Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn 
by Jacques Rivette 

This 1950 article by Jacques Rivette from La Gazette du cinéma appears here for the first time in English translation, by Ted Fendt. (Maximum thanks to him.)

*

Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn

The critical reaction to Hitchcock’s last film indicates a certain discomfort. It seems like the conspiratorial silence will only be broken in order to quickly take shelter under two or three reassuring commonplaces about filmed theater, monologues and the return of the “art film.” The story is, moreover, never mentioned except as a very flat melodrama, not worthy of holding the attention of honest folks. This is undoubtedly jumping the gun and there are some lines, by way of exception, that do grab our attention: “It seems as if Hitchcock is the only director who understands what cinema can take from Dostoyevsky’s universe, by which I mean a purely moral universe” (J.J. Saloman). Is this script—which combines several of the most beautiful themes American cinema has had the pleasure of treating—not the best with which Hitchcock has ever worked? It participates, first, then, in the prestige of films where a dark past weighs on the story’s present and the action is summed up by the variations in the relationships the two protagonists have with it. No revelation, moreover, motivates their change of attitude and it is out of a greater awareness of themselves and their true relationships that is born this new, more lucid perspective that makes them victorious over the past. This is a past whose power is extended in the appearance of a governess who gives the story its only spectacular outlet and objectivizes action that could have remained completely interiorized. Her plans coincide with those of the intimate fatality hovering over them: to separate the lovers the way they are separated by their past, the bad memory of which wants them all to itself. Bergman’s alcoholism, encouraged by the governess, is only the image of the secret ravaging her inside and the punishment of the imprudent person who wanted to lock the past inside her.

Everything happens, then, in light of memory and in relation to it. The secret subject of this drama is confession, the deliverance from a secret in its two meanings: in the psychoanalytic sense, because it frees us from the secret by giving the secret a verbal form, and in the religious sense, the confession of sins being equivalent here to their redemption.

A person’s reconquering of their own self is carried out under the double sign of deliverance and redemption providing the film its internal, dramatic progression, a victory over self-contempt and fear of the contempt of others. Social displacement is only the image of a more profound decline: what is worse, having to hate oneself and feel one’s own fall or to know one is responsible for the fall of someone else? The transfer of responsibility for the sin had previously split the couple, the one assuming the punishment, the other the bad conscience. This first sacrifice, wrongly consented to, obliges them to abandon themselves to the euphoria of other incessantly renewed mutual sacrifices. In the end, it is not possible for them to abandon the sacrifice and accept happiness without the third person in turn taking it on before departing—the carrier of evil, bringing in her wake the drama’s Erinyes, far from Australian land.

Not the least of the script’s merits is its resolving of this complex network of emotions and shots into a story with a clear, linear continuity. Hitchcock’s direction—which is also very discreet—intentionally remains on the side of its subject, refusing to underline the important points and, instead, simply presenting them to us. The camera surrenders to the characters as they move around but usually refuses to penetrate and intervene in their interior lives. If the surface details of the story—including the macabre evidence—are underlined in one heavy, abrupt stroke, it is because Hitchcock does indeed love disposing of the whole spectacular side of a plot through excess and, by taking on the outrageousness of such details himself, frees the spectator from being preoccupied with them.

Long takes are also employed without any problems. Shot changes are frequent—on the axis or at pauses and breaks in the action. Still, every moment of sustained tension demands to be filmed in one take: the governess’ insidious monologue, Bergman’s long confession. The shot is identified with each movement of the drama.

Because the camera lingers inside one dwelling, on four characters, and because the outside world barely intervenes except as caricatured and reduced to a universe of puppets and postcards, people talk about filmed theater. Yet, is what is shown to us not constantly established as what is most important, if not most spectacular? To regret not seeing a horse break its leg while all the dramatic tension on the verge of breaking a moment later is concentrated right before our eyes between Cotton and Bergman is a very infantile conception of cinema.

