THE FUTURE OF CINEMA by Alexandre Astruc translated by Adrian Martin

The only chance any art has of reaching Let’s get back to cinema. Here’s the para- maturity lies in the extent to which it can dox: the art of film is currently the art of become a form of expression. The prob- saying nothing. What it does manage to lem of cinema’s future (we discuss it a say, it says despite itself, to the extent that lot at present) is completely wrapped up it shuts up. It’s no coincidence, to be sure, in this question: will the cinema manage that cinema started as the art of silence. to become the means of expressing abso- This art was born gagged, and it had to be lutely any human thought — or not? Or, taught how to speak, but it never gave a to put it another way: will it be possible blessed thought to opening its mouth. This to one day say on film what others have silence is definitely revealing: but only said, for centuries, on painted canvases from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis or or in the pages of novels? sociology, the domain of which—whatever one’s opinion of German aesthetics—does That is a far cry from the current situa- not coincide with that of art history. Amer- tion of our art. To grasp the full signifi- ican comedy belongs to the 20th century, cance of this question, we must obliter- but in just the same way that the popular ate a great deal from our minds: the fact novel is linked to the 19th: it signifies the that cinema is still, today, merely a spec- era, but does not create it. To put it anoth- tacle and that, apart from some marvel- er way: the 19th century is Stendhal and lous exceptions, its greatest successes Rimbaud, not Eugène Sue. I realise that, in only ever happen on the levels of enter- sociological terms, Sue might be more in- tainment and anecdote. The great names teresting than Balzac. But Sue is complete- of painting or literature do not belong ly defined by his era (he wrote, every day, only to writers or painters, i.e., those by taking down the dictation of what the artisans or technicians able to place a era expected from him), while Mallarmé certain mode of address in the service and his little pieces of paper defined the of a particular sensibility; they belong, era by expressing something essential. above all, to those minds who could in- scribe in their works what we can call a The true authors of films are their pro- metaphysics, belonging just as much to ducers. There are no Collected Works the history of the mind as to a history of Alfred Hitchcock or William Wyler; of forms. Michelangelo was not only a only those of David Selznick and Darryl painter adept at painting bodies in tor- Zanuck. Scripted for mediocre sensibil- ment, and Balzac not solely a builder of ities, it is fundamental that they reflect intrigues, once he had learned his craft only temperaments that are nothing out from Walter Scott. The art of the West of the ordinary. However, the domain of has never been just an art of ideas; its sensibility is clearly not the same as the painters are lyric poets just as its philos- domain of art; at best, there are moments ophers, too, are poets. Pascal is a philos- (such as the Romantic periods) when they opher and Racine a playwright, but they coincide. Of course, Beethoven is “easier say the same thing: that man is nothing to take” than Bach, because Beethoven without grace. Nietzsche proclaimed the shares a common denominator with Ro- death of God, but the cry also belonged, manticism. In cinema, the essential ques- at the close of 19th century, to Balzac the tion for an author is precisely how to dole novelist and Debussy the composer; that out this common denominator: that’s why very same cry, of a universe torn apart all subjects are exactly the same. Imagine by its essential movement, sneaks inside Mallarmé having to disguise himself as the icy rhetoric of Mallarmé, as well as Pierre-Jean de Béranger 01 in order to reas- Paul Cézanne’s apples. sure his public. 46 In cinema, it seems, such disguise is Not only show it all, but express it all. The more and more necessary. Note well the tiny patch of ground that we had allowed fact that, once upon a time, this question it, midway between boulevard theater, was never even posed. Why? Because, the popular novel, and reportage, is now for the first 50 years of its history, the do- exhausted: we cannot kickstart one hun- main of cinema precisely coincided with dred more poetic documentaries on Paris, the reigning sensibility of its time. The surveys of current events, or American themes of silent cinema, for example, are comedies. What’s left to say? Everything. post-war themes (escape, exoticism, bars, Cinema has had its chroniclers and its jazz, childishness, cops, etc). Cinema has photographers, now it awaits its Stend- benefitted, up until now, from a state of hal, its Shakespeare, its Pascal, its Paul innocence: that’s why there have been so Valéry, or its