Manny Scale (3)

February 8, 1943

Manny Scale (2)

Manny Scale (1)

"Like Straub, I think it's sinful to give the audience material it knows already, whether the material is about race relations or the car culture or the depiction and placement of a candy bar."
-Manny Farber

*
Lumiere: A Conversation Between Jean Renoir and Henri Langois

Translated from the French by Bill Krohn

(This translation originally appeared in the Summer 2006 edition of the online political journal THE NOVEMBER 3RD CLUB. Presented here with an additional video extract. I'd like to note that the date of this dialogue is 1968.)

*

A French television broadcast, under the rubric Aller au cinema, of films by Louis Lumiere intercut with comments by Jean Renoir and Henri Langois provides a rare opportunity to learn how these two masters of cinema regarded the birth of a new art form. The "Lumiere parts" of those films are well described by Renoir's and Langois' comments about fantasy and reality, and the recreation of the atmosphere of a period, even of the soul of a society.


The program was assembled by New Wave director Eric Rohmer, who may be one of the two questioners we never see. What follows are quotes pulled or summarized from the program, with some indication of what films Rohmer chose to illustrate the comments. With only one exception, the comments are not laid over the films, which appear to have been shown in their entirety, without music, of course. This three-way conversation (including Rohmer's film selections) is also a reminder of why the French have a special place in the history and present of the art of film. -------Bill Krohn


Jean Renoir : I don't feel that the cinematograph was just a way of putting the present in a box for the future. There is in these films a recreation of the atmosphere of the period that is exactly what we love today in Godard.


When we look at the very first films, they're almost all extraordinary. You feel like using the word "genius." But these cameramen weren't geniuses — they were helped by the fact that technique was still difficult.
I find more fantasy in certain Lumiere films than in paintings that aspire to fantasy. It's the creation of a world that exists in reality, but also of a world that exists in the imaginations of Theodore Rousseau or the Lumiere cameramen. The angle chosen by the cameraman — a humble servant of reality — is the work of his unconscious talent. Many great works of art are the result of the unconscious. I would even say that when a film we've made works, it's in spite of us.


[After a questioner mentions a comic strip that Lumiere imitated in "L'arroseur arose," adding that it is cut like a film would be today:]

That kind of cutting was easy to do with pen and ink, but not with a camera. That's what I mean when I say that the fact that the technique was difficult worked to their advantage. Because the cameraman can't cut, he has to compose more carefully.


Henri Langois : "As if by chance" a film begins with a tramway passing and ends when another one passes, close to the camera. In between you see the movement of people in the street. The cameraman saw that this set-up would give him a series of shots: You have a close-up, a long-shot and a medium shot and a movement linking them. That's not chance — it's science.


*Film: Liverpool - Church Street*


There was a big difference between Lumiere and the others at this period. There's nothing more boring on film than the inauguration of a monument, kings, queens and so on. The great thing about Lumiere is that he didn't show History — he showed Life. The force of his films is in the atmosphere of life, the ambience of life, the philosophy of the period — everything is there. When you see two little girls playing in the street, on the Champs-Elysee, you think of Proust, of Renoir.


*Film: Champs-Elysee*


Monet had painted the Gare St-Lazare before Lumiere filmed it. What you are seeing in Lumiere's film is the baton being passed from painting to film. The whole history of art from the mid-nineteenth century to the late nineteenth century leads up to Lumiere. Impressionist painting, everything that was greatest, newest in that period was absorbed by Lumiere's films. That's what gives them the quality of life. What Lumiere looked for was what is imponderable in life.


*Films: Le Bassin des Tulleries, Retour d'une promenade en mer*


[HL answering a question about improvisation and preparation in the Lumiere films:] The Lumiere cameramen when they got to a city would look for what would be best to film. They'd pick the spot, choose the angle. After that came improvisation. They didn't do it mathematically - they felt it in their hearts.


*Film: Milan - Place du Dome*


Painting describes society as it sees itself, but with Lumiere's films, for the first time we see it as it is. When I look at these films I'm often appalled. What is out of fashion in them? The bourgeoisie. What is modern? The people. Because of the evolution of society, we are more like them than like the bourgeoisie of the period, we feel closer to them.