If theater and cinema both present us man in action (speech and gesture), the modes of appearance differ in singular ways and this change of perspective does not occur without seriously changing its subject. It is not only that in this case it is a matter of the organization of a concrete world where the sets always fool our eyes and look as real as the actors’ bodies, where man is inserted into a real universe, in his image. Here, this order takes the form of the irremediable: affixing something on film—willingly or not—imposes it but demands a definitive agreement between all the elements in the shot. How, finally, do we separate each moment from the point of view to which the camera surrenders us—the prefabricated gaze, irremediable as well, whose agreement with its subject is undoubtedly verified not so much by the invisibility of the découpage as by its transparency? It seems we are more sensible to this the more the artifice is threatened and it is certainly not defined by an absence of research but by extreme research taken to the point of destroying its own traces. Theater is subject to the virtue of presence and the contagion of corporeal lyricism, cinema intellectualizes concrete givens through the sole distinction of the rigorous organization of time and space, irremediably linked and positioned. Not the least of the Ten Minute Take’s virtues is its surrendering of all the elements of the film to such a precisely mechanical organization: the economy imposes its law on the aesthetic and completes it, the timing of every gesture constrains the actors to metrical movements. Subjected to the camera they are focused into these mechanical performances that are characteristic of cinematic performances usually only arrived at through fatigue after long rehearsals. The actors yield to the camera while the camera, to the contrary, follows them and the alternately tense and relaxed performances respect the double movement of tension and relaxation in dramatic respiration. The actor’s body—which in theater is only the abstract support of gesture and speech—discovers its full carnal reality: an opening eye breaks the screen, hands and faces, in their slightest quivers, open and express, like voices, a truth that is entirely of appearances. Constantly, before our eyes, the flesh is visited by the spirit. A certain plastic ugliness only brings out more the entirely moral beauty of this film: Ingrid Bergman shriveled, covered in makeup, old during her first appearance, rediscovers, little by little, at the same time as inner peace, the strength to smile and be beautiful and it is while radiating from purity and happiness that she takes her leave with a bow.

Jacques Rivette 
"Under Capricorn d'Alfred Hitchcock" 
La Gazette du cinéma
October 1950, No. 4.

Translation by Ted Fendt

Before Babel

Film conversation between Artavazd Peleshian and Jean-Luc Godard

On the periphery of the official and commercial circuits, a network based on complicity and admiration has led to Peleshian's films being discovered, little by little, in the West. Jean-Luc Godard was one of the first and still one of the most enthusiastic defenders of his work. The Armenian's journey to Paris provided an opportunity to suggest that they meet. They talked about art and science, morality and politics, show business and information. In short, they talked about film.

Jean-Michel Frodon

Jean-Luc Godard: What conditions have you worked under?

Artavazd Peleshian: I've made all my films in Armenia, but often with help from Moscow. I don't want to praise the old system, but I wouldn't complain about it either. At least they had the VGIK (Cinematic Institute), which provided excellent training. We learned about cinema not just in the Soviet Union but all over the world and everyone then had an opportunity to find his or her own voice. I don't want to make the system responsible for the fact that I have made so few films; let's just say that I had some personal problems. I still don't know what is going to happen in the new situation. I hope I will be able to go on working; there are always problems, as there are in France  as well, problems relating to production and to the relationships between people. Until now, the biggest problem has been the poor distribution of my films.

JLG: I discovered them because they were shown at the festival of documentary films at Nyons, a few kilometres from where I live. Freddy Buache, the director of the Cnémathèque de Lausanne, applied the "Soviet method" to them for making copies: he made a copy of them during the night and showed it to us -- to Anne-Marie Mieville and me. They made an enormous impression on me, but quite different to the films of Paradjanov, who seems to me close to the tradition of Persian carpet making and to literature. Your films, it seemed to me, could only come out of cinematic traditions. As if the work of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Vertov had managed to go on and make an impression something like certain films of Flaherty or certain documentaries of the Cuban film-maker Santiago Alvarez. A type of film both traditional and original, completely outside America, which is very strong in world cinema. Even Rome, an open city, owes something to America. When there is an occupation, the problem of resistance comes up and how to resist. When I saw your films I had the impression that, whatever defects the so-called socialist system may have, at one time certain powerful personalities succeeded in thinking differently. Probably that's going to change. As far as I'm concerned, being a critic of reality and of the means used to represent it, I rediscovered the technique that Russian film-makers used to call montage. Montage in a deep sense, in the sense in which Eisenstein called El Greco the great montage artist of Toledo.

AP: It's difficult to talk about montage. That is certainly the wrong word. Perhaps one has to say "the system of order". To cast light, beyond the technical aspect, on reflecting the depths.

JLG: What is the Russian word for montage? Isn't there one?

