: "It was editing."

Probably, given that my father was a doctor,

I'm... (likely unconsciously)... led to...

led to that... to not...

No, I think there was a sign.

It was... well, invented by humankind...

There was a sign showing that something was possible

if we went to the trouble of calling things by their names...

and if this was a new way of calling things by their names -

a way that we'd never seen before and that was vast and had popular appeal.

Because it needs an audience. Right away.

Let me go back to the example of Vertov,

since he interested you a great deal at one time.

So there was something in cinema that tried to be seen,

that was visible, and that was covered up.

That's where we're up to.

We can call it �editing�, or something like that.

We really should call it �editing�. if that's the term we're using.

But it turns out that films endure -

you can watch at least a tape of a Vertov film.

Straight off.

Wait... What endures?

Because the lesson or thing that we were supposed to see in Vertov

was supposedly not seen - it was concealed.

But the object remains all the same.

It persists as an object.

That is, it will survive various readings and non-readings,

including unexpected or strange readings,

that might arise later on - you never can know.

Personally, when you're watching a Vertov, what do you feel?

Admiration?

Sadness? Melancholy?

Do you think: "It's all pointless. It existed

and, at the end of the day, it's beautiful"?

Because you speak of Vesalius and Copernicus, but no one said

Copernicus's book was beautiful. Here we're talking about art,

and a characteristic of art is that it leaves behind objects.

But it is art. Cinema is an art.

But as science is also an art,

And then, in the 19th century something happened

with the rise of communications

and what I describe in Histoire(s) du cin�ma,

namely, filming technique -

�technique� in an operating rather than an artistic sense;

not the movement of a watch

made by a watchmaker in the Jura

but rather 120 million Swatch watches.

Technology, telecommunications,

semaphore and so on appeared

at the same time (as Flaubert observed)

at the same time as stupidity.

At the same time as "Madame Bovary".

It all came...

It all came in at the same time.

I've forgotten what I wanted to say...

Remind me of your question... It will come back to me.

You said: "Personally, do you think...?"

I'll summarise what I said.

When you're watching a Vertov film...

in light of what you've just said -

that cinema brought us something

that was not accessed, because it was concealed...

So what's left for you

when you are personally confronted with an object

such as Three Songs About Lenin, say, which is nonetheless

a beautiful object?

What do you do with the beauty?

Right, yes.

But science is like art -

it's the same thing. And science is an art.

And at a certain point, in the 19th century,

science - not art, but science -

became

became what was called (since the word did not exist before then)

�culture�.

At that point it became something else.

Cinema, which was an art -

an art with broad appeal -

gave rise, little by little, perhaps because of its popular appeal

and because of science, which had also advanced,

to television,

which is not art, but culture - that is to say...

Transmission.

...that is to say, commerce and transmission.

So they need what's left of art,

but art is a bit lost.

For those who called it �art� - only people in the West called it art.

By the way, my, let's say, �working� hypothesis

is that the (hi)story of cinema, in my opinion, is interesting to tell,

as it's, in a way, the (hi)story,

or the last chapter

of the history of art which is itself

the last chapter of the history

of an Indo-European or European civilisation.

Other civilisations did not have art.

It's not that

there's no pottery in China

or no novels...

It's not that there are none in Japan or in Mexico -

after the Maya.

Only Europe had, at a certain point, a conception of art

that is connected - a little before and a little after -

to the idea of gods

and, later, to that of a single god in Christianity.

The others don't - they don't have art.

The idea of art is European.

But well, it's coming to an end, and it's rather strange to hear...

It's no coincidence that we're all talking about Europe.

It's because Europe's on its way out.

And since it's gone,

let's make an...

an ersatz, as the Germans said during the war.

Because in 2000 years...

We had a lot of trouble dismantling the empire of Charlemagne.

Well, we're at it again.

Also, it's Central Europe, if you will.

The rest doesn't exist.

If you ask someone if Greece is in Europe,

they won't answer.

They'll think: France, Germany, to some extent Italy.

Certainly not Spain.

So cinema, if you will, was...

it's art.

We distinguish it from trade, when we trade in it.

Our quarrel with Hollywood has always been along the lines of:

"Gentlemen, you must behave a little

like Durand-Ruel

or Ambroise Vollard behaved towards C�zanne,

or like Van Gogh's brother behaved with..."

The details are somewhat vague.

But one shouldn't behave only in a commercially minded way.

Because as soon as you're doing commerce it's something else: culture.

It's only us, the New Wavers,

who said that American cinema is art.

Everyone else hated it at times.

Bazin

recognised that "Shadow of a Doubt" was a good Hitchcock film.1

He didn't say the same for...

"Notorious".

I remember when "Notorious" came out, he found it...

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes".

No, but I remember with "Notorious"...

He considered it frankly despicable -

true Social Democrat as he was -

that such a �useless� subject

could be used to produce such a marvelous mise-en-sc�ne.

Given his secularism, there was something that deeply shocked him about it.

If you will.

But only the New Wave was able to say

that there was art to be found in certain objects

that had been detached from

their object, or their subject, by

by the big companies.

Because they quickly became big.

And then, historically, it's well known.

At some point, the big companies -

like the feudal lords -

gained power over...

...the great poets.

Just like if Francis I of France had told Leonardo da Vinci,

or if Julius number x had said to Michelangelo -

actually he did a little, but it was a more democratic debate...

the sort of debate that Stroheim and Thalberg must sometimes have had.

Imagine if they'd said:

No! You must paint that angel's wing like this! Not like that!"

It's culture... It's art.

Hence what you call my appetite for science.

I consider that science is art.

Or art is science - either way round.

And I don't consider that Picasso is superior, or inferior, to Vesalius.

They're equal in their desires or...

I don't think that a doctor

who cures a ...

a sinus infection

is either superior or inferior to myself

if I pull off a good shot of Maruschka Detmers.

It's more or less equal.

Though if you do science

but overdo the publications and so on.... That's no good.

I think that...

Einstein, for instance, is a myth.

He became such a big concept,

and yet he wrote three lines.

Much has been written about him, but he himself wrote about three lines,

if you compare him to others.

Which means: we shouldn't write too much.

We shouldn't create these immortals.

Because when others start making theories,

language tends to get in the way.

It's striking.

For example, there's a book I like a lot.

By Heisenberg. "Relations"... or "Uncertainty", something like that...

Or "Nature".

"Modern Physics".

"Nature in Modern Physics".

I understand the idea very well, but

it�s a little difficult to explain.

