D.W. Griffith told a little story not so very long ago. It was about himself, and it possessed the qualities his pictures possess … whimsy and pain and laughter, intertwined … but home. “A castle of freedom, it was,” he said … He told how, among his many duties, he had to go at night and bring in the cows, and he told what peculiarly fearsome cows they were, and what a long distance it seemed to him he had to go for them … across a meadow … across a creek, thru a grove of ghostly sycamore trees … “Sometimes,” said Mr. Griffith, “I would call my older brother and sometimes, only sometimes, he would go with me, and I cannot tell you what a relief it was to me to have him go along. It did not seem so dim and dreadful a way; the creek was not so remote and the sycamores did not seem to cast such shuddering shadows. Ah, I cannot tell you what a blessed thing it was to have a brother to whom I could call, knowing that he would respond. And so, someday, perhaps two thousand years from now, I hope to make a picture which will show a world where every man, adventuring thru the ghostly sycamores and distant creeks and many pitfalls which we call 'life,' will be able to raise his voice and call ‘Brother!’ –knowing an answer will come.”

The Universal Brotherhood of Man … beautiful, beatic, tender, tremendous theme. The Photoplay of the Future … what more profound hope can it have than this … that it will bring the clasping of men’s hands to pass.

“The Genius of a Masterpiece”

from the publication Shadowland,1922.

I speak of what helps me to live, of what is good. I am not one of those that seek to wander off, to find forgetfulness, by loving nothing, by diminishing their needs, their tastes, their desires, by leading their lives -- that is, life -- to the hateful end of their death. I do not insist upon subjecting the world solely by the potential force of the intellect. I want everything to be sensible, real, useful, to me; for it's at this point I conceive my existence starts. Man cannot exist save in his own reality. He must be aware of it. If not, he exists for others but as a corpse, as a stone, or as manure. 

P. Eluard, introduction to Picasso. 1947.

Say the striking workers in INTOLERANCE (1916, David Wark Griffith)

FORD EYES

Excerpt from Tag Gallagher's 

"Then Came a Dream" (2011), on John Ford's IRON HORSE (1924). 

An extra on the Masters of Cinema/Eureka edition of IRON HORSE.

Renoir's Kingdom

KARL MARX: REPORTER by Murray Kempton

The posting of this article is dedicated to my dear brother, Matthew Rector.

Dr. Charles Blitzer's Introduction to The American Journalism of Marx and Engels, a selection of thirty-three of the more than five hundred dispatches which Marx and Engels composed for Greeley and Dana's New York Daily Tribune, is so exemplary a work of information without intrusion that it is embarrassing to begin by finding fault with its conclusion. If Marx seems "less striking and original today" than he must have seemed in the mid-nineteenth century, this is because, Dr. Blitzer says,

 the general approach to political history and analysis that he invented has been almost universally adopted in our time. If a preoccupation with the social and economic background of politics, and a determination to uncover the real motives that lie behind the words of politicians and governments are the hallmarks of modern political journalism, then Karl Marx may properly be said to be its father.

But the dispatches are striking and original, it seems to me, just because they have so little to do with most of the journalism I read or, for that matter construct myself. The best of Marx's descendents are no closer to him than collateral. There is a puzzle here rather like that which arises when one confronts the early Carlyle: one sees at once that here is the way to get at the thing, and wonders why, with the sign painted this plain, the road has been so seldom followed.

That Greeley and Dana exploited Marx (and, without knowing it, Engels) is a piece of anecdote so familiar that President Kennedy sought to amuse the American Newspaper Publishers Association with the notion that the revolutionary specter might never have arisen had the Tribune not beggared its correspondents. Marx's contempt for Greeley had its side of self-disgust for having fallen so low in trade "grinding bones and making soup of them like the paupers in a workhouse." "Mere pot boiling," Engels said long afterward. "It doesn't matter if they are never read again." Indeed Marx and Engels were not the unconscious future of daily journalism. They are only a sport in its past; and the conditions which have permitted their interlude were passing even while they grumbled at how trivial was the work which, as serious men, they never succeeded in trivializing. Greeley had his side; he was also cutting his own wage and Dana's, because early in the 1850's there had begun the process by which the Times slowly ground down the Tribune. "The Times was crowding us too hard..." Greeley wrote in 1852. "It is conducted with the most policy and the least principle of any paper ever started. It is ever watching for the popular side of any question that turns up, and has made lots of friends by ultra abuse of Abolitionists, Women's Rights, Spirit Rappers, etc., which I cannot do. Besides it has had the most room for reading matter the past winter..." That great instrument of collectivist progress, the journalism of accommodation had arrived.

