Untitled - Monoskop

Franfois Reichenbach
Reichenbach : Two cameras equipped for Dyaliscope. We shall be shooting in,
Eastman Colour. Marcel Grignon will have an assistant, so will I. And two,
station-wagons.
Godtlrd: Is that all?
Reichenbach : I was forgetting the little portable Nagra6 for recording sound'
direct. This is very important, especially in America. Actually, I believe onci
could make a film about America without pictures. Just the soundtrack wo�
be enough. Of course there is noise in Paris. But compared to New Yor�l
Los Angeles or Chicago, it's like birds twittering. Once I was in 78th Street.\
Suddenly sirens began screaming so loudly in the district that I thought w�
had broken out again: it was a cleaner being taken to hospital. A
everything is like that, even the meanest aspect of everyday life. It is bo
terrifying and fantastic. I don't think it exists anywhere else to such a degr
It is this fantastic aspect - used in the German Romantic sense - that I wa
to capture.
In a fortnight I shall make a start by filming the huge Baby Parade whi
takes place every year in New Jersey. At least two thousand twins get t
gether in this picnic decor, a little like Joshua Logan's film. It's a hallucinati
sight. Next, I shall go to see the race organized by Ford for kids with min·
ture cars. I shall also go to the under-eight-year-old boxing-matches. I sh
go everywhere - on millionaire beaches, among the last Indians, to tat
strip-tease shows.
Godard: So it will be a sort of dissertation on America?
Reichenbach : Perhaps. I also want to film the rodeos for prisoners in
death cell. I want to reveal the unusual in the banal and vice versa. A wom
in a kitchen is nothing special. But a woman who cooks a meal, eats it an
washes up in five minutes is amusing, its poetic. And in America, that'
what poetry is. They say exactly the opposite to us: I am, therefore I thin
Everything is action. Living is all in top gear. You may say it's the poetry 0
snack-bars and plastics, but it's poetry just the same.
The interesting thing in documentary, you know, is not picturesqueness 0
strangeness. Not primarily, anyway. The thing of prime interest is actualityJ
reality. The amusing thing about travel is discovering things you know in •
different form, in a different decor. I loathe exoticism. It's pernicious. When 1
go to San Francisco, what I like doing is having a beer and playing the pinball
machines as if I were on the Champs-Elysees; looking at people's faces
as I look at them in France; feeling that I'm a man and not a tourist. Why is it
that when film-makers go abroad to make films the results are almost always
bad? Because the film-makers no longer behave like normal people. I had a
friend like this. His father paid for him to travel a lot and was scandalized
when, in Madrid for instance, instead of making hot-foot for the Prado, my
friend bought a newspaper and went to sit on a cafe terrace. I approve of that
- and it's the sort of outlook one needs to make a film about America.
It is inasmuch as people are prosaic that they are poetic. But I see I am
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