Proust. Yet that’s why we few true cineastes maudits, cursed film- must still carry a mask, because Stendhal makers — Jean Vigo maybe, or today is allowed to hang around for a hundred Erich von Stroheim — whereas in paint- years, but us… ing and poetry… And, likewise, so few strangled, totally misunderstood films. In Lately, cinema has been experiencing a order for cinema to have its “Manet Af- fundamental crisis. Something has died: fair” or its “Baudelaire Scandal,” we had the spectacle-film, a visual narration last- to wait for La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, ing 90 minutes, divided into 20 sequences 1939), whose audience smashed up the and around 600 shots. The cinema which seats, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is busy being born will resemble a book (Robert Bresson, 1945), or The Magnif- far more than a spectacle; its language icent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942). will be that of the essay—poetic, dramat- These works shocked not because they ic, and dialectical all at once. We really were in themselves shocking, but because have to convince ourselves that the cur- they had forgotten to wear their disguise rent conditions governing the exploitation costumes. of cinematic vision are not truly definitive. There is no reason to believe that cinema Renoir, in his creative excitement, as he will always be a spectacle. mowed down rabbits in the clearing of La Règle du jeu, did not realise he had let We cannot yet properly imagine what his “spectacular entrepreneur” mask slip. television will be like, but there is a good He forgot to “make cinema,” and instead chance it will contribute to the creation spoke of what was close to his heart. We of a new cinema addressed, above all, to anticipated La Grande Illusion (1937) as our intelligence. This is why the idea of something that might belong to the “wor- a “Descartes of cinema” is, in itself, not thy film” category; but it immediately so paradoxical, after all.02 If it seems so struck us as something maybe like the today, that’s only because no distributor Liaisons dangereuses of our time, offer- would be insane enough to publicly ex- ing only distant memories of what used to hibit a film which is, on the cinematic be called “cinema.” It was the same story plane, the equivalent to Pascal’s Pensées with Partie de Campagne (1936), which or Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. But Valéry sat in a box for ten years before being has an audience, and it’s large enough that projected. That’s not cinema; it’s an unin- a TV program could be devoted to him terrupted unreeling of celluloid on which several hours a week. something has been caught, impressed — blowing in the wind, like the rifled pages The future of cinema is completely bound of a book. Film is no longer a spectacle; it up in its developmental possibilities as a has become a form of expression. language. The documentary age, when the camera was set up on a street corner And that’s why it needs to disguise it- to record the minor happiness of its im- self: because we have reached the point age-cargo, is well and truly over. Now where cinema is able to say everything. we must speak, and speak in order to say 47 something. Little by little, film replaces Marcel Carné by way of Jacques Feyder, paper or canvas as the privileged material in which the art of film amounts only to where the trace of individual obsessions dramatic staging and the photographic il- are inscribed, where they unfold. The lustration of a narrative, is today giving up filmmaker will come to say “I” just like its final fruits. We cannot watch la Char- the novelist or poet, and sign, in his fe- treuse de Parme (Christian-Jaque, 1947), ver, swaying cathedrals of celluloid, just for instance, without feeling, beyond even as Van Gogh could express himself while any matter of quality, a strange sensation sitting in a chair poised on kitchen tiles. of attending a spectacle from another age, Works will be valuable only to the degree where nothing corresponds to our ideas, that they offer an inner landscape. We ask our preoccupations, our beliefs. the cinema of tomorrow to be the seismo- graph of our hearts, the wayward pendu- This art, which is hardly even a tech- lum inscribing on film the tender dialectic nique, limits itself to animated photogra- of our most cherished ideas. phy: none of the problems intrinsic to cin- ema are raised or resolved at the highest We know the core of the problem is right level; and just where we expect something there. The cinema only has a future if the that could be the equivalent, in filmic lan- camera can manage to replace the pen: guage, of Stendhal’s style, we find only a that’s why I assert that its language is rhetoric of camera movements that, in the neither fiction nor reportage, but the es- best cases, are justified only in light of the say. Once again, it must tear itself away story