the soil, youth is not taken into consideration.
The cinematograph is fifty years old. My own age, alas. A lot for me. Very little for a Muse who expresses herself through the medium of ghosts and with equipment still in its infancy if one compares it with the use of paper and ink.
It seems likely that the remark ‘Do write about the marvels of the cinematograph,’ derives from the films
Le Sang d’un Poète
and
La Belle et la Bête
, conceived at an interval of fifteen years, and in which everyone sees the embodiment of that curiosity which impels us to open forbidden doors, to walk in the dark humming to keep up our courage.
Now,
Le Sang d’un Poète
is only a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body. There the actions link as they please, under so feeble a control that one could not ascribe it to the mind. Rather to a kind of somnolence helping memories to break out, free to combine, to entwine, to distort themselves until they take shape unknown to us and become for us an enigma.
Nowhere is less fitted than France for the exercise of this faculty which has recourse neither to reason nor to symbols. Few French people are prepared to enjoy an exceptional event without knowing its source, its object, or without investigating it. They prefer to laugh at it and treat it with contempt.
The symbol is their last resort. It gives them some scope. It also allows them to explain the incomprehensible and to endow with hidden meaning whatever draws its beauty from not having any. ‘Why? Is it a joke? Whose leg are you pulling?’ are the weapons that France uses against the new form, which some proud spirit takes on when it manifests itself, contrary to all expectation, and intrigues a few of the open-minded.
These few open-minded people are at once taken to be accomplices. Sometimes snobs, who have inherited the flair of kings, follow them blindly. This creates a mix-up which the general public cold-shoulders, incapable of recognizing the signs of a new embryonic form which it will acclaim tomorrow. And so forth. The marvellous then, since a prodigycan only be a prodigy in so far as a natural phenomenon still eludes us, would be not the miracle that sickens by the disorder it causes, but the simple miracle, human and absolutely down to earth, which consists in giving to objects and to people an unusual quality that defies analysis. As is proved to us by Vermeer of Delft.
This painter certainly paints what he sees, but such accuracy, pleasing to everyone, shows us where he deviates from it. For if he does not use any artifice to surprise us, our surprise is the more profound, faced with the peculiarities which earn him his uniqueness and preclude us from making the slightest comparison between his work and that of his contemporaries. Any other painter of the same school paints with the same frankness. It is a pity that such frankness does not divulge any secret for us. In Vermeer space is peopled from another world than the one he depicts. The subject of his picture is only a pretext, a vehicle through which to express the realm of the marvellous.
This is what I was coming to: that the cinematograph can ally itself with the marvellous, as I see it, if it is content to be a vehicle for it and if it does not try to produce it. The kind of rapture that transports us when in contact with certain works is seldom due to any attempt to move us to tears, or to any surprise effect. It is rather, I repeat, induced in an inexplicable manner by a breach which opens unawares.
This breach will occur in a film in the same way as in a tragedy, a novel or a poem. The rapture will not come from its opportunities for trickery. It will come from some error, from some syncope, from some chance encounter between the attention and inattention of its author. * Why should he behavedifferently from the Muses? His
The cinematograph is fifty years old. My own age, alas. A lot for me. Very little for a Muse who expresses herself through the medium of ghosts and with equipment still in its infancy if one compares it with the use of paper and ink.
It seems likely that the remark ‘Do write about the marvels of the cinematograph,’ derives from the films
Le Sang d’un Poète
and
La Belle et la Bête
, conceived at an interval of fifteen years, and in which everyone sees the embodiment of that curiosity which impels us to open forbidden doors, to walk in the dark humming to keep up our courage.
Now,
Le Sang d’un Poète
is only a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body. There the actions link as they please, under so feeble a control that one could not ascribe it to the mind. Rather to a kind of somnolence helping memories to break out, free to combine, to entwine, to distort themselves until they take shape unknown to us and become for us an enigma.
Nowhere is less fitted than France for the exercise of this faculty which has recourse neither to reason nor to symbols. Few French people are prepared to enjoy an exceptional event without knowing its source, its object, or without investigating it. They prefer to laugh at it and treat it with contempt.
The symbol is their last resort. It gives them some scope. It also allows them to explain the incomprehensible and to endow with hidden meaning whatever draws its beauty from not having any. ‘Why? Is it a joke? Whose leg are you pulling?’ are the weapons that France uses against the new form, which some proud spirit takes on when it manifests itself, contrary to all expectation, and intrigues a few of the open-minded.
These few open-minded people are at once taken to be accomplices. Sometimes snobs, who have inherited the flair of kings, follow them blindly. This creates a mix-up which the general public cold-shoulders, incapable of recognizing the signs of a new embryonic form which it will acclaim tomorrow. And so forth. The marvellous then, since a prodigycan only be a prodigy in so far as a natural phenomenon still eludes us, would be not the miracle that sickens by the disorder it causes, but the simple miracle, human and absolutely down to earth, which consists in giving to objects and to people an unusual quality that defies analysis. As is proved to us by Vermeer of Delft.
This painter certainly paints what he sees, but such accuracy, pleasing to everyone, shows us where he deviates from it. For if he does not use any artifice to surprise us, our surprise is the more profound, faced with the peculiarities which earn him his uniqueness and preclude us from making the slightest comparison between his work and that of his contemporaries. Any other painter of the same school paints with the same frankness. It is a pity that such frankness does not divulge any secret for us. In Vermeer space is peopled from another world than the one he depicts. The subject of his picture is only a pretext, a vehicle through which to express the realm of the marvellous.
This is what I was coming to: that the cinematograph can ally itself with the marvellous, as I see it, if it is content to be a vehicle for it and if it does not try to produce it. The kind of rapture that transports us when in contact with certain works is seldom due to any attempt to move us to tears, or to any surprise effect. It is rather, I repeat, induced in an inexplicable manner by a breach which opens unawares.
This breach will occur in a film in the same way as in a tragedy, a novel or a poem. The rapture will not come from its opportunities for trickery. It will come from some error, from some syncope, from some chance encounter between the attention and inattention of its author. * Why should he behavedifferently from the Muses? His
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