I understand very well that what he says is not what he saw,

and that if it�s taken so long

to admit it,

it�s simply because language...

There�s a great struggle between the eyes and...

this thing �language�.

I think...

I think there�s only Freud and others like that,

and whom we still tend to make fun of today

oddly enough.

who have tried to see it another way.

Well, we tell them that sexuality is not everything...

Quite right. So to sum up - if I�ve understood correctly:

first...

cinema is an art and the last chapter

in the history of the idea of art in the West.

Consequently, cinema is a special case.

And only the West had the idea.

And so the West is the first, of course, to have given it up.

Mmm, yes, I don't know why it happened that way.

Because yes - the West gave it up itself through masochism or something like that.

Secondly, what's important about cinema is...

it provided information on what people could see...

But could see in a way...

Rather than reading a... You saw in a way...

I find it�s more pleasant because it tells you a story.

It was even a link. Cinema was a link to other civilisations.

All these stories: when you watch a Lubitsch film, what are you being told?

It�s telling you something you can find in the "Arabian Nights".

The other forms of art did not have that;

they were exclusively European.

And at given time, through the influence of cinema -

at about the same time...

Because Picasso�s African Period didn�t come just any time -

- it came at a particular time.

It came when there was cinema.

It was not because of colonialism but because of cinema.

Colonialism already existed

in Delacroix�s time, but he didn�t paint pictures

influenced by African art

or Arab art,

as Picasso and others did.

This was something else.

So there was a very strong feeling, which is due to the visual.

Cinema belongs to the visual.

The visual has not

in my view, been allowed

to find its own form of expression -

other than through an RCA or Tobis-Klang

or what-have-you procedure.

It hasn't been able to find its own language that isn�t based on, say,

"L'�v�nement du jeudi".

- I�ve lost the thread. - And how about getting the poets back...?

Because the one who talked about the blank page - Mallarm�,

probably hit on his idea on leaving the canopy of trees.

Doubtless. If we looked into it.

If we researched the day when Mallarm�

wrote his piece on the blank page -

if we had a court judge who went through all the documents,

and say we found the answer...

I�d say he found inspiration on leaving the canopy of trees [feuillade].

I even know which one.

The Feuillade called "Erreur tragique".

There�s something else that cinema did:

it created a sense of belonging to the world.

This strikes me because I think it's now disappearing.

Yes, that's...

Perhaps we do have a feeling of belonging to the planet.

Because the planet is now so circumscribed: the earth with all its problems.

But it�s not the same thing.

There�s a difference between the universal and the international.

We hear of international problems through communication.

In cinema, one belonged to the world.

Also, what has changed in what we now call the media -

in television, but it�s going to extend far beyond that,

is that when I went to the cinema,

I was taken in a bit like an orphan deprived of social contact.

I was given some contact but some contact was taken from me first -

it was the film that took it, using techniques specific to cinema:

editing, storyline - things like that.

Whereas now, when I�m in front of my TV set

late in the evening, watching, say, news

about some very engaging very real events,

I don�t have the same feeling.

I�m not engaged as an orphan, as a subject.

I am engaged as a powerless adult,

with a vague feeling of compassion produced by modern communication.

You can feel sad to be powerless, but you can also, perversely, revel in it.

In that sense, we can see to what extent (I speak for myself)

cinema adopted us and gave us an additional world -

one that, perhaps like you said,

could connect up...

culture, which had the monopoly on perception, and

the world �to be perceived� - that is, the rest of the world.

We'll start from there with the next reel.

You were saying

that I wanted to describe cinema

and say it had failed and is finished.

No, that�s not really my impression.

The failure is not the failure of cinema but...

the failure of its parents.

If you will, let�s say it�s childhood and there�s a feeling of...

That�s why it was so popular.

Certainly, everyone can love a Van Gogh painting.

But imagine a person who...

has invented a way of displaying Van Gogh�s crows everywhere,

and in a form that is, let�s say...

less terrifying,

such that everybody liked the work and felt close to it.

Cinema was the planet earth, in a sense.

Then, when television arrived...

Television is like the invention of the plough.

A plough is no good if you don�t know how to use it,

or how to turn over the soil,

or how to grow such and such type of wheat.

So the sadness or, for me, the failure,

and the sadness it causes,

is what many filmmakers experienced - big names or not:

�Oh, if they�d only let us do it...�

Less, I think... It�s only afterwards...

And it's television that doesn�t...

that has become something else entirely

It�s as if,

It�s as if, I�d say, all the compass points had been lost.

In cinema we had the East and the West -

it was always that way: from Moscow to Hollywood, more or less,

covering all of Central Europe.

That�s where all cinema comes from.

There is no cinema in Egypt, even if there are Egyptian films.

There is no Swedish cinema; they've been long lost in abandon...

Though there are some magnificent Swedish films - but that's not the point.

There�s a great freeway, like this...

And television...

That's the function of cinema: to lay things out and examine them.

I've always compared it to a court case:

you take a file and open it.

And then you weigh it. It's similar to a novel as it has an order.

But since it's visual, there's something else, too.

You have the weight of one page and the weight of another page -

that's cinema.

And then you have something else: direction.

It wasn't clear...

Perhaps we might say that you need the compass points - all four.

It�s as if there was cinema's east and west,

and television leapt on that,

but overlooked north and south -

which, however, are right for television and not possible for cinema.

Cinema couldn't do it and did not need to:

it had something else to do.

Though television,

even in a silly way, does need to manage time.

The other day I was watching a documentary -

one made by a good documentary maker: Marin Karmitz.

It was about Fran�oise Dolto.

They were interviewing children...

but you didn�t even get...

you didn�t even hear the whole question.

Above all, you didn't even fully see the children's expressions.

Or what they said.

You only get that in novels -

or books.

Terry Brazelton�s or...

or Dolto�s, for instance.

The government did not even give Dolto a "Maison verte".

- did not even finance 50 "Maison vertes".

Though they're happy

to give her 50 l�gions d�honneur.

At that point Dolto�s message, which was communicated in writing

and that probably...well...

Her message could not be heard

because the language became

something else.

It�s what we were saying yesterday about the media.

If you publish Dolto in "L�Express" , her message won't come through.

- Of course. - Something else will come through.

Meanwhile the child is still sick.

Now, do we want the child to remain unwell? I think so.

I'm an example. I say we want... I remain unwell, damn it.

I myself perhaps have a tendency to...

Automatically, being part of that world...

