GERMAINE DULAC

GERMAINE DULAC

WRITINGS ON CINEMA
(1919-1937)

Texts collected and presented by Prosper Hillairet

With a foreword by Tami M. Williams

English translation by Scott Hammen

Classiques de l’Avant-Garde
Paris Expérimental
2018
 Copyright

In 1990 Christian Lebrat founded the series, Classiques de

l’Avant-Garde, that publishes pioneering works by some of the most
influential artists and filmmakers of the 20th century.

English translation from Germaine Dulac. Ecrits sur le cinéma

(1919-1937)
© 1994 Paris Expérimental – printed version, out of print
© 2018 Paris Expérimental – e-book version
ISBN : 978-2-912539-56-4
All rights reserved
Germaine Dulac
(BIFI – Coll. Cinémathèque française / FEMIS)
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword : DULAC’S ÉCRITS by Tami M. Williams

Preface 2018: GERMAINE DULAC, A MODERN FILMMAKER by Prosper Hillairet

Preface 1994: FOR AN UNBOUND CINEMA by Prosper Hillairet

1919 :
LET US HAVE FAITH

1921 :
AT D. W. GRIFFITH'S

1922 :
THE CREATION OF A CINEMATIC VOCABULARY

1923 :
G. DULAC INTERVIEW WITH P. DESCLAUX
1924 :
THE EXPRESSIVE PROCESS OF CINEMATOGRAPHY
HOW I BECAME A FILM "DIRECTOR"
IMAGES AND RHYTHMS
MOTION AS CREATOR OF ACTION

1925 :
CINEMA, AN ART OF SPIRITUAL NUANCE
THE TRUE SPIRIT OF THE SEVENTH ART
DEFENCE AND ATTACK OF CINEMA
ABOUT ÂME D'ARTISTE: MME GERMAINE DULAC'S IDEAS
APHORISMS
THE ESSENCE OF CINEMA - THE VISUAL IDEA

1926 :
EVERY FILM IS LINKED TO AN AESTHETIC
CONCESSIONS
DIFFICULTIES
SOME REFLECTIONS ON "PURE CINEMA"
FRENCH CINEMA AS SEEN BY MME GERMAINE DULAC
PHOTOGRAPHY – CINEMATOGRAPHY
1927 :
THE FUTURE OF CINEMA: AN INTERVIEW
WITH GERMAINE DULAC
ON RUSSIAN FILMS
FROM A SENTIMENT TO A LINE
CONVERSATION
LET US UNITE
WITH MME GERMAINE DULAC
VISUALIZATION
ESTHETICS, OBSTACLES

1928 :

MUSIC OF SILENCE
THREE ENCOUNTERS WITH LOIE FULLER
RHYTHM AND TECHNIQUE
OUR INQUIRIES INTO "TALKING FILM"
VISUAL AND ANTI-VISUAL FILMS
TALKING FILM… COLOR FILM
SOME REFLECTIONS ON QUOTAS
ARE YOU AFRAID OF CINEMA?

1929 :
PROPORTIONS
PLAYING WITH NOISES
NOTES OF GERMAINE DULAC

1930 :
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF COLOR FILM?
THE PUBLIC'S RESPONSIBILITY
GERMAINE DULAC AND THE CINEMA TODAY

1931 :
THE NEW EVOLUTION
THE NECESSARY EVOLUTION
WITHIN ITS VISUAL FRAME CINEMA HAS NO LIMITS
THE SUCCESS OF A FILM?
OUR GOODWILL IS EXTENDED TO THE TRIUMPH OF AN IDEA
INDEPENDANCE
THE ACTION OF THE CINEMATIC AVANT-GARDE
THE MEANING OF CINEMA

1932 :
WHAT IS CINEMA?
 AVANT-GARDE CINEMA

1933 :
FOR OR AGAINST FILM CENSORSHIP?
THE DIFFICULTIES OF CINEMATIC JOURNALISM
ON THE UTILITY OF FILM SCHOOLS

1934 :
NEWSREELS
NEWSREELS ARE NOT ALWAYS WHAT THEY SHOULD BE
THE SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGE OF
NEWSREELS

1936 :
THE NEW DRAMATIC ART OF COLOR
LET US UNITE
AN OPINION FROM GERMAINE DULAC
REFLECTIONS ON THE CINEMA NEWSREEL

1937 :
THE WORK OF CINEMA IS FINISHED WHEN THE SHOW
BEGINS

INDEX

NOTES

BIOGRAPHIES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

COLOPHON
 Dulac’s Écrits
(Foreword)

Germaine Dulac’s Écrits sur le cinéma (1919-1937) constituted one of my first points of
entry into the exciting world of this inimitable cineaste, whose extensive accomplishments
remained largely obscured.[1] In the summer of 1996 in Paris, despite a lackluster 16mm
screening of her 1923 feminist classic, La Souriante Madame Beudet, a few of Dulac’s
articles on educational film and the newsreel as pure cinema (1932-34) piqued my curiosity.

One sunny August afternoon, the Dulac Archive not yet available, I stumbled upon a
little bookstore, Ciné Reflet, tucked away on rue Champollion, near the Sorbonne. Little did I
know how much the little red book that I was about to discover would impact and transform
my world!

After the steadfast cinephile and celebrated bookstore owner, Frédéric Damien, told me
of the recently published Dulac’s Écrits, and promised to send a copy to me in California, I
began a long journey into the world of Germaine Dulac. Within a year of this transatlantic
expedition, I made the first of many trips back to Paris to meet lifelong friends, Paris
Expérimental editor, Christian Lebrat, and Université de Paris VIII instructor, Prosper
Hillairet. I already felt I knew them well.

In 1997, the Dulac archive was made available at the Bibliothèque du film, 100, rue du
Faubourg Saint Antoine, where Dulac had first screened her film Le Cinéma au Service de
l’Histoire (1935), just over sixty years prior. Thanks to that little red book, my long sojourn
through the Dulac archives had begun, and it would become my second home until 2003,
and a meeting place for Dulac Studies for many years to come!

In 2002, I was invited to present Dulac’s films at the first Dulac Workshop and
Retrospectives in Frankfurt with Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramann, and in 2003 at
the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley by Irina Leimbacher, while I organized the 2005 Dulac
Retrospective and Conference in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay, each uniting many
international scholars around Dulac’s work. (These were followed by a series of ongoing
smaller and mid-sized retrospectives organized by myself and others in Bologna, Athens,
Ljubjiana, Vienna, Washington D.C., New York, L.A., and elsewhere.)

During this period, we have seen a flurry of activities and publications on Dulac’s
oeuvre in Europe, North America, and in a few other non-western cities (Istanbul), with
recent retrospectives at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (New York) and the UCLA
Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) in 2018. The Frankfurt workshop (2002) and the
conference I organized with Laurent Véray at Université de Paris XII-Nanterre (2005) gave
way to an early issue of Kinothek (2002) and my edited collection, Germaine Dulac: Au delà
des impressions (AFRHC/Cineteca Bologna, 2006), respectively, before my own thesis
(UCLA Ph.D., 2007), and monograph Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (University
of Illinois Press, 2014). Numerous other articles have appeared in Europe and North
America by Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Thomas Gunning, Charles Musser, myself and others.

None of this work would have been possible without Dulac’s Écrits sur le cinéma. This
book has helped open up a vast landscape for exploration, offering a unique vantage point
on interwar France, a rich period marked by extensive transformation and innovation in
many arenas. Dulac’s writings offer insights into the birth of an art cinema and ongoing
struggles against the constraints of an apprehensive industry, the largely ignored and often
obscured role of women in the early film industry, the development of early French theories
of film aesthetics, early approaches to intermediality, the emergence of diverse avant-garde
and experimental film tendencies, the concomitance of abstract filmmaking, film
professions, questions around sound, color, and 3D, the symbolist expression of anti-
institutional, gendered, and queer approaches, the emergence of specialized movie
theaters, international film markets, and film schools, the development of international visual
literacy and educational film movements, questions of finance and censorship, the
negotiations of film unions and syndicalism, international newsreel production… the list is
long.

In 2018, just over two decades after its first edition, Germaine Dulac. Writings on
cinema (1919-1937) constitutes now more than ever an essential reference for Dulac’s
writings. It offers a roadmap to Dulac’s interwar film career, her major cinematic
preoccupations, and eye-opening inroads into what will become some of the most essential
debates of French commercial and avant-garde cinema during the interwar years: from
cinematic impressionism and surrealism to abstraction, social realism and a proto-direct
cinema, still at the heart of aesthetic realist and formalist debates today, from slow cinema,
and new silent cinema to global cinema networks.

Tami M. Williams
 GERMAINE DULAC, a modern filmmaker
(Preface 2018)

DULAC REBORN

In the early 1990s, when we were considering with Christian

Lebrat to publish Germaine Dulac’s texts, almost total silence, at
least in France, surrounded her filmic and theoretical work.
At best there was silence, indifference, ignorance, if not outright
attacks, contempt, insults. The attacks were directed more against
the filmmaker than the theoretician, who was known even less. She
remained the filmmaker who had betrayed Artaud, the filmmaker
who had betrayed the poet. This “betrayal” concerns Dulac’s film La
Coquille et le Clergyman (1927-1928), based on a scenario by
Antonin Artaud, and the ensuing dispute between the filmmaker and
the poet. Ado Kyrou sets the tone in his book Le Surréalisme au
cinéma,[2] (Surrealism in film) where he feels that Germaine Dulac
“betrayed the spirit of Artaud, by making this into a feminine film”.[3]
He continues with an account of the premiere of the film at the
Studio des Ursulines on February 9, 1928, where the Surrealists
came with the intent of carrying out a coup and preventing the
screening of the film, even picking up an insult that one of the
participants in the uproar had launched: Mme Dulac “c’est une
vache” (she’s a cow).[4]

While doing research for this book, I encountered inquisitive

glances, amused expressions, discreetly mocking laughter on
several occasions. All this said much about the lack of interest in this
filmmaker, her films, her ideas about the cinema. However, it was not
only Germaine Dulac who suffered from this lack of interest at that
time but, more broadly, French cinema in the 1920s, films and
theories, and the so-called impressionist school of Gance, L’Herbier,
Epstein… not to mention the even more formal and radical
filmmakers like Henri Chomette.[5]
This is not to say that there was nothing. Some were searching
and clearing the terrain and producing pioneering work.
In 1968, a monograph by Charles Ford appeared in L’Anthologie
du Cinéma,[6] an important landmark for studies on Dulac and a rare
reference available at that time. As the text proposed a biographical,
filmic as well as theoretical approach, it provided a complete,
composite and condensed picture of Dulac’s personality, films and
ideas.[7]
But before and after there was very little. Charles Ford drew up a
bibliography that was inevitably short, listing his Histoire du cinéma,
as well as similar works by Sadoul and Bardèche-Brasillach, where
the names of Georges Charensol and Henri Fescourt are cited.[8]
It was not until 1990 (and on the other side of the Atlantic) that a
new and important text was to appear. That year, Sandy Flitterman-
Lewis published in the United States a book on three eminent female
figures of the French cinema: Marie Epstein, Agnès Varda et
Germaine Dulac.[9] The particular novelty of this study and the
importance of its contribution is that the author approaches the
biographical dimension, film analyses and cinematographic theories
from the perspective of feminist studies. This book had an important
impact and encouraged more studies in this field.
The publication in 1994 of Germaine Dulac’s Écrits sur le cinema
(1919-1937)[1] was thus part of a secret, discontinuous development,
which today takes on its full meaning.[11] Several articles were
devoted to this book, notably by Alain Virmaux and Pascal Auger; it
seems to me that the latter also had the idea of publishing Dulac’s
texts. Even the newspaper Libération briefly announced its
publication.[12]
There was now a tool for better understanding Germaine Dulac’s
ideas, and to refer to them well informed. At the same time, a
renewed interest in the “1920s” was manifest during the decade
1990-2000. New research on Dulac appeared,[13] which crystallized
at a colloquium held in June 2005 that was initiated by the Scottish-
American scholar Tami M. Williams and which brought together the
world of Dulac research.[14] This colloquium was accompanied by a
retrospective at the Musée d'Orsay, which made it possible to
discover all of Dulac's oeuvre and to rethink her films in relation to
those of other filmmakers of her generation. A publication of the
conference’s contributions then followed.[15] All these events –
colloquium, retrospective, publication – were a milestone, an
important moment for studies on Dulac, and beyond.[16]

This Dulac moment has lasted, in large part due to her most
notorious film – La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the
Clergyman) – for which she is also so negatively known. In
particular should be mentioned here the new edition of Alain
Virmaux’s book on the Dulac-Artaud quarrel which accompanies, in a
box set, the DVD of the film[17] (co-produced by Light Cone-Paris
Expérimental, 2009). As was the case for the colloquium and the
retrospective, this was well received by critics in the media.[18] And
the box set received an award at the Film Festival of Bologna in
2010 for its bonus features.[19]

So, from 2005 to 2010, Dulac enjoyed a visibility that was much
like what she had known during her lifetime when, if not famous, she
was at least a prominent figure through her actions, her films, her
views, and often solicited by the media for questions concerning the
cinema but also other issues. During this more recent period, she is
quoted and her films are shown, there are lectures about her,[20] and
ciné-concerts (in particular for La Coquille et le Clergyman, which
inspired musicians a great deal), attesting to a real and growing
intérêt Dulac.[21] We are far from the kind of contempt that Ado Kyrou
manifested, even though there is still, although less often, rejection,
ignorance, incomprehension.[22]

More recently, in 2014, Tami M. Williams’ important book,

Germaine Dulac. A Cinema of Sensations, appeared.[23] In keeping
with Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Williams develops an overall study,
based on archives and in a historical perspective, of all aspects of
the filmmaker: biography, films, theories, feminist and political
commitments. Tami M. Williams and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis and
others show, through their sustained work, Dulac's continued
presence in the United States, particularly in universities.

FIRST EDITION

It is 1994, and Dulac’s Écrits sur le cinéma (1919-1937) have

been published. When I accepted Christian Lebrat’s proposal to
collect and present Dulac’s texts on cinema I did not know that I was
embarking on a venture that would engage me for the rest of my life.
There were years – how many? – spent first of all at the Bibliothèque
de l'Arsenal to search the famous Fonds Rondel, even before there
was the Dulac book project; then at the Bibliothèque de la
Cinémathèque, where I haunted the different locations (with as many
different names): Palais de Chaillot, Avenue Kléber (where I spent
long moments alone with Valdo Kneubuhler, who provided me with
invaluable support during this whole undertaking); then Faubourg
Saint-Antoine (the Cinémathèque moved to the Bercy site after the
book was published). This is an opportunity to thank all the archivists
who had supported and guided me, and given me access to all the
documents, and in particular (besides Valdo), Nadine Teneze and
Frédéric Dumas, who had devoted his life to Dulac.[24]

All those who have immersed themselves in an archival collection

have felt the apprehension of the immensity of the task. Will we ever
manage to go through all the documents? But there is also passion,
sometimes pushing us to the point of confinement where, inhabiting
a world of paper, articles, letters, manuscripts, photos... we have the
sensation of reviving these solely by our gaze, our reading. This is
where we live and get lost. A journey without end.

And the Fonds Dulac is one of those continents of paper. I often

got lost there (I have not acquired the technique of the archivist), I
insisted, never let go and accumulated a mass of notes, references,
facts. And, of course, I was very quickly confronted with Germaine
Dulac’s life in all its dimensions. The filmmaker, theorist, critic,
lecturer, feminist and political activist, at the head of so many
associations and trade unions, which she often had launched
herself.[25] Against its will, Paris Expérimental could not support a
“complete” edition of Dulac, which would at any rate have been
impossible in her case. And this task, which had already been going
on for years, could drag on forever. We had to choose. There were
already the Écrits sur le cinéma of Jean Epstein, and those of Louis
Delluc, now there should be the “Écrits sur le cinéma de Germaine
Dulac”. By tropism and to fill a gap, this was Christian Lebrat’s and
my final choice. No doubt limited, even unfair, but this was intended
to be a first step. While it cannot be said that the book was at the
origin of all the activity and attention devoted to Dulac that I
mentioned earlier, it has made a significant contribution in that it has
given researchers access to selected texts they need for continuing
their work.

Germaine Dulac the theoretician, yes, but what about Dulac the
film critic?[26] Dulac, the tireless feminist activist? Sandy Flitterman-
Lewis and Tami M. Williams have helped to make Dulac’s fight for
women known, but someday Dulac's articles, conferences and
lectures, and all sorts of other different activities should be
published. Here, too, there is urgency.[27]

Germaine Dulac the theoretician, yes, but even this Dulac takes
on many forms, considering the number of articles she published
and lectures she gave.[28] All this had to be sorted out, especially
since Dulac had no qualms about repeating herself. She had some
main ideas that she took up wherever possible, even in places far
removed from the world of cinema, in order to relentlessly pursue her
defense of film. With so much interlacing of repetitive text, assembly,
collage and cut-and-paste, your head begins to spin (Dulac the
hypertext adept). You start reading an article or a lecture, whose
view seems original to you when, all of a sudden, a familiar tune fills
the air and you ask yourself, where have I already read this? And so
it’s back to shuffling through the mass of texts once again to locate
the source which, no doubt, is a copy of another text… and so it
goes, yes, without end.[29]

A NEW EDITION, DULAC ONLINE

With the book out of print and the attempt to publish a new
edition in 2011-2012 unsuccessful, how could we make her texts
accessible again? Reprint the paper edition? It was clear to us that
an electronic edition, published online, was the solution. At present,
this is the only means for reaching the greatest number of people.
And we are proud to publish Dulac online. If she were living today,
she would obviously still be at the forefront of technology, new art
forms, new means of expression. She would have formulated
theories, produced images and conceived of these new technologies
– video, digital, internet – as extensions of the cinema; or, on the
contrary, she would have applauded their great specificity, wondering
what these technologies have that is so particular and sets them
apart, what constitutes their proper strengths. She would have
rejoiced at hypertexts, hyperlinks. Dulac online is self-evident.

For all the reasons mentioned above, we therefore decided to

republish the 1994 edition online as is – with its choices and its
shortcomings[30] – but also with the aim of making reading her texts
more accessible, inciting once again readers to take these texts
further, as far as possible.

This preface has retraced the growing interest in Dulac over the
past few decades. And today? It is still there.[31] There is also greater
interest in historical avant-gardes even though, as we have said,
technologies have changed, but the determination and the desire for
art that is unrestricted, creative, inventive and free of commercial
priorities and conformism, is still very much present and alive.

I often meet students, young film- and video makers, who are
inspired by these avant-gardes, wishing to renew them, and seeking
new art forms. This new edition is for them, and for all those who
want to experience what Germaine Dulac called “Matière-Vie” (Life-
Matter).

Prosper HILLAIRET
April 2018
 FOR AN UNBOUND CINEMA
(PREFACE 1994)

The two principal paths on which the cinema has embarked since
its inception have been to reveal the world and to tell stories. This
has been its fate. It could have been otherwise. And in fact for the
artists and theoreticians that history has grouped under the name of
the avant-garde, it has been otherwise.

AN OBSERVABLE FACT

By her writing and certain of her films, Germaine Dulac was one
of those who enabled these other forms of cinema to exist.
But everything begins with an observable fact. For the most part,
cinema can be summed up by these two dimensions:
documentaries/newsreels and narrative films mostly adapted from
novels and theater plays. These two categories restrict the cinema,
according to Dulac, to either an utilitarian function or to one of
popularization: discover the world through moving images or use
them to visualize a novel or a drama. These are cinema's uses.
These two dimensions, as we shall see shortly, are not on the same
level and have not had the same fate. If cinema has partly lost its
documentary function – today we see the world and observe its
events on television – the narrative dimension has prevailed. Is it
necessary to point out how pertinent this observation is today? What
is labelled, produced, and studied under the name of cinema is
narrative cinema. Dulac was not thinking of a specific genre of
narrative but, more fundamentally, of the nature of cinema =
narration; her goal was always to break this down in order to open
cinema to other possibilities.
A double question arises from this observable fact. Is this
cinema? Is this what it was invented for? To just copy novels or
theater. These questions, which are the starting point for any avant-
garde actions concerning cinema, lead Dulac to two other
fundamental questions which she was among the first to ask: What
is cinema? What are its possibilities?

THE ARTS VERSUS THE CINEMA[32]

The cinema is not a copy of the novel, it is not the copy of other
art forms. It owes nothing to the other arts. "The cinema is not the art
of the painter, of the architect, of the writer, of the actor."[33] On this
point Dulac seems to oppose Canudo’s "Manifesto of 7 Arts"[34]
where the cinema is defined as the synthesis of the arts of space
(architecture, painting, sculpture) and the arts of time (music, poetry,
dance). But both have the objective of establishing the specificity of
cinema. For Canudo its singularity is that it is All of the arts,[35] while
for Dulac its identity should not be sought from among existing art
forms. Cinema is not made from any element of other art forms,[36] it
is not the "reflection of earlier art forms."[37] That is where the
mistake occured, it was not understood at its invention that it
represented a new form of expression, it was made into an
application of literature and theater, reproducing "slavishly the form
of our old thinking,"[38] without trying to determine if an "unknown
metal" had slipped in to make it rumble with some "new forces.”[39]
So cinema should not be judged by the way it had been used but "by
itself and for itself,”[40] it should be rediscovered according to the
principle which presided over its birth.[41]

AN HISTORICAL-TECHNICAL APPROACH

To understand the nature of cinema, Dulac reached back to its

invention by the Lumière brothers and asked the question: why was
it invented? "From its beginning, the cinema was a purely
mechanical invention, recording, thanks to photography,
manifestations of motion in external life: waves, passing trains,
fountains"[42] Therein lies the answer, it was there, obvious to all,
from the very beginning: the cinema is a tool to analyze and
reproduce motion, the motions of the world. It is a scientific tool for
knowledge of the world.
Motion, this is what cinema captures and reveals, the new force
which it hides and Dulac singles out. Motion, the very essence of
cinema. "Motion" will be the key word in her thought, as it will also be
for the whole cinematic avant-garde of the 1920s.[43]

MOTION

The cinema is the art of motion. We should stop and take a

closer look at what is involved in such a definition. Beyond its
obviousness, which can quickly be forgotten, every question about
cinema can be found wrapped up in this. Everything depends on
where we start and for Dulac it is necessary to go back to the
invention of cinema to reaffirm the motion at its source.
Others will embrace the documentary dimension (knowledge of
the world) or above all the narrative dimension (little stories). The
filmmaker Peter Kubelka, recognizing that it was indeed to reproduce
motion that cinema was invented, will find in it another dimension,
which he will also present as a force, "articulation between frames,"
and he will assert that cinema is not motion. Depending on which
axiom is put forth, the concept of cinema and the films made
accordingly will be of different natures.
Cinema is the art of motion. With this as her starting point, Dulac
will define a vision of the world where all is motion: the body,
thought, writing, image. "We are carried away by motion both
physically and spiritually and it is this wild race, of our souls, of our
bodies, of the world we live in, that forms the true essence of
cinematic thought."[44] Motion is what cinema captures and reveals
of the world and it is the very essence of cinema, its form and its
substance. Dulac insists on this last point: motion is the very
essence of cinema, as color is to painting, as sound is to music.[45]

CINEGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAPHY
 The material essence of cinema, according to Dulac, contains
another element: light. Motion of light is the quintessence of cinema;
she emphasizes this point,[46] light, like every other element, cannot
be conceived in cinema in relation to motion: "Cinema is not the art
of catching beautiful lighting effects, interesting expressions, but the
art of exploring emotional motion." Which brings her to the following
conclusion: the cinema owes no more to the aesthetics of
photography than it does to the theater or the novel, "in cinema, the
static element must be pushed away. The shot whose quality stops
the mind is defective because it stops.’"[47] Cinemato-graphy is not
photo-graphy in that it only shares a technical base. So what is
photography in a film? "It is simply a means to convey the rhythmic
ideas of the filmmaker in a tangible realm."[48]

A SPIRITUAL DIMENSION OF MOTION

Photography is the technical base of cinema: film, a palpable,

tangible element for the composition of light within a frame. Dulac
often repeats that this static, material, technical dimension has taken
on too much importance, has been over developed. A parallel can be
drawn with narration: it starts with a scenario that can then be
illustrated by moving images, just as cinema could be seen as
starting with a photograph that can then be put into motion. But
cinema is not just a photograph in motion.
At this point a process begins that will distance us from the
invention of the Lumière brothers, the Cinematograph. The cinema is
a technique for the reproduction of motion, it follows a mechanical
movement, but in fact there are two dimensions to motion.
The cinema does not only capture external motion, it does not
address only the eye and sight, it also evokes an internal dimension.
An internal dimension which causes external motion.[49] Motion is the
external manifestation of an internal necessity. Or rather a triple
necessity: that of the creators who express their internal world on the
screen, the necessity of a visual expression of the moving nature of
the world through cinema, the necessity of cinema itself to express
its essence as motion. Dulac presents this internal necessity of
motion as a spiritual impulse (the spiritual "cause" of external
motions). Motion thus also belongs to a spiritual dimension. Motion
in cinema has a double dimension: spiritual and mechanical.[50] It is
as if there were three levels: the photographic image, motion in its
mechanical dimension – both on a material plane – and a spiritual
force that penetrates images and motion and establishes them.
This spiritual force is thus necessarily the cause of
cinematographic motion. Because for Dulac there can be no motion
without causes, otherwise it is just agitation.[51] It must be guided by
an idea, to express an action, describe a character, evoke an
emotion. But it would be a mistake to believe that in this way she is
reinserting the preeminence of the narrative form (the idea of the
scenario) over images.[52] The idea must serve motion.[53] Cinema-
ideas must be motion-ideas. It is these ideas, this internal world of
the creator, expressed in moving images of the external world, as a
spiritual force, that will form the sequence of motions.

FORM, RHYTHM

So we have movement as the raw material, animated by a

spiritual force which is its essential cause and which forms it. But
what form does this take since the narrative model has been
rejected? In fact the narrative form has not been completely
abandoned – Dulac herself will primarily make narrative films – but
the story is seen as a surface under which motion rumbles and flows
as a spiritual force. The form which corresponds to this underground
force is minimal. Motion is a malleable material to which form can be
given and, the material thus formed is Rhythm. As she says in a
1924 conference about a sequence from Kean by Volkoff, "The
rhythm, the juxtaposition has been enough to touch our emotions, to
show us the drama."[54]
At this point, Dulac is going to reach another dimension of
cinema as one of its possibilities. Rhythm is the minimal and
necessary form of movement. In a certain sense, cinema is not
made up of images but of motion, and motion is introduced through
rhythm. Cinema no longer needs to be defined at the level of the
image, it no longer captures the external motion of the world as the
Lumière brothers' camera did, but a rhythmic composition of
motions. The rhythms of the world can lead us toward the rhythms of
abstract figures: "A hand comes to rest on another hand. Motion. A
dramatic storyline, analogous to a geometric line connecting one
point to another."[55] Dulac has now arrived at abstraction. As a line
in painting can form landscapes, take on a human form, construct
surfaces or geometric volumes, considered by its form and color on
its own, cinematographic motion can be the mobility in a landscape,
a gesture, human expressions, but also the expressions of geometric
figures, chromatic or luminous variations, rhythms of lines.[56] It is
cinema seen from the angle of the displacement of lines: "I seek a
cinema free from literary subjects, whose subject would be lines and
volumes."[57]
Geometric figures or figurative images, what counts is the
construction and the perception of rhythms: "I picture a dancer! A
woman? No. A line bouncing to harmonious rhythms."[58] It is the
idea of "Pure Cinema," that must be understood here as abstracted
from any narrative form or any psychology connected to a character,
whether the image is figurative or not. Abstract cinema, cinema of
pure rhythm, which she also calls "Integral Cinema" because its
rhythm is the form of all the possibilities of motion, and gives it "its
intimate significance."[59]
Rhythmic motion brings us to a musical dimension: "The integral
film that we all dream of composing is a visual symphony made up of
rhythmical images that only the sensations of an artist could put onto
the screen."[60] Music is the detour that permits Dulac to take cinema
out of its narrative and figurative context, to open it up to rhythm as a
form of motion,[61] it is also a metaphor to describe motion in its
spiritual, non-material, intangible dimension that she calls the
"inexpressible." It is like a geology of cinema: "Of course the cinema
can tell a story, but do not forget that the story is nothing. The story
is just the surface. The Seventh Art, the art of the screen, is about
rendering the depth which extends below this perceptible surface:
the musical inexpressible."[62]
 ACTION CINEMA

The musical metaphor also serves to have us perceive the

cinema as sensation. "The song of the soul, beating of the heart,
inner rhythms, motion…the theme of action, a feeling…no story but
nevertheless an impression…"[63] For Dulac the perception of
cinema is not in the intellection of the story - the cinema is what
cannot be narrated – but in the physical effect that it provokes in the
viewer. This is what she means when she says that in cinema the
image is action, and when she is careful to distinguish this from the
narrative "action" that is shown. The image is action in itself because
it is motion, rhythm and it has a physical effect on the viewer: "The
role of cinema is to move us by the play of movements and not by
the idea of an action which provokes these movements."[64] This is
what the Lumière films already showed in their simplicity: "A train
arriving in a station gave a physical and visual feeling".[65] The
aesthetic of Dulac concerns the physicality of cinema, the physicality
of movements with their accelerations, decelerations, coming closer,
moving away, their harmonies, interruptions, their intricacies and
progressions.

A KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD

This physicality of movements in cinema is of course the echo of

the physicality of movements in the world. The world and the
cinema are always closely linked in Dulac’s thought, they are linked
by rhythm and motion. Pure cinema and documentary cinema, the
former with its graphic lines in motion, the latter by its capturing of
the world’s motion, both express the essence of motion of cinema
and the real world.[66]

It is in this context that Dulac’s positions on color film and sound

film must be understood. Color films and sound films improve the
way cinema can show the real world. They strengthen its realism.
But when applied to motion they can contribute to the physical
sensation that cinema can produce.[67]
 Of course Dulac had far more reservations about sound film than
about color. And she was very much opposed to "talking pictures."
Sound cinema could be justified in the context defined above, even
if, given that cinema was "visual music," a "music of the eye," in
itself, sound could only be considered redundant. But with dialogue
films, the whole world of theater returned in force and this theatrical
cinema would for years destroy all hopes for this form of music
composed for the silence of the eye.
In her reaction to color and sound can be seen Dulac’s complex
position regarding the relationship between the world and cinema.
Cinema draws its strength from reality (motion, colors, sounds) but
must also create its own motion, colors, and sounds.[68]

THE GERMINATION OF A GRAIN OF WHEAT

Woven through Dulac's work like a poetic refrain, the image of

the germination of a grain of wheat crystalizes the idea of a moving
image as the embodiment of the motion of the world, its spiritual
force, rhythms, and emotion.[69] "The vision of a pure motion which
plays out according to the continuous logic of its dynamic force."
This scientific film shows, through time lapse cinematography, the
development of the plant which grows by a strength contained in its
seed; but this strength meets resistance from its environment, and its
vertical rhythms give way to opposing ones, all of these rhythms
forming, like a moving graph, a moving visual drama: "External
influences interfere with this happy blooming; denied sunlight, the
stem searches in vain for its warm and regenerative source, the
plant's anguish is conveyed by choppy rhythms which change the
meaning of its motion, and its rhythms, already purified in their form,
will have determined the emotion, a purely visual emotion."[70]
All of the cinema of Germaine Dulac is in this image of the
germination of a grain of wheat. A drama of nature, of a plant
struggling to bloom which becomes a visual drama through a cinema
of motion, of time lapse, the vegetal rhythms becoming cinematic
rhythms as abstract lines are played out by the action of a force.
 FOR AN UNBOUND CINEMA

And is this not for Dulac a parable for the development of

cinema? This nascent force that asks only to blossom by its singular
and multiple rhythms like the branching out of a plant, and has been
hampered by the resistance of the environment in which it has
appeared. Therein lies the seed of the whole development of a
cinema[71] which would express all the possibilities of motion and
rhythm; a cinema that will be reborn, like a subterranean force, a few
decades later. An unbound, unlimited cinema, a wild grass, powered
by creative force and which will have as its motto the last words of
Germaine Dulac’s first article, Let Us Have Faith: "Copy no more,
create."[72]

Prosper Hillairet (1994)

 LET US HAVE FAITH

An article?
But what remains to be proved?
That cinema is an art? And that we have a lot to learn from it?
Or, is this still open for discussion?
If publishers…If the government….If film directors…If artists…If
financiers…
No, everything has been said. Better to work in silence and
concentrate our strength on making progress with our works which
will be more useful than our theories. Thinking too much about all the
obstacles in our way isn't the right way to surmount them. Not that
faith will be enough but now is the time for it rather than for criticism.
Anyone among us who really has a thought worth expressing will
express it through cinema, in spite of all the external difficulties and
will create a great work.
But perhaps we lack faith in ourselves and that is the problem. Our
so-called inferiority in cinematographic art has given us this nasty
passion for criticism that drives us to seek perfection in correcting
our mistakes rather than taking pride in our strengths. We believe
more in the former than the latter. Instead of looking at ourselves,
having lost our confidence, we look at the efforts of others, over
there in America and we try to model ourselves on them. The time
has come, I think, to listen to our own song in silence, to try to
express our own personal vision, define our own sensibility, and
define our own path. Let us know how to watch, to see, to feel. To
have something to say and eyes, eyes open not to reflections but to
life itself. Let us look at ourselves, find ourselves… copy no more,
create.

Le Film, 15 October 1919

 AT D. W. GRIFFITH'S

In New York, in the very heart of the city, a few yards from
Broadway, in the active center of big business, in New Jersey, on the
other side of the Hudson, on Long Island, across the East River
where factories line the liveliest areas, the most active in the huge
city are the studios where American cinema's ideas are developed
and carried out. These studios are veritable factories with their
workplace rules, their manufacturing processes, their specialized
tools for high-volume production, their bustle of well-organized
workers. There is an impression of individual anonymity but
successful production. A factory of marvelous modern imagination.
Do moving images, in order to attain their highest perfection,
require the combination of several minds working together, divided
into channels according to an industrial discipline, can they not serve
the vision of a single artist in the same way as sculpture, painting,
literature and music? While New York spreads out infinitely, there is
a point where the streets and factories thin out, where there is some
space between houses, the noise dies down, and the broad white
tree-lined streets lead to other places…a mile, two miles, three miles
out, New York disappears. Calm, reflective nature scattered with
cottages inviting restfulness. And yet, if one follows the great white
roads, a studio appears… ten miles, twenty miles, thirty miles out,
past long barren areas, shady parks….
- "Mr. Griffith's studio, please."
It's necessary to turn off the main road and take a lane heading off
into solitude, even farther from the passing crowds. Water…the
Hudson looks like a huge lake, its far bank out of sight. A small point
of land surrounded by the river widened into a bay. A gate. "Private
Property." A country house next to a large shed surrounded by out-
buildings. At the end of the lawn, a pier.
- "Mr. Griffith’s studio?"
- "Right here."
 There's no huge industrial factory to be found. You're in the home
of an artist who, in this calm, plans out his work. On entering, there is
silence. And yet people are present, speaking in hushed voices so
as not to disturb the thought process. High ceilings, a large wooden
fireplace that recalls hours passed warming up after hunting or
fishing. The atmosphere conjures up what it must have been like at
Wagner's home in Bayreuth. Does not Griffith’s genius radiate over
modern cinema like that of Wagner's, not so long ago, over music?
- "Could we see Mr. Griffith, please?"
The master of the house is absent but his secret presence reigns
over the home he has just left.
- "Would you like to see the studio?"
A short dark hallway. And a large workshop. – No noise. – The
cameraman is next to his camera. On a set as solid as an actual
house, lit by arc lamps arranged according to a personal technique,
emerges a very young woman. A superhuman ardor glows in her
eyes…she seems to be rehearsing under the guidance of the master
….the master, nevertheless, is far away. –"Miss Carol Dempster," I
am told. "She’s trying to find the right make-up and costume." A
constant, highly personal search. I was expecting the atmosphere of
a movie studio instead I find that of an artist's studio.
And here is a model: the village of Way Down East in miniature ...
Each branch of a tree is rendered with such artistry, the electrical
devices are arranged with such care to diminish or heighten the
scene's relief. One's impression is not so much of a miniaturized set
as of a carefully considered effect.
Miss Dempster has finished. A young man, a very young man with
large black eyes has taken her place. His mouth, his body seek to
evoke a character with sharp gestures.
Richard Barthelmess, as his make-up is being applied, tries out an
expression. Richard Barthelmess ... the Chinaman of Broken
Blossoms, seems so resolute! He does not speak but his eyes meet
yours with the flame of intense moral activity. He seems always to be
thinking.
A look around. How muted and deliberate the masses of lights are.
 Here is Ralph Graves who begins to speak admiringly of Griffith.
Who said Griffith was absent? His presence is so strong. His actors
are so animated by his thoughts that they seem to be a living
extension of him.
It is late. The studio lights are being turned off. We come back to
the entrance hall with the great fireplace.
- "Would you like to see the room where Mr. Griffith brings together
his actors?"
A big square room with wide windows. At its back a wooden table
and two chairs. Opposite them a row of chairs. It is the sanctuary of
thoughtful work where Griffith, several weeks before going down to
the studio to shoot his film, imparts his will to those who will act it
out. An iron will forged out of strength and conviction that takes an
actor's soul, molds it, shapes it before flinging it vibrantly into the
film. Ah! How far we are from being in a factory! The cinema will
indeed be like the other arts, the expression of an artist.
A force of will, a meditation, an art work to be created, not just a
film to release at whatever cost…the work must mature…Its
preparation is long-term, not to be done hastily.
Griffith was not there…but I feel as if I had met him. When I finally
meet him, I feel I know him already.
A friendly handshake. Eyes which, when they meet you, out of
habit seem to look for your undiscovered and mysterious inner
qualities. A tall man, very tall, very thin, with violently striking
features. He is just about to join his actors in the big square room.
Carol Dempster, lively and anxious, Richard Barthelmess always
locked up in his ardent silence, Ralph Graves highly athletic and
healthy, all vibrant and ready to receive the words which will
galvanize the tangible energy they are holding within themselves, to
drive them to surpass their own expressive talents.
And our exchange of words begins.
Griffith started in film twelve years ago. He had been a playwright.
He was one of the first to understand that the silent film could reveal
certain kinds of feelings that were described, but not felt, in words,
and which were inaccessible to the theater, to the novel, to painting,
and he devoted himself to these.
 To distinguish cinema from other forms of art, reveal its own
purpose, its own grandeur, its own personality, this was the effort and
achievement of Griffith who has always been an innovator, not a
disciple. To him we owe the discovery of close-ups that isolate the
expression, the inner play made visible by the attitude, by contrast,
the depths of the soul, so different from dramatic artifice; this study
of hazy images that blur certain traits; these iridescent projections or
colors attenuated into a single tint that frame the screen; the
experiments of swathes of color on photographic black. The power of
cinema's techniques today are owed to him.
"Do you feel the director must be the sole author of a film?"
Griffith smiles: "I buy an idea, but I transform it, I cut it out myself."
Griffith does not add that from a dull story, from a theatrical play
that is fixed and rigid in its words and dramatic structure, he
amplifies the idea to create a new life rich in extensive realism and
symbols. Yes, every cinematic work that has value in its sensitivity
and power must be the result of a single will. The evidence is clear.
One would not impose on a painter a drawing whose lines had
already been traced by a workman and just ask him to fill in the
colors of already drawn forms. His entire painting must be the result
of the impact of his sensibility. In industry the division of tasks is
appropriate, even necessary, but not in art! It was natural that Griffith
who is a great artist, with deep emotional gifts, would escape from
established customs and prove that, like in all great works of art,
individuality is the mark of a great cinematographic work.
And Griffith speaks of his films. Born in 1880 in La Grange,
Kentucky, he began in 1908 with The Adventures of Dolly. In twelve
years he made more than four hundred films ("some of them bad,"
he adds with good humor) of which the greatest were The Birth of a
Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, and Way Down East.
A unique philosophical idea seems to dominate him: that of the
progress of human evolution, always slowed down by brutal
reactionary forces.
This is the theme of Intolerance and, in another variant, that of
Broken Blossoms. The Chinaman and the poor little girl from the
London slums are, even if they belong to different races, brother and
sister in the equality of their spiritual evolution. But all the powers of
obscurantism strengthened by tradition represented by the Boxer
rises up against their union in order to destroy it, as Cyrus the
Barbarian destroys Babylon the Civilized in Intolerance.
… And Griffith speaks of music, the music that guides the measure
of images on the screen. He always knows how to direct the songs
of instruments to correspond to the action which he controls. So it is
not surprising, a few minutes later, when we visit the big projection
rooms, to see the area for the orchestra, and to see a piano and
music stands. Music of the spirit, music of the eye; the cinema must
be a rhythm without dissonance. In this way Griffith seeks to ensure
that movie theaters the world over show his films with the
harmonious compositions that should accompany them.
Miss Carol Dempster, Richard Barthelmess, Ralph Graves wait
impatiently in the big square room. It is time to work. And Griffith
goes over to them.
As the big solitary country house fades into the fog, the high shed,
the sophisticated laboratories, aligned along the bay and ready to
launch the Master's productions out into the four corners of the
world, the trees hide the outdoor sets for Way Down East, the huge
factories which manufacture "film" seem like a heresy, an offence to
the Seventh Art which industry would kill, if men, great artists like
Griffith, do not defend it with the pure air of solitary work, the
grandeur and the cult of thought.

Cinéa, June 1921

 THE CREATION OF A CINEMATOGRAPHIC
VOCABULARY

Words are important for the attitude that they reflect and provoke.
The investigation by L'Écho de Paris indicates a major worry for
cinema as it seeks to reformulate the vocabulary to eliminate the
obscure and often improper terms used by those studying cinema.
I fervently support the abolition of the term "metteur en scène."
The artist who, on a given theme, composes and harmonizes an
image, the film equivalent of a word, is not a mere organizer of
movements, he sees, he feels, he expresses, he creates a tangible
thought, he is the visualizer of a work of art.
On the other hand, I find the word "scenario" to have the right
proportions, designating the succinct theme to be developed by
moving images. The written work is nothing without the vision that
makes it real. If the “scénariste” indicates his action in gestures, in
lights, in movements, in cadences, he has then written a film… But
few writers still write a "scenario" in the belief that they are writing a
film. I'll use the term “scénariste” for now. Cinemania, cinephobia…
fine. Let’s just hope that cinephilia wins out!

