Ev'ry Time We Say Goodby Film was invented a hundred years ago. During this time people all over the world have travelled on a scale uhat is unprecedented since the establishment of the first cowns, when the nomads became sedentary One might immediately think of tourism: busines trips too, for the world market depends upon a continual exchange of products.and labor. Rs mostly, the travelling has been done under coercion. Displacements of whole populations. Refugees from famine or war, Wave after wave of 18, emigrating for either political or economic reasons but emigrating for survival, Ours is the century of enforced travel. I would go further and say that ours is the century of disappearances. The century of people helplesdy seeing others, who were close to them disappear over the horizon. ‘Ey'ry Time We Say Goodbye” ~ asi ized by John Coltrane. Perhaps itis net so suprising that this century's In Paria there iva chapel that was built in the year 1900 on the site of a Roman arena, The chapel adjoined a palace that has now disappeared as palaces often do. When the chapei was finished, Gioto and his assistants began painting frescoes all over the interior walls and ceiling. These have survived. They tell the story of the life of Christ and the Last Judgement. They show heaven, earth and hell. When. you are inside the chapel, you are surrounded by the events depicted. without a tra The storyline is very strong. The scenes are dramatic. (The one where Judas kisses Christ, for exaraple, offers an unforgettable rendering af treachery.) Everywhere the expressions atid gestures are charged with intense meaning ~ like those in silent films, Ciotto was a realist and a reat mettaur en sane The scenes, which follow one afier another, are full of stark material details, taken from life. This chapel, built and conceived seven hunclred years ago, is, think, more like @ cinema tian anything, else that has come down to us from before the twentieth century. Somebody one day should name a cinema the Serovegni — which is how the chapel is called, after the family who had the palace bul Nevertheless, there isa very obiious ilference between cinema and painting. The cinema image moves and the painted image is sate. And this difference changes our relationship to the place where we are looking at the images. In the Scrovegni you have the feeling that everthing which as happened in history has been brought there and belongs to an eternal present in the chapel in Padua. The feeseoes = even those that have ¢ carly deteriorated ~ inspire a sense of trans cendental permanence. The painted image makeswhatisabsemtin thatithappened farawayor Jong ago-~ present. The pi and now. It eollects the w inted image delivers whatit depicts the here andl brings it home. A seascape by Turner tayappear to contradict what I've just sti, But even before a Turner the ns aware of the pigment that has been scraped on to the andindecd thisawarenessispartofhisexcitement Turner comes ‘out ofthe gale with a painting. Turner crosses the Alpsand brings ark an image of mare's awesomeness. Infinityand the surface of che canvas play hhide-andseck in a room where a painting is hung. This is what! meant anu brings home, Ant team eo this because its images ae s nd changeless. Imagine a cinetna ser film being projected on tot. Let'ssay the scene where the angel appears to the shepherds to announce Chris's birth at Bethlehem. (The legend en being installed in the Scroveyni Chapel anda has it that Giotto, when he was a boy, was a shepherd.) Watching this film, we woudl be transported out ofthe chapel to afield somewhere at night, where shepherds are Wing in the grass. The cinema, because iis images are moving, takes us aumy from whete we are tothe some of action (Action! murmurs or shouts the director to set the scene in Painting brings home. The cinema transports elsewhere Compare now the cinema with theatre. Hoth are dramatic: arts, Theatre brings aetors before a public anc every night during the seas they reenact the saune drama. Deep in the nature of theatre 3 sense ritual rer, The cinema, by contrast, wansports its audience individually, singly. tof the theatre towards the unknown, Twenty takes of de same scene ay be shor, but the one that is used will be selected hecanse it has the most convincing look and sorind of a First Time Where, then, do these First Times take place? Not, of course, on the set. On the screen? The screen, a8 soon asthe lights go out, feo longer a surface but a space. Not a wall, asthe wall of the Serovegni Chapel bt more like a sky. A sky filed with events and people. From where else ‘would film stars come if not fromm a fil skyThe scale andl grain of the cinema sereen enhance the sky effect. This is why cinema films shown on small TV screens lose se mich of their sense of destiny. The meetings are no longer in a sky but in & kind of cupboard, At the end ofa play, the actors aluundoning the characters they have ‘been playing, come tothe footlights to take their bow, The applause they receive isasign of recognition for their having brought the dramainto the theatre tonight. Atthe end of afl, those protagonists who are stil alive have tomove on. We have been following them, stalking them, and, fin ‘out there, they have to elude us. Cinema is perpetually about leaving. IK there is an aestheties of dhe cinema," siid René Clair, “it ean be summarised in one word: movement.’ One word: movies. Maybe this is why so many couples, when they go to the einen hhands, as they don’t in the theatre. A response to the dark, people say. Perhaps a response to the travelling too. Cinema seats are lke those in a jet plane. ‘When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers ofa book are ike roof and four walls. What is w happen next will tke place witain the fone walls of the story: And this is possible because the storys voice makes everything its own. Film i» eleeto the nal to Le able to do this And sa it has no home grou i. Ii always coming and going, laa story which is read, suspense simply involves wating. In a film It valves displacement To show thatitisin the very nature offi to shuttle us between a here land a there, let us think of Breston’s first masterpiece ~ Un Condaené Mont Est Echappi Watching. it, we scarcely ever leave the prisoner, Fontaine, who is either in his cell or inthe exercise yard. Meticulously sep by Mep, we follow him preparing for his escape, The story i tol in very linear way, ike one of the ropes Fonta is making to escape with, It ‘must be one of the most unitinear films ever mace, Yet all the while, on the so indurack we hear the guards in the prison corridors and on the i, the sound of trains passing, (How much the cinema was in love with locomotives!) We remain here with Fontaine in hiscell but our imagination is being pulled to dhe, where the guards are doing their roubds, or 19 the, where men at liberty can still ake ain of an elsewhere. This is part of the inevitable method of film narration Continually, we are made aware he only way around it would be to shoot whole story in one take andl with a camera that didn't move. And the result would he a phowcopy of theatre — without the alLimportant presence of the actors. Movies, not because we see things moving, but becase a film is a shuttle serview between different places and times 1 early westerns there are those classe chase scenes in which we see a train and men on horses galloping beside it, Sometimes a rider succeeds in leaving his horse and pulling himself aboard the train, This action, so ‘beloved by directors, i the emblematic action of cinema. Al film stories use crossovers. Usually they occur not on the screen as an event but a the consequence of editing. And itis through these crossovers that we are made to feel the destiny of the lives we are watching ‘When we read, itis the story's voice which conveys a sense of destiny Films are much nearer to the aceidents of life, and in them destiny is revealed in the split second of a cut or the few seconds of a disolve ‘These cuts, of course, are not accidental we know that they are intondad by the film ~ dhey reveal how the fm is hand in glove with the destiny Working in the story. The rest of the time this destiny is lurking else where, in the sky behind. Tina m dhat, eighty years after Grifth and Eisenstein, I'm simply saying that the seeret of the Seventh Art is editing! My’ argument, ng of films, but how they work, when, ade, on the spectator’ imagination ‘Walt Whitman, who was born at the end of the Napoleonic age and died two years before the first reels were shot, foresaw our cinemato- Braphic vision. His intensely democratic sense of human destiny made hhim the poet of the cinema before the cameras were made. Listen, The lite one sleeps in its exude Tift the gauze an look 2 long time, and silently ‘rush away lies with my hand The youngster and the reeMfaced git turn aside up bushy ill, I peeringly view them from the top. ‘The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom, T witness the corpse with its dabbled hai, 1 note where the pistol has fallen (Song of Maal section 8) Film narration has another unique quality. The French eric Lucien Seve once said that & film shot offers scarcely more explanations tha realty iGelf, and from this atises its enigmatic power to ‘cling to the surfoce of things’. André Bazin wrote, ‘Cinema is committed to com municate only by way of what i real.’ Even as we wait to be transported chewhere, we are held fascinated by the presonce of what towards us out of the sky. The most familar sights ~a child sleeping, a rman climbing a staircase ~ become mysterious when filmed. The mystery Gerives from our closeness to the event and from the fact that the filmedevent sill retains a multiplicity of posible meainge. What we are being shown has, at ome and th same time, something of the foews, the intentionality, of art, and the unpredictability of reality Scots: ‘se, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors precisely in order Directors lke Satyajit Ray, Rosellni, Bresson, BuSuel, Forma that the people we see on the screen may be searcely more explained than itself: Profesionals, except for the greatest, usualy play not just the necessan ¥ role, but an explanation of the role Films which are null and void are so not because af their trivial stories but because there is nothing elke but story. All the events they show have bieen tailonmade for the story and have no recalcitrant body to the There are no real surfaces to cling to. Paradoxically, the more familiar the event, the more it ean surprise Us The surprise is that of rediscovering the world (a child asleep, a rman, a staircase) after an absence elsewhere. The absence may hve bbeen very brief, but in the sky we lose our sense of time, Nobody has wed this surprise in his films more crucially than Tarkovsky. With him we come back to the world with the love and caring of ghosts who eft it No other narrative art can getas close as the cinema to the variety, the texture, the skin of daily life. But its unfelding, its coming into being, its ‘marriage with the Elsewhere, reminds us of a longing, or a prayer Fellini as ‘ios a ats? A provinelalwho fnuls himset somewnete betwen physeal re