itself, i.e., to accompany characters from the dictatorship of photography, and or uncover panoramas. Such movements the faithful representation of reality. And never serve to introduce into cinema the finally, it must become a path to the ab- equivalent of literary or pictorial style, stract. i.e., that gap, that imperceptible rift be- tween the work and its author—the means The development of 16 millimeter today, by which the author takes up a position and of television tomorrow, are going to vis-à-vis the work. We can say—to sum- greatly enhance the possibilities for cine- marize a cluster of ideas now familiar to ma expression. Step by step, we will reach a new generation of critics, aestheticians, a state obliterating the clean demarcation and filmmakers—that technique is still, line between amateur and professional at the moment, only a means of very pre- cinema. It is strongly advisable to imag- cisely narrating a mise en scène … which ine that the current crisis of cinema — is the exact opposite to what technique its commercial crisis — will lead to the becomes in our dreams, an incredibly emergence of those marginal works made precise language of camera movements in extraordinary conditions and on un- and expansive shots shaped to correspond expected subjects, works whose creation to the times and modes of words, consti- would have been unthinkable during a tuting a syntax and thus a metaphysics. “normal” period. At the extreme, if the cost of filmmaking continues to drop, we To put it another way, découpage tech- can imagine a situation when all the stu- nique or “shot breakdown” will become dios will close, while streets and private the means of expression for a conception apartments become the battleground for of the world. Formal problems will be of amateurs writing their confessions with a an ontological order. Where Dos Passos 16mm Paillard camera in their parents’s used a simple past tense and Flaubert a dining rooms. past imperfect — because these modes corresponded to their respective concep- I’m hardly exaggerating. An era in cine- tions of time—the filmmaker will take ma history is in the process of dying. The recourse to the arrangement of elements already long tradition of spectacle-cinema in the frame, use (or not) a shot in depth, which, for example in France, runs from mobile framings or a tracking-back. In Jacques de Baroncelli to the heights of cinema, every technical choice relates to a 48 conception of the world, and it is precisely ‘in depth’. All the characters’s entries are in this choice of technique that the entire performed from either under the camera art of cinema lies. or in the deep background of the frame — never simply from the right or left, as in Such is true of every artistic form: the more the two-dimensional technique of Carné evolved it gets, the more individualized or Christian-Jaque. Because Renoir works and meaningful it becomes. This is be- within space, his camera movements do cause, as André Malraux has well shown not divide the scene up in terms of width in his Imaginary Museum, the greatest and height; they turn it around. That’s rigour and most genuine authenticity in why there is an abundance of tracking-in the domain of inspiration correspond shots, reframings through turning move- to the highest specificity in technique.03 ments. Painting becomes more meaningful at the moment that it overcomes everything in it And a comparison is in order here, be- which is not painting. Cézanne said more tween the uses of tracking shots in Renoir than Jean-Louis-Ernest Meisonnier 04 be- and in Carné — a comparison which cause his art was less figurative, and it throws particular light on that famous an- is precisely to the extent that it becomes alytic, descriptive, French style of which more formal that it also becomes more we are, it seems, so proud. Carné only meaningful. Likewise, it isn’t by chance ever uses movement to narrate and delin- that the only specific technique in French eate; he follows, analyzes, draws forward, cinema—Jean Renoir’s technique—can- from frame to frame, the thread of the not be associated with any school, and story that screenwriter Jacques Prévert that it belongs to an author whose works has already constructed. But Renoir pene- carry the largest amount of what we have trates, enters, moves through his universe no words for, thus leading us to that point on a victor’s chariot. He runs, frolics, of appealing to a “vision of the world.” rolls about in the mud, sets himself up There is technique here only because like some old African king in his empire. there is something to reveal. Seizing in his frames the characters that were previously only in his head, he is not I well know that nothing is more suspect content to merely analyze them: rather, he in the cinematic domain than to talk of creates them. He lets the universe speak technique. A phenomenon analogous to by covering it in depth; he directs with a