The New Wave was indeed

exceptional in that sense, since it believed.

But that�s the doing of Langlois,

who himself followed in the footsteps of a number of people.

The New Wave believed what it saw. Simple as that.

I was thinking of the New Wave... That is...

With the first question I asked.

I was thinking that it was the only...

When we say �New Wave�, we mean three people...

Right, right,

Right, right, but nonetheless.

I was thinking that it was also the only generation that began in cinema

just when television was appearing. - True.

And so, in the work of the New Wave there is a sort of encroachment...

It belonged to both worlds.

And then Rossellini - an important figure in the youth of the New Wavers,

took the plunge himself a little later...

And so, all the filmmakers...

- But he got... - Yes, he got...

- Rossellini�s story is the same as... - He got a thrashing.

... the sames as Christ's because he...

Renoir and Rossellini were the two great admirers of the New Wave...

Renoir filmed "Experiment in Evil"

at the time as Claude Barma was making his TV dramas.

Exactly.

- We were all captivated by it. - Sure.

and yet we gave Claude Barma a hard time.

But this dual TV heritage is interesting.

Because French TV (Barma is a good example)

has built itself up, to a great extent, as a continuation of French-quality cinema:

dramas, the Studios des Buttes-Chaumont... Even today, really, it�s the same.

At the same time, certain major filmmakers -

important figures because they did things differently to others,

such as Rossellini, but even Bresson, who never touched TV, and Tati,

all anticipated the TV setup in the 50s.

That is, the need for other, far-reaching effects,

but without forgetting cinema. So films.

You came in, as critics then filmmakers, just at that point, I think,

and you hesitated between the two.

There was never any anti-TV talk from the people I've mentioned.

- No. - Welles, Hitchcock, Tati...

- They all did at least some television... - Never...

But you know, one ought not to confuse...

At first there was a sort of happy incest.

Later it became very unhappy.

Yes, but: the plough and the earth. One shouldn�t...

The earth isn�t...

They themselves were the oxen.

The earth is not... man and ox.

Donkey and ox. They were both donkey and ox.

- Rossellini was a disciple of... - One should not confuse...

He considered himself stupid...

One should not confuse the land and the tool.

Television is not land; it's a tool.

When the tool becomes the land,

we finish up with... AIDS.

Which comes at the right time.

I don�t think we will cure cancer very quickly.

We will get better at it; we'll have things...

But we don�t want to.

If we wanted to...

In any case....

In any case, we haven't proved

that we want to and that we are able to see.

Once,

Once, if you will, you've got Fran�ois Jacob

is studying...

lymphocytes, antigens, antibodies...

I�m not well versed in the terminology...

Once he's no longer doing what he did in bringing together...

But that�s because it took 400 years of hindsight

for him to be able to say that Vesalius drew the insides of the human body

when Copernicus...

But that's 400 years ago.

So he needed 400 years to be able to see that.

Or else the person - Fran�ois Jacob, in this case -

saw all this at the end of a string of people and things.

But when he sees the lymphocyte and so on...

Well, if he opened Chandler

or even John Le Carr�.

If he saw...

Actually I�d recommend he read the early novels of Peter Cheyney.

That'd be better.

You see the work

of the cell, the spy, the code and so on.

Because these are all the same words.

Well, let�s hope he doesn�t see. I can�t do much...

I can only tell him: "You should be looking here.

And with your individual genius,

... you ought to say different things to...

This is where you'll find the vaccine.

Or the beginning

If you don�t do this, then you won�t find the vaccine.

Do some cinema."

But when he goes to the cinema, he likes "One Deadly Summer".

What can you do?

It�s a... Television is

...staggering.

When you have something staggering and with tremendous popular appeal...

It�s because it's staggering that...

...it has tremendous popular appeal.

- Yes. - Of course.

Cotton or silk, but...

it�s absolutely...

Cinema, novels and paintings -

European or of European influence,

from America

to Greece, have generally done

at least some of what they could do.

The child has got older.

Television,

on the whole, has not.

Given television's popularity and universality,

this is a catastrophe on a global scale.

It�s the switch from something that could have been universal

to something that has become village-sized,

to use McLuan's terminology.

In any country - for example, in Switzerland:

you watch television to see what's happening in the �Swiss village�.

But you know that, roughly speaking,

the same thing's happening in the �Italian village� next door.

Simply, the people and accent are a little different.

Each has its rituals, Cockaigne poles, ridiculous paraphernalia,

and more or less the same news.

We have the feeling that our land is expanding,

and that a tiny plough is moving constantly in the same direction.

Cinema had land that was not yet �complete�.

An explorer�s terrain, where some things were still unknown,

or little known.

But at least the discoveries were made personally

and were followed directly for a certain period of time -

less and less time, but nonetheless for a fairly long time.

That became clear - for me at least...

I understood it had become clear for me

when I realised,

after a few years,

that cinema...

...had not shown the concentration camps.

We'd spoken about them

but not shown them.

That...

It�s the...

- For me it's... - Do you mean...?

It interested me, perhaps for the reasons you mentioed

my guilt, my social class...

And I still don�t understand why.

I don�t understand why it bothered me so much,

since it did not concern me directly, if you will.

It�s strange because you say...

Cinema had not shown the camps,

but the camps were really the first thing to show.

I mean...

we had shown...

how a man walks using Marey�s chronophotographic gun.

But we didn�t show the camps.

We didn't want to see them.

So there�s something...

It stopped there.

I thought that the New Wave was not a beginning

but rather an ending...

That's more or less what I wanted to ask you.

If cinema explored

and showed certain things the way it did,

is it not

- it�s sad but that�s how it is -

because of

because of unprecedented events

in the history of humankind - namely the two world wars

and the concentration camps.

These events did, for a certain time, compel

people to look. Cinematic language wouldn't have changed

without the First World War.

It�s clear that, from Gance to Griffith,

and from Vidor to Raymond Bernard...

or Renoir, who was in the First World War...

Perception...

He was in the war as a...

Right, he was in the cavalry.

Perception was completely transformed - like the world�s fields and trenches.

And the change was immediate in cinema.

The second time round, it wasn't quite the same.

Apart from the Italian �back shot�, let's say...

There were some jolts.

There was a jolt that proved to be the last -

known as, I think, Italian neorealism. - Right, as I said.

Two films in total, but a jolt.

And then a jolt from a jolt - the New Wave,

which was born of Italian neorealism.

Fassbinder perhaps finished that �jolt�.

He was perhaps the last to... following on from the others...

