The above texts are excerpts from a questionnaire appearing in Film: Book 2, Films of Peace and War, edited by Robert Hughes (available here). Besides Bresson, Fuller, Renoir, Godard, Truffaut, and critics Noel Burch, Marshall McLuan, and Guido Aristarco, all quoted above, the other respondents were: Claude Autant-Lara, Andre Cayatte, Sergei Gerasimov, Richard Griffith, Alexander Hammid, Kurt Hoffman, Stanley Kaufmann, Stanley Kramer, Len Lye, Roger Manvell, Louis Marcorelles, Arthur Miller, Robert Osborn, Gian-Luigi Polidoro, Tony Richardson, Dore Schary, George Stoney, Archer Winsten, Robert Wise, and Paul Goodman. 

***

Billy Woodberry's words to the youth...

From the closing remarks of a talk given last night by Billy Woodberry after a screening of the great Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) ––

(On change:) devise the means, discern the questions. 

There are more means, more avenues for films today but, as James M. Cain said, we can't all be selling hot dogs to each other: you send me a youtube, I send you a youtube...

Diversity lost, imperium triumphed, and the rest withdrew from the fight.

Small circles resist. They encourage and applaud each other, and that is refined. 

Look, the example is there. We can dust it off.

What we're living might look like an apocalypse, but do not relent. That is not your job. You say: the world could be better, and accept nothing less. You go ahead and try on cynicism. But that's not your coat.

The Pocketbook (Woodberry, 1980)

Alain Resnais (1922-2014)

M. wild grass, he had the courage to make the greatest film ever made, the world's only militant film on the Holocaust...

Faithful as ever,

The grass flourishes on the muster-ground round the blocks.

An abandoned village, still heavy with the threats.

The furnace is no longer in use,

The skill of the Nazis is child's play today.

Nine million dead haunt this landscape.

Who is on the look-out from this strange watch-tower

To warn us of our new executioners' arrival?

Are their faces really different from ours?

Somewhere in our midst lucky Kapos survive.

Reinstated officers and anonymous informers.

There are those reluctant to believe

Or believing from time to time.

There are those who look at these ruins today

As though the monster were dead and buried beneath them.

Those who take hope again as the image fades

As though there were a cure for the scourge of these camps.

Those who pretend all this happened only once,

At a certain time and in a certain place.

Those who refuse to look around them,

Deaf to the endless cry.

Nuit et brouillard

*

...toute l'imagination du monde

*

Q: Cinema has ossified...

Henri Langlois: It's not hardened arteries, it's murder. No comparison. Film is being murdered in a marvelous way, like Othello when he snuffed out his wife with a pillow. That way we can't cry murder, because there's no blood.

Q: Can you elaborate?

Langlois: I can't.

Q: It's too complex?

Langlois: No. Everyone will understand.

Some called her Miss Black...

Some called her Miss Black... 

...Polly Tix,
that Kid 'in' Africa,
Managed Money,
Wee Willie Winkie,
Ours,
Merrily,
War Baby,
Marky,
A Twentieth Century Fox,
that Kid in Hollywood,
Dora,
Bright Eyes,
Curly Top,
Littlest Rebel,
Poor Little Rich Girl,
Dimples,
Heidi,
Philadelphia Thursday,
Storybook...



In memory of Shirley Temple, 1928-2014.

Pedro Costa and Chris Petit discuss Where Lies Your Hidden Smile? last January 9th at the "Institute of Contemporary Art," London, plus a question and answer... here. Thanks to Mehelli Modi.

Your attitude toward art?

One-millionth part of the inventiveness which every man shows in his daily work in the factory, the work, in the field, that already contains an element of what people single out as so called "art". 

The very term "art" is counter-revolutionary in essence, since it shelters a whole caste of privileged people, who imagine themselves to be not people but the miracle workers of this same "art". Inspiration, or rather an enthusiasm for your work, is not the prerogative of these "Magi", but also of every worker on the Vlkhov Hydro-Electric Plant, every driver in his train, every turner at his lathe. 

Destroying once and for all the term "art", we should not, of course, bring it back in another form, let's say under the sauce of "artistic labor". It is essential that we establish definitively that there is no border between artistic and non-artistic labor.

Dziga Vertov, "Otvet na piat voprosov", Kino, 21 October 1924.

Pedro Costa rediscovers the intuition of the greats, Godard and Straub, when he says he admires the idea that cinema is "cinematographic life experience." The cinema is not only a very specific practice (to make quickly, thinking-shooting-showing), but a model of life whose rhythm is in itself finding, as if losing, a line drawn by thought. 

(Costa:) "Increasingly I only see little ideas, techniques, formal, script things, or whatever. The device that wants to be vraisemblant, it stinks, and it feels and shows on film. Before, there was a thought that accompanied practice, a diffuse thought, not necessarily structured." 

Dominique Villain, THÉORIES INTIMES sur Le Travail du cinéma