GERSHON KREIMER

Notes on
Cinematography
Robert Bresson
Translated by Jonathan Griffin
Urizen Books New York
1950-1958
Rid myself of the accumulated errors and un-
truths. Get to know my resources, make sure of
them.
o
The faculty of using my resources well
diminishes when their number grows.
o
Master precision. Be a precision instrument
myself.
o
Not have the soul of an executant (of my own
projects). Find, for each shot, a new pungency
over and above what I had imagined. Invention
(re-invention) on the spot.
o
Metteur-en-scene, director. The point is not to
direct someone, but to direct oneself.
o
No actors.
(No directing of actors).
No parts.
(No learning of parts).
No staging.
But the use of working models, taken from life.
BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (actors).
1
2
HUMAN MODELS:
Movement from the exterior to the interior.
(Actors: movement from the interior to the ex-
terior.)
The thing that matters is not what they show me
but what they hide from me and, above all, what
they do not suspect is in them.
Between them and me: telepathic exchanges,
divination.
o
(1925 ?) The TALKIE opens its doors to theater,
which occupies the place and surrounds it with
barbed wire.
o
Two types of film: those that employ the
resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc.)
and use the camera in order to reproduce; those
that employ the resources of cinematography
and use the camera to create.
o
The terrible habit of theater.
o
CINEMATOGRAPHY' IS A WRITING WITH IMAGES IN
MOVEMENT AND WITH SOUNDS.
o

A film cannot be a stage show, because a stage
show requires flesh-and-blood presence. But it
can be, as photographed theater or CINEMA is, the
photographic reproduction of a stage show. The
photographic reproduction of a stage show is
comparable to the photographic reproduction of
a painting or of a sculpture. But a photographic
reproduction of Donatellos Saint John the Bap-
tist or of Vermeer's Young Woman with
Necklace has not the power, the value or the
price of that sculpture or that painting. It does
not create it. Does not create anything. 3
[J
CINEMA films are historical documents whose
place is in the archives: how a play was acted in
19 .. by Mr. X, Miss Y.
o
An actor in cinematography might as well be in a
foreign country. He does not speak its language.
o
The photographed theater or CINEMA requires a
metteur-en-scene or director to make some ac-
tors perform a play and to photograph these ac-
tors performing the play; afterwards he lines up
the images. Bastard theater lacking what makes
theater: material presence of living actors, direct
action of the audience on the actors.
o
4
· .. without lacking naturalness, they lack
nature. * -Chateaubriand.
Nature: what the dramatic art suppresses in
favor of a naturalness that is learned and main-
tained by exercises.
o
Nothing rings more false in a film than that
natural tone of the theater copying life and
traced over studied sentiments.
o
To think it more natural for a movement to be
made or a phrase said like this than like that is
absurd, is meaningless in cinematography.
o
No possible relations between an actor and a
tree. The two belong to different worlds. (A
stage tree simulates a real tree.)
o
Respect man's nature without wishing it more
palpable than it is.
o
No marriage of theater and cinematography
without both being exterminated.
o
* ... sans manquer de naturel, manquent de nature.
Cinematographic film, where expression is ob-
tained by relations of images and of sounds, and
not by a mimicry done with gestures and intona-
tions of voice (whether actors' or non-actors').
One that does not analyze or explain. That re-
composes.
o
An image must be transformed by contact with
other images, as is a color by contact with other
colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a
green, a yellow, a red. No art without trans-
formation.
o
The truth of cinematography cannot be the truth
of theater, nor the truth of the novel, nor the
truth of painting. (What the cinematographer
captures with his or her own resources cannot be
what the theater, the novel, painting capture
with theirs.)
o
Cinematographic film, where the images, like
the words in a dictionary, have no power and
value except through their position and relation.
o
If an image, looked at by itself, expresses
something sharply, if it involves an interpreta-
tion, it will not be transformed on contact with
other images. The other images will have no
power over it, and it will have no power over the
other images. Neither action, nor reaction. It is
definitive and unusable in the cinematographer's
system. (A system does not regulate everything.
It is a bait for something.)
o
5
Apply myself to insignificant (non-significant)
images.
o
Flatten my images (as if ironing them), without
attenuating them.
o
On the choice of models.
6 His voice draws for me his mouth, his eyes,
his face, makes for me his complete portrait, out-
er and inner, better than if he were in front of
me. The best deciphering got by the ear alone.
ON LOOKS
Who said: "A single look lets loose a passion, a
murder, a war"?
o
The ejaculatory force of the eye.
o
To set up a film is to bind persons to each other
and to objects by looks.
o
Two persons, looking each other in the eye, see
not their eyes but their looks. (The reason why
we get the color of a person's eyes wrong?)
o
r -
'"
On two deaths and three births.
My movie is born first in my head, dies on
paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and
real objects I use, which are killed on film but,
placed in a certain order and projected onto a
screen, come to life again like flowers in water.*
o
To admit that X may be by turns Attila,
Mahomet, a bank clerk, a lumberman, is to ad-
mit that the movies in which he acts smack of
the stage. Not to admit that X acts is to admit
tha t Attila = Mahomet = a bank clerk = a
lumberman, which is absurd.
,
(
7
o
Applause during X's film.
"theater" irresistible.
The impression of
o
A model. Enclosed in his mysterious appearance.
He has brought home to him all of him that was
outside. He is there, behind that forehead, those
cheeks.
o
"Visible parlance" of bodies, objects, houses,
roads, trees, fields.
o
To create is not to deform or invent persons and
things. It is to tie new relationships between
persons and things which are, and as they are.
o
* To "cinematograph" someone is not to give him life, It is
because they are living that actors make a stage play alive,
8
Radically suppress intentions in your models.
o
To your models: "Don't think what you're say-
ing, don't think what you're doing." And also:
"Don't think about what you say, don't think
about what you do."
o
Your imagination will aim less at events than at
feelings while wanting these latter to be as
documentary as possible.
o
You will guide your models according to your
rules, with them letting you act in them, and you
letting them act in you.
o
One single mystery of persons and objects.
o
Not to use two violins when one is enough."
o
Shooting. Put oneself into a state of intense ig-
norance and curiosity, and yet see things in ad-
vance.
o
* Ti avverto se in qualche concerto troverai scritto 5010
dovri'i essere suonato da un solo violino. [Note that if in any
concerto the word solo is written it should be played by one
violin only. J (Vivaldi).
One recognizes the true by its efficacy, by its
power.
D
Passionate for the appropriate.
D
Expressive face of the actor on which the
slightest crease, controlled by him and magnified
by the lens, suggests the exaggerations of the
kabuki.
D
Counter the high relief of theater with the
smoothness of cinematography.
D
The greater the success, the closer it verges upon
failure (as a masterpiece of painting approaches
the color repro).
D
What happens in the junctures. "The great bat-
tles," General de M ... used to say: "are nearly
always waged at the points of intersection of the
staff maps."
