Change nothing so that everything is different.
MAY EACH EYE
NEGOTIATE FOR ITSELF
Don't show every side of things.
Allow yourself a margin of indefiniteness.
FOR MARY MEERSON
FOR MONICA TEGELAAR
The Rules of the Game.
Cries and Whispers.
HISTORIES
OF CINEMA
Broken Blossoms.
FATHER
DON'T YOU SEE
THAT I'M BURNING
EVERY STORY
Histories of Cinema. Chapter A.
Histories of cinema, in the plural.
All the stories that could be.
That will be or that could be?
That have been.
CINEMA SUBSTITUTES
You, at least, haven't changed.
You still have the same absent eyes,
the same smile,
the same laugh, all of a sudden,
the same way of holding out your arms...
of slowly bringing your hand against your shoulder.
You also wear
the same perfume.
Remember, it was in Frederiksbad garden.
You were standing slightly sideways against a stone balustrade
on which rested your hand,
with half of your arm lying on it.
FOR OUR EYES
You were looking at the main alley.
A WORLD
I walked towards you.
I stopped at a certain distance.
I looked at you.
You were now facing me.
However you didn't seem to see me.
THAT MATCHES
...you just smiled.
OUR DESIRES
I know you're pretending to just listen to me.
No, no. There are so many beautiful women.
- A mazurka then, Princess? - At my age? No, no.
So listen to my complaints. I can no longer bear this role.
I can no longer bear this silence,
these walls, these whispers in which you've locked me up.
Don't speak so loud, I beg of you.
These whispers...
Matter and Memory.
All the stories that could be...
The Thousand And One Nights.
The Counterfeiters.
...that will be or that could be?
That have been.
Does the ''u'' in produire
prevent to the ''dire'' in ''produire''?
To tell the story of Hollywood.
To tell the story of the last tycoon...
Irving Thalberg.
A TV executive has, at most, 200 films a year in his head.
THE CROWD
Thalberg was the only person who,
every day, had 52 films in his head.
FREAKS
GREED
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
THE MERRY WIDOW
FLESH AND THE DEVIL
The foundation.
The founding father.
The only son.
MARK
The Holy Terrors.
This story had to pass by this:
OF THE VAMPIRE
The Lily in the Valley.
...a young body, fragile and beautiful...
TREASURE ISLAND
...as described F. Scott Fitzgerald -
so that this could exist:
The Plague.
...the power of Hollywood.
- Who are you? - Me? I am a nobody.
I am the film director, the screenwriter and my name is...
To tell the story of Hollywood.
The power of Babylon.
A dream factory.
Histories of cinema.
SUDDENLY
Newness of history. History of news.
The Gulag Archipelago.
The 500 Millions of the Begum.
...the Beaten Tracks.
STORM ON CINEMA
Darkness...
A
DREAM
FACTORY
What has gone through cinema and is still marked by it
can no longer enter anywhere else.
A dream factory.
Communism wore itself out trying to dream up such factories.
ONE MUST DREAM
DREAM
DARKNESS OH! MY LIGHT
Married to one of the prettiest women alive.
Off the Beaten Tracks.
Or to tell the story of Howard Hughes.
ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS
Braver than Mermoz, richer than Rockefeller.
I AM GOING
TO WRITE
MY NAME EVERYWHERE
A BEAUTIFUL WRITING MACHINE
Producer of Citizen Kane, president of TWA.
PRISONER OF LOVE
...Howard Hughes appears above Le Bourget and lands,
bringing with him the film of his departure.
As if Meliès ran Gallimard and the SNCF.
And before Hughes Aircraft
began fishing up CIA submarines from the bottom of the Pacific...
SON OF A BITCH
...he forced RKO starlets to go on weekly limousine rides...
IMPOTENT
SON OF A BITCH
...at one mile an hour...
YOU NEVER COME TO SEE ME
...so their breasts wouldn't bounce up and down.
His death, worse than anything
Defoe had imagined for Robinson.
Everything belonged to him but it didn't matter.
What mattered was to sort out to whom he belonged.
HÄXAN: Witchcraft Through the Ages
HEART OF DARKNESS
HOW MANY DARK POWERS WERE ENTITLED TO
CLAIM HIM
The object seems to say ''I'm alone'',
hence swept by an implacable necessity.
lf I only am what I am, I am indestructible.
Being what I am and being whole,
my loneliness knows yours.
Every dragon in our lives is perhaps a princess
waiting to see us all brave and handsome.
All the terrifying things are perhaps simple powerless things
waiting to be saved.
To tell the stories of all the films never made...
Yes, night has come.
Another world rises, harsh, cynical,
illiterate, amnesiac, revolving without reason,
spread wide, flattened,
as if the perspective, the vanishing point, had been erased.
Strangest of all,
the living dead of this world are constructed on the former world.
Their reflections and sensations are from before.
Such horror...
I am the mistake that lives.
I am Jean...
Degraded and Offended.
To tell the stories of all the films never made,
rather than those that were.
The School for Wives.
Those that were can be seen on television.
Let's not exaggerate:
They're not even copies, just reproductions.
All the stories about sex.
Farewell My Lovely.
Because this is what they are usually about, these films that are never made...
Hello Sadness.
...the bottom of things, the sex.
The foundation.
Sentimental Education.
1940. Geneva. L'Ecole Des Femmes. Max Ophuls.
He fell on Madeleine Ozeray's arse,
while the Germans were taking the French from behind
and while Louis Jouvet was giving up.
He panicked when he saw you.
He has that many things to blame himself for?
Are you happy at least with that miserable man?
WE MOVE ON
FROM THE OBJECT
OF THEATRE
TO THE OBJECT
OF CINEMA
Theatre is something too much known.