AP: Yes, montaj.

JLG: Because for "image", for example, there are two words in Russian. That's useful. It would be interesting to make a dictionary of cinematographic terms in each country. The Americans have two words: "cutting" and "editing" (related to the people called "editors", who are not the same as an "éditeur" in the French senses of the word, who is more like a "producer"). The words don't refer to the same things, and they don't come back to the same idea as "montage".

AP: We are have difficulties in talking because of the problem of terminology. There is the same problem with the word "documentaire" (documentary). In French you talk about a "fiction film", while in Russian we call it "an artistic film". Whereas all films could be artistic in French. There are also two other expressions in Russian, meaning literally "played film" and "non-played film" ("le cinéma joué" et le "cinéma non joué"-- a year after this conversation took place Godard would make the short video Les enfants jouent à la Russie. - Ed.)

JLG: That's a bit like the Americans, who talk about a "feature film" when it is fiction. "Feature" means characteristics of a face, physiognomy, which goes back to the appearance of the stars. There is a lot that needs understanding about these things, such as the fact that for the French "copie standard" (the copy in which the sound and the visual image are combined), the English say "married print", the Americans "answer print", the Italians "copia campione" (first-rate copy) -- and that comes from the times of Mussolini. But the misunderstanding about documentaire/documentary is one of the most serious. These days, the difference between documentary and fiction, between a documentary film and a commercial film, even if it's called artistic, is that the documentary has a moral attitude that does not apply to the feature film. The "New Wave" always mixed up the two; we always said that Rouch was so fascinating because he made fiction with the force of documentary and that Renoir was too, because he made documentaries with the force of fiction.

AP: It is no longer a problem of direction. Flaherty is often thought to be a documentary film-maker.

JLG: Oh, certainly. He's a documentary film-maker who directed everything and everybody. Nanouk, Man of Aran, Louisiana Story -- every shot has been carefully directed. When Wiseman made a film about big department stores, The Store, he observed the direction and fiction of the department stores themselves.

AP: For the same reasons, I have never even asked about working in the framework of a film or television studio. I have tried to find a place where I could film in peace. Sometimes that happened to be for TV. What is important is being able to speak one's own language, the language of film. Sometimes people say that film is a synthesis of other art forms; I don't think that's true. In my view, it started at the Tower of Babel, where the division into different languages began. For technical reasons it first appeared after the other art forms, but in its nature it precedes them. I try to make pure cinema, owing nothing to the other arts. I look for a setting that may create an emotional magnetic field around it.

JLG: Being something of a pessimist, I see the end of things before their beginning. For me, cinema is the last manifestation of art, which is a Western idea. Great painting has vanished, great novels have vanished. Cinema was, if you like, a language before Babel, which everyone understood without needing to learn it. Mozart played to princes, the peasants weren't listening, whereas Chaplin played for everybody. The film-makers went in search of the foundations of what is unique about film, and this kind of search is, yet again, something very occidental. It is montage. They talked about it a great deal, especially during times of change. In the twentieth century the biggest change of all was the transformation of the Russian Empire into the USSR; logically, it was the Russians who made the greatest progress in that search, simply because with the revolution society was itself making a montage of before and after.

AP: Film relies on three factors: space, time and real movement. These three elements exist in nature, but among the arts it is only cinema that rediscovers them. Thanks to them it is possible to find the secret movement of matter. I am convinced that film is able to speak the languages of philosophy, science and art, all at the same time. Perhaps this is the unity that the ancient world was seeking.

JLG: One finds the same thing when one reflects on the history of the idea of projection, as it was born and evolved until it was applied technically in projection equipment. The Greeks imagined the principle in the famous cave of Plato. This Western idea, which was not envisaged by Buddhists, nor by the Aztecs, took form in Christianity, which is based on the hope of something larger. Later it took a practical form among mathematicians, who invented -- again in the West -- descriptive geometry. Pacal worked hard at it, again with a religious, mystic after-thought, elaborating his thoughts about cones. The cone is the idea of projection. Later we find Jean-Victor Poncelet, a scholar and officer in Napoleon's army. He was imprisoned in Russia, and it was there that he conceived his treatise on the projective properties of shapes, which is the basis of modern theory on this matter. It was not by chance that he made this discovery in prison. He had a wall in front of him, and he did what all prisoners did: he projected onto it. An urge to escape. Being a mathematician he expressed himself in equations. At the end of the nineteenth century came the means of technical realization. One of the more interesting aspects is that at that time sound movies were ready to go. Edison came to Paris to present a method using a disk synchronized with the visual tape. That was the same principle as that of today in certain studios where a compact disk is coupled with the film to create numerical/digital sound. And that went on! With imperfections, like other images, but it went on and was able to improve the technique. But people didn't want it. The public wanted silent cinema; they wanted to see.