D
Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film
like a battle. *
D
• At Hedin we all stayed at the Hotel de France. During the
night 1 was haunted by Napoleon's saying: "I make my bat-
tle plans from the spirit of my sleeping soldiers." ["Ie fais
mes plans de bataille avec l'esprit de mes soldats endormis. "1
9
10
A whole made of good images can be detestable.
ON TRUE AND FALSE
The mixture of true and false yields falsity
(photographed theater or CINEMA). The false
when it is homogeneous can yield truth
(theater).
o
In a mixture of true and false, the true brings out
the false, the false hinders belief in the true. An
actor simulating fear of shipwreck on the deck
of a real ship battered by a real storm - we
believe neither in the actor, nor in the ship nor in
the storm.
OF MUSIC
No music as accompaniment, support or rein-
forcement. No music at all. *
o
The noises must become music.
o
Shooting. No part of the unexpected which is
not secretly expected by you.
o
Dig deep where you are. Don't slip off
elsewhere. Double, triple bottom to things.
o
• Except, of course, the music played by visible instruments.
Be sure of having used to the full all that is com-
municated by immobility and silence.
o
Draw from your models the proof that they exist
with their oddities and their enigmas.
o
You shall call a fine film the one that makes you
think highly of cinematography.
o
No absolute value in an image.
Images and sounds will owe their value and
their power solely to the use to which you
destine them.
o
Model. Questioned (by the gestures you make
him make, the words you make him say). Re-
spond (even when it's only a refusal to respond)
to something which often you do not perceive
but your camera records. Submitted later to
study by you.
ON AUTOMATISM
Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and
automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate
them to will and to thought.
o
11
12
Models who have become automatic (everything
weighed, measured, timed, repeated ten, twenty
times) and are then dropped in the middle of the
events of your film - their relations with the ob-
jects and persons around them will be right,
because they will not be thought.
o
Models automatically inspired, inventive.
o
Your film - let people feel the soul and the heart
there, but let it be made like a work of hands.
o
CINEMA draws on a common fund. The
cinematographer is making a voyage of dis-
covery on an unknown planet.
o
Where not everything is present, but each word,
each look, each movement has things underly-
ing.
o
Significant that X's film, shot at the seaside, on a
beach, breathes the characteristic smell of the
stage.
o
To shoot ex tempore, with unknown models, in
unforeseen places of the right kind for keeping
me in a tense state of alert.
o
Let it be the intimate union of the images that
charges them with emotion.
o
Catch instants. Spontaneity, freshness.
o
How hide from oneself the fact that it all winds
up on a rectangle of white fabric hung on a wall?
(See your film as a surface to cover.)
o
X is imitating Napoleon, whose nature was not
to imitate.
o
In * * ". a film that smacks of the theater, this
great English actor keeps fluffing to make us
believe that he is inventing his lines as he goes
along. His efforts to render himself more alive
do just the opposite.
o
A too-expected image (cliche) will never seem
right, even if it is.
o
Set up your film while shooting. It forms for
itself knots (of force, of security) to which all the
rest clings.
o
13
14
What no human eye is capable of catching, no
pencil, brush, pen of pinning down, your
camera catches without knowing what it is, and
pins its down with a machine's scrupulous indif-
ference.
o
Immobility of X's film, whose camera runs, flies.
o
A sigh, a silence, a word, a sentence, a din, a
hand, the whole of your model, his face, in
repose, in movement, in profile, full face, an im-
mense view, a restricted space .... Each thing
exactly in its place: your only resources.
o
A flood of words does a film no harm. A matter
of kind, not quantity.
o
It would not be ridiculous to say to your models:
"I am inventing you as you are."
o
The insensible bond connecting your images
which are furthest apart and most different is
your vision.
o
Don't run after poetry. It penetrates unaided
through the joins (ellipses).
o
X, an actor, uncertain like an uncertain color
made from two tones superimposed.
o
On the boards, acting adds to real presence, in-
tensifies it. In films, acting does away with even
the semblance of real presence, kills the illusion
created by the photography.
o
(1954 7) The CRANDS PRIX lunch. One-eyed man
in the kingdom of the wilfully blind.
Where is my judgement fled
That censures falsely what they see aright?
o
Let it be the feelings that bring about the events.
Not the other way.
o
Cinematography: new way of writing, therefore
of feeling.
o
Model. Two mobile eyes in a mobile head, itself
on a mobile body.
o
Don't let your backgrounds (avenues, squares,
public gardens, subway) absorb the faces you
are applying to them.
o
15
16
,
Model. Thrown into the physical action, his
voice, starting from even syllables, takes on
automatically the inflexions and modulations
proper to his true nature.
o
In every art there is a diabolical principle which
acts against it and tries to demolish it. An
analogous principle is perhaps not altogether
urlfavorable to cinematography.
o
Forms that resemble ideas. Treat them as actual
ideas.
o
Model. "All face."*
o
*A certain man demanded of one of our loytring rogues,
whom in the deep of frosty Winter, he saw wandring up and
downe with nothing but his shirt about him, and yet as blithe
and lusty as an other who keepes himselfe muffled and
wrapt in warme furres up to the ears, how he could have
patience to go 50. And have not you, good 5ir, (answered he)
your face all bare? lmagine l am all face. (Montaigne, Essays,
L chapter XXI; John Florio's translation). [Je ne sais qui
demandait a un de nos gueux qu'il voyait en chemise en plain
hyver aussi scarrebillat que tel qui se tient ammitone dans les
martres iusoues aux oreilles, com me il pouvait avoir
patience: : "Et vous, Monsieur, repondit-il, vous avez bien la
face decouverte: or moy, je suis tout face. "J
Shooting.
Wonderful chances, those that act with
precision." Way of putting aside the bad ones, to
attract the good ones. To reserve for them, in ad-
vance, a place in your composition.
[]
Actors, costumes, sets and stage furniture are
bound to make one think at once of the stage.
Take care that the persons and objects in my
film may not make people think at once of the
cinematographer.
[J
Someone who can work with the minimum can
work with the most. One who can with the most
cannot, inevitably, with the minimum.
D
Shooting. Stick exclusively to impressions, to
sensations. No intervention of intelligence
which is foreign to these impressions and sensa-
tions.
D
The power your (flattened) images have of being
other than they are. The same image brought in
by ten different routes will be a different image
ten times.
D
* "I often paint bouquets on the side where I have not plan-
ned them." (Auguste Renoir to Matisse. Quoted from
memory.) ["]« peins souvent les bouquets du cote OU je ne les
ai pas prepares"]
17
18
NEITHER DIRECTOR NOR SCENARIO-WRITER. FORGET
YOU ARE MAKING A FILM.
o
Actor. The to-and-fro of the character in front
of his nature forces the public to look for talent
on his face, instead of the enigma peculiar to
each living creature.
o
No intellectual or cerebral mechanism. Simply a
mechanism.
o
If, on the screen, the mechanism disappears and
the phrases you have made them say, the
gestures you have made them make, have
become one with your models, with your film,
with you - then a miracle.
o
Unbalance so as to re-balance.
o
Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The
most important will be the most hidden.
o
Acting, which seems to have an existence of its
own, apart, outside the actor; to be palpable.