ity and a metaphysical one. Before this metaphysical ality we are all of us provincial, Who are the true citzens of transcendence? ‘The Saints. But it’ this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier-countey between the tangible world and the intangible one ~ which is teally Une realm of the artis, Ingmar Bergman says Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience inthe way ‘lm does, and goes direely wo our felings, sleep down inwo the dark rooms of tbe 30 From the heginning the cinema's talent for inventing dreams was seized ‘upon. This faculty of the medinm is why cinema industries have often become dream futries, in the most pejorative sense ofthe term, prod cing soporitics Yer th are dea The Catt sno film that does not partake of dream, And the great films ns which reveal. No two moments of revelation are the sane Russ very different from Pather Pancha, Nevertheless, Fwant to ask the question: What is the longing that film expresses and, at its best, sities? Or, what isthe nature of this filmic revelation? Film stories, as we have seen, inevitably place ws in. an Elsewhere, where we cannot be at home. Onee again the contrast with television is g at home. Its serials and soap revealing, TV focuses on its audience bein operas are all hased on the idea of a home fom ome In the cinema, by contrast, we are travellers, The protagonists are strangers to us. Femay be ard (© believe this, since we often see these strangers at their most intimate moments, and since we may be peofounly moved by thei story Yet no individual character in alm do we fncw— as we know, sa, Julien Sorel, of Macbeth, Natashs Rostova, or Tristram Shandy. We carmot get 'snarrative method means that we can only encounter them, not live with them. We mect ina ky where nobody can stay How then does the cinema overcome this limitation to attain ts spe to know them, for the cies power? It daes sa hy celebrating what we have in common, shat we share The cinema longs to go beyond individuality Think of Citizen Kane, an atch indivcualist, At the beginning of the story he dies, and the film tres to put together the puzzle of who he ally was. Ic urns out that he was multiple. we are eventually moved by him, itis because the fl seveals that somewhere Kane might have been aman like any other. As the Citizen Kane becomes a coitizen with us Im develops, it dissolves his individvaliry The same is not true of the Master Builder in Ibsen's play or Prince Myshkin in Dostocesky’s novel The Hot In Death sn Venice Thomas Mana’s Aschenbach dies discreetly, privates Viscond's Aschenhach dies publily and theatrically, and the difference is not merely the result ‘of Visconti’s choices but of the mediuin’s narrative need, In the written version we follow Aschenhach, who reties ike an animal t die in hiding, In the film version Bogarde comes towards us and dies in closeup. In his death he approaches us When reading a novel, we often identify ourselves with a given character. Tn poetry we identify ourselves with the language ise {Cinema works in yet another way: is alchemy i such that the euaracters come to identify themselves with ws! The only art in which this ean happen. Take the oldkage pensioner, Umberto D., in De Sica's masterpiece. He thas been made snonymnous by age, indifference, poverty, homelessness live For and he wants to kl hae, AC the end of the He has nothing t story. only the thought af whar wil happen to ie log prevents him from, floing so, But by now this nameless man has, for us, came to represent life. Consequently, his dog becomes an obscure hope for the world, As the film unfolds, Umbexto D. begins to abide in us. The biblical ex defines with surprising precision how De Sica’narrative film ~ has to work, Heroes and heroines, defeated or trium pphant, come out of the sky to abide in us, At this moment Elsewhere becomes everywhere, Umberto D. comes to abide in us because the film reminds us ofall he reality that we potentially share with him, anel because it discards the reality which distinguishes him fram us, whiely has Separate and alone. ‘The film shows what happened t0 the ol ‘opposes it. This is why film ~ when it in fife and, im the show achieves at ~ becomes like a human prayer. Si an atempt © redee! The star grtem too, in a paradoxical way, is dependent upon sharing, We know very well that a star is not just the actress or actor. The latter merely serve the star ~ often tragically. The star always has a different uitancously a plea and find mythic name, The sta Js a figure aeeepled by she public as an archetype. This is why the public enjoy and recogniae sar playing reltely edingoec, many diferent voles im eiferent fim The ovevapping ian ackantage, nota hindrance. Each time, the ar pls the roe, pull the character fn the film sor, towars her oF his sich The dificil of labeling she archetypes shor not encourage vs Take Lael and Hardy, They form a couple. Because they do 9, sca afe nga tn Swiatvien of thee le, Tweet hae certain habit gestres which are dinty‘fteminat.So whys it that they donot rege inthe public imagination as homosexal? is became, archetypally, Laurel and Hardy ae kids somewhere between the ages of veven ad eleven, The public agitation perees them a3 id wrechers ofan adsl worid order, And sherefore, gen their arche type age they are not yet sexual beings! I thant thr archetype that dey are nor sexaly abet Finally, ers ren to the fet th ‘one into which we are thrown at birth and which we all share, Painting «film pull us nto the visible world the does not do this: it interrogates the visible. Nor dacs sil photography forall till photographs are about the past. Only movies pull us into the present andl the visible, the visible which surrounds al Film doesn’t have to sy ‘ee’: it ean show a tree. It doesn’t have to escribe a crowd: itean be in one. It doesn't have ta find an adjective for smu: itcan be up tothe wheels in it Itdoesn’t have to analyse a face, it ‘ean approach one, 1 doesn't have to lament, it can show tears, Here is Whitman, prophetically imagining the screen image as it addresses the public er rer Transhicent mould of me it shall be you! Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you! masculine colter it shall be you! Whatever goes to the tilt of me it shall he you! ‘You my rich blood! your mifky steam pale suippings ‘of my fel Breast that presses against other breast it shall he My brain it shall be you conivohuionat Root of wasl'd sweeeflg! timorous poncsnipe! nest ‘of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be yo Mis'd tnsled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be “Trilling sip of maple, Sire of manly wheat, i shall ‘be you Sun so generous it shall be you! Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you! (Sing of Myself, section 24) Most films, of course, do not achiewe universality. Nor can the universal be consciously pursued for such an ambition leads only to pretension bor rhetoric. Ihave been trying o understand the modality of how cnet ‘occasionally hestonesniverslity upon a filmmmaker's work. Ually i ie in response to love or compassion, At such mot something very complicated in a simpler way than any other art can Here are (wo examples. Im Jean Vigo's £Alalane a sailor marries a peasant girl, We see the couple come out of church at the end of a jopless, almost siniste ceremony, with all the men dressed in black, intimidated by the priest, and with old women whispering scandal. Then the sailor takes his wife hhome to his barge on a river. She is swung aboard on a yardarm by the crew, who consist ofa kid and an old mn. The Atalanecasts off ate sails away on its long journey to Paris, Perhaps itis dusk. The brie, sil in white, slowly walks along the length of the barge towards the prow Alone, she is being borne away and she walks solemnly, as ifto anocher altar that is no longer a sinister one. On the banka wornan with a chil sees her passing down the rivers and she crosses herself a8 if she has ust seen avision, And she has, She has seen a that momenta vision of every bride in the world In the Mean Sines of Martin Scorsese, a ging of neighbourhood ‘iendls put up daily, makeshift shelters against dhe Danes, They do this separately and together. The flames are those of hell. The shelters are: wisecracks, shoot outs, whisheys, memories of innocence, a windfall of a hundred bucks, a new shir. New mis cinema does ork Kalian Catholics they know about 48: ree enn een IJesus, but here, on the Lower East Side, there sno redemption; everyone ison the back of everyone, trying not to sink down into the pit. Charlie is though he ean save nobody. Driving away from yet another fight, he ss out loud: 'T know things haven't the only one capable of bullshit pin sgone well tonight, Lord, but I'm trying.” And, in chat instant, which is buried in the shit of Manhattan, he becomes the repentant child in all of us and a soul in Dante’s Hell - Dante, shose vison of the Inferno was modelled after the cities he knew in his tims ‘What is saved in the cinema when it achieves ari is a spontaneay ‘continuity with all of mankind. Iris not an art of the princes er oft bourgeoisie. Tis popular and vagrant in the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs 10 Ui apart from their single Hives. is essential subject ~ in our century of ‘sippearances is the soul w which it offers a global refuge. This, 1 believe, isthe key toils longing and its appeal 1990 That Which Is Held am thinking in froat of G quoiation trom Osip Mandelsta orgione’s Tempe and 1 For Dante time is the content of history felt as a single synchronic act, And inversely the purpose of 10 begin with a history i 1 keep time tngether so that all are brothers in the same quest and conquest of ime COfaN that we have inherited from the nineteenth century, only certain axioms about time have passed largely tnquestioned. The left and right fvohutioniats, physicist. and most revolutionaries all accept ~ at least on 4 historical seale ~ the nineweenth-century view of 2 unilinear and uniform “flow of time Yet the notion of a uniform time within which aff events ean be temporally related depends upon the synthesizing capacity of a mind, “ start a phenomenological problem, We are obliged to begin with a Jaxies and particles in themsehes propose nothing. We face at the Everybody has noticed that, despite clocks and the regular turning the earth, time is experienced as passing at different rates. This ‘im- pression’ is generally dismissed as subjective, because time, according 1 the nineteenth-century view, is objective, incontestable and indifferent, to its indifference there are no limits. ‘Yet perhaps out experience should not be dismissed $0 quickW. Supposing we accept the clocks ime does not low down or accelerate But tine appears to passat cifferent rates because our experience of pasing imoles not a single but fw dynamic processes which are ‘opposed to each other: as accumulation and dissipation, #4 moment, the greater the accurmulation of The deeper the experience of experience, Thisiswhy dhe momentislivedas longer. The disipatio the time-low is checked. The lived dureris nota question of length bat of dlepih or density. Proust is the master who gave this ruth a literary form