AP: When sound finally arrived, at the end of the twenties, the great film-makers, such as Griffith, Chaplin and Eisenstein, were afraid of it. They felt that sound represented a step backwards. They were not wrong, but not for the reasons they imagined: sound did not interfere with montage, it came to replace the image.

JLG: The technology of the talkies arrived at the same time as the rise of fascism in Europe, which was also the time when the speaker had arrived. Hitler was a great speaker, and so were Mussolini, Churchill, de Gaulle and Stalin. The talkie was the triumph of the theatrical scenario over the language that you have been speaking about, the language that existed before the curse of Babel.

AP: To recover that language I use what I call absent images. I think you can hear the images and see the sound. In my films the image is situated next to the sound and the sound next to the image. Theses exchanges bring about a result that is different from the montage in the time of silent films, or, better, of "non-talking" films.

JLG: Today, image and sound are growing further and further apart; one is more aware of television. The image on the one hand and the sound on the other, and there is no longer a healthy and real association of one with the other. They are merely political reports. That is why in all countries in the world television is in the hands of politics. And now politics is working at creating a new type of image (so-called high definition), a form nobody needs at present. It is the first time that political powers have bothered to say: you will see the images in this film and through this window. An image that would otherwise have the form of a small basement window, one of those little things at pavement level also has the form of a chequebook.

AP: I wonder what television has given us. It can eliminate distance, but only the cinema is able to defeat time, due to the montage technique. This germ of time -- the cinema can go through it. But it moved further along that path before the talkie. No doubt because man is greater than language, greater than words. I believe in man more than in his language.

2 April 1992

Artavazd Peleshian in Paris

Photo by Hermine Karagheuz



Thanks to "the Joueur" Phelps
Originally published in Le Monde
French language version available here

From the online publication of The Making of F.W. Murnau's TABU: The Outtakes Edition. 

Deutsch Kinemathek. Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung.

With a country in my eyes





And these romantic dreams in my head...

                                               

Echoes of Silence

At twenty-three years of age, one night in the Fall of 1965, (Jean-Claude Biette) disappears to escape military service, ordering André Téchiné to tell no one. His parents panic, his father visits the offices of the Cahiers, then a search through television, on the Leon Zitrone program. A letter finally arrives: from Rome, where he remained for four years. There he made four short films, two fiction (Ecco ho letto and La Partenza), two documentary (Attilio Bertolucci, Sandro Penna). In the process this leads him to the Pesaro Festival, where he makes ​​the acquaintance of Adolpho Arrietta. In Pesaro, along with Jean-Marie Straub, Jean Eustache and Bernardo Bertolucci (son of Attilio, the poet) he receives the shock of Echoes of Silence by Peter Emanuel Goldman....

— from Pierre Léon's new book Jean-Claude Biette, le sens du paradoxe. 

*

On Echoes of Silence (Peter Emanuel Goldman, 1965)

By Jean-Claude Biette

Recently banned by the French censors, Echoes of Silence seems to provoke the spectator not because Peter Emanuel Goldman shows a somewhat tarnished girl who sells herself to a fat old man, or a boy who caresses the chest of a male friend, or his hero Miguel discarding a girl with whom he no longer wants to make love — scenes that one could very well find again, complaisance aside, with many New York filmmakers; but because, pursuing faces obstinately, hesitating often from one to another, seeking the slightest traces of muteness even in dirty hands, grasped pieces of mirror, hair in disorder, Goldman pushes away the customary points of support, intrigue, clarified unfolding of a lived mixture, commentary by double exposure (sometimes only cartoons designate the situations), and so on.