ON POVERTY
Letter of Mozart's, about some of his own con-
certos (K. 413, K. 414, K. 415): "They hold the
happy mean between the too difficult and the
too easy. They are brilliant ... r but they miss
poverty."
o
Montaigne: The movements of the soul were
born with the same progression as those of the
body. *
o
Unusual approach to bodies.
On the watch for the most imperceptible, the
most inward movements.
o
Not artful, but agile.
o
Sudden rise of my film when I improvise, fall
when I execute.
o
CINEMA seeks immediate and definitive ex-
pression through mimicry, gestures, intonations
of voice. This system inevitably excludes expres-
sion through contacts and exchanges of images
and of sounds and the transformations that
result from them.
o
* Les mouvements de I'ame naissaient avec meme progres
que ceux du corps.
19
20
What has passed through one art and is still
marked by it can no longer enter another."
o
Impossible to express something strongly by the
coupled resources of two arts. It is all the one or
all the other.
o
Not to shoot a film in order to illustrate a thesis,
or to display men and women confined to their
external aspect, but to discover the matter they
are made of. To attain that "heart of the heart"
which does not let itself be caught either by
poetry, or by philosophy or by drama.
o
Images and sounds like people who make ac-
quaintance on a journey and afterwards cannot
separate.
o
Nothing too much, nothing deficient.
o
X's film. Two wicked eyes, trying to be good; a
bitter mouth made for silence, which never stops
talking and contradicting the words as soon as
said: Star-system in which men and women
have a factual existence (as phantoms).
o
* CINEMA and theater stick together for convenience.
Mixing them up is a practical interest.
Charm of X's film made of bric-a-brac.
o
To be as intended, CINEMA films can only use
actors, cinematography films models only.
o
Music takes up all the room and gives no in-
creased value to the image to which it is added.
o
THE SOUNDTRACK INVENTED SILENCE.
[]
Absolute silence and silence obtained by a
pianissimo of noises.
o
X's film. Vociferations, roarings, as in the
theater.
o
Model. What you make known of yourself by
coincidence with him.
Let each image, each sound exert its weight
not only upon your film and your models, but
upon you.
o
Draw the attention of the public (as we say that
a chimney draws).
o
21
22
A small subject can provide the pretext for many
profound combinations. Avoid subjects that are
too vast or too remote, in which nothing warns
you when you are going astray. Or else take
from them only what can be mingled with your
life and belongs to your experience.
o
Generality of music which does not correspond
to a film's generality. Exaltation that hinders the
other exaltations.
o
"The devil hopped into his mouth"; don't have
a devil hop into a mouth. "All husbands are
ugly": don't show a multitude of ugly husbands.
o
Of lighting.
Things made more visible not by more light,
but by the fresh angle at which I see them.
o
Bring together things that have as yet never been
brought together and did not seem predisposed
to be so.
o
X's film, open on all sides. Dispersion.
o
Model. Over his features thoughts or feelings
not materially expressed, rendered visible by in-
tercommunication and interaction of two or
several other images.
o
Neither inflation nor overloading.
o
Debussy himself used to play with the piano's
lid down.
o
A single word, a single movement that is not
right or is merely in the wrong place gets in the
way of all the rest.
o
Rhythmic value of a noise.
Noise of a door opening and shutting, noise of
footsteps, etc., for the sake of rhythm.
o
A thing that has failed can, if you change its
place, be a thing that has come off.
o
Model. His permanence: always the same way of
being different.
o
An actor needs to get out of himself in order to
see himself in the other person. YOUR MODELS,
ONCE OUTSIDE THEMSELVES, WILL NOT BEABLE TO GET IN
AGAIN.
o
23
r
24
,
Reorganize the unorganized noises (what you
think you hear is not what you hear) of a street,
a railroad station, an airport. ... Play them back
one by one in silence and adjust the blend.
o
Acting.
The actor: "It's not me you are seeing and
hearing, it's the other man." But being unable to
be wholly the other, he is not that other.
o
CINEMA films controlled by intelligence, going no
further.
o
Retouching the real with the real.
o
Model. His pure essence.
o
The exchanges that are produced between
images and images, sounds and sounds, images
and sounds, give the people and objects in your
films their cinematographic life and, by a subtle
phenomenon, unify your composition.
[J
Images, conductors of the gaze. BUT THE ACTOR'S
ACTING THROWS THE EYE.
o
With the Beaux-Arts, no rivalry.
o
Dismantle and put together again till one gets in-
tensity.
o
Don't think of your film apart from the
resources you have made for yourself.
o
An actor coming from the theater brings with
him inevitably its conventions, its morality and
some duties towards his art.
o
Make yourself homogeneous with your models,
make them homogeneous with you.
o
Images chosen in prevision of their inner as-
sociation.
o
Models mechanized externally, internally free.
On their faces nothing wilful. "The constant,
the eternal beneath the accidental."
o
Be the first to see what you see as you see it.
o
Naive barbarity of dubbing.
Voices without reality, not conforming to the
movement of the lips. They "have mistaken
their mouths".
o
25
26
Return the past to the present. Magic of the
present.
o
Model. All those things you could not conceive
of him before, or even during.
o
Model. Soul, body, both inimitable.
o
An old thing becomes new if you detach it from
what usually surrounds it.
o
All those effects you can get from the repetition
(of an image, of a sound).
o
To find a kinship between image, sound and
silence. To give them an air of being glad to be
together, of having chosen their place. Milton:
Silence was pleased.
o
Model. Reduce to the minimum the share his
consciousness has. Tighten the meshing within
which he cannot any longer not be him and
where he can now do nothing that is not useful.
o
Images. Like the modulations in music.
o
Model. Withdrawn into himself. Of the little he
lets escape, take only what suits you.
o
X's film. Contagion of literature: description by
a succession of things (pans and travelling shots.)
o
It does happen that the disorder of a film,
because it is monotonous, deceives us, gives us
the illusion of order. But it is a negative, sterile
order. AT A RESPECTFUL DISTANCE FROM ORDER AND
DISORDER.
o
Dig into your sensation. Look at what there is
within. Don't analyze it with words. Translate it
into sister images, into equivalent sounds. The
clearer it is, the more your style affirms itself
(Style: whatever is not technique.)
o
Shooting.
Your film must resemble what you see on
shutting your eyes. (You must be capable, at any
instant, of seeing and hearing it entire.)