*Films: Leaving in a car, Carpenters, Cultivation of the earth*


When a painter paints women wearing the fashions of the era, he paints them as they are supposed to fit and look. When Lumiere films them, we see what they really looked like.


*Films: Debarquement, Wedding party entering a church*


What about New York City in the Lumiere films? It isn't the city we see in fiction films, or period recreations. It's a city of business.


*Films: New York - Broadway and Wall Street, Le grand prix a Paris*


Whereas Paris in these films really is the Paris that Hollywood recreates when it wants to show this period. It really IS elegant. Look at a shot of Germany. The power of Germany shows through in it. You realize that the German empire was already there, whereas we were the flower of the nineteenth century. One observes a thousand little details like that.


*Films: Dresden: Auguste-Bencke Street, London: Westminster Bridge, Moscow: Tverskai Street*


When I see a woman walk past in a Lumiere film I see all of her psychology, all of her history, all of her life, her perspective, her "horizons." It's different in the films that are acted.


*Film: Card players watered *


Jean Renoir: In the little acted scenes it's obvious that it's Lumiere's family and employees "pretending." But it's not really being acted. What matters is not the characters; what matters is that Monsieur Lumiere has gotten them all together and had them do this. Monsieur Lumiere is filming himself. M. Lumiere expresses through their acting a certain wonderful naivete that often enters into French art. Much "good" acting is no less false.



*Films: The fake legless man, Battle of women, Nursemaids and soldier*


Henri Langois: [answering a question about whether a Lumiere cameraman was really the first to move the camera:] He didn't want to "move the camera." He wanted his camera with him in a gondola to show what he saw.


*Film: The Grand Canal in Venice*


If the filmmakers of the 20s had seen these films, people like [Fritz] Lang, they could have saved themselves a lot of time. But no one at the period of the Lumiere films thought that Lumiere's cameramen had invented the moving shot or the pan, because that's not what they saw. They saw "a shot of a tram moving."


*Film: Panorama of arriving in Aix-en-Bains taken from a moving train*


We see the genius of cinema popping up all over the place, but the spectators of that time didn't have the background to see that. [The following is the one time the voice over is overlaid, during the shot entering and leaving the tunnel:] Now, after the whole development of the cinematic language discovered in the 20s, we are approaching an art of cinema that is much closer to Louis Lumiere, who is the absolute of the art of cinema.


*Films: Passing through a tunnel, Liverpool: Panorama taken from an electric train*


[HL is asked to sum up his impression of the films]: What strike me is the lumiere (light), the quality of the light, the sunlit quality of the images, which they were obliged, I believe, to film at certain times of day. And the depth of field. In other French films of the period, [Louis] Feuillade, for example, there's depth, but the shot is composed for a flat surface, like a painting. There's something more scientific in the films of Lumiere that comes, I believe, from the light.


*Films: Goldfish bowl* [amazing!], Marechal-ferrant, Disembarking from a ship


They have to be developed using the procedures of the period for that to be seen, as they first were in Venice when a scientist I knew worked out a system for doing that. Seeing them properly developed, you understand that film is a plastic art.


*Films: Venice - Pigeons in Saint Marks' Square*


[HL answering a question about diagonal compositions:] It's not a diagonal - it's a triangle. All of silent film uses that triangular composition, not just the Lumiere films. There's never anything in the center, until you get to the style built around the plan americain and the close-up.


*Films: Transport d'une tourelle, Attelage d'un camion*


Jean Renoir: [Asked to sum up:] The precision and veracity that Henri Langois sees in these films shows, he says, that cinema is a resume of all the other arts. I see it differently. For me cinema is an art in itself, even though everything is linked. The world, as I never tire of saying, is one. And the world of Louis Lumiere is one.


For me the value of these films is that they are open to interpretation. Seeing one of them, I can make up the story I want, invent a before and after. You only have a work of art when the public is a collaborator. These films open a door to the imagination, permitting the spectator to invent part of what he sees. Which is also why the art of Getrmany in the 17th Century was music, since everyone in that society could be a musician. And why France is the art of painting, because of the atmosphere of painting that bathes it.

percentage of survival (2)

"With every film the director should make it felt that man is a magnificent thing, and in the same moment that he is the curse of the planet."