The order and number of sequences seem to matter little, to us as to him; there exist two different prints of the film without one's being able to characterize them differently than by variations of duration and of lighting. It scarcely matter either that the musical sequences are repeated; they are there to prolong a state, as in the endless drawings-out, fishing for tuna or ascension, with Rossellini. Each chapter, or canvas, interrupts itself by virtue of continuing a length of time; the glances exchanged by three girls in a little room lead to nothing and keep within themselves, latent, a drama that does not unfold. To these beings lost in New York, nothing ever happens. A forlorn girl cradles a poor doll and nothing is resolved, one observes only an infinitesimal change. Here time is not accountable to the tumult of everyday life, and the film progresses by amplification, like a wave, slow but without return, not by the addition of actions or events whose exact path one seeks, but by the ensnaring joining of solitudes. If ever new faces appear, if one frequents surprising spaces -- like the museum — an ephemeral metamorphosis can be brought about; Miguel prowling through the museum, like Nosferatu, is suddenly caught in the circle of his motionless prey. But later when the phantoms will scatter in the streets of New York, scarcely distracted by the vehement reading of the Bible, for what reason would the film pace off the glimpsed desert?

                                    —  Jean-Claude Biette

From Cahiers du cinéma, no. 188, March 1967.
An English translation from Cahiers du cinéma in English, no. 11, Sept. 1967.

Bresson's film of incessant pathetic fallacy,
Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (Four Nights of a Dreamer).

1977, Toute révolution est un coup de dés 

Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice

MAY DAY

Sun Trust, the bank, forecloses on a supermarket. 

Policemen in Augusta, Georgia, guard food as it is thrown into the trash.

Exhausted, exhausted, L'age d'or

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for 9/10ths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those 9/10ths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary conditions for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In a word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Tati Speaks

There are very few interviews with Jacques Tati in English or English translation, but one quite exceptional interview appears in - and mostly comprises - the short, forgotten, and lovely book Jacques Tati (The Entertainers) by Penelope Gilliat (1976). The following are excerpts —

*

When people don't know each other they follow right angles. When they are intimate they go in curves. 

* 

You won't find another Chaplin, you won't find another Keaton, because the school is closed. 

* 

Now, a new car: maybe the old one has more memories. Souvenirs. When my old car came back from the repair shop I was so happy. At the Benzie station well-modernized men throw away everything because it doesn't work. Our world becomes every day more anonymous. In other times, the butcher was a man with a colored shirt. Now he puts on a white overall like a male nurse. The world is in the process of becoming an enormous clinic.

But if, at the beginning, the inhabitants know themselves to be at sea and then force themselves to change their new city to suit their idiosyncrasies then they will come to arriving at humanizing modern decor, little by little. Accidents will happen. People will laugh. Chairs in the shape of Henry Moore sculptures will be felt to be uncomfortable for sitting in.

*

(Hulot) promenades, that's all. He takes a walk. Innocent and tranquil. He simply looks at things. Is it his fault if we have baptized him with our invented desires and needs? And if believing ourselves to be serious, we have insisted on being solemn? Hulot is not a reactionary, you understand. He is not against progress. And he is not funny himself, not at all. He conducts himself according to strict rules of courtesy that do not ever allow him to express surprise.

*

— (Tati's) luggage was lost on some flight in the American South. I saw him soberly struggling with something called an "irregularity report" that had on it a box saying firmly "Write nothing in this box".

*

I never went to church. We have agreed that it may be an ersatz show. We don't know, do we? Who does? It's stupid, at any rate, to give money to be blessed by God. If you believe in something you have to do it yourself, yes? You have to stop in a big forest and make your own mind up and decide about your own conscience in front of a tree.

*

— Showing Playtime in New Orleans, (Tati) found that the curtains wouldn't pull according to any signal from the projection booth. He said to the discouraged cinema staff before the showing, "This will be difficult for you, because the film has no end. It simply stops. So I shall pull the curtains myself. The electric mechanism for closing them has failed, you say? Never mind. I shall drag the curtains by hand very rapidly and no one will notice."

