State of Cinema 2020

Cinema in the Present Tense

I have some good news, for everyone: cinema is in crisis. Which is hardly news, in a way, for it has
continuously been in crisis throughout its existence. It is not a sign of future danger either – the
future is an enigma, and it takes a lot of irresponsibility to speculate about it, to pretend to decipher
its mysteries – but rather that of a seismographic sensibility to the stakes of the present. I think there
is no other symptom more relevant to an art’s vitality than its constant reappraisal, in accordance
with the constant reformulation of our world. The real issue would be to know whether the forces
that transform the world are the same forces that transform the arts, how both feed on one another,
unless they are contradictory.

It seems to me that another question arises today as well, which, in its own way, parasitises the
other two, muddies the waters, and obscures our reading of cinema and its place in its own history:
the nature of the reflection determining our gaze and the way in which this reflection is structured.
Historically, that is to say, since the middle of the history of cinema, its modern age, the tools
of cinephilia have defined this framework, which was conceived by André Bazin, himself a product
of Jacques Maritain’s Social Christianity. Its success and relevance are due to the fact that it was
adopted by a generation of young filmmakers, those of the Nouvelle Vague, for whom theoretical
writing was the foundation of their practice. Reflection and action were two poles of a dialectic that
would become the key to our understanding of cinema, its singularities as well as its paradoxes.

Forgive me for going back so far in time, more than half a century, in order to deal with the current
state of cinema, but the problem of time seems vital to me when trying to understand where we are
exactly. This is why we should begin by asking ourselves both the question of what this original
cinephilia is exactly and what its alternative might have been. 

I postulate, rightly or wrongly, that any reflection on cinema is consciously or unconsciously based
on the ambiguous nature of cinema’s relationship with the other arts. And, consequently, with their
theory. From the earliest days of cinema, a contrast existed between the proponents of a cinema in
line with the synchronous history of the avant-garde on the one hand and the proponents of its
intrinsic bastardism on the other – torn between popular literature and symbolist imagery. André
Bazin and Cahiers du cinéma, for their part, chose to examine praxis and to build an essentialist
bubble out of it. Cinema was, as it were, elsewhere, unrelated to the old issues.

The various Nouvelles Vagues that spread through the world federated around this approach.

At the centre of it all was the question of filming and the ethics of filming, and the freedom of the
auteur, which allowed all idiosyncrasies. But from the beginning of the 1960s, and more extremely
afterwards, this cinephilia was doubly cornered: by the repressed relationship with the visual arts –
Jean-Luc Godard made this the centre of his work – and the socio-political evolution of the world,
which was shaken up by the youth movement that materialised in France in May 68 and in the
United States in the Summer of Love of 1967.

Put simply, the relationship with the visual arts questioned the form of modern cinema, its
relationship with figuration and narration, while the upheaval that swept across contemporary
societies questioned the place or even the legitimacy of the auteur.

Everything that seemed clear became blurred; everything the new cinema had been built on was
consequently called into question, even by its main artisans. 
This profound and insoluble question of whether or not cinema is part of the visual arts left its mark
on me personally. Is cinema the “seventh art”, a term that is often used without really understanding
it, or is it something other than an art, perhaps even the philosopher’s stone that the 20th-century
avant-gardes were searching for, the sublation of the arts, in the Hegelian sense of the term. Cinema
as an art, indeed, but one that would possess the power to look at the other arts, to solve the
mysteries of the representation of the world, in short, to perform the miracle of the reproduction of
perception as a whole, the access to which haunts the history of painting – Turner similarly solved
the search for movement by way of abstraction.

I often think of what Ingmar Bergman said about Tarkovsky moving freely through spaces whose
doors he himself had knocked on his entire life.

In this sense I have always been confused by the misunderstandings sparked off by the distinction
between experimental cinema, heir to the early-20th-century Dadaist (Hans Richter) and Surrealist
(Man Ray, Buñuel) endeavours, and the narrative cinema that established itself very early on as
popular entertainment, gradually winning its spurs. Venom and Eternity (1951) by the founder of
Lettrism, Isidore Isou, should in my opinion be regarded as the harbinger of the Nouvelle Vague.
And, on the other side of the Atlantic, a similar break brought about by a generation of experimental
filmmakers who challenged everything that came before them, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Jonas
Mekas, Stan Brakhage or John Cassavetes, was the basis of the free cinema to come, of New
Hollywood, if you like. Especially in terms of the formal reformulation of cinema’s aesthetics,
which far less affected the Nouvelle Vague. Through superimposition and black magic (Anger),
abstraction (Brakhage), a diaristic style (Mekas), dramaturgy and the status of the actor
(Cassavetes), or the use of the zoom as a reinvention of the fixed shot, liberated from the static
camera obscura (Warhol), it is not the syntax but the very texture of cinema that is at stake.