He was the last to try to reconstitute -

though very indirectly and interminably - something that lacked an image:

namely, post-war Germany.

But Fassbinder died over 10 years ago - no, not yet 10 years...

Now one has the feeling that these jolts are over.

That has been your experience...

Let�s have a break then get back to Fassbinder.

Tapes 6 and 7 are missing.

You were saying... What does it mean nowadays to...?

What does it mean nowadays to need images?

That is, in the current audiovisual landscape,

given that people have changed, society has changed and so on.

It�s a question I ask myself pretty often...

but starting from the answers,

really...

when I try to show what we usually call...

�images�...

or �pictures�, as the Americans say.

I tend to consider them to be answers rather than questions.

And I try to understand

what the question was behind them...

because answers they are, no matter what form they take:

a book, novel or potato -

it�s always an answer to something.

You ask why they're needed... Indeed.

But, I don't know... Maybe one shouldn�t confuse...

need and desire...

No, no I�m talking about need.

At the same time, I think there�s a desire for images,

because they're the only thing that...

When exactly did we develop a sense of identity?

It must have become, around, say, the end of the 19th century...

...a fundamental concept. Individual people...

have a greater feeling of identity, than, say,

in the Middle Ages.

Nowadays even believers,

when they pray, don't...

That is,

they feel like individuals.

They no longer feel (though what do we know?)

like the people Malraux talks about,

who followed the teachings of Saint Bernard.

People need identity, I think.

Put simply, we recognise one another.

If I see a picture of you, I don�t claim that it�s an image of Toubiana,

and vice versa.

And in recognising one another...

we might say

that �recognition� [reconnaissance] has two meanings:

reconnaissance in the sense of �reconnaissance�

during a war, by a scout -

like Davy Crockett, the scout in the films of John Ford -

and reconnaissance in the sense of �recognition� or �gratitude� -

we are grateful to others

for recognising us and allowing us to recognise one another.

I think that, before the Holocaust,

cinema rhymed with

the identities of nations -

or peoples:

peoples who were more or less grouped together in a nation.

Later this tended to disappear.

It�s something I looked at in...

...in a 3B programme

called "La r�ponse des t�n�bres".

It's about, let's say, war films.

It basically says

that cinema is actually an art form produced by boys:

a Western art form made by boys - by white men.

And it...

... well, for example, when I speak to Anne-Marie...

She got into cinema before I did, that is, at a younger age.

Her family would not let her see films

because cinema was considered poor quality.

When she did go to the pictures, she was only allowed to watch westerns.

Jeff Chandler made her laugh; she quite liked him.

But apart from that she could not stand...

To this day she has trouble even with a John Ford film:

"All these blokes on horses, men everywhere...

I�ve sick and tired of them!"

So I was talking about war films -

films made �just because�.

The Americans quickly became specialised in such films.

After 1914 - after they'd got a taste for...

But I think it's cinema that initially got them into that:

first they were invaded by cinema, then they themselves took to invading -

in a friendly or less friendly fashion...

Then they even...

Well, now it�s the Americans who tell the story of the Vietnam war:

not the Chinese, not the Vietnamese, not the Egyptians...

not the Swedish. No, the Americans.

The story of World War II was also told by the Americans.

Sure, a little bit by the Russians, who told the story for themselves,

but chiefly by the Americans.

There's much that can be said about

this desire that the old Europeans have

with respect to the new Europeans -

that is, the Americans:

a desire to maintain ties, to prostrate themselves,

to support the dollar when it's weak,

to weaken it when it's too strong...

What other explanation is there?

We're the only ones

who�ve ever really liked American cinema.

Take the "Cahiers".

Which brings me to the following question:

Why...

I mean in World War I and World War II...

was there no �resistance cinema�?

Sure, there were a few films about resistance here and there.

But the only resistance cinema -

or the only resistance film, in the sense of �cinema of resistance� -

that is, a cinema that resisted...

the �occupation� of cinema by...

America, or resisted a certain

standardised way of doing cinema -

is Italian cinema.

Italy - the country that fought the least -

though it suffered undeniably.

Italy, quite simply, lost its identity.

And cinema... up until then -

well, the last time was "Rome, Open City".

Italy got back on its feet after "Rome, Open City".

Benedetti should really

buy a ton of pet food for the descendants of Rossellini�s dogs.

That... was the only resistance cinema.

As for the others, the Russians made...

propaganda and martyrdom films.

The Americans made films that were advertisements.

The English did more of the same.

Germany couldn't make resistance films for itself.

As for the French, they only made films about prisoners.

I mean, "The Battle of the Rails" is not a film.

The Polish made a couple of films -

they were the only ones who tried, twice in a row,

to make a film about the camps.

- "Passenger". - Yes, "Passenger", and...

- "The Last Stage" by Wanda... - Jakubowska.

Right. And "Passenger", by the way ends... Well, it's not finished.

But, you know, it was, if you like, an �individual nation�.

Poland didn�t want that; an individual did.

When Rossellini made "Paisan"... Actually, even when De Sica...

"Rome, Open City" is not the film that is best known and worked best.

but "Shoeshine", afterwards.

See, cinema represented, for a long time,

but only up until around then,

the possibility of belonging to a nation

while also being oneself within that nation.

Then all that changed: cinema became the image of oneself through a nation.

- Exactly. - Also, there was a set of cinemas

that were more or less national and that were...

Well, there was the Marshall Plan and so on.

Then all of that disappeared.

If people still like cinema today,

it�s a bit like the Greeks who liked stories about Zeus.

That's how it is. If they like films, say Belmondo -

not mine, they wouldn�t work, neither would Straub�s...

But if they still like this idea of cinema on television -

scaled-down cinema, so to speak -

it�s because there's a vague memory, or something like that...

We no longer have our identity,

but if we turn on the TV

there's a vague little signal saying we do perhaps have one.

So there you have it. Otherwise...

Then films will disappear from TV.

There�s no knowing why films on TV are still so popular.

It�s interesting to talk about America because it�s a country

that's very different from other countries and that continues to make films...

And without false consciousness - that�s always been America�s thing.

With very little innovation -

far less than the Europeans at one time.

The modes of narration, the forms used and so on -

it�s a cinema that's been formatted definitively, at least since talkies began.

- But what moves people is that... - But America doesn't have...

It's... Well, I think everyone knows:

America doesn't have a history in the same way

as Persia, China or...,

... say, Egypt.

On the other hand, the US is teeming with lots of little stories.