L'Écho de Paris, 15 April 1922

 GERMAINE DULAC INTERVIEW WITH PAUL
DESCLAUX

- You want to know my ideas on cinema? For me cinema will be a

splendid art form. If I say "will be" and not "is," it is because up to
now none of us has been able to work within the line of thought
which it brings to the intellectual field. The public has not evolved in
its appreciation of cinema as anything more than a simple
distraction, a substitute for theater, whereas, empowered by new
forces, it has become an art form that owes nothing to other forms
and comes to us with an unimaginable abundance of new expressive
possibilities.
The cinema is not just an art form for the expression of purely
external acts but for the visualization of the subtlest nuances of the
soul, in its inner life. As you see, I am far from considering adventure
films and love stories as the true formula for cinema. My highest
admiration is for Swedish films. I don't like American films which,
behind their luxurious production values, hide a fundamental poverty
of thought. You can likewise take note that I do not consider that any
of my own films have achieved my cinematic ideal.
La Souriante Madame Beudet, which I have recently finished
directing is the work which comes closest to my cinematographic
ideas, along with L'Invitation au Voyage which I hope to shoot one
day.
- When you were the drama critic at the journal La Française, did
you begin to suspect what the cinema might be capable of?
- At that time, it seemed to me that the theater was the expressive
form most adapted to my sensibility. And criticism was just a way to
acquire a technical expertise of drama by analyzing the work of
others.
- Were you contemptuous of cinema at that time?
- I only went to the cinema to hear a good orchestra cheaply and,
as any humble moviegoer, to be entertained by the prestigious
adventures of Fantômas and other screen heroes.
- You had wanted to be a playwright when in1908 you staged
L’Emprise. Have you ever regretted not having pursued that path? In
all honesty, don't you think that the cinema will be able to stir up
more ideas than the theater?
- It's true that I had wanted to become a playwright, but when my
financial circumstances forced me to abandon that first path and
choose the more lucrative one of cinema, I had no regrets.
Nevertheless I was not at first capable of understanding the full
potential of cinematographic expression. It was not until I started
working first-hand with the ideas, the feelings, the lights, the camera,
when I got to the end of my first film, that I understood what cinema
really was, an art about inner life and feelings, so foreign to theater
and literature, an opportunity to express thoughts in a new way…an
art form that is not derivative of others, an original art form with its
own meaning, an art form which escapes reality by becoming reality:
capturing the spirit of people and things!
- How did you begin directing films? Weren't you at first intimidated
by the difficulties of mastering technical skills which you must have
suspected were needed but that you had never learned?
- Contrary to what you might think, I learned the techniques of
cinema before deciphering their meaning. As a child, I used my
savings to buy cameras. I entertained myself with light effects.
Before starting to direct, I studied the entire technical side of cinema.
And then the Pathé Company told me one day: "You ought to direct
films!"
It was by making my first film that my critical sense was
awakened, that I understood the spirit, the essence of
cinematographic art, and that I was ashamed at myself for the
heresy I was committing by just following the rules of a
straightforward story and doing nothing more. In France and Italy, I
had learned just the literal application of the rules of the profession.
My emancipation did not come until after I had made Les Sœurs
Ennemies.
- You are going to do an adaptation of Le Cachet Rouge. But
aren’t you against the adaptation of literary works for the screen?
How are you going to approach the work of Vigny? In what frame of
mind?
- I am against adaptations. But publishers, distributors, theater
owners want already-known titles and stories! It’s too bad!
Adaptations slow the advancement of cinema, because they allow
directors, or rather creators, the authors of cinema, to devote
themselves to the visualization of a work already written which they
cut into pieces and transform. And this half-measure delays their
achieving a complete expression of their artistic ability. I’m going to
approach Vigny’s work with a desire to visualise something beyond
his words, his thought process beyond just the facts. Reconstitute
the premise of his story, emotions with acquired facts, with new
facts.
- Don’t you think that the future belongs above all to works that are
born out of a close collaboration between directors and scenario
writers? Isn’t cinema an art of collaboration? Are you among those
who believe in the necessity of a director also writing the scenario?
- I believe that a work of cinema should be born out of a jolt of
emotion, the vision of a single person for whom cinema is the only
possible means of expression. The director must be the writer and
the writer the director. The cinema, like any work of art, comes from
tangible emotions…For these emotions to have value and to be able
to reach others, they must come from a single source. The writer
must “feel” the idea strongly enough to direct its filming. Questions of
technique only come afterwards.
- I don’t agree with you. That a director with your gifts should be
her own writer is only natural, but…but... let’s not be unkind! I
understand however that you would argue this because right now it’s
hard to find film writers who are exclusively writers. I’m convinced
your opinion will change over time. Could you tell me what your
intentions are when you begin a work? Do you seek to reach a mass
audience or is your work destined for an elite audience?
- My intentions? To work towards progress, advance toward the
ideals which we aspire to. Not to flatter the public but, on the
contrary, to lead them slowly to new concepts. But at the same time
without ever neglecting the commercial side without which the art of
cinema cannot live.
- How, in your opinion, can you attract educated people who
disdain the cinema and don’t go to see films?
- By offering them films that make them think, that surprise them…
By avoiding banal subjects, forms, and thoughts…By presenting
them with an art form rather than an industrial product that is
perceived as the poor man’s theater. There are remarkable artists in
France. I would hope that we could put less value on what is
photogenic in just a pretty way and more on what is “expressively”
photogenic. But we don’t know how to promote our real stars, we
don’t feature them enough. We try too hard to promote just pretty
girls and not hard enough to promote real artists!
- You told me a little while ago that you don’t like American films.
What is your opinion based on?
- American films are holding back the progress of cinema. They
are childishly limited to just a series of pretty images. They seem to
be mechanically generated by an industrial process… with nothing
new or original. They are a bad influence both on the public and
those of us who work in cinema.
- And what do you think of German films?
- They are remarkable. They are the result of real thought and
innovative in their form. You can only work with architecture and
proportion through set design. And the study of visual volume is
essential to cinema. Not enough attention is paid to the use of
physical proportion in cinema. Set design is the only way to perfect
and explore these sorts of visual effects.
- Isn’t there room in cinema for different sorts of films as there is in
literature? A popular sort as well as others?
- At this moment, no! Because the bad sorts are preventing a new
sort of film from emerging. But eventually, yes.
- Do you think it’s possible for anyone to make a film?
- No, it’s necessary to have a minimum of technical skill, to learn
how to write, direct, or to act. As in literature, it’s necessary to know
how to externalise feelings, to modulate them, and choose how to
express them. You have to know how to concentrate. For this
reason, I don’t allow curious bystanders around me in the studio. I
insist on calm and reflection.
I point out to Germaine Dulac the scenario she has been holding
in her hand and ask:
- Judging by the script you’ve been holding, you don’t seem to
improvise much while shooting. While you’ve been talking, I’ve
permitted myself to glance indiscreetly at those pages and I notice
that they are full of extremely detailed instructions.
- There is no room for improvisation on the set. A work of film is
conceived on paper. Improvisation is often a sign that the director is
badly organised. And don’t forget that this usually results in a waste
of money.
The chief electrician comes over to us and discreetly signals to
Germaine Dulac that the lighting is ready and that shooting is ready
to begin.
Before leaving, I ask my interlocutor a last question:
- How do you envision the film of the future?
Germaine Dulac answers in a staccato voice without a second’s
hesitation. She knows what she wants:
- The future of cinema?, she says. An art of feelings. A story
based not on dramatic elements but on emotional ones. In other
words, more of an introspective art than an extrospective one!
And I think that last sentence of Germaine Dulac explains better
than any lengthy commentary the whole philosophy of her subtle art.

Mon ciné, 25 October 1923

 THE EXPRESSIVE PROCESSES OF
CINEMATOGRAPHY

The role of different shots and angles.

The Fade, the Dissolve, the Superimposition
Distortions. Animation.

A Lecture by Mme. Germaine DULAC

17 June 1924 at the Musée Galliera
(Cinematography exhibition)

Cinema is a silent art. Silent expression is the formal law and, for
those who serve it, this sentence from the Holy Scripture could
apply: No sound shall emerge from their throat. For us, film authors,
the difficult task is to write without words, without phrases capable of
expressing the emotions of the soul, the most intense scenes of
love, to depict, without any sound, the noisy celebrations or ear-
splitting jazz bands, to be heard over the joyful clamor of shouts and
laughter, to make heard, without sound, without voices, the hiccup of
a sob, the heartrending call of an unhappy soul whose tone
communicates all its emotion. And so it is not astounding that
filmmakers lose, after a few years of reflection about and production
of films, the habit of using words. They withdraw into themselves.
They live in dreams inhabited by forms and expressions. As they go
by, images and gestures collide, get mixed up, become juxtaposed,
become for filmmakers the only elements capable of revealing their
thoughts. They forget words and become taciturn. They watch,
compare, and note their impressions and remarks in schematic
observations. So imagine their confusion when they find themselves
obliged to speak, to expound an idea in words, to produce by other
means than images, an account of their thoughts.
Because I am a filmmaker, try to understand how distraught I feel
before you.
 But nevertheless I must talk to you about a subject that is
particularly close to my heart: the expressive processes of cinema,
the role of different shots and camera angles, fades, dissolves,
superimposition, soft focus, distortions. In all, the entire syntax of
film. But as much as this syntax must seem bizarre to you, it seems
to me simple, and flexible to handle in comparison with the
manipulations of writing and words. I would so much rather talk to
you about this while giving you a live demonstration, I would be
much more comfortable if, instead of all these lecture notes, I had
my cameraman and camera next to me, I could, with your assent,
ask you to participate in a scene which would have as its subject: a
speech at the Musée Galliera based on actions instead of words. I
could then avoid any difficulty explaining things by continuously
projecting examples.
The Seventh Art, like most other arts, has set itself the goal of
dominating matter and giving it the summum of humanity. Up to now,
the medium for this has been clay, color, sound, words; for some
years now it has also included cinematographic film. The Seventh
Art does not stop at the stylization of an impression in the way that
sculpture and painting do. It develops an action by grafting emotions
through its own method, in parallel to literature, theater, and music. If
the work of cinema, by its development and movement, is similar to
the theater, the novel, symphonic music, it still is based only on its
visual form. The moving image, the devoted guardian of a gesture, a
fleeting expression, draws all its eloquence from the silence which
directs it. The composition of a moving image is our rhetoric, the
contrasts, and involvements that it induces, are our means of silently
stirring emotions.
To give ourselves a common understanding, I am going to project
for you right away a fragment of work marked by the talent of one of
my colleagues: Marcel Silver. After seeing it, you will understand the
emotion that a logical succession of moving images can provoke.
This film contains none of the texts which, in our trade, we call
intertitles. The moving image only is supreme, so the work moves
you by purely cinematic techniques, by contrasts and parallels, and
you will be able to see how, despite the excellent acting, it is the
impact of the moving images, the judicious choice of isolated
expressions developing a theme, a thought, which is the prime
source of emotion. Thanks to the moving image, the film’s author
exhales his sensitivity, like all artists do through their works. The
photography, the actors, the landscapes are bent to his will. He
alone is the creator since everything is organized according to his
logic. He is the one who chooses, contrasts, juxtaposes, sets the
rhythm. Before going any further, let’s be clear, I do not conceive a
work of cinema to be a substitute for theater, with the actor’s tricks
as the center of interest. When cinema borrows from theater, it
demeans itself. It is no longer itself. And we should not consider this
deplorable compromise here. We are speaking here of the work of
cinema seen from the point of view of its own powers and
possibilities.
Before presenting a fragment of the film L'Horloge, I am going to
summarize the situation in a few words.
In a small village lives an old watchmaker. This craftsman had long
ago made a clock with the superstitious idea that the day its
pendulum stopped swinging his own heart would stop beating. Time
passes, a desperate need for money forces the watchmaker to sell
the clock to a neighbor, knowing that the neighbor will keep it wound
up. More time passes, the neighbor dies, the watchmaker is now but
a wreck of a man confined to a wheelchair. But the clock, in the
empty house, continues to tick on faithfully. The watchmaker’s
daughter, aware of her father’s superstition, enters the abandoned
house surreptitiously and every week makes sure the clock is
wound. One day the inheritor of the house comes back from the war
and takes possession of it. He is intrigued by the fact that amid all
the dust and neglected objects, there is a clock that still works.
Perhaps he would have believed in some supernatural power if he
had not discovered the truth and fallen in love with the young girl…
who returns his love.
Happiness is selfish, it easily forgets everything else. The young
couple, thinking only of themselves, go off one afternoon into the
high mountains, far from the village, to celebrate their love, when
suddenly the village church bells start ringing, and trigger a horrible
thought…they have forgotten to wind up the clock and in a few
minutes it will stop. The stage is set. I’ll show you a scene.
[Projection of a sequence from L'Horloge.]
Ladies and gentlemen, I have no doubt that you have followed
step by step the mood of the two lovers. Calm…long scenes, the
young couple look at each other, infinity is in their eyes. The
audience understands their mood through the juxtaposition of distant
horizons which spur great dreams of open space, the unknown,
distant peaks. In this majestic natural setting, their lips approach.
The distant church bell tolls.
The emotion takes hold as soon as the meaning of the church
bells shatters their happy reveries. Image follows upon image in wild
succession. The searing image of the pendulum contrasted with the
desperate race of the two lovers creates the drama. Did you notice
the technique of this scene? Short shots… How long a road the
young people have to travel, the obsession stressing the action. The
interminable road, the imperceptibly far-off village. Shots of the
pendulum take on ever greater importance as the filmmaker
contrasts it with shots evoking distance. Through his choice of shots,
their rhythm, their duration, their juxtaposition become in themselves
a source of emotion. Distance and the pendulum alone rivet our
attention. And when we finally arrive at the irremediable conclusion:
again silence and calm.
Your interest has been captured, you have been moved by
techniques unique to cinema, the contrast between shots, their
rhythm, their length… The first and foremost means of expression.
If the juxtaposition of shots and their succession create movement,
this also perfectly depicts the mood of a character, and allows us to
enter into his thoughts better than with words. The character can be
motionless without our missing any nuance of his emotions.
Here is a quite typical example that I’ve taken from a very beautiful
film of Tourjanski: Ce Cochon de Morin. Morin is a provincial
businessman who has come to Paris on business. The night, my
God! He forgets his serious concerns! Aren’t the Montmartre
cabarets there for one to have a good time? Morin dances and
downs numerous glasses of champagne. On the train taking him
home, he sleeps, trying to recover from the excesses of the previous
evening…His mind is not very clear. But he is happy! Which means
has Tourjanski used to permit me, the viewer, to understand this:
“that Morin’s mind is not clear but he is happy”…A simple succession
of shots! ... First you see Morin, then the locomotive’s wheels
turning…And in his half-awake state, the noise of the locomotive’s
pistons mixes with the bass drum of the jazz band he listened to all
night. And Morin smiles. He is entranced. A mood provoked by the
result of three images: Morin…the train’s wheels…a jazz band…
Morin mixes up the sounds, he doesn’t clearly perceive the reality
around him, but he is full of cheer. In his thoughts the previous
night’s party goes on.
I’m going to project for you a short sequence from Ce Cochon de
Morin.
[Projection of a sequence from Ce Cochon de Morin]
Such simplicity and such science ….The noisy silence. A complete
state of mind in a few shots. We are in the midst of real life. Without
the use of any words, we have been able to penetrate the innermost
workings of a man’s soul.
I have given you two examples of how juxtaposed shots can
create action. Turbulent drama and a state of mind. Now I’m going to
show you another example and close this first section of my talk. The
conflict between two who love each other.
The example is drawn from Kean, portrayed by Mosjoukine and
directed by Volkoff.
Kean, the famous English actor, is in love with a “grande dame”.
Kean despairs of being able to attract her. In a sleazy bar, disguised
as a sailor to escape his creditors, he drinks, he dances…the ferocity
of his pleasure reveals his desire to forget an impossible love. For
two minutes, you witness a disheveled dance to a wild beat.
Pleasure in his eyes, his gestures, his mouth, pleasure at any price!
Once the exaltation has passed, sadness, emptiness, a long pause,
Kean is discouraged. He does not feel loved. Skillfully juxtaposed
with another shot…a change of scene, we see the ambassadress
lying down, dreaming of a handsome actor, but she dreams of him
costumed as Romeo. She loves the actor. She conjures up his
image.
We have taken a step into the action. Again, the rhythm, the
juxtaposition has been enough to touch our emotions, to show us the
drama.
[Presentation of a sequence from Kean. A scene of his
drunkenness ending with his appearance as Romeo in the bedroom
of the ambassadress.)
I would now like to explain to you how the impact of the
imagescreates an atmosphere. A little while ago, you saw Kean in
his drunkenness, throwing himself into a disheveled dance. His
expression, his gestures made us understand his state of mind …But
the more ferocious his desire, the greater his intimate pain surely is.
How can the ferocity of Kean’s pleasure be portrayed? The actor’s
expression must be true, not excessive. To keep Kean’ssimplicity,
another shot will underline it. We are going to feel the floor move
under the dancer’s nervous feet, we will see animals seized with
fear. Opposite the drinkers, the bottles at the bar will tremble on their
shelves, a cat will be watching but soon be frightened and will seek a
corner to hide in…These juxtapositions of shots are not just
appetizers. They are put there to create an atmosphere, noise both
in the midst of and created by silence. They have their reasons to
exist just as a well-placed word is necessary to illuminate a
sentence.
[Presentation of a clip from Kean.]
These examples with commentary have enlightened you about the
basis of our technique: the juxtaposition of shots.
From now on, you will acknowledge their fundamental importance,
that the composition of a shot has an almost mathematical value.
Each shot must single out an expression, underline an intention. And
the camera’s work begins.
The camera is equipped with a set of lenses which can either
close in or move back in order to frame the scene of our dialectic.
Each lens records and transmits to film the vision which we have
conceived intellectually.
 In the fragments which you have just seen, the placement of the
camera has played a major role in situating, emphasizing, isolating.
In L’Horloge, for example, if Marcel Silver had cut out the peaks of
the mountains instead of presenting a perspective where the sky,
snow, and clouds merge, we would not have experienced the feeling
of infinity. When, in their race back to the village, we would not have
empathized with the young people overcome with anxiety if we had
not seen how small the village was at their feet and how very long
was the road they had to travel, and it would not have appeared so
imposing.
Now, in each shot the combination of mountain peaks, road, and
village appearing with different proportions is obtained by the art of
placing the camera.
In the same way, in Ce Cochon de Morin, was the placement of
the camera to isolate the train’s wheels not perfect? If we had seen
what was above the wheels and pistons of the locomotive, we would
not have had the impression that the noise of these wheels and
pistons recalled for Morin the noise of the jazz band.
If the juxtaposition of shots is precise, the placement of the
camera is no less so.
This is what provokes and accentuates an impression.
I am going to show you a clip from a film by Henri Fescourt (a
master in this area) extracted from La Poupée du Milliardaire.
An apartment for rent, what a stroke of luck! We enter a house…
climb the stairs…ready to do anything to find the sought-after
lodging…we climb the steps, four at a time, out-of-breath, a
stairway… This stairway would have no psychological significance if
we only glimpsed a few steps. But Fescourt, by a curious distortion
of perspective, shows us the whole stairway, a perspective of an
endless series of landings…The shot leaves us out of breath. And
we are sure to identify with the desire of the characters and then feel
their disappointment.
You can judge for yourselves just how important the placement of
the camera is in this scene.
[Projection of La Poupée du Milliardaire.]
 The placement of the camera succeeding in creating an emotion is
a purely cinematic process. With this we can bring fantasy, a sense
of humor (like Henri Fescourt) and emotion to a film. But this
demands a lot of reflection, a lot of experience, a lot of technical
skill…
I think it was Alexandre Dumas fils who claimed that there was
only one right word to express a thought. In cinema, to get the image
with the right meaning, there is only one way to place the camera.
This is how we filmmakers write well.
I’ll move on to another technical quality: the sequence created by
the juxtaposition of shots and the camera angle. The sequence
consists of the expressive impact of the isolated image defined by
the lens’s framing…The shot is simultaneously the place, the action,
the idea. Each different juxtaposed image counts: the shot is a piece
of the story, a nuance which leads to the conclusion. It is the
keyboard we play on. It’s the only means we have to create, through
movement, a bit of internal life.
I’m going to project a film for you, La Souriante Madame Beudet,
which I directed from a scenario by André Obey based on a play that
the author wrote in collaboration with Denys Armel. After the
projection we will discuss the shots.
[Projection of the first part of La Souriante Mme Beudet.)
You have no doubt realized the importance of the shots in this
drama. In the beginning: the group shots – hints of sadness from the
empty streets, the diminutive people, the drabness of the
provinces…
Then other shots bringing things together, two hands playing the
piano and two hands weighing a pile of money. Two personalities.
Two opposing ideals…different dreams, we already know it; and all
of this even before seeing a single character.
Here are the characters…a piano…behind it a woman’s head…A
snatch of music. A vague dream...sunlight playing on water among
the reeds….
A shop. Fabric is being measured, account books. A man places
an order.
 Up to here, everything has been distant…People have only
engaged with things…We see them evolve in context…Movement.
There is a foreboding that poetry and reality are going to collide.
In a very bourgeois room, a woman is reading. The book is made
quite prominent…Intellectuality. A man enters: Mr. Beudet…He’s
important. He’s holding a swatch of fabric…Materialism…
Shot: Mrs. Beudet doesn’t even raise her head.
Shot: Mr. Beudet sits down at his desk without speaking.
Shot: Mr. Beudet’s hands count the threads in a fabric sample.
The characters are established by shots isolating their different
gestures and bringing them into relief by contrasting them.
All of a sudden, a group shot brings the two individuals together.
Abruptly everything that divides two people in a marriage is made
apparent. It is a stroke of theatrical drama.
Such is the approximate interplay of shots with their movement
and, above all, their psychology. Depending on whether it’s a close-
up or view from a distance, the importance of the shot changes,
depending on whether it separates or unites elements, its degree of
intensity is not the same, its meaning changes.
Mrs. Beudet’s shrug of the shoulders, seen in a long shot, would
not have the same meaning, as a close-up of the same shrug. When
Mr. Beudet laughs, a laugh that grates on his wife’s nerves, the
laugh must fill the entire screen, the entire cinema, and the audience
must react to the vulgar husband with the same antipathy as Mrs.
Beudet. This will serve to excuse the idea of the crime that will
germinate later. The shots gradually become longer; the importance
of Mr. Beudet’s laugh is emphasized in order to impress and horrify
the audience. Some have criticized me for how I use the trick of
Arquillères [sic]. I maintain that the character of Mr. Beudet would
have had less depth if each of his nervous tics had not been
emphasized, laid out for display, if I may put it that way.
As we play with the juxtaposition of shots, the placement of the
camera, we play also with space. The psychological shot, the close-
up as we call it, is the very idea of a character projected onto the
screen. It is his soul, his emotions, his desires…The close-up is also
an impressionistic note, the passing influence of things that surround
us. In this way, in Madame Beudet, the close-up of Mme Lebas’s ear
represents provincial life, all the gossip, the narrow-mindedness, the
petty pretexts for quarrels and disagreements.
The close-up should be used with discretion. It is too important to
be used without first being sure that it is absolutely necessary.
While medium shots, “American shots” to use the jargon of the
profession, which cut off the characters at the knee, are used for
motion or when two or more people meet, the close-up serves to
isolate an expression that signals a change. It reveals an intimate
view of people or things.
Inner life made perceptible with images is, along with motion, the
whole art of cinema… Motion, inner life, the two terms are not at all
incompatible. Nothing is more full of motion than psychology, with its
reactions, multiple impressions, its projections, its dreams, its
memories. The cinema is marvelously equipped to express these
manifestations of our mind, our heart, our memory. And this brings
me to another process I want to talk to you about: superimposition.
You have already seen examples of superimpositions in Kean,
when the beautiful ambassadress evokes her favorite actor, and in
Mme Beudet, when the poor wife, exasperated by her noisy
husband, dreams of a strong and powerful man who will liberate her
from her accountant-spouse…The man she calls for is glimpsed only
in her dreams. He is impalpable and fluid. He is a phantom who does
battle with the stingy soul of Mr. Beudet. A transparent scene is
grafted onto the concrete scene: the one that Mme Beudet sees in
her imagination.
Superimposition is thought, inner life… It is obtained by combining
two images.
The technique can be used in psychologically subjective ways to
build up magnificent dramas. Think about what heights of thought
could be reached if visually a flesh-and-blood person could enter into
a struggle with their soul.
Moral phantoms: fears, regrets, hopes, take form and confront
each other in ardent combat. Dreamland, hell…a phantasmagoria in
real life…who we are when we go beyond ourselves! ... What a
domain! ... And a domain that is purely cinematic, thanks to
superimpositions.
I’m going to show you a few magnificent examples from Volkoff’s
Kean. Kean, in the transports of his love, has sent a subaltern to
deliver a bouquet of roses to the faraway ambassadress whom he
loves though he is but a humble actor, the plaything of crowds and
dignitaries…Alas! These roses are destined to be received first by
servants before being presented to the great lady who cannot feel in
this gift all the love that Kean has put into it. The poor old subaltern
goes back to Kean, and tells him what has happened. So Kean, the
artist, suffers.
In a series of superimpositions, Kean’s reactions collide in a
violent, fiery, feverish rhythm. Of course Mosjoukine handles this
scene admirably, but equally admirable is the animator [filmmaker]
who made this discovery: the big mouth of a laughing servant seems
to swallow Kean in its contempt. This servant’s mouth with its vulgar
laughter, combined in the same image with the expression on the
face of the suffering Kean, what a world of feelings this evokes.
Crass materialism pulverizing true love.
Here is cinematic drama at its best.
[Projection of a sequence from Kean.]
Another example of superimposition, this time from Hannelé
Mattern. Hannelé is a humble little girl, very gentle, mistreated by
life. Poverty has made her an outcast in the village. She has no
friends. Children throw stones at her, her mother was beaten to
death by a brutal husband… She has found the only tenderness in
her life in church, in religious faith…And now here she is on her
deathbed in a miserable room. But what dazzlement there is in her
fever! The angel of death extends a friendly hand. Other angels blow
their trumpets gloriously and prepare to welcome her in triumph.
Even better, the tailor, who used to provide her with clothes, has now
brought her a marvelous tunic. Her bed is transformed into a saint’s
shrine and all the children who made fun of her when she was alive
have now gathered to sing her praises and prey for her soul about to
go to heaven…A curious detail, none of these celestial scenes were
photographed directly. The superimposition throws the humble
Hannelé Mattern, the outcast with a pure heart, into a divine and
sumptuous world. But through all these celestial visions you can
always see, in the same place, the real-world setting, the table and
chairs of the impoverished outcast’s room in an asylum. A splendid
contrast which touches the heart. Superimposition may well be one
of cinema’s richest techniques.
[Projection of Hannelé Mattern.)
To come back to earth, we are now going to evoke once again Ce
Cochon de Morin. See the martyrdom of this poor man, his anxieties.
In the train bringing him back to his marital nest, he becomes
overbearing with a charming fellow passenger. The young girl
complains to the police and they interrogate Morin. He instantly feels
all the weight of provincial gossip, scandal, ruined reputation.
Identifying himself while answering the questions of the police, his
imagination is seized by horrible visions. These visions are the
manifestation of an inner turmoil, they grip the audience more
strongly than reality. The action intensifies.
[Projection of Ce Cochon de Morin.]
And the action continues. But you have understood: Morin is no
longer really alive. He has been devoured by fear. Look at this
curious trajectory. It seems to Morin like the whole town is pointing
its finger at him, is pursuing him. Don’t you think, between us, that
this is better than a great Hollywood cavalry charge?
[Projection of Ce Cochon de Morin.]
Now I would like to speak to you about lap dissolves, soft focus,
and distortions.
The lap dissolve is a way to transition from one image to the
following one by superimposing the end of the first shot over the
beginning of the next. It is also a psychological process. The shots
link up and blend instead of crashing into each other. The lap
dissolve brings people and things together either quickly or slowly. In
one of my own films, La Mort du Soleil, I wanted to depict the painful
recovery of a great scientist who has suffered a stroke. His
paralyzed hand brings to mind a whole world of sad realities. He
understands his condition. His eyes fall on his female collaborator,
then on a large painting representing a warship in full sail, he looks
at his hand…The great voyages of the spirit, alas! are no longer to
be his. He then looks at his student, a vision that blends with the
large painting (quite an indication) and, despairingly turns back to the
window where autumn leaves are silhouetted. Separated into
successive changes, this cinematic phrase would have lost its
intellectual value. The scientist’s thought must unfold into a
conclusion. The lap dissolve participates in this unfolding …I’ll let
you be the judge.
[Projection of La Mort du Soleil: The patient’s bedroom.]
Once he has recovered, this same scientist keeps his student as a
prisoner, who represents for him his strength, his thoughts, the
complement to his brain shrunken by illness. You are going to see
the two characters act in isolation but they are nevertheless linked…
The lap dissolve signals the hold one brain has over another,
domination, a connection that nothing can break.
[Projection of La Mort du Soleil: The last dictation.]
I’ll give you two more examples of the lap dissolve. One
psychological, the other poetic…
In the first, taken from La Belle Dame sans merci, a film I directed
a few years ago, a married woman finds herself in the presence of
her husband’s mistress. The legitimate wife wants to object, but the
charm of the seductress, her environment influence the soul of the
wronged wife who cannot defend herself against the refinements of
the courtesan under whose influence she falls just at the moment
when she wants to rebel. Bizarre flowers, penetrating perfumes put
her soul to sleep. These flowers, this fragrance, softly come together
above the head of the artist and make us aware of his evolution.
[Projection of La Belle Dame sans merci: The perfume scene.]
The lap dissolve is unity within diversity. It is also a way to bring in
a shot smoothly and to build a link between impressions.
The lap dissolve makes possible poetic impressions.
Henri Fescourt, whose camera positions full of humor and fantasy
you were able to admire earlier, has just finished a film, Les Grands,
and I have been able to obtain a very curious dissolve, a purely
cinematic effect. A dried-out tree, made up of barren branches,
suddenly bursts into flower.
 [Projection of Les Grands.]
Fescourt, I believe, makes use of this dissolve as a rhetorical
image…A soul opens up.
I will tell you very little about dissolves, a procedure thanks to
which a scene, once finished, fades out and turns to black. It is the
full stop, or sometimes the comma, depending on whether it comes
at the end or the beginning of a scene. It can also be a parenthesis
when, in the middle of a scene, an event is slipped in. The dissolve
is none other than a form of punctuation.
For me it serves as a full stop, in order to move on to the last part
of my presentation: distortions and soft focus. Distortions, like
superimposition, are a way to make imaginary phantasmagoria real.
The superimposition comes as a reaction, the lap dissolve as a link,
distortion and soft focus as commentary. When recoiling from an
emotion, do we see things as they are? Don’t we tend to enlarge or
shrink things?
Do we not, in a word, lose our sense of proportion?
Only literature seems to have had the possibility to translate this
moral unbalance which follows a violent emotion. You’ll undoubtedly
remember this short story by Maupassant: a poor ministerial
employee, the day after the death of his wife, is obliged to sell her
jewelry which he has always assumed to be fake. The jeweler he
proposes them to tells him that they are extremely valuable and this
is how Maupassant depicts the man’s turmoil at this revelation: “A
terrible doubt comes over him…his wife! So every piece of her
jewelry was also a gift from someone! He felt as if the ground was
shaking beneath him, that a tree was being felled in front of him.”
Here is how the cinema today could visualize this, thanks to
distortion. The tree could be felled, the earth could move, I obtained
this effect in my film Gossette when a little gypsy girl dies of hunger.
Distortion and soft focus bring a whole visual philosophy to
cinema. We have in France a great director, Mr. Jacques Feyder. In
his admirable film Crainquebille he plays in ingenious ways with the
process of soft focus and distortion.
Soft focus…. Crainquebille wants to convince his lawyer of his
innocence. Crainquebille is not an important client, he is just a poor,
completely penniless loser. There’s no point in listening to him. And
to show just how distracted his lawyer is, the audience sees the
notes he’s taking about Crainquebille’s case become hazy and
incoherent. A visual explanation.
We are going to watch this scene.
[Crainquebille: The lawyer scene.]
This added element of soft focus and distortion was unsettling to
the spirit of a public who ill-understands the real goal of cinema, the
visualization of the drama and joy of the inner life. A film could be
made with a single conflicted character using these techniques.
This is practically the tour de force that Feyder superbly achieved
in Crainquebille. Crainquebille and his feelings of hope and fear!
Seen from the angle of Crainquebille’s thoughts, soft focus,
distortions, superimpositions, play out majestically. This poor
Crainquebille, innocent of the crime of which he has been accused,
no longer has a balanced view of things…The accusing policeman
seems like a giant to him, the witness for the defense like a midget,
whose testimony seems to disappear into a void, and there is this
policeman’s arm right next to him. Why is the guard’s arm so close to
him? He hasn’t done anything wrong!
You will be shown a sequence from Crainquebille, one of the most
powerful, most perfect of French films: Crainquebille in court!
[Crainquebille. The lawyer scene.]
This film has demonstrated to you, I hope, the usefulness of
distortions and soft focus... Crainquebille’s ingenuous soul has been
revealed, now that a skillful director could visually dissect its
impressions.
What other art than cinema could achieve such psychological
development?
Is it not curious that the public, spoiled by the twists and turns of
dramas based on real life, had so little comprehension as to need
the insult of a warning that I deliberately left at the beginning of
Crainquebille, in order to enable you to evaluate the struggle that we
are obliged to carry on to free the cinema from the routine in which
even its friends sometimes imprison it.
 You see here, ladies and gentlemen, how rich our palette is.
Camera angle, shots, lap dissolves, soft focus, distortions,
superimpositions, so many nuances with which to express ourselves
without theatrical artifice, without excessive set decor. Cinema is an
art that must be left alone to develop alongside the six others;
proudly, because it can, if it wants to, borrow nothing from them.
What obstructs us in cinema are the public’s prejudices, and also the
influence of the other arts which seek at all costs to help us.
The other arts can only do a disservice to cinema so long as they
don’t try to blend into it, if they are asked to collaborate. But those of
us who struggle, who fight to save our art from the nefarious
intrusions and wrong-headed principles, we have a hope of victory.
Were we not only yesterday associated with fairground barkers?
Nevertheless today the Musée Galliera opens its doors to us. It is
now up to the general public to help us by seeking to understand us
in our innovations and discoveries. The cinema will advance,
shedding everything that diminishes it. What we have achieved so
far are only trial attempts. Tomorrow we are sure that the cinema will
create pure masterpieces and will deserve, even more, to be called
the Seventh Art as those who have faith in its future have already
baptized it.

Cinémagazine, n°27, 28, 29, July 1924

 HOW I BECAME A FILM “DIRECTOR”

Have you read Le Roman merveilleux by Pierre de Coulevain?

The author shows how our life, from childhood on, is populated by
desires, aspirations, actions, encounters that are closely related
despite their often different appearances, and that they all pull us,
quickly or slowly, to our destiny, drawing us into a veritable role that
we must play and for which we have in fact been created.

Well, I could say that my present career is proof of the truth of

Pierre de Coulevain’s theories for, now that I am at the end of it and
look back, I perceive that everything that has happened, all the
things that were my joys, my prevailing tastes, were like parcels of
this art, to which I became dedicated, that all of my attempts, all my
tentative works were a form of unconscious apprenticeship, and that
this film director career, to which I am devoted, is the real answer to
all my wishes, the synthesis of my capabilities.
Since I am asked how I became a director, I answer: it was without
realizing it, just like that, little by little, without suspecting that I would
ever become one, and without ever even thinking about it either,
before taking a try at it. I was simply, passively, obedient to the
circumstances that were driving me. So I learned my trade without
really being aware of it, and I wouldn’t know how to explain how I
went about it! A love has dominated my whole life, since the age
when one begins to understand what one feels, this love has been
for photography.
When I was a kid, I passed my time photographing everything I
saw. My parents were at first aghast at the character of this strange
little girl who disdained games and candy, all the pleasures, all of
children’s favorite things, to pursue her obsession: to photograph. I
would have given all the dolls in the world, all the cakes and candy,
the most beautiful dresses, to have a camera!
My greatest childhood joy, that which most marked my simple life
and which I still remember today, was the feverish excitement of the
purchase of my first camera at the Gaumont store. I was ten and
wanted to shop myself for what I considered the most precious
treasure; I thought that I had taken possession of all the happiness in
the world in carrying next to my heart the little black box with which I
knew I was going to be able to capture the mystery of light and
sunshine, shadows, gestures, in fact all of life, the expression of
which already enchanted me.
After that, another passion possessed me: that of literature, the
literature of theater! I started writing plays and miming the roles,
created by me, for the sole pleasure of rendering expressions,
finding gestures, rendering emotions in my own way.
I was also a painter, deeply haunted by light and the play of colors,
but this also did not entirely satisfy my desperate desires for
expression and life.
For a long time, I was possessed by music and I found in it, more
than anywhere else, joys of magnificent intensity.
I did journalism, I wrote analyses and interviews. But in doing it,
even while loving the profession, I was up against one of my greatest
weaknesses: timidity. Because, even though when I am in a film
studio I possess great force of will, an almost virile energy, in daily
life I am afflicted with the timidity of a very young girl!
At this time, when I had to interview a celebrity, I felt brave until I
reached the bottom of the stairs. But as I started climbing them to
reach the right floor, my heart would begin to tremble in my chest.
When I reached the landing, my courage had fled. It would even
happen that, once I rang the doorbell of the apartment and heard the
rustle of feet inside that indicated that someone was about to
answer, I would flee, victim of a fear so intense that flight was the
only recourse. Once I had time to think and my nervous anxiety had
diminished, I would heap reproaches on myself and would return to
gather the impressions and quotes I would need for the article my
newspaper was waiting for.
One particular interview sticks in my memory, the one I conducted
with Mme de Noailles.
A strange thing, as soon as people started to speak to me, I was
transfixed and seduced by their facial movements and expressions,
and my timidity melted away. Alas, just at the moment of saying
goodbye, my timidity rushed back and I began again to feel
awkward, helpless, tortured!
Starting in 1910, I frequented the Gaumont Cinema assiduously.
Not because I was under the spell of film, it did nothing for me! I
went there to hear good music. I admit I was addicted to harmony!
The art of silent film was of very little interest to me and I was far
from thinking that it was therein that I would find my destiny.
The war came with its torments and anxieties of all sorts; I could
no longer dream of working at what I loved but had to figure out how
to make a living and, I don’t know why, no doubt the mysterious
advice of destiny – I thought of film as a way to earn enough to live
and film directing as a possible career. Someone from the Pathé
Company had asked me: “Why don’t you direct a film?” I thought
about this idea which from the very first had made me smile, then I
ended up getting very interested, and I set my mind on doing it.
Friends had confidence in me and raised the twelve thousand francs
that were needed at the time to “shoot” a small film. So I began my
career. Light, photos, expressions, techniques and shots, smiled at
me as if they were old familiar thoughts, with whom I had always
lived in a dream, and which now materialized. I learned how to
handle forces whose value I was aware of but to which I had never
given a form.
My first film, Les Sœurs ennemies, was, to be perfectly honest,
just a trial run. My technical apprenticeship was marked by a number
of moments of panic and flailing about, but it was made easier by
sympathetic collaborators. The initial result did not satisfy me at all. It
was, to tell the truth, frankly awful.
But I had had a taste of this mysterious art, whose attractions I
had barely suspected, I was conquered. Immediately the
businesswoman I had thought at one point that I was, was replaced
by an artist, as if the worthless rock surrounding a precious mineral
had been broken away and all my wishes, all my aspirations,
everything that had been sleeping in me, had suddenly burst into
flower and had finally spilled out.
 I understood that I had found my way, that this career was
passionately mine, and that it was the synthesis of all the earlier
ones which I sampled, tried out, then dropped like personal
disappointments.
My second film, Géo le mystérieux, was the result of my finding
my true calling and I brought to it all my feverish energy and the
talents which I had been unconsciously developing as a secret to
myself. Then there was Venus Victris, Âmes de fous, in which the
lively and understanding actress Ève Francis played the lead in such
a noble way. La Fête espagnole, based on the book by the great
actress’s husband, La Cigarette, La Mort du Soleil, La Souriante
Mme Beudet, Gossette, La Belle Dame sans merci, Le Diable dans
la ville.
Right now the project I hold most dear is an attempt to adapt to the
screen the beautiful short story of Guy de Maupassant: Boule de
suif. Here there are no random adventures but a state of mind to be
externalized in all its multiple and painful facets. And the challenge
attracts me because what I am looking for in cinema is not at all to
direct external movements but to bring out from a theme, and the
people moving about in it, the multiple emotions of the mysterious
flame of human sensibility.
I am sometimes asked if my profession could be feminine, if it
could offer a new career to my sisters? I answer no.
It demands considerable moral and physical energy. Resistance to
all kinds of fatigue, enormous expenditures of nervous energy, in
other words powers that are more masculine attributes.
Finally, it is not a profession that can be learned: one needs an
intimate form of intuition that comes from natural gifts and
temperament.
The last and ultimate reason: in order to start this career it is
necessary to have major financial means, a fortune, or backers who
can have confidence in your faith while awaiting the results of your
talent.
So here, I’m afraid, are many obstacles to feminism and it will not
be anytime soon that there will be women film directors in the four
corners of the world.
Ève, 31 August 1924
 IMAGES AND RHYTHMS

Illusions! On the screen is a play of shadows and lights: a

succession of images that form, transform, and disappear…shadow,
light, illusions!
This is cinema.
A marvelous art form that adorns itself with the other arts as if they
were a superfluous luxury.
It can borrow harmonious lines from architecture, beautiful forms
from sculpture, rhythm from music, skillful lighting from painting and,
perhaps soon, color.
But it goes further in its quest for perfection by revealing the inner
soul of people and things.
The author of a film must first create an image as the basis for his
expression, the word which transmits his thoughts and his sensibility.
Photos, actors, landscapes are the elements he uses, with light
and film to replace clay, marble, canvas.
Images composed like the words of a sentence are cut up,
rearranged, and juxtaposed in a rhythm unique to cinema, and which
result in a new form of art, an unprecedented expression of inner life.
It is in this way above all that cinema is marvelous: the impact of
moving images alone can portray every state of mind.
The vision of a quick gesture, a fleeting expression, contains all
the eloquence in the silence that governs it.
So images rush by in a form of movement that the general public
all too often confuses, alas, with an agitation which is in fact the
opposite of the truthful nature of cinema.
Motion, inner life, these two terms are not at all incompatible; what
is more full of motion than psychological life with its reactions, its
projections, its dreams, its memories? Cinema is marvelously
equipped to express these manifestations of our thought, our heart,
our memory.
 Its real objective must be to make inner life visible. One could
make a film about a single character in conflict with his soul, his
moral ghosts, fears, regrets, memories, hopes, taking form and
colliding in fierce combat.
Enchantment, hell, phantasmagoria. What we are beyond
ourselves... What a realm!... and a realm so purely
cinematographic!...

Jeudi, 13 November 1924

 MOTION AS CREATOR OF ACTION

A Lecture by Madame Germaine Dulac given at the meeting

of the "Amis du
Cinéma," on 7 December [1924] at the Salle du Colisée

When Cinémagazine invited me to this meeting to talk to you

about a subject related to cinema, I was happy to accept, but it was
not to tell you definitive things. Filmmakers are devoted to a silent
art, as you know, they prefer the play of images to the play of words.
But I felt real joy at the prospect of a frank and friendly conversation
with the members of a group bearing such a lovely name as the
“Friends of Cinema.”
Among this group of friends that you and I belong to, there are
working professionals as well as just fans. The former create, the
latter simply appreciate and understand. But each one of us,
according to our means or our method, is striving towards the same
goal: to put cinema in its rightful place. It is not my status as a film
director that authorizes me to supply you with new reasons to love
the cinema, and if I have accepted to share with you thoughts which
are doubtless already familiar to you, it is to create and sustain a
closer communion between those of us who create and those who
criticize but can also be allies.
I hope you will excuse my borrowing a quote from an amiable
philosopher: “When my friends are one-eyed, I look at them in
profile.” Because, for the public on the one hand, and for us, the
filmmakers, on the other, the cinema is a one-eyed friend that we
look at in a somewhat, I’m tempted to say, unfriendly way, but let’s
say only in profile. The viewing public says “Films are so childish,
inept, uninteresting!” And we, their creators, say “If only the public
was willing to understand and follow our lead, wouldn’t the cinema
be beautiful!” And so the discontent is mutual.
 Friends of Cinema, viewing public and filmmakers, we must finally
tear down the wall of ignorance that separates us and understand,
on the one hand, what you, the viewer, wants, and on the other, let
you know what we are searching for as artists so that we can interest
you, and hope that the discoveries we make to liberate cinema from
its worn-out formulas will meet with your support and
encouragement. Thanks to this fusion attempted by your enlightened
presidents, Jean-Pascal and Jean Chataigner, the art which we love
can develop magnificently in a spirit of understanding and harmony.
Because I needed a theme for today’s talk, my choice is “motion in
Cinema”…a deliberately controversial subject since I consider that
one of the causes of the lack of understanding between filmmakers
and their audience is a different conception of the association
between the two words: motion…cinema…
From its beginnings, the cinema was a purely mechanical
invention, recording, thanks to photography, moving manifestations
of external life: waves, moving trains, spouts of water.
As a successful curiosity, in the same sense as a fairground
sideshow attraction, was the first way in which this new art was
welcomed, offered as a present to the world by scientific minds.
This term “fairground attraction” makes the Seventh Art seem
somehow defective in the eyes of the law and in certain literary and
intellectual circles. Nevertheless the birth of cinema signals a new
form of expression for modern artists. Is not motion a new form of
writing, a palette, a chisel, a bow…?
But if “motion considered as the cause of some effect is called
action” becomes by this token the basis, the interest, the goal of
cinematographic art, motion without cause is but meaningless
agitation which by deplorable confusion throws onto our screens
innumerable cowboys on horseback, dancing and fighting in saloons,
lavish hectic spectacles serving next to no purpose. Agitation is not
motion, agitation does not create action.
Motion, the creator of action, is never futile, never useless, it is
guided by thought and its development is coordinated to express a
fact, portray a character, expose a problem and, above all, extract
emotion.
 The lack of understanding of the true value of motion considered
from a cinematographic point of view has sidetracked the real
meaning of the marvelous discovery of the Lumière brothers which,
through its mechanical investigations, has brought us a new form of
artistic expression.
We have put motion at the service of ideas for theater and novels
and neglected to put ideas at the service of motion.
Our efforts strive to free us from this primary error. Do you think
that motion conceived as material to be sculpted, as an unfolding of
expressions through a succession of nuances, must necessarily, in
order to hold our interest, just decorate a more or less rawly
conceived process of narrating fables? Can motion only move us
when it creates a drama out of two forces heading towards each
other or colliding with each other? We touch here on the
fundamental error of the first filmmakers. The simple motion of a
facial expression is interesting and represents the essence of
cinematographic thought, just as the concept of two contrary
movements combining to create a third can be opposed to the very
spirit of cinema.
In art, the theme is primordial. The sculptor is moved by form, the
painter by a vision of the color of objects or expressions, the writer
by a story, the musician by an inner life singing inside himself. All
arts are motion because there is development, but image-based art
is, I believe, closer to music through rhythm which is common to
them both. The technique of a musician and that of a filmmaker are
very close… A theme, orchestration through images, a musical
phrase dominating or blending into others.
The play of light, the combinations of gestures, beats, languid or
abrupt phrases, each image akin to a different cadenced note and
contributing to the melody, such can be the art of film through its
motion and technique. What is different in film is that motion is
concentrated on a feeling.
The cinema departs from musical emotion and approaches
dramatic emotion. The concept of any adventure told in images, just
as in a children’s book, with a presentation of a problem and then its
resolution, does this indeed correspond to the very essence of
cinema?
Every artist has their own vision of people and things, and,
according to Pirandello’s already proverbial phrase: “Everyone has
their truth.” I do not want to affirm anything. My truth is maybe not
yours. But do you nevertheless think that cinema should be more an
art of narration than an art of emotion? A simple question but maybe
a critical one. Don’t ask me to come to a conclusion: we are
searching, we are thinking it over…That’s all…
Far from me is the idea to one day banish from the screen the cute
or heart-breaking little stories that we all write, because that’s what’s
asked of us, for a public who we do not know but we are told asks for
them.
I only ask you that when in our films one of us seeks, in a short
sequence, to escape from the realm of theatrical fables that are
contrary to the spirit of cinema, and attempts to move you by feelings
alone, by emotions, by the motion of things seen for themselves, to
help us, to understand us, because by struggling against the
intrusion of the literary and dramatic into our artistic domain, we
might be holding the truth.
One can be moving without characters, without theatrical means:
look at the way railways and wheels can sing.
A theme but not a drama…Rails, overlapping tracks of rigid steel,
rails like the distance of a life, a poem in which the rhymes are
simple, moving lines, that then multiply? Never, in my view, has the
cinema reached a higher level than in the short film poem of our
master Abel Gance. The play of light, the play of form, the play of
perspective. An intense emotion coming from a simple vision of
something deeply felt. Then the wheels, rhythm, speed…One of the
locomotive’s pistons whose mechanical movement follows the
rhythm of the heart. Remember….
[Projection of La Chanson du rail]
Abel Gance, ladies and gentlemen, is above all a poet. He sings
not with words but with images. The stories he tells us are not nearly
as valuable as the intense breath that animates them and the
philosophy that he knows how to draw from them.
 You remember this extraordinary sequence from La Roue. A
locomotive driven by a jealous man whose enflamed passion has
made him careless of his own life and that of others. He drives the
woman he loves towards a destiny hostile to him. Abel Glance
expresses the ferocity and grandeur of this man’s love by the details
of motion: speed, rhythm, the darkness of a tunnel, light, whistle
blasts, vibration of the train’s wheels, brief glimpses of facial
expressions of conflicting emotions, and suddenly, calm, the majestic
arrival of the locomotive at the station. The man has surmounted the
panic in his head and his heart. The movement of eyes, wheels,
landscapes, quarter notes, half notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes,
all combined into a visual orchestration: cinema! Drama maybe, but
a drama conceived according to an absolutely original formula, far
from the rules which govern the stage and literature. The film soars
like a great symphony, striking deep and sorrowful chords, raising it
far above the clever little stories that the public too often enjoys. I am
going to show you this sequence which has become a classic of our
cinematic archive.
[Projection of La Roue.]
Ladies and gentlemen, I am a bit ashamed to present to you one
of my own productions after the one by Abel Gance The sequence
that I’d like to submit to you comes from a film-novel, a much
ridiculed genre, but much loved by audiences. I will show you, with a
sequence from Gossette, the “state of mind” motion has achieved
not just through a series of shots, but by the double movement of the
shots and their juxtaposition.
In Gossette, the goal was to comment on two situations:
1) Daring bandits kidnap a young woman and put her to sleep.
2) In addition, to develop the action well, the mental state of the
victimized young girl must be made perceptible. Motion alone was
the basis of my psychological technique: twisting roads, elongated
trees, motion within another motion, multiplying heads, fantastic
impressions, representing a state of mind : the soul of the young girl
in all of her fear and innocence.
[Projection of Gossette.]
 The poetry and symphony of Abel Gance, the psychology of
Gossette, the song of the soul, beating of the heart, inner rhythms,
motion…The theme of action: a feeling…no story but nevertheless
an impression…
Here is another film, Le Diable dans la ville, a not-yet-released
production that I directed from a scenario by Jean-Louis Bouquet.
Commotion! And not without cause! A town in an uproar, carried
away by a wave of insanity, fantastical superstition, but the frenzy is
reasoned. A comment: the motion is less in the gestures, the flow,
the agitation of the crowd, than in the fluid shots of groups of
villagers that briefly pass by, thus showing and explaining the
predominance of moral preoccupations over events. The real
movement is not what is most apparent: beyond the orchestration of
movements is the inner theme of the people’s souls.
[Projection of Le Diable dans la ville.]
At this moment M. Chataigner, with his customary eloquence,
confirms the speaker’s intentions, and she, very touched by his
remarks, can but thank him for his expertise with a vigorous hand-
shake.
You may all remember this perfect film, Premier Amour, by
Charles Ray ...Another example of true motion in cinema…A man is
suffering, a single shot: the slow motion of a facial expression
changing. Then the storm, the fall…Speed, panoramic landscapes
rush by…Matter dominates will. The emotion, only the emotion of the
drama, and not the drama in itself…We have no fear of an accident.
The motion carries us away, we are swept up in the whirlwind of the
storm, the landscapes become blurred, change shape, and the
speed increases. We forget what is happening as we get caught up
in the emotion…
[Projection of Premier Amour.]
Do you believe, after seeing this example, that it is necessary to
have a story to stir an audience? Isn’t the visual effect enough, does
it not play upon your nerves like a symphony?
Another example…look at Kean. A man’s psychological state
transmitted only by motion and the more or less long musical rhythm
of the shot…Noises, drunkenness, feelings…suffering. A head, feet,
a circle of bottles dancing on the shelves…A whole drama in this
short sequence, a whole inner drama. You have no need at all to
know who Kean is, where he comes from, where he is going, for the
sequence to hold your attention….He is suffering, he is drinking, he
is loved as the slow rhythm of his thoughts of the two women
penetrates this diabolic fever, and nevertheless he is not happy.
That’s enough…The film’s author, M. Volkoff, is a master of motion.
[Projection of Kean.]
As I have repeated, the cinema is motion, more inner than outer, in
my view. Take a look at Ce Cochon de Morin, made possible thanks
to the talent of Tourjansky. This snoozing man who believes he is
hearing the jazz band of a nightclub in the noise of the wheels and
pistons of the train taking him back to his distant province. Motion…
an unfolding psychological line…
[Projection of Ce Cochon de Morin.]
And the gossip begins, running through the streets of the little
town, it spreads and increases, knocks at the door of its victim and
follows him like his shadow…You see the significance of running
feet, faces frozen in meanness. Not just a continuing shot but again
motion…
[Projection of Ce Cochon de Morin.]
I am going to end this program with a short projection chosen from
La Souriante Mme Beudet, one of the films I have directed with the
most love. An inner obsession…Here again, it is motion that creates
the rhythm of the emotions. A detested husband who invades
everything…Slow-motion intensifies his nervous tics, speeds them
up, intensifies their noise. A state of mind described by speed.
[Projection of Madame Beudet.]
He who tries to prove too much proves nothing…Like all my
colleagues, ladies and gentleman, when I consider the cinema, I
seek, I ask what its essential nature is. While submitting to the
current rules which govern it, I believe we have misunderstood its
power of motion and I would like to share my doubt with you: “Does
not literature in its present form do harm to cinema?” I have sought
to show you that motion and its combinations could create emotion
without reordering the actions and adventures, and I wanted to cry
out to you: Keep the cinema true to itself as motion without literature.