I, for my part, regard cinema as a whole: narrative cinema has always fed on experimental works
just as the latter have always been inspired by the limits or deadlocks of figuration. What I mean is
that there is some Brakhage in Michael Bay and some Warhol in Fassbinder or Almodóvar. 

At the heart of these matters, as is often the case when it comes to questioning the contemporary, is
the work of Jean-Luc Godard, initially a product of classical cinephilia and haunted until sundown
by his questioning of and by the doubt eating away at this same cinephilia, the knot of suffering that
has defined his art for a long time now. 

Theory is thought in motion, thought in its capacity to take hold – including in strategic terms – of
the issues of a present that is constantly redefined. At what point, when exactly, did cinema cease to
be thought? When did it lose the vital, essential link between the practice of an art and its
reflection? I fear that many irresistible forces have contributed to what I continue to perceive as the
failure of a generation.

First of all, I would say that cinema has been the victim of its own prestige, and (auteur) theory of
its international success, which has opened wide the doors of the academy. As soon as film thought
became an academic discipline, it became fixed; it ceased to be the continuation of filmmakers’
material and practical concerns. Who, today, is seriously interested in how lenses transform space,
particularly by the long focal lengths specific to modern cinema? Who wonders about the
monocular perspective as a limit to cinema’s reproduction of the real? Or, again, who explores the
disparity between the open, free field of novel or modern-theatre writing and the narrow limits of
the conventions governing the work of committees and commissions holding the power of life and
death over cinematographic works? Not to mention series, whose standard-bearers seem all too
happy to have a go at applying the tissue of conventions and platitudes from American
screenwriting textbooks.
What I am getting at is the point when living theory becomes dead ideology. In the hands of
university professors, who see it as a chance to add a touch of modernity to their teaching, thought
in motion becomes a doxa, an assemblage of rules, of automatisms, no longer based on anything
since we have forgotten their very source, the source of youth, of the most spontaneous poetry.

If I wanted to take my reflection another step further and be more provocative than I wish to be in
this context, I would say that it is time, today, to seriously, and responsibly, confront the failure of
cinephilia. I do not mean to cast doubt on its achievements, nor on its critical importance within
20th-century thinking about the image: it is of paramount importance. But the very success of this
treasure of film history should open our eyes and force us to admit that it is a moment of cinema,
that this moment is long past because it no longer produces anything new, if not a form of tetany
resulting in the idea that the totality of cinema would have been thought in the era of 1960s
modernity and of classical cinema before that, and that the only thing left for us today is to be
satisfied with the values and tools of an ironic, or rather non-duped postmodernity, if not lapsing
into baroque grotesques. 

What I mean is that in a world of proliferating images, of all kinds, we cannot but notice the
fragility of the place of cinephile thought, which has become a fall-back position, whereas, until
recently, it was still at the centre of the debate.

Once its great principles had been acquired, once film had been recognized as a legitimate object of
study, once its auteur had gained the prestige that was formerly reserved for those practising older
and more serious disciplines, once its legitimacy had been recognized to be halfway between high
and low culture, we did not move an inch, it seems. I have witnessed the walls of a – university –
stronghold being constructed so as to protect, around the guardians of this temple, values that have
not produced anything useful or relevant for a very long time.

I say this all the more uneasily as I put myself not only in the position of essayist here but also in
that of a filmmaker examining theory, asking the question of knowing, of understanding, in what
way it would have been useful or stimulating to me beyond what I learned by contributing
to Cahiers du cinéma for five years, between 1980 and 1985. The answer, as far as I am concerned,
and it could – perhaps – be different for others, is brutal: nothing. And, as nature has gifted me with
a rather contrary spirit, I am left with the feeling that I had to swim against the tide of ephemeral
conceptions, of lucky charms, of instantly forgotten fashions of a drifting cinephile thought,
determined by a late connection with Bourdieusian sociology, dabbling in the mirror games of
postmodernity and naively running after the prestige of the visual arts, ever since the latter have
invaded the field of the moving image via the practice of installation art, however fragile and
questionable.