SIGHT AND HEARING
To know thoroughly what business that sound
(or that image) has there.
o
What is for the eye must not duplicate what is
for the ear.
o
27
28
If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost
nothing to the ear. * One cannot be at the same
time all eye and all ear.
o
When a sound can replace an image, cut the
image or neutralize it. The ear goes more
towards the within, the eye towards the outer.
o
A sound must never come to the help of an
image, nor an image to the help of a sound.
o
If a sound is the obligatory complement of an
image, give preponderance either to the sound,
or to the image. If equal, they damage or kill
each other, as we say of colors.
o
Image and sound must not support each other,
but must work each in turn through a sort of
relay.
o
The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient,
the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient.
Use these impatiences. Power of the cinema-
tographer who appeals to the two senses in a
governable way.
Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tac-
tics of slowness, of silence.
o
* And vice versa, if the ear is entirely won, give nothing to
the eye.
It It It American (English?) film in which the two
stars compete for the attention of the public.
They impose an order on their features and
never cease watching it. Waxwork aspect of
their faces photographed in color.
o
Model. Preserved from any obligation towards
the art of drama.
o
On the stage a horse or dog that is not plaster or
cardboard causes uneasiness. Unlike cinema-
tography, looking for a truth in the real is fatal
in the theater.
o
Model. The cause which makes him say this
sentence or make that movement is not in him, it
is in you. The causes are not in the models. On
the stage and in CINEMA films, the actor must
make us believe that the cause is in him.
o
Everything escapes and disperses. Continually
to bring it all back to one.
o
The field of cinematography is incommen-
surable. It gives you an unlimited power of
creating.
o
Model. Don't just reduce or abolish the gap
between you and him. Deep exploration.
o
29
30
Actors. The nearer they approach (on the screen)
with their expressiveness, the further away they
get. Houses, trees come nearer; the actors go
away.
o
Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an
art conceived in another art's form.
o
There is nothing to expect from a CINEMA
anchored in the theater.
o
Natural voice, trained voice.
The voice, soul made flesh. Trained, as in X's
case, it is no longer either soul or flesh. A preci
sion instrument, but an instrument on its own.
o
To be constantly changing lenses in photo-
graphing is like constantly changing one's glas-
ses.
o
Belief.
Theater and CINEMA: alternation of believing
and not believing. Cinematography: continually
believing.
o
Practice the precept: find without seeking.
o
Models. Letting themselves be led not by you,
but by the words and gestures you make them
say and do.
o
To your models: "One must not act either
somebody else or oneself. One must not act
anybody. r r
o
A thing expressible solely by the cinemat-
ographically new, therefore a new thing.
o
Simultaneous precrsion and imprecision of
music. A thousand possible, unforeseeable sen-
sations.
o
An actor draws from him what is not really
there. Illusionist.
o
Avoid paroxysms (anger, terror, etc.) which one
is obliged to simulate, and in which everybody is
alike.
o
Rhythms.
The omnipotence of rhythms.
Nothing is durable but what is caught up in
rhythms. Bend context to form and sense to
rhythms.
31
32
GESTURES AND WORDS
Gestures and words cannot form the substance
of a film as they form the substance of a stage
play. But the substance of a film can be that
... thing or those things which provoke the
gestures and words and which are produced in
some obscure way in your models. Your camera
sees them and records them. So one escapes from
the photographic reproduction of actors per-
forming a play; and cinematography, that new
writing, becomes at the same time a method of
discovery. ""
o
Your models, pitched into the action of your
film, will get used to the gestures they have
repeated twenty times. The words they have
learned with their lips will find, without their
minds' taking part in this, the inflections and the
lilt proper to their true natures. A way of
recovering the automatism of real life. (The
talent of one or several actors or stars no longer
comes into it. What matters is how you ap-
proach your models and the unknown and the
virgin nature you manage to draw from them.)
o
One forgets too easily the difference between a
man and his image, and that there is none
between the sound of his voice on the screen and
in real life.
o
• Does so because a mechanism gives rise to the unknown,
and not because one has found this unknown in advance.
Your models must not lend themselves to your
(camera or microphone) take. Render their at-
titude (what is singular about it) easy for them.
o
Your film will have the beauty, or the sadness,
or what have you, that one finds in a town, in a
countryside, in a house, and not the beauty,
sadness, etc. that one finds in the photograph of
a town, of a countryside, or a house.
o
IN THIS LANGUAGE OF IMAGES. ONE MUST LOSE
COMPLETELY THE NOTION OF IMAGE. THE IMAGES MUST
EXCLUDE THE IDEA OF IMAGE.
o
Voice and face.
They have formed together and have grown
used to each other.
o
Your film is not readymade. It makes itself as it
goes along under your gaze. Images and sounds
in a state of waiting and reserve.
o
Today" I was not present at a projection of
images and of sounds; I was present at the visi-
ble and instantaneous action they were exerting
on one another and their transformation. The
bewi tched real.
o
* Cutting. October 19567
33
34
The distance Racine demands is the impassable
distance which separates the stage from the
audience. Distance of the play from reality, and
not the distance of the writer from his model(s).
o
Formerly, Religion of the Beautiful and sublima-
tion of the su bject. Today the same noble aspira-
tions: to scrape oneself clean of matter and
realism, to emerge from vulgar imitation of
nature. But the sublimation turns towards
technique .... The CINEMA falls between two
stools. It cannot sublimate either the technique
(photography) or the actors (whom it imitates as
they are). Not absolutely realistic, because it is
theatrical and conventional. Not absolutely
theatrical and conventional, because it is
realistic.
o
The sight of movement gives happiness: horse,
athlete, bird.
o
The actor projects himself before him in the
form of the character he wants to seem; lends
him his own body, face, voice; makes him sit
down, stand up, walk; penetrates him with sen-
timents and passions he himself does not have.
This "I" who is not his "I" is incompatible with
cinematography.
o
From the beings and things of nature, washed
clean of all art and especially of the art of drama,
you will make an art.
o
Let images and sounds present themselves spon-
taneously to your eyes and ears as words do to
the spirit of a creative writer.
o
X demonstrates a great stupidity when he says
that to touch the masses there is no need of art.
o
Because you do not have to imitate, like painters,
sculptors, novelists, the appearance of persons
and objects (machines do that for you), your
creation or invention confines itself to the ties
you knot between the various bits of reality
caught. There is also the choice of the bits. Your
flair decides.
o
What ennobles an actor on the boards can make
him vulgar on the screen (practice of one art in
the form belonging to another).
o
Models. What they lose in apparent prominence
during the shooting, they gain in depth and in
truth on the screen. It is the flattest and dullest
parts that have in the end the most life.
o
They think this simplicity is a sign of meagre in-
vention. (Racine, preface to Berenice).*
o
.. Ils pensent que cette sirnplicite est une marque de peu
d'invention.