Cinémagazine, 19 December 1924

 CINEMA, AN ART OF SPIRITUAL NUANCES

We are at a time when film directing has a higher value than

literature. I could preach forever on the question of cinema, but what
good would it do? The cinema, in fact, can be seen from many
angles. Do we not all transpose our own personality and
preoccupations onto every external event? Does not every work of
art reflect at the same time the soul of its creator and the soul of the
audience that judges it?
What is cinema?
I can’t imagine all the answers that my question would trigger, but
many would judge the cinema only by how it has been used and not
its spirit. But does not cinema deserve to be judged in itself and for
itself?
The cinema is not an instrument that has been given to us to
slavishly duplicate our old ways of thinking. That the cinema
contrives to show us beautiful landscapes, to allow us to become
familiar with marvelous sites that we would otherwise have never
known, to visually explain scientific facts which we would never have
been able to understand exactly, that it enjoys popularizing books
and works of theater, good! That it serves art, sculpture, painting,
decoration, architecture, that can be tolerated! The cinema reaches
out to the most isolated, rural towns to propagate its intellectual and
artistic richness, to educate and entertain. In addition, as cinema is
international, it makes different peoples with different mentalities
aware of each other and, through cinema, they become acquainted
and appreciate each other.
But the cinema goes far beyond just these educational, social, or
recreational considerations. The cinema is a new art form, an
unprecedented form completely different from older forms of
expression. It resembles none of them; their intrusion into its way of
functioning can only act as an obstacle to achieving its own
perfection. It is neither a substitute nor a form of popularization, but a
new form of communication.
Cinema is the art of motion and by this I mean the progression of
life itself with both its onrush of external events and the inner
workings of the spirit which cause them. Everything around us is in
motion, all the unknowable things, all the events both perceptible
and imperceptible.
We are carried away by motion both physically and spiritually, and
it is this wild race of our souls, of our bodies, of the world we live in
that forms the true essence of cinematic thought.
By being able to capture motion in its smallest details, we possess
a totally new means of expression. There are multiple notions of
motion. I write, you read, both are forms of motion. And beyond that,
my thoughts and yours are another form of motion. The cinema is
the only art form in which the rhythm of several shots can synthesize
in a single second these multiple forms of motion, and reflect my
impressions as well as yours and our expression of them all at the
same time. Two totally opposing themes, one completely spiritual,
the other completely materialistic. External motion, internal motion,
one commenting on the other to form a cinematic statement, a facial
expression, the fluidity of a gesture, the meaning of a small detail,
and one shot after another in a rhythm that conjures up different
perspectives.
Form!...Motion!...Images!... Thought!... I’ll stop here…We already
have the form. It is made of logic, the opposition and juxtaposition of
movements. Thought! Alas! Form has overtaken thought in
cinematographic art…We are forced to draw out thought little by little
and, to free it from its chains, to disturb the tastes and ideas of those
who claim to love the cinema.
We ask the artistic cinema to move us with action!...as if action
were the only source of emotion. By demanding charging cavalry,
drama, popularised theater and novels, we contradict the idea of the
Seventh Art which we mock and blame for not giving us what it
should.
The Seventh Art deserves its title. Its possibilities for poetic and
philosophic expression are infinite, and the audience will only realize
this when it finally rejects the often idiotic shows that we, the
filmmakers, are asked to provide.
The cinema has its form, its raw material, just as sculpture has
clay, painting its pigments. The cinema also has its thought, it’s up to
the audience to allow us to bring it out by supporting our
explorations, by not rejecting out of hand the innovations that might
make our films seem strange. What might seem like a mistake today
could well be seen as an obvious truth tomorrow.
The cinema is the art form of the 20th century. It is up to today’s
filmmakers and audience to shape it, guide it, and give it its classical
character. A great mission!
I could be wrong since we are hypothesizing based on a particular
understanding but, in my view, the art of cinema is more of an art of
expression, of inner rather than outer motion. What I mean by this is
that its technique must be more attached to psychology than to
action developed by means of events. The cinema is the art of
spiritual nuances, there is nuance in an individual and nuance in a
crowd.
Who will give us the definition of cinematographic action? Maybe
emotions more than a series of events…The emotions of music,
philosophy, and poetry more than drama.
In any case, the cinema must be liberated from the tyranny of
literature and theater for the well-being of its thought!

Cinéa-ciné pour tous, January 1925

 THE TRUE SPIRIT OF THE SEVENTH ART

It is far from theater and literature.

Readers of Le Soir, permit me to ask you a question.
Are you friends of the cinema?
Its authors, its actors, its events are perhaps not unknown to you
and you are perhaps among those swelling the number of spectators
crowding in front of its screens!
But will your interest for the Seventh Art prove to be a genuine
affection? And don’t you think that this might be more of an attraction
for an easy and diverse distraction than admiration for the intellectual
richness, the world of new thoughts made possible by the Lumière
brothers’ discovery?
The audience which claims to love the cinema, do they really love
it? They appreciate it as an agreeable pastime without trying to see
in it a new mode of expression, a marvelous source of artistic
possibility.
We, the technicians of film, screen artists, often think that the
patrons of movie theaters, who would appear to support our efforts
based on the frequency of their movie-going, are our worst enemies
because satisfied with the mediocre, the conventional, the traditional,
they reject our innovations, our highest impulses when these take a
form that they are not familiar with. When audiences appreciate a
story well told, a heartfelt drama, or when they take pleasure in the
efforts of a director who presents them with pretty images, well-
controlled crowd scenes or lavish set design which beguiles their
eyes, have they really grasped the meaning of cinema? I don’t think
so. The very words with which I describe the cinema as we conceive
it today, stories, dramas, pretty images, crowds, set design, seem
heretical to me.
Could we not imagine that there exists cinematic thought
completely different from the forms of thought already developed and
expressed by the other arts?
 What does cinematic thought consist of?
The whole problem of cinema lies in its definition. Is real cinematic
thought a philosophical, poetic, commentary on an event or an action
in which images have only the value of a word or a sentence? Is it a
faithful vision of life applied to the illustration of an idea? An
unoriginal theme, could that not be the consequence of the
destructive intrusion of literary forms into the cinema? By literary
intrusion I mean the technical device which is used to move us by
the antiquated formulas of storytelling, plot exposition and resolution,
according to the tradition of psychological mystery or drama, which
constitute the basis for written or acted dramas. In my opinion, this
way of thinking about action has pushed cinema down a very bad
road. Is there not action enough in motion itself which can change,
evolve, and develop?
But why must action be subject to a dramatic situation as in the
theater? Can we not conceive of an action based on the
development of simple emotions as in music?
The conception of a film script based above all on a dramatic
situation seems to me to be contrary to the spirit of the Seventh Art
and here I blame literature which believes itself to be superior to the
cinema and so forces it to live under its law.
Whether a work is adapted from a play or novel or whether it has
been originally conceived as a film, for me the mistake is the same;
the setting of the scene, the depicting of a problem and then its
resolution is not the point.
Cinematic action? A feeling! The film a visual symphony. Down
with storytelling!
Theater is not the only form capable of stirring emotion. Why
should cinema be imprisoned in the traditions of the past? I’m
sounding the alarm to those who may have understood just how far
real cinematic thought is from that which governs the other arts that
we so revere, above all literature. Why persist in a destructive error,
why not change the direction of cinema today in order to discover its
misunderstood potential? But without the support of the audience,
there’s nothing we can do. That’s why I’m leaving to the readers of
Le Soir, with so much hidden hope, this question and this doubt. The
cinema must rid itself of everything that is literary.
We must keep in mind these two words: Film…Symphony…

Le Soir, 16 April 1925

 DEFENCE AND ATTACK OF CINEMA

I defend cinema! But is it really under attack, you ask me? Yes,
because cinema, such as it appears in its current manifestations, is
wearing a mask that the public forces it to wear and that disfigures
its face!
The cinema that I have been working for for the last several years
has nothing in common with the one which will one day seduce more
enlightened crowds, with the one of tomorrow, with the one that must
come into being.
I take up my pen to defend the cinema against today’s cinema and
attack the factors which force us, filmmakers, to follow a path which
is leading us in the wrong direction. I can anticipate your objections.
You certainly have the right to say to me: isn’t it up to you and your
colleagues, film professionals, to present to the public the real face
of this Art that you serve and which you feel has been perverted?
Here I have an easy answer, it is the film-going public much more
than we, the filmmakers, who builds the tradition of cinema. Let me
explain:
The art of cinema is ruled by economic requirements; in order to
produce films, we need to raise capital that we can only obtain from
bankers, and who require above all a guarantee that we will pay
back the investment and moreover return a profit.
The financial security that we must guarantee depends above all
on our ability to please the audience we address. So here is the
problem. Audiences, used to a fake tradition of cinema, will not
accept or tolerate anything besides films that amuse and divert them,
those whose ideas are in general mediocre. You will have noticed
that every cinematic innovation that tries to change the conceptual
approach of what appears on the screen meets with an icy reception
if not outright hostility.
In cinema, progress is only achieved when it does not stray very
far from established traditions. So it is easy to understand that a film
producer, like any astute merchant, orders us to avoid any affront to
the taste of the mass audience and to totally forget any innovations
which might diminish sales and the commercial success of a film.
When the public’s taste has changed, when our audience has
come to judge our films with an open mind unfettered by any
established tradition, the producer who’s convinced that his films will
please will ask for nothing more than that we be left free to express
our ideas.
So I defend the cinema, I defend the producer, the director, the
scriptwriter and I place responsibility on the shoulders of the public
alone for the mediocrity of an art form that could reach a higher level
of thought and beauty, the same level as other art forms. Without the
public, we can do nothing. If it takes a long time for audiences to
react, we will stagnate, we will contrive to produce cute little stories
in pictures which will have nothing in common with true cinema.
In the last thirty years artists born in the age of cinema have begun
to think in terms of cinema without worrying about the intervention of
other existing art forms and they have rejected the stranglehold of
these older forms, particularly that of the literary ones of drama and
fiction, on cinema, a form they revere for its new possibilities of
expression. They clearly envisage the possibility of moving you in
the way of a musician by singing a musical theme: by the
coordination and juxtaposition of shots recording motion. Visual
phrases that can be compared to musical phrases, a series of
impressions with or without characters, with or without the decor of
sets, with or without storytelling, more related to poetry and music
than to dramatic arts, poetry or the novel. Is not cinematic thought
psychological, a way of capturing visual motion in all it subtlety? With
the flowering of this new sensibility, the Seventh Art has really been
born. There now exists a form of purely cinematic thought that is new
and original. I would like to see this truth about cinematic thought
finally recognized. But revolutions are in vain if there is no strong,
confident organization to replace what is in place. I have no intention
of crying out to you to no longer go to the cinema, no longer support
our current efforts, close your eyes to what is in order to better ask
what will be. The result would be destructive. Cinema has to live, our
movie theatres must not be left empty, today’s cinema must not die
before it is reborn.
So let’s sum it up. Is cinema an art form?
Has cinema brought a new form of expression to
artists’sensibilities? In my view, yes, because I consider that no other
art form can express what cinema can express. So I reproach the
film-going public for, in pursuit of its own pleasure, discouraging the
efforts of those who want the cinema to be itself, true to its own form
of thought, and I reproach the other arts with wanting to imprison
cinema in their formulas, preventing it from living freely on its own
without their support.

Paris, 25 April 1925

 ABOUT ÂME D’ARTISTE
[An Interview by René Manevy]

Madame Germaine Dulac, who has just finished Âme d'artiste for
the Société
Ciné-France-Film, is a filmmaker with strong ideas about the
cinema and its possibilities.
- An amiable philosopher, she tells me, wrote one day: “When my
friends have only one eye, I look at them in profile.” So, for the public
on the one hand, and we filmmakers on the other, the cinema is a
one-eyed friend whom we only look at in profile. The public
complains: “Most films are childish and uninteresting!” And we
filmmakers reply: ”If only the public wanted to understand, if only
they wanted to follow our lead, how beautiful the cinema would be!”
So it’s a question of getting over the wall of ignorance which
separates the public from the cinema’s creators. It’s important to
understand what the public wants and it’s important that, we the
creators, make our artistic research, our innovations, known, in order
to try to free the cinema from the old formulas within which it has
been confined since its invention.
It’s what I would call, if you will, the “cinema of progress,” says
Mme Dulac with a smile. This cinema must be a new form of
expression, of thought, and of emotion. Moving images must
become like a new form of writing, a new painter’s palette of colors,
a new sculptor’s chisel, a new musician’s bow. Up to now, we have
put motion at the service of novels, theatrical ideas, while we should
have done the opposite and put ideas at the service of motion. So I
consider we have got off-track: 1) When we simply transpose theater
and novels to the screen; 2) When we want just to tell a story; 3)
When we add intertitles to our films.
A series of images can be perfectly effective without the images
being tied to some sort of intrigue. Here, I will take a simple,
concrete example: not that long ago, I saw a documentary film on
the “germination of wheat.” Could one imagine a simpler subject?
Well! The succession of images of this germination, the slow ascent
of the seeds towards the air and the sun, was made moving by just
the feeling that their movement evoked.
So I am persuaded that cinema can move us without characters,
without set decoration, and theatrical artifice.
- Do you think that the film-going public can follow you into this
realm?
- No, not right away. We shouldn’t ask for too much. I have no
desire at all to, all at once, banish from our screens the nice little
stories that we all tell because that is what we are asked for and that
is what we are told a public, whom we don’t really know, apparently
wants. But whenever I can, even for a brief moment, escape from
theatrical fairy tales and attempt to move the audience with pure
feeling, by the motion of things seen for themselves, by the play of
light, by the combination of gestures, I seize the opportunity.
Perhaps someday I will be able, without being accused of being
incoherent, to create the “film symphony” that I dream of and in
which every image contributes to the overall melody. But all this, as
I’ve said, remains just a vision of the ideal.
- Even before its release, your latest production, Âme d'artiste, is
being greatly praised.
- Yes, I’m happy to be able to report that, for the first time, I have
been able to shoot a film with unusually ample means, thanks to the
Société Ciné-France-Film, which provided me with everything I
needed to work well. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention to you
how happy I was with the entire cast, including Miss Poulton, Mrs.
Yvette Andreyor, Mrs. Gina Manès, Bérangère, Messrs.
Koline, Pétrovich, Henry Houry, and the admirable set design of
Lochavoff. Everyone worked together with unprecedented unity and
energy to produce a truly remarkable final result.
As Mme Dulac was concluding, I suddenly felt a tap on my
shoulder and soft fur brushed past my cheek: it was “Syn,” the cat of
the house, who had jumped onto my shoulder from the top of a
bookcase and interjected herself into the conversation.
 Oh! I’m so sorry, I love animals and “Syn,” as well as her
companion “Nelly,” always have the run of my office. And indeed,
“Nelly” a sweet dog, came to the rescue, doubtless jealous of the
affectionate caresses that I was lavishing on “Syn.”
- You should know that “Nelly” is a big star; she had a role in
Gossette, and I’ll certainly need her again in other films.
- So you already have other projects?
- Yes, but I can’t talk about them yet. I have just finished Âme
d'artiste using some new techniques and new set design. Some time
ago, I made La Cigarette and, as I look back on how far I’ve come,
Âme d'artiste seems like a luxury cigarette. It’s a film I feel very
strongly about, the way a mother always loves her last born, but I’m
already thinking about new productions. For a film to be perfect, its
scenario, its editing, the directing, should all be done by the same
person, as I have done with Âme d'artiste. I don’t like the division of
labor when it comes to filmmaking.
But doesn’t that mean an enormous amount of work? Very few
filmmakers would force themselves to take on such a task.
- Well, Mme Dulac answers, work is still the most interesting way
to pass one’s time and one must give one’s all to what one wishes to
achieve. So at the moment I’m working on five scenarios, I get up
every morning at seven and am often still at work at 10 in the
evening.
I glance around the vast office into which this hard-working woman
director has invited me. The walls are covered with nothing but
bookshelves from floor to ceiling.
- Do you like to read?
- I love books, photography, politics. If I didn’t make films, I would
work in politics. In fact, I have become a more committed feminist
since the last elections, since I saw those notorious posters, you
know, the ones where France, Serbia, and Romania, appear as
black stains, indicating the only countries in which women cannot
vote. Women must have the vote, proclaim it!
I just did.

Ciné-Miroir, 1 June 1925

 APHORISMS ...

Every attempt to alter the conceptions of the screen gets an icy, if

not hostile, reception from the public.

For the art of cinema, progress is only accepted if it in no way

distances itself from already established traditions.

Nevertheless, the art of cinema, as presently conceived, has very

little in common with the one that one day more enlightened
audiences will see, the cinema of tomorrow, the one which must
exist.

Between now and the future, why not save time?

The cinema is an art of spiritual nuances, there are nuances of

the inner soul, nuances of the crowd, nuances in things themselves,
the definition of cinematic action?...
… Feelings perhaps, more than just a series of actions…

Overly elaborate set decoration adds nothing to the value of a

work of cinema. The expressions of a soul have their own value,
regardless of their surroundings.

Wheat germinating…
Crystallization…
Documentary films and, above all, avant-garde films.
Motion, evolution, rhythm, truth, subtlety, logic, capturing the
uncapturable. The cinema has its own place in the intellectual
domain, outside all previously known art forms.

The cinema does not contain any of the elements of other art
forms. It is unjustly kept prisoner inside the cage of what exists. It is
chained and reduced to ancient ideas, when it should be free to seek
its own true identity, the expression of human feeling in a new form.

With cinema there will be no more unexplored countries, no more

barriers between us and things, no more barriers between our spirit
and truth in its psychological or visual subtlety.
The cinema is a big eye open to life, an eye more powerful than
ours, which can see what we do not see.

It is not the characters in themselves who have the greatest

importance in a work of cinema, it is the relationship of images
between themselves.

External actions are only interesting to the degree that they are
the expression of inner souls. The motion of things and people,
passing through the intelligence and sensibility of an artist, the
filmmaker, the only animator, the only author.

Have you noticed that those who speak sincerely of the avant-
garde and who believe in it, gallantly make films which can be called
commercial?
They have faith in their hearts but they love cinema too much,
and above all want it to live and prosper.

Why should the filmmaker, alone among artists, alone among

scientists, not have permission to say: “Our art will still evolve, our
science will be perfected” without unleashing blame and criticism?
The cinema is the art of motion and light.
Out with stagnation.

The cinema, which takes on so many forms, can also remain

what it is. Music accompanies many theatrical dramas or poems. But
music would not ever have been “Music” if it had been limited to just
notes combined with words and action
There is the symphony, pure music, integral music. Why cannot
cinema too have its symphony?
The musician plays with sounds, like the filmmaker with images…

To live is to evolve …
The cinema must live.
So be it!

Paris-Midi, 1 December 1925

 THE ESSENCE OF CINEMA – THE VISUAL IDEA

There is no question of writing a long treatise on technique in just

a few pages, but I would like to try to define the moral essence of the
art of cinema, an art born of our time, and which should be shielded
from incomprehension as unexpected revelations often are.
We know that what exists today will have another face tomorrow,
and we are already
trying to glimpse its features in the fog of the future. The truth of
tomorrow first appears submerged in yesterday’s truth before it
replaces it, but as we are anxious to advance, we will not accept to
remain in yesterday’s shadow.
It is true that we apply this liberal spirit, that our era prides itself in,
only to the scientific domain. One discovery is always prepared by
another discovery and this process makes us welcome the new one
more. In the realm of pure thought, this liberalism is not as great,
let’s admit it, despite our dressing it up in a fancy way.
Sometimes a prophetic mind produces an unprecedented idea,
without any preparatory accompaniment and we find ourselves
surprised. We don’t understand and have trouble admitting it. But
this idea, shouldn’t we contemplate it religiously as soon as it
appears in the light of its dawn, with a new intelligence, stripped of
all tradition, and avoid pushing it down to our level of understanding
but, on the contrary, rise up to its level and expand our knowledge of
what it can bring us? But domineering tradition remains,
contemptuous of and ridiculing every innovation.
The Cinema is a convincing example of this little theory.
Thirty years ago, when the Lumière brothers perfected the
discovery that permitted the capture of life’s motion, everyone was in
awe of their mechanical invention. The sensitivity of photographic
film recording images of steps of motion and, by their multiplicity,
succeeding at reconstructing an entire action, everyone found this to
be a marvelous accomplishment. Their invention attracted interest
and it was perfected. The film camera came into being as a scientific
instrument, a precision recording tool.
Many long years later, when artists, handlers of thoughts,
discovered that cinema had a soul, an intellectual sense that allowed
it to extend beyond the scientific domain to enter the realm of art with
unknown powers and forms, tradition was moved.
For many centuries, there were only six arts: painting, music,
poetry, sculpture, dance, architecture, and anyone who claimed to
add a new element to this magnificent cohort would have been
considered completely crazy. Another art form? What an absurdity!
Was such a thing necessary, did artists really need a new form to
express themselves?… Human sensibility could already flow out
abundantly through existing channels, that a new art form should
spring up among the others appeared both useless and foolish.
Nevertheless a new caste of artists was born, one not content to
seek expression of its sensibility and intelligence in any of the
existing art forms. They are neither literary artists, nor playwrights,
nor painters, nor sculptors, nor architects nor musicians, they are
Filmmakers for whom the art of motion, as embodied by the cinema,
is a unique form of expression. These practitioners of a new art form
do not see the cinema in the same way as the mass audience and
when, out of economic necessity they get drawn into accommodating
the taste of the general public, they feel ashamed of themselves, like
traitors.
And that is why for a while now, passionate Filmmakers, in their
writing and speaking, have been preaching their faith, trying to
convince, so that the fruits of their labor do not result in mortal failure
because, I should add parenthetically, failure is not permitted in a
business which requires enormous sums of money, unless there is a
wealthy sponsor….but that is but a dream, and what we must really
do is win over the general public (without whom we can do nothing)
whose tastes and desires are not in line with the true spirit of
cinema.
From the beginning, we became accustomed to an erroneous
cinematic approach, and when Filmmakers, realizing the mistake,
tried to lead the masses of filmgoers towards a new approach, they
refused to follow and the error persisted. The Cinema, as we
perceive it at the present moment, is nothing but a reflection of the
other arts. But it is too important to remain simply a reflection, we
must free it from its chains and allow it to assume its real personality.
In its technical aspects, nothing binds it to the already existing arts.
Without a doubt, it is widely assumed that the outward objective of
cinema is to visually reproduce motion in all its aspects: it does not
reproduce, like sculpture or painting, a momentary gesture, but a
gesture in its entirety from beginning to end. It owes nothing to
sculpture, painting, interior decoration, architecture, frozen in
immobility. I would go so far as to say that photography is just its
means of expression, its pen, its ink, not its thought.
If I now imagine the portrayal of inner motion, I find myself faced
with literature (poetry, dramas, novels) and also music.
A theatrical drama contains motion because there is a constant
development of characters, in their actions, in their facial
expressions. The novel contains motion too: the unfolding of a
succession of thoughts that deduce, clash, collide. Motion too in
poetry which mirrors a succession of impressions, that opposes and
links feelings and states of mind. Words, in literature, can be
assimilated with the elements of motion, which are reconstituted into
a phrase. There is motion too in music which rolls out in always
changing, always lively, harmonies.
So we admit that the diverse forms of literature, theater, and music
are arts of motion like the cinema.
Others besides me have made this association as the discovery of
the Lumière brothers has been refined, a destructive association
which has distorted the very basis of the new medium of expression
that experts had brought us. The mechanical instrument having
preceded inner feeling, we have commercially exploited the
discovery of cinema without looking at its artistic possibilities and
without asking if, in its essence, there does not lie an unknown
element, a new form of expression.
At this time, I repeat, Filmmakers, those who feel the need to
express themselves with motion, do not yet exist in the intellectual
world. The instrument having preceded the creative spirit, and form
having come ahead of art, those with practical intelligence have
decided to put visual motion at the service of already existing motion,
at the service of literature, of dramatic and novelistic concepts.
Instead of imagining an art of motion in itself, we have confused it
with mere agitation and just shifting things around. We see in cinema
just a way to increase the number of dramatic scenes and sets, to
extend the theater stage to infinity and strengthen dramatic action by
practical changes.
As far as music is concerned, no one has even thought about it.
Music is an art in which feelings are too abstract. It serves only as an
accompaniment to the projection of films.
From then on, Cinema has been filed away in the intellectual
domain. It became just a new means of expression given to
novelistic or dramatic literature and, since the cinema was motion, it
was confused with a collection of actions, situations and used for
“stories-to-be-told” and, since visual stories need a setting,
architecture, painting, and all the static art forms, following in the
steps of literary ideas, descended on poor cinema as on an easy
prey, waiting to be domesticated. What then could cinema borrow
from them? Nothing. Only set decoration which wasn’t really suited
for it anyway. Because cinema provides its own décor: moving,
changing, blending light, natural, mobile light.
Credited (or should we say discredited?) as a minor intellectual
curiosity, cinema has been classified as a lower form of expression.
In this subservient role, it has no way of growing and, despite all the
worthy achievements it offers us, but which are perhaps not really in
its true spirit, it remains suffocated.
And so cinema has not yet prevailed in its quest to find its real
place as an intrinsic art form. The public, suspicious by its very
nature of any innovation, has filed it away, in support of tradition,
between theater and literature, happy that it is not considered as a
substitute for painting, architecture, or sculpture!
In fact, cinema is not made out of the elements of any of these art
forms. It has been held prisoner within the frame of what exists,
reduced and chained to ancient concepts when it should be explored
for what it can bring, a broadening of our senses in an unexplored
form.
The cinema is a new art, and even in the forms which commerce
and tradition have imposed upon it, its contribution is extremely
important.
One of its primary characteristics is its educational and
instructional power; documentary films expose it as a form of
microscope which enables us to see things in the real world that
would have otherwise been invisible. In a documentary, in a scientific
film, life and its progress appear to us in a thousand details that our
naked eye could not ordinarily follow.
There exists, among other examples, a study recorded in slow
motion of flowers coming into bloom. The life stages of flowers seem
brutal and limited to us: birth, flowering, death, and we are not aware
of their minute progression through movements equivalent to
suffering and joy. Cinema reveals this to us in all the fullness of their
being.
When we were taught natural history as children, we were told
about bees and their behavior. We looked at still images in books but
it all appeared very distant to us, like a faraway land that could only
be imagined. With cinema, there are no unexplored lands and no
longer any barriers between things and us, between our imagination
and the truth in all its subtlety. And, scientifically speaking, the
cinema illuminates everything that it records with a clarity that avoids
errors and distortions.
The Cinema is an eye wide open on life, an eye more powerful
than ours which sees what we do not.
Truth, subtlety, logic, capturing the uncapturable; undeniable
qualities; the cinema has its own place, an eminent place since it
teaches us things which we would not otherwise know. And building
from this solidly concrete scientific base, we can begin to erect a
framework of theories for a new form of art, an art of visual ideas that
has its roots in nature, in reality, and in the imponderable.
The films conceived in every country bear the mark of their origin,
they have a national character. But we go beyond local customs, to
the spirit, to the soul, because cinema, though its stories may often
be a bit childish and make us shrug our shoulders, has
accomplished the marvelous task of drawing our spirit closer to what
is human, to teach us to contemplate the big picture, to ignore what
is unimportant. It simplifies our spirit by raising it.
In the domain of the imagination it has thus submitted inspiration
to what men have in common between them and also to rules of
synthesis which lead to a great clarity, and logic that results in
making one point of motion harmoniously prepare another one.
The cinematic methods which concentrate impressions have
habituated the most rebellious spirits to a sort of rapidity that one
also finds in today’s literature and theater. And this brings us to the
observation that neither literature nor theater, which tend to dilute
impressions and inspirations, have influenced cinema but that, on
the contrary, they themselves have been influenced by the cinema.
Can we not then conclude that, since literature and theater, which
have always wanted to incorporate themselves and still want to
incorporate themselves into a visual idea, have had to submit to the
laws of cinema, because they are not made to collaborate with us?
And a very curious thing: when a filmmaker is obliged to base his
work on a novel or piece of theater, he most often takes from the
novel or the play elements that are not made concrete by words or
actions, and creates a new work alongside the already existing one.
The cinema is the art of vision as music is the art of hearing,
should it not on the contrary lead us towards a visual idea made from
motion and from life, towards a conception of an art of the eye
created from a sensory inspiration, evolving in its continuity and
attaining the same level of thought and sensibility as music?
An art made from the truth of nuances, from which springs the
imponderable! An art which is not limited to a piece of clay, a swath
of canvas, to precise lines, to words which close off life, to the
narrow channel of a sentence restraining feeling.
Music alone can evoke this impression that the cinema also
proposes. And in the light of the emotions it offers us, we can
understand those which the cinema of the future will offer us. Music
does not have precise boundaries either; can we not therefore
deduce in the light of existing things, that a visual idea, that the
theme which resonates in the heart of filmmakers, pertains more to
musical technique than to any other technique or ideal?
Music which provides this sort of transcendence to human feeling,
which records the multiplicity of states of mind, plays with sound in
movement just as we filmmakers play with images in movement.
This helps us understand the concept of the visual idea, an artistic
development of a new form of sensibility.
The integral film that we all dream of composing is a visual
symphony made up of rhythmical images that only the sensations of
an artist could coordinate and put onto the screen. A musician does
not always compose under the influence of a story, but more often
under the influence of a feeling.
Le Jardin sous la Pluie by Debussy or Le Prélude de la Goutte
d'eau by Chopin, for example, are the expressions of a soul pouring
itself out and reacting to things around it.
There is no story other than the one of a soul which feels and
thinks and yet our sensibility is affected. The musician’s heart sings
in the notes which, heard in turn by the listeners, will give birth to the
emotion in them. The same is true for the sensibility of the filmmaker
who can express himself by the superimposition of light and of
motion whose vision will move the audience’s soul.
The cinema which, like Proteus, takes such varied forms, can also
remain what it is today. Music accompanies many dramas or poems,
but music would never have been music if it had limited itself to just
a combination of notes, words, and action.
There is the symphony, pure music. Why cannot the cinema too
have its symphony?
It is not the personality of the character that has the most
importance in a scene, it is the relation of images between
themselves and, as in all art, it is not the external action which is
really interesting, it is what emanates from inside, a certain
movement of things and people, seen through a state of mind. Is that
not the essence of the Seventh Art?
At the present moment, the inspiration of the filmmaker is
restrained.
 Every work of art is essentially personal. But unfortunately
filmmakers do not have the right to express themselves; they must
put their sensibility at the service of works already known because
the public, alas, will so far only accept a certain form of film.
Among the audience, there are a few who love the future
possibilities of cinema. They are the ones who understand. There
are many others who love the cinema only in its current state and it
is to them particularly that I address my words because it is above all
a disastrous mistake to hold prisoner this beautiful art of the future
that is far greater than the poor little stories we force it to tell.
And I will have reached my objective when I have said it again:
Our ideal goes far beyond what we have so far produced, you must
help us to free cinema from its shackles and create pure cinema.

Les Cahiers du Mois, 1925

 EVERY FILM IS LINKED TO AN AESTHETIC

La Folie des Vaillants is less a sketch of poetry and lyricism

plucked from nature, in the heart of rough people, the victims of
violent emotions, than an attempt, without pretention, to simplify the
theme of cinema, bring it back to simple basic lines, without mixed-
up situations, without visible technical artifice, without a
predominating theme, with only a concern for creating a harmony of
images in a rhythm and an arrangement leading more to a
suggestion than to the knowledge of a clear and unequivocal
expression.
Drama, in other words the brutal conclusion of a situation, is less
the result of actions than of moods. The actions? They do not
amount to much without the moral force which drives them. Are not
actions the result of an emotion, and this emotion in its nuances and
its unfolding, is it not, more than the acts and situations it provokes,
the real drama?
La Folie des Vaillants! … The reactions of a sensibility drawn from
the very soul. Symbols, lyricism, formulas that may have gone out of
fashion, but remain very much alive in everyone’s heart when one’s
heart is in an emotionally receptive state.
A song of images, a sensuous rhythm dominating the muffled
orchestration of action.
"Avant-garde?" "Old cinema?" Doubtlessly both. The avant-garde,
what can it mean in the context of the Seventh Art, too young to
really know itself and too old to not already be the prisoner of
tradition. Perhaps the abandonment of the strengths that it cannot
draw solely from itself, the search for a way to live off of its own
possibilities. The effort of slow progression which can only be
attempted with a light touch.
La Folie des Vaillants, simplification of a theme, predominance of
a harmony between images, storytelling reduced to a minimum of
combined events and settings. This is all I have tried to do in this
film. A step towards getting used to the idea of a visual symphony,
where so-called “theatrical” action will be nothing and sensibility…
everything.
But who can claim today to have followed their inspiration to its
end, to have achieved their ideal?... Tirelessly searching, freeing the
cinema from its ties to the other art forms, little by little, with the
caution of an explorer in unknown territory. Succeeding, also making
mistakes…
If only the public was willing to follow us in our attempts and not
blame us when what we do does not resemble what we have done
before! To share our quest at our side! … Utopia! …

Comœdia, 15 January 1926

 CONCESSIONS

Le Colisée and Lutétia are showing my latest film this evening: La

Folie des Vaillants. The critics, with a unanimity for which I am
grateful, praised this work when it was presented to theater
managers and the press, and judged it on the basis of the aesthetic
according to which it was made and not on traditionalist prejudices.
But the critics, knowing full well that the cinema is too young to be
held to unmovable principles, can accept the experiments of
filmmakers, whose research, thoughts, and development they are
aware of, while the majority of the public ignores all this. A filmmaker
is, for the mass audience, just a distant artist of whom they know
nothing, not even his name, having not yet understood that behind a
film is hidden a creative will equivalent to that which forms the basis
of the creation of every work of art and that a work on the screen,
like a painting, a sculpture, a book, a theatrical play, can and must
emanate from the sensibility of a personal vision. The fullness of an
art form arises from an abundance of individuals bringing to it the
diversity of their approaches. Manifestations of cinema are not
always just commercial, akin to objects mass-produced to satisfy
customer demand. Sometimes they reflect an ideal and a form of
personal expression emerges from their technique.
All art forms have their different schools, and command
recognition despite the opposing ideas which divide them, and all
gain from this richness more strength in their unity: the cinema, an
art form as well, has been excluded from this tolerant law and forced
to fit into a mold with only one concern: tell a story, move audiences
with specific actions that illustrate it, and above all always be the
same as other films.
When we stroll through an exhibition of painting or sculpture, we
do not expect uniformity in each work’s conception. In the same way,
in a concert, it is accepted that there be a variety of inspirations and
harmonic methods.
 In a movie theatre, nothing of the sort. In order to be appreciated,
a film must resemble other films. If not, whistling and booing break
out. The majority of the public, those who impose their will, do not
look to a work of cinema to have their ways of understanding
expanded, but instead expect a repetition of emotions they have
already felt. The public does not tolerate a film that expands the
visual domain with new sensations, it does not permit the puncturing
of dangerous holes into the thick vegetation of its routine.
Nevertheless an art can only blossom when it has the freedom to
explore the possibilities that arise from the diversified techniques and
inspirations of the artists who express themselves with it.
Painters, writers, sculptors, musicians, are free to create according
to their ideas and styles. As long as their work is moving, it does not
matter what the techniques or the meanings of their works are! But
the filmmaker is imprisoned by the tyranny of the majority of the
public.
Why this injustice? Why must the filmmaker be the “eternal
jester?”
So, La Folie des Vaillants is a barbaric poem, a rhapsody of the
steppes, a work of combat, with all of its qualities and defects, a
work conceived in the hope of grabbing for an instant the attention of
that part of the audience that is only attached to the story and its
unfolding not through the narration and the development of specific
external actions, but through the lyricism of the shots and how they
accord with each other, in other words, through the evocation of what
is happening outside the obvious visible action. Will this conception
be understood?

In searching for a new direction, I have avoided associations with

yesterday’s avant-garde; in reaction to it, I have simplified in the
extreme the theme just as much as the plot devices, the
photography, even the set design.
Can the cinema touch one’s feelings without combining and
accumulating story events? This is a very timid experiment, but
attempted with heartfelt sincerity, far removed from my ideal of
melodic visual rhythms conceived without human forms, but still
responding to a clear aesthetic, a defined wish. Rhythms in motion,
but motion as a subject, although far in the future, rhythms in the
motion of lines and forms will stir emotion all by themselves.
A branch of cinema. Like the symphony is to music. One form of
cinematic expression among others.
Why does not the majority of the public today allow us anything
but uniformity?

Comœdia, 2 April 1926

 DIFFICULTIES

It is easy to defend myself.

As long as the public does not permit our ideas to appear in our
works, the films which we present to it will reflect commercial
concerns above any for art.
We are not painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, artists who, to
give form to their inspiration, need only a bit of canvas, some
pigments, some clay, some paper. The raw materials of our work
are, alas, subject to such material contingencies that the very least
of our creations requires the backing of powerful financial interests.
Unfortunately subject to the rule of money, we must keep our own
personality quiet and do everything to please the public. We assure
you that in doing so, we are ourselves in the role of screen heroes.
Keeping one’s own personality silent is often not easy when one has
an inner faith in the future of cinema and in all the new riches that
this Art form can bring.
In my view, the Seventh Art is completely misguided. It is for the
moment nothing but a reflection of the other arts and will not be able
to live its own life until it is completely freed from the false traditions
that suffocate it. The cinema of the future is so far from the cinema of
today that a slow evolution is necessary before we, film authors, can
steer it towards its own truth.
Meanwhile, we have to stay in favor with the public, maintain a
certain popularity, a certain renown, to enable us, little by little, to
teach instead of please. If we are unknown to producers, unknown to
the public, it will be totally impossible for us to act.
We cannot afford to offend the taste of producers because they
alone hire us to make attractive commercial films; to offend the
public is equally impossible because the failure of our films in their
eyes would be catastrophic.
I make commercial films but I write, I speak at conferences to try
to change the public’s perspective on cinema and it is with my
speech and my written words that I try to attain my real ideal, pure
ideas. Working in this way keeps us, film artists, in contact with the
public’s intelligence and not just its pleasure, and we may be able to
create an environment capable of understanding the new expression
of Art that we would like to magnify through original works, the mark
of a true cinematic meaning of visual ideas.
So that is why our films do not reflect our thoughts. There is, on
the one hand, the profession: what you see; and, on the other hand,
there’s our personality: what we think, what we write, and which the
general public does not know.
Our fate is in the hands of the public. As long as it asks for works
of narrative emotion, we will continue to tell neatly arranged stories
in images, completely the opposite of the nature of true cinema, but
what else can we do?

Indépendance Belge, 1 May 1926

 SOME REFLECTIONS ON “PURE CINEMA”

The art of cinema is, in our time, for those who have faith in its
inexhaustible wealth of expression and its new aesthetic, a source of
both disappointment and enthusiasm.
Of disappointment, because the screen does not seem to be
adapted to reflect the traditional forms of art when one understands
that motion, light, and shadow can create emotion while sweeping
across the whiteness of its surface in rhythmic harmony. Of
enthusiasm, because the art of cinema, born in our time, is far from
having reached its full potential, is not yet conscious of the form it will
take, which permits its disciples to sally forth in search of its real
meaning.
Up until now, cinema has been content to be anecdotal and
narrative, attaching itself in this way to literature. It has been just a
succession of animated images capturing the movement of life, it
has been able to rise to the description of moods, attaining a
psychological or poetic form, but without ever escaping, even in its
most beautiful works, the intrigue which confines it to the realm of
the theater or the novel.
Considered in this way, cinema does not seem to have any
character of its own, and to be nothing but the sensation of
photographs in motion, depicting situations which other art forms
have used as the source of their inspiration over the centuries. But it
appears to some that cinema has the potential for a new form of
expression, independent and unfettered: a line where every point is
moving, a volume, whose magnitude and form are transformed, a
music of the eye, analogous to music made from the uniting of
impalpable sounds in tune or in melodic phrases.
The elements which constitute the raw material of cinema: motion
and light, are they not capable of creating what souns coming from
the union of strings, brass, woodwinds can offer the human
sensibility? I believe they can, and I have always wondered why the
public refuses to see in cinema an art form capable of enlarging the
scope of its feelings instead of obstinately reducing it to a role which
can only be considered that of a minor art form, when within it
rumble new strengths capable of broadening the intellectual and
artistic domain.
Already, in other countries, works which we could call “pure
cinema” are appearing on the screen and are being rewarded with
success.
In France, the vast majority of the public disapproves and only
recognizes progress in the art of cinema if it does not clash with a
mistaken idea of storytelling.
Often we filmmakers are told; “The cinema is not an art. It has
nothing to offer.” Nothing to offer! How could it offer anything? If it
seeks to be itself, it is repudiated. It is judged according to outdated
aesthetic notions, while to understand it fully it would be necessary
for the public to receive it in a new sense: a visual sense, analogous
to a musical sense.
Dramatic art evolves, pictorial art evolves. Literary forms change.
To each new manifestation of old art forms, the public tries to adapt
its understanding. But not so when it comes to works of cinema. For
the public, today’s film must just be an extension of yesterday’s with
greater perfection, richer, maybe more intelligence…that’s all. And
that leaves us, the filmmakers, stuck on the ground despite all the
momentum pushing us towards the future.
When will the public consider cinema to be a new art form that
must be judged with a new spirit?

