Untitled - Monoskop

M ontparnasse-Levallois
I got on very well with Maysles because he is a painter in his way of
seeing. Wherever I would have moved the camera, he moved it. Afterwards
he told me that when he wanted movement within the frame, the actors
moved. One day I shall make a longer film with him where the whole thing
will be organized along these lines. Maysles will have a vague idea of the
story ; I will rehearse movements and actions with the actors. Then, at a set
time, someone will come out of Claridges and walk up the Champs-Elysees
or go to the Latin Quarter. Maysles will be there. He knows what he can leave
out and what he mustn't on any account miss. If there's an assassination, he
must start filming just when the assassination starts. It's a ceremony I am
premeditating.
108: Pierrot my friend
You say, 'Let's talk about Pierrot.' I say, 'What is there to say about it?'
You say, 'All right, let's talk about something else and we will inevitably
get back to it, like McArthur and the bad penny, for revenge and because
it's normal.' But while waiting to dot the i's on some poem of Rimbaud,
for isn't criticism quite simply or quite frankly, one or the other, a matter
of understanding the poetic structure of a film, a thought that is, of managing
to define that thought as an object, of seeing whether or not that object is
living, and of eliminating the dead ; while waiting, as I say, to discover what
i's and what dots, like aircraft waiting to take off, better at the moment,
rather than answers and questions, rivers of feelings promptly losing themselves
in the sea of thoughts or vice versa, better to dissolve, dissolve, dissolve
till one is out of breath as Franc;ois1 sometimes does, and he alone,
because no one else knows how, or else it's the fashion, yes, better to drift
into digressions so as to sew up again, with films as needle, the scattered
pieces of our great white canvas, the one which is patched each year, today,
this morning, as work begins, so we finally end by not knowing it is virgin,
still virgin, like negative stock whether it be called Dupont, Ilford or Kodak,
still in one piece too, and which one only has to blow on vigorously to
stretch, that is to say to set those who have lost their way sailing in the right
direction, whatever the name of the prompter may be, Skolimowski, Hitchcock,
Langlois. Yes, dissolve, magnetic montage of ideas, without points of
suspension, this is neither a thriller nor Celine, let's leave him to literature,
he well deserves it, suffering and piling book upon book amid the regiments
of language, we, with the cinema, are something else, life first of all, which
isn't new, but difficult to speak of, one can barely live it and die, but speak of
it, well, there are books, but in the cinema, we have no books, we have only
music and painting, and even those, as you know, can be lived but rarely
spoken. So, Pierrot, maybe you understand a little why what to say about it?
Because life is its subject, with scope and colour as its attnbutes, for I have
big ideas. Life, I should say a start to life, rather as the story of Euclid's
parallels is a start to geometry. There have been other lives, and there will
be more, just think of the blossoms broken, the lion hunt with bow and
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