"The human race I prefer to think of as an underworld of gods. When the gods go slumming they visit the earth. You see, my respect for the human race is not one hundred percent."

-percentage of survival (1)

R.I.P.

João Bénard Da Costa

"(...) buzina. Descobrindo o efeito sonoro do seu movimento, a criança repete-o um sem número de vezes, sempre de costas voltadas para a rua e sempre a olhar para a velha. Esta não esboça a mais pequena reacção ao jogo da miúda, mas, embora não lhe vejamos o olhar, sabemos que está com toda a atenção a ela. Atenção que, de certo modo, é devolvida, pois que a brincadeira da criança, sendo também uma brincadeira solitária, é uma brincadeira para a velha, ou uma brincadeira com a velha. (...)"

-"Sobre NO QUARTO DA VANDA", João Bénard Da Costa

If sensitivity to a single shot or a film's title are worth a damn to the English speaking world, then film critic and historian João Bénard Da Costa's work will one day be recognized and translated. He died today (1935-2009). I only became aware of João Bénard Da Costa through my work on Pedro Costa, and what Pedro and other Portuguese friends have told me of João Bénard's importance. One of the few (the only?) ways you can see João Bénard Da Costa with English translation is in a penetrating interview about OSSOS (Pedro Costa) included on this dvd of the film. He wrote an entire text, a beautiful one, about the above shot in IN VANDA'S ROOM (Pedro Costa). He wrote monographs on Hitchcock, Buñuel, Lang, Sternberg, Nicholas Ray, Hawks and Ford. He also did the kind of work you cannot completely transcribe or translate since it resides in the minds of hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries, that of being a great director of the Cinemateca Portuguesa since 1980. My impression is that there are many who could say about the films and the light shed on them by João Bénard Da Costa "I would have died if you hadn't come back." Is it a lie Johnny Guitar?

Separation

Louis Hochet - Class Relations (1984)

Danièle Huillet : There is something else in cinema besides directors, on which all the cinema rests: its craftsmen, its technicians, and that's also a social history. People who entered the cinema of the generation of Louis Hochet, our sound engineer, were generally people who came out of the working class and for whom the cinema was a possibility of upward mobility. But they brought their classes with them, their intelligence and experience. Now, this has also disappeared from cinema: the cinema became a Mafia, the son of a technician becomes a technician, the daughter of an actor becomes an actress... And that represents a loss of fantastic energy.

Jacques Aumont : It's true from this point of view, the lists of students at IDHEC or FEMIS are interesting, there is a high proportion of surnames of film people or known intellectuals.

D.H : We see it in concrete terms. The young technicians are often very nice, relatively less pretentious than directors. Nevertheless, there is a loss in terms of intelligence and experience, which is also frightening.

Jean-Marie Straub : And then, there’s too much vanity. There’s almost only vanity, there’s no ambition now.

D.H. : But ambition is also a social fact: someone that comes from below and wants to climb has ambition.

(...)

J.-M. S. : A musician condenses time with time. That’s the affinity between music and cinema. The work to be done is of not of getting bogged down in the space that we show; it’s terribly annoying to see tracking shots, never ending pans. When I hear talk about sequence shots (plan-sequence) I want to vomit; that consists of being bogged down, and besides people now don’t even know what it means concretely. One must know how to, with space, condense time, and how to condense space to get time; also, if the actors speak there can be a relationship to vocal music (or not, if we don’t want it). After all, when someone says hello, it can be notated, no? [To Danièle Huillet:] Why are you staring at me like that?

D.H. : I was thinking about the time when all that wasn't separated...

J.-M.S. : It was well before cinema!

D.H. : Yes... But cinema could find something, and that's what has been lost. It's frightening when you look at old films, to see what was lost en route, all that was possible and that has been ransacked, looted, repressed. This is especially frightening because it's a model for what happens in general.

J.-M.S. : That money is profit. Barbarism is not just in society, it's also produced at the individual level.

J.A. : How then to continue to make films?

D.H. : By saying every time that this will be the last -- not like (Ingmar) Bergman, but concretely, in the knowledge that one has no future.

--1987