Le Figaro, 2 July 1926

 THE FRENCH CINEMA AS SEEN BY MME
GERMAINE DULAC

The occasion of an outdoor film shoot led me most recently to a

unique site, whose attractions and charms enhanced by one of our
most distinguished curators provided an artistic background for the
psychology and the motion of a scene of my next film, Antoinette
Sabrier.
The luck of a ray of sun and the work of everyone brought together
the curator of the museum and park and the director of the scene of
the film. The latter, being me, could only smile with much sincerity
and give thanks for the welcome received and the marvelous setting
put at the disposal of the scenes to shoot.
A bit of national pride accompanied the grateful greeting I
addressed to the distinguished gentleman who oversaw the
organization of this joyous visual occasion, pride that was
augmented by a certain satisfaction in thinking that cinema, having
finally taken its rightful place among the exalted arts, will have the
power to propagate French ideas beyond borders, and to take pride
in having them accepted where they are not yet known.
But the seminar in which the curator and I were engaged did not
permit me to express these pleasurable feelings.

SEMINAR

- I hope you are not going to bring in here a motley crowd, black…
blue… yellow…
-…
- French cinema is quite bad… Except for a couple of films… Why
this mediocrity when the Americans… the Germans…
-…
- Why do you always choose actors to perform in your films?…
-…
 - Why are your films always inspired by subjects taken from novels
or theater plays?…
A bit flustered by this avalanche of hostile and vaguely sarcastic
questions that I avoided answering, it would have taken too long…
and the sun was threatening to disappear, I needed to shoot, work,
take advantage of the favorable light to do justice to the photogenic
setting. And also, what good would it do to discuss with a single
intelligent individual when it is the public at large that must be
responded to?
These reflections of one refined and enlightened man, how many
times have we heard them in different forms and from all directions,
how many times have they come to us, alternately inciting and
discouraging our fervor!

TO SUMMARISE

The cinema, a carnival fairground.

The cinema, yes… occasionally… America… Germany…
The cinema, a pale substitute for other art forms, the theater, the
novel, but a substitute, a reflection.
The cinema, a distraction of debatable quality.
… and the filmmakers lose patience.
Here are a few thoughts submitted for their consideration to the
public with whom I would like to open a discussion

THOUGHTS

The cinema, as it appears in its current manifestation, has a fake

face, wears a mask that disfigures its face but that the public
requires it to keep on.

Today, the cinema… Tomorrow the Seventh Art, only the public is
delaying its progress.

Works of art on the screen, as we conceive of them today, have

nothing to do with those which will one day delight a more informed
audience, with those which must come to be. In this space between
the present and the future, why not save time?

It is up to you and your colleagues, screen professionals, to show

us the real face of the art which you serve, as the public enjoys
saying. But how can we, since the public will not accept the progress
of cinema unless it follows the path of a mistaken tradition?

It is the public, much more than us, that builds the tradition of
cinema. The art of cinema is governed by economic requirements. If
we filmmakers are to create, we need to raise capital that we can
only obtain from bankers who require, above all, a guarantee that we
will pay back the investment and return a profit which they have
every right to expect. The financial security that we must guarantee
is founded, above all, on our ability to please the audience we
address. Audiences, used to a tradition of fake cinema, will not
accept or tolerate anything besides films which amuse and divert
them, those whose ideas are mediocre. They do not consider
cinema in a sophisticated way, as an exploration, a new insight.
Every cinematic innovation that tries to change the idea of what
appears on the screen meets with an icy reception if not outright
hostility. The producer, as a wise businessman – and as such he is
not to be blamed for his prudence – opposes every innovation that
could endanger the sale and success of a film. The guilty party, the
only guilty party… the public.

When the audience judges our films with a far-reaching spirit,

freed from all traditions, curious about progress, truth, sincerity,
altruism for the art of cinema that has not yet revealed its true
meaning, producers, confident that their product will be well
received, will let the artists and technicians create the original works
that their sensibility already wants to achieve.

Without the public, we can do nothing. If audiences do not react

for a long time, we will stagnate, we will contrive to produce cute little
stories in pictures which, as we know, have nothing in common with
true, exclusively visual cinema.

The cinema does not contain any of the elements of other art
forms. It is unjustly kept prisoner inside the structure of what exists.
We keep it chained to ancient ideas, reduced to old concepts, when
we should seek to find in it the free expression of our human feeling,
in a newly explored form. Current practice has lead the public to
think that, to exist, the cinema must borrow from the theater, its
decorations and its actions with a defined plot line from beginning to
end; from imaginary adventure literature, its principal attraction; from
the actors, its main appeal.
But is not true cinema in any way analogous with music, sounds in
motion…lines and volumes in motion, the play of light?

Music, like cinema, has no precise boundaries, so can we not

deduce, in the light of existing things, that the visual idea, the theme
which resonates in filmmakers’ hearts, has much more to do with
musical techniques than with any other technique or other ideal?
So, music which provides this sort of transcendence to human
feeling, which reflects a multiplicity of moods, plays with sound in
motion just as filmmakers play with images in motion.
Does not music help us to understand the visual idea from the
point of view of art, the development of a new form of sensibility?
The cinema, which like Proteus can take on many forms, can also
just remain what it is today. Music certainly accompanies novels and
poems but music would never have been music if it had been limited
to just a combination of notes, words, and action.
There is the Symphony of pure music. Why should the cinema too
not have its symphony: visual motion reflecting artists’ moods where
objects and light can play just as great, if not greater, a role as the
characters in its story?

Every work of art is essentially personal because it emanates from

the mind of an artist or a personal sensibility, and it is this mind or
this sensibility which gives it its value.
 Unfortunately, filmmakers cannot express themselves, they must
put their sensibility at the service of works already known because,
alas, the public has up to now accepted only a certain form of film.

I apologize to the readers of this article. Many of them love the

cinema for its future possibilities: these readers will understand me.
Many also love the cinema in its current state, and it is to those
readers that I address myself above all to ask them not to keep
prisoner in a disastrous error this beautiful art of the future that is so
much greater than the poor little stories that we force it to tell.
But is it really right to blame us without listening to us, we
filmmakers, who are the first to suffer from the state of things that the
public, who somewhat disdain us, has created?

Nouveau Siècle, 12 July 1926

 PHOTOGRAPHY – CINEGRAPHY

I came to cinema through my attraction to photography, and in

the ten years since I have chosen cinema as my mode of
expression, I have lost my taste for photography.
This may seem paradoxical since cinema is apparently nothing but
photography.
Nevertheless, our effort, for us Filmmakers, is it not to forget that
our thoughts can take form in their growth and in their rhythm only by
the inevitable material means of the lens and light-sensitive film? In
the same way, a writer’s inspiration sometimes rebels against the
words which shut him into a defined framework.
For me, cinema is not the art of surprising with beautiful lighting
effects, interesting expressions, but the art of exploring emotional
motion. The photographic effect, in cinema, is nothing if it is not
dynamic and does not correspond to a stage of progression along a
visible or invisible line.
Photography, if we consider it in the general sense, is painting
made possible by the acuity of the eye which knows how to see
through a lens.
The captured light is true, as are the shadows, whether it is a
question of backlighting, frontal lighting, lighting from the side, or
combinations of the three radiating in composed ways, capable of
showing a fragment of life in all its meaning. While in painting,
contour and light pass through the artist’s mind to be inscribed in a
subjective way on a canvas, in photography the mind of the artist
makes a purely cerebral choice and the lens does its work on reality
for him. But the result is similar, each achieves the visual emotion
through a static view more or less enveloped in intellectuality.
But, in cinema, the static element must be pushed away. The shot
whose quality “freezes” the spirit is defective because it “freezes”
motion. Is this to say that the aestheticism of photography should be
ignored? I would not push the paradox so far. But does not
photography, which imposes itself as photography, correspond in a
work of cinema to the rhetorical effects that weigh down the
balanced order of a literary work?
For the Filmmaker, photography is nothing more than the printing
press which permits the communication of ideas. Obviously, it is
better if the letters in a book are beautiful, but what meaning do
these letters have if they do not correspond to an inspiration worthy
of being communicated? Printed musical notes, as printed letters,
have no existence of their own, they are just signs. The same is true
for photography in cinema. The only thing that matters is the overall
idea that coordinates, juxtaposes images, words, sounds.
But one can object that cinema finds the source of its emotion in
the picture recorded by the eye. The art of capturing rays of light,
harmonizing them, making them interact, of framing the shots, is this
not one of its sensory values?
Does the visual emotion of cinema really come from the formal
beauty of its images? I don’t think so. Is not the combined lighting of
a picture a defect when it is static and immobilizes what it
illuminates…? The motion of light, maybe more than its beauty, is its
truth, but then we are leaving the photographic sphere.
Just as I am hostile to the romantic or dramatic script in cinema,
so am I hostile to the photographic effect which removes the
spontaneity of motion from the art of the screen.
Scientific films teach us an important lesson: the phenomena of
crystallization in the Pathé collection, for example, stir emotion not
by their photography but by their rising and transformative motion
which exposes the light-sensitive film through the lens. And the light
plays across moving prisms, not static to produce just one effect, but
changing, alive, accompanying the motion.
Photography in cinema must not impose itself as photography. It is
simply a means to transfer the rhythmic ideas of the filmmaker into a
tangible sphere.
It is not photography that is in play because a work of cinema is
formed not from the images themselves but by the way in which they
succeed, oppose, and are coordinated with each other and, more
than any other element, by the choice of shots.
 Skillful photographic effect, selective focus, the gradients of
lighting, all come to nothing if they are not controlled by the values of
the shot and its framing. It is therefore not the photography but the
placement of an expression with a dominating or diminishing value
that carries the meaning.
The most beautiful photographic effect is meaningless if it is not in
harmony with the framing of the shot.
Cinema is not the photographer’s art any more than it is the art of
the painter or writer; it is the art of these new artists who find their
expression in motion.
Good photography never rescued a bad film; a good film, well-
conceived, has often made viewers forget bad photography.
A beautiful phrase has never rescued an empty thought; a strong
thought has sometimes rescued an awkward phrase.
Photography in cinema has only the value of a printing press. You
may say that this is already a lot but I do not accord to
cinematography the status that one wants to give it in the Seventh
Art. Obviously, we play with “fades,” “lap dissolves,” “travelling
mattes,” lenses that bring us closer or distance us, and it all involves
the grammar we use to distill the effects that they induce, but these
are the techniques of the filmmaker and not strictly speaking the art
of photography.
Cinema is at once very close to and very far from photographic art.

Stéréo-Revue, 25 October 1926

[reprinted in Photo-ciné, August 1927]
 THE FUTURE OF CINEMA
AN INTERVIEW WITH GERMAINE DULAC

[by Paul Guiton]

Cinema, as an art and an industry, is today in a rather strange

situation. At the same time as its success with the mass audience
grows, it is winning over a more discriminating elite. The magazine
"Les Chroniques du Jour" has just devoted an issue, magnificently
presented, to Charlie Chaplin. One can find in it articles by Henry
Poulaille, René Clair, Ramuz, Moussinac. In Paris there are avant-
garde theaters that present selected films that feature, as much as
possible, audacious techniques. Places such as the Vieux-Colombier
and the Studio des Ursulines are among the best known. But in
parallel to this movement, the vast majority of films opt for facility and
are highly reluctant to follow a new aesthetic even if it is no longer
possible for them to cling to the rudimentary techniques of pre-war
films. But, above all, there is a storm raging in the marketplace. The
intransigence of the American studios has resulted in the entire
European film industry uniting against them. This was clear at the
international cinema congress that was held in Paris last September
under the auspices of the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation.
To clarify such an exceptional question, it is necessary to consult
the masters of cinema, the film directors and theoreticians who
struggle to advance this art. Among these apostles, of whom the
most distinguished are French, there is no one who speaks with
more authority than Germaine Dulac. She graciously agreed the
other day to grant an interview to the readers of the "Petit
Dauphinois." She greeted me in a room full of nautical maps,
compasses, old books and souvenirs of the sea. It seemed like the
pilot house of the ship D’Entrecasteaux. One felt like one was at sea.
The film director’s whistle recalled that of a ship’s quarter master.
And Germaine Dulac has the stature to fit either of these jobs.

- You would like to know, she asks me, where cinema stands right
now? In a decisive stage of its history. We are in the process of
freeing ourselves from the grip of American cinema to form a
European film union. Yes, without a doubt, the American cinema has
made important contributions; but it has become too imperialistic.
Supported by the dollar, it has succeeded in imposing itself on the
entire world, and it does absolutely nothing for its world audience. It
seeks to please only its American customers. The rest is just a minor
supplement to its revenue and has no voice in the business. And it
has let others advance far beyond it in technical terms. It has not
taken advantage of its commercial prosperity to perfect itself apart
from a few rare exceptions. It is not going forwards, but backwards.
How can a European film union be put together? But it could be
said that this has already happened. In practical terms, this union will
include but three big producing nations, at least for the moment:
France, Germany and Sweden. The Swedish film, such a
magnificent accomplishment, has been the first victim of the
American cinema. Today, for a film to make back its cost, it needs to
have a huge potential audience, an international audience. If not, it is
destined to lose money. This is most often the case for film
production in small countries. They have a very limited domestic
market, and little or no foreign one. So you can see how none of
them are able to survive.
Italy? That’s another story. The Italian film has deliberately
committed suicide and it’s very unlikely that it will be resuscitated
anytime soon. In a European union, it can play absolutely no role
today. The Swedish film, on the contrary, asks only to be revived and
be rescued from its imprisonment at the hands of the Americans.
As for the Germans, they are indeed strong. They have the capital,
magnificent organization; their filmmakers can work with great
freedom. But do not think that they are so advanced. They are proud
of their marvelously equipped studios and they consider audacious
techniques that we do not use anymore. It’s like a pianist whose
virtuosity becomes a distraction to the music. In France we have
sought a much more refined art behind its outward appearance of
simplicity. Above all we explore rhythm, the composition of shots, the
subtle transition from one shot to another. We have gone past the
point where the Germans still find themselves.
What will each nation bring to the union? It will be a purely
commercial federation. Each member will preserve its technique, its
own vision, its preferences. When we meet, as filmmakers of
different nationalities, as we did last September during a conference
organized by the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, we form groups
according to our particular tastes, according to our own particular
aesthetic interests. There are those who favor pure cinema, and
those who support psychological cinema.
Personally, I am for pure cinema. I think viewing a film should be
like listening to music: a succession of lines, of volumes, light and
dark, arranged according to a rhythm with different sorts of
harmonies and dissonances. My ideal is the film without characters
and, therefore, without a plot. Difficult? Too hard for the general
public? No. If you present films in talks about the cinema, do an
experiment. Show a documentary, for example on the germination
and growth of plants. The Philistines will accept it because “it’s
educational”. Sincere people, which is to say most of the public, will
take obvious pleasure in watching the development of beautiful
forms, beautiful images, devoid of any sentimental preoccupations.
It’s what is happening now at the movie theater, Studio du Vieux-
Colombier. Go see it for yourselves. There are remarkable things to
see. This week they are showing a marvelous film on Hawaii:
Moana. There is no plot, nothing but images. It is very modern.
As for me? I have just shot Antoinette Sabrier. The script is
adapted from a popular play.

This was said with a slight tone of regret. True artists always take
pleasure in what they do and do everything they do well; it is the
great moral of art. And Germaine Dulac is a great artist. But, among
the innumerable amateurs or professionals who speak every day
about art and literature in public lectures, why are there not any who
risk defending cinema, an inherently French art form, whose
distribution abroad brings us so many advantages, material as well
as cultural?

Le Petit Dauphinois, 6 January 1927

 ON RUSSIAN FILMS

Russia, a country which has dared, attempted, achieved, which

has torn down in order to better rebuild in the spirit of the laws of
modernity.
Cinema, a new art, which dares only timidly, attempts only
restrictively, achieves only by following a short tradition, has nothing
to rely on when faced with the concept of a brutal revolution that
would allow it to be itself and bring it back to its fundamental
principles.
Very often I have asked myself this question:
How can a people, living in a new social order, clear in its vision of
everything, envisage the art of cinema which, born in our time, is still
too weak to overcome the economic and moral obstacles which
prevent it from living and developing in line with its own true
significance? So I have often asked myself - knowing that Russia still
produces few films given its size and knowing that some of our films
have been projected there - with what attitude these works,
conceived in a country whose social ideals are quite different, could
be received, especially by a younger generation which can only be
aware of the customs of a bourgeois state through second-hand
descriptions.
How have these films been reviewed and what were the creative
possibilities of Russia for this still undeveloped art form? Will Russia
bring the same audacity of conception and production to art as it has
to sociology? Every overthrow of an old order necessarily brings with
it new spiritual expressions. What will be the cinematic expression of
the Soviet Republics?
During the last year, the response of the Russians has not been
slow. They could have exported films that were honorable but
unexceptional, without a well-defined personal character, but instead
they gave us high caliber films distinguished by a very precise
technical point of view, a highly defined line of composition.
 I have had the occasion to view and study several major Russian
films, Mother, taken from a novel by Maxime Gorki, and two
commercial works on a more popular level: La Noce de l'Ours and
Abrek-Zaour (in French “Hors la Loi”).
The primary strength of works of Russian cinema shines through
in the quality of deep and noble inspiration, in the renewal of the
subject filmed.
Up to now, the intellectual side of cinema, with the exception of
certain documentaries, certain highly exceptional works, certain
scientific studies, has been enclosed by intellectual boundaries
which leave it very little room.
The cinema, “prisoner of the formulas of pre-existing arts,” and of
commercial demands, reflects only a concern for competently telling
stories of fiction in images, and depicting the development of
sentimental conflicts adapted to the particular mentality of each
country.
The custom of featuring actor-stars crushes ideas which have now
been reduced to remaining within limited boundaries.
The Russian cinema has, if I dare say it, swept away the
“individual” from cinematic inspiration and raised it to the height of
collective expression. The Battleship Potemkin is without a doubt the
most beautiful film one can see.
The Battleship Potemkin is not a story but history made
discernible, transformed into a page of a visual epic, an event behind
which rumbles the human and mystical impulses of an entire people,
the soul of masses in revolt seeking to live.

In The Battleship Potemkin, the Russian cinema makes the narrow

sentimentality that has up to now been a fundamental principle of
works of cinema look cheap and rises to the level of real sensibility,
one that stirs strong feelings.
The Battleship Potemkin is a work of pain and enthusiasm, a great
drama that puts opposing social forces into play: authority, a people,
an ideal, the future, reality.
From a material action, we are lifted effortlessly by a human
lyricism towards abstraction. The “individuals” disappear into the
crowd, and the crowd itself into the Idea. Nevertheless, all the
emotion we hold within ourselves is exalted to paroxysm.
When The Battleship Potemkin was projected I remember being
seized by the throat by the very first shots, as with the first chords of
a musical symphony.
This film reconciled me with action as it brings a new conception of
how it can work on the screen. Up to now screen action has stayed
attached to the theatrical aesthetic of plays and stage shows. But, in
The Battleship Potemkin, it is altogether something else. It is
architecture which rises up in a jet. Minor events and complications,
ordinarily so disagreeable, become here an individual detail that
gives fullness to the larger context.
The Russian film directors have drawn directly from new sources
of cinematic inspiration, casting off all the accoutrements of vain
literature, and knowing exactly how to measure out the degree of
pathos that a shot should contain.
I’d like now to cite the beautiful scene where all the boats in the
port of Odessa raise their sails to go out and resupply the sailors on
the battleship in revolt. These sails seem to embody the mystical
aspiration of the whole town towards an ideal. It is the soul of the city
which, in the sails swelled by the wind, goes out to join sailors as in
“Hors la Loi.”
The precise juxtaposition of shots, each of them highlighted in
order to achieve a more powerful impact, a perfect technique
sustained by a great breadth of vision.
I found in Mother by Gorki these same qualities of collective
vibration, the magnification of ideas.
In this film, it is individuals who are obviously in the foreground,
but they always communicate the impression of the crowd that we
can feel behind them. They are not just individuals but carry a larger
meaning.
Stemming from the same inspiration as the boats, the red flag
flying in the wind, behind which, thanks to skillful backlighting, can be
glimpsed the sun and the sky.
The Russian cinema is honest, we never find in it the sort of vain
artifice that presents pretty images just because they are pretty. It
goes straight to the heart of the matter. Every unique element of the
overall motion carries its own emotional message.
La Noce de l'Ours and Abrek-Zaour, which are more standard
films, seek to tell a story and align themselves more closely with
commercial conventions. But in Abrek-Zaour, for example, the
storytelling still draws its theme from authentic sources.
The Russian cinema does not draw its strength from complicated
techniques but from a renewed moral aesthetic of film. It reflects the
concerns of a people, their suffering, their impulses, their thoughts,
their hopes through this new art which is cinema.
The Russian cinema is the soul of a people which has effortlessly
discovered the meaning of images as a means of self-expression.

La Vie Économique des Soviets, 20 February 1927

 FROM SENTIMENT TO LINE

Rivarol once said "when you are right twenty-four hours before
the majority of people, for twenty-four hours you seem to lack
common sense."
When, in front of the majority of the public, and often too in front of
a great number of intellectuals and professional filmmakers, you
bring up the idea of abstract cinema whose expression will take its
form from the visual capturing of pure motion, outside pre-existing
aesthetic standards, a skeptical, even hostile, discomfort meets the
new aspiration of an art that is allowed to evolve as long as, in its
search for perfection, it does not stray outside a fixed framework
where a sort of tradition confines it.
But now, from many points of the globe, without knowing or
consulting each other, filmmakers devoted in isolation, in the silence
of their thoughts and their intuition, to identical quests come together
on the frontier of a new movement. “Utopia!” cries the phalanx of
those who stop at the exact limits of already solidly established
practice. “Truth!” responds the theory of the logicians who see in
everything only an ephemeral stage of transformation.
A new conception springs from a single mind. A dream, perhaps,
but the seeds of progress. A similar inspiration springs from several
minds, a small group is created and, with it, a reality.
Abstract or integral cinema should not be held in suspicion nor
disdained because, latent in the constructive energy of some and the
already significant proclamations of others, it exists as such.
Conceived, wished for, already concretely elaborated in several
films, it has descended from the branches of nebulous theories into
the realm of concrete expression. Certainly still in an embryonic
state, nevertheless tangible by the upward growth that animates
every living principle, it will establish itself mechanically, take its
place, having grown out of a collective instinct.
 The opinion of minorities may not immediately prevail but it must
be considered as a truth in its gestation period, the anticipation of an
ideal for the future.
It’s not my way of thinking to say that “integral cinema,” the
composed visual rhythms made concrete in forms purified of all
literal meaning, should be the “unique cinema,” but that “integral
cinema” is the very essence of cinema envisaged in its general term,
its intimate reason to exist, its direct manifestation, because
independent of dialectics and the material form of other arts.
It is through a slow evolution, based on experience, that I first
arrived at the concept of the visual symphony, then at that, more
synthesized and stronger, of integral cinema, music of the eye.
Like everyone, I considered that creations for the screen had to be
based on the development of an action, an emotion, by the optical
illusion of capturing life directly or in a reconstituted form, of a human
figure either singly or in multiples, and their emotional qualities
emanating from the chosen juxtaposition of animated images whose
intrinsic and successive mobility combined to produce a result more
intellectual than physical.
Motion, considered in itself, for itself, in its dynamic force and its
different rhythmic measures, did not yet seem to me to be an
"emotive note" worthy of being isolated.
But it soon appeared to me that the expressive value of a face was
contained less in the attitude of the facial traits than in the
mathematical duration of the reactions recorded by them, in a word,
that a muscle which relaxes or tenses up under the influence of a
shock only achieves its full meaning through the measure of the
length of the motion that takes place.
Because a retracting or fully developed movement of one of its
muscles can evoke an abstract idea without the whole face needing
to express emotion, is not the visual drama dependent on the
intervening rhythm in its evolving movement? A hand comes to rest
on another hand. Motion. A dramatic storyline, analogous to a
geometric line connecting one point to another. Action. The hand
executes this motion, slowly or quickly, the rhythm gives the motion
its intimate meaning. Fear, doubt, spontaneity, strength, love, hate.
Different rhythms in the same movement. Let’s consider
cinematically the stages traversed by the germination of a kernel of
wheat planted in the earth. In the same shot, without moving in time,
we would have the vision of a pure motion played out according to
the continuous logic of its dynamic force and whose rhythms
provoked by the difficulties of its complete development combine
their suggestive emotional theme with the actual physical theme.
The seed expands, pushes through the clods of earth. In height, in
depth, it finds its path. Here, its roots grow longer, multiply, struggle
to find a grip; there, the stem shoots up, seeking air and light, in a
light, instinctive hope. The straight stem seeks the sun, it bends
crazily towards it, the roots stabilize themselves, the ear of corn
reaches maturity. The motion changes path. The upward stage is
over. It is time for growth in other directions. If external influences
interfere with this happy blooming, if the stem, denied sunlight,
searches in vain for its renewing warmth, the plant’s anguish will be
conveyed by choppy rhythms which change the meaning of its
motion. Roots and stems will have created harmonies. Motion and its
rhythms, their forms already purified, will have determined emotion,
a purely visual emotion.
Flowers or leaves. Growth, the fullness of life, death. Worry, joy,
pain. Flowers and leaves disappear. Only the spirit of motion and of
rhythm remains.
A muscle twitches in a face, a hand is placed on another hand, a
plant grows toward the sun, crystals form on top of each other, an
animal cell grows, we find at the root of these mechanical
manifestations of movement a sensitive and suggestive impulse, the
power of life, expressed and communicated by the rhythm. From
there comes emotion.
From vegetation and minerals, whose lines, volumes and forms
are less precise, to integral cinema, the threshold is quickly crossed
because only motion and its rhythms create emotions and
sensations. A spinning circle crosses a space and disappears, as if
propelled by the force and the measure of its movement outside our
field of vision, and we create a delicate impression if the rhythms of
speed are coordinated with a defined inspiration.
 The idea of emotion is not attached exclusively to the evocation of
specific actions, but to every manifestation that effects a being in its
double life, both physical and moral.
When the cinema is used to tell stories, to magnify events, and
compose others for the greater pleasure of a mass audience I doubt
that it has achieved its goal. The cinema captures motion. Of course
the movement of a human being going from one place to another is
motion; just as the projection of this same being through space and
time, as well as his moral evolution. But the mere growth of an ear of
corn provides an even more perfect, more precise, cinematic
conception in giving the preponderant role to the mechanical motion
of a logical transformation, in creating by a unique vision a new
drama of the spirit and the senses.
The disciples of integral cinema are accused of being Utopian.
Why? As far as I am concerned, I’m not going to deny the necessity
of emotional values in a work. The creative will must address the
receptivity of the audience by a responsive line that brings them
together. But what I oppose is the narrow idea of motion that we
generally hold. Motion is not just changing position, but, also and
above all, evolution, transformation. So, why banish it from the
screen in its purest form which, maybe more than any others, is
hiding in itself the secret of a new art form. Lines, volumes, surfaces,
light envisaged in their constant metamorphosis are capable of
embracing us like the growing plant if we know how to organize them
into an assemblage capable of corresponding to the needs of our
imagination and our nerves, because motion and rhythm remain, in
any case, even in a more physical and significant incarnation the
unique and intimate essence of cinematic expression.
I picture a dancer! A woman? No. A line bouncing to harmonious
rhythms. I picture a luminous projection on veils. A precise
substance! No. Fluid rhythms. The pleasure that motion procures in
the theater, why disdain it on the screen? The harmony of lines.
Harmony. Of light.
Lines, surfaces, volumes directly changing, without anything
artificial, in the logic of their forms, stripped of all overly human
meaning to better rise towards abstraction and give more room to
feelings and dreams: INTEGRAL CINEMA.

Schémas, 1st and only edition, February 1927

 CONVERSATION

This week De Reusse has given me the responsibility of writing

the editorial for the Hebdo-Film. It’s the second time in less than a
year and, like the first time, I am a bit confused by the choice of my
subject.
Sometimes, and always with good humor, De Reusse discusses
my ideas in his own columns. Am I going to play him the dirty trick
today of writing an article in favor of integral cinema, or any other
question on which we disagree?
I have to admit, this fantasy situation tempted me a bit, as De
Reusse won’t miss the opportunity to oppose me right here next
week and we will begin to prepare in this way the foundation for the
opposing speeches which we have promised to give some day, with
him attacking my ideas and me defending them. But wouldn’t it be
better to emphasize our points of agreement more than our
differences?
The other day, at a presentation I found myself seated next to one
of our most open-minded film producers. “What we lack in France,”
he told me, “is the capacity for a united effort. You accuse us of
being money-grubbers and this doesn’t help us work together.”
I personally have never accused producers of being “money-
grubbers.” My God, what would we do without them, we poor
filmmakers who have no financing; and, admit it, what would they do
if by backing films likely to displease the public they saw all their
money melt away like snow in the sun?
Sometimes, to evaluate a situation fairly, one has to know how to
rise above it all, above even one’s own position.
In the first speech that I gave at the Club du Faubourg, I think, I
found this passage:

The art of cinema is ruled by economic necessity. To be able to

produce films, we need to raise capital that we can only obtain from
bankers who require, above all, a guarantee that we will pay back
the investment and return a profit which, we should admit, they have
a perfect right to demand. The financial security that we must
guarantee depends above all on our ability to please the audience
we address. So here is the problem. Audiences, used to a fake
tradition of cinema, will not accept or tolerate anything besides films
which amuse and divert them, those whose ideas are in general
mediocre. The public does not consider the cinema with refinement,
a love of experimentation or rare impressions; it asks only for a few
hours of pleasurable leisure. You will have noticed that cinematic
innovation that tries to change the conceptual approach of what
appears on the screen meets with an icy reception if not outright
hostility. In cinema, progress is only accepted when it does not stray
very far from established traditions. So it is easy to understand that a
film producer, acting like any astute merchant - in this he is not to
blame and I would never bad-mouth him - orders us to avoid any
affront to the taste of the mass audience and to totally forget any
innovations which might diminish sales and the commercial success
of a film. I hope you will excuse me for this financial parenthesis but
it is necessary at the beginning of this debate to clearly specify that
when the public’s taste has changed, when our spectators start
judging our films with an open mind unfettered by any established
tradition, curious to see progress, truth, sincerity, originality, the
producer determined to please them will ask for nothing more than
that we, the filmmakers, conceive works that our studies, our
observations, and our experience sometimes render so different
from the tastes of the general public.
So I defend, along with the cause of cinema’s continuing progress,
the producer, the director, and the scriptwriter, and I place
responsibility on the shoulders of the public alone for the mediocrity
of an art form that could reach a higher level of thought and beauty,
the same level as other art forms, if only it was understood. Without
you, the public, we can do nothing. If you do not react for a long
time, we will stagnate, we will contrive to produce cute little stories in
pictures which will have nothing in common with true cinema. And so
it is up to your generation, please believe it, to liberate this new art
form from routine and error.

It is for this reason that a few of us, concerned about the continued
progress of cinema both in spirit and form, speak, write, postulate
theories, not to blame producers, but to influence the public’s taste,
to prepare it for the evolution we are hoping for of an art that is still in
the making. I maintain that a producer is not predestined to favor one
type of production over another but is simply looking for its suitability
for the marketplace. If, to take an example, we can induce the public
to appreciate integral cinema in addition to dramatic screen
narratives, and to make it successful, producers will immediately
grant filmmakers the freedom of thought and technique that they
deny them now.
These words and theories are addressed to a public who always
rejects new aesthetic forms before accepting them. One remembers
the battle provoked by soft focus, image distortion, slow-motion
effects. But these shots, which were mercilessly booed two years
ago, are now greeted with applause and admiring astonishment.
And, to pick up the thread of my talk, “we would call on some more
youthful spirits,” the producer I was referring to told me, “if we were
sure of their good will toward us.”
Producers are assured of our good will. Are we not proving it?
They ask from us films that are adapted to the public’s current taste,
we do as we are asked with honesty and energy, giving them the
best our talent can do, whatever other ideas we might be capable of.
There are several reasons for this.
For us, working is a necessity, we cannot erase the past in one fell
swoop. Is it not slowly over the course of making films that do not
upset anyone that we can make the cinema move towards its greater
perfection?
But, in exchange, if two or three of these commercial films make a
lot of money, would it not be fair, as a form of reward, to allow us to
experiment a bit, make a few films with a bit of originality?
Not long ago, De Reusse told me: “Why can’t you, for heaven’s
sake, give us films instead of theories? It’s the only way to convince
us.” But my dear De Reusse, without the producers, we don’t have
any tools, which is to say, financing.
Let me be clear: I am not fighting here for a specific form of
cinema, but for a cinema that makes progress, that evolves.
I like Ruttmann’s films, shown at the Ursulines studio and which
embody my line of thought, but I also like The Battleship Potemkin,
The Holy Mountain, Variety, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and
many others with completely different approaches. Progress has to
be on a broad front and not associated with a single form. Music has
different aspects from the symphony to the operetta; everyone
follows their own style. The cinema, too, can have different aspects
from integral cinema to dramatic cinema if it is conceived through
experiments made in good faith in an exclusively cinematic spirit.
But one thing is certain and cannot be denied: filmmakers are not
just hired hands, as Mr. Bernstein declared in a memorable meeting,
but creators, artists with whose aspirations one must count.
Can we not in this era, when certain cinematic values are being
questioned, reconcile industrial and artistic concerns through a
mutual understanding and a complete agreement on a fair balance
between commercial necessity and artistic impulse? Art dies if it
does not advance. It does not advance if it does not change. The
same thing is true for industry.
What will happen if innovative films come to us only from other
countries, films that we in France had long planned to make but did
not have the material resources to make and take the lead over
others?
The art of cinema cannot live without concern for its own economic
laws, but neither can it live without the creative will of its artists.
De Reusse who laughingly makes fun of avant-garde filmmakers,
is he not himself aligned with the avant-garde when he disapproves
of adapting existing stories? Is De Reusse not speaking for the
avant-garde when he tells me: “I would not be opposed to the
cinematic strategies that you favor if you convince me of their
emotive power.”
So De Reusse accepts progress, so De Reusse accepts that, in
addition to what exists, the future holds other things.
 Is it too late for me to say: “Obviously, while remaining as loyal as
possible to our ideals, we must support with all our courage the
industry without which we could not live.”
All of our discussions arise from our great love of cinema, so from
a good intention, and they need to be clarified. This clarification is
only possiblen in a total alliance and a good balance between the
inclinations of artists and financial necessity, a union that can only
benefit cinema.
Can we not find a way to give filmmakers, who want to
experiment, the means to either brilliantly use or totally waste five or
six hundred meters of film in exchange for many more meters of film
thatwill be certain to sell easily?
I’d like to come back to the idea of an intellectual reward I
mentioned earlier, everyone would be happy and all suspicion
banished, the era of theories brought to an end, for the filmmaker is
not essentially born to be a journalist or a critic but is, and must
remain, an image-maker. He is not nourished by words but by films,
and perhaps, my goodness, even producers will have the pleasure of
seeing what I believe will be a continuouselevation, wider and more
perfect, of the audience towards cinema.
Are we wrong, my dear De Reusse, to never be satisfied, to
always be looking further without, however, meaning to harm the
commercial nature of cinema? But, I must add, because I took pains
to note at the beginning of this article that I would emphasize the
areas of agreement between us and not just our differences, that the
eclectic producer sitting next to me during the past hour, was in
perfect agreement with me on all of this.

Hebdo-Film, 9 April 1927

 LET US UNITE

“French film is dying, French film is dead!”

The alarmists proclaim at the top of their voice its decline and
disappearance, accusing all those who have devoted themselves to
its progress and development of a lack of ability and understanding.
French film is dying! How could it possibly live? Over and over it is
told to be American, to be German, to be international. Above all, not
to be itself. And it is also told to exist, to grow, to be strong, to assert
itself. How can it? Its own screens doubt that it has the right to be
seen!
Our eminent professor, Mr. Herriot, recently wrote about the
Musical Exhibition of Frankfurt am Main, this phrase which deserves
to be inscribed on the first page of the book of our cinematic destiny:
“To be international, one must first be national.”
Alas, French film has not heeded this wise principle. In trying to
please everyone, it is questioned by everyone and atrophies as it
fails to assert itself. American film imposes itself, why? Because it is
frankly American and no other nation tries to find itself in it. German
film imposes itself, why? Because overflowing with its own spirit, it
surprises with its effects which astonish and interest others because
they are so different from any other country’s mentality.
French film in remaining completely French, loyal to the secular
quality of its race, would it not stand a chance of reconquering
audiences beyond our borders, just as films of other countries have
conquered audiences right here in France with their sharply defined
personality?

We’re accused of not having the spirit of cinema! First of all, have
we really established what the general meaning of "the spirit of
cinema" is, and has America or Germany really understood and
served it better than us? I see many cinematic productions; very few
attract my attention. Most of them primarily reflect a mediocrity of
inspiration that does not belong just to France. Can we not count in
France, if we look closely at its production, as many first-class films
as other countries claim? It’s just that we are difficult to please.
Perhaps more than any other people, we have foresight about what
cinematic expression should be, what it should become in the
domains of art and intellectuality, and so we denigrate our current
efforts in obedience to our inner thoughts, our vision of the future.
France searches, studies. We can be accused of lacking
boldness, but not intelligence or understanding. If we get a little
encouragement, even if it is from ourselves, we will surely dare to do
more!
A colleague, and quite a notable one, said to me the other day: “in
other countries, the slightest effort gets support. Here, those who act
and produce get attacked by everyone. If we could avoid criticizing
ourselves so harshly, criticism from others would not be so bitter.”
It is hard to work productively in combat conditions, it’s obvious. To
be productive and contribute one’s share, one must have the great
peace that comes from silence. Why not be more forgiving of our
failures, more appreciative of our successes. We are all searching
for and progressing towards a deeper understanding of the art of
cinema. So?...What we have achieved on the screen so far are just
steps taken towards that goal, not fully achieved masterpieces. Why
prejudge an effort that does not delude itself?
A filmmaker from abroad, in France at the moment, admitted to me
recently: “I came here to learn.” As I was a bit astonished, I received
this compliment addressed to us all, in surprised, questioning
silence, he added: “Yes, I see in French film the greatest indication
of original determination.”

The French filmmaker is excessively individualistic. If you speak to

him of collaboration, being influenced, commercial necessity, he will
proudly resist, which from certain points of view could be destructive
but also wonderful when it is a matter of defending artistic ideas. Is it
not in this fact which we have trouble untangling but which others
perceive without our noticing it, that the redemption of French film
lies? To be personal, to be national, to better collaborate with the
high international philosophy of film, to create high class French film,
protected for a time from foreign competition and collaboration,
damaging because we are not proud enough nor well-enough
organized to defend ourselves, is that not an ideal around which we
all can rally?
In a few years, then, if we have not succeeded, we can allow the
alarmists to say: “French film is dying, French film is dead!” But why
bury French film at its very birth? We are better off uniting into a
broad fraternity to make it grow.
Photo-ciné, June-July 1927
 WITH MME GERMAINE DULAC
(by Y[von]. D[elbos].)

- A film must create emotion through images, and only through

images, the theatrical setting eliminated or reduced to nothing. The
cinema is a visual symphony; cannot vision alone provoke an artistic
reaction? Music (…) a symphony, does it worry about having an
intellectual meaning?
From this point of view, I was very happy to adapt Antonin Artaud’s
scenario because I could create in my own way the rhythm I
imagined.
Here’s an example: the day of the presentation, I noticed among
the audience that those looking for an underlying meaning were
unable to understand anything; on the other hand, those who were
willing to be swept along by “pure” images found, I believe, a certain
charm in it.
To preserve the integrity of this visual symphony, the film was
presented without music. At the end of the film, when this was
mentioned to one member of the audience, he replied that he had
not even noticed it.
- It’s an anti-intellectual idea. You condemn storytelling?
- Almost. Or rather, cinematic drama is not just a series of actions,
but a sign: a face, eyes, etc… An existing drama, but an inner drama
which must never be subordinated to a central, overriding idea that
directs the scenes.
Mme Germaine Dulac, who holds these views, has, by the way,
every right to do so; she has indeed proved that she knows how to
adapt the most diametrically opposed sorts of subjects, while all the
while keeping her strong personal identity. She agrees to this
observation with a smile.
- At the same time as I was shooting La Coquille et le Clergyman, I
was making L'Invitation au voyage, which will be released at the end
of the month. And yet it is a totally different film, very much made for
a wide audience. Nevertheless, I worked hard to preserve a unity of
time and place. Soon, I’m going to shoot for Alex Nalpas a film with
Edmonde Guy and Van Durren. Then, as the magazine Comœdia
has announced, Madame Bovary.
I’ve been accused just recently, Mme Dulac concludes, for making
this kind of film. A journal abroad questioned whether one has the
right to talk about pure cinema if one makes so-called commercial
films.
The criticism has little merit: in addition to providing support to the
film industry, is it not wise, for the industry as well as the filmmaker,
to educate the public progressively through works in which,
nevertheless, we put so much of ourselves?

Comœdia, 18 November 1927

 VISUALIZATION

What is causing the cinema to stagnate? Why does the Seventh

Art, a new form, a broad, magnificent form of expression, seem to be
stricken with sterility in its usual manifestations and fill us with
disillusion and sometimes bitterness? The screen, far from capturing
visual vibrations on the white surface of its canvas, seems content to
just reflect forms which are, if I dare say so, anti-visual.
To be visual, portray a sensibility by harmonies and the play of
shadows, light, rhythm, movement, facial expressions, is to address
the sensibility and the intelligence of the eye.
A deaf person can hear nothing but the inner music that plays
inside himself, and could not in any case perceive sound waves
emitted in the external world and take joy in them.
In the same way, logically, a blind person cannot be struck by
visual forms he has never seen. But I assert that in cinema a blind
person can take pleasure in the filmed work. It would suffice that a
person next to him explain the on-going action in the images: “Here
we have the young male lead, he is tall and blond, he is sitting in a
garden in the moonlight, he is alone and seems to be waiting for
someone. Here we have the young female lead running into view.
She approaches him. They embrace. Not far off, in the garden, the
villain lurks.” I can guarantee you that the blind person hearing this
recounting will get a taste of the film, in other words, he will follow
the story and get at least fifty per cent of the impact out of the
hundred per cent he would have received if he had been able to see
it.
But, a true film, should not be able to be narrated because it
should draw the value of its action and emotion from the meaning of
images made from unique visual vibrations. Can we narrate a
symphony? Can we narrate a painting? Can we narrate a sculpture?
Of course not. We can only describe the impression and the emotion
which emanate from them.
 Works on the screen, to be worthy of the deeper meaning of
cinema, should not be able to be summed up by just a storyline. The
power of the image should be paramount and count more than any
other quality.
In the preparation of a film, the story comes first and then the
image, which is to say, that theater is preferred to cinema. When this
approach is reversed, the cinema will begin to find its true meaning.
The struggle of the image, taken in the profound sense of its
orchestration, against literature.
The future belongs to a film which cannot be summed up in its
story. The whole challenge for the film of the future is in this word:
“Visualization”.

La Rumeur, 29 November 1927

 AESTHETICS, OBSTACLES
INTEGRAL CINEMA
To Yvon DELBOS, friend of cinema.