Please allow me to look to the past one last time before coming to less negative considerations,
although I am in many ways a supporter of the powers of the negative, which were a great
inspiration to me. 

When historical cinephilia was formed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, did the theory of the visual
arts have anything at all to say about cinema, about its history and the powerful forces that
determined its transformation? Not much, in my opinion, and you do not have to be, as I was, a
reader of Guy Debord and the Situationists to observe that during those years, faced with the advent
of the New York School (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko...), the main question troubling the European
avant-gardes was their own political failure and the rehashing of the deadlocks of abstraction, the
repetition of transgressions that weren’t even shocking anymore in 1930. Cinema was so far
removed from the concerns of the theory of the visual arts that it referred, even in its most
contemporary variations, such as Italian neorealism, to the the most basic monocular reproduction
of the world. Cinema’s question of figuration seemed insignificant compared with the exploration of
the obscurities or the dazzlement of the unconscious through the means of abstraction and, even
more so, compared with the movement of art’s negation through happenings in their most radical
and extreme variations, such as Viennese Actionism. Or, again, the Hamburg Theses of Debord,
Vaneigem and Kotanyi which signalled the Situationist renunciation of art in favour of the
“realization of philosophy”.

I am writing this to recall how cinephile thought was also a powerful antidote to the destructive
forces at work within the avant-gardes and how it enabled the budding filmmakers of the time,
undoubtedly the richest and most prolific generation in the history of film, to find a basis for a
practice of representing the world, which the visual arts were denying them.

We will have to come to the present. I am going to try and do that. I would like to begin with the
issue of theory, given that I reject cinephilia for its ossification into ideology and dogma.

In his recent book A History of Pictures, David Hockney, whom I consider to be the main
contemporary thinker of the image, apart from being the greatest living painter, pursues a
fascinating reflection on the origins of representation: how it was long built around a relationship
with the monocular perspective, with the technical evolution of lenses and their usage, and the
technique of the camera obscura. As much as these tools allow him an infinitely stimulating
rereading of the classical era of painting, he also deals with their modern reappraisal. The
Cubist moment was a pivotal event in this regard, breaking with the traditional reference points of
perspective through a multiplication of angles for one and the same image.

In my view, Hockney does not go far enough, in the sense that his view is not supported by the
theory of cinema, which has over time forgotten being a theory of perception – except with Gilles
Deleuze who, primarily in The Movement Image, has been one of the very last great thinkers of
cinema. It is indeed from the point of view of movement – and of the multiplication of perspectives
and axes within a sequence, not within a shot, which is not the true syntagm of cinema – that the
question of cinema as an answer to Hockney’s concerns plays out, as a way of questioning the limits
of the original camera obscura. The movement of the camera, ever since it can be carried, and the
use of long lenses, including indoors, ever since we have sensitive enough opticals at our disposal,
indeed brings us several steps closer, I think, to the reproduction of perception, which is finally
within reach.

Hockney refuses to take stock of these questions at work in cinema, which is the limit of his
reflection, but it seems to me that the last breakthrough in his most recent work is essential, in the
sense that it suggests placing painting back at the heart of the history of images. To summarize it
schematically, he does not consider the shift from painting to photography as a break but a
continuity in which the decisive invention is not so much the rival reproduction of the real as it is
the ability to fix – on photographic paper – an image that painters had already known for a long
time through their use of perspective and which was at the source of its techniques and their
evolution.

The importance of this idea lies in its relegitimization of the age-old artistic theory developed
around painting at the heart of cinema, which could quite reasonably be considered the continuation
of the invention of photography. Fundamentally, the question I am trying to ask would be to know if
it would not be in the interest of cinema today to confront the wealth of reflections that have, since
the Renaissance, been concerned with considering both the question of the reproduction of the
world and the even more essential question of the exploration of perception. If I were asked what I
think is most useful to teach in today’s film schools, I would recommend these two tracks.
Besides, in order to support these intuitions, it would suffice to observe how the thinkers of the
image that Jean-Luc Godard – the most authentically plastic of all the great modern filmmakers –
most often refers to are Elie Faure and, above all, André Malraux, whose brilliance and staggering
juxtapositions – theoretical short circuits – most certainly continue to haunt us.