that which Jean Paulhan has denounced snowpiercer, crushing the extras against in the literary world under the name of the sides of his camera, getting right up terror is noticeable here, deriving from an close to Sylvia Bataille as she rolls in the obsession with innocence and a romantic, grass, or (on the contrary) hanging back naïve belief in a sort of primacy of intu- nonchalantly on a street corner, hurling ition over means of expression.05 But the a blanket over the enormous snout of truth is clear: it is in those directors whose the camera, letting the scraps fall where technique is most monstrously clumsy they may, uncorking the big booze bottle, that such bad faith is most evident; this and chucking a napkin around his throat. tendency generally disappears when they Framing in Renoir is a perpetual re-cre- have managed to master technique. The ation. The sheen that results is truly this ease of Renoir, the virtuosity with which mirror in which a world is made to ap- he resolves the most abstract problems, pear; already no longer the type of mirror are, in him, the sign of a pure soul. Tech- that allows us to amble down Stendhal’s nique does not exist in his work, because it road, but a world veritably born in the no longer exists for his work—I mean, as mirror, with the camera mounted atop a a problem or obstacle. From that point, it’s big motorcar, and us not really knowing possible for Renoir to transform technique what is about to appear on the roadside in into a means of expression. If we analyze this reflection: peasants, soldiers, nannies, his films shot by shot, we perceive, for in- or bus drivers—we just don’t know, we’re stance, that his découpage is carried out hurtling, always in motion, and all of it, 49 ultimately, feels as if it has emerged from posers and, of course, actors as well: in the stomach of this Big Daddy Renoir, their hands, the cinema once again be- who one day laid out his bottles so as to comes the work of a single person, a participate more fully in his own, small, strip unfolding the rigorous dialectic of personal universe.06 a succession of images whose theme gets lost and is confused with a perpetual Please forgive this sudden burst of enthu- transformation of forms and actions that siasm for Renoir. A serious magazine arti- are no longer illustration, but creation cle should maintain, from start to end, the itself. Four of five films of today and of same, sober tone. My text, which began yesterday thus prefigure the future era of in speculative mode, has ended up in fra- cinema, and these are the films we have grant lyricism, shaking the tambourines, learned by heart, running them back and firing machine-guns from the page cor- forth through the Moviola so as to grasp ners, bringing in the entire dictionary of their secret. That’s why I find the follow- synonyms regarding the act of digestion, ing anecdote so revealing: this tale of a and successively discharging an unruly boy who didn’t at all like Les Dames du bunch of crude approximations upon this Bois de Boulogne when it was projected trellis of printed lines. But that’s because, on a Saturday afternoon in a theater on in this new cinema which is in the process the Champs-Élysées—but who was as- of being born, our Big Daddy Renoir is tonished, completely fascinated by its something of a prophet. He’s the precur- slow unfolding, once it was unveiled for sor, misunderstood, the monolith, the in- him, and only him, on a tiny screen, like spired one. Alongside Bresson who is the something to be read, no longer just seen; consciousness of this new cinema, Welles only then could he discover this extraordi- its fireworks, and Roberto Rossellini its nary work in its true light.08 cunning, Renoir is the first in a gallery of film auteurs, camera-men, carving out in So this is where we are, what we await, a single frame, from the matter of nature, and what we believe: a camera in the their obsessions—as far removed from right trouser pocket, recording on an documentary realism as from theater, image-sound track the wanderings, the true writers of cinema, filmers,07 sculp- slow or frenetic unfolding of our imagi- tors in glycerine, rhetoricians of cellu- nary universe, confession-cinema, essay, loid, eyes fixed on the prize beyond their revelation, message, psychoanalysis, ob- camera, stealing the faces of their stars, session, the machine that can read the and pointillistically sketching the lines of words and images of our inner landscape, their dreams. No mere hacks, of course, the totality of things, objects, creatures, these film authors mix up the totality of stones, cities, gestures, and cries of the the world’s objects and creatures so as universe brought to the status of materi- to divert them from any natural order al, the art where we paint with agitated and oblige them to become the reference faces and write with the guttural sounds points of the makers’s own, figurative of