Is cinema an art?
In the development of its strength, which is breaking down the
barriers, however solid, of lack of understanding, prejudice and
laziness, cinema is revealing itself in the beauty of a new form, thus
proving definitively that it is.
Every art form carries in itself a personality, an individuality of
expression that confers on it its value and its independence. Up to
now, we have kept the cinema within the limits of the task, splendid
but at the same time servile, of breathing motion into the life of the
other arts. Considered like an old master of human sensibility and
spirit who must abandon his own creative possibilities to take on the
shape of whatever traditional notions of the past, the cinema thus
loses its character as the Seventh Art. Yet, resolutely, by means of
opposing elements, occasionally stopping at certain stages of
struggle, it is rising little by little above the obstacles to emerge in the
light of its own truth before the eyes of an astonished new
generation.
If, as we currently envisage it, the cinema is just a substitute, an
animated image, but only an animated image of expressions evoked
by literature, music, sculpture, painting, architecture, dance, then it is
not an art. But, in its very essence, it is a very great one. And thus
there are constant and accelerated transformations of its aesthetic
that attempts unceasingly and painfully to free itself of repeated and
erroneous interpretations of which it is the victim, and to reveal itself
finally according to its own temperament. The cinema is a young art
form. While the other arts have had centuries to evolve and perfect
themselves, the cinema has had but thirty years to be born, grow
and move from its first babbling to a conscious language, capable of
making itself understood.
Looking beyond the forms that we have imposed upon it, let’s look
at the form that the cinema has taken, in its turn, to little by little
impose itself on us.
Cinema, a mechanical discovery made to capture the precise,
continuous motion of life and the creator also of combined
movements, surprised when it first appeared the intelligence,
imagination and sensibility of artists who were not prepared for this
new form of externalization and who up to then had been content to
create and express themselves through literature (the art of written
thoughts and feelings), sculpture (the art of material expression),
painting (the art of color), music (the art of sounds), dance (the art of
the harmonies of gesture), and architecture (the art of proportions). If
many minds appreciated the curious contribution of cinematography,
very few grasped its aesthetic truth. For the intellectual elite, as well
as for the general public, cinema was obviously lacking a
psychological element, indispensable for judgment, namely, that the
vision of motion taken from this angle: a displacement of lines, could
incite emotion and require, to be understood, a new meaning,
parallel to literary, musical, sculptural or pictorial meanings. A
mechanical device existed that promoted expressive forms and new
sensations, latent in its gears: but in each person, even with a
malleable intelligence, no spontaneous feeling emerged that called
forth the rhythm of moving images and the cadence of their
juxtaposition like a keyboard of long wished for, long searched for
vibrations. It was the cinema which slowly revealed to us, inhabiting
our unconscious, a new emotional sense that brought a sensory
understanding of visual rhythms and made us greet the cinema as
an expected art form – not our rational desire.
While subservient to our old aesthetic concepts, we kept cinema at
our level of understanding, while it attempted, in vain, to raise us up
to an unprecedented conception of art.
It is fairly troubling to note the simplistic mentality with which we
greeted the cinema’s first manifestations. At first, it was nothing more
for us than a photographic means of recording the mechanical
motion of life, the word “motion” evoking in our mind only a
commonplace vision of animated people and things, coming, going,
moving about, without any other concern besides moving within the
frame of the screen, when we should have been considering motion
in its mathematical and philosophical essence.
The sight of the hilarious train arriving at the Vincennes station
was enough to satisfy us, and no one, at that time, dreamed that in
cinema was hiding a new contribution to our sensibility and
intelligence with which to express ourselves, and no one thought of
going further to explore beyond the realistic images of a crudely
photographed scene.
We did not seek to know if in the Lumière brothers’ device lay, like
an unknown precious metal, an original aesthetic; we were content
to domesticate it and make it just the receptacle of past aesthetics,
disdaining any in-depth examination of its own possibilities.
Aiming to make cinema’s mechanical movements, which we
declined to study carefully, more attractive, we decided to add the
moral activity of human feelings through the intermediary of fictional
characters. In this way cinema became an outlet for bad literature.
We started gathering animated photographs to illustrate external
actions. And, after having been first experienced in its purity, the
cinema entered the realm of fictional motion of narration.
A work of theater is motion because states of mind and actions
evolve. The novel is motion because there is a presentation of ideas,
a series of situations, which follow each other, clash and collide. A
human being is motion because he moves around, lives, acts, reacts
to a succession of impressions. From deduction to deduction, from
confusion to confusion, rather than studying the concept of motion
itself in its rough and mechanical visual continuity, ignoring that the
truth might be within it, we assimilated cinema into theater. We
considered it an easy way to multiply the scenes and sets of a
drama, to reinforce dramatic or a variety of fictional situations by
ceaselessly changing views, thanks to the alternation of artificial sets
with nature.
The capturing of motion, taken from life, was followed by a strange
concern for dramatic reconstructions, derived from pantomime,
exaggerated expressions and enacted subjects, where the
characters become the principal elements of interest, even though
maybe the evolution and transformation of a form or volume or line
would have brought us more joy.
We completely lost sight of the meaningful value of the word
“motion” which we put cinematically at the service of specific stories
to be told in which a series of images, obviously animated, serve to
illustrate the theme.
Most recently we[74] had the fortunate idea of comparing the films
of our time to a film from an earlier period, thus showing us a
caricature of the narrative cinema we still venerate today in a more
modern form: photographed action so far from the theory that points,
after years of error, to pure motion as the creator of emotion.
Opposite these images of delicious childishness, just how much
closer the simple view of a suburban train entering the station of
Vincennes seems to be to the true sense of cinema. On the one
hand, arbitrary storytelling, without any visual considerations, on the
other the capturing of raw motion, that of a machine with its pistons
and wheels, its speed. The first filmmakers, who thought it was
clever to enclose cinematic action into a narrative form, embellished
with cheap reenactments, and those who encouraged them were the
perpetrators of an error.
A train arriving in a station gives a physical and visual feeling. In
composed films there is nothing comparable. An invented story, a
fiction, without emotion. The first obstacle encountered by the
cinema in its evolution was thus this preoccupation with a story to
tell, this conception of dramatic art judged necessary, played by
actors, this prejudice of the inevitable human being at the center, this
total misunderstanding of motion considered for itself. If the human
soul is going to extend itself through works of art, can it do so only
through other souls shaped by a cause?
Painting can nevertheless create emotion by the sole power of a
color, sculpture by that of a simple volume, architecture by that of the
play of proportions and lines, music by the union of sounds. None of
them needs a face. Could we not consider motion from this unique
angle?
The years passed. Production methods, the science of filmmakers,
were perfected, and narrative cinema, in its error, attained the
fullness of its literary and dramatic form with realism.
The logic of an action, the precision of a frame, the truth of an
attitude constituted the structure of visual technique. In addition, the
study of composition entering into the organization of the images
created a surprising expressive cadence which was assimilated into
motion. The scenes no longer followed one another independently,
simply connected by an inter-title, but were now dependent one on
another according to a emotive and rhythmic psychological logic.
At that time, Americans were supreme. We came back little by
little, circuitously, to the meaning of life, if not the meaning of motion.
We worked on telling stories of course but we filtered images so that
they no longer contained useless gestures and unnecessary detail.
We balanced them in harmonious juxtaposition. The more cinema
perfected this approach, the more, in my opinion, it strayed from its
own nature. Its attractive and reasonable form was even all the more
dangerous than it was illusory.
Skillfully written scripts, splendidly acted performances, luxuriously
decorated sets, drowned the cinema impetuously in literary,
dramatic, and decorative notions.
The idea of “action” was more and more confused with the idea of
a “situation”, and the idea of “motion” vanished into an arbitrary
series of briefly rendered actions.
We wanted to be true. Perhaps we had forgotten that in the
presentation of the famous train in Vincennes, when our spirits, free
of traditions, were surprised by a new spectacle, the attraction that
we found there was rooted less in the exact depiction of characters
and their gestures than in the sensation of speed (very low at the
time) of a train coming straight at us. Feeling, action, observation,
the struggle began. Cinematic realism, the enemy of pointless
commentary, friend of precision, attracted so many viewers that the
art of the screen seemed to have reached with it a summit.
 Nevertheless cinematic technique, through a curious detour,
started to rise towards a visual idea by means of a fragmentation of
expressions that presided over the production of the scenes acted
out.
To create dramatic motion, it was necessary to successively
oppose facial expressions and intensify them with different shots
corresponding to the emotion promoting it…
The intervening shots, the necessary fragmentation, the cadence
established itself. From juxtaposition was born rhythm.
Carmen du Klondyke was one of the masterpieces of this type.
Fièvre, by Louis Delluc, which will stand as one of the most perfect
examples of realist film marked its high point. But in Fièvre, beyond
the realism floated a bit of dreaming which went over the line of
drama to an “expression” that transcended the specific images. A
suggestive cinema made its appearance.
The human soul began to sing. Going beyond actions, an
imponderable movement of feelings melodically emerged dominating
people and things piled up at random as they are in life. This film by
Louis Delluc did not meet with the success it deserved. The public,
always prisoner of habit and tradition, the eternal obstacle that every
innovator runs into, did not understand that an event is nothing
without the play of fast or slow actions and reactions which causes it.
I remember that in 1920, in La Mort du Soleil, having to depict the
hopelessness of a scientist who regains consciousness after having
been overwhelmed by a stroke, I put into play more than the artist’s
face and his paralyzed arm, the lights and shadows surrounding him,
giving to these elements a visual value measured in their intensity
and cadence against the physical and moral aura of my character.
This sequence was of course cut out, the audience not tolerating
the action being delayed by perceptible commentary. Nevertheless
the era of impressionism had begun. Suggestion was going to
extend action, creating in this way a vaster sphere of emotion
because it was no longer confined within the barriers of specific
actions.
Impressionism made the audience consider nature and objects as
elements contributing to the action. A shadow, a light, a flower, had
first a meaning as a reflection of an inner soul or a situation, then
little by little became a necessary addition with their own intrinsic
value. We tried hard to make things move and, with the intervention
of the science of optics, tried to transform their lines according to the
logic of a state of mind. Following rhythm, mechanical motion, long
suffocated inside a literary and dramatic frame, revealed by these
means its will to exist…But it collided with ignorance and the force of
habit.
La Roue, by Abel Gance, marked a significant step forward.
Psychology and play became clearly dependent on the cadence
dominating the film. The characters were no longer the only
important factor, instead the length of shots, their juxtaposition, their
accordance played a primordial role next to them. Rails, locomotive,
engine, wheels, pressure-gauge, smoke, tunnels: a new drama burst
forth composed of motion, at last rationally understood, reclaiming its
rights, taking us magnificently towards a symphonic poem of images,
towards a visual symphony located outside known formulas (the
word symphonic is used here only as an analogy). A symphonic
poem where, as in music, emotion bursts out not in actions and in
gestures, but in sensations, the image carrying the value of a sound.
A visual symphony, the rhythm of combined motions freed of
characters where the displacement of a line, of a volume, in varying
cadences, creates the emotion with or without the crystallization of
ideas.
The public did not give Abel Gance’s La Roue the success it
deserved. When filmmakers used the play of various rhythms in
which, sometimes, the speed of a single shot, striking like a bolt of
lightning, had the value of cadence - I was going to say of a thirty-
second note - analytical rhythms in the synthesis of motion, the
audience started to boo: pointless booing which metamorphosed
later into applause. For the same thing, yet different effects only
several months apart. The time needed to get accustomed, what an
obstacle, a waste of time.
Cinematic motion, the visual rhythms corresponding to musical
rhythms, which give to general motion its meaning and its power and
are made from values analogous to the values of harmonic duration,
had to be perfected, I dare say, by sonorities constituted by emotion
within the image itself. Here intervenes the architectural proportions
of the set, the forced flickering of light, the thickness of the shadows,
the balance or imbalance of lines, optical resources. Each shot of
Caligari seems very much to be a chord struck in the movement of a
fantastic burlesque symphony. A perceptible chord, a baroque chord,
a dissonant chord in the higher movement of the succession of
shots.
In this way cinema, despite our ignorance, emerged from its initial
mistakes and transformed its aesthetics, becoming technically closer
to music, leading it to finding that rhythmic visual motion could bring
out emotion analogous to that aroused by sounds.
Imperceptibly, narrative storytelling and the artifices of actors took
on less importance than the study of images and their juxtaposition.
As a musician works with the rhythm and the sonorities of a musical
phrase, the filmmaker began to work with the rhythm of images and
their sonority. Their emotive value became so great and their relation
to each other so logical that they had expressive value without the
help of a text.
This was the ideal that guided me just recently when I composed
La Folie des Vaillants, avoiding the acted scene to devote myself
entirely to the powerful play of images and sentiments through action
that was diminished, inexistent, but always dynamic.
We are allowed to doubt that the medium of cinema is a narrative
art form. As for me, the cinema seems to go farther by perceptible
suggestion than by making definitive statements. Could it not be, as I
have said before, that cinema is music for the eyes, and should we
not imagine the theme which serves as its pretext as being like the
perceptible theme which inspires the musician?
The study of these different aesthetics, tending to evolve towards
a single concern for motion, logically evokes a pure cinema capable
of living outside the guardianship of the other arts, outside any
theme, outside any interpretation.
The principal obstacle for cinema is the slowness with which our
visual sense is developing and looking for fulfillment in the integral
truth of motion. Can lines that develop according to a rhythm
dependent on feeling or an abstract idea move us on their own,
without a setting, by just the action of their elaboration?
In the film on the birth of sea urchins, a schematic form - by a
more or less accelerated rotating motion depicting the different
angles of a curve - provokes an unknown impression in the thought
of which it is the manifestation with the rhythm, the breadth of motion
in the space of the screen, becoming the only critical factors. A
purely visual emotion in an embryonic state, a physical, not cerebral,
motion, comparable to the effect of an isolated sound. Let us
imagine several forms of motion that an artistic effort reunites in
diverse rhythms within the same image and juxtaposes in a series of
images, and we succeed in conceiving “Integral Cinema.”
An example, where a bit of literature is present but composed of
quite simple elements: the growth of a grain of wheat. The joyous
song that is the germination of the grain which reaches, slowly then
in a faster rhythm, for light, can this not be a synthesized and total
drama, exclusively cinematic in its intentions and expression? Yet
this hardly perceptible idea disappears before the nuances of
harmonized measures of motion in a visual score. Lines stretching
out, in conflict or in unity, blossoming and disappearing: a cinema of
forms.
Another expression of brute strength, lava and fire, this storm which
ends in a whirl of elements destroying themselves in their speed to
become nothing but streaks. A struggle for supremacy between
whites and blacks: a cinema of light.
And crystallization. The birth and growth of forms which harmonize
through the rhythms of analysis in an englobing motion.
Up to now documentaries, without any ideal or aesthetic, whose
only goal is to capture the movements of the infinitesimal and of
nature, have permitted us to bring attention to the technical and
emotional components of integral cinema. Nevertheless they draw
us towards a concept of pure cinema, of cinema as the art of motion
and visual rhythm of life and imagination.
Let an artist’s sensibility, inspired by these expressions, create,
coordinate according to a defined wish, and we touch on the concept
of a new art form, finally revealed.
 To strip the cinema of all impersonal elements, to seek its true
essence in the understanding of motion and visual rhythm, this is the
new aesthetic that appears in the light of a coming dawn.
Here is what I wrote in Les Cahiers du Mois:

Cinema, which can take so many varied forms can also just
remain what it is today. Music does not disdain accompanying drama
and poems, but music would never have been music if it had been
limited to having its notes tied to words and action on the stage.
There is the symphony, pure music. Why could not cinema also have
its symphonic form? The word symphony is only used here as an
analogy. Narrative and realistic films can use the flexibility of cinema
to pursue their aims. But the public should make no mistake: cinema
used in this way is just one variation, not the true cinema which must
seek its emotion in the art of lines and form in motion.
This quest for pure cinema will be long and painful. We have
misunderstood the true meaning of the Seventh Art, we have made a
travesty of it, shrunk it, and now the public, used to its current
charming and agreeable form, has mistaken this idea, this tradition,
for the true nature of cinema.

It would be easy for me to say: “Only the power of money prevents

the progress of cinema.” But money is only a symptom of the taste of
the public and its dependence on a type of cinema that it likes. True
cinema, I believe, is stronger than we are and, whether we like it or
not, will impose itself by revealing visual meaning. While the
techniques of music and cinema are similar, up to now their
inspirations have been dissimilar. They are both art forms which
create emotion through the power of suggestion.
Cinema, the Seventh Art, is not the photography of real or
imagined life as we have been led to believe until today. Considered
in this way, it would be nothing but a mirror of successive eras,
remaining incapable of generating immortal works which every form
of art must create.
To preserve what happens is good. But the very essence of
cinema is something else and carries the seed of eternity in itself
because it pertains to the very essence of the universe: Motion.

in L'Art Cinématographique, Volume II

(Paris, Librairie Félix Alcan, 1927)
 THE MUSIC OF SILENCE

There was a time, still not that long ago, when the cinema did not
desperately seek, as it does today, its own significance through the
erroneous interpretation in which commercial activity liked to envelop
it. It was content to remain in a sort of quasi-traditional form,
perfecting its technical capabilities while ignoring its superior
aesthetic.
Its technique, that is, the scientific side of its material expression:
photography. Its aesthetic, that is, the inspiration which uses
technique for expression of a spiritual order.
And, if the great masters of its advancement admitted that the
concepts of light, optics and chemistry, which surround it, could be
transformed, being at the mercy of progress, they soundly rejected
the thought of a parallel moral advancement.
Thanks to the combination of rolls of light-sensitive film and the
appropriate mechanism, we had in our hands a means for
photographing life, and to record its various manifestations and
movements. To photograph was to aim the lens at tangible objects
moving forward with a purpose or towards a purpose, and anyone
who spoke of going beyond this specific purpose and photographing
the intangible would have been considered a lunatic.
I say the intangible and not the invisible. The invisible, what exists
materially outside our visual perception, had been captured by
cinema for a long time, using an astute set of technical combinations
permitting the recording of, for example, each stage in the
germination or flowering of a plant, to render on the screen in
harmonious lines the drama and physical joy of growth and
blossoming.
The invisible could further be captured when slow motion,
multiplying the number of images recorded, allowed us to analyze
the reason for the beauty of a movement by showing us the nuances
of which its synthesis was composed.
 So, each new discovery modified and still modifies the conditions
of visibility. Some discoveries are focused on proportions and search
the shots seeking an impact on our vision. Others, by improving the
sensitivity of the film, offering the capability of capturing nuances and
the delicacy of colors, rendering their contrasts more pleasing to the
eye with more subtle blacks and whites. Still others perfect the light
permitting it to send off vibrations that strike the eye more powerfully.
If devices decompose motion to explore the domain of the
infinitesimal in nature, it is to visually teach us about the drama and
beauty which our eye, too synthetic, does not perceive. A horse, for
example, jumps over a barrier. With our eye we evaluate the effort
synthetically. A grain of wheat sprouts, we also evaluate its growth
synthetically. The cinema, by decomposing motion, makes visible in
an analytical way the beauty of the jump through a series of rhythms
that conclude in an overall rhythm and, when we examine
germination, thanks to cinema, we no longer get just the synthesis of
the motion of growth but the psychology of this motion. We sense
visually the effort of the stem to push up through the ground and
flower. Does not the cinema allow us to witness, by capturing these
unconscious, instinctive and mechanical motions, the imperceptible
aspirations of plants toward air and light?
Visually, motion, by its rhythms, straight and curved, brings us into
a complex form of life.
So, as we can see here, each scientific discovery has a well
defined purpose: improving visual perception. The cinema seeks to
make us "see this," to make us "see that." In its technical progress it
constantly addresses itself to our eye to affect our understanding
and our sensibility. It seems, therefore, that in its logical truth the
cinema only has to address our vision just as music addresses only
our hearing.
I keep repeating these words: visual, visually, view, eye, look, and
nobody would say "you are wrong," but there is a contradiction. If, by
virtue of its technique, cinema is uniquely visual, it happens that by
its moral aesthetic, it disdains what is purely visual: the image, by
concentrating only on reproducing expressions where the image
perhaps has a role, but not the most important one.
 For example, the cinema records photographic snapshots not to
move us "visually" but to narrate or embellish anecdotes, which were
not necessarily created to be seen, but to be read or heard.
Instead of focusing on the value of the image and the rhythms of
motion that it contains, today’s films focus on silent dramatic action.
Between mute dialogue or music of silence, there is a world of
difference. Up to now, the cinema has tended more to being a mute
dialogue than to being music. Two actors speak to each other in a
scene. Error. Only the silent expressions of their faces are visible.
But unfortunately in dramatic cinema actions count more than
expressions.
To sum up, the instrument of cinema in its scientific possibilities
was conceived with a purpose, while the inspiration of cinema
pursues another one. Where is the truth to be found? In my opinion,
in the technical instrument that created the Seventh Art. But why this
dual objective, you might ask? By the fundamental error which
governed the first film scripts, imbued with the prejudice that a
dramatic action can only be developed in the way it is in a novel or in
the theater, in other words, by specific actions rather than by
suggestion.
As for human action, since this is a matter of capturing it in its life
cthrough making gestures, surprise comings and goings, races,
battles, and since it was necessary to find a pretext to support this
external action, we say: "Let’s adapt literary and dramatic works,
works that merely entertain and that have already been successful,"
and from this comes the cinema as it is today.
When we, filmmakers, are asked to make a film, the producer
does not ask: "Do you have a visual idea? Do you know of a visual
theme, how will your scene unfold visually?" but they tell us: "Adapt
this theatrical play which has action in it, or this novel which has
been a bestseller," and we look for a story by trying to inject
something visual into literature.
Should we not struggle? 1) In favor of the greatest simplicity of
theme that disappears before the meaning of the image, in other
words, before visual expression; 2) In favor of the simplicity of sets -
don't forget that sets are visually, not dynamically, static, and that the
cinema is motion, and that a set, despite popular belief, does not
create the artistic value of a film; 3) In favor of this idea, that the
cinema, in the clarity of its images, must be more suggestive rather
than explicit, in the same way as music which, by the precision of its
chords, expresses the inexpressible; and 4) In favor of the rejection
of every idea promoted for a film that will not be able to accomplish
its emotional development by images alone, in the silence of the eye.
Of course the cinema can tell a story, but do not forget that the
story is nothing. The story is just the surface. The Seventh Art, the
art of the screen, is about rendering the depth, which extends below
this surface, perceptible: the musical intangible.

Cinégraphie, January 1928

 THREE ENCOUNTERS WITH LOÏE FULLER

Old memories... Ibsen and classical music were triumphant

successes at the theater on the rue Blanche. Often on Sundays the
music lovers, in leaving a concert, would come into the Casino de
Paris which shared the same exits as the main auditorium of what
would later become the Theâtre Réjane. Loïe Fuller! Everyone was
talking about this American artist who danced with light: changeable
and mobile white sheets evoking flowers and butterflies; projectors
whose multi-colored beams painted on the moving whiteness and
the gleaming variations of the gauze. An invisible body melting into
the diaphanous folds out of which emerged a head… a mind borne
by light.
It was in this way that Loïe Fuller appeared to me at the end of an
afternoon of austere music, other music, this one visual, revealed to
me almost stealthily, to me whose age prohibited admittance to the
music hall.
Loïe Fuller was not born a dancer and was not a dancer. At the
age of three, she was on the stage, she grew up in the glow of the
limelight, played Shakespeare, and from acting progressed quickly to
creation. Could light, like words, sounds, gestures, provoke emotion?
Touch your feelings? Loïe Fuller thought it could. She enriched art
with another harmony. She opened a school, not of dancers, but of
young people who learned from her how to take light and give it a
deep meaning. At the moment of this first revelation, did the public
understand the full import of Loïe Fuller’s art? I don’t think so; Loïe
Fuller’s creations pleased them but they perhaps did not realize that
they were sounding the first chords of visual music.

The years went by. I saw Loïe Fuller again. It was during the war.
The Light…how could Loïe Fuller not have spoken of it! But at that
time she did not want to imagine it only as an expression of art, but
as a defensive force: to blind the enemy, prevent him from continuing
his advance! The calculated and powerful play of projectors haunted
her, and perhaps she was right. Loïe Fuller was a great friend of
France.
It was just a little later that the great artist, at the intelligent
instigation of her collaborator, Miss Gaby Sorrère, became interested
in cinema; actually, she did not like cinema very much; she found no
charm in its visually impoverished stories, in their photography.
Could a white screen …really not be made richer in light and
motion? She was perhaps the first to really play with the effects of
black and white in the fluidly told fairy tale, Le Lys de la Vie, where
she found drama through optical tuning more than theatrical
expressions, and pushing her explorations further, she discovered, I
would almost say a superior form of cinema, perhaps not even
thinking that "this" was also cinema; the play of light and color in
depth and in motion on a normal screen, a manifestation of art that
was my last contact with her and my last astonishment.

Loïe Fuller struck her first chords with light at the time when the
Lumière brothers gave us cinema. A strange coincidence at the
dawn of an era which is and will be that of visual music; the work of
Loïe Fuller is close to ours, and that is why filmmakers pay her a last
and deep homage.

Bulletin de l'Union des Artistes, n° 30, February 1928

 RHYTHM AND TECHNIQUE

There are sometimes luminous hours in the career of a

filmmaker; that is how I would describe my short trip to Holland and
the reception that the public at the Filmliga gave to L’Invitation au
Voyage and La Coquille et le Clergyman. I recently wrote:

In a country of the old economic world, the cinema still adheres to

an idea, the visual ideal without reference to equations, additions,
subtractions, this country should be honored, Holland.
At the impetus of the "Filmliga", an elite group of artists and
intellectuals, a discriminating audience was selected in ten or so
towns, an audience respectful of creative effort, willing to make an
effort to understand and support the most modern advances of
works on the screen, generous and open-minded enough to look
beyond cinema’s established traditions, and to embrace without
criticism or complaint the new forms of cinematic expression that are
proposed to it when these are certain to reveal a visual truth.

In fact, the mass audience who complains about the intellectual

and artistic mediocrity of most cinematic spectacles is itself
responsible for this through its indulgence in works of anti-cinema
and by the indifference it shows for films that are worthy of support
as real expressions of a new aesthetic of thought and sensibility
which the play of moving images can bring us.
Faced with this taste for the mediocre on the part of a public that
takes pleasure in the most banal of cinematic concepts, how can
artists conscious of a higher art react? And how can the cinema,
which is both an art and an industry because it supplies spectacles
to the whole world, not sink to the lowest level of commerce, since
no higher will of the public, for whom these films are created, can
positively influence the producers, theater managers, buyers, whose
only thought, naturally, is profit? The artistic ideal is blocked by an
impenetrable barrier.
The Filmliga audience, who acting in reaction to this state of
affairs, are thus the most powerful allies that filmmakers could find in
the struggle they are conducting against the errors in how films are
interpreted today. The art of cinema cannot live without the artists
who create it and an audience who understand and altruistically sort
out the quality of their work.
There are good and bad films, there are cinematic subjects, that
is, those likely to elicit emotion from images alone, others where the
image has no value other than to simply photograph the steps of an
action. The latter are, in my view, anti-cinematic films.
The truly cinematic subject is one which permits the viewer to
acquire a sensitive perception of emotions or thoughts by visual
suggestion, whether it is a question of human expressions, or pure
motion, or the play of light. In cinema it is not the brutal action which
makes an impression but the emotion which it evokes. The theme
can thus be only a hypothetical line where actions are linked from
space to space, connected by their rhythm, bearing visual harmonies
as fluid and fleeting as sound.
In music, musicians are inspired by a theme which takes the form
of harmony and rhythm. Orchestration of notes enshrined in
measure. The cinema obeys the same law. In the past, in the first
films, only action existed, juxtaposed without rhythm, synthetically in
each composition. It was the discovery that harmonic chords and
rhythm could have a dramatic role that marked the great progress of
films in the last several years.
Film is subject visually to the discipline of rhythm in the same way
as music. A theme expressed in images can only have impact if it is
prepared according to the strictest laws of harmony.
Literature has very little place in the notebooks of visual
composers, the notebooks which serve to guide the making of a film.
Behind the instructions for action, the calculations, the number of
images needed for a shot to make its visual impression, a duration
always based on the mathematical measurement of the camera
which records 16 images a second and 53 images by meter of film.
The focal length of the lens - 35-50-75-90 and 105, etc., to define the
angle of view, the degree of camera tilt, the number of turns of the
crank, the lens stop, the length of film to be rewound for a
superimposition. Numbers, few words. Notations of light. Such is the
rhythmic orchestration of a film to emphasize harmonies, or if you
prefer, the tangible details that must "express" an action, bring it into
the visual domain.
And to get back to the main subject of this article, since the
directors of Filmliga have asked me to explain some technical points
of La Coquille et le Clergyman, I can say that my entire effort was
devoted to seeking the harmonic points in the actions indicated in
the scenario of Antonin Artaud, and to link them through carefully
composed rhythms. Such was the case, for example, at the
beginning of the film where each expression, each movement of the
clergyman was measured against the rhythm of breaking glass.
Such was also the case in the series of opening and closing doors
and also in the number of images determining the direction of these
doors which merge with the opposing beats in a measure from 1 to
8.
Two sorts of rhythm exist. The rhythm of a single image, and the
rhythm of multiple images together, in other words a gesture must
have a length that corresponds to the harmonic value of the
expression and depends on the rhythm that comes before or after:
rhythm within the image. Then, rhythm between the images: the
tuning of several harmonies.
I can assure you that not a single image of Clergyman was
created by accident.
I have been asked to reveal the technique I used for certain
effects.
Effects have had less importance for me than the measure, the
cadence, the visual orchestration of which they are just an element.
Nevertheless, getting some of them required a lot of patience. For
example, the head of the priest cut in two. A fine black thread divided
the actor’s face. A matte separated the film, the lens recording only
half of his head in the first take, while an obliquely descending
platform turning around eight times, gave the shot its motion; the
priest's face moving away from its normal axis. Once finished, the
camera was put back in its rectilinear position, the matte was put
over the other side, masking the other half of the head being filmed,
and then the same procedure was followed for the second take. All
of the difficulty arose from the exactness and mathematical
equivalence necessary for the two recordings, the head having to
come together with no overlap. The same effort of patience for when
the face of the priest divides. If the actor's head had to stay
motionless for half an hour in the preceding scene, its immobility
verified by the black thread, the other scene was no less laborious to
record. Using a stick of make-up, we had to trace a line from top to
bottom on the actor's face, a line of two millimeters for one turn of
the camera crank, approximately seventy times. As the face was
scarred by ten or so stripes, it took two hours to shoot the scene!
The other effects belong to the category of simple superimposition
(the head in the jar), and complex superimposition (the clergyman's
thoughts framing his head). A play of mattes and double mattes and
shots made at separate times and then put together. Shall I tell you
about the human forms, or the bodies distorted by using prisms and
steel mirrors? The lens ….the Diastréphore which widens or
lengthens, the Brachiscope…which distances or doubles the shot,
the Polytipare…direct superimposition, a mirroring plate with moving
shadows. The play of light captured in water or on glass or with
gauzes that shimmer…Instruments of visual music, creators of
harmonies…But what would they be (these cinematic effects were
already known almost thirty years ago) without the discovery of
harmonies and the study of cadence and measure. I can conceive a
film without optical research. But I do not conceive one without
perceptible notes or rhythm.

Filmliga, 11 April 1928

 OUR INQUIRIES INTO "TALKING FILM"

The response from Mme Germaine DULAC

1) The art of cinema, is it not the art of visual beauty in

combination with motion and light? To add words is to destroy its
deepest meaning. It is regression not progress.

2) The idiom used in each country is a moral frontier. Current films

already use bilingual titles. When our images are dependent on
words, something I cannot imagine, a big part of cinematic
performances will be incomprehensible for a part of the public.

3) The public, who are used to the silence of images and their
expressive sensibility, will revolt, I am certain of it, against the talking
film.

4) The technical modifications that will result from the advent of

talking pictures will take us back to the prehistoric era of cinema, the
cinema of static shots, cinema-theater (which we all condemn!) But
the great progress, if not talking films, will at least be musical films.
Harmony of images. Harmony of sounds. Two forms of expression
that are profoundly human and international, transcending the border
of language. As much as I condemn the talking film, I would greet
enthusiastically the musical film, like the one that a major French
studio has already produced.

Comœdia, 19 June 1928

 VISUAL AND ANTI-VISUAL FILMS

In the present state of world cinema, the critics, the studies, the
polemics have as much impact as the actual films. I would even say
they have more impact. Casting a ray of light onto an obscure future,
they altruistically point the cinema towards a specific goal, revealing
its ideal strength, its perfect image at a time when it can only be
contemplated in a deformed way.
The filmmaker himself is poorly equipped for this struggle. His
artistic will is constantly bullied. He is a slave. And I would even add
this cruel truth, he is not only a slave but almost happy to be one.
When he is not one, it's because he is not working, he cannot
manipulate expressions and light, explore the mysteries of the
lenses and prisms, materially embrace the image.
Who among us, filmmakers with pure ideals, would not even
sacrifice a bit of our ideals to possess a deeper understanding of film
and grasp the truth of its spirit in its technique. A slave is what the
filmmaker truly is. He is given the money necessary for the pursuit of
his work only in exchange for a pledge of subservience to the
public's taste, and in order to better serve his god, to know his will,
he prefers to recant.
These last years I have often witnessed this tragic instance, young
people full of enthusiasm, hopes, original ideas, innovative activity,
drowning like us in today's film industry.
The secret of this slavery: the economic vise. The musician writes
a symphony or a lyrical work. A writer composes a poem, a novel, or
a play. A painter is moved by a color or by a play of light. What do
these artists need to create the work they have imagined: paper, ink,
canvas, tubes of paint.
The other day, one of our best-known novelists, whose works have
been huge bestsellers, told me:
"For each of my novels, I need about 30 francs worth of ink and
paper."
 In the very worst case, if this novel goes far beyond the
understanding of today's public, if the writer, musician or painter
cannot publish or exhibit his work, what will happen? The literary or
musical manuscript stays in a drawer, or the painting in a corner,
until the day, in 20 or maybe 30 years, when it will be appreciated
and come out of obscurity to the greatest detriment and greatest
confusion of the generation which had disdained it.
In this case, public opinion does not influence the faith and ideas
of the sincere artist who dreams only or expressing his inner vision
without having to ask: "Will my work please people or not?" with all
of the anxiety about money spent and the fear of not being able to
afford to create other work in the event of failure.
If a filmmaker wakes up to the torment of a new feeling or insight
that he would like to express, obviously he will seek words to write
down this feeling, this insight, but the film will not yet exist because
cinema exists beyond words, in the feeling created by the shots and
the way they are woven together in succession.
To create these shots, an arsenal of costly instruments is needed.
How few benefactors have said to artists: follow your inspiration
without worry. And so filmmakers stay under the yoke, powerless,
counting on the improvements brought by the passing years to
enable them to reach the promised land of their dreams, the
promised land where the verbs "to think," "to feel," will be the
equivalent of the verb "to create" for those who have the talent.
Still, an art form does not grow except in proportion to the mind
and the inclinations of the artists who seek to express themselves
through it. But, up to now, filmmakers have had to express
themselves on demand and not simply on their own terms. The
superiority of altruistic achievements over material work is
indisputable.
Doubt can be cast among those who are ignorant by a book, an
article planting a good seed, with the independence of free thought
which owes nothing and expects nothing, and shapes art without
worrying about contingencies and necessities.
Criticism stirs reflection, incites each individual to meditation, a
healthy meditation on desired changes. The work of art confronts
prejudice, surprises without giving thinking the time to catch up, and
gets a result that is the opposite of what it sought.
Criticism prepares, explains, discusses, appeals directly to the
intelligence. The work of art addresses the sensibility, shocks and
provokes immediate reactions which are destructive to its spirit.
For a work of art to succeed, intelligence must have prepared the
way for sensibility, the work must be wished for before even existing,
the public must almost have imagined it before seeing it.
In cinema, sincere and genuinely visual work can rarely succeed
without the support of an intelligent and independent critique that
shows it the way and anticipates it before it even exists.
Of course, it is necessary to fight for one's ideas and have faith in
them, but one must also look around oneself.
Every art form has its schools, the tendencies of each one are
good when they end up producing a work of art. There is no point in
any one school reviling or disregarding another.
I am so imbued with the idea that cinema and music have a
common bond, and that motion alone by its rhythm and development
can create emotion, that I would evoke, if I followed my own
convictions, only one form of almost mechanical cinema where
rhythm governs all.
I wrote in my journal Schémas these few lines, a whole profession
of faith:

The idea of emotion is not exclusively attached to the evocation of

specific actions but to every manifestation which touches a being's
double life, physical and moral.
I doubt that cinema will have fulfilled its objective if it serves only to
tell a story, magnify events, and invent others for the greater
pleasure of a mass audience. The cinema captures motion. Of
course the movement of a human being from one point to another is
motion. Just as the projection of this same being in space and time
and also his moral progression, but already the flowering of a grain
of wheat seems to be a more perfect cinematic conception, more
precise in giving priority to the mechanical motion of transformation,
in creating by a unique vision a new drama of the spirit and the
senses.

So ideally, if not literally, I belong to the school that Viking

Eggeling, Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Man Ray have already illustrated.
But opposed to this school of pure, I would say extra-visual, motion,
is the anecdotal school. And what I would like to do here is to reunite
these two schools through the link of their common successful
elements: sincerity and knowledge of the visual.
Why does the anecdotal cinema so rarely offer us the spectacle of
a work of art? Because it lacks sincerity. At the base of a film stands
the filmmaker. But the filmmaker rarely expresses himself as artists
in other forms do because of their need to express themselves.
Between ten plays, ten books or ten scripts inspired by dramatic
and literary principles, the filmmaker is told: "Choose your theme," it
is the only freedom he is given. He must then submit to the story to
be told according to the treatment demanded by popular taste and
will.
The filmmaker is thus not sincere because he bows to a choice
and must voluntarily summon sincerity to the degree required by the
imposed subject and the public.
His sincerity will become the skill, the ingeniousness of technique,
without ever touching the very depths of his art. This question of
sincerity is very serious. It is perhaps the touchstone of what
constitutes a good or bad film.
A painter, in order to make a color sing with his brush, must
experience that color, developing different shades around it in the
form he has chosen, an abstract or realistic form. A playwright, an
author, experiences his subject too. A musician, the theme of his
harmonies. But the filmmaker is the only artist who cannot
completely serve his art spontaneously through his inspiration, he
must amputate his own feelings to be "industrially" pleasing.Sincerity
is nevertheless the major factor which must serve cinematic
progress, because only sincerity can produce works of art.
The other day I attended a meeting of the board of censors. We
were projecting a Russian film in which a scene was judged
inappropriate to be put on the screen.
Around me, I was hearing remarks: "How have the Russians been
able to produce such good films so quickly, almost always
exceptional films?" people were saying, despite political criticism.
And I was thinking to myself: "It’s because the Russians experience
their images. Whether it's The Battleship Potemkin, or Mother, they
celebrate their dream, their joy, their suffering. Every one of their
images comes from the deepest part of their being. They have first
experienced them, then seen them, then expressed them.
The best American films, are they not those in which a people, that
has had to conquer its territory with energy, expresses itself?
Swedish films whose themes draw from the source of ancient
legends are also heartfelt.
For the good of the Seventh Art, is it not necessary to nationalize
the inspiration of a film, letting each people find its visual expression
in the depths of its own soul?
First, national sincerity. Then individual sincerity. But neither one of
these types of sincerity is accorded to films which must obey, in
order to be sold, the laws of a narrow internationalism.
The sincerity of a people and the personal sincerity of the artist
must be at the root of a work of art, whether abstract films or
anecdotal films. But another big problem arises: that of visualization.
The great pity for cinema is that, while it is a uniquely visual art, it
does not today seek its emotional force by purely optical means. For
every cinematic drama, whether it is created from forms in motion or
by humans in a state of crisis, must be visual and not literary, and
the feeling that it evokes, the intangible creative idea or guiding
emotion, can only come from optical harmonies.
There was a time, still not that long ago, when the cinema did not
desperately seek, as it does today, its own significance through the
erroneous interpretation in which commercial activity liked to envelop
it. It was content to remain in a sort of quasi-traditional form,
perfecting its technical capabilities while ignoring its superior
aesthetic.
Its technical nature, the scientific side of its physical expression:
photography. Its aesthetic, the inspiration which uses technique for
spiritual expression.
And if the grand masters of its evolution accepted that the
conceptions of light, of optics and chemistry that surrounded it could
be transformed, being at the mercy of progress, they completely
rejected the thought of a parallel moral evolution.
Thanks to the combination of ribbons of light-sensitive film and the
appropriate mechanism, we had in our hands the means for
photographing life, and to record its various manifestations and
movements. To photograph was to aim the lens at tangible forms,
moving forward with a purpose or towards a purpose, and anyone
who spoke of photographing visual harmonies other than in these
defined forms would have been regarded as crazy.
But, every technical discovery was, and still is, modifying and
attaching itself to the conditions of visibility. Some modify proportions
by using new lenses or prisms and search through all the shots
looking for ways to impress our vision; others, by improving the light
sensitivity of the film, give it the capacity of capturing delicate
nuances of color contrasting in whites, blacks, or greys capable of
caressing the eye. Others, perfecting light, permit it to send off
vibrations that strike the eye more powerfully. If instruments
decompose motion and explore the infinitesimal in nature, it is to
show us visually the dramas or beauties that our eye, a powerless
lens, cannot perceive.
For example, a horse jumps over a hurdle. With our naked eye, we
judge its effort synthetically: a grain of wheat germinates, we also
judge its growth synthetically. The cinema, by breaking down the
motion, makes us "see" in an analytical way the beauty of the jump
by a series of lesser rhythms that add up to a total rhythm, and when
we examine germination, thanks to cinema, we no longer perceive
just the synthesis of the movement of growth, but the psychology of
the movement. We visually sense the effort of a stem piercing the
surface of the soil and flowering. The cinema allows us to witness,
by capturing unconscious, instinctive, and mechanical motion, its
momentum towards the air and light.
Visually, the motion by its rhythms, its straight lines and its curves,
involves us in the complexity of life.
 But, as we can see, each technical cinematic discovery has its
own well-defined purpose: it improves our visual perception. The
cinema makes us see this, see that. Constantly, in its technical
evolution, it addresses our eye in order to affect our comprehension
and our sensibility. In doing so, it seems in its scientific truth to
address only our sense of sight in the way that music addresses only
our hearing.
I am constantly repeating the words "visual, visually, sight, eye."
But a contradictory fact exists. If by its technique cinema is uniquely
visual, it happens that by its moral aesthetic, it disdains what is
purely visual: the image, by attaching itself just to reproducing
expressions where the image perhaps has a role, but not the most
important one.
For example, the cinema records photographic shots, not to create
emotion "visually" but to tell or embellish anecdotes which were not
essentially created to be seen, but to be read or heard.
Instead of focusing on the value of an image and its rhythms, films
today focus on dramatic action. Between silent dialogue and the
music of silence, there is a world of difference.
Up to now, cinema has tended more to be a silent dialogue than
music. Two actors speak in the course of a scene. Error. The silent
expressions of their faces alone will be visual. But in the cinema of
drama, alas, actions count for more than expressions.
So, the instrument of cinema in its scientific possibilities was
conceived for a purpose, the inspiration of cinema pursues another
one. Where is the truth to be found? In my view, it is in the
instrument which created the Seventh Art. But why, you ask me, is
there this duality of objectives? Because of the fundamental error
which governed the first film scripts imbued with the prejudice that a
dramatic action could not be developed in any way other than in the
manner of a novel or a work of drama, in other words, by specific
actions more than by the suggestion of expressions.
As for human action, since it was a question of bringing it to life
through making gestures, surprise comings and goings, races,
battles, and, since a pretext must be found to support this external
action, it was said: "Let us adapt literary and dramatic works to the
cinema, entertaining works that have already been successful," and
from that we get today's cinema.
When we filmmakers are asked to make a film, the producer does
not ask us "Do you have a visual idea? Do you know of a visual
theme, how will your scene be played out visually?" But they say:
"Adapt to the screen this theater play that has action in it, or that
novel which was a bestseller, and we look for the story, pouring the
visual into the literary.
Which explains the stagnation of the cinema. Which explains why
the Seventh Art, a broad form of expression, magnificent and new,
seems to be afflicted with sterility in its usual spectacles, and fills us
with disillusion and sometimes bitterness. So the screen, far from
capturing "visual vibrations" on the white surface of its canvas, is
content to just reflect forms that are, if I dare say so, "anti-visual."
To be visual, achieve sensibility by harmonies, the play of
shadows, light, rhythm, movement, facial expressions, is to address
sensibility and intelligence through the eyes.
A deaf person can only hear the inner music that plays inside
himself, and could not in any case perceive sound waves emitted in
the external world and take joy in them.
In the same way, logically, a blind person cannot be struck by
visual forms he has never seen. But I assert that in cinema a blind
person can take pleasure in the filmed work. It would suffice that a
person next to him explain the on-going action in the images: "Here
we have the young male lead, he is tall and blond, he is sitting in a
garden in the moonlight, he is alone and seems to be waiting for
someone. Here we have the young female lead running into view.
She approaches him. They embrace. Not far off, in the garden, the
villain lurks." I can guarantee you that the blind person hearing this
recounting will get an idea of the film, in other words, he will follow
the story and get at least fifty per cent of the impact out of the
hundred per cent he would have received if he had been able to see
it.
But, a true film should not be able to be narrated because it should
draw the value of its action and emotion from the meaning of images
made from unique visual vibrations. Can we narrate a symphony?
Can we narrate a painting? Can we narrate a sculpture? Of course
not. We can only describe the impressions and the emotions which
emanate from them.
Works on the screen, to be worthy of the deeper meaning of
cinema, should not be able to be summed up by just a storyline. The
power of the image should be paramount and count more than any
other quality.
In the preparation of a film, the story comes first and then the
image, which is to say, that theater is preferred to cinema. When this
approach is reversed, the cinema will begin to find its true meaning.
The struggle of the image, taken in the profound sense of
orchestration, against literature.
The whole challenge for the film of the future is in this word:
"Visualization."
It would not therefore be paradoxical for me to tell you:
The future belongs to films which cannot be narrated. I'll explain.
The visual shock is ephemeral, it is an impression one gets that
suggests a thousand thoughts. A shock analogous to the one which
creates a musical harmony.
The cinema can of course tell a story, but it must not be forgotten
that the story is nothing. The story is the surface.
The Seventh Art is the art of the screen, making the depth that
stretches out below this surface perceptible, it is musical intangible.
Whether it is the appearance of a face, a geometric form, a
changing line, it is motion in all its breadth produced by the rhythm of
its curves, its various lines, which creates the drama. A figure that
relaxes or tenses up in a complete motion. A grain of wheat that
grows, a horse jumping, silent visual motion of the same nature,
following the directive. It is not the profligacy of literary imagination
that makes a film. A film is something much simpler. A facial
expression, to achieve its full impact, must be seen in a single shot.
A growing grain of wheat does not change position, it rises; a
horse jumps within a very restricted space, and yet in these three
instances, there is motion, more, believe me, than in a chase scene,
for agitation should not be confused with motion.
 This concept necessarily brings some filmmakers to envisage a
unity of action and a unity of place in their films, thinking that in this
concentration and in this continuity the dramatic visual movement
will have more impact, more value. An aesthetic completely contrary
to the American theory of combined actions and dispersed views.
The more we can get rid of the anecdotal and move towards a
visual cinema, the more we advance the Seventh Art.
This concept necessarily involves revising certain cinematic
themes.
Anecdotal film or abstract film, the problem is the same. To touch
our sensibility by the power of sight and give, as I have already said,
predominance to the image by removing everything that cannot be
expressed by image alone. So the image can be composed of
motions which combine expression and light.
Visual cinema, the two words together should be a pleonasm.
Perhaps one day, but not now…The cinema today is anti-visual.
Make it visual. That is the first great transformation to be attempted.

Le Rouge et le Noir - July 1928

 TALKING FILM… COLOR FILM

What should we think about film in natural color?