What I am trying to say here is how poorly equipped cinephilia is to face these questions, which are
at the heart of the understanding of cinema’s mysterious contemporary nature, whose very elements
still seem to escape us. Whereas the history of the arts offers us a wealth of stimulating
opportunities to reinvent our relationship with the moving image and, perhaps, to set it back in the
long history that ended up being obscured by the opposition between classical cinema and
modernity, a productive time. 

Who is thinking cinema today, from which point of view and based on which values? And what
does cinema think of itself, according to which ethics and principles? Two questions of a very
different nature, whose answers seem to have crumbled – especially on the internet – and whose
coherence has become infinitely difficult to imagine.

Seen from a limited angle, that of French cinema, it seemed to me that, although I was not part of it
myself, the strong personalities of Serge Daney and Claude Lanzmann served as reference points
for a while by founding a sort of funeral postscript to cinephilia, which was post-leftist rather than
post-modern and defined by the question of the taboo: on the one hand, the “tracking shot in Kapò”
which was criticized by Jacques Rivette in an essay about Gillo Pontecorvo’s film of the same name
(Pontecorvo made The Battle of Algiers and had previously been an indestructible idol of anti-
colonialist cinema) and which, for Daney, becomes obscenity itself, the aestheticisation of
deportation, at a time when he is giving a deeply moving literary form to his own hitherto repressed
personal history of a father he never knew, a Polish Jew and victim of the camps.

Claude Lanzmann, on the other hand, the auteur of the astonishing masterpiece Shoah, by grasping
deportation in a transcendental way and refraining from using archival images, built a film ethics
around this question that made a lasting impression. 

The combination of these two issues served as theory for a generation of filmmakers who were
themselves rarely directly affected by these historical questions but who were looking for a moral
code which the ruins of classical cinephilia, already critically wounded by leftism, were unable to
provide.

The paradox of this moment in cinema theory is that it had nothing constructive to propose other
than the establishing of some code of restriction. Complete with the obligingly raised spectre of the
death of cinema. I wouldn’t have liked to start making films in those dire circumstances, and it was
Arnaud Desplechin who, in La Sentinelle – a film I always thought Serge Daney would have loved
– managed to untie this knot and rescue cinema from this curse. But wasn’t there a fundamental
truth to all this and wasn’t Serge Daney, who climbed aboard the post-Bazinian train during the
1970s, nearly clairvoyant with regard to the deadlocks of cinephilia around which he had
established himself and whose unravelling, decomposing and self-denial he witnessed while he was
himself dying?

What is left of these questions? Do they remain, did they get past the borders of France? Not really.
Do they appeal to young filmmakers? Do they have a posterity, or are they only relevant within the
context of this reflection on the present state of cinema? Hardly.
When trying to identify the place of a reformulation of cinephilia today, it is impossible not to
situate it on the internet and in the latter’s redefinition of both the viewing modes of cinema and the
way in which we move through its history. It is an irrelevant commonplace and yet a truth worth
mentioning that today’s generations have an infinitely wider access to history – to the entire history
of cinema as well as to its present – unimaginable for pre-digital humanity, who only had access
through the Cinematheque to a fraction of the masterpieces of cinema, some of them remaining
perfectly unattainable.

We don’t see everything, but we have access to almost everything, free of charge even; cinephilia
has dissolved into a multitude of conflicting cliques, each organized around one fragment of one
glorious past, to the extent that even its symbolic value continues to diminish. There are still films,
often very good ones too – more good films are made today than at any other time - whose stakes
play out on an ad hoc basis: will it win the Oscar, the Palm, the Lion, the Bear, will it be
nominated? While filmmakers as auteurs are fading. Who today knows how to follow the thread of
an oeuvre, to understand what is at work in an artist’s search, however senseless and futile? It’s all
about this film right here, and after that everything starts all over again. In the digital fragmentation
and its dilution of theoretical pertinence today, the entire legacy of auteur cinephilia is pretty much
called into question.

Which theory is entering into dialogue with cinema in the present, which theory is accepted, has the
right to help shape the inspiration of filmmakers? To whom is one accountable? I am a little afraid
of the answer, to be honest.

It seems to me that it is sociology – it is easier to say the political – and communitarianism. But is

this a good or a bad thing? And am I not venturing onto fragile, shifting sands? I believe there is an
injunction to address these questions, even if I doubt that I will be able to formulate a satisfactory,
let alone consensual, answer.