Then all at once,

initially through the unconscious means of a war...

In World War II, they knew what they were doing.

They'd thought it through. They waited to enter the war

at the right time.

In World War I they were much vaguer. Things happened...

It was then that they got hold of the most powerful cinema in the world -

the only cinema then: French cinema.

They got hold of it like someone

who buys and takes over a house

when the previous owner or tenants have gone to war

and been killed.

American cinema got hold of French cinema,

which was the most powerful cinema in the world back then.

All the same, there�s something different about America:

their cinema has always helped them answer the question

"Who are we?"

- It�s the question of identification... - They must have been very pleased.

... though it�s not enough. Everyone asks themselves who they are.

At the moment, the Japanese are obsessed with that,

though they've dropped their cinema all the same. So it�s not enough.

In the case of America, there was more: "We're from a history, from a story..."

"We're come from Europe, from some other place...

from a passage in the Bible, from a Puritan script."

They need cinema to check that the same story still holds,

and it's this that's been so impressive and so admired

and that still works, as you say, in the form of

little glimpses of light on television.

It's all about origins.

As for Europe... Europe was too old.

They were the only ones who knew how to do it, one must admit.

Europe was too old to say where it had come from

and not strong enough to say what it could come up with using cinema.

But the question I�ll ask you again - the same as before,

only we�ve done away with the preliminaries -

concerns individualism, which has really gained ground over the past century:

�social conquests�, as you wrote...

What does that mean in terms of the need for images?

What do people reasonably have in terms of desire, as we were saying,

and in terms of fear - the �must-dos�,

�can-dos�, �allowed-to-dos�?

What can people get from an image that they will not get from

the other images they see, say, in advertising and so on -

images whose purpose is to conceal others, or to make others impossible.

Because increasingly that's what images do:

they open onto something -

that we ask ourselves as an individual. So I�m talking about someone who ...is no longer

no longer the slave of cinemas, say.

Someone who, like yourself, can get themselves some tapes,

edit photos,

use modern machines, work with videos and basically make

their own cinema.

Because you're not just surrounded by people who consume images, nowadays -

people who remember very clearly...

what cinema used to be but are not really with the times.

Rather, we are all, in a way, in a situation like your own:

what should we do with images? Given that we tend to consume them alone

and to use them to personal ends?

But now we're talking about editing. They say �image�, but these aren't images.

Yes, you might say that.

They are no longer images. They're just...

You have relations and stuff like that but not...

You can't call that...

The Americans are more pragmatic.

That's their strong point... We might...

I often feel riled about that because

they shouldn't use their strong point in such a way.

That is, a right always comes with a duty.

An image always conjures another;

images are never alone,

unlike what we call �images� today.

Such �images� are sets of solitudes connected by...

discourse that is,

at worst, that of Hitler,

but that can never be...

say, that of Dolto, Freud, Wittgenstein or someone else of that kind.

And so...

Everyone needs...

Sometimes Van Gogh sells well, though nobody has seen his work.

But if his work is known...

along with that of some others, too, of people who had vision -

in particular, Impressionist works,

which are the least loved in the world.

Few people have reproductions

of Monet on their walls.

They have reproductions of Picasso up, or one of Renoir�s young women.

They don't have one of Renoir�s pots of flowers on the wall.

They instead have another...

They use the character element of the painting.

Because in fact the Impressionists had real vision

that turned things upside down.

Technically, cinema was born at around the same time.

Up till then there was no such vision.

Not at the beginning of the 19th century,

not in the 15th century... not before. There was...

I think that before,

the difference between a blind person and somebody who could see

was not so big as it is today.

Between a blind person...

I�ve always said that between losing my hands and being blind,

in terms of making films I would rather be blind.

Cut!

End of reel.

Well, we'll do a couple more.

We were saying that...

What we call �images� are not images.

Though I don�t know what they are.

They are parts. The Americans are more accurate:

They say �pictures�

and they use the same word for �photo�.

And for films they say �movies�

which preserves the idea of movement.

Whereas if you say �cinema�... Well.

Pretentious Americans - intellectuals, say �image�.

The intellectuals, sure, but...

- They say �cinema�... - But in real life they say �pictures�.

They've always said �pictures�.

And by the way, they don't say �television� but �network�:

a �spider's web�. You have to admit, it's a bit...

There's something else, too.

All the major American films

we've seen...

up until now and over the past 100 years,

have always focused on...

... work.

That is, salaried work and its difficulties

have, generally, been what drove the scripts.

More or less all films are about that now,

which is why they are still successful.

The same goes even for American series: Starsky and Hutch and so on...

Because you see a detective at work.

People like to see the workplace, which is the only place that...

People have always wanted to show it, and they suffer because of it.

But at the same time, as they don�t like their own work...

Before they did like work.

Perhaps they didn�t like being so poorly paid.

But otherwise they liked work.

You still see that among

the working classes, and in poor areas.

If you speak to a bus driver, he might well like his bus.

What he doesn�t like are the conditions in which he works.

But otherwise, essentially, he doesn't think himself any less worthy than Picasso.

So, the fact that we no longer show the work,

There's no longer... Even the type of work I was telling you about -

a certain art of doing nothing,

but that produced work anyway,

because the way it was done was

what cinema was all about.

Well, there's no longer...

There no longer is any work,

and we call on (if I may say so) the image -

that is, on what we call the image today,

to, as you were saying, work

�with the eye� [� l'oeil].

That is, not with words, but � l'oeil.

Though really, what an expression...!

French is a very interesting language.

It's one of the languages that contains the most...

sleights of hand, connections and things like that:

�Xork with the eye� [also meaning �work for free�].

We might have said �work with the hand�...

Or, au doigt et � l'�il [�at someone's beck and call�].

No, but...

..travailler � l'oeil can also mean �not work�.

- Yes, sure. - Or else �work...� I'm not sure...

Vision and the eye...

We have our identity...

straight after birth, more or less.

Probably, even...

as ...

people know, if they've studied embryos,

we have it even sooner.

As soon as there is anything.

Perhaps even before.

And so what we expect, more and more,

from what we continue to call �images�...

We no longer expect a representation of...

...of the real, with its signs of hope...

-... hope and proof and so on. - No, that's finished.

Which means we no longer expect these things from ourselves either.

And we want...

That's how I understood what you were saying about...

about �figures�: that we want figures...

in the sense that ice skaters trace figures.

Exactly, yes.

I think... We said that many times in a very...

in a joyful way in the 1970s:

down with representation -

whether political, artistic or whatever. Including in cinema.