*

I am not a communist. I could have been, if communist history was not so sad. It makes me sound old-fashioned, but I think I am an anarchist. Great things were done by the historic anarchists... The students of May 1968 seemed very good at the beginning. But when they came to the workers at Renault, the workers say, what do you propose? They say, we have fought for years to have a bigger apartment. You see, revolution has always come from intellectuals, but it has to have a popular impulse. I would like to make films for everybody, though this doesn't mean that every film I make is alike. In the Hulot films or Playtime there is not a shot I have made that I can put in another picture. A film is like a person. Picasso has nothing to do with Renoir or Michel St Denis, and students want to see what is personal. They mostly don't like to live in a society where manufacturers make money by distributing electric guitars. This is true capitalist society. I am on the side of the students., I have to say. They ask, how can you be honest if a government stuffed with scientific people doesn't say that the water from the Seine is about to smell terrible? The government budget, for instance, is based on cars and petrol. Now, how can one speak nostalgically about trees if each day you bring into the city thousands of cars polluting the air? That's where the students are right. I feel sad for them that they weren't as successful in '68 as they are in taking dope. You can't have a good talk with a man who lies down and goes to sleep in the middle of a sentence. Finished. On the whole, though, as I said, I salute the students. They have proved that girls often have silly make-up. If they don't want to wear shoes, fine. Though they are unfortunately also showing that they live in a ghetto, and I don't like that. They have done something far more wonderful when they have managed to cross frontiers. In one American city, for instance, I asked why there was only one black in a thousand whites at college. I didn't mean to be asking a political question, because I am not American. I shall not judge. None of the professors answered me. It was the students who saw the point. They agreed, of course, and this was in the South, where it is not so easy. Students and children are interested in change and they give me courage to continue. The older people are not so good. I met a woman from Mississippi  She said, "No, the times have not much changed, and now we have these horrible machines." 

*

Hulot beings to disappear in Playtime because everyone is the hero. A lot of people think I am M. Hulot, but I am really quite different. I can't always walk with head in air. I'd crack up. The expression wouldn't stay. M. Hulot is out of the moon, as I said. But today there is no moon. 

*

Of course (Chaplin) didn't really alter anything. The Great Dictator didn't stop Hitler. But art can change things a little. The Great Dictator was one of the first underground pictures. Now the kids of ten say shit to the frigidaire. 

*

I should like to make films that are not lowering to the spirit.  A new building can be very harrowing, I should like to give people a chance to whistle. 

*

I mean decor that is self-important. That was the reason I wrote Playtime, which is maybe the smallest picture in 70mm ever made.

*

— We were in Paris when there was a garbage strike. (Tati) was on the side of the strikers, as one would expect, though not so silly as to ignore the complexity of the economic issues. "People are okay. They take time. That's what I like." He glared at a lorry full of the military who had come in as strike-breakers and then spread his hands, looking at the pile of mess outside every house and shop. "What's that?" I said, walking over to a heap of what seemed to be ticker-tape or blank film-strips. "Telex," he said, picking up a metre or two of it and pretending to read, shaking with laughter. "All those important messages. Gold is up! Gold is down! Buy into aluminum! I expect the office boy threw it all away before the vice-president had had a chance to read it. What a scandal!" He stirred the heap as if it were an enormous plate of noodles. Children gathered, watching solemnly, and then started to bounce in the tape as if it were a feather-bed. "You see, they are like engaged couples trying out mattresses, only they are having more fun than if you were a bed-salesman protecting the springs."

*

— He denies vivaciously that (Playtime) is an attack on modern architecture. "It is a comedy about our time. No one important notices that things have changed. For instance, dogs and children don't. Dogs are very natural. For dogs in New York, it is still the old New York."

*

I receive a lot of lessons from dogs. They don't have any lessons to receive from the new engineers. They always say hello to each other in their way... They didn't change. I want to follow and understand (them). And they are, for me, marvellous comedians.

*

About grown-ups, I would like to make a film called "Confusion". It would take place in the new tunnel in the Concorde and it would be about tourists and a guide. Every time the guide says "There is so-and-so," the tourists bus goes down another tunnel before the passengers see anything except the walls of the new tunnel. The idea of the film is that a lot of clever grown-ups don't know what they are doing." 

*

For the first time (with Parade), the audience itself is in an arena watching a circus. The glass is broken. People talk... I am happy if people talk in a cinema. I am happy if a little boy asks a question of his father. 

*

Music-hall is one of the reasons why I like to shoot from far away. On the legs, Keaton for me is Number One. You could have a sound-track through the means of his legs. A dialogue. Interrogation. Then decision. Finally fear. Chaplin, on the other hand, has been very clever all the time. He's a great comedian. He creates very good situations, but they are a little bit too much for me. Too much is done on purpose. He says too clearly, "I'm a poor man. I'm cold. I'm hungry." 