We know the evils of our time. Global warming, ecological disaster, an insane increase in social
inequalities, the impossibility of managing migratory flows and, above all, the inability of those
who govern, of states, to give a satisfactory or even vaguely reassuring response to these anxiety-
inducing subjects, not to mention wars, epidemics or unemployment. Conversely, it seems as if the
self-destructive opposition to the apprehension of these evils has in our democracies become an
electoral asset.

It is only natural that filmmakers are citizens too and thus legitimately involved in the issues society
is facing. But the political is the domain of the complex, and it does not necessarily produce good
cinema. What’s more, fictional cinema struggles – which is normal – to grasp social issues that are
analyzed or represented much more adequately by publishing, the press or even documentaries,
longer and therefore more legitimate forms that possess the ability to treat fragile or sensitive
subjects with the necessary rigour, precision and exactingness that cinema can only very
exceptionally offer.

From my point of view, the sociological is a bad branch to catch hold of, not least because
simplifications, amalgamations, and dramatization risk cutting out the facts, reducing them to
comfortable generalities and resulting in an interpretation that is both erroneous and harmful.

I do not wish to criticize or delegitimize a cinema that aims to be accountable to the state and its
citizens; on the contrary, it is perfectly commendable. I just want to say that I find it very difficult,
and sometimes even dangerous, and that I do not at any rate discern a key there that would allow us
to think contemporary, let alone future, cinema in a satisfactory or stimulating way.
What to think of communitarianism, which has become a factor influencing our societies and which
in turn examines cinema for lack of being examined by it, which would seem more fundamental,
riskier and more satisfying anyway to our minds; I have always been convinced that it is the role of
cinema and art to examine society and certainly not to be examined by it, especially not in terms of
censorship, the eternal hallmark of totalitarian regimes.

I was an adolescent in the 1970s. I have often repeated this and will continue to do so because this
period, and its questioning of all society’s values, left an indelible mark on my life. I lived and was
actively involved in a counterculture that advocated the liberation of everyday life, and I was
engaged in forms of leftism that promoted individual liberation rather than collectivist utopias and
support for authoritarian or even genocidal regimes. I have seen the liberation of homosexuality in
words and deeds, I have seen the revival of feminism and its decisive victories. I have seen the
invention of a Franco-Maghrebi identity, of a culture originating in the districts the African
immigrants were relegated to, encouraged to settle in France in order to serve as labour for Gaullist
France’s great infrastructure works.

I was less interested, afterwards, in the identitarian drift that followed from these steps forward, nor
in their political or ideological instrumentalization. Perhaps they were fatal; perhaps they were
necessary, I don’t know. I have personally never thought of my relationship with others in terms of
the colour of their skin or their sexual preferences. As for my relationship with women and
feminism – which would be my lifelong favourite political party because I am utterly convinced
that toxic masculinity has become the source of all evil in our world – it was Groucho Marx who
gave the best definition when he said that man is a woman like any other. I couldn’t have said it
better myself.

I add these more personal comments not just to define who I am but, in this instance, “where I’m
speaking from”, to use the jargon of the political years. I personally think that cinema can be
communitarian – I do not think it is intended that way, but why not – but this communitarianism is
nevertheless entirely unsuited to taking the place of the absence of theoretical thinking on cinema,
which we have to take stock of today.

I will have to address Hollywood. I have practically nothing positive to say about it except that this
industry’s prosperity and new modalities do not delight me, they frighten or even repulse me,
because what they have recently produced is diametrically opposed to what I loved or admired
about the American cinema that, throughout film history, provided this art with several of its
greatest masters.

We are witnessing the triumph of series, the distribution of films through digital platforms and the
confiscation of screens in the service of (mostly Disney-studio) franchises, whose hegemony now
seems absolute.

Why take the trouble to finance a film that is not meant to provoke a sequel, a spin-off, or another
film “in the universe of” and whose unsure relationship with the public is unpredictable? For a long
time now, in Hollywood, the territory of film has been shrinking. To the benefit of an independent
cinema forced to make do with ridiculous budgets – and thus limited in its practicing of the
contemporary syntax of cinema, which is reserved for major productions.

And Netflix, and Disney Plus, and Apple, etc.: hasn’t cinema taken refuge there? Haven’t Alfonso
Cuarón, Martin Scorsese, the Safdie brothers, and Noah Baumbach found political asylum there? I
have even been there myself, since my film Wasp Network is distributed by Netflix in most places,
except where it had been bought in advance — first of all in France, where it was an honest public
success on the big screen. No other distributor offered the producers of the film a viable alternative.