35
36
Two simplicities. The bad: simplicity as
starting-point, sought too soon. The good:
simplicity as end-product, recompense for years
of effort.
o
Corot: "One must not seek, one must wait.':"
o
Model. His (untrained) voice gives us his in-
timate character and his philosophy, better than
his physical aspect.
o
To TRANSLATE the invisible wind by the water it
sculpts in passing.
o
Model. He shuts himself up in himself. So does
X, that excellent actor. But he does it to reappear
masked by acting, unrecognizable,
o
Models. Capable of eluding their own vigilance,
capable of being divinely" themselves".
o
Life cannot be rendered by photographic
recopying of life, but by the secret laws in the
midst of which one can feel your models mov-
ing.
o
.. 11 ne [aut pas chercher, iI [aut attendre.
With the centuries, the theater has bour-
geoisified. The CINEMA (photographed theater)
shows how far.
o
A whole gaggle of critics making no distinction
between CINEMA and cinematography. Opening
an eye now and then to the actors' inadequate
presence and performance, shutting it again at
once. Obliged to like in a lump all that is pro-
jected onto the screens.
o
Resemblance, difference.
Give more resemblance in order to obtain
more difference. Uniform and unity of life bring
out the nature and character of soldiers.
Standing at attention, the immobility of them all
shows up the individual signs of each.
THE REAL
The real, when it has reached the mind, is
already not real any more. Our too thoughtful,
too intelligent eye.
Two sorts of real: (1) The crude real recorded
as it is by the camera; (2) what we call real and
see deformed by our memory and some wrong
reckonings.
Problem. To make what you see be seen,
through the intermediary of a machine that does
not see it as you see it."
o
.. And to make what you understand be understood,
through the intermediary of a machine that does not under-
stand it as you do.
37
38
The persons and the objects in your film must
walk at the same pace, as companions.
o
Wha t is done wi thou t self-con trot active
(chemical) principle of your models.
o
Rightness of relationships fends off the color
repro. The newer the relations, the more lively is
the effect of beauty.
o
To have discernment (precision in perception).
o
THE BONDS THAT BEINGS AND THINGS ARE WAITING
FOR, IN ORDER TO LIVE.
o
X's film, in which the words are not bound to the
action.
o
The true is not encrusted in the living persons
and real objects you use. It is an air of truth that
their images take on when you set them together
in a certain order. Vice versa, the air of truth
their images take on when you set them together
in a certain order confers on these persons and
objects a reality.
o
To put sentiments on his face and into his
gestures is the art of the actor, is theater. Not to
put sentiments on his face and into his gestures is
(still) not cinematography. Involuntarily expres-
sive models (not wilfully inexpressive ones).
o
The eye (in general) superficial, the ear profound
and inventive. A locomotive's whistle imprints
on us a whole railroad station.
o
Your film must take off. Bombast and the pic-
turesque hinder it from taking off.
o
Make visible what, without you, might never
have been seen.
o
No psychology (of the kind which discovers only
what it can explain).
o
When you do not know what you are doing and
what you are doing is the best - that is inspira-
tion.
o
Your camera passes through faces, provided no
mimicry (intentional or not intentional) gets in
between. Cinematographic films made of inner
movements which are seen.
o
39
40
Images and sounds must sustain one another,
from far and from near. No independent images
or sounds.
o
The true is inimitable, the false, untr ans-
formable.
o
Right intonations when your model exercises no
control over them.
o
Models. No ostentation. Faculty of gathering
into himself, of keeping, of not letting anything
get out. A certain inward configuration common
to them all. Eyes.
o
To your models: "Speak as if you were speaking
to yourselves." MONOLOGUE INSTEAD OF DIALOGUE.
o
They want to find the solution where all IS
enigma only. * (Pascal)
o
X, famous star, with the over-exposed too intel-
ligible features.
o
lis veulent trouver la solution Ii'! au tout n'est qu'enigme,
Model. It is his non-rational, non-logical "I" that
your camera records.
[J
Model. You illumine him and he illumines you.
The light you receive from him is added to the
light he receives from you.
o
Economy.
Make known that we are in the same place by
repetition of the same noises and the same
sonority.
o
Shooting with the same eyes and the same ears
today as yesterday. Unity, homogeneity.
o
Choose your models well, so they lead you where
you want to go.
o
Models. Their way of being the people of your
film is by being themselves, by remaining what
they are. (Even in contradiction with what you
had imagined.]
o
Music. It isolates your film from the life of your
film (musical delectation). It is a powerful
modifier and even destroyer of the real, like
alcohol or dope.
o
41
..
42
Cutting. Phosphorus that wells up suddenly
from your models, floats around them and binds
them to the objects (blue of Cezanne, grey of £1
Greco).
D
Your genius is not in the counterfeiting of nature
(actors, sets), but in your own way of choosing
and coordinating bits taken directly from it by
machines.
D
Models. Mechanized outwardly. Intact, virgin
within.
D
To communicate impressions, sensations.
D
X, looked at on the screen, right in the face, as
though he were a long way off.
D
Model. His essence, neat.
D
Neither beautify or uglify. Do not denature.
D
It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.
D
--
Your film is beginning when your secret wishes
pass into your models.
o
An actor used in a film as on the stage, outside
himself, is not there. His image is empty.
o
Retouching the real with the real.
o /
To move people not with images likely to move
us, but with relations of images that render them
both alive and moving.
o
The actor's creative simplification has its own
nobility and its reason for existing on the stage.
In films it does away with the complexity of the
man he is and, with this, the contradictions and
obscurities of his true "I".
o
Cutting. Passage of dead images to living images.
Everything blossoms afresh.
o
Slow films in which everyone is galloping and
gesticulating; swift films in which people hardly
stir.
o
43
44
Do not use the same models in two films. (1) One
would not believe in them. (2) They would look
at themselves in the first film as one looks at
oneself in the mirror, would want people to see
them as they wish to be seen, would impose a dis-
cipline on themselves, would grow disenchanted
as they corrected themselves.
D
See your film as a combination of lines and of
volumes in movement apart from what it repre-
sents and signifies.
D
YOUR MODELS MUST NOT FEEL THEY ARE DRAMATIC.
D
Cut what would deflect attention elsewhere.
D
Quality of a new world which none of the ex-
isting arts allowed to be imagined.
D
Extreme complexity. Your films: attempts, trials.
D
Your images will release their phosphorus only in
the aggregate. (An actor wants to be phosphores-
cent right away.)
D
Model. The spark caught in his eye's pupil gives
significance to his whole person.
D
Image. Reflection and reflector, accumulator and
conductor.
o
Not beautiful photography, not beautiful images,
but necessary images, and photography.
o
To place the public opposite beings and things,
not as some people place it arbitrarily by acquired
habits (cliches), but as you place yourself ac-
cording to your unforeseeable impressions and
sensations. Never decide anything in advance.
o
The actor learning his part presupposes a "self"
known in advance (which does not exist).
o
Shooting. Agony of making sure not to let slip
any part of what I merely glimpse, of what I
perhaps do not yet see and shall only later be able
to see.