*

When Chaplin made The Gold Rush, people could actually go off into the mountains to look for gold. Now they go winter-sporting. Chaplin's boots and bowler would be unfortunately out of place in the snow..... Not that I don't like the new times, as I said. I'm saying nothing against the marvellous new sunny schools for children. I'm only trying to bring a little humor to - say - Orly Airport. People would have liked me to continue with Hulot in the old way, of course. 'Hulot goes Skiing , 'Hulot at St Tropez'. And if I had, I'd have all the money I need and my wife and children would be living in a castle. If I had continued to make small-budget successes in black-and-white, everyone would be happy. 

*

It's perhaps a good thing that Playtime didn't make much money because I am always in the position of a new director. I feel young inside, so I feel like a student when I start a new picture. I am not making money for banks, not killing myself for a mortgage repayment; I make films.

*

One of the reasons I don't like to shoot in close-up, I have no right to bang anyone's nose against the screen. I would like to give them an alternative. Something else to watch. In life outside, when people are told that they have to live in such and such a region to go to the factory to get work, they have no alternative and they get sad. 

*

I began with a copy of old slapstick. Mistake. Then I thought I should find a new sort of visual comedy. Not made by the ordinary kind of technicians, you see. They are like civil servants. It is not their fault. It is the fault of the studios and the backers. Left to themselves, all people are creative. You will get a certain genius from the men in the sound lorries, a certain genius in a moustache from the wardrobe, etcetera, etcetera. It's a big building, the cinema comique. Everyone has brought his stone. If people wonder why I made Playtime in 70mm, which is generally for super-productions of cavalry charges or undressed stars: well, the comic effect is the change of dimension. The comedy of observation is supported by stereophonic sound which adds to "le gag visuel" "le gag sonore". 

*

There was a school of bearing that said silently to the public, "I am the amazing star of the evening,  I can do a terrific number of things. I can juggle, I can dance, I'm a great man, I'm the gag man." That was the old school of the circus and music-hall, the one I came from. What I've been trying to show is that the whole world is funny. There's no need to be a comic to make a gag.

* 

I want to show who's who. Not like in the book Who's Who. That says what school you went to, what club you belong to. I want to show who's who in other ways. What's what. Then I have a chance to look at the big businessman opposite me behind his enormous desk and his telephones, you know (tie-straightening gesture, buzzing gesture, leaning back in expensive-chair gesture), and to let audiences say for themselves, "Well, maybe you're not so important." That's one of the the things I like about young people. They like to show what it is to be dressed or undressed. It is a good exercise to say to yourself, "What would those big businessmen be like nude?" When I see them travelling, I see them suffering for their expensive leather luggage. The conveyor belts throwing their cases as if they were hurling baskets of fruit at the fruit market. Except, of course, that actual men at the fruit market are more careful. I believe I like the secondary characters in a film best. They breathe the truth. 

*

I suppose it was all those years in music-hall that made me realize actors like to have their legs showing. To cut off an actor's legs is like cutting off a swan's neck." — I said that Buster Keaton had once told me that, when he was doing a leap across the stage, he treated his head at the rudder and his legs as the wind that filled the sails. Tati nodded, asked more, and spoke of Keaton's technical care. "I am trying to do something that I hope he would have liked with this knotty problem of sound-tracks in comedy. For instance, when people are in strange surroundings, natural sounds always sound louder. He would have understood that."

* 

I have spent a fortune to have magnetic sound. No distributor wants it. But optical is out. I am not speaking about making a Chevrolet  That I can't do. But a man less happy than I am takes a salary. He is in charge of Sony, say. He is very important, but he is not allowed to have a small idea. He says, for instance, paint the lift blue. There is immediately a conference. If you want to have an idea, a better idea, it is not permitted....

*

— He likes films to be "about everybody but also about nobody big." Before he started Trafic, Tati went to a highway and just sat watching. "People going away for the weekend. Not a smile. A dog looked out of the back of one car, staring at a field where he could have run about."

*

You know what I should like to do, of course. I should like to film a little the differences individuals can make. Because, you understand, in this super-mechanized organization, there will always be a lad who will be fortified with a minute screwdriver and break down an elegant automatic lift that has Muzak playing in it as you go up to the thirty-second floor. In the meantime, the screwdriver is doing its work and the lad is whistling a tune of his own. There are two universes now, you see. That is what I am always trying to show.