If there is one issue cinema-thinking – which could use some sorely missing theoretical tools –
comes up against, it is the confusion generated by the profound transformation of film distribution
and financing. First of all, do the platforms intend to finance ambitious contemporary auteur
cinema, beyond the incidental effect of fame that comes with the rivalry in this field of newcomers
determined to take over a large share of the market? In other words, will Netflix, in need of prestige
and symbolic value today, still need it next year or the year after? Not really, I guess. As for the
studios, will they return to film as a business model or is the deviation towards franchises on the one
hand and series on the other definitive?

In short, is there still room for a free cinema on the big screen? I believe that if this window is not
closing, it is at least shrinking before our eyes. The only real model left is an independent, radical,
daring cinema, alas with limited distribution.

Am I comfortable with that? Not really. I come from the visual arts originally; I was influenced by
contemporary poetry, and my musical tastes have most often led me to artists on the margins’
margins, not to mention my aesthetic, philosophical, and political convictions, which are of a
terribly minority nature within my generation. But if I chose to devote myself to cinema, it was
because of its majority status, because it was the last art form that profoundly resonated with
society, that wasn’t trapped in its stronghold, that hadn’t suffered the overwhelming deviation of the
visual arts, which opted for an alliance with triumphant financial capitalism, choosing a false
cynical radicalism, which Guy Debord called “state Dadaism”, meant to promote it to stratospheric
heights.

The cinema that inspired me, that I loved, that I have tried to practise myself is an impure and open
cinema, particularly accessible to those for whom cinema is often the only opportunity to encounter
art as vital, beneficial and, why not, salutary. 

Do I think, in this regard, that Alfonso Cuarón, Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, and so many
others have been right in choosing a form of security and entrusting their films to Netflix? I don’t. I
think that their films demonstrate that the cinema I believe in is alive and feasible – most of these
films could have easily been financed without the help of Netflix or other platforms – and that it is
the extension, the continuation of an art that is truly of our time, of our generation, that gives the
most susceptible, sensitive account of the transformation of the world, of beings, of time, so many
things that belong to cinema and which are in danger of getting lost or forgotten in the flow of
images; and, even if I have few certainties, I am certain that this danger is very real, that facing it
and persevering will unite us, however powerful the forces we have to face.

At this point, my reader has every right to ask me what this absent theory is, exactly, that cinema in
the present time would need. It seems I have already evoked the indispensable back and forth
between intuitive, spontaneous, uncontrolled practice, often determined by the use of new tools or
new mediums, and its thought. I don’t mean to say that the development of the arts is the word of
the Pythia and that it is up to critics, essayists, and certain filmmakers too, as I am doing at this very
moment, to try to decipher its enigmas. But I do think it might be important, perhaps even essential,
that works generate what Roberto Longhi called ekphrasis, that is to say the discourse made
possible and provoked by the questions, enigmas and breakthroughs that art in its quest for life and
its contradictions leaves unsolved. A writing that would be in dialogue with the artists, a revelation
of the work and by this very fact an intercessor for the spectator.
I understand this in the most literal sense, that of knowing how to read and answer the questions
raised day by day by the practice of film, but I would also like to push this issue a little further and
open it up to two fields which seem to offer great potential within the present context. The first is
the unconscious, and the second is ethics.

Here, more than elsewhere, I must speak in the first person and share concerns that have always
haunted me, even when they were losing ground in film reflection and in the inspiration of
filmmakers.

Applied to cinema, and please forgive me the inevitable simplifications and shortcuts when
approaching that vast a subject, psychoanalysis enlightens us in two different forms. The first,
broadly Freudian, form reminds us that auteurs are never entirely aware of what they are doing in
their apprehension of characters and their acts, in the same manner that writers, taking up their pen,
do not always write what they had planned to, as writing reveals thought rather than thought
freezing writing: in short, I mean that both filmmakers and writers, however lucid they may be, do
not always know what they are saying or doing because their unconscious is at work.