45
-1
ON FRAGMENTA nON""
This is indispensable if one does not want to fall
into REPRESENTATJON. To see beings and things in
their separate parts. Render them independent in
order to give them a new dependence.
o
Displaying everything condemns CINEMA to
cliche, obliges it to display things as everyone is
46 in the habit of seeing them. Failing which, they
would appear false or sham.
o
Intonations of voice, mimicries, gestures, con-
ceived by the actor in advance and at the time.
o
Shooting. You will not know till much later if
your film is worth the mountain range of efforts
it is costing you.
o
The real is not dramatic. Drama will be born of a
certain march of non-dramatic elements.
o
* "A town or countryside at a distance is a town, a
countryside; but as one approaches it, those are houses, trees,
tiles, leaves, grasses, ants, ants' legs, to infinity." (Pascal)
fUne ville, une campa[l;ne, de loin est une ville et une cam-
pagne; mais Ii mesure qu'on s'approche, ce sont des maisons,
des arbres, des tuiles, des feuilles, des herbes, des [ourmis, des
jambes de [ourmis a l'iniini. J
In his film X displays things having no ap-
propriateness to each other, and so without
bonds, and so dead.
o
Your film is not made for a stroll with the eyes,
bu t for going right into, for being totally ab-
sorbed in.
o
Expression through compression. To put into an
image what a writer would spin out over ten
pages.
o
Failure of CINEMA. Ludicrous disproportion
between immense possibilities and the result: the
Star-system.
o
A director drives his actors to simulate fictitious
human beings in the midst of objects that are not
so. The false which he prefers will not change
into true.
o
An actor, however excellent, limited to one type
of creation (without shadows).
o
Borrowing the theater's resources leads in-
evitably to the visual and aural picturesque.
[J
47
r
48
One does not create by adding, but by taking
away. To develop is another matter. (Not to
spread out.)
o
Empty the pond to get the fish.
o
Against actors' assurance, set the charm of
models who do not know what they are.
o
One same subject changes in accordance with
images and sounds. Religious subjects receive
their dignity and their elevation from the images
and the sounds. Not (as people believe) the other
way about: the images and sounds receive from
the religious subjects ...
o
To an actor, the camera is the eye of the public.
o
Models. It is to you, not to the public that they
give those things which it, perhaps, would not
see (which you glimpse only). A secret and
sacred trust.
o
An ice-cold commentary can warm, by contrast,
tepid dialogues in a film. Phenomenon
analogous to that of hot and cold in painting.
o
,
Silence, musical by an effect of resonance. The
last syllable of the last word or the last noise like
a held note.
o
Things too much in disorder, or too much in
order, become equal, one no longer distinguishes
them. They produce indifference and boredom.
o
Obvious travelling or panning shots do not cor-
respond to the movements of the eye. This is to
separate the eye from the body. (One should not
use the camera as if it were a broom.)
o
Models. You will fix not the limits of their
power, but those within which they will exercise
it.
o
Quantity, enormity, falsity of means yielding
place to simplicity and rightness. Everything
brought back to what suffices you.
o
It is not a matter of acting "simple" or of acting
"inward" but of not acting at all.
o
Cinematography films: emotional, not represen-
tational.
o
49
50
I
r!
Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.
o
The CINEMA did not start from zero. Everything
to be called into question.
o
A cry, a noise. Their resonance makes us guess
at a house, a forest, a plain, a mountain; their
rebound indicates to us the distances.
o
It is with something clean and precise that you
will force the attention of inattentive eyes and
ears.
o
Model. That which animates him (words,
movements) is not something that paints him, as
in a theater, but something that obliges him to
paint himself.
o
Your public is not the public for books, stage
shows, exhibitions or concerts. Taste in
literature, in theater, in painting or in music is
not what you have to satisfy.
o
Let the cause follow the effect, not accompany it
or precede it."
D
Words do not always coincide with thought.
Earlier, later. The aping of this non-coincidence
is dreadful in films.
D
From the clash and sequence of images and
sounds, a harmony of relationships must be
born.
D
Model. Closed, does not enter into communica-
tion with the outside world except unawares.
D
Create expectations to fulfil them.
D
Model. You will pin down his image intact, not
deformed by his intelligence, nor by yours.
[]
" The other day I was walking through the gardens by
Notre-Dame and saw approaching a man whose eyes caught
something behind me, which I could not see: at once they lit
up. If, at the same time as I saw the man, I had perceived the
young woman and the child towards whom he now began
running, that happy face of his would not have struck me so;
indeed I might not have noticed it.
51
52
r
Without abandoning the line, which must never
be abandoned, and without letting go anything
of you, allow camera and tape recorder to catch,
in the space of a flash, the new and unforeseen
which your model offers you.
o
A virtuoso makes us hear the music not as it is
written, but as he feels it. Actor-virtuoso.
o
Don't show all sides of the objects. A margin of
indefiniteness.
o
Shooting is going out to meet something.
Nothing in the unexpected that is not secretly
expected by you.
o
Not only new relationships, but a new manner
of re-articulating and adjusting.
o
Face to face with the real, your taut attention
shows up the mistakes of your original concep-
tion. * It is your camera that corrects them. But
the impression felt by you is the sole reality of
interest.
o
" Mistakes on paper.
Shooting is not making something definitive, it
is making preparations.
o
Several takes of the same thing, like a painter
who does several pictures or drawings of the
same subject and, each fresh time, progresses
towards rightness.
o
Model who, in spite of himself and of you, frees
the real man from the fictitious man you had
imagined.
o
The actor is double. The alternate presence of
him and of the other is what the public has been
schooled to cherish.
o
Mark out clearly the limits within which you
seek to let yourself be surprised by your model.
Infinite surprises within a finite frame.
o
The crude real will not by itself yield truth.
o
Your camera catches not only physical move-
ments that are inapprehensible by pencil, brush
or pen, but also certain states of soul rec-
ognizable by indices which it alone can reveal.
o
53
54
Star-system. Makes nothing of the immense
power of attraction which belongs to the new
and unforeseen. Film after film, subject after
subject, confronting the same faces that one can-
not believe in.
D
Transplantation.
Images and sounds are fortified by being
transplanted.
D
Accustom the public to divining the whole of
which they are given only a part. Make people
diviners. Make them desire it.
EXERCISES
Put your models through reading exercises,
designed to equalize the syllables and to do away
with any intentional personal effect.
The script made uniform and regular. Expres-
sion that can pass unnoticed, obtained by almost
imperceptible slowings and quickenings and by
the dull and the brilliant in the voice. Timbre
and tempi (timbre = stamp).
D
What our eyes and ears require is not the
realistic persona but the real person.
D
Films whose slownesses and silences are in-
distinguishable from the slownesses and silences
of the audience are ruled out.