Up until now, I felt that colors in cinematography would create a
kind of "chromo" vision.
To tell the truth, the art of cinema has not yet rid its own spirit of
the mass of errors and traditions that have blocked its progress, so
color can only reinforce these errors and traditions. In the future,
when cinema has become a symphony of the eye, pure visual music,
perhaps fields of color will reinforce emotion released by motion.
Today, I am against color film, tomorrow, perhaps, my opinion will be
less categorical. It all depends on the meaning and the spirit of the
application of color to motion.
On the subject of talking pictures, I consider that from the point of
view of art, cinema is a form of visual music, words can only diminish
it. From the point of view of propaganda, if a stage play must be
projected onto a screen to allow people in rural areas to see the
literary and dramatic spectacles that only city dwellers can see, I
think that talking pictures could be useful, but here I am speaking of
"propaganda cinema" which does not have much to do with the Art
of Cinema.

Paris-Midi, 17 August 1928

 SOME REFLECTIONS ON QUOTAS

France believed it had to take some measures to protect its films

abroad and within its domestic market. Many feel that this new state
of affairs is destructive as much from an international as a national
point of view.
I have to admit that from the very first I have favored the legislation
proposed, then voted on; I see it as a way to do justice to the work
and to the French spirit.
It was said in France: "The French cinema does not exist, except
for two or three films, two or three filmmakers! ...the others –
productions and producers – are not worthy of any interest! Admit
that France has no cinematic sense. Look at American, Swedish,
German, Russian productions…" But, to these detractors of French
cinema and the laws that have protected it thanks to the generous
support by M. Yvon Delbos first, and then M. Herriot, it is easy to
prove that if the morale of American cinema, Russian cinema,
German cinema is very high and no doubt their commercial situation
as well, it is thanks to the wall they have erected between
themselves and other countries.
There has been much criticism of the obligations contained in the
definition of the first category of French film, such as, for example,
"The filmmaker must be French."
I have heard tell that in America, when a worker, whatever position
he holds, stays in the country for a long time, he is asked either to
leave or to become a citizen. Moreover, if you want to set foot in New
York, you must prove your identity, prove that you will not compete
for employment with American workers, etc., etc., and because of
this, apart from a few exceptions like Murnau, Leni and Seaström
[sic], films that come from America are made by Americans.
It seems that a foreigner can make a film in Germany, that's fine,
but when you make the film it has to be co-credited to a German
filmmaker.
 As regards the Russians whose films are so powerful, so perfect, I
doubt that they have any intention at all of accepting filmmakers from
another people who would, by taking a different approach, in some
way diminish the power and originality of their fortunately highly
nationalistic film production.
A Frenchman would not be able to make an American film, or a
German film, or a Russian film. The nationality of a film and the
characteristics of its origin never prevent it from being accepted in
another country. An American told me recently:
"We’re not fond of showing foreign films, we don’t want our
audience to get used to a formula different from ours." Isn’t this state
of mind just a quota that is less overt, more hypocritical than ours?
Similarly, Russia hardly ever accepts foreign productions. Every
one of these countries acts wisely, so when we follow their example,
why react in horror? Let's keep our minds open to what is done in
other countries.
Cowboy films have their appeal when they are authentic, German
films are beautiful when they are "pure-bred" German. Russian films
deserve our admiration because they are the song of a people, a
sort of modern epic. Why ask a French film not to be French?
Internationalism does not mean abdicating race but, on the contrary,
favors its expansion. The French sense of film is criticized but what
does it have to prove? Out of 800 American films every year, only 20
are worth anything. I estimate that out of the 60 French films every
year, two bear the mark of real genius, so the percentage is the
same. It's just that Americans make so many…
Quotas reassure investors by reaffirming our confidence and give
us the possibility of increasing our production. There is no reason for
other countries to see that as a sign of hostility towards them, we just
want to be able to earn a living from our work in our own country
without competing with our foreign colleagues within their sphere.
These colleagues have the same right to be in control in their
sphere.

Ciné-Export Journal, July 1928

 ARE YOU AFRAID OF CINEMA?

Germaine Dulac’s response

Afraid of cinema…Why?
I have never been afraid of the future (life)…unknown worlds…
But of the past (death)…of what we think we know of it…
Abstract or concrete, the cinema, this powerful lens, perceives and
records beyond our visual limits.
I am not afraid of cinema, only of our excessive pride in it and our
idiotic routine.

Du Cinéma, n° 1, December 1928

 PROPORTIONS

We are the victims in France of a pernicious habit, that of

excessively criticizing ourselves, screaming about our defects,
remaining silent about our qualities, and then to admire on principle
every effort and every result of our action.
Why such overflowing candor, such awkward modesty, such
mindless enthusiasm.
In this way, we say: French filmmakers have no aptitude for
cinema. Look at the Germans, the Americans, the Russians, they
know how to make films! Their films mean something! The Germans
have mastered the science of rhythm and carry out their work
agreeably, the Americans have unrivalled technical skills, the
Russians have the powerful gift of visual cadence and human
lyricism. And it is written that America, Germany, and Russia only
export a selection of films, but sometimes, even often, produce
mediocre films, even bad films, in the same proportions as France…
Films that we do not see!
An example, a calculation.
America produces around 800 films a year. 20 of them are
remarkable or just interesting: 2.5%.
France produces 60 films a year of which maybe two are of
indisputable quality! Approximately 3%. So? It is not the capability of
French production that we should criticize but its capacity…or rather,
its current incapacity to get organized to produce in quantity.
Which is not at all the same thing!...
Which we must demonstrate.
Is there any country where films called avant-garde, demonstrating
technical and spiritual inquiry, are more numerous than in France,
where commercial films are concerned as much about artistic ideals
as they are about financial gain?
It’s not the cinematic sense that is lacking here but the commercial
will to produce.
 If America has the gift of knowing how to tell charming stories
without importance, Germany to unlock the strange and mysterious
side of life, Russia to make social change lyrical, none of these three
countries focus on either form or rhythm. Each of them retains its
own personality so that one could never confuse a film from
Hollywood with one from Berlin or one from Moscow.
But vision is a sense that is cultivated by repetition. On the world
market the French film, which is made from observation, a sense of
proportion, and taste, is rare. In these pitiful conditions, can it impose
its manner, spirit, and cadence? Even in its home market, the French
film seems like a foreigner, defeated from the start.
Has France given all it can? No, because France does not
produce. It can only do this by multiplying the number of films it
makes at every level of artistic quality, if not the highest.
Let’s admit our weaknesses, but not be confused about domains.
There is no crisis of cinematic sense in France, as we so often
proclaim, but a crisis in commercial sense, which we do not talk
about enough. Because economic force does not stand behind our
artistic effort, we cry out in protest at the latter, even questioning its
very existence. Is that fair?
Believe me, it is not the time for battles, for brawling, for attacks
between allies all in the same boat threatened by the same danger,
but for a collective effort, for harmony, agreement, an "organization"
which will help us think! And then, to give ourselves courage, let's
recognize our strengths…Simply, the ones we have. That’s enough.

Cinéma, January 1929

 "PLAYING WITH NOISES"

I have seen and listened to Broadway Melody. Theoretically, I am

against talking pictures, but in a way, and this may be just my
peculiarity after all, if I listen to people talk for an hour and a half, I
get tired.
First, one doesn’t pay attention to vision anymore, second, the
swirling dream which carried us away is dissolving.
But if I reject talking pictures, I support sound in film. Infatuated by
harmony, I know that it’s possible to play with sound in the same way
as images. And in Broadway Melody, certain sequences have a
poignant beauty, completely new: I’m thinking in particular of the car
door slamming as the woman sobs in her bedroom…the sound of
the car door echoing in the street, evokes the lid of a coffin closing
on her destiny.
Unfortunately, this scene loses its depth, its emotion, because of
the dialogue before and after it.
The ideal talking film will be one where there is but one word, one
cry, a few exclamations to reinforce the image. Besides that, there is
only room for silence.
But, what is both awful and childish at the same time, is that we
are behaving now about talking pictures as we did for silent film at
the beginning: instead of focusing on the originality of the discovery,
on new possibilities, we film dialogue to the exclusion of all else. A
fundamental mistake which will lead to as much disappointment as
was experienced with silent film earlier.
Once our curiosity about talking pictures is exhausted, the true
sound film will be born and achieve its true objectives.
In saying this, I’m stepping outside my identity as a filmmaker and
seeking to see things from the viewpoint of the general public.
As far as I’m concerned, I will be making talking films while all the
while regretting that we do not reflect on the possibilities of silent
films combined with talking ones.
 As far as technique goes, I don’t think that it differs very much.
There is just the separate research into how to reproduce sound.
The Americans have not modified their techniques at all and up to
now have not exploited the advantages of the marvelous keyboard
that sound film makes available to them.
As I am enthralled by music and cinema, I use the sound film to
carry out my idea: create a synchronous orchestration of sounds and
images and not a misbegotten and banal musical recording. I fear
that we are missing out on an admirable art form that will rise above
others in the near future: in four or five years.
To distill words and sounds and not to overwhelm ourselves with
one and the other, this should be the ideal of the film industry…
Cinema in its very essence is music. Words should not be misused,
a word can add a pearly note when well-placed: words can give an
arabesque-like style to the image rather than substituting for it. It
seems to me that the director of The Jazz Singer, by observing this
truth, has achieved far more than the makers of Broadway Melody.

Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, 1-15 August 1929

 NOTES OF GERMAINE DULAC

Words and sounds seem, at this point, to be capable of shaking

up the aesthetics of cinema to the point of making them predominant
over the image. In my opinion, that would be an error. The image
and the play of images between each other must keep their integral
visual drama. Sound and words should serve them without
suffocating them. They should be a new resonance added to their
expression.
The drama of images: the choice of a revealing detail, the
obsessive and dramatic juxtaposition of the proportions of the lines
and rhythms of shots.
The drama of images: the play of light and movement.
The essential dramatic art of film, whether it is silent, with sound
and with dialogue.
Drama with sound and dialogue: the noise which opposes or links
a feeling. The obsessive and dramatic juxtaposition of words and
silences in their truth and their cadence.
Words, silences, and noises, the human orchestration of the film
which we no longer call silent but simply film, in the purest cinematic
sense.
The sound and dialogue film must remain visual, the words, the
silences, and the sounds that accompany it playing in rhythmic
harmony with the true nature of its shots.
Let us no longer say silent film, but visual film. The result of fifteen
years of research, the solid base which will give a cinematic meaning
to spoken and sonorous orchestration.
Because, in film, words and sounds must be cinematic, just like
the images.
The word must distance cinema from all literature, from all
conventional staging, make it truer, more human, that’s all…and not
absorb the image.
To possess the gift of seeing…
To possess the gift of hearing…
Visual detail…
Auditory detail…
The cinema of the future!
The real drama of word and sound: the study of silences.

Cinégraph, 24 November 1929

 WHAT DO YOU THINK OF COLOR FILM?

Germaine Dulac's answer

Three-dimensionality? We have always been seeking it. We have

tried to obtain it by playing with light. There is already three-
dimensionality in a beautiful photograph. As for the techniques of
reproducing natural colors, they have been used in cinema for a long
time without changing things. What is new is the industrialization of
cinema in color with three dimensions.
Look at what happened when sound arrived. Cinema, as silent as
it was, satisfied us. Having paid the price in effort of struggling
against old errors and an almost total misunderstanding, we had
succeeded in creating a new form of expression, independent of
theater.
But now the industry comes up with sound. It was enough for the
cinema to lose everything it had gained and return to theater. Not for
long though, fortunately, because some of us took a wider view and
found that, when used judiciously, sound, far from being damaging to
cinema, could offer it new possibilities. What exactly had happened?
We had misused a process. We had wanted to commercialize talking
pictures before even knowing exactly what we could get out of them.
This was the mistake. It was almost inevitable because in cinema,
art and commercial exploitation are too closely linked, and it is a real
danger that this same phenomenon is going to recur with color and
three-dimensionality. From the beginning we will misuse it, as we
misused dialogue. We will want to do like in painting. Films will be
one hundred per cent in color, one hundred per cent in three
dimensions, just like today they are one hundred per cent talking.
We will forget that the essence of cinema does not change just
because we perfect it technically; it remains the art of visual motion,
an art where proportion, for example, will always be more important
than words, colors, or other elements.
 An invention should remain in the laboratory stage as long as
filmmakers seek to find aesthetic expression in it. There is no
purpose in technical progress if the thought behind it doesn't
advance in parallel. Technical improvements that are not yet mature
complicate the filmmaker's task to the detriment of art.

Pour Vous, 22 May 1930

 THE PUBLIC'S RESPONSIBILITY

The public has not been as flexible about cinema as it has been
about other forms of art.
The majority of the public often imagines that the films presented
each week on their screens are exclusively an exact reflection of the
filmmakers' ideals and the culmination of all the intellectual and
artistic possibilities of cinema.
It is nothing of the sort. Cinema, despite unimaginable technical
progress, has not yet revealed itself in the entire diversity of its forms
of expression and today's productions are but the first murmurs of a
very great form of art, in its infancy, an arrangement of single notes
compared to the orchestration of images which films will offer in the
future. It is to this quest for a broader orchestration that we must
devote ourselves, without disdaining what already exists, outside
more expedient and more traditional productions.
This quest involves new things, surprises, sometimes films which
astonish, disturb, appear momentarily obscure. But the audience,
filling the theaters week in and week out, has no regard for this
concern for the intellectual and visual progress of cinema.
In regard to this new art form, born of our era, just 35 years old (I
say "art form" and not just distracting entertainment), the public does
not display the intellectual flexibility it brings to the other forms or art.
When they buy their ticket and enter the movie theater, they say: "I
want to be amused, I want to be entertained, I want to have a nice
evening out, and above all, I want to see films that I'm accustomed
to seeing and that won't force me to think."
In no case will they ever say to the theater manager: "Show us,
along with big conventional productions, films that raise our
awareness of how cinema is evolving, films that can surprise us with
their originality, and point us to new concepts of the "Art of the
Screen."
 On the contrary, the public has shown itself to be the enemy of
these innovations, of the enlargement of cinematic expression that
are nevertheless vital to the spiritual progress of film. Which explains
the slow and painful progress of an art that could raise itself, as it
has already proved in a few instances, to the highest summits. A
marvelous expression of modern thought, a powerful launchpad for
propaganda and the spread of ideas, the cinema deserves a more
altruistic attitude on the part of us all.
As soon as a scientific discovery shakes up the status quo in
cinema, it is immediately accepted, that is how we have seen silent
films start to talk, without struggles or obstacles; but as soon as the
change involves one of mentality, of intellectual progress, the public
resists.
A few days ago a journalist who had come to see me asked me
this question: "In your opinion, what is the reason for the moral
poverty of the majority of films we see today?"
I answered him that the primary cause of this poverty is the Public,
its taste, its wishes.
The public which has been interested in cinema for the last twenty
years now, its films, its scientific progress, its actors, is also the
greatest enemy of its artistic progress. For them the cinema is not
yet an art form which can deepen their understanding and
knowledge or make their sensibilities vibrate with the discovery of
previously unknown aesthetic approaches. It is a mere distraction,
an easy way to pass the time. In the public’s eyes, the cinema is just
the unacknowledged outlet of all their latent childhood fantasies.
Will the leading lady marry the leading man? Will he succeed in
his mission before the villain stops him? Up to now, cinematic
imagination has hardly been any higher, remaining at the level of the
lowest type of romance novel. When cinema tries to imagine more, it
often meets with utter failure, as happened with Dreyer's Jeanne
d'Arc for example.
But the purpose of cinema is not only to tell cute little mediocre
adventure stories, it is a new art, a visual art, an art of motion that
possesses its own aesthetic, outside current theatrical and literary
principles, an art which has its grandeur, which can and must
entertain without demeaning itself, but must also sometimes rise to
the heights of independent artistic expression by the richness of its
own means.
This expressive richness, this grandeur, is it not up to the
filmmakers to make them known by making striking films? one asks.
Wrong. There are maybe, somewhere in the world, a few thousand
amateur spectators who understand the moral and intellectual reach
of the Lumière brothers’ discovery, and who would like, therefore
following the ideal of several artists enamored of progress, to extract
its meaning in its integrality, but what do these few thousand
devotees come to when faced with the vast crowd of spectators
animated only by a need for simple entertainment? Thus it is with
cinema: obliged to submit for financial reasons to the demands of the
intellectually indifferent General Public, the Seventh Art is suffocated
and vegetates, imprisoned by the boundaries of an understanding
that, while not necessarily wrong, is too narrow.
The public, more than filmmakers, influences the destiny of
cinema.

Cinégraph, August 1930

 GERMAINE DULAC AND THE CINEMA TODAY
by Jacques Guillon

Twilight.
Madame Germaine Dulac indicates with her hand an austere
sculpted wooden chair.
My eyes, which haven't yet adjusted from the bright light outside,
are bewildered.
I had wanted to begin our interview in an original way, but I am
confused and resort to commonplace clichés.
My eyes get used to the darkness: I notice the face of my subject:
large, very active, dark eyes, a slightly large mouth whose nervous
contractions indicate a great force of will: the short hair and necktie
make me think of George Sand.
Austere and sober furniture: sculpted wood. A detail amuses me:
the presence of sailing ships in bottles that are often seen in the
films of Germaine Dulac; they are practically everywhere, on the
furniture, along the walls, on the floor. There is something spiritually
paradoxical in the proliferation of these fairground trinkets amid such
a sober decor.

Madame Dulac speaks to me: a soft voice with slow inflections.

-I'm not doing anything important at the moment, I'm working on
very short 150 meter strips. I'm illustrating records…
She explains:
-…listening to a record suggests to me images that I feel are the
visual complement to the musical passage, that reproduce it. I put
together a scenario in which, stopwatch in hand, I time out a
succession of images, within a tenth of a second margin of error,
images which make concrete, if I may say, the spirit of the musical
passage.
The equipment in movie theaters, which now all have electric
amplifiers, permit the record and the image to be played in
synchrony.
- And what sort of record do you illustrate?
- I started with classical music but, in addition to the difficulty
involved in translating music that is the expression of abstract
feelings, I ran into the lack of understanding of a public whose
musical ignorance rendered them incapable of grasping the
relationship between the different musical passages and the images
proposed.
So I limited myself to working with a more easily approachable
kind of music; right now I'm illustrating an old record of a Strauss
waltz on the other side of which was an accordion dance number
which I illustrated by filming, almost unnoticed, dancers at a
neighborhood street festival.
- You have to disguise yourself so as not to be noticed.
- Not at all. Everything is arranged beforehand. When I go out as a
reporter, I am alone with my cameraman. The unwitting extras in
general don't even notice they are being filmed until the end, which
is preferable because they would start posing to their best
advantage, in which case it would have been better just to recreate
the whole scene in a studio.
The classic question:
- What do you think of sound film?
- From a technical point of view, it's too early to make any
judgements, just like, twenty years ago, it was too early to judge
cinema and phonographs which were still in their infancy.
- Are you in favor of 100% talking pictures?
- They horrify me; "talking" pictures are boring; nothing could be
further from the spirit of pure cinema.
The approach to sound film which I like and which my next sound
productions will adopt is that of White Shadows in the South Seas by
Van Dyke and that of the wonderful Melody of the World by
Ruttmann, where the sound is specially conceived to follow note-by-
note the image which it strengthens and completes. As for the
"talking" part, a single word at the right time, a cry, an exclamation,
or a song, would suffice.
- On another subject: what do you think of American films today?
 - I think we judge them in a much too categorical way, either we
consider that they are the only films that matter or that they do not
exist at all. I don’t want to take up their defense because I am quite
anti-American, but nevertheless I give them their due: alongside a
great number of assembly-line "commercial" films manufactured
according to a standardized theme, there are occasionally excellent
films. But they are very rare.
- I agree…And French film?
-…It is going through a particularly severe crisis, because the
Americans have taken advantage of the fact that we are not yet
equipped for sound production, to get ahead of us, to produce
French talking pictures before us and so corner the market. They
buy studios in France and produce intensively; thanks to their
capital, they make every effort, under the pretext of helping us
because they are not lacking in pretention, to paralyze the French
film industry.
- Do you think, Madam, that the danger is great?
- Fortunately not, for we are beginning in Europe to be less
admiring of the Americans, they are losing their prestige and their
power to intimidate and we are getting tired of their bluff and their
serial ways. There is a movement in favor of European production.
We are interested in Eisenstein's films such as The General Line –
the film without actors that has met with such considerable success,
Mor-Vran by Jean Epstein, a film also without actors that contains
splendid photography of the sea, shot in Brittany in rainy weather;
then the astonishing films of René Clair, of Cavalcanti…
- Don’t you think that we can look to the avant-garde for providing
the formula for a national cinema to oppose American films?
- No, because the public is too used to American films, they would
be too brutally disoriented. We must proceed methodically, if we
don’t want to run the risk of failure.
- Can you remind me of some of your own films, Madame?
- La Souriante Madame Beudet, which marks one of my attempts
at rhythm in the "avant-garde" vein. L'Oublié with the dancer Van
Durren, L'Invitation au Voyage. Several record illustrations, La Folie
des Vaillants, La Coquille et le Clergyman …
 The telephone rings. Madame Germaine Dulac goes to answer
it…she returns.
- Pardon me, Sir, I’m going to autograph the photo you asked for
for Ma Revue, because my cameraman is asking me to come look at
the negatives developed last night. My car is waiting, if you’d be
interested…

Ma Revue, September 1930

 THE NEW EVOLUTION
[The complete text of a speech given at the Salon d'Automne on
3 December 1930]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

My little talk has no ambition other than to introduce the films that
will be projected for you in a little while, a short summary of the
efforts and tendencies that we find at the source of the evolution of
Cinema from 1915 to 1929 and the new problems imposed by the
techniques of sound and voice recording that are now demanding
our attention.
At the Salon d'Automne where, for the last four years, Robert
Jarville has asked me to say a few words to spectators curious about
the art of the screen, I have often expressed and developed this
opinion of the cinema: that it is a strictly visual and silent form of
expression, a total expression offered to our sensibility and our
intelligence consisting of two elements: the image and its rhythm, the
motion of the image.
A film is composed with action, in other words an idea developed
by a succession of scenes, that is to say a script, and then with the
shots which not only translate it into images but extend it by giving it
its full meaning, its sentimental and emotional truth, its atmosphere.
If you will permit a comparison: the shot and the collection of shots in
the way they follow each other and their rhythm create an
orchestration around a theme, going far beyond the theme's precise
truth, towards what has been psychologically, poetically, or lyrically
unexpressed. The shot does not limit itself to reproducing, recording;
in cinematic terms, it suggests.
What are the elements of a shot?
1) The camera angle and its effect, the dramatic value of the
scene;
 2) Its proportions and its angle, visual expression;
3) Light, the expression of atmosphere;
4) The measure of movement, rhythm.
Thus, in a film there is the story with its structure: the theme and
all its orchestration which is born from the elements cited above.
Whether the idea is inspired by visual equivalents or that,
inversely, it creates these equivalents, we always find it at the source
of every work of cinema.
Is every idea cinematic?
Certainly, if it can take a pure visual form without losing any of its
strength. The interest of a very beautiful action can be completely
destroyed if it does not find the right line. A less interesting, less
moving action can, on the contrary, take on more weight if it is suited
to being elaborated through compelling shots.
A good film, in addition to the value of its subject, is thus one in
which the interaction of the shots is the most expressive, the most
complete. A bad film is one in which the shots have no other value
than those of photographs which simply record the phases of an
action. It is thus necessary, in order to portray a cinematic subject
without damaging it, to dissect it, to multiply its forms and motions,
and forget the words which narrate it in order to transpose it to the
realm of the silent image.
In cinema, it is not brutal action that impresses but the emotion
that emerges from what we are seeing.
During the projections that follow, you will see five films presented
in the chronological order of their making. The first, Épouvante,
played by Mistinguett, was made twenty years ago. It will amuse you
despite its dramatic title, because the images which convey its basic
action only reproduce scenes without any concern for their
atmosphere, without any play of rhythm, limiting themselves to the
depiction of a simple series of events, recording the mimicking of
gestures, a simple external story without effect. The image, a few
years later, would have played the same theme by expanding and
amplifying it, with a whole harmonic orchestration and, in doing so,
transformed it.
 At the next stage, in reaction to the lack of expression of the
image, misunderstanding the attempt, by it and for it, to suggest
harmonies tracing a psychological line, emerges La Souriante
Madame Beudet which, in 1922, with a minimum of inter-titles and a
maximum of visual commentary, attempts to imbue the simple
events with a whole internal and invisible life.
You will excuse me for giving La Souriante Madame Beudet as an
example, because it is my film, but as it was available to me, it was
easy to use it to illustrate my point.
In the third film, Nogent, Eldorado du Dimanche, you will see an
arrangement of shots that is more direct than that of La Souriante
Madame Beudet, put together for conscious effect to capture the
idea-reality and deploy it in its splendor of expression and rhythm.
This short sequence fills us with the joy and gaiety of Sunday
leisure through its light and happy impressions, gathered and
multiplied in their strength solely by the excellence of the shots, their
succession and nuances. This film says entirely what it means and
fully satisfies us in the feelings that it seeks, and succeeds, to give
us.
La Souriante Madame Beudet, with its sparing use of inter-titles,
had attempted the experiment of psychological suggestion, of the
evocative power of certain visual elements.
Nogent, Eldorado du Dimanche focuses on the sensibility of sharp
descriptive development.
These three films, the last of which was made a year ago, mark
both a starting point for cinema and the constant progress that it has
made through its images. If we composed a film today on the same
theme as Épouvante, you could judge the progress that we have
achieved.
At the beginning of this talk I had proposed the idea that action
was created by visual equivalents or that action created these
equivalents on its own.
In La Souriante Madame Beudet, visual harmonies express the
action. Mr. Carné, on the other hand, in Nogent, Eldorado du
Dimanche, has created an action through visual equivalents. It's an
effort I also made myself in Thème et Variations which, by means of
the shot - a sort of equivalent of rhythm - attempts to provoke a
simple pleasure for the eyes, without a story: the motion of
machines, the motion of a dancer, a cinematic ballet.
In these three experiments, we thus see the image go beyond the
mere replication of a photograph to create, either on its own or by
the associations which it arouses, or by the rhythm which it
embraces, a suggestion transcending mere shapes.
The whole difference, all of the formidable progress made since
before the war, has to do with the image moving from the realm of
photography into the realm of visual harmony.
With these three films, we have explored several cinematic
realms, either the psychological and sentimental with La Souriante
Madame Beudet, the descriptive and perceptible with Nogent,
Eldorado du Dimanche, and a pastoral poem, or a play of images
around simple rhythmic and visual equivalents with Thème et
Variations: three tendencies, three schools, three possibilities.
The work of the young filmmaker Jean Vigo will now show us the
impact of the image in another sphere. The documentary À propos
de Nice guides us through a piece of biting social criticism, without a
word, by the simple juxtaposition of scenes collected and formed in
their content by life itself.
This remarkable film is more valuable than a long speech on the
same theme because by the silent eloquence of the groupings of
images we see, we sense directly without our imagination playing
through words. Then we will experience the Virgilian calm of Moana.
It is in this way, by a fairly slow ascension, that the liberated image
has tried, up until 1929, to show us which new art form has been
born from it, rich in truth, in dreams, in its momentum toward what
has never been expressed. It had succeeded in the poetic domain
with felicitous results as attested to by the charming poetry of
Nogent, Eldorado du Dimanche, Moana and the powerful lyricism in
À propos de Nice.
All of the commentaries and projections that will follow, Ladies and
Gentlemen, will convince you of the powerful eloquence of the silent
moving image which up to now has been, with its rhythm and motion,
the only dramatic ingredient of cinema – its very essence. The
moving image, we should acknowledge, has not been an invalid
incapable of expressing itself because it is, itself, an expression,
stronger than words because more suggestive, knowing how to
penetrate beyond itself into the domain of the inexpressible.
Such has been the evolution of the cinema up until 1929, such has
been the evolution for which all filmmakers have worked fiercely with
the faith that accompanies every new revelation.
But roughly two years ago, a new invention upset everything. It
permitted moving images to talk. Was this progress or not? This
beautiful art of silence, this beautiful art of dreams, was it going to
die? Some among us, fanatical about this silent art, believed so and
believe so still. So a new evolution is in progress, after a dead time
in which words seemed to dominate the moving image, exploiting it
and not being guided by it. Two currents are already clearly evident:
the one which resists the word and seeks always to take the moving
image forward, and the other which, having never served it,
continues to treat it as an accessory, making cinema a drama based
on words, a spectacle, in other words, where the action depends on
the impact of words and no longer on that of moving images.
Nevertheless, in no case must words dominate the moving image.
The cinema is not theater, its dramatic art is not the same because
up until now it has shown itself to be a powerful and complete form
of expression by relying on camera shots, their form, their light, and
their rhythm. The moving image alone is enough, either in the
development of an action, the description of a feeling, or a visual or
poetic impression, and can sometimes lead to an abstract idea. We
incorporate ourselves into the very image.
Words in cinema and sound can, like an orchestration, surround
the moving image, but in no case can they be a substitute for it when
it is a question of a work of film art.
In the early days, we did not look for the original character of
cinematic expression, we focused just on a photographic recording
of the miming of gestures, without getting to the bottom of the
expressive possibilities. It was the power of suggestion by moving
images and their rhythmic orchestration which raised cinematic
expression to a high degree of artistic expression.
 Today, there is a broad tendency to start again from a similar
mistake. We have found a way for film to record noises, sound
effects, and voices, we have found a way to synchronize this with
silent images and, without trying to find a real aesthetic meaning for
this new discovery, we tell ourselves: silent action was incomplete,
by adding words we now have a spectacular complete art form.
However, the assault is brutal. I was speaking recently with the
son of a famous playwright. He said to me: "Finally the time has
come for theater people to take over cinema," and faced with my
astonishment: "Yes," he explained, "consider how works of theater,
deprived of words in the cinema, became just a pale reflection of
themselves, but now we will be able to record them verbatim." The
danger, you see, is right there, the death of the art of cinema.
And yet, if only we wanted to understand the impact of the
recording of sound and words, if only we wanted to try to create a
drama of sound and words, grasp its impact, and understand that
words that combine their rhythm with the rhythm of moving images,
without dominating them, could result in very powerful works of art.
That words and sounds add to film, that they be mixed into the life
of a film as an integral part of its rhythm and not just slapped on or
superimposed, that’s fine, but in no case should they dominate the
drama of images, because in cinema only moving images can impart
true feeling and integrity to an action.
A new evolution is underway: to defend the expressive moving
image, on the one hand, and to see how it can be combined with
words without diminishing its rhythm and power. On the other hand,
after numerous experiments, it appears that long dialogues are a
mistake, a simple exchange of words is more powerful, that silence
also has more power if it is not continuous. The error is to want to
believe that words take the cinema back to a sort of theater with just
more set decoration, without any concern for essentially cinematic
elements.
The cinema must remain cinema. But we need the encouragement
of the public to support us through this new evolution which is
certainly not, as one might believe, a resistance to words and sound,
but rather the channeling of this new discovery towards cinematic
objectives, in other words toward a balance between the microphone
and the lens for the greater progress of the Seventh Art.
The new evolution is the art of knowing how to keep intact what
has been up to now our appropriate ideal of moving images and its
expression, to understand that, while remaining true to its aesthetic,
words and sound can be incorporated. The new evolution is to
protect, as we did in our old struggles in earlier days, the cinema
from theater.

Cinégraph, January 1931

 THE NECESSARY EVOLUTION

We filmmakers are very happy when, in parallel to the official

circuit of theaters, groups are formed to promote and support our
earnest research into non-traditional forms of filmmaking, outside of
what "must be done"…outside of the commercial market.
The majority of the public believes that the films presented every
week on the normal theater circuit, are the highest achievement of
the expressiveness and sensibility of cinema and the ideal of what
we, the filmmakers, aspire to.
It is no such thing. The cinema, despite extraordinary technical
progress, has not yet revealed all its potential diversity of forms, and
the films which have satisfied us up until now are but the marvelous
murmurs of a very great art form in its early infancy, a simple scale of
notes in relation to the orchestration of moving images and words
that will characterize films in the future. It is thus on the quest of this
broader orchestration and its perfection that we must focus, beyond
the daily minor improvements we bring to traditional productions.
This quest, this forward march, involve innovation, surprises,
sometimes films which astound, disturb and remain temporarily hard
to understand.
But, the majority of the public filling movie theaters week in and
week out does nothing to encourage this concern for extending
expressive possibilities. In relation to cinema, this new art born in our
time and only 35 years old (I deliberately call it an art and not simply
entertainment), the public has not shown itself to be, in its sensibility,
as flexible as it is with other art forms, painting, music, and literature,
for example. When they buy their tickets and come into the movie
theater, they say: "I want to have fun, to be entertained, have a nice
night out, and, above all, I want to see films that I'm used to seeing
and that don’t force me to think."
In any case, they would never say to a theater manager: "Show us
films that educate us on the subject of cinema, films that can
surprise us by their originality and point us toward new concepts of
the Art of the Screen."
On the contrary, the public has shown itself to be the enemy of the
widening of cinematic expression that is nevertheless vital for the
advancement of Film in general. Which explains the very slow and
painful progression of an art that could attain - it has already proven
itself capable of doing so in a few circumstances - a very high level.
A marvelous expression of the modern sensibility, the cinema
deserves a much more altruistic attitude on everyone's part.
As soon as a scientific discovery upsets cinematic norms, it is
accepted right away, without difficulty. We have seen this to be the
case when silent films became talking pictures. But when it is a
question of a spiritual quest, visual progress, an enrichment of
expressive qualities, the "image" in general, the public reject it.
For them, the Cinema is not yet an art form which should deepen
understanding and knowledge, bring to life unknown discoveries,
sensibilities, but only a form of entertainment, an easy way to pass
the time.
Will the leading lady marry the leading man? Up to now, cinematic
imagination has hardly been any higher, remaining at the level of the
lowest type of romance novel. When cinema has tried to attain a
higher level, it has met with utter failure.
But cinema is not destined to only propagate such mediocre
adventures. It is a new art form, a visual art, despite talking and with
talking, an art of modern inspiration, an art of motion that possesses
its personal aesthetic distinct from the principle of the art of the stage
and literary formulas, an art which has its grandeur, which can and
must entertain without demeaning itself, but which must also rise to
the heights of an independent form of expression by the very
richness of its qualities.
This richness of expression, this grandeur, is it not for the
filmmakers to make them known? Alas, there are maybe,
somewhere in the world, a few thousand amateur spectators who
understand the moral and intellectual reach of the Lumière brothers'
discovery, and who would like, therefore, to follow the ideal of
several artists enamored of progress and extract this discovery’s
meaning in its integrality, but what do these few thousand devotees
come to when faced with the vast crowd of spectators animated only
by a need for simple entertainment? Thus it is with Cinema, obliged
to submit for financial reasons to the demands of the intellectually
indifferent General Public, and so the Seventh Art suffocates and
vegetates, imprisoned by the boundaries of an understanding that,
while not necessarily wrong, is too narrow.
In Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, England, Spain, groups
have been created under names such as the "Independent Film
League" or "Ciné-Club". In France there are 17 of them. They act
both against the inertia of the general public and to encourage every
film that earnestly shows the praiseworthy ambition of pushing
cinematic expression forward, to amplify it, to free it from established
traditions, incrusted prejudices based on discoveries already made
and also commercial contingency. These groups speak to the
honesty of those yearning to see an art, like Cinema not yet frozen
by specified limits, either purify its form or extend its possibilities. In
doing so, they recognize the necessity of exceptional films which the
general public cannot or will not understand. Does not this mass
audience rebel against every attempt to present them with a film that
explores or attempts something new?
An experimental film is not necessarily good. Made with whatever
means at hand, it is often less perfect than films in wide release, but
it always contains a principle of renewal and spiritual quest that
deserves to be encouraged and retained. It can be said that a
progressive cinema has existed since 1916. Confronted with each of
these films, the majority of the public has regularly bridled, and then
this same public, a few years later, has judged these films with an
open spirit, accepting them, liking them, considering them as a
welcome evidence of progress; by these works, the scope of
cinematic expression was broadened, the commercial Cinema
revived, renewed. It can also be said that the films, which are being
applauded today by everyone, are the result of the cinematic
discoveries of the crazy filmmakers, the earnest reckless ones who,
in an earlier time, outside their strictly opportunistic productions,
braved the storm of jeers, faced the battle, armed only with their
faith.
Would we, for example, be applauding The Melody of the World,
with the interaction of its powerfully moving and dramatic images, if
a few visual composers had not in the last fifteen years put into
practice theories which at the time were judged vain and subversive,
and had not made films which seemed to contradict the common
sense of the time, finding only Ciné-Clubs to support and encourage
them? These progressive films attacked at the time by producers
because the public greeted them with hostility, nevertheless
contained today's visual truth. Without them, current visual technique
would be singularly impoverished. The Cinema, a new art, is
transforming itself every day. But so much time is lost in endless talk,
pointless discussions, and misunderstanding.
Every form of science has its laboratories, every art has its
experiments. We should certainly not divide Cinema into a special
class and a commercial class. A popular art, it should reach both a
mass audience and an elite through its very broad humanity. But
besides this general goal, it is necessary to examine the possibilities
of expression, first with an elite, outside commercial distribution
circuits, in order to then reach the mass audience.
To free cinematic expression, explore it to the extremity of its limits
and its forms is the concern of all filmmakers. In the quest for this
expression, certain schools have formed, have even harshly
opposed each other, while admitting of course that the directly
human work of cinema, a reflection of universal preoccupations and
commonly held feelings, remains the priority. Whether the focus is on
integral Cinema, in other words pure motion or abstract expression,
or lyrical, poetic, psychological Cinema, every school attempts to
make a beneficial effort and deserves to be welcomed eclectically,
cinema being expressive not just of one thing but of many things.
Will it not be the bringing together of all these diverse things, of
these forms which still clash with each other, each taken to its own
extreme, which in a magnificent synthesis, will make Cinema a very
great art form?
 When a film is surprising, it must be understood before it is
condemned. Maybe the surprising innovations of the artist who
created it are anticipating the Cinema of tomorrow. From his errors,
truth will spring.
Artists and the public work together to develop the science of
Cinema, the gift of our century, the former bring their skill, the latter
their understanding. The public is thus just as useful for the evolution
of Cinema as the artist/creator. Each of them has their own
responsibility for its progress.

Ciné-Club, March 1931

 WITHIN ITS VISUAL FRAME CINEMA HAS NO
LIMITS

An evolving cinema has existed since 1918. Each of the works it

has inspired has met with rejection from the public. And,
methodically, this same public, a few years later, has judged these
films with an open spirit, accepting them, liking them, considering
them as a welcome evidence of progress; by these works, the scope
of cinematic expression was broadened, the commercial cinema - in
other words, the cinema that everyone understands - found itself
revived and renewed. We have to recognize that the films being
applauded today by the general public grow out of, technically
speaking, the cinematic discoveries of the ardent, reckless but
brave ones who in an earlier time, dared go outside their strictly
opportunistic productions. Would we now be applauding
Homecoming in mass market theaters, would we now see The
Melody of the World, if a few filmmakers between 1920 and 1925,
had not produced theories that were then considered vain and
subversive, subjected to jeers and whistles?
Evolutionary films, those with a new inspiration, often contain the
seeds of the future, and are a gage of the very vitality of cinema, a
new art form, that is perfecting itself every day. However, if cinema is
an art form, films are also industrial products governed like ordinary
merchandise by economic principles; they must thus be supported,
understood, distributed. The public, unfortunately, does not go to
films with artistic concerns, but only with a wish to be entertained.
They shun works which do not give them the pleasure they expect.
Between the public and the artist anxious for progress, there is
therefore disagreement. This distance from what is ideal transforms
progressive cinema into marginal cinema, which is disdainfully
contrasted with commercial cinema. Could not both terms be
abandoned: "Marginal cinema" (improperly labeled "avant-garde
cinema") and "Commercial cinema," and leave remaining just the
shorter term "Cinema"? To do that, it would be necessary to
convince the public that the cinema, in its visual expression, has no
limits. The camera lens perceives the growing grain of wheat just as
well as the frown or smile of a human face. It captures the intensity
of a feeling and the sensibility of a landscape, it narrates, it suggests;
it can focus simultaneously on the visual philosophy of an external
action and the immaterial expression of thought. The play of images
between themselves and their motion is flexible, rich in impressions
and expressions like those of colors and musical harmonies.
Why imprison cinema inside a strict frame? It captures life, it
reproduces it in its multiple manifestations. Our lives are not limited
to external manifestations, but above all, and even more, consist of
internal impressions which transform us into different mirrors of an
identical action. So many beings, so many visions. Literature,
painting, music, accept this individual originality and this blossoming.
But when it is a question of cinematic works, the public only
accepts its own traditions. Doesn’t this shrink a domain of art? The
domain of cinema is not just "this" or "that," the sum of "this" and
"that."
Recently, coming out of a film club where the films, as is now the
fashion, are subject to attack, I heard this observation about one of
them:
- It means nothing, it doesn't have a story.
As I see it, the joy of living things and the earth in the springtime
can be just as much of a story as one in which a young girl, after a
thousand mishaps, marries the man of her choice. In one case, there
is a melody of images, in the other a specific drama, that's the only
difference. It is sometimes necessary to "submit" and not to "search."
We accept the rhythmic movement of the blooming of a plant, why
not accept that an artist can capture this impression to develop it
with the rhythmic motion of images? Life, I'll repeat it, does not
reside solely in a sensory extension. Must this personal perception of
an artist be banned from the art of moving images?
In listening to the second Arabesque of Debussy, for example, I
had the completely personal vision of the earth turning, rejuvenated
by the sun, a vision of flowers, of sap, of fountains of water rising
and falling back, of joy, of rebirth, of physical well-being. I chose the
visual rhythms to compose a "film ballet" made from the very
material of the Seventh Art, in other words, of motion, of light, of
form, of connections. Would I claim that "This is the entirety of
cinema?" No. Better than that: it is a possibility of cinema. I'll repeat
it, one interpretation does not detract from the other, but adds to it.
The whole ideal of the cinema of evolution.
Moving images go by, traverse the mind, why not seize them,
capture them in short or long works? Symphonies, lyrical dramas,
melodies, paintings, sketches, studies, pure music, pure color,
poetry, the rhythm of words, anecdotal, descriptive, suggestive films,
why fight about it?...A waste of strength and time, while in fact every
school contains a little of the truth of total Art.

Paris Nouvelles, 9 May 1931

 THE SUCCESS OF A FILM?

What is the moving image in cinema? The moving image is not

only the photographic reproduction of an action or a vision, but also
and even more, a dramatic harmony, a harmony in which the fullness
and sonority consist of the judicious placement of the visual,
sensory, and expressive elements that compose it, and all of this in
the measure of rhythmical movement. Today sounds and words have
come to be conjoined to the image; I say conjoined because words
and sound can comment on the image, complete it, blend into it, by
intensifying its atmosphere, but do so in a cadence always
determined by it. One can conceive of a film without words, but not
without moving images. So strictly cinematic action remains, in all
ways, dependent on the succession of moving images, in their
rhythmic motion.
In a film, there is action, in other words the idea developed by a
succession of shots, that is the script, and then there is the image
which translates it in giving it its full meaning, its emotional and
sensory truth, its atmosphere. To allow myself a comparison: the
image and the series of images by their succession and their rhythm
form an orchestration around a theme and, going beyond the reach
of it, further than it, touch on the inexpressible. The image must not
just reproduce but suggest! It is what, alone, makes the public's
sensibility vibrate.
In a film, there is the story with its structure: the theme.
Whether the idea is inspired by the visual equivalents or that,
conversely, the idea creates these equivalents, we always find it at
the source of every cinematic work, whether it takes the appearance
of an emotion felt, a situation, a material fact, or, simply, movements
or combined pictures.
Is every idea cinematic? Certainly, when it can be dressed up,
without losing its strength, as a visual form. There are good and bad
films. A beautiful action can be completely ruined, its interest
negated, if, visually, it does not find the right line. An action less
interesting, less moving, can, on the contrary, take on impact if it is
expressed in a compelling series of images.
A good film, besides the value of its subject, is thus one where the
interaction of images is the most expressive, the most complete; a
bad film is one where the moving images have no other value than
those of a sterile photographic reproduction of the phases of an
action.
It is therefore necessary, in order to render a subject cinematic, to
break it down into a multiplicity of forms and movements
mathematically observed, to forget words that narrate, transpose it
into the realm of the image, succeed at externalizing the sentimental
or emotional elements that it contains by optical suggestions,
expressions, the play of light and now, words and sounds.
In cinema, it is not the brutal action which makes an impact but the
emotion which the visual imprint releases, emotion that words and
sound will now reinforce.
Previously the cinema did not break down drama into harmonies
and rhythms. But it is, I believe, the rhythm (motion and measure),
organizer of harmonies (moving images) thoughtfully and separately
chosen, which has characterized the great progress made by the
cinema in the last few years. An example: we all know the American
films that are shown in theaters. The theme that inspires them is
usually banal, watered down, they don't bother in their bland
generality with any substantive concerns. We are frequently
conscious of how vacuous their themes are but we nevertheless pay
attention to their development. This is because their choice of
harmonies and the power of their rhythm is, it must be admitted, first-
rate.
The American film almost always has a superior rhythmic sense.
That is what makes us forget the weakness of its narrative structure
while being swept along by the visual momentum of its rhythm.
Is it not the furious rhythm of a charming fantasy that constitutes
the entire value of the dazzling cartoons which we applaud in our
theaters?
 So it is not always, as we have easily assumed, the skill of the
actor which generates the emotion, but the exact point where this
skill is used. The value of an actor's talent, of his gestures, depends
on the general balance of the film. We say sometimes: this actor was
good in this film, bad in another. I'm not so sure that it's a question of
the actor's talent, but the attention paid to the study and attribution of
the harmonies of his expressions within the rhythmic flow of the
drama. An expression obviously reaches its full impact through the
emotional potential it contains, but also because, at a given point
mathematically, it is expected and desired as a culminating harmony.
The actor's expression has a value equivalent to sound, to its
resonance, whether it is a question of the depth of a glance, of the
sadness or the joy of a smile. It is the film's composer who must
want this harmony, to position it and create its rhythm.
Why do certain films whose actions are interesting sometimes
seem flat to us? It is because the image's visual and rhythmic
elements, which alone can give depth, intensity, and motion to the
theme, have not been worked on.
A somewhat curious observation shows that each country has a
different visual rhythm that stamps its character on a film, no matter
how international its theme is. Without knowing where it is from, film-
lovers can identify the national origin of every film just by its rhythm.
Should this surprise us? Isn't the same true for music? German
musical rhythm is different from Russian, French or American
rhythm. This observation proves that the nature of a film depends
much less on the concept of the script than on its orchestration and
its rhythm. And that is why rhythm is so important. Because of it,
every film remains a product of its native country. Rhythm is an
expression of a people. But films must also be international, just as
music is, whose emotional potential touches what is universal in
human sensibility.
It is through visual and musical rhythm that different peoples can
come to understand each other. Rhythm depends on instinct. A race
cannot alter its instincts. Therefore each race must celebrate itself
freely.
 The same emotions stir up humanity, humanity must be
celebrated. What I would wish for is that the public of each country
do not subscribe to a single form of visual rhythm but understand
them all, reacting to them as they would to works of music.

