talent for deceiving the eye and the mind also deceives one about his claim to nobility.
Cinematography is an art. It will free itself from the industrial bondage whose platitudes no more condemn it than bad pictures and bad books discredit painting and literature.
But, for mercy’s sake, don’t go taking it for a magician. This is the way people talk about a craftsman, avoiding by this term fathoming his ventures. His gift does not lie in card tricks. He goes beyond jugglery. That is only his syntax. It is elsewhere that we must salute the marvellous.
Le Sang d’un Poète
contains no magic, nor does
La Belle et la Bête
.
The characters in the latter film obey the rule of fairy-tales. Nothing surprises them in a world where things are accepted as normal, the least of which would disrupt the mechanism of ours. When Beauty’s necklace changes into a piece of old rope, it is not this phenomenon that shocks her sisters, but the fact that it changes into rope because they touch it.
And if the marvellous is to be found in my film, it is not in this direction that one should expect it; it will show rather in the eyes of the Beast when he says to Beauty: ‘You caress me as one caresses an animal’, and she answers him: ‘But you are an animal.’
Indolence, in the robes of a judge, condemns, in our poetic ventures, what it considers unpoetic, basing its verdict upon that semblance of the marvellous of which I am speaking, and deaf to the marvellous if it does not bear its attributes.
When one sees fairies they disappear. They only help us in a guise which makes them unrecognizable and are only present through the sudden unwonted grace of familiar objects into which they disguise themselves in order to keep us company. It is then that their help becomes effective and not when they appear and dazzle us with lights. It is the same with everything. In
La Belle et la Bête
I have not made use ofthat slope down which the public would like to slide more and more rapidly without it being spared any dizziness.
I persist in repeating: Marvels and Poetry are not my affair. They must ambush me. My itinerary must not foresee them. If I opine that a certain shady place is more favourable than another to shelter them, I am cheating. For it may happen that a road exposed to full sunlight shelters them better.
This is why I care to live just as much in Beauty’s family as in the Beast’s castle. This is why fairy-like atmosphere means more to me than the fairy element itself. This is why the episode, among others, of the sedan chairs in the farmyard, an episode which does not spring from any phantasy, is, in my opinion, more significant of this fairy quality than any artifice of the castle.
In
Le Sang d’un Poète
, the blood that flows throughout the film disturbs our critics. What is the point, they ask, of disgusting and shocking us on purpose? This blood which sickens us compels us to turn our heads away and prevents us from enjoying the happy inventions (by happy inventions they mean: the entry into the mirror, the statue that moves, the heart that beats), but from one to another of these shocks that awaken them what link is there, I ask you, except this blood which flows and from which the film derives its title? What do they know of the great river, those who only want to enjoy the ports of call? And what would these happy inventions, as they call them, be worth, if they were not the result of an architecture, even if an unconscious one, and connected to the rest by this bond of blood? They sleep and think that I sleep and that my awakening wakens them. Their torpor condemns them to taste nothing of a meal but the pepper. They feel nothing but the pricks. It is these that excite them, give them the fidgets, compel them to run from place to place.
In
L’Eternel Retour
the lovers’ castle seems to them rightfor poetry. The brother’s and sister’s garage wrong. They condemn it. Strange foolishness. Because it is precisely
Cinematography is an art. It will free itself from the industrial bondage whose platitudes no more condemn it than bad pictures and bad books discredit painting and literature.
But, for mercy’s sake, don’t go taking it for a magician. This is the way people talk about a craftsman, avoiding by this term fathoming his ventures. His gift does not lie in card tricks. He goes beyond jugglery. That is only his syntax. It is elsewhere that we must salute the marvellous.
Le Sang d’un Poète
contains no magic, nor does
La Belle et la Bête
.
The characters in the latter film obey the rule of fairy-tales. Nothing surprises them in a world where things are accepted as normal, the least of which would disrupt the mechanism of ours. When Beauty’s necklace changes into a piece of old rope, it is not this phenomenon that shocks her sisters, but the fact that it changes into rope because they touch it.
And if the marvellous is to be found in my film, it is not in this direction that one should expect it; it will show rather in the eyes of the Beast when he says to Beauty: ‘You caress me as one caresses an animal’, and she answers him: ‘But you are an animal.’
Indolence, in the robes of a judge, condemns, in our poetic ventures, what it considers unpoetic, basing its verdict upon that semblance of the marvellous of which I am speaking, and deaf to the marvellous if it does not bear its attributes.
When one sees fairies they disappear. They only help us in a guise which makes them unrecognizable and are only present through the sudden unwonted grace of familiar objects into which they disguise themselves in order to keep us company. It is then that their help becomes effective and not when they appear and dazzle us with lights. It is the same with everything. In
La Belle et la Bête
I have not made use ofthat slope down which the public would like to slide more and more rapidly without it being spared any dizziness.
I persist in repeating: Marvels and Poetry are not my affair. They must ambush me. My itinerary must not foresee them. If I opine that a certain shady place is more favourable than another to shelter them, I am cheating. For it may happen that a road exposed to full sunlight shelters them better.
This is why I care to live just as much in Beauty’s family as in the Beast’s castle. This is why fairy-like atmosphere means more to me than the fairy element itself. This is why the episode, among others, of the sedan chairs in the farmyard, an episode which does not spring from any phantasy, is, in my opinion, more significant of this fairy quality than any artifice of the castle.
In
Le Sang d’un Poète
, the blood that flows throughout the film disturbs our critics. What is the point, they ask, of disgusting and shocking us on purpose? This blood which sickens us compels us to turn our heads away and prevents us from enjoying the happy inventions (by happy inventions they mean: the entry into the mirror, the statue that moves, the heart that beats), but from one to another of these shocks that awaken them what link is there, I ask you, except this blood which flows and from which the film derives its title? What do they know of the great river, those who only want to enjoy the ports of call? And what would these happy inventions, as they call them, be worth, if they were not the result of an architecture, even if an unconscious one, and connected to the rest by this bond of blood? They sleep and think that I sleep and that my awakening wakens them. Their torpor condemns them to taste nothing of a meal but the pepper. They feel nothing but the pricks. It is these that excite them, give them the fidgets, compel them to run from place to place.
In
L’Eternel Retour
the lovers’ castle seems to them rightfor poetry. The brother’s and sister’s garage wrong. They condemn it. Strange foolishness. Because it is precisely
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