"I have written nothing for Dana because I've not had the money to buy newspapers," Marx wrote Engels that same year. That remark is instructive, not for what it says about Marx's poverty but for what it tells us about his method. He was the journalist of the most despised credentials, the one who does not have access. Circumstance condemned him, of course, to be an outsider; but one comes to doubt that easier circumstance would have altered the method. Marx seems to have been incurious even about what was convenient to hand.

Did he ever visit the Crystal Palace? If he did, there is no evidence that this visual experience worked in any way upon his imagination. The most "unabashed hymn to industrial progress under capitalism" George Lichteim has found in Marx and Engels is their vivid conjuration of the immense shift that would come in the locus and proportion of commercial power with the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill.

Marx had no use for the tactile and no infirmity of distraction by it. At the center of his imagination was the document from whose pages the historical moment jumped only for him. The successive lodgings in Soho, the British Museum, and Hampstead Heath are the only London place where Mehring sets him. It cannot be argued that direct observation would have been of no use to him whatever. If The Eighteenth Brumaire remains on a plane above even the best of this work, the difference, along with its higher passion, must be his direct experience with events; he was acquainted with some of its personages and had at least seen many of the others. Even so, intimacy could never have been so important as the method itself. The Eighteenth Brumaire might be just as unique a piece of historical specification if Marx had got it up from nothing except the files of the Moniteur. The problem with any surmise is that the Moniteur, superior though it might otherwise be to the run of Parisian press, was inadequately stocked with the raw material of fact upon which the historical imagination depends for stimulus. A journalist whose needs and disposition confined him to the study of paper could hardly have worked, however uncommon his genius, anywhere except in the London of the 1850's. Periodicals embodying a special national idiocy can be found anywhere of course; but the British had those and something more. Their journalism was free and lively enough to provide a rich ration of revelatory anecdote. And what was more consequential, the British were the only social staticians in Europe, which meant that they counted their sins along with everything else; Great Britain was the only European nation that bothered to compute its deaths during the 1848 epidemic. This material, primitive as it was, was all Marx needed; what is embarrassing, one hundred years and megatons of documentation later, is how much more he did with such treasures then than our journalism does now.

There were no limits of time and distance to the range of his mind. The house of Commmons debates the British rule of India, "in the usual dull manner," and Marx is off on an examination of the question, impossible of course without a long consideration of the origins and the destruction of the Indian village system. The Duchess of Sutherland attacks slavery in America; and Marx notes the event as a definition of the "class of British philanthropy which chooses its subjects as far distant from home as possible and rather on that than on this side of the ocean." The definition would not, of course, be complete without a full account of the rapacities of the Staffords in Scotland since the end of the seventeenth century.

He notices points that appear to have escaped all public debaters, whatever their side; he even wonders -- as no mere ideologue could have -- whether India has not cost Britain more than it has been worth to her. Most of all, he is unchained from any notion of fixed place; he sits in his imagination wherever it would be most illuminating to sit. When he writes of the opium war, it is as though he were Chinese watching the barbarian ships come up the river; when he unearths the blue book that describes revenue methods in India, he is the Brahman being tortured for his taxes. Sympathy does not take him there; sympathy was not one of Marx's weaknesses; he is simply impelled to find the seat that affords the clearest point of view.

There are none of the rewards of access in these dispatches. They are faintly suggested only by Engels in his sketch of Lord John Russell, where there is some of the small change of gossip we have got used to in journalism. (...)

Of all the illusions we bring young to journalism, the one most useful to lose is the illusion of access to sources .To take two cases, I.F. Stone gets along splendidly by avoiding it, and Walter Lippman gets on no less splendidly by having it and throwing it away before settling down to make up his mind. Persons privy to events either do not know what is important about them or, when they do, generally lie, as even Lincoln lied to Greeley for purposes of seduction. Marx had neither temptation nor opportunity of access; even so, his judgement again and again fits very closely the private observations of those persons safe inside the closed society that he speculated upon from across the moat.

