- Daniel Pomereulle, Serge Bard, Patrick Deval, Philippe Garrel
The height of perception of a film must necessarily be considered a mental springboard itself capable, by virtue of the force of its trajectory, of calling into question the only thing that’s worthwhile, namely a radical change in the dialogic angle of vision. The time has come when a film is no longer only seen and looked at through the work of dissecting its detail, but rather in the grasping of its entirety. The man who, today, fails to gather the projection of fragments of a filmic idea dispersed in all possible horizons, is and will remain a spectator definitively stuck in his armchair, a marginal figure forever separated from the action of this comprehension.
The ease of multiple positions that consist of believing, on the part of the “director”, the “spectators”, the “actor”, that they are maneuvering to the building of a cathedral of thought in the most industrious way possible, that the main idea only takes shape with the accumulation of enrichment, can only contribute to a coopting confusionism.
The impact truly comes alive when, surpassing these considerations of a fictional order, it precisely allows one to escape from these schemas that some very thick idiots continue to call the honor or joy of writing, the fantastic praise of the actor, or the easy reception produced on an audience, without realizing in the slightest that, generally, the invented product is of the same height as the consumed product. The systems of confusion are only equalled by the system of the individual.
The violence of cinema lies mainly in the fact that it evades any attempt at sharing. If judgment continues to function in this way, it’s because it is still in its umbilical state, a state which, above all, allows the service dogs to continue to affirm all sorts of reassuring things in the face of the immense fear glimpsed in a world into which they do not dare to advance.
Daniel Pomereulle
Violence in cinema can only be the restitution of the total desert that underlies the irreconcilable relationship of the spectator to the screen. The mental field of this relationship only takes on meaning and strength within a movement of fissuring escalation. Here, the mise en scène must be brought into the cinema hall1. The field of definition of this violence must be the difference. It is necessary to burn all the bridges, to transform the seizure of identification into a seizure of aggression, which must make each film a question mark to which the thought of the spectator will be, depending on the case, the only answer or the absence of an answer. In short, this simply means war.
Serge Bard
Cinema—all is betrayed. The history of the earth begins with the words: “It is done”. The history of cinema has deprived us of destiny. Here lies pride. Humanity doesn’t even exist yet. The horrific novelty is revealed to us: the fictional worlds of religions are collapsing. The infamous deception of words collapses. The film strip, a mental fabric, liberates the space it creates.
Cinema makes the world unbearable. It cannot bear the beatification of poetry, it demands its reality.
To see everything in everything: the language of cinema is subsequent to the ancient distinction between speech and silence. Let us consider the first poems of the Swabian poet Hölderlin, let us consider the last unallusive poems of the poet, a mask of cold butter on his face: spring, summer, winter, autumn. Naked, shaven, risible, nothing.
Tracking out over the dying world, the French leaders come out from their corpse, twirling around thick and sharp.
Patrick Deval
The film strip is the material reflecting mental images, which must tend towards abstraction: abstraction of signs (the puzzle) as well as subject matter (the whole), according to the coincidence of the formulated and the formulating = to be received by the spectator beyond understanding, and symmetrically, for the author, shot beyond understanding.
Cinema, if emptied of all anecdotal and psychological dramaturgy (the degree of the film’s perfectability), can account for a rise under perpetual aggression, past the stage of speech to the confines of anguish and reflexive irony. The revelation that strikes the author after the eruption of the need for expression in meditation, leaves him capable of shooting only in a state of waking somnambulism.
The cinema makes use of the same codification as dreams, so it can be received by all since everyone dreams in their own way. Thus collapses the concept of esotericism.
The film cannot be evaluated according to spatio-temporal criteria since any distance from its reception, as well as its conception, is excluded. The new criterion that then appears for judging the film is that of transparency. The spectator is assimilated in one way or another by the author who leads him into a waking dream surpassing individual biographical traumas to clarify his condition. Identification ceasing at the same time as the projection ceases, the spectator, emerging from the illusion, is obliged to redefine himself. Modifications in behavior may or may not follow, like at the exiting of a dream. Which reminds us that thought is axial, contagious and evolutionary. According to this ideal, cinema constitutes a new mode of communication through the violation of personality—the most developed of one-way communications. So be it.
Philippe Garrel