Toute la Terre, 16 May 1931

 OUR GOODWILL IS EXTENDED TO THE TRIUMPH
OF AN IDEA

At the end of September Germaine Dulac presided at the

Congress of the Ciné-Clubs of France which was held in Grenoble.
During its inaugural evening Germaine Dulac gave a very interesting
short talk. We are happy to share a few portions of it with our
readers.

Our goodwill is extended to the triumph of an idea.

You are familiar with this idea. It springs from an ideal that you
have often been told about and that is faithful to a single altruistic
objective regardless of the circumstances: explore the great mass of
cinema, extract all of the treasures that it contains one by one, do
not dwell on those already found but always seek new ones.
You are aware of the difficulties this task entails. Commercial
cinema seeks box office success. It achieves it by flattering the
established visual and auditive expectations of the public.
An art form such as Cinema, always evolving, is ill-adapted to
these expectations which weigh it down miserably.
The Cinema rises and expands while the public all too willingly
stagnates.
This Congress is going to permit us to take stock. What do we,
filmmakers and directors of the federation of Ciné-Clubs hope for?
To educate the mass audience in the realm of cinema, familiarize
them with the diverse forms, tendencies, and applications of our art;
make them more flexible and not let them fall asleep in the
spectacular comfort of the films that they are accustomed to seeing.
Some of these films, of course, are worthy of their interest, but they
already belong to the past; to repeat them in another form is the film
industry's work, to surpass them today and tomorrow is our work, the
filmmakers, when we are able, and it is your work, the creators of
Ciné-Clubs, you, the elite filmgoers, who bring your precious gift of
understanding to the advancement of cinema.
What will be the task of the Ciné-Clubs this year? To show its
members films that have become classics, the historical role of great
teaching, where they can see the struggles that are necessary to
bring about this or that innovation in visual expression, seen at first
as too new but now completely accepted; make known the new
directions born of the old ones which are now accepted and
recognized, and to please a receptive audience that is already open
to change, but also to expand your actions by means that, from
tomorrow on, we will begin to test.
What are the new directions in Cinema? Life, its material and
philosophical truth. As you see, this is an ambitious program: life has
multiple aspects, depending on whether it is considered from a
moral, social, emotional, or physical angle, whether viewed starkly,
stripped of all arbitrary trappings, or in its inner dream-like, fairy tale
aspects, which can be just as true as its outward appearances.
What we want to combat is what is artificial; what we seek is what
is real - it is expanded Cinema, without literature and without theater,
the universe, nature, the lens pointed straight at humanity’s heart, at
the infinitely small and the infinitely large. What we want to do with
the screen is to measure our powers with those of the primal
elements and space.
We find the truth of cinematic thought in its pure state in films
made to teach natural history, or in technical instruction films where
one can see men at work in their struggle with raw materials, in
documentaries and in certain artistic films where all of these
techniques are brought together and magnified by inspiration.
So I would like to see the Ciné-Clubs not be satisfied with
programming only pure art films but to extend their choices to
scientific and instructional films, and to documentaries whose
images show the life of the living, breathing world.
A serious question arises for the Ciné-Clubs in how to treat the
discovery of sound and talking films. They are not yet equipped to
project for you the wonderful films that we would like you to see and
to support.
 The talking film has its problem. Words tend to lead it back to
theatrical formulas that push us backwards, and lean on literary
dialogues that are not adapted to its rhythm.
So, it seems that words in moving images must not command the
images but, on the contrary, the image, always expressive in the first
degree, must dominate the word, and be its simple extension.
The word and sounds must be a true accompaniment and, except
for music, recorded spontaneously.
I have been told that Ruttmann, the great creator of The Melody of
the World, has just attempted a curious experiment by composing a
symphony of noises and words captured in nature: the wail of a
siren, the noise of machines braking, a heavy door turning on its
hinges, and the slamming of its closing shutters, the footsteps of
workers hammering the ground, hurried or slow, shouts of joy or
fatigue, tramways; and the next day, everything that can be evoked
by sound of the pleasure of relaxation, of daydreams, and the
attraction of Sunday, then the siren, the door whose shutters open,
the purr of machines; the lovely Sunday is over. Monday begins…
Work!
This experiment by Ruttmann demonstrates what talking and
sound film brings us; a new form of symphony, which united with
moving images brings a broadening of the expressive power of
cinema that I mentioned earlier.By excluding sound recording, Ciné-
Clubs, which have been at the avant-garde of the cinema movement
up to now, are going to seem old-fashioned and behind the times.
They should not be overwhelmed with blame. The rental of talking
and sound film is very expensive and to prepare them for these
additional expenses next year, they must, I think, either increase
their membership or reduce the number of their screenings to give
each one more importance.
I will end this short talk by thanking all the members of the different
Ciné-Clubs present here by saying: you are necessary to us, the
filmmakers, because from you will come the rebirth of Cinema, a
rebirth that is new every year.
Let us not be discouraged. I told you a little while ago that the new
trend in Cinema is toward truth and life. Let us work for the truth of
cinema art, for its real life, and if we would like to see our strength
measured on the screen and to dominate the elements, let us prove
that we are not mere dreamers and that, if there are obstacles, we
will triumph over them.

La Vie Alpine, November 1931

 INDEPENDENCE

La Critique Indépendante, the journal whose advent we celebrate

today, makes a profession of faith which should leave no self-
respecting filmmaker indifferent. Independence, free judgments,
sincere opinions: a program which must be praised and supported.
I have often thought about the term independence as it applies to
any branch of cinematic activity. Is independence something likely to
be allied with the art or the industry of Cinema?
On the industrial side. Producers, businessmen above all else, are
slaves to finance and, to satisfy it, they must submit to theater
managers and buyers charged with exporting film products abroad.
Theater managers. What are they looking for? Box office revenue.
Their only ideal is the taste and pleasure of the public, under whose
yoke they labor without complaint. The public itself follows its own
instincts for pleasure. For which we cannot blame them. But,
antiquated tradition, wrong-headed visual education, an
uncontrollable laziness of spirit, a defective evolution, or, to put it in a
single word - routine - keeps the public tied up too long in the same
place.
The composer of films (commonly and erroneously called the
director) and the script writer, subject to all these forces, can only
obey them and chasten their thoughts and their personality if they
want to earn a living by the profession they have chosen.
The press. Every business must promote its products to make
them known and sell them. How can the cinema-industry
disseminate its product if it does not have at its disposition the
means to publicize it?
Dependent, therefore, on the publicity which it needs to survive,
how can the majority of journalists ever find a way to say what they
really think in all sincerity? They would like to, they try, and
sometimes they succeed. But it is hard to maintain the effort and the
risks are great.
 Those who claim they are free, are they not actually the prisoners
of their prejudices, their likes and dislikes? Nothing is more
dangerous and injust than the spirit of a clique.
So we see the art of cinema, victim of these pressures, kept
subordinate to these different wishes and clashing interests,
progressing slowly and painfully towards perfection and the diversity
of forms which we can feel within it. Capitalistic at its source, its spirit
is corrupted by money and it is convenient to say, without fear of
contradiction, that the art of Cinema is in a debate with the Cinema
industry. A tragic struggle, an unwanted struggle, a damaging
struggle, which could end if there were only a fair understanding.
The ideal of one side and the interests of the other could, in fact,
be reconciled with a revision and fair implementation of the values
(whether they are predominant or secondary) of the cinema
hierarchy, and with a certain courage to healthily and honestly
educate the public who, following the progress of cinema, are alone
capable of influencing the industrial machine in favor of the spirit.
The press should be a mediator between the parties. To do that, it
must frank with:
Producers;
Distributors;
Exhibitors;
Theater managers;
Filmmakers;
Script-writers;
and itself.
In regard to the public, the press must be a great educator, who,
without taking sides, reports, defends, attacks.
The Cinema has its artistic truth. It also has its economic truth.
Only the public has the power to bring these two points, which
should never be antagonistic, together, a public that a skillful press
must protect from mistakes. But for the press to fulfill this mission, it
must succeed in living up to the dictionary definition of the adjective
"independent."
Independent – Not dependent on something. Not subordinated to
someone (when it comes to individuals). Free from all political
dependence. Does not like to depend on anyone. Not subordinated
to anything (when it comes to things).
We could add: Not subservient to anything (as it happens, to the
cinema world, in light of its two sides, artistic and commercial).
To be fair, we must have total independence with regard both to
ourselves and to others, including the interests and ideas which we
must master. We must look objectively at how these efforts can be
made, ane talk about the difficulties encountered, the contingencies
which arise, the ideal being pursued, and the promises which they
entail.
For Ciné-Clubs, interested in research, in popular movie theaters,
eager for raw emotion, looking for more adventurous fare than
provided by strictly commercial films, the screen can and must
provide films capable of attracting both praise and criticism.
Cinematic perfection is not the domain of a single kind of filmmaking
but of all kinds.
So let us hope that La Critique Indépendante will be worthy of its
name and serve the cause of Cinema without favoritism for either the
creators or the businessmen. A difficult mission, but worth
attempting.

La Critique Indépendante, 25 December 1931

 THE ACTION OF THE CINEMATIC AVANT-GARDE

The cinema is a massive formation that our generation, for thirty-

six years, has been trying to cut down to size, from which we have
been able to extract some useful expressive forms, but we still
remain ignorant of the totality of its spiritual and technical richness.
Exploring it is a heavy task.
For many long years, the aesthetics of cinema, its artistic,
intellectual, social, and practical impact have struggled in the
shadows of obscurity and ignorance, feeling their way along, looking
for a path through the mistakes of erroneous interpretation that have
accumulated in front of and around them.
What is Cinema?
The scientific answer is precise.
The discovery of the Lumière brothers is one in which, by analysis,
we can discern a series of almost identical but nevertheless slightly
different photographic images which reconstitute the motion in which
the light and speed of a continuous sequence display a pulsing life
and truth on a screen. Of that, we are certain.
If I transfer my question to the realm of ideas, different schools of
thought develop, different opinions form.
One school asserts that the Cinema is simply spectacular
entertainment. The innate spirit of Cinema matters little as long as
the story is attractive, the images pleasant, the actors interesting.
Whether the film is light-hearted, tragic, or composed of clever and
shimmering scenes, the pleasure it brings is for them the only truth
that matters. Others view the cinema as an element of culture;
newsreels, as an insight into contemporary history; and
documentaries, as perfect lessons in geography, science, or
publicity.
Almost always the Cinema will be judged by the way it is used and
not by its spirit.
 But, does not Cinema have the right to be considered in itself and
for itself?
The Cinema is a new art form, a never-before-seen form of
expression, absolutely foreign to old forms of expression. But these
old forms, by imposing their techniques, have delayed Cinema’s
spiritual development without contributing anything. It is not just a
substitute but a new instrument of thought, knowledge, and art.
The Cinema, by its mechanical action, reveals its true artistic
expression by recording and reestablishing the exact form and
motion of all things in their deep and essential truth. To be logical,
the direct and natural function of Cinema is thus to capture life in its
general sense and to reflect its dynamism.
All the arts draw their inspiration from nature. Some copy it. Others
describe it, explain it, building their dreams onto transposed material
and sentimental realities.
They operate, if I may say so, only by reaction, by reflections.
They do not work, as the Cinema does, with the raw material of life
itself.
A simple mechanism in a black box, equipped with a lens, moving
a light-sensitive film perforated in long strips, has achieved the
miracle sought after by artists everywhere: to create a work directly
from elements of real life, undiminished by copying or interpretation.
To summarize, the arts up to now have tried to get closer to life.
The Cinema tries to compose a work of art with life itself, using
visual equivalents, attitudes, moving lines, expressions combining
with each in an order that creates drama.
We can say, without fear of being accused of utopianism, that we
find the expression of Cinema, the true nature of the art form,
outside literature, outside painting and sculpture, outside music
(especially since the invention of the means to record sound
directly), outside intellectualism, in motion and its sources.
The discovery of talking and sound in cinema expands its
possibilities, but does not modify its spirit. Words and sounds can be
considered an accompaniment, a splendid extension of the image,
but they do not intervene in its essential form.
 We cannot deny it: the Cinema brings us ten times more
knowledge. It takes us out of our customary frame, our habitual
environment, out of our familiar thoughts and acquired knowledge,
and takes us into unexplored worlds. It moves, capturing forms, their
rhythms, their spirit, and by focusing on nuances it detects their
instincts. It is a powerful eye that extends our own much too limited
one.
We pass by marvels all the time that we are unaware of, we brush
against lives, intelligence, joys, miseries whose existence we do not
suspect. The Cinema shows this to us, uncovers it, makes it
tangible, so tangible that all this becomes familiar, and does so with
only the power of lenses mathematically calibrated to the speed of
advancing film.
A plant is no longer for us a piece of vegetation that attracts us by
its flavor, its fragrance, or its beauty, but a sensory organism that
suffers or blossoms, a tiny living thing that can feel heat and cold,
that needs air and sun to live, just as we do, and the exact meaning
of whose reflexes we are beginning to learn.
I doubt that the Cinema has really fulfilled its mission if it is just
used to tell stories, to magnify some events and invent others to
amuse the general public. The Cinema captures motion. Of course
the movement of a human being from one place to another is
motion; just as is the projection of this same being into space and
time, and also his moral evolution are motion. But even the flowering
of a grain of wheat can appear to us to be a more perfect, more
precise cinematic event by giving a predominant role to the
mechanical movement of its logical transformation, by creating
through its unique vision a new drama of spirit and meaning.
Lenses in their unique power do not shy away from capturing the
invisible and the psychologically elusive.
The invisible: what our eye cannot see; the elusive: the dramatic
spirit that comes from motion. The invisible, what materially exists
outside our visual perception, can be captured by the Cinema, using
a skillful play of technical combinations which permit the recording of
every stage of the germination and flowering of a plant in order to
recreate them on the screen in harmonious lines; and it captures the
elusive, in other words the drama of the physical joy of a plant's
growth and flowering, for example.
The invisible, again, when slow motion multiplying by its speed the
number of images, permits us to break down a motion into its
smallest visible steps. The elusive, when it renders imperceptible
moral and psychological reactions perceptible.
Slow motion Cinema has discovered the intimate little drama of
the life of a pigeon which, created to fly and soar through space,
suffers from touching the ground. Its feet in contact with solid ground
show a motion of repulsion that is very expressive of pain.
Visually, motion by its rhythms, its straight lines and its curves thus
puts us in contact with a complex life.
The Cinema seeks to make us "see this," to make us "see that."
Constantly in its technical evolution, it focusses on our eye in order
to reach our intelligence and our sensibility. Now, the addition of
sound does not constrain its power – just the opposite.
Not even microbes escape visual inquiry. Plants or animals,
infinitely small, reveal their pure state, their instincts and their
gestures, the mystery of their evolution and their actions.
We witness fierce battles between underwater animals, their
impertinent and hypocritical tactics.
Chemical mineral formations also reveal to us the secret of the
decorative seduction of their form, in a way that makes it easy to say
that it is nature in evolution, captured sur le vif which, through
Cinema, educates us at every moment, making perceptible things
that we know exist without understanding them by the intricacy of
their existence finally revealed by captured motion.
And our artistic sense is embellished by visions, our sensibility by
understanding, our science by specific knowledge.
With Cinema, the human being surpasses himself. His strength is
regenerated by the whole earth; if he knows exactly how to feel the
meaning of the images of truth that the Cinema offers, he becomes a
conqueror who reaches out into the universe, conscious of not being
the center of the world.
Considered from an artistic angle, the cinema has not followed in
its evolution the precious indications contained in its own technique.
It has confined itself to story-telling in an arbitrary way, disdaining
any attempt at a new form of dramatic art made from the universal
elements of which I have tried to give you a few glimpses.

Conclusion

Only the cinematic avant-garde, struggling against business and

tradition, despite being mocked, has extracted bit-by-bit the
expressive richness contained in the cinematic monolith. It should be
thanked rather than criticized, even when it has gone to extremes. Its
task has been immense.

L'État Moderne, December 1931

[reprinted in its entirety in Ciné-amateur, n° 9, January 1932]
 THE MEANING OF CINEMA

On the occasion of the International Conference of Rome, I have

been asked to expound on a very vast subject, which comprises,
according to paragraph III of our program: 1) The classroom film, 2)
the adult education film, 3) the recreational film, 4) the documentary
film, 5) technical and scientific films, 6) artistic films, and 7) social
education and hygiene instruction films.
This program is a general study of the totality of cinematic
expression and its evolution up to now if it is considered as a whole.
I am therefore going to offer for your consideration some ideas
that touch on the very essence of the Seventh Art. What they have to
offer is quite relevant to the social and educational concerns that
have brought us together.
My presentation will be divided into several chapters.
I’ll try to be as brief as possible and to summarize in a few pages
the content of an entire book.

General considerations on the cinema.

The Cinema is a massive formation that our generation, for the

last thirty-six years, has been trying to cut down to size, from which
we have been able to extract some expressions, while remaining
ignorant of the totality of its spiritual and technical riches. To explore
it is a heavy task.
For many long years, the aesthetics of cinema, its artistic,
intellectual, social and practical impact, have struggled in the
shadows of obscurity and ignorance, feeling their way along a path
through the mistakes of erroneous interpretation that have
accumulated in front of and around them.
What is Cinema? The scientific answer is precise.
The discovery of the Lumière brothers is the reconstitution, by
synthesis, of a series of photographic images different but very
similar, in which the light and speed of the motion of their continuous
passage throws pulsating life onto the screen. Of that we can be
certain.
But if we transpose the question into the realm of ideas, different
schools of thought develop and different opinions are formed.
Some will see the Cinema as simple, however spectacular,
entertainment. What difference does it make what the essence of
cinema is, if the story is engaging, the scenes pretty to look at, the
actors interesting!
That the film is light-hearted, dramatic, its scenes clever and
shimmering, the pleasure it brings is for them the only truth that
matters. Others will view cinema simply as an element of culture;
newsreels, as an insight into contemporary history; documentaries,
as perfect lessons in biology, geography, science or publicity.
Almost everyone will judge Cinema by its applications and not for
its spirit.
But doesn't Cinema have the right to be judged in and for itself?
The Cinema is a new art form, an unexplored form of expression,
absolutely foreign to older forms of expression; and the introduction
of these older forms into its technique have delayed its spiritual
development without contributing anything to it. It is not a substitute,
but a new instrument of thought, of knowledge, and of art.

Cinematic expression.

It is by its mechanical action that Cinema reveals its true artistic

expression to us: it records and then reproduces the exact form and
motion of everything in its deep and essential truth. To be logical, the
natural and direct function of cinema is to capture life and render
dynamic its different modalities.
All the arts draw their inspiration from nature. Some copy it. Others
describe it, explain it, building their dreams onto transposed material
and sentimental realities.
They work, if I may say so, not by using nature itself but by
reflecting it. The other arts do not, as Cinema does, work with the
raw material of life itself.
 A simple mechanism in a black box, equipped with a lens, moving
a light-sensitive film perforated in long strips, has achieved the
miracle long sought after by artists everywhere through the ages: to
create a work with elements that are true and direct, undiminished by
the intermediary of interpretation.
To sum up, the arts, up to now, have tried to get close to life. The
Cinema uses life itself to compose a work through visual equivalents,
dynamic attitudes, the movement of lines, expressions, whose
convergence and organization create drama.
So we can say without fear of being accused of utopianism, that
cinematic expression, the veritable aesthetic of Cinema, is to be
found outside pure appearance, outside literature, outside music
(especially since the invention of sound recording), outside
intellectualism, in motion and its sources.
The discovery of how to add dialogue and sound to Cinema
extends its possibilities but does not alter its spirit. Words and
sounds can be considered an accompaniment, a splendid extension
of the image, but they do not intervene in its essential form: so
Cinema throughout my report will be imagined first from a visual
point of view, with words and sound becoming an indispensable
complement.
The true scientific and artistic contribution of Cinema is motion.
It is possible to photograph people and things in a way that the
observation of their movement creates drama. But if different
sources of motion can be imagined, the movement in itself will
always be real since it is unscripted and recorded spontaneously.
Truth in relation to the recording device lies in motion and its
object.
The work of the artist will be first of all, in addition to any
manipulation, to seize this truth and make it emotionally stirring to
whatever degree. He will break down its rhythmic components and
the different phases of motion, according to the emotional gestures
which they express.
The artist must play with the different angles from which truth can
be perceived in order to emphasize them.
 Every second has its predominant visual gesture; it is the gesture
that we have to seize. The gesture and the expression are true to
reality; the art consists of choosing, emphasizing or diminishing
according to the emotion sought.
If we want to create drama from a given scene, we introduce an
opposing element by the same method, just as true to reality. The
conflict will explode.
To summarize, cinema brings a new form of expression to art and
this expression, whatever forms it pleases us to give it, is one which
is especially splendid, the expression of motion, the capturing of life
and its causes.
I have rarely found the truth of cinematic art applied in either
artistic or purely entertaining films, which are both too derivative of
the old concrete traditions of theater and literature, which operate
indirectly through transposition and evocation.
On the other hand, I have always found it in a pure state in a branch
of cinema that has for a long time been disdained, documentary,
educational, and civic films. These films, free of any secondary
concerns for stirring up emotion or laughter, go straight to the heart
of the matter. By its very technique and by its own power, Cinema
teaches about life. It is the fact that it educates us that gives it such
great moral and social force.

Its application in the educational, civic and artistic fields.

We cannot deny it: the Cinema brings us ten times more

knowledge. It constantly takes us out of our customary frame, our
habitual environment, out of our familiar thoughts, and acquired
knowledge, and into unexplored worlds. It moves, capturing forms,
their rhythms, and their spirit, focusing on nuances detecting their
instincts. It is a powerful eye which extends our own much too limited
one.
All the time we are close to mysteries, marvels that we are
unaware of, we brush up against lives, minds, joys, miseries whose
existence we do not suspect. The Cinema shows them to us,
uncovers them, makes them tangible, so tangible that they become
familiar, and does so with the power of lenses mathematically
calibrated to the speed of advancing film.
A plant is no longer for us a piece of vegetation that attracts us by
its flavor, its fragrance, or its beauty, but a sensory organism that
suffers or blossoms, a tiny living thing that can feel heat and cold,
that needs air and sun to live, just as we do, and the exact meaning
of whose reflexes we are beginning to learn.
We now find ourselves a long way from the simple recording of
nature and invented drama. On the one hand, we now know nature's
vital actions through scientific experiments, ane on the other, the
rhythm of its movements which evoke what causes these actions,
and which are perhaps the essence of real cinematic drama.
The expressive value of a face is contained less in the volume of
its features than in the mathematical duration of the reactions
recorded and held by these features, in other words, the muscle
which contracts or relaxes in reaction to a shock, only reveals its
meaning in the measure of how long the movement lasts.
A hand comes to rest on another hand. Motion. A dramatic
storyline, analogous to a geometric line connecting one point to
another. Action. The hand executes this motion, slowly or quickly, the
rhythm gives the motion its intimate meaning. Fear, doubt,
spontaneity, strength, love, hate. Different rhythms in the same
movement. Let's consider cinematically the stages traversed by the
germination of a kernel of wheat planted in the earth. In the same
shot, without moving in time, we would have the vision of a pure
motion played out according to the continuous logic of its dynamic
force and whose rhythms provoked by the difficulties of its complete
development combine their suggestive emotional theme with their
actual physical theme.
A muscle twitches in a face, a hand is placed on another hand, a
plant grows toward the sun, crystals form on top of each other, an
animal cell evolves, we find at the root of these mechanical
manifestations of movement, a perceptible and suggestive impulse,
the power of life, the rhythm expresses and communicates it. From
there comes emotion.
 I doubt that Cinema will have fulfilled its objective if it serves only
to tell a story, magnify events, and invent others for the greater
pleasure of a mass audience. The Cinema captures motion. Of
course the movement of a human being from one point to another is
motion; just as the projection of this same being into space and time
and also his moral progression are motion, but already the flowering
of a grain of wheat seems to be a more perfect cinematic
conception, more precise in giving priority to the mechanical motion
of transformation, in creating by a unique vision a new drama of the
spirit and the senses.
We evoked a little while ago lenses and their power. Their unique
power does not shy away from capturing the invisible and the
psychologically elusive.
The invisible: what our eye cannot see; the elusive: the dramatic
spirit that comes from motion.
The invisible, what materially exists outside our visual perception,
can be captured by the Cinema , using a skillful play of technical
combinations which permit the recording of every stage of the
germination and flowering of a plant in order to recreate them on the
screen in harmonious lines; it also captures the elusive, in other
words the drama of the physical joy of a plant's growth and flowering
for example.
The invisible, again, when slow motion, multiplying by its speed
the number of images, permits us to break down a motion into its
smallest visible steps. The elusive, when it renders imperceptible
moral and psychological reactions perceptible.
If devices decompose motion to explore the domain of infinitely
small things in nature, it is to visually teach us about the drama and
beauty which our eye, too synthetic, does not perceive.
Motion by its rhythm, its straight lines and curves visually brings us
into a complex life.
The Cinema seeks to make us "see this," to make us "see that." In
its technical progress it constantly focusses on our eye to affect our
understanding and our sensibility. Now, sound has been added but
this in no way constrains its power, quite the contrary.
 Not even microbes escape visual inquiry. Plants or animals,
infinitely small, reveal their pure state, their instincts and their
gestures, the mystery of their evolution and their actions.
We witness fierce battles between underwater animals, their
impertinent and hypocritical tactics.
Chemical mineral formations also reveal to us the secret of the
decorative seduction of their form in a way that makes it easy to see
that this is nature in evolution, captured sur le vif which, through
Cinema, educates us at every moment, making perceptible things
that we know exist without understanding them by the intimacy of
their existence finally revealed by captured motion. And our artistic
sense is embellished by visions, our sensibility by understanding, our
science by specific knowledge.
The Cinema, by recording the truth, shows it to us. The artist or
the scientist who seizes it takes on the task of making it visible as a
form, whether scientific or human.
The Cinema, by its own technique in the artistic domain, has thus
the facility to create new conflicts, no longer opposing man against
man, and blending him into nature.
When children and adults, who at school or in classes will have
been visually educated, they will understand that nature surpasses
our imagination and that its only goal is to combine dreams with
reality and, when penetrated with the true meaning of cinema, they
form the audience of the future, then the majority of artistic films of
today will soon no longer show such weak imagination, good enough
sometimes but often incomplete. They will be expanded. This is why
the artistic or educational Cinema form part of a single entity, simply
with different modalities of expression and application.
Considered from an artistic angle, the Cinema has not followed in
its evolution the precious indications contained in its own technique.
It has confined itself to story-telling in an arbitrary way, disdaining
any attempt at a new form of dramatic art made from the universal
elements of which I have tried to give you a few glimpses.
The Cinema can be used as a lesson but it is also and above all
an art, a new form of expression; but unfortunately for cinematic art,
the tool came before the thought. While the first artisans of the
screen, ignoring the new expressive richness that the invention of
the Lumière brothers brought them, let the other forms of art
suffocate the art form that was being born, scientists, whose only
goal was to study life found, I believe, the true meaning of Cinema in
looking beyond humans to the very heart of life. The Cinema could
focus on the large and small dramas of nature as a whole. Only the
scientists discovered this.
Truth and subtlety, knowledge of the elusive and the invisible, this
is what cinema brings us in the intellectual domain.
Rising beyond a completely concrete and scientific base, we can
now look at theories about a new art form, an art of visual and aural
ideas, with diverse roots - in nature, in truth, in logic, in the
knowledge of the invisible and understanding of the imponderable.
In the moral sphere, almost without our realizing it, Cinema has
transformed us. In earlier times, every people was locked into its
customs, believing itself to be at the center of the world; now that the
life of other peoples has been made accessible to us in its evocative
motion, still warm in its customs, its manners, without being
transposed, we realize that, if their lives are foreign to us in their
details, in their main emotional traits they are similar to ours in every
way.
In this way the Cinema makes us understand the unity of all men
and leads us logically to the conclusion that beyond culture and
country, there is humanity and that in humanity there is the infinitely
big and infinitely small.
From knowledge of the world in its entirety can come brotherhood.
The films of each country bear their stamp of origin; by certain
particularities they remain national, but beyond local customs,
spiritual and social internationalism shines through. Cinema is the
marvelous Volapük and, by being a universal language, creates
affection and understanding between peoples. Did not Hamp say
that filmmakers were the mechanics of international language?
Will you permit me to highlight with an example a few ideas on the
new dramatic art that is brought to the screen?
I had the occasion to attend the projection of a film that was a
study of glands, where their function and role in our physical and
moral equilibrium were demonstrated. The disturbances which their
shrinking or their excessive vitality caused in a living organism were
expressed so tragically by such painful deformities, as to evoke the
drama of the abnormal and diminished lives these disturbances
cause. Prepared in this way, the theme of the film suddenly came
clear, focusing on the problem of old age, of the strong, intelligent
person whose strength and mental capacities decline as glands dry
out and arteries are clogged.
Then, the experience, the moral and physical regeneration, the
research of scientists, succeeding at giving a sort of fullness of life
up to the limits of death, the joy of strength regained, of the more
supple thinking of a man who, aging poorly, regains the flexibility of
his mind and the elasticity of his body. Rarely has a poem been
written with a lyrical impact stronger than this film of a medical
demonstration where the mechanics of the human body enter
visually into a struggle with the mind and human constraints.
The scientific film never ceases to teach artists in a great way; it is
the way cinema itself can teach.

Cinema’s evolution today in different film-producing

countries.

To be logical within the spirit of my talk, I will consider the body of

Cinema in its entirety and look at what our intelligence and our
understanding have been able to extract from it.
The Cinema will be simply divided by our analysis into several
categories according to their particular objectives.
Let us imagine these different categories and pay special attention
to what is called entertainment Cinema and art Cinema which,
modeling itself after real life, becomes an expression of human
thought not with the intention of demonstrating anything but just to
incite joy, emotion, and pleasure.
In its entertainment form, Cinema is very widespread. It is difficult
to draw the line between Cinema as amusement and Cinema as so-
called Cinema art. Nevertheless, we can admit that certain films are
at the same time entertaining and artistic, because they draw us into
the realms of rhythm, dreams, and feelings, in fantasy and spiritual
exaltation, of emotion, by the qualities of sights and sounds that are
exclusive to its technique and its spirit.
The entertainment film is one that does not bother with many
concerns in its development, for better or worse, it amuses or moves
us without any cinematic principles.
The entertainment film is sometimes very guilty; it prostitutes film
technique. Sometimes, from masses of undistinguished films, "The
Film" stands out, a work that constitutes a landmark in the evolution
of the screen, an indication of progress, a victory.
Why is the entertainment film so rarely satisfying? Because it so
rarely seeks to raise the public's taste by encouraging it to accept
innovations, but seeks only to flatter it.
An example: the biggest major film-exporting country is certainly
America. Of the 200 or 300 films which reach us in Europe every
year, we can admit that most of them are pleasant, relaxing, but that
only 5 or 6 deserve to hold our attention.
For every film like Lonesome, Greed, Hallelujah!, The Wedding
March, Tabu, White Shadows in the South Seas, Trader Horn, how
many little not-too-badly made entertainments are there which we
barely remember and do not advance Cinema or thinking about it in
any way, even if they earn their producers a lot of money?
And that is ethe whole problem posed by art cinema.
The Cinema is dominated by money. Not one meter of film can be
exposed without the support of an arsenal of banknotes and cash.
A great number of films are necessary to supply the movie
theaters of the world every evening. So the capital needed to make
them and that must be amassed is formidable.
One can find a private benefactor for a small sum, but not for a
large one. The economics of film must consequently be established
on an industrial scale with, as their goal, immediate commercial
success without regard for any altruistic ideals. Seeking success
means giving the public what it wants; neither over-estimating nor
under-estimating their intelligence, or rather, let’s admit it, mostly
under-estimating.
 The public's cultural consciousness can be divided into different
classes. So they must all be taken into consideration and
harmonized, and the Film is built on this amalgam, a process far
closer to manufacturing industrial products than to the creation of a
work of art.

***

Above what we call entertainment Cinema, the film industry, there

is nevertheless art Cinema. You can easily guess what the dangers
are.
The art Cinema that educates the public with genuine
expressiveness rarely meets with any commercial success.
Disdaining tradition, it walks a straight path towards what is true, and
in its forward momentum its films are met with incomprehension, and
seen as isolated cases, films which the film industry can admire but
never encourages because their profitability is so unreliable.
A few artists have tried to conceive of and make works outside the
beaten path of the industrial production circuit. It is to them that the
cause of cinema owes whatever progress it has made. And after a
few years, entertainment films will seize and eventually popularize
the discoveries that were initially rejected.
I want to speak here of the avant-garde Cinema which takes
theories to their limits, the avant-garde Cinema which goes off like a
prospector in search of unknown treasures. It makes mistakes, it
makes discoveries. It is never indifferent. It is almost always
scorned, then forgotten when its great classic and all-encompassing
works appear. But it points the way. It has, by the way, its own
distribution circuit in the form of ciné-clubs. In England we have the
Film Society; in France, La Fédération des Ciné-Clubs; in Holland,
Le Film Liga; Spain has three ciné-clubs spread out over its territory
and Germany has seven.
France and Holland have, in addition, a few theaters showing
avant-garde films regularly. Specifically I'm thinking of Paris where
there is the Vieux-Colombier, the Ursulines, Studio 28, and the
Cinéma des Agriculteurs; in Amsterdam, a theater has been opened
under the auspices of the Film Liga. New York also has a showcase
for the avant-garde, and Prague offers some special projections.
Avant-garde films have a particular life; they are either booed or
applauded. Those who make the effort to show them are disdained
by the magnates of the film industry who do not look favorably on
experiments outside of the industrial mainstream.
A film made as an experiment is not necessarily good. Made with
whatever means are at hand, it is often less refined than films on the
commercial distribution circuit but it always carries with it a spirit of
renewal, of spiritual quest, and deserves to be encouraged and
embraced. It can be said that this progressive cinema has existed
since 1916; that every time one of these works is shown the public
regularly balks, and then, a few years later, the same public
methodically judges the very same works with an open mind,
accepts them, loves them, and considers them as a welcome proof
of progress; by these works, the reach of cinematic expression is
extended, commercial Cinema gets new life, is renewed. It can also
be said that the films now being applauded by everyone are the
direct result of cinematic discoveries, what the crazy ones, the
earnestly reckless, have done before outside strictly opportunistic
productions, defiant of the torrents of criticism.
For example, would The Melody of the World, whose interaction of
moving images are so powerfully emotional and dramatic, have been
applauded on the commercial exhibition circuit if, over the last fifteen
years a few filmmakers had not put into practice theories which were
judged at the time to be self-indulgent and subversive, had not made
films that contradicted the received wisdom of their day, and had not
found Ciné-Clubs that would support and encourage them? These
progressive films that were opposed by producers because they
were met with hostility by the public, contained nevertheless today's
visual truth. Without them, current technique would have been
exceptionally impoverished. The Cinema, a new art form, transforms
itself every day. But how much time we waste in blather, pointless
discussion, and incomprehension!
Every branch of science has its laboratory, every form of art has its
experiments. Of course we should not divide Cinema into a class of
excellence and a commercial class. As a popular art, it must touch
both the elite and the masses by the breadth of its humanity. But
beyond this general objective, it must specifically examine the
expressive possibilities, first with an elite audience, outside the
commercial circuits, in order to then reach the general public.
So the avant-garde, incomprehensible to the mass audience, is
necessary to the overall art of film; by balancing all trends,
techniques, and sensibilities, it constitutes the work of cinema. The
avant-garde operates without definitions, it looks ceaselessly to find
beauty in new facets of the medium. Some of the axioms that were
ridiculed in the past have now become truths about the dramatic art
of the Screen. The avant-garde Cinema is the work of a few pioneers
who make their films, usually shorts, outside the official production
companies, in their spare time between more popular titles.
Avant-garde films, in my view, are instructional films. They teach
the public – who in this sense are its pupils – about Cinema and
they deserve special attention. These films educate by elevating the
visual and auditory level of the public and add to the expression of
the image, transforming little by little the entertainment film, a
splendid means of transmitting culture because, in the very
mediocrity of its ideal, the entertainment film surpasses in spite of
itself the goal of simple amusement which it sets for itself.
From an international point of view, a film, whatever it is like, is
inspired by the customs of its country of origin. It makes audiences
familiar with the country’s sites, decorative style, fashions, crafts and
costumes.
Through a film, one can judge the spirit and level of refinement of
a people. Film is for each country a messenger to the world about its
power, its emotions, its efforts.
Entertainment films, to be sure, bring together people of different
nationalities and make them aware of each other's moral and
material progress through visual examples. Certain fashions have
been adopted by means of a film which just happened one evening
to amuse us but which we don't even remember anymore since it
didn't impact us in any meaningful way. But even if it doesn't move
us, we can, through its images, love the energy, the gaiety, the youth
of certain peoples, the constructive faith of another.
The entertainment film is the very foundation of the film industry.
All countries have been so permeated by the importance of
entertainment films that each wants to produce them, even more so
now that dialogue has made this a sort of national obligation.
We are witnessing in Europe a renaissance of film. And I'd like to
point out in passing that the more a film springs from a local
inspiration, the greater the chance it has of bringing sincerely
interested people closer to one another, their souls laid bare.
Each country can only exist cinematographically by the integrity of
its visual expression; why not encourage each people to develop, in
images and sounds, in its own way, without its personality harming
these exchanges? In films composed for this purpose, only the
techniques or certain customs could surprise foreign audiences, but
not the feelings expressed, given that the Cinema is the art form with
the broadest human values.
Nothing can attain perfection without emphasizing its own
qualities. The very value of sincere films, made according to this
principle, will break down boundaries and perhaps create
friendships.
In conclusion, we can say that the mediocrity of the entertainment
Cinema comes from: 1) the public's laziness of spirit about learning
the true language of Cinema; 2) worldwide business practices which,
for financial reasons, necessarily make the public complicit in
commercialism; 3) the lack of cooperation between those who
believe in the advancement of entertainment Cinema in regard to its
social, educational and international potential.
I should not end this paragraph without speaking of Russia, which
has been able to surprise us with what it has brought to the Screen,
knowing how to use film and becoming the leading country
cinematically in the world. As most of its entertainment films are
based on the study of real life, they reflect cinematic truth both in
their technique and their spirit. The new Russia lives with Cinema as
its highest form of expression. Its objective is more than just earning
money. It wants to win over hearts and minds. Its sudden advances
and flourishing can be explained by this. Russia imposes education
on its audiences in every way possible by Cinema. This objective
makes it possible to focus on new kinds of drama.
I will cite The General Line by Eisenstein, which show us how
obscurantism engenders hard labor and the machine brings
happiness to effort through progress. Humanity, emotion, education,
and all of it expressed in visual language which reaches the highest
level of artistic lyricism.
And now we come to the pure educational film, a film which most
frequently is banished from movie theaters, except perhaps for
travelogues; films which are integrated into the classroom while
entertainment films occupy the theaters.
The educational film has produced the greatest results, even if
unevenly distributed. It can be divided into: 1) school films, 2)
continuing education and adult education films, 3) technical and
scientific films, 4) social education films and instructional films on
hygiene.
We can hope that one day, in a pleasant way, entertainment films
will contribute to a kind of general education. But we must think
about pure technical and professional education without any artistic
involvement.

The school film.

The cinema, especially now that it has sound and dialogue, can
teach anything to children by capturing their attention with real views
of the subject of their course. It has a precision that eliminates errors
of imagination. The screen can easily help the teacher because it
can present everything visually through real-life images.
I don't want to get lost listing all the subjects that Cinema can
teach. This list only specifies the cinematic possibilities that I have
already detailed at length.
From a psychological viewpoint, what we actually see and feel is
more easily retained and assimilated. The sight of an action or an
event provokes an intellectual reaction in both children and adults
that helps in the development of their personalities.
 A child who has actually participated in many events is better
equipped than one who has drawn all of his scientific knowledge just
from books. Science then becomes a real experience and a memory
and not just an abstract idea. However it will require a new
generation of modern teachers to stir interest, channel reactions, and
correct the errors that will arise.
I hope you will excuse me if in an international Congress I speak
primarily about France but I think, from the point of view of Cinema,
all of the questions and debates are more or less the same in every
different country.
In France, the educational film has its detractors. Unhappy spirits
claim that, for example, the cinematic view of a growing plant distorts
understanding because a plant does not get bigger, bloom, and die
in the space of a minute. Do they not know, these unhappy spirits,
that the sequence projected has recreated in this minute the different
genuine phenomena that the lens has captured over long weeks,
and that each stage of germination is scrupulously accurate and
scientific?
This influence is offset by the attitude of more progressive spirits.
But it is a struggle and it slows down progress. So it is that one side
is drafting a law that will provide an additional subsidy to teachers
using film projectors and the other side is fighting this project.
Here again we are up against the power of routine, of established
traditions. If art needs an avant-garde, so too is it necessary to have
an avant-garde in teaching to prepare the future. But there are
always obstacles for the avant-garde. Over centuries, the apostles of
new ideas have always been sanctified in the future while
nevertheless having their actions attacked and destroyed at the time
they proposed them.
Those who have used films in schools have observed the good
results they produce. Four-fifths of a class assimilates the contents
of a lesson through film, while perhaps only two-fifths would have
retained it if they had received the lesson only orally from the
teacher.
The school film exists but it is at the first dawn of its
implementation.
 The I.C.E. centralizes information with statistics on this subject,
information which we must propagate with numbers and graphs in
order to convince those who do not believe us. A city is not built in a
day, but one must work every day to assemble the construction
material with which the city will be built. So we must focus on: 1) the
creation and production of purely instructional films on every subject:
natural history, geography, ethnography, history; sound films, foreign
languages (thanks to cartoons), mathematics, political science; 2)
conferences for the education of teachers; 3) the rational study of the
cinematic possibilities adapted to the needs of courses; 4) the study
of how these efforts can be financed and how a state organization of
school cinémathèques can be set up; 5) the collection of detailed
documents from all countries in order to conduct a general study of
propaganda; and 6) exchanges of films between countries in order to
raise general knowledge.
Every nation is trying to use Cinema in schools, but not on the
same scale. In my opinion, America, Germany and Russia have the
most rational organizations. England is in the process of deciding.
I will cite two extracts borrowed from a report by my colleague Mr.
Jean Benoit-Levy, a tireless advocate in France for instructional film.

GERMANY – In general all ministerial departments are interested

in the question of instructional film and most especially the Ministry
of Commerce of Prussia.
It can be said that in Germany, teaching with film has become
official and practically obligatory. The greatest resources are put at
the disposal of specialized film producers in the form of
advantageous prices on unexposed film and, above all, tax
exemptions for "cultural films" shown in movie theaters.
We'd like to draw your attention to this extremely important fact
which has the potential, in our opinion, of giving educational cinema
the means to develop.
Germany and Italy have understood the necessity of encouraging
theater managers to show films beneficial to people's culture, and in
pursuit of this goal their governments have issued a decree to allow
tax exemptions for theaters calculated by the percentage of films
shown that are deemed "useful."
It cannot be over emphasized just how great an increase in impact
such an action might have on the promotion of professional
orientation.
UNITED STATES – The development of instructional and
educational cinema in the United States has enjoyed prodigious
growth thanks to the support it has received not just from private
initiatives but also and above all from the government.
It is highly notable that the U.S. Department of Education
subsidizes roughly 48% of the production costs of instructional films.
In addition, 17% of schools entirely amortize their expenses
(equipment installation, film rental) from revenue they earn from
after-school screenings to which parents and even the public are
invited.
Finally, educational institutions benefit from numerous private
grants.
The results of a questionnaire recently addressed to 517 teachers
or teaching supervisors in the United States showed that 44% of
schools now use cinema as an integral part of their curriculum.
It can be said that the Americans consider the cinema to be not
just a great industry, but also a means of mass education and
teaching in schools.
In ENGLAND there is a plan to found an Imperial Film Institute to
stimulate the use of cinema among the arts, sciences, and education
throughout the British Empire. This decision was made at the
conclusion of the Conference on Cinema Education held recently in
England.
This institute would be of a semi-independent nature but under the
authority of the President on the Board of Education and it seems
that, in addition to the preponderant influence he would have on the
question of educational cinema, he would also have a favorable
influence on the moral level of entertainment films.
FRANCE has just held a congress in which the questions on the
agenda were the following: urgency of producing films truly suited for
education (directed by the most capable educators); methodical
organization of cinémathèques and the lending of films;
decentralization; adoption of an international standard for school
films in a small format; international exchange of instructional and
educational films; propaganda in favor of genuine documentaries;
geography, natural history, customs, industry.
SCANDINAVIA, according to the report of Mme Gagner, is also
making a major organizational effort. Ten years ago in Sweden there
were 500 educational films, including documentaries, today they
number 2500.
I would also like to point out that SPAIN, at the initiative of Dr.
Caballero, is trying to put together its first attempts of producing
instructional documentaries. Similarly, HOLLAND has produced
some marvelous films, thanks to Mr. Joris Ivens.
In CZECHOSLOVAKIA, the Ministry of Public Education has
created the National Institute of Film and Illuminated Projections in
Prague. This institute is responsible for all issues concerning
educational film, while the inspection of cinematic installations is
under the auspices of the Ministry of Public Education.
In BELGIUM, the Belgian Cinematographic University offers every
year 120 programs composed of 7 professional training films.
In regards to ITALY, the institute Luce possesses approximately
370,000 meters of educational films.