butchered seals; the pen which pumps universes. Ahead of their time, cinéastes out directly, as part of the same universe, maudits whose works slide off the im- the most formidable vocabulary that any age-rink amid the angry silence of Satur- artist has ever had at his fingertips, the hu- day night crowds, they manage to make man reality which stages the ballets of our films for just a few people, those viewers imagination on the stage of the universe, who have escaped from the general mer- the crushed rocks reconfigured accord- riment, who have passed somehow, for ing to another order, making us like God some unknown reason, right through the since we are remaking, in our own image, celluloid wall of current production. the entirety of creation; the caméra-stylo or camera-pen, this art in which the en- At once directors, screenwriters, produc- tire universe is our material. So you, Holy tion designers, make-up artists—that’s Guardians of Realism, do you really think how it has to be—maybe also music com- that we are going to limit ourselves, in 50 this situation, to rendering a faithful re- ing possession of those domains that, un- flection or an imprint, when all you can til now, were reserved for other forms of offer us here is the sacrifice of mankind’s expression, in order to become the most dream of building, from faces and sighs, total, most exhaustive resource ever of- the cathedrals of our imagination? 09 fered to mankind. The future of cinema, from this day forward, is embroiled in the There’s a time for modesty, but also a time future of art itself. It is, for the 20th centu- for excess. Abel Gance, mocked by a gen- ry, this unique, privileged form, destined eration of derisive critics: we offer to re- to replace all those that preceded it, and habilitate your good name. Cinema today beyond which there will be no other, pos- needs extreme ambitions, waywardness, sible expression any time soon. craziness, idiot dreams, hypertrophy of the brain, wilful pride, exploding skulls, icy debauchery — just as much as it needs This text originally appeared in La Nef, consciousness or reasoned choices. And no. 48, November 1948. In 1992, it was so let’s have done with the contemplation reprinted both in Du stylo à la caméra et of our great forebears, and those bums de la caméra au stylo: Écrits 1942-1984, calmly arranged on the moleskin seats of edited by Claude Gauteur (Paris: L’Édi- film clubs, our night schools. Realise that tions de L’Archipel), and in Trafic, no. 3 something fundamental is in the process (Summer), pp. 151-158. of coming into being: an art is slowly tak-

01— Pierre-Jean de the “museum without 04— Jean-Louis- to be seen, in several 09— Although the Béranger (1780-1857) was walls”) was first pro- Ernest Meisonnier senses, as a “Daddy.” name of André Bazin is a very popular French posed in his The Voices (1815-1891) was a French 07— Coincidentally, mentioned nowhere in poet and songwriter. of Silence (Princeton Classicist painter and and probably without ref- Astruc’s articles of 1948, 02—Astruc is here University Press, 1978, sculptor famed for his erence to Astruc’s formu- this dismissal of the idea alluding to his own dis- first published in English depiction of military lation here, Jonas Mekas of cinematic realism as cussion in his earlier in 1953, and in French in scenes. has always defined him- a “faithful reflection or essay of 1948, “The Birth 1947), then elaborated in 05— See Jean self as “not a filmmaker, imprint” of the world is of a New Avant-Garde: his three-volume series Paulhan, trans. Michael but a filmer.” As well, Le probably intended as an La Caméra-Stylo,” of the Le Musée imaginaire de Syrotinski, The Flowers Filmeur (2005) is the title allusive rejoinder to his “Descartes of today.” la sculpture mondiale of Tarbes, or Terror in of a “personal diary” writings. See Bazin, What See The French New (“the imaginary museum Literature (University of video/film work by Alain is Cinema? (Montreal: Wave: Critical Landmarks, of world sculpture”) Illinois Press, 2006). Cavalier. Caboose, 2009). edited by Peter Graham between 1952 and 1954. 06— Normally, refer- 08— We can assume 10— Abel Gance and Ginette Vincendeau The strong pictorial and ences to “Père Renoir” that Astruc is speak- (1889-1981), director of (London: British Film design element of this (whatever the language) ing autobiographically many remarkable and Institute, 2009), p. 33. book series wielded a are to Jean’s father, the here, about first seeing innovative films, is best 03— André Malraux’s strong influence over painter Pierre-Auguste Bresson’s film as a teen- remembered today for concept of the “imag- Jean-Luc Godard’s TV Renoir. In this context, ager, and later studying it his epic Napoléon (1927). inary museum” (often series Histoire(s) du however, Astruc clearly on the “tiny screen” of a referred to in English as cinéma (1988-1998). intends the filmmaker Moviola editing machine. 51