By 1852, he had barely learned enough English to do the Tribune chores, which Engels had, until then, been composing under his name; yet he was already able to dismiss that summer's parliamentary elections:

The bribery and intimidation practiced by the Tories were, then, merely violent experiments for bringing back to life dying electoral bodies which have been incapable of production, and which can no longer achieve decisive electoral results and really national Parliaments. And the results? The old Parliament was dissolved, because at the end it had dissolved into sections which brought each other to a complete standstill. The new Parliament began where the old one ended; it is paralytic from the hour of its birth.

In that same month, James Graham was writing Gladstone: "It will be an impossible Parliament. Parties will be found too nicely balanced to render a new line of policy practicable without a fresh appeal to the electors." In 1855, even Disraeli, in a letter to a friend, embroidered for Palmerston a metaphor very like Engels's, seeing the Prime Minister -- designate as "utterly exhausted... and now an old pantaloon, very deaf, very blind and with false teeth, which would fall out of his mouth when speaking, if he did not hesitate so in his talk."

In Marx's journalism, then, we read dispatches which come as close as contemporary publication ever could to the journals shrewder members of a ruling caste keep for themselves and the letters they write their friends. There the Outsider meets the Insider: Marx makes himself in his own work the embodiment of the Hegelian principle of the contact of extremes (1). His intimacy with persons never seen extend as easily to ground never walked upon. When Marx deals with the Indian village system, there is the impression -- he was not above cultivating it -- that we look upon the distillation of long years of experience in the East set down by a man whose command of every possible detail of the picturesque is controlled by his determination not to let it distract our attention from his hypothesis. Yet all of it is the work of the historical imagination; (...)

To read Marx is to commence to suspect that a great deal of what was to happen to Great Britain was determined by the forces which developed the nineteenth century's solutions, and thereby fixed their limitations. It has become, for example, almost automatic for even the soberest historians of the early Victorian period, when they come to the Ten Hours Act, to be carried away by the spectacle of an aroused national conscience. But Marx noticed even then how contained and confined that conscience had always been: The Established Church, having watched the Enclosures without protest, was suddenly aroused at the sufferings of the victims in the cities. The difference in response had an obvious root for Marx: The Church got its living from the landlords; the mills were owned by Dissenters.

We have grown used to dismissing the Marxist assessment of motive as simpleminded: Still, if this shot were wide of the mark, would there have been as much cant in the Victorian conscience as there was, could there indeed have been that indifference to all humans who were not Western Europeans? One reads all the way through The Age of Improvement without being reminded that Great Britain and France invaded China for no other reason than to force the opium trade upon her: It is an event described only in histories of China, and in the irony of Marx:

While the semi-barbarian stood on the principle of morality, the civilized opposed to him the principle of self.

For the decay of Britain probably began, not so late as we usually set it, but in the years of Palmerston and Russell, who seemed farsighted when they were only indifferent; the one the most insular of foreign adventurers, the other the reformer who changed almost nothing. Great Britain, more lastingly even than France, established government as the theatrical art from which we suffer still. Its invention defeated Marx; one of his mistakes was his failure to recognize that no one is a fitter instrument for resisting history than the mime. England's lasting educational impress on the Indian subcontinent was not the railroad from which Marx expected so much, nor the English verse from which Macaulay hoped for so much. It was instead the mummery that has produced the Pakistan whose official lies are so like Sir Douglas Haig's and the India that lies in the cadences of the New Statesman. The post-Marxian world is an international of the insular.

Still one arises from this hack work of Marx's and thinks of him, defeated, in the heroic form Isaiah Berlin evokes during those years in Soho:

The task of preparing the workers for the revolution was for him a scientific task, a routine occupation, something to be performed as solidly and efficiently as possible, and not as a direct means of personal self-expression. The external circumstances of his life are therefore as monotonous as those of any other devoted expert, as those of Darwin or Pasteur, and offer the sharpest possible contrast to the restless, emotionally involved, lives of other revolutionaries of his time.

Journalism is certainly the less important of the two vocations that have forgotten his example of how a job of work should be done.

JUNE 15, 1967. 

(1) "A most profound yet fantastic speculator on the principles which govern the movements of humanity" Marx begins his dispatch of June 14, 1853. "[Hegel] was wont to extol as one of the ruling secrets of nature what he called the law of contact of extremes. The homely proverb that "extremes meet" was, in his view, a grand and potent truth in every sphere of life, an axiom with which the philosopher could as little dispense as the astronomer with the laws of Kepler or the great discovery of Newton."

- Articles by Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune, 1852-1861.
- Articles on China, 1853-1860, from the New York Daily Tribune by Karl Marx

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.