In another time, not long ago, this went without saying, and one went looking for what motivated or
determined the modern individual, for better or for worse, in reflections on Ingmar Bergman’s,
Michelangelo Antonioni’s or Jacques Tati’s characters. I believe the same could be the case today, at
a time when the meaning of films, in its multiple forms, has more than ever become a subject of
debate and polemics. In films, as in any work of the mind, it is the unconscious that acts. We open
our doors to it and there is nothing more precious than what it expresses through us once we refrain
from commonplaces, convenience, conventions and all the false dramatic rules determining
committees and commissions on which the present and future of cinema sadly all too often depends,
limiting and distorting the authentic inspiration and desires of young filmmakers who are taught
how not to be themselves by the dominant rules of the film industry.

The other dimension according to which psychoanalysis defines cinema I would like to call broadly
Jungian, in the sense that cinema in its entirety, even in its most conventional and simplistic form,
can – and, in my opinion, should – be regarded as a collective unconscious. The world of images,
the fantastic, the imaginary, wherever it may lead us, often in the most disappointing or banal ways,
is the dream of our society, and it informs us, often without knowing, about the state of the world
better than any other art, with the exception maybe of songs, of popular entertainment and music in
all its forms, providing a real-time account of what is flowing through our present time.

For example, I have always considered Star Trek a quasi-documentary look at office life and the
interactions between employees, torn between their daily routine and the dangers of the outside
world; I only later realized what was literally staring me in the face, that their spaceship is called
“Enterprise”...

On a darker note, it is difficult not to consider the proliferation of films that are in some way
haunted by destruction and the end of the world, and built around Marvel superheroes, a sort of
revenge of masculinity, which is threatened by the redefinition of the place of women in modern
societies.

And I deliberately choose two rather simple tendencies with the sole intention of showing that
unravelling these threads could contribute to thinking the truths, including the unpleasant ones, that
animate our time.

Which brings me to ethics.

It deserves to be examined, even if the present state of cinema might provide us with few easy or
satisfactory answers.

It is not a question of morality for me, given that most of the works of Eisenstein or Vertov could be
defined as propaganda, that Rossellini himself made films approved by the fascist state, that it can
be painful to watch The Birth of a Nation, one of film history’s masterpieces, that Bergman,
Hitchcock and many of the most eminent artists in the history of cinema have made Cold War films.
This does not detract from their genius. Not to mention Leni Riefenstahl, who is denied her –
important – place only because of her Nazism and the benefits she derived from it. A great
filmmaker like Xie Jin, the inspired auteur of Two Stage Sisters and Woman Basketball Player No.
5, had no scruples about pursuing his career during the Cultural Revolution’s darkest hours.

I rather consider it a question of practice, like when André Bazin spoke of a “forbidden montage”
when two antinomic shots are put together, a wild beast on the one hand and an actor disguised as
an explorer on the other. Or when Claude Lanzmann, who I quoted earlier, examines the legitimacy
of representing, of fictionalizing the concentration camps and the gas chambers. Everyone has the
right to argue and to defend his or her point of view on this issue. It is no less relevant and it has,
above all, the merit of going to the utmost limit of a question that arises on a smaller scale in every
single gesture of the practice of cinema.

Who finances films, where does the money come from, whose accomplices do we become when
spending that money, when practising our art? What did we give up, what did we have to
compromise with when we needed to meet the demands of the market and the industry dictating
their rules? The practices of which television channel, basing its audience on which demagogy, do
we approve of? To which fantasized demand, to which “general public”, despised by those who
claim to speak in their name, have we given in?

For example, fifteen years after the fact, I discovered that my film Sentimental Destinies had been
distributed in the United States by a company, and a very sympathetic one at that, whose main
shareholder happened to be the extreme-right agitator Steve Bannon. Am I comfortable with that?
No, I’m not. Do I have a choice? I don’t know, perhaps, but things would be much clearer if these
issues were discussed and laid out in black and white. The same goes for American
megaproductions adapting their scenarios to the demands of the Chinese government’s politico-
confucian censorship in order to reach the planet’s largest audience.