The cinématographe, too unknown...
up to now.
HISTORIES OF CINEMA
OF CINEMATOGRAPH
HOW?
WE ARE! ARE WE?
WE ARE ONE AND THE OTHER
ITS SUBJECTS
MAY, WHICH WAS PAINLESS
OH ! MONTH OF BLOSSOMING
History of cinema newness of history.
History of news.
Histories of cinema, with ''s''s.
With SS.
STABBED
NEWSREELS FROM GAUMONT
MEMORY SCREEN
1939, 1940, 1941 ...
Betrayal by radio,
but cinema keeps its word.
RADIO PARIS IS GERMAN
Because from Siegfried and M to the Dictator and Lubitsch,
films were made.
1940, 1941.
Even scratched to death, a simple 35-millimetre rectangle
saves the honour of reality.
1941, 1942.
lf poor images still strike
without anger or hatred, like a butcher,
it is because cinema is there: Silent film,
with its humble and formidable power of transfiguration.
1942, 1943, 1944.
That which plunges into the night
is the echo of what silence submerges.
What silence submerges
sustains in light that which plunges into the night.
ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT
SIEGFRIED AND THE
THE LIMOUSIN
WARNING SHADOWS
Because from Siegfried and M to the Dictator and Lubitsch,
films were made, weren't they?
CINEMA OF THE DEVIL
Theatre is something too much known.
The cinématographe, too unknown...
up to now.
IN THE SACRED TROUBLE
Images and sounds...
BORN FROM THEIR REMORSE
...like travellers whose paths cross and who can no longer part ways.
THEY QUESTION
LOVE
FOR THEY HAVE SEEN
The Metamorphosis.
DEATH
The Perfume of the Lady in Black.
WAR HAS BROKEN
FICTION
AGAINST REALITY
To prove it, the masses like myths.
Cinema speaks to the masses.
But if the myth begins with Fantomas,
it ends with Christ.
What did those who listened to St. Bernard hear?
Not what he was saying?
Maybe. Probably.
How can we neglect what we learn
when that unknown voice plunges deep into our hearts?
BEYOND
Here's what the news can teach us:
The birth of a nation, of hope...
WAR HAS BROKEN OUT
...of Rome, Open City.
The cinématographe never meant to create an event,
but a vision.
BECAUSE MASSES LOVE
THE MYTH
Because the screen
is the same white canvas as the Samaritan's shirt.
AND CINEMA TALKS TO MASSES
What Arnold and Richter's cameras preserve,
so as not to be outdone by nightmares and dreams,
will not be shown on a screen, but on a shroud.
lf the deaths of Puig and the Négus,
of Captain Boïeldieu,
and of the little bunny were inaudible,
it is because life never rendered what it stole from film.
Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.
You and the anarchists, for different reasons
you want to be something.
It's the tragedy of every revolution like this one.
The myths on which our lives are based upon are contradictory.
We have to sort them out.
HOPE
Change our apocalypse into an army or die.
That's all.
Histories of cinema,
stories without speech,
stories of the night.
AND GOD
ABANDONED
MEN
FORTY ONE
For nearly 50 years, in the dark,
moviegoers burn imagination to heat up reality.
Now reality is seeking revenge.
It wants real tears, real blood.
FORTY FOUR
From Vienna to Madrid, from Siodmak to Capra,
from Paris to Los Angeles and Moscow,
from Renoir to Malraux and Dovzhenko -
great fiction directors couldn't control the vengeance
which they had directed over and over.
COMRADE P
I WILL NEVER FORGET
THE BLOOD
THAT THE CRIMSON OF THE KISS FORESHADOWS
The poor cinema of news
must clear the blood and tears of all suspicion
as streets are cleaned too late,
after the army has fired at the masses.
I WRITE YOUR NAME DOWN
What there is of cinema
in wartime newsreels says nothing.
It does not judge.
ONLY THE ERASING HAND CAN WRITE
No close-ups.
Suffering is not a star.
Nor is the burned-down church or the bombed-out countryside.
NEVER
The spirits of Flaherty and Epstein took over.
Daumier and Rembrandt, with his terrifying black-and-white.
THE FAITHFUL HEART
A few pans,
an occasional high angle, for a mother mourning her murdered child.
ALL THOSE THAT SPRING
KEPT IN ITS FOLDS
WORTHY OF ENTERING HISTORY
It is because this time alone
the only veritable popular art form rejoins painting,
that is: Art.
That is: What is reborn from what was burned.
We've forgotten that village, its white walls and olive trees,
but we remember Picasso,
that is: Guernica.
We've forgotten Valentin Feldman, killed in '43,
but we remember at least one other prisoner,
that is: Goya.
And if George Stevens hadn't used the first 6mm colour film
in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck,
Elizabeth Taylor would never have found a Place in the Sun.
1939, 1944.
Martyrdom and resurrection of the documentary.
How marvellous to be able to look at what we cannot see.
What a miracle for our blind eyes.
Besides that, cinema is an industry.
And if World War I allowed
American cinema to ruin French cinema,
with the advent of television,
World War II allowed it to finance,
that is, to ruin, European cinema.
FINAL SOLUTION
''Do you have two hands?'' Asks the blind man.
But looking won't reassure me.
Why trust my eyes, if I have doubts?
Why check my eyes
to see whether I see my hands?
YEAR ZERO
HELP!
LAST WORD FROM MAX LINDER
TO BE CONTINUED
The gas was coming out.
It started to come out through little holes
and to fill the entire gas chamber.
Those nearest to the columns
would die maybe after two minutes.
For those further away...
it would take 0 to 5 minutes.