But it�s true that in cinema, of which you are now telling the (hi)story,

we were represented.

We were represented by something on a screen

and we could be taken hostage by a film

but returned to the world afterwards, the better for it.

But we felt something very close to a fear of being taken

and of being let go of.

This was linked to the image each individual created of himself -

a sort of amateurish psychoanalysis through watching films.

But it wasn�t a representation that was made in our absence,

contrary to what we often said.

We stepped aside

and had a look at ourselves.

And here we can think of the splitting of modern cinema,

which led both to dead ends and some terrific results:

"Am I taken hostage �properly�?"

"Are things going as they should?"

"Am I going somewhere?" Otherwise I won't have it.

We gave a moral overtone to the way

we were represented in films,

which could not have worked without, say, Hitchcock, who did that best of all.

Now we've moved towards a system that people

- technocrats - speak of with...

with... great candour and much joy

because it opens the doors to some kind of paradise for them: participation.

That is, spectators interact with the image,

which therefore no longer has to represent them.

Likewise, spectators no longer have to monitor the image or...

work on their relationship with it, or check whether it works on reality.

They participate,

simply, in a period that is no longer one of war and fear

but rather one of peace and anxiety -

which is not the same; peace is more associated with television.

In this context, spectators are targeted as individuals or, at best, citizens.

Simply put, if we think about what is just around the corner -

digital and computer-generated images, which people are already working on -

we get a funny feeling:

we think that now we have software, programs and so on,

images can generate one another - one begets another, like in fission.

So instead of having children...

A film, you said, is a child: there's a sex act

...love,

and the image supposedly reproduces itself like an amoeba or a clone.

It�s an increasingly

synthetic world,

rather as if we had extracted

figures from the surrounding world

then noticed that the camera was also recording the surroundings.

Some filmmakers had already worked a lot on on how to go

from a detail towards the whole, or else on, say, angles and editing.

Now we

...have...

Well, we...

seem to have only one thing on mind:

to have images that work autonomously

and as if, so to speak, in a trapeze act;

that is, in a vacuum

or in vitro.

We're no longer interested . What are the surroundings?

Our relationship to others, for one thing, and to the rest of the world.

That's why things are now so clannish:

television is not interested in the rest of the world -

it provides a few documents (not even documentaries)

But these are too parochial to be of interest.

What strikes me is that modern cinema

takes the human figure and says: "Careful, this figure has been destroyed.

It's been disfigured and we're not going to �re-figure� it."

Only bad films did... resistance stories

where attractive heroes got out of the concentration camps and so on.

No, the human essence was damaged metaphysically -

everyone knew that very early on,

though it sunk in very late and even incompletely.

We are now in a period where we say

that cinema can no longer report on our surroundings -

on what is nearby, in the environs or unexpected - simply there.

It can no longer capture the world. But...

...it will have great difficulties, (perhaps it won�t be the one to do so)

on what seems to interest the powers that be nowadays -

people working in advertising, communications and media.

Namely: now that we have little synthetic characters lifted of their context,

where are we going to put them?

As for the surroundings, currently there are none.

I think that�s why films like "The Bear" and "The Big Blue" have been successful:

they tell the story of little specimens -

not necessarily humans, but individualised specimens -

in a landscape that is far too big for them.

I think advertising played a huge role in this.

But we didn�t really notice because we�ve always criticised it

on slightly reductive or puritanical moral grounds.

It has got us used to seeing

only a a character or... Or... how to put it?

A body, a character and a human combined.

And we thought: "Ah, he's selling deodorant or Marlboros - how rotten!"

But what the person was selling does not matter.

What matters is that we saw these characters alone

and in a non-environment, or just with a bit of blue behind -

a swimming pool or the sky, say.

This matter of remaking the surroundings

is very important, because

we don't know what world the modern individual will inhabit,

given how he is today.

For the time being he's completely alone.

He's a figure much closer

to the experiments in "The Island of Dr. Moreau" or "Frankenstein".

That is, we don�t really know how things work

and so we try miming,

using an animal similar to humankind - a mammal, like the bear -

in order to teach humans what they look like

while showing them something alongside:

an animal that stands up like a human.

And we say, "Your story should look something like that, but we�re not sure."

It�s because we're not sure that Annaud rather unscrupulously plays

with both realism and special effects.

For him that changes nothing.

As for myself, I consider it tragic. Perhaps you do too.

Questions of editing, that is,

of all at once juxtaposing two very different things,

are no longer posed.

We�ve gone beyond that.

Now it�s all a question of figures.

When I say �figure�, I don�t necessarily mean human figures.

If there is some truth in all that,

then one can see that you are telling the (hi)story of cinema,

because cinema is not interested in these matters.

Simply, when talkies appeared,

cinema played the game for a while -

something that really backfired, incidentally:

it flirted with propaganda, that is,

with propaganda

that created �supermen�.

But it didn�t work, and all of modern cinema

has been an attempt not to reconcile too quickly -

to use the title of Jean-Marie�s magnificent film

"Not Reconciled".

And now it�s as if...

well, so to speak: �Nacht und Nebel: Not Reconciled�.

It�s as if you could hear a voice everywhere;

you sense a sort of euphoria

that is both cynical and anxious,

saying: "It's all over."

There is a reconciliation - we don�t know between what and what,

but we�re not going to trouble ourselves with recording the world.

We're simply going to have some figures work for us

and they no longer come from perception,

but rather from the mental world

of our commercial needs.

That was a long digression.

Well, we'll try to bear that in mind...

Because that�s what needs to be resisted.

...we�ll bring back other figures.

In figure skating you have free figures and set figures,

like in tennis,

...too....

It�s possible...

Badly done as television is,

there�s something

that I�ve stopped criticising because...

because we're in an �occupied country�; we�re not going to change everything,

and meanwhile we must go on living in the country.

I mean sports and matches in general...

I�m not keen on boxing,

but take tennis, football...

unfortunately there�s too little basketball and volleyball

and too few matches played between women, as well.

But sport is one of the rare things,

like films...

that are successful on TV -

that is, that attract the largest audiences.

Simply because...

in watching a football match, people communicate.

Sure, it's just a ball...

Yes, but they also know the rules.

But note: they apply certain rules and break others.

So you have simultaneously

rights, duties,

desires, play

and work.

Work because these are professionals - you never see amateurs on TV.

I would like to see more amateurs.

We will continue to make amateur films

as opposed to professional films,

with both amateur figures

and other types of figure.