D
The actor's performance is definitive, un-
transformable. It remains what it is.
o
In the Greek Catholic liturgy: "Be attentive!"
o
CINEMA, radio, television, magazines are a school
of inattention: people look without seeing, listen
in without hearing.
o
Model. He paints his self-portrait with what you
dictate to him (gestures, words) and the likeness,
rather as if it were indeed a painting, has in it as
much of you as of him.
o
Color gives force to your images. It is a means of
rendering the real more true. But if this real is
not wholly real, it stresses its unlikeliness (its
non-existence).
o
Model. Has become automatic, protected against
any thought.
o
Films are at the stage of academic painting.
Bouguereau's Siege of Paris, where one seems to
be looking at soldiers in some movie action
which they have learnt.
o
55
56
r,
See at once, in what you are seeing, what will be
seen. Your camera does not take things as you
see them. (I t does not take what you make them
mean.)
o
It is profitable that what you find should not be
what you were expecting. Intrigued, excited by
the unexpected.
o
The collocaziorze of the images and sounds.
o
Make the objects look as if they want to be there.
o
Photography is descriptive, neat image confined
to description.
o
Model. Beautiful with all the movements he does
not make (could make).
o
The most ordinary word, when put into place,
suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the bril-
liance with which your images must shine.
o
FURTHER NOTES
1960-1974
,.
Wondrous, wondrous, wondrous
machine! -Purcell
o
"How extraordinary, is it not, that a man should
be a man!':" This is perhaps what camera and
tape recorder say to each other in front of G
(model).
o
Be as ignorant of what you are going to catch as
is a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing
rod. (The fish that arises from nouihere.]
o
When the public is ready to feel before under-
standing, what a number of films reveal and ex-
plain everything to it!
o
I remember an old film: Thirty Seconds Over
Tokyo. Life was suspended during thirty
wonderful seconds,** during which nothing
happened. In reality, everything happened.
o
Cinematography, the art, with images, of
representing nothing.
[J
• "Com me c'esi extraordinaire, n'esi-ce pas, qu'un homme
soit un homme!" Baudelaire
U The thirty seconds of a flight across Tokyo by an
American interceptor during the war.
59
60
G. divinely man, F. divinely woman (models),
without any trick. The TRICKis what is hidden in
them, not let out (not revealed).
D
Leonardo recommends (Notebooks) thinking
hard of the end, thinking first and foremost of
the end. The end is the screen, which is only a
surface. Submit your film to the reality of the
screen, as a painter submits his picture to the
reality of the canvas itself and of the colors ap-
plied on it, the sculptor submits his figures to the
reality of the marble or the bronze.
D
Ten properties of a subject, according to
Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance,
form and position, distance and nearness, move-
ment and stillness.
D
The people I pass in the Avenue des Champs-
appear to me like marble figures moved
forward by springs. But let their eyes meet mine,
and at once these walking and gazing statues
become human.
D
Two men facing each other, eye to eye. Two cats
attracting each other ...
D
To defeat the false powers of photography.
D
Hollow idea of "art cinema", of "art films." Art
films, the ones most devoid of it.
o
What I reject as too simple is the thing that is im-
portant and that one must dig into. Stupid mis-
trust of the simple things.
o
Evolution in a zone forbidden to the existing
arts, unexploitable by them.
o
The theater is something that is too much
known, cinematography a thing too unknown
up to now.
o
The public's irresistible need to see, get near,
touch the stars in the flesh, a need frustrated by
the photographed theater. Autographs.
o
Your film's beauty will not be in the images
(postcardism) but in the ineffable that they will
emanate.
o
Many people are needed in order to make a film,
but only one who makes, unmakes, remakes his
images and sounds, returning at every second to
the initial impression or sensation which
brought these to birth and is incomprehensible
to the other people.
[]
61
62
To forge for oneself iron laws, if only in order to
obey or disobey them toitn difficulty.
o
In X's eyes the cinema is a special industry; in
Y's an enlarged theater. Z sees the box office
figures.
o
Telephone. His voice makes him visible.
o
ECONOMY Racine (to his son Louis): I know your
handwriting well enough, without your having
to sign your name. *
o
The future of cinematography belongs to a new
race of young solitaries who will shoot films by
putting their last cent into it and not let
themselves be taken in by the material routines
of the trade.
[]
In your passion for the true, people may see
nothing but faddism.
o
Laugh at a bad reputation. Fear a good one that
you could not sustain.
o
* [e connais assez 1Jotre ecriture, sans que 1JOUS soyez oblige
de mettre 1Jotre nom.
Think carefully what this meticulous work re-
quires of you and that an actor (professional or
not) remains an actor, even way out in a desert.
o
Prodigious, heaven-sent machines" - to use
them merely for belaboring something phony
will appear, in less than fifty years' time, ir-
rational and absurd.
o
The public does not know what it wants. Impose
on it your decisions, your delights.**
o
Is it for singing always the same song that the
nightingale is so admired?
o
Novelty is not originality nor modernity.***
o
Proust says that Dostoievsky is original in com-
position above all. It is an extraordinarily com-
plex and close-meshed whole, purely inward,
with currents and counter-currents like those of
the sea, a thing that is found also in Proust (in
other ways so different) and whose equivalent
would go well with a film.
o
* Camera and tape recorder.
U [Fr: tes uolontes, tes uoluptes. "Your decisions, your
delights" - but stronger also: almost "your urges, your
orgies".]
u* Rousseau: l did nat seek to do like the others nor
otherwise. []e ne cherchai pas Ii faire camme les autres ni
autrement.]
63
64
1(1963) Left Rome abruptly, abandoned ir-
revocably the preparatory work for Genesis, to
cut short idiotic discussions and desecrating
obstruction. How strange it is that people can
ask you to do what they themselves would cer-
tainly be prevented from doing, because they do
not know what it is!
o
The things one can express with the hand, with
the head, with the shoulders! ... How many
useless and encumbering words then disappear!
What economy!
o
Shudderings of images awakening.
o
I have dreamed of my film making itself as it
goes along under my gaze, like a painter's eter-
nally fresh canvas.
o
It is from being constrained to a mechanical
regularity, it is from a mechanism that emotion
will be born. To understand this, think of certain
great pianists.
o
A great non-virtuoso pianist, of the Lipatti kind,
strikes notes that are rigorously equal: minims,
each the same length, same intensity; quavers,
semiquavers, etc., likewise. He does not slap
emotion onto the keys. He waits for it. It comes,
and fills his fingers, the piano, him, the
audience.
o
Production of emotion determined by a
resistance to emotion.
o
Bach at the organ, admired by a pupil, answered:
"It's a matter of striking the notes at exactly the
right moment."
o
It is as if there are two TRUTHS: one that is dull,
flat, boring, at least in the eyes of those who
daub it with falsity; the other ...
o
For want of truth, the public gets hooked on the
false. Falconetti's way of casting her eyes to
heaven, in Dreyer's film, used to draw tears.
o
These horrible days - when shooting film dis-
gusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the
face of so many obstacles - are part of my
method of work.
o
A highly compressed film will not yield its best
at the first go. People see in it at first what seems
like something they have seen before. (There
ought to be in Paris one quite small, very well
equipped cinema, in which only one or two films
would be shown each year.)
o
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66
Precision of aim lays one open to hesitations.