We can assume that the entertainment film can provide moral

education to children. So it is urgent to undertake a study of film from
the point of view of the psychological reactions it provokes and to
base stories on principles of social and individual morality, principles
that would seem abstract or dead if they are not brought to life by
being practiced in real life. Let us not forget that moving images can
make children either successful or criminal and that they form their
character.
The Soviet method brings us back to the alliance of the
entertainment film with the educational film.
If the school film is still in gestation, the continuing and adult
education film is, on the contrary, flourishing.
 In a quite remarkable report, a Frenchwoman, Mlle Léone Bourdel,
has summarized the advantages of the use of film in professional
orientation. I'll take the liberty of citing a few pages of the report
which she has entrusted to me because it expresses my thoughts
exactly.

The role of cinema in professional orientation.

The professional orientation film concerns primarily children and

young adults. Its objective is to inform them about different
professions so that they can orient themselves and choose
knowledgeably, based on their interests and aptitudes, the work that
will accompany their daily life.
Those who manage Professional Orientation know just how
difficult it is to produce a complete program. If medico-psychological
tests, interviews, etc. make it possible to adequately discern the
physical and mental aptitudes of individuals, what will make them
succeed at certain professions and, even more important, the contra-
indications which should make them avoid others, there is on the
other hand nothing that presents professional life to young people,
showing them the particular traits and the multiple forms that it can
take.
Conferences and brochures can only give partial information. The
description is not the profession. It is always more or less a personal
interpretation. It misrepresents things, for better or for worse. So
factory visits have been tried. But, here again, there are other
difficulties: group visits do not permit everyone to see everything –
they only show certain aspects of work. And they cannot be too
frequent either since they take up a lot of the teacher's and the
student's time and inconvenience plant managers by disturbing the
smooth operation of their factories.
The Cinema, on the other hand, permits an exact presentation of
all professions to an unlimited number of young people without great
disturbance and also without any danger. Everything that is essential
to know can be presented for each profession,: the profession's
nature – what it consists of; the different forms of work it requires –
the tools needed and how to use them; the physical and mental skills
demanded by it – its advantages and disadvantages; and the future
and possible advancement it offers.
An entire complete guide can be filmed and reproduced in
hundreds of copies, projected before the eyes of thousands of
interested and attentive young people. And this visual guide can then
be supplemented by a written guide that every young person can
keep to preserve their thoughts.
Film can make children aware of professions that they never
dreamed existed. It can show them other industries than just the
ones they see prospering around their village or their neighborhood,
show them that they can succeed in professions that exist farther
away. Films broaden their horizons.
Film lets young people take their first steps in the professional
field; they must be made to feel what work is, and instinctively,
imperceptibly, without even being conscious of the process, learn to
respect and like work, thanks to the prestige of the screen. The
screen can reveal to young people the richness of different
professions of the working life, and provide them with the information
needed to make a wise choice. The Cinema serves young people
and does so joyously because young people love moving images,
they love life.
The Cinema also serves industry. It is even possible that in an
indefinable future it will be able to partially help solve such huge
problems as unemployment and labor shortages.
Film can serve to revive dormant professions. It can attract
workers to those which lack physical and mental manpower. It can
launch new professions by attracting the necessary manpower. It is
only necessary that Professional Orientation be in constant touch
with the labor market in order to create the right films and distribute
them where they are needed.
In Technical Education, the cinema has an even deeper role to
play. It brings a new method, not one destined to replace the teacher
or books as its detractors claim, nor practical experience, the
personal effort of students. It is rather, as Jean Benoit-Levy has said,
an approach based on visual instruction that contributes another way
of presenting things with other methods.
The Cinema succeeds at showing what no teacher, what no
factory visit can teach; the acrobatics and true feats of strength and
patience demanded to shoot a film on technology need months to
prepare and can be accomplished only in a single try. Neither the
student nor the engineer instructing him would be able to go
everywhere the camera lens does. The film's huge advantage is that
it can present a condensed, complete picture, rich, animated, lively
and clear, which makes visiting a factory after reading the technical
manuals more productive.
For technology courses aimed at older students, those in the elite
schools of higher education….or for specialized engineers, the value
of the services that the cinema can provide no longer needs to be
proved. It is an analytic research process of the first order. In the
area of demonstration, it is now an indispensable tool.

In France, technical education has created 13 cinémathèques.

There also exist regional bureaus for film education in Lyon, Lille,
Saint-Étienne, Nancy, and Bordeaux. These cinémathèques and
films are supplied through the purchases at the ministerial level.
Chambers of Commerce also place orders for films that interest
their region. The Ministry of Technical Education plans to multiply the
number of these films and their uses in three areas: 1) choice of
profession; 2) technical description and apprenticeship; and 3)
evolution and progress achieved in this profession by publicizing
their necessity through demonstrations at conferences in schools of
higher education.
Technical education will try through moving images to interest
young adults in certain professions that have been neglected and to
steer them away from certain branches of industry that already have
a sufficient labor force.
And here we see Cinema as an inevitable influence on the
management of economic problems. The Cinema does not just
educate by teaching, but also guides, directs, publicizes, and helps
to ensure a balance in social activity.
 Advantage of cinema from a technical and industrial
viewpoint.

Technical and scientific Cinema is applicable to everything. Here

is a quick glimpse of a few examples of its applications:

Two studies conducted by J.A. Piacitelli, a specialist in industrial

organization, show that the use of small format film has produced
excellent results (production increased by 60%, reduced fatigue,
higher wages, lower production costs). He has stated that the
demonstration of actions recorded on film, when they are shown
repeatedly in short cycles, is more economical than any other
method of demonstration.
Mr. F. G. Gilberth and Mr. Allan H. Morgan, assistant editor of
Factory & Industrial Management, have photographed the progress
of construction work and the movements of workers at their jobs and
have concluded that the "greatest gains in efficiency can be
achieved by eliminating useless motions that are badly managed
and inefficient."
With small format film, the analysis of infinitesimal motions is
made possible without significant expense.
It detects the wasted movement of workers who seem to be
working quickly and shows that "speed and skill are not necessarily
synonymous."
In the USSR, the Cinema is a fundamental tool in addressing
problems relating to workplace security and safety techniques.
Every factory is equipped.
Films treat such problems as: "Fatigue and how to combat it,
fatigue-induced trauma, first aid for workplace accidents (how to stop
hemorrhaging, treating drowning victims, etc.)." They are very
carefully made and projected.
Other films are devoted to the dangers of certain kinds of work:
"Toxic Gas in Mines," "110 Volts," "Moving Heavy Loads" etc…
Psychotechnical selection plays a major role in the organization of
workplace methods. Several films deal with this problem (R.I.C.E.,
June 1931).
 In GERMANY, the Cinema division of the Krupp Company, at
Essen, uses film to help reduce accidents in the workplace.
In the UNITED STATES, in FINLAND, in FRANCE – all fire brigade
regiments have instituted a film department; in Italy, in Luxembourg,
film is used as a way to avert workplace accidents (R.I.C.E., June
1931).
Since 1926, in ITALY, the ENIOS (Entente Nazionale ltaliano per
I'Organizzazione
Scientifica del Lavoro) has created a vast movement to focus on
the technical and economic problems of the workplace. Producers,
businessmen, and farmers embarked on an overhaul of their
equipment and obtained better returns. In 1927, the ENIOS
produced 8 films demonstrating the advantages of employing
methods for the scientific organization of the workplace in the
different sectors of industry (R.I.C.E., August
1931).
In France, the Société des T.C.R.P. uses Cinema for the training of
bus and tramway mechanics.
The railway Compagnies de l'Est et du Nord for the handling of the
poles to be attached to train cars, freight cranes, the operation of
switching tracks ("Le Cinéma et l'Enseignement", p. 48, J. Coutrot.
"Cinéma et Organisation Scientifique du Travail").
Can the Cinema help identify professional aptitude?
Mr. Lahy has used cinematographic vision to measure the "feeling
of acceleration" in bus drivers.
The "Fachfilm" in Berlin has produced a film which can be used to
measure the degree of exactness with which an observer perceives
the speed of scenes and movements.
From a mental point of view, the operation of "witnessing" can be
of some importance. It makes it possible to see candidates for a
given job describe the film of an operation a short time after they
have seen it, how they remember it, what they have forgotten; what
reasoning they use to compensate for the parts they have forgotten,
etc. To sum up, submitting to candidates about whom it would be
useful to have information about their "attention span",
"suggestibility," etc, one or more appropriate film projections is a
method that could be proposed as having a certain usefulness (from
a study by Mr. Alfredo Niceforo).
In the same vein, the viewing of professionally varied scenes can
arouse in a young man or woman emotions, reactions, symptoms of
a mental nature that may seem inexistent in their daily environment
but that could be revealed by exposure to their vocation.

Fatigue.

All work requiring muscular activity can offer numerous examples

for the study of the techniques of work and the way to execute them
with the greatest economy of effort possible.
The Cinema finds its use in the teaching of home economics and
in the professional education of the mentally handicapped (Professor
Loriga, p. 138, "Cinéma et O.S. du T.").
The scientific organization of work has not yet asked much of
Cinema compared to all it can offer.
As a result of the Congress of 1929, a Study Commission has
been created to produce films that deal with the subject intensively.
For each, an illustrated poster will be created with images extracted
from the film to ensure memorization of its lessons. (J. Coutrot, p.
45, "Le C. et l’O.S. du T."). The difficulty is a financial one, these
films can hardly be shown commercially. So it is necessary to have
the support of companies in industry, public bodies, and to make that
possible they need to be made aware of the question's importance.
In GERMANY, in Berlin, a very complete organization attached to
the "Photo-Cinematographic Office of the City of Berlin," exists for
teaching film technique: the Filmseminar.
There are courses for teachers, professors, for the training of
specialized and certified workers; to help perfect the skills of young
men and women who have entered the cinema industry without
preparation.
A British physician, Dr. Bentley, of the Office of Hygiene of Bengal,
recalling an epidemic of cholera in Calcutta, confirmed that the
distribution of a half-dozen prints of films on the prophylaxis of
cholera and the precautions to be taken in case of an epidemic
would have enormously facilitated the task of the doctors and
medical authorities.
It was in Germany, I believe, that a department store produced a
film to familiarize its employees with the best sales techniques.
Advertising films themselves educate the public by exposing them
to new industrial inventions that make everyone's lives more
pleasant and practical.
The Cinema, even in its smallest effects, facilitates and spreads
progress.
The Cinema uses the raw material of life, makes the individual
less alone and throws him, willingly or not, into the industrial and
scientific activity of his time.
In this way, Cinema brings us new methods of expression and
action.
Leaf through the main catalogue of the International Institute
directed by Mr. De Feo, and you will have an admirable overview of
all that the educational Cinema can produce. Let us also pay
homage here to Italy for having so well understood the potential of
cinematographic efforts.
From the point of view of hygiene, the Cinema can be a major
resource. Connecting cause to effect, teaching about remedies
through real-life situations…Lessons in morality are included.
Because in addition to our domain of activity and concern, we are
still ignorant of so many facts and questions! ...
The cinema forces us to go outside the small domain of what we
are used to. By it, thanks to it, the smallest village can communicate
with the entire world, the most isolated individual with all men.
Do I need to expand further how the cinema can contribute to the
educational, artistic, social and international point of view?
You can draw your own conclusions.
I have deliberately chosen not to cram this talk full of documents
and statistics.
What we can say at the very least is that out of the massive block
of cinema to which I referred earlier, starting as a carnival sideshow
36 years ago, the Cinema has risen to a dominant form of
expression and that a whole world of thought is forming around it.
 The formation of this world belongs to all of us. It is still vague, still
in gestation. But we know that it must be. And it will come soon
because we are convinced of its usefulness.

Obstacles in the way. The means to be used.

I have now come to the last chapter, to the wish that I would like
to help you formulate. The best artistic Cinema, the most flourishing
educational Cinema, is blossoming in Russia. Why?
Because, from the artistic point of view, leaving behind banal
stories, the Russian Cinema, which is a State Cinema, is focusing on
great human questions. And educational Cinema has become
commonplace.
So the intrusion of the State appears to have a beneficial effect
since the State does not intervene for financial gain but for social,
altruistic reasons.
A film, whatever kind it is, costs money. Film production
companies require capital investment, not just for a return at an
ordinary level, but at an extremely profitable one. I am not
exaggerating; if a film does not double its original investment, its
investor is not happy.
We cannot change traditions. My intention is not to put the
commercial Cinema on trial. It has its uses; it must survive; it must
be encouraged and helped. Important works sometimes emerge
from it. We have examples.
But can we not convince every government to become the
proprietors of theaters where only the highest quality films from all
fields are shown, theaters whose success will serve as an example,
and stimulate both the initiatives of theater managers and the
cinematic education of the public? And then could these
governments, between themselves, not create a sort of international
circuit for these judiciously selected films where the thought of all
peoples could come together on the screen in the form of their best
artistic, scientific, and research films?
This circuit would serve to encourage film production companies
who would cease to be haunted by the spell of the purely
commercial, it would guide the public whose eyes it would open to
the different expressive possibilities of Cinema.
This very short proposal will be the practical conclusion of this talk.
Our altruistic wishes will always be smashed against the
commercial barrier. Let us look to the League of Nations. It alone can
help Cinema get around the obstacle by proposing an international
spectacle of Nations where cinematic expression, in the diversity of
its highest forms will find an outlet for its best advancement and its
greatest artistic and moral expansion.

***

The questions so extensively considered by Mme Germaine

Dulac in her report made up Point III of the agenda of the
Conference of Rome. The delegates of the different countries
insisted on supplementing the already abundant documentation of
the session's secretary with the following information:

ITALY (Mme Costanzi-Masi): The national institute L.U.C.E. has

assembled a catalogue that comprises a large number of films,
including classroom, documentary, agricultural, folklore, hygiene,
security, technical, and scientific films. L.U.C.E. films concerning the
teaching of surgery were judged the best of their kind at the last
congress on surgery in Warsaw. L.U.C.E. films on hygiene are also
greatly in demand in other countries.
SWITZERLAND: A national school film office exists in Basel where
all information on documentary films can be obtained. The "Cartel
romand d'hygiène sociale et morale" has been created to make and
acquire several films on social education and hygiene. Women's
groups are using films for their propaganda more and more
frequently. For example, on the occasion of the national exhibition of
women in the workplace in 1928, women from the Vaud countryside
created a film showing the work of women in the fields and
vineyards. The Swiss association "Friends of Young Women" has
made a propaganda film (which has already paid for itself) and the
Swiss Association for Women’s Suffrage has also made its own
propaganda film.
AUSTRALIA: The directors of two or three schools show their
students educational, travel, and other films. Movie theaters never
show films destined especially for children.
We have had some very interesting local films showing different
industries: wool weaving, biscuit and jam factories. But of course the
usual films are imported, such as dramas, comedies, travel films,
etc.
BRITISH INDIA: The special showings of children's films have
been a financial disaster. It has been suggested that in India, as in
England, certain films should be screened exclusively for adults.
According to a British newspaper, it appears that this process has
not had satisfactory results. Children have been able to enter
theaters accompanied by adults which has resulted in many children
being accompanied by strangers and attending the films anyway.

The many different ways that cinema can be used for a great
variety of purposes necessarily made the discussion of Point III on
the Conference’s agenda particularly lively. Indeed, the discussion
for which Mme Dulac’s report provided a wealth of material was
extremely thorough and, focusing most especially on the problem of
the educational film, it concluded with the adoption of the following
recommendation:

RECOMMENDATION

The conference welcomes the following recommendation issued

by the Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters of the League of
Nations of 9 July 1931, a recommendation which endorses the
principle already adopted by the International Council of Women:

The Committee, persuaded of the value of educational cinema as

a means to communicate not just national cultures, but also the
mutual understanding of what is highest and most noble in their
people, requests that the Commission on Intellectual Cooperation
draw the attention of the International Institute of Cinematography to
the advantages that could be obtained, by appropriate means, from
the inclusion in the program of each delegation of films of an
educational character.

Given the important role held today by cinema, it is indispensable

to take all necessary measures to implement the distribution of
educational films, encourage producers to make as many of them as
possible, create a close collaboration between producers, scientists,
and educators for the establishment of teaching films, or films that
can propagate ideas about hygiene, science, art, etc. …
In addition, speaking from an educational point of view, the
Conference requests that historical accuracy be respected.

Revue Internationale du Cinéma Éducateur, December 1931

 WHAT IS CINEMA?

In asking the question: "What is cinema?", it is not my intention to

enter into a discussion of aesthetic tendencies, but into one of a
moral order. I would therefore answer: the cinema is an art form
because, in order to exist, it calls upon the intellectual and sensory
creativity of artists whose minds conceive and create the images and
sounds that compose it. It is also an industry because it materially
depends on the financial firms that support it, commercially exploit it,
and its development is subject to the laws of the marketplace. The
body of cinematic activity is thus divided into two distinct factions.
The industrial faction which raises capital, places orders for the
production of films according to market conditions, and the artistic
faction, which is creative and technical, composing and making films
with the ideals and individual originality that are the focus of every
work of art.
The industrial faction must assume responsibility for the finances
and the "commercial" quality (and I emphasize "commercial") of a
film in order to assure its widest distribution, its appeal to the taste of
its national audience and to that of the entire world. An industrially-
conceived film is an expensive product whose return on investment
must be guaranteed by substantial sales. It is indisputable that it
must be a marketable commodity because every evening it must
supply great numbers of movie theaters in every country.
But cinema is more of an art than an industry. Whether we like it or
not, it is a reflection of the intellectuality and sensibility of a people,
an expression which, if it is to develop, requires creative thought,
and therefore an author.
Are not the commercial qualities of a film the result of sensibility,
inspiration, technical values, thought, science, and so finally of an
essentially artistic nature?
An industrial product can be duplicated, imitated, copied. Every
film, on the other hand, has a personal form; at some point it always
escapes from the authority and regulation imposed on it. Its value is
exclusively dependent on those who made it, those who supplied its
inspiration and visual creativity. For all logical, practical purposes, it
belongs to both art and commerce, and not to commerce alone,
whatever the current theories say.
We will have arrived at the perfect form of cinematic development
when we have achieved a complete and total harmony between the
artist and the businessman. The visual director needs an author to
provide a film as a piece of merchandise. The merchant who orders
a film would be wrong to believe that the author of "his" film is a
mere rented workman. Moreover, his fortune is dependent on the
filmmaker's talent. To be fair, they are associates: the visual author
contributes artistic capital, the businessman contributes it in the
currency of commerce.
What is a film author?
The author of a film, in my view, is the one who creates a visual
idea out of nothing, the moving images and their accompanying
sounds, who creates the work of film. The production crew are not
authors because they are only carrying out a suggestion, a wish.
Creation is in the theme and in the image.
In a musical work, there is the author of the libretto and the
composer of the music. The orchestra, the singers execute and
interpret, they do not create. In cinema the situation is identical. On
the one hand, the theme, on the other the musical development. A
libretto, a cinematic theme, can exist outside the music or the
images. But only the music confers value on the libretto, just as only
the moving images confer cinematic value on the theme.
Sometimes there is only one author: the visual composer, called
the film director. Sometimes, there are two authors, the visual
composer and the script writer, the author of the theme, of the idea.
In both cases, the author or authors have created. They have
made a work of art and because there is intellectual creation,
invention, it therefore belongs to them. In all justice, authors have the
right to ask for protection of the thought they have created. But film
authors too often see all their rights denied by the industry.
 Once a film has been completed and accepted by its producers, it
is frequently believed that it must be altered to meet the
requirements of commercial distribution. There is nothing strange
about this. The viewing of a scene often reveals certain defects that
were not detected in the editing. And we have seen this in the
theater, where directors often ask for actions to be modified and
scenes eliminated before and after the full dress rehearsal. But in
general it is the author himself who makes these changes. In the
cinema, nothing of the sort. The producer often says: I bought or I
ordered this film so it is entirely my property. So it is cut, shrunk, its
scenes changed around, without the author of the action, the author
of the film being informed …or only informed after the fact. And the
name of the poor author is featured on a work which sometimes
bears little resemblance to the one he created, a work he disavows
because it is unbalanced, damaged, illogical.
Does capital have the right to suppress artistic property in this
way? I am ending the article with this question, which is a sort of
preface for the next one which will be devoted to the question: What
is a filmmaker ?

La Critique Indépendante, 12 February 1932

 THE AVANT-GARDE CINEMA

The works of the cinematic avant-garde.

Their future, the public and the film industry.

Any film can be called "avant-garde" whose technique, used in

the service of innovative expression in moving images and sound,
breaks with established tradition in order to seek in the strictly visual
and audible sphere undiscovered notes of deep emotion. The avant-
garde film is not destined for the simple pleasures of the mass
audience. It is both more selfish and more altruistic. Selfish because
it is the personal manifestation of pure thought; altruistic because it
is detached from any concern other than progress. The genuinely
inspired avant-garde film has the primordial quality of containing,
sometimes under an appearance of inaccessibility, the seeds of
discoveries likely to lead films toward cinematic forms of the future.
The avant-garde is born at the same time of the criticism of the
present and the foreknowledge of the future.
Cinema is an art and an industry. Considered from an artistic
angle, it must jealously protect the purity of its expression and never
disguise it to please. But it is also an industry. To make and distribute
a film, money is needed, a lot of money. The film on which the image
is imprinted is expensive, the processing it requires costly. Every
element of image and sound that is used corresponds to a fixed cost
in itself and represents an outlay. The electricity required by a
beautiful lighting effect can only be obtained with money, as well as
the lens that records it, for example. The list of expenses goes on
and risks being long.
The film industry produces commercial films, which is to say films
that are made with the hope of reaching a broad public, and
merchandisable films. It must be understood that merchandisable
films are those that make every concession to public taste and
pursue a simple financial objective, while commercial films are films
which, taking maximum advantage of cinematic techniques,
sometimes result in interesting works in their pursuit of hard-earned
profit. This is thus a union of industry and art.
From commercial cinema emerges the total work, the balanced
film for which both groups, the industry and the avant-garde, work.
In general, the industry does not zealously support the artistic
contribution; the avant-garde, facing in the opposite direction, is
alone in its concern. Thus the antagonism.
We would be wrong to say that art in cinema should aspire only to
exceptional work likely to shake up public opinion. Between the
cinema of industry and the cinema of the avant-garde, there exists a
cinema with no specific label. It is this cinema which is the most
important because it is so plentiful.

To begin, a fairly serious mechanical question must be asked.

Either the opposing forces are equal and cancel each other out by
rotating in place – the cinema will spin like a top – or we can
establish a harmonious balance between the two forces which will
allow the cinema to progress.[75]

And here we have a beautiful dream that offers a glimpse of how

the avant-garde can break down barriers, open new paths, and
break new ground. And then the film industry can make a
harmonious and judicious selection from the avant-gardes'
discoveries to create a full work of art. In this way, the commercial
cinema can be secure in its development.
The avant-garde and the commercial cinema, in other words, the
art and the industry of film, form an inseparable ensemble.
But the avant-garde that is necessary for this evolution is opposed
by the majority of the public and the totality of producers.
The different areas of the avant-garde have tried: 1) to free the
cinema from the grip of existing art forms; 2) to bring the cinema
back to its essential elements: motion, rhythm, life.

Historical evolution.
 The cinema, since its mechanical invention by Louis Lumière,
has always elicited a spiritual quest from filmmakers in parallel to the
goals of its engineers. Was not Méliès, in his time, an avant-garde
filmmaker when he replaced the photographic spirit with the
cinematic spirit?
In addition, there is Grimoin-Sanson who, in 1897, two years after
the birth of cinema, applied for a patent in this way: "The purpose of
this patent request is to guarantee me the exclusive ownership of a
new animated panoramic view invention permitting the spectator in
the center of the theater to experience the illusion of ascending in a
hot-air balloon."
"During the first screenings," wrote the Revue du Cinéma of 1st
November 1931, "several spectators were stricken with a
seasickness characteristic of trips in hot-air balloons."
This first attempt resembles, twenty five years later, that of the
avant-garde of 1924, which, in the recounting of an anecdote,
considered the feeling an action provokes to be more important to
the drama than the action itself. Of course, at the time, no one
understood the import of the discovery of Grimoin-Sanson.
It is fairly troubling to observe the simplistic attitude with which the
public greeted the first manifestations of cinema. To begin with, the
cinema was for the public a photographic means to reproduce the
mechanical motion of life. The view of a train arriving at a station was
enough to satisfy it, without imagining that in cinema was hidden a
new expressive dimension to our sensibility and intelligence.
The capturing of motion – life viewed as a simple photographic
reproduction – became above all else an outlet for literature.
Animated photographs were used to record an artificial fictional
action, abandoning the point of view of real life to show just the point
of view of literature. The cinema thus became just a means to
imagine narrative movement in the way that a work of theater is
movement. The novel, too, is movement because there is an
interlocking succession of situations, ideas, feelings, which collide
with each other. Human beings are movement because they move
around, react. From deduction to deduction, from confusion to
confusion, rather than studying in their own right the concepts of
motion, the moving image and its rhythm in their intrinsic value, we
gave cinema the role of a scenically photographed stage play. It was
considered an easy way to multiply the episodes and sets of a
drama, to reinforce and vary the dramatic or novelistic situations of
the story with constant changes in points of view, thanks to the
alternance of artificial constructed sets with natural settings.
The years passed, perfecting the means of production and refining
the cinematic sense of filmmakers. The narrative cinema, purely
arbitrary and novelistic, evolved. The anecdote was wrapped in
realistic forms and emotions were brought back to a strictly realistic
and human scale.
The logic of an action, the exactness of the framing, the truth of an
attitude constituted the framework of the new cinematic technique. In
addition, with composition, the expressive measure, intervening in
the way images were put together, gave birth to rhythm, and in spite
of the visual feelings that were beginning to emerge, the conception
of the story for the story's sake predominated.
The dramatic scenes were no longer independent of one another,
simply linked by an inter-title, but highly dependent on one another
through a psychological, emotional, and rhythmic logic.[76]
A little later came the idea of photographing what had not been
expressed, the invisible, the imponderable, the human soul, the
"suggestive" visual arising from the precision of photography. Above
the action was drawn a harmonious line of emotion that dominated
people and things.
From this the psychological film logically derived. It seemed
simplistic to place a character into a given situation without evoking
the realm of his internal life and adding it to his gestures, the vision
of his emotions. By adding to the specific events of a drama the
description of multiple and contradictory internal impressions, in the
middle of the action, the events no longer existed in themselves but
became the consequence of a moral state, and imperceptibly a
duality intervened which, in order to remain balanced, adapted itself
to the cadence of a rhythm, a dynamic, in tune with the images.
 And the action of the avant-garde began. The public and the
majority of film producers had accepted realism, but they resisted the
developed and isolated play of sentimental and emotional elements.
The cinema should, according to their theories, belong exclusively
and strictly to the drama created by situations and actions and not to
those provoked by the internal conflicts of hearts and minds. They
fought against impressionism and expressionism without thinking
that all of the initiatives undertaken by current innovators served to
enlarge the realm of pure action, of the emotion produced by
psychological conflicts and atmospheric analysis.[77]
La Roue, by Abel Gance, marked a major step. In this film,
psychology, gestures, the drama became dependent on a cadence.
The characters were no longer the only important factors in the work,
but were just one among others – objects, machines, the duration of
scenes, their composition, their juxtaposition, their framing, their
relation to each other. Rails, locomotive, steam engine, wheels,
pressure-gauge, smoke, tunnels, playing with the characters through
moving images, a new form of drama sprang forth, composed of
emotion, the motion of rationally measured images, and it claimed its
place, just as the expression of "things" magnificently reached the
level of a visual poem made of human instincts of life, playing with
both concrete reality and the abstract imponderables. A symphonic
poem where emotion bursts forth not i, not in acts, but in visual
sonority. Unnoticeably, the narrative storytelling, the actor's playing,
lost their isolated value in favor of a general orchestration of shots,
rhythms, framing, angles, light, proportions, juxtaposition, and the
harmonization of moving images.

To strip away from the cinema all the elements impersonal to it, to
find its veritable essence in the understanding of motion and of
visual values, this was the new aesthetic appearing in the light of a
new dawn.[78]

Definitive launch of the avant-garde

 It was around 1924 that the attempts and experiments made by a
few audacious filmmakers broke away from commercial production
to form what can be called the avant-garde. The divorce between the
two forms of production was necessary, as the public could not
accept certain experimental sequences in a popular film where they
were enraptured by the anecdotal storytelling. The sequences were
immediately eliminated from the film either by the producer or by
theater managers worried about upsetting or displeasing audiences
with a new technique of visual expression.
So there was, from then on, commercial output and the
development of the avant-garde. For the latter, a minimum of
production and restricted distribution. Minimal production because
experiments of this nature did not find the capital that is continuously
needed for any stable cinematic activity. And yet the avant-garde,
detached from the commercial circuit, bravely progressed towards
the conquest of new forms of expression that it believed useful to
broaden cinematic thought, without material support, without moral
support, but with faith. It looked for possibilities for the broadening
that it sought by analysis, focusing on making emotionally powerful
its expression of every being and every object, neglecting neither
what is infinitely big nor what is infinitely small. It sought by all pure
cinematic means, outside literature, outside theater, emotion and
feeling in motion, volumes and forms, playing with transparency,
opacity, and rhythm. It was the era of pure cinema which, rejecting
any other action, focused exclusively on action arising directly from
the moving image itself "attempting to give a strictly personal
expression to the universe."[79]
Pure cinema did not reject sensibility, nor drama, it just tried to
reach them through purely visual elements. It tried to retrieve
emotion beyond the framework of human actions in everything that
exists at the heart of nature, in the invisible, in the imponderable, in
abstract movement. It was the branch of cinema which showed in
various forms, ironic,[80] sensory,[81] the expression of motion and
rhythm, freeing them from narrative situations in order to let ideas,
commentary, dramatic action arise by suggestion. The standards it
had to meet were: 1) the expression of a motion depends on its
rhythm; 2) the rhythm in itself and the development of a motion
constitute two sensory and emotional elements, the basis of the
dramatic art of the screen; 3) the work of cinema must reject any
impersonal aesthetic and search for its own in its visual qualities; 4)
the cinematic action must be "Life"; and 5) the cinematic action must
not limit itself to human beings but reach beyond them into the
domain of nature and dreams.
The actual elements of pure cinema could be found in certain
scientific documentaries, those that showed, for example, the
formation of crystals, the germination, growth, and blossoming of
flowers or vegetables, the trajectory of a ball, the bursting of a
bubble (such pure rhythm and very moving, the admirable
transformations of microbes evolving, insects in their expressions
and their life.)
Did not the cinema have in its lenses the power to capture the
infinitely big and the infinitely small? This branch of cinema, focusing
on the uncapturable, paid attention to dramas other than those
played out by actors. It was the most opposed because it disdained
storytelling to concentrate on subjective impressions and
expressions and sought to envelop the viewer not in a mesh of
relationships, not with actions to follow, but with feelings to be
undergone and experienced. We find the influence of this branch
quite clearly today in the action of certain beautiful films that are
accessible to all sensibilities such as The General Line (the
transformation of cream into butter through the movement of the
mechanical churner) and Earth by Dovchenko (the rain fertilizing the
soil and streaking flowers and fruit). In parallel to pure cinema,
certain visual composers sought to treat nature itself with new
rhythms transforming abstract dreams into concrete and living reality.
Through them, the cinema was amplified by rhythmic truth.[82]
Everything that avant-garde cinema offered, slowly and gently,
was instinctively absorbed by commercial cinema. While pure
cinema, voluntarily, remained abstract, other audacious works,
inspired by it, applied its technique to more direct sensations, that
normally led to less generally controversial ends.

Organization and uses of avant-garde films

It was also in 1924 that by a play of reciprocity some enlightened

spirits had the idea of creating specialized movie theaters where all
research initiatives could be developed and bear fruit by reaching a
public whose curiosity had been awakened and prepared. On 14
November 1924, Jean Tedesco opened the Vieux-Colombier theater.
The specialty of his programming, of which he was the first to
perceive the necessity, produced the astonishing result of putting the
public into contact with works that they would not have tolerated in
other theaters and of supporting the tendencies of films which,
though seeking commercial success, were nevertheless not
commercial enough to please a nervously ignorant audience. In this
way it was possible for films of quality such as Ménilmontant, Moana,
The Last Laugh, Le Cabaret des figures de cire [sic], The Last Horse
Carriage in Berlin and other beautiful creations to be received with
the appreciation they deserved. The Last Laugh, for example, was
booed at the Aubert-Palace theater but applauded and understood at
the Vieux-Colombier. Documentaries, ignored by standard
distribution channels, finally found, when they transcended
photographic banality to reach a high level of living expressiveness,
an encouraging reception that their perfection deserved.
On 21 January 1926, it was Armand Tallier and L. Myrga's turn to
open the doors of the Studio des Ursulines with this declaration of
faith:

We propose to recruit our audience from the elite of writers, artists,

and intellectuals of the Latin Quarter and among those, in ever
greater numbers, for whom the poor quality of films keeps them
away from movie theaters. Our program will be composed of French
and foreign films of various tastes, interests, and types: everything
that shows originality, value, and effort will be welcome on our
screen.
 The Studio des Ursulines was true to the intentions of its program
and welcomed every type of film. To pure cinema, a new form of film
art could now be added in which the clash or harmony between
shots renewed the dramatic structure of storytelling in longer-form
works. Again, attempts at visual philosophy, films of conflict, of free
instincts and moral rebellion expressed by abstraction and rhythm.
[83]
Anxious to do justice to their program of eclectic action, Armand
Tallier and L. Myrga did not abandon films of a more classical nature
that only the errant whims of the general public had prevented from
being commercially successful. These films were above all
profoundly human and their inner meaning came out through visual
observation.[84] The doctrines of the avant-garde that flourished in
them, now more accessible, anticipated new techniques in
commercial films.
In 1928, a third specialized movie theater was founded in
Montmartre under the auspices of Jean Mauclair, Studio 28, which
presented not just experimental work but also both strictly
commercial current films that had the good taste to be truly cinematic
and those of the past.[85] Studio 28 presented the first Russian film to
be projected, Bed and Sofa, and the first Surrealist films: Le Chien
andalou and L'Âge d'or by Buñuel.
In 1929, under the direction of Jean Vallée, another specialized
theater made its screen available to experimental work, L'Œil de
Paris, whose goal was to serve cinematic thought across the entire
range of its expressive possibilities.[86]
Then it was the Agriculteurs Theater, under the direction of Mr.
Querel, which sought to establish a repertory of notable films by
varied programming. This twin effort by filmmakers and actors,
motivated by the advancement of cinema, succeeded at
circumventing the mass audience whose curiosity attracted them to
specialized theaters. The whistling and booing did not intimidate
these modern theater managers. They continued with their
educational task unconcerned by the protests of their customers who
soon changed their minds. These managers had founded a
commercial distribution circuit. From now on free-thinking works and
misunderstood beautiful films had the right to be seen and could
count on earning revenue and an audience. Here is where we should
mention the action of Ciné-Clubs, the groups of amateur filmmakers,
whose goal was to organize at regular intervals shows, accompanied
by talks and demonstrations of cinema. Let us pay homage to the
first to do this, the newspaper La Tribune Libre, founded by Mr.
Charles Léger, who gave prominence to this formula for public
discussion of films; the Ciné-Club de France, an assembly of expert
professionals, presided over successively by Léon Poirier, René
Blum and Henri Clouzot. The Ciné-Club de France organized the
Paris premiere of The Battleship Potemkin in a private screening
when it had been banned by the censors. Other clubs in Paris
followed the example of La Tribune Libre: Le Club de l'Écran and
L'Effort, artists groups also incorporated film screenings into their
programs. The provinces followed their example. At Agen,
Montpellier, Nice, Marseille, Lyons, Reims, Strasbourg, Bordeaux,
Châlons, Alger, Tours, clubs opened and, while remaining
independent, associated themselves in 1929 under the banner of the
Fédération Française des Ciné-Clubs.
Depending on their financial possibilities, these clubs organize
approximately every month film shows with the same ideal and the
same action plan as those of the specialized theaters. But since
every region does not operate at the same level of science and
cinematic knowledge, each of their programs are composed
differently, adapted to the public which they must educate by
evolution, not revolution. These clubs rent films from distributors and
operate in the same way as regular movie theaters. The film
cooperative, under the direction of Mr. Robert Aron, designed
programs and concentrated on the distribution of films that had been
made with a special effort. Pierre Braunberger also founded Studio-
Film, and produced and officially encouraged avant-garde
productions while trying to put them on a solid commercial and
financial basis. Specialized theaters, the Ursulines, Studio 28, Œil de
Paris, were also sponsoring experimental films which were to appear
on their screens.
 The movement was also developing abroad: the filmmaker Hans
Richter founded seven clubs in Germany. In Holland the Filmliga
Association have created seven of them, of which the largest are in
Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, Haarlem and Delft. In Spain,
Madrid, Barcelona and San Sebastian were following the lead of the
London Film Society which had its specialized theater. In Belgium,
Ciné-Clubs in Brussels, Ostend, Ghent, Antwerp and Liege are now
united into a single federation rendering tribute to cinema through
their efforts. There was interest in the avant-garde movement in
Argentina and even New York opened a specialized theater under
the auspices of the Film Arts Guild.
Experimental film had thus, in Europe and America, its production,
its theaters. Little by little, an international network was being woven
around it. Disparate groups, guided by the same faith, were making
contact with each other, either directly or through critical reviews.
Free cinematic thought had its free press.
It is not surprising that this distribution had an influence on
commercial films and their audience, so much so that, from 1931 on,
excepting only abstract films or fight films, there were fine
productions that both ordinary theaters and specialized theaters
were competing over to show.[87] It is thus possible to say, in
conclusion, that except for experimental films we had finally reached
a concept of cinema without rules or classifications. The Blue Angel,
The Threepenny Opera, cannot be put in any category. Their beauty
comes exclusively from their dramatic structure and their images.
They are purely cinematic while still accessible to all sensibilities.
The talking film destabilized the experimenters for a moment. The
cost of sound and dialogue productions prevented them from
pursuing their experiments. But it is worth pointing out that already in
1930, in regular theaters, Ruttmann's The Melody of the World
showed the true nature of the sound and dialogue film, with words
employed not for literary purposes but springing forth as a natural
attribute of the moving images. A German filmmaker, Fischinger,
succeeded in two short abstract works at creating visual rhythms
mathematically tuned to the musical rhythms of The Sorcerer's
Apprentice by Dukas and the Fifth Dance by Brahms.[88] A close
communion of ear and eye. Far from theater and literature, the
dramatic structure of sound and dialogue in cinema is created
according to the precise instructions of the avant-garde.

Conclusion

To sum up, the avant-garde has been seeking and finding the
abstract manifestation of pure thought and technique applied to films
on a clearly human scale. It has not only laid down the foundation for
a dramatic structure for the screen but has experimented with and
propagated all the possibilities of expression contained in the
camera lens.
Its influence is undeniable. It has, it can be said, refined the
public's eye, the creators' sensibility and broken ground by
broadening cinematic thought in its vast scope.
The avant-garde, I repeat, is life in ferment, it contains the seeds
of a future generation's concepts and thereby progress.
The Film Avant-Garde is necessary to the Art and Industry of
cinema.

in Le Cinéma des origines à nos jours [Ed. by Henri Fescourt],

Paris, Éditions du Cygne, 1932
 FOR OR AGAINST FILM CENSORSHIP?

Censorship should not exist in cinema any more than it does in

theater. If a film provokes disorder, the police intervene and the film
is banned; censorship is thus imposed automatically. But in its
current form, it is preventing film from renewing itself. It's quite
understandable why production companies do not want to risk
money on a film that is not going to get certification. They would take
greater risks if they could be sure that only the public would be the
judge.
A reform of censorship is thus needed. We could take as a model
censorship in Belgium which considers that only the particularly
vulnerable sensibilities of children need to be protected. In France, a
mature person's mentality will not be changed by a film. People's
opinions in our country are too well established to be at the mercy of
a film, no matter how good it is.
In any case, those who are interested in banned films will find a
way to see them. When, in 1924, we founded the Ciné-Club de
France, we wanted specifically to educate the public's taste by
projecting certain films that were landmarks in the history of cinema
and had a beneficial influence on the films that followed them. The
Federation which I lead has the same objectives. As far as we are
concerned, censorship is irrelevant. Nothing can prevent private
screenings reserved for members of a club who can thus watch
whatever films they want.
In any case, my experiments in the domain of abstract film have
never caused me any difficulties with censorship. But recently, for my
newsreels, I have received a discreet request to eliminate certain
military parades from prints of the newsreels to be distributed
abroad. Along with this, the anniversary of the death of a political
figure has provoked reactions in certain theaters whose violence
obliged me to stop the screening.
Pour Vous, 11 May 1933
 THE DIFFICULTIES OF CINEMATIC JOURNALISM

The task of cinematic journalists is very complicated in Paris,

because we are considered most often as an annoyance. Our
colleagues who are simply print journalists or photographers are able
to get along without disturbing anyone because their equipment is
minimal…but for us, with our truck full of sound and image recording
machines, we are more or less paralyzed if we are not allowed to set
up.
And there are even worse cases! At a reception hosted by a very
important politician, I was asked to come. So I made the effort to
install my cameramen, my electricians, etc…only to hear that we
were in the way, that our lights might disturb the speakers and that
we should leave…Another time, at Meaux, I was supposed to record
the inauguration of a monument to the Battle of the Marne donated
by the Americans. We were prevented from setting up on the pretext
that we were taking up too much room. So we had to step aside,
hide the microphones…trying to be small with a whole factory behind
us!
Another example: we show up at the Élysée Presidential Palace
the day of the drawing for the Davis Cup. First we are told that we
can only film the president without sound, then that we are forbidden
to use our generators for electricity in the presidential quarters.
The result: we were only able to shoot a few meters of film and
even they were unusable. We had to discard them.
How many times, moreover, have I heard legislators tell us:
"Whatever you do, don't blind me with your floodlights, I won't be
able to speak." And then there are others who speak so fondly of the
cinema… which returns the compliment (Mr. Herriot, for example, or
Mr. Daladier.)
If our problems were only with politicians they would not be so
serious, but our task is never easy, even when the subject is only a
common criminal. And yet we have received some very interesting
footage from the U.S. of the trial of Zingara because our American
colleagues are permitted to set up anywhere.
But if I myself was able to film Gorgulov, it was only due to luck.
Shooting news footage was not even my job. I had gone to the Court
of Justice with my camera crew because there were complaints that
what happened there was never shown in movie theaters. Once
there, I realized that the light was bad and so it would be very difficult
to work. Not wanting to leave with nothing to show for our effort, I
started chatting with the people gathered there and learned that
Gorgulov was about to be brought into court and that instead of
going through the basement, he would be brought across the
courtyard and so would be in broad daylight. Needless to say, I
jumped at the chance.
The fact that film reporting, especially now that there is sound,
requires the transport of cumbersome equipment, has disadvantages
that are not just physical but psychological: it surely makes us seem
a lot more indiscreet!
But its very difficulty makes our profession even more exciting.
We are constantly on our toes without ever being able to hide
ourselves!
For breaking events, we can obviously never get to the scene
before the event is over, like all other journalists, but what we report
has the enormous advantage of conveying the tone and expression
of witnesses to a crime or accident when they are still spontaneous
without any editorial or visual presentation. Our viewers can truly
say: "It’s as if we were there."
Not long ago, we were able to record the end of a scene of the
recovery of a drowning victim: the body was still there, surrounded
by gawkers who had seen it pulled from the water. Children who had
just arrived were pushing and shoving, shouting: "Did you see…it’s a
Moroccan..." And all the while, the fishermen went on calmly
watching their floats.
Our professional curiosity is not always without risk either: one day
we learned that outside Paris, at Andrésy to be exact, there had
been a gangland fight and someone had died. Our truck left
immediately. Upon arrival at the scene our cameramen prepared to
interview the eyewitnesses…and things started to go a bit wrong: a
lot of diplomacy was required for just a few meters of film.
When there is a disaster, like a fire on an ocean liner, for example,
an elaborate expedition must be prepared and extremely quickly.
In the case of the Atlantic, we did not use the airplane that was put
at our disposal because we had learned that there was fog over the
sea at that moment; but it was a crazy trip by road in our truck.
Even for lesser catastrophes, I always try to get there quickly.
The great art of our profession is less covering the obvious
aspects of an event than to make events interesting that are not very
interesting in themselves.
This is the case for official ceremonies which have a wearisome
tendency to all be alike.
At the last ceremony in Cocherel, for example, I asked my crew to
seek out local people – whether it was a café owner or a fisherman -
and to get them to speak about what it was like to have Briand as a
neighbor.
Unfortunately, the humorous effects that we obtain in this way are
not always appreciated by the public. I remember a report we did on
Octave Mirbeau of which I am quite proud. I interviewed the
inhabitants of his birthplace who told me things such as: "Oh! My
father knew him when he was a child, he was a pretty little blond
boy."
The caretaker of a house that Mirbeau had owned, who had heard
that this Mirbeau had written "bad books," when asked about the
previous owners, said, "There was Mr. X…, Mr. Y…, Mr. Z…"
- And Mr. Mirbeau?
- Never heard of him!
The fact that there was a commemorative plaque on the house
made