I am often reminded of the title of an article by François Truffaut, ironically called ‘Clouzot at
Work, or the Reign of Terror’. We have to acknowledge, as Truffaut did, the image, widespread at
the time and more diffuse today, of the demiurge-filmmaker who abused his authority and power to
the benefit of an unspeakable quest, an absolute as vague as it is hard to formulate, and whose
whims, anger and impertinence are as many tangible expressions of it, remaining, however,
inaccessible to ordinary mortals. I consider the opposite important, that filmmakers are accountable
to their crew and that the quality of concentration, the richness of sharing, the clarity of intentions
all form a decisive part of the collective adventure of a film shoot. I have often, whenever I had the
opportunity, thanked the crew of my films and reminded them how much cinema is the sum of
energies relayed by a director, whose art often depends on his ability to listen, to pay attention to
ideas, to the flow of things that arises on set day after day. His talent also depends on knowing how
to give rise to that. For me, it is an old and deep conviction that the best of cinema depends on the
quality of everyone’s commitment to a strange undertaking which has to do with the reinvention
and re-enchantment of the real, but which is also a parallel world, a parallel life in which everyone
must be able to surpass themselves, to find fulfilment and, in a way, to give meaning to what is a
little more than a job, the commitment of a life, an intimate quest.
This in no way means that I would renounce what I have often declared, namely that directing is
first and foremost a force of disruption in the automatisms that structure the functioning of a set. It
is indeed up to the mise en scène to constantly unsettle conventions and conveniences, forms that
are only alive if they are constantly shaken up and questioned: and the more we shake them up, the
more we refuse to content ourselves with ready-made answers, the more we put into practice the
conviction that cinema can and should be a thousand things – what it was in the past or what
remains to be explored, that this territory is infinite and the only one that really deserves exploring –
the more chances we get to reveal the very meaning of our art and its place in the world. But none
of that can be achieved alone. It needs to be extended, deepened, applied by everyone, with all
attendant risks and with the exactingness necessary to realize this ambition. 

This applies to all filming and to all filmmakers who have chosen to practise their art outside the
laws and rules of the streaming industry and who have been able to preserve their often hard-won
freedom – cinema’s supreme value – to their own benefit, of course, but also, and just as much, to
the benefit of their collaborators. A film is a microcosm, all of society, every stratum is represented
in it, and the same waves, the same tensions run through it, except that these values are put to the
test more immediately, more urgently, on a daily basis and with immediately observable
consequences. This is why I attach inestimable value to an ethical practice of cinema whose
beneficial effects, pleasures as well as dangers, would be shared by all, amounting to a disalienated
work at the heart of the very territory of alienation. I talked about accountability, and I believe one
must first of all submit one’s work to the respect of these values.

As you can guess, I do not really like what has become of the current film industry in the hands of
executives who look more like business managers produced by business schools, or of senior civil
servants, who are often people of great quality but whose instincts, ambitions and imagination are a
million miles away from those of the adventurers, the players and visionaries who built this
cathedral we all share, the cathedral of the first century of cinema.

In this regard, I have always put my Faith in what is called independent cinema – structures whose
historical models would be François Truffaut’s Les Films du Carrosse or Barbet Schroeder’s and
Eric Rohmer’s Les Films du Losange. But this would disregard the work of producers who have, in
the often hostile undergrowth of various film-funding bodies and in the maze of the banking system,
managed to support – beyond any profit logic, happy not to be out of pocket themselves – singular,
atypical works against the values of their time. Works by authentic authors who are themselves
carried by nothing but their convictions, their obsessions but also their limits and their fragilities,
the raw material of their work.

It is this ecosystem, rephrased time and again in different cultures and countries, more or less
dependent on cinema-favourable legislation or patronage, or on nothing at all, that has kept alive
reflection, research, daring and, first of all, a form of integrity that is indispensable to the best
practice of cinema.

We have seen the wave of streaming cinema grow, we have seen cinema become an industry, and
this industry become dominant – and I am hesitant to use the words “mind-numbing” or “alienating
”, which would have, until recently, flown quite naturally out of my pen without even feeling the
need to justify it. Yet whereas, in another time, one could dream of cinema as a utopia, it seems to
me that it has become perfectly dystopian and that, in the name of entertainment or whitewashed in
conformism and bland good intentions, it is essentially devoted to the perpetuation and flattery of
the most conventional emotions and of the lowest, if not inane, desires. In this respect, I am happy
enough when a film, for lack of a concern with nature, light and the human, at least refrains from
being harmful.
This is why, deep down, today, cinema must be made against cinema. Especially if it wishes to
embody, within the new world of images, that which is most precious and most vital: the freedom to
think, to invent, to search, to wander and to err, in short to be the antidote we need so as to preserve
our faith and keep the flame alive, which it is our duty to know how to protect and transmit,
generation after generation, in a battle that is never won.

March – April 2020