When you see

a drawing by Matisse and a drawing by Giotto,

it�s almost the same thing.

Yet that

did not stop Matisse from painting all his life and...

In terms of needing an image,

we can take the example of sport on TV.

If there's an important football match

and the cameraman, out of aesthetic zeal,

starts filming elsewhere when a goal is scored,

you may end up with a riot.

Whereas if you film the Pope on one of his countless trips

that no longer interest anyone,

and at some point someone else is filmed instead of the Pope,

nobody will notice.

So the real...

The very minimal morality that still exists in the audiovisual world

is sport on TV.

That's because people know the rules.

So you could say that,

regardless of the human activity

being filmed,

people need to know the rules in order to enjoy the performance.

It�s about trying to find what we might call �subject matter�.

It�s about finding

a few rules...

Because something TV has plenty of is rules specific to TV.

Rules that do not match the rules of the subject at all.

TV imposes procedures, orders of truth and so on.

- No... - But political life is not like that...

- ... not the same speed, not... - I think that cinema worked...

for a long time, and people liked it, but no longer do, on the basis of:

"You�re going to see something you�ve never seen before."

Today it�s the same thing.

But it's...

You have the two together - though one is always stronger...

"You're going to see..."

It's what we�ve never seen of what we already know.

Exactly.

That's where it comes from... When it's,..

say, Spielberg or Lelouche doing it,

it works

for four or five films.

Then all at once there's a film that doesn�t work.

Then when others, like us,

do it, we need to know even better what we're doing.

we have to try more to speak...

to try to find a subject...

In what way are we a subject? In what way are we an object?

It�s somewhat the opposite... TV, or take Annaud, as you were saying...

End of reel!

We're...

I don�t know.

- It's true that... - We can only hope

Ask me a question.

I�d like you to give a �lecture�

on all these files that are in front of you -

impeccably presented, each a different colour, and...

all initialed in your famous handwriting.

I suppose that this is the artillery?

For your (hi)stories of cinema?

Yes I haven�t really gone through it properly.

I�ve put everything into sections -

two subsections.

Then I decided to buy a book on...

Before beginning I thought I should read

the life of Littr� and then that of Cuvier.

So you can imagine that I haven�t yet...

I wanted to know how

he came to the idea of classifying things -

not even the practice, so much,

but the desire he had

to classify.

That was also the time that Marx...

cam up with the idea of class struggle

and things like that.

In this case it�s relatively simple.

My Histoires du Cin�ma begins with All the (Hi)stories -

lots of little stories, but stories in which you can see signs.

Then you have A Single (Hi)story

because it�s the only (hi)story there has ever been.

You know how excessively ambitious I always am,

and I want to say that it�s not only a single story but the only story

that has ever been and ever will be and that has ever...

and that there ever can be.

There can be no others. Otherwise it won�t be a (hi)story.

You're the only one who'll have told it, then.

It�s not that I want it to be that way, but I must...

It�s my mission.

I�m like a village vicar who proclaims:

"I�m the vicar of village x". That�s all.

Then there come some studies,

some cross-sections, so to speak.

One of them I have called, for example, Deadly Beauty,

in reference to a film by Siodmak, called D

Deadly Beauty,

and starring Ava Gardner. It was based on

a novel, I think: Dostoevsky�s The Gambler.

Why Deadly Beauty? Well, cinema consisted, largely,

of guys filming girls,

which was deadly to this particular (hi)story,

and to history generally:

to the fact that we want to tell (hi)stories,

and to the fact that we all want to make of these (hi)stories

something that we call, well, once called, �history�.

Then there's a more practical study

that I've always wanted to do.

It can be done on video, and I call it The Coin of the Absolute -

from the title of Malraux's

book on art.

It's...

It focuses more on criticism.

I wanted to analyse just once, since it's never been done.

I�ve always done what's not been done.

At one point it was almost systematic:

"Rivette�s done that," I�d say, "and Rohmer�s done that...

And Chabrol�s done that... So I�ll do this other thing.

If they go one way, I'll go the other way, that we will cover

all the ground." If nobody wants to do something, I�ll do it.

I'll find a way.

I stand by Sartre from that point of view:

man is what he does, and what one makes of him.

So criticism...

But visual.

I did that once in a programme, but here it's better.

We'll say,

We'll say, for example: war - here�s how Kubrick, a great filmmaker,

shows war, shows America...

And here�s how a Cuban documentary maker

(this will be an opportunity to talk about documentaries),

shows the same war and the same place.

So here are two cinemas.

Judge for yourself. Take a look. Here�s what�s been done.

And then I bring out a few ideas and so on.

So some basic criticism.

I think I�ll take July 14.

I�ll read a line or two of what you�ve written about it,

and I�ll think: "How ever

can he say that?"

When you�ve got Pola Ill�ry doing this,

and Annabella doing that, and someone else doing...

while the reveller is putting on his white...

how can you describe things like that? Non.

I�ll think: "Serge was clearly had by absolute evil,

which must have been winging over at the time."

Another part (I mentioned it before) is called Answer from the Shadows.

It asks why Italy was

the only country that made a resistance film.

Then there�s another on editing

I call it "Editing: My Beautiful Problem".

I�d written an article,

very innocently at the time,

but that I don�t really understand any more,

though there was something in it:

the idea that cinema just as...

painting succeeded with perspective,

and Bach succeeded with certain things in music,

and certain things have been achieved by novelists., Well, cinema should have

achieved something but

but couldn't because of the invention of talkies.

Or rather, because of the application of that invention at a specific time -

historical,

And there are still traces of that. You see traces

when you watch Harry Langdon�s "Three's a Crowd" ,

and see it's possible to make a film

about a baby in a pram that lasts an hour.

It's a film ..

of its time...

Such a film would be unthinkable today.

We don�t want to see work like that...

So, yes, stuff like that.

And then there�s the last part called "The Signs Among Us".

The idea is that cinema,

and those who make it, are an image, yes,

but an image of images of images

that represents

a large part of humanity.

And we would have been able, had we wished,

have found in cinema

at least 80% of solutions.

If I film a traffic jam in Paris,

and I know I can see it - but not me alone:

say that, also, the biologist Fran�ois Jacob sees it.

In that case we'll discover a vaccine against cancer,

if there exists such a vaccine - I don�t think so;

but a vaccine for AIDS, say.

We can do so if we know how to see,

and if we know how to act,

because we�re seeing things magnified.