Debussy: "Tve spent a week deciding on one
chord rather than another.'?'
D
Do not draw back from prodigies. Command the
moon, the sun. Let loose the thunder and the
lightning.
D
What damage, not only among the public, is
done by idle, out-of-date criticism that judges
according to the optics of the stage!
D
Reject historical films whose effect would be
"theater" or "masquerade". (In my Trial of Joan
of Arc I have tried to avoid " theater" and "mas-
querade", but to arrive at a non-historical truth
by using historical words.)
D
Oscars to actors whose body, face and voice do
not seem to be theirs, do not produce any cer-
tainty that they belong to them.
D
It is useless and silly to work specially for a
public. I cannot try what I am making, at the
moment of making it, except on myself. Besides,
all that matters is to make well.
D
* "I'ai passe lme semaine ame decider pour un accord plutot
que pour un autre." -
Be precise in the form, not always in the sub-
stance (if you can).
o
It is what I do not get to know of F and G
(models) that makes them so interesting to me.
o
Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to
what you have done and redone ten times in
your head.
o
Ideas gathered from reading will always be
bookish ideas. Go to the persons and objects
directly.
o
Have a painter's eye. The painter creates by
looking.
o
The pistol-shot of the painter's eye dislocates the
real. Then the painter puts it up again and
organizes it in that same eye, according to his
taste, his methods, his Ideal Beauty.
o
Every movement reveals us" (Montaigne). But it
only reveals us if it is automatic (not com-
manded, not willed).
o
* Tout mouvement nous descouvre.
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68
Talking of automatism, this also from Mon-
taigne: We cannot command our haire to stand
on end; nor our skinne to startle for desire or
feare. Our hands are often carried where we
direct them not."
o
Subject, technique, actors' style go by fashion.
Result, a sort of prototype, which one film every
two or three years changes for a new one.
o
MASTERPIECES. The masterpieces of painting or
sculpture, such as the Gioconda or the Venus of
Milo, have so many reasons for being admired
that they are admired for both the good and the
bad ones. CINEMA masterpieces are often admired
only for the bad ones.
o
X, to follow the fashion, puts into his films a lit-
tle of everything, like a painter who works with
too many colors.
o
While some people, under the influence of
CINEMA, are trying to change the theater, others,
as they shoot their films, get all tied up in its an-
cient habits (rules, codes).
o
* Essays, L chapter xx: John Florio's translation. [Nous ne
commandons pas a nos cheveux de se herisser et a nosire
peau de fremir de desir ou de crainte, la main se porte sou-
vent ou nous ne l'envoyons pas.]
MISUNDERSTANDINGS. No (or hardly any) harsh
criticism or praise that is not based on some mis-
understanding.
D
One ought to be born with a special sense for
reconciliation and harmony.
D
In this non-picturesque film, in which nothing
theatrical lingers on, B sees only emptiness.
D
Always the same joy, the same astonishment at
the fresh significance of an image whose place I
have just changed.
D
The things we bring off by chance - what
power they have!
D
"That's it" or "that's not it", at the first glance.
Reasoning comes afterwards (to approve our
first glance).
D
Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the
unforeseen.
D
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70
Take action first.
In London a gang broke open the safe in a
jeweller's shop and laid hands on pearl
necklaces, rings, gold, precious stones. They
found, also, the key of the nearby jeweller's safe,
which they cleaned out, and this safe contained
the key of a third jeweller's safe. (Newspaper
reports.)
o
Get things away from habit, de-chloroform
them.
o
In the NUDE, all that is not beautiful is obscene.
o
On the indispensable, absolute confidence in
oneself, this from Madame de Sevigne: "When I
listen to myself only, I do wonders.':"
o
Equality of all things. Cezanne painting with the
same eye and the same soul a fruit dish, his son,
the Montagne Sainte- Victoire.
o
Cezanne: "At each touch I risk my life."**
o
* "Quand je n'ecaute que mai, je fais des merveilles,"
** "A chaque touche, je risque rna vie,"
Build your film on white, on silence and on stil-
lness.
o
Silence is necessary to music but is not part of
music. Music leans on it.
o
The number of films that are patched up with
music! People flood a film with music. They are
preventing us from seeing that there is nothing
in those images.
o
It is only recently and gradually that I have sup-
pressed the music and have used silence as an
element of composition and means to emotion.
Must say this or incur dishonesty.
o
Let nothing be changed and all be different.
o
Montesquieu says, about humor, that "its dif-
ficulty consists in making you find in the thing a
new feeling which nevertheless comes from the
thing."*
o
Do not try, and do not wish, to draw tears from
the public with the tears of your models, but
with this image rather than that one, this sound
rather than that one, exactly in their place.
*"5a difficulti consiste a vous faire trouver un sentiment
nouveau dans la chose qui vient p ourtant de la chose."
71
72
MAKE YOURSELF BE BELIEVED. Dante in exile, walking
in the streets of Verona - people whispered to
each other that he goes to Hell when he chooses
and brings back news from there.
o
What do I start from? From the subject to be ex-
pressed? From sensation? Do I start twice?
o
What is - face to face with the real - this in-
termediary work of the imagination?
o
To be scrupulous. Reject everything about the
real that does not become true. (The dreadful
reali ty of the false.)
o
What H (model) hides from me he hides not to
appear to himself or to me as what he is not, but
from modesty.
o
DIVINATION - how can one not associate that
name with the two sublime machines I use for
my work? Camera and tape recorder, carry me
far away from the intelligence which complicates
everything.
o
Excerpts from: Notes on Cinematography:
Two ki nds of fi lms : those which use the theater's
means (actors , direction, etc.) and wield th e camera in
rder to reproduce: those which se the ci nematog-
rap 's means and wield the camera in order to
cr eate.
An app eal to the eye only makes the ear impatient: the
ear p aled to alone makes the eye impatient. Use
these impatiences. The cinemat grapher's strength
a pli es adjustably to two senses.
Chang ing your lens constantly is like chang ing your
gl asses constantly.
With the centuries the theater has become bourgeois.
The cinema (photographed theater) shows to what
extent.
No absolute value to an image. Sound and image owe
their value and their power only to the use you put
them to.
In the mixture of true and false, the true makes the
false stand out, the false prevents belief in the true. An
actor simulates fear of a shipw reck, on a bridge of a
real ship buffeted by a real storm, and we believe
neither the actor nor the ship, nor the storm.
-:.
1JURIZE N