Moreover,

because of the way it functions,

cinema is a bit like those

pre-war peddlers.

Like in the novel by Ramuz -

My title is the title of one of his little-known novels

that I�ve always wanted t o work on, but won't.

Like "Michael, Brother of Jerry"...

Not Jean-Luc pers�cut� [The persecution of Jean-Luc]?

No, "The Signs Among Us". It�s the story of a peddler

who arrives in a little village in the region of Lavaux, above Vevey.

Like in two or three other novels by Ramuz,

his arrival portends the end of the world.

There's a terrible storm that lasts five days after his arrival.

The peddler settles in... Then the sun comes back

and he's driven out. Cinema is the peddler.

What have you got in the folders? Photos?

Photos that I haven�t yet sorted.

But they're the sort of thing..

For example in Only Cinema...

These are photos

that can only be cinema photos -

They are not Tintoretto...

not Madame Bovary,

They are �only cinema�.

Only Cinema can have... But there are subfolders

to prepare the way:

�Cinema was alone�, and �Only cinema was alone�.

And that�s it.

So there are some photos...

...but you also use s ome tapes, some clips...

Yes, some clips: quotations, but not necessarily,

because, given what television has become,

if you put in a photo with some text above...

all that suddenly acquires...

a power and so you can�t

necessarily keep it up.

Because you trap yourself.

If you show a photo of a dead person...

and then you say: "War was..."

I don�t know, like they do on TV...

Well, you can�t. Because you'd be saying ten times too much.

So the idea is to let photos be photos,

and, if possible, restore their completely individual character.

A photo needs a name.

That's what Ren� Benjamin said. No... not R�n�.

the Benjamin...

of Brecht�s time...

- Walter. - Right, Walter.

For him photos only exist via their name,

or the legend you give them,

whereas films can exist without a legend,

because you have the legends right there and you put them...

Though photograph must...

But the name must be the name of each photo,

and when you put it with films, it becomes more general,

but it remains the name of the photo. It should not be emblematic -

which it usually is today.

Sure, recognise each photo as individual.

Nor should you not leave it...

So sometimes, in using a photo, I hesitate between...

For example, in the episode I've done, there was a photo of...

We were talking about the Spanish Civil War.

I had my plan...

I wanted to put in Malraux and...

But it went that way because I had the photos.

I had a photo of Malraux and a photo of Ingrid Bergman

in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" .

I wondered about it, because for Malraux I had the same document in photo form

but also in video format -

a video of him speaking.

I was undecided for a long time, but I chose to use the photo

because if I'd shown the video...

it'd have become an interview with Jean-Marie Drot,

and that didn�t work. It spoiled the whole.

So I put in the photo and I just used the audio.

And there you have...

the couple from "For Whom the Bell Tolls" -

Malraux and Ingrid Bergman, of course.

But that�s also the couple �of hope�.

If I�d used the video clip of Malraux, that would have changed everything.

I�d have had to put in one - the right one - of Bergman as well.

So you see, things like that.

Even in preserving the name of each thing...

I feel very close to...

somebody who really...

I haven�t read his work in a long time, but at the time he influenced me a lot:

Francis Ponge.

He said that

a creator is a repairman for the universe.

Which is just what I am. I�m a repairman.

We have to repair wrongs,

and I'm probably the first to be wrong

in thinking I should repair wrongs...

An eternal problem.

And what about your physical presence?

Do we see you? Do you speak?

That�s for a touch of television.

I show myself doing...

But I think all the main programmes will be...

The first is done with books, with book titles.

The other one will be with the titles of musical works,

titles of visual artworks,

and titles...

based on landscapes and places.

Which of your files is giving you the most trouble?

- None of them. - None?

None. Once they're...

Though things change as you go along.

I realised I�d done the first one with barely a glance at the file.

That�s what I call "training", if you will.

I�d say that in the case of television,

it�s not that there isn�t any work, but there�s no training.

The result is like one of Leconte's matches:

Lost in advance!

A write-off.

With respect to what you are saying: what can you do?

Yes, I was a little defeatist in the past. And too critical.

Now it�s different:

I say: "Sure, not bad". I feel that everything's...

Sometimes you feel a bit jealous - at least I do.

That�s my nature...

When I think that "The Bear" was so successful...

Well, OK, that's how it is.

But I still feel jealous that it was that successful.

It's tough. Sometimes I think of Straub, who must be much more...

Straub does me good because he's outdone me in bitterness.

So, as I'm contrary by nature...

I tell myself that it's good you make those remarks about figures.

I'll do some figures!

and in my next film... I didn't know what I was supposed to do.

I�m not going to do another story about a couple.

I�ve done hundreds and botched them all.

Perhaps there was no figure or not the right figure -

One that "fait bonne figure" as we say in French.

Maybe we should create a character who fait bonne figure -

It could be a terrible figure, but one that puts on a good front.

The trait... Well, there�s doubtless something else...

All that will stick around a while, at least during my lifetime.

Computer-generated images, I mean. Because otherwise...

If today there were only computer-generated images coming in -

just like when talkies came in...

In that case I think I�d give up.

I�d try a bit, I wouldn�t succeed, I wouldn�t want to do it, and I�d give up.

In particular, with respect to machines, for instance,

I don�t feel at all...

the equal of people who work with computers.

You know, it's a specific, very precise type of machine

that allows them to think that they�re doing something.

If you give kids a Minitel,

they'll tap away like madmen and are just delighted.

But then it�s like with the Polaroid: two years later,

when they�re caught up in problems with their girlfriends,

the Minitel isn't much use.

At least for the time being.

It�s like me, if you will... One more minute?

You see, given that I like machines very much...

Anne-Marie's the same.

When I finish "Histoires du Cin�ma" I will say thank you to each machine.

I�m not saying that to... But sometimes I feel I have to.

I go round and thank each of them in turn.

Even the little one I might easily forget - a flashing light.

I thank that too.

Sometimes they're very useful.

These things have all been invented. I can�t feel annoyed with the Japanese.

Sure, I�m annoyed with what they do, but they�re the work of someone's hands.

I would like to give those hands a squeeze. How could I not?

I feel we�re equals.

I criticise them because

their machines should not be used only in that way.

Fine, have your computer-generated images.

Go ahead. Just don't expect me to write the script for you.

But do as you please...

Back to the law of X and Y again.

Yes, of course.

I know them well.

It's a clean slate each time.

As Jean Rostand said, theories come and go

but the frog remains.

Well, I think we�re done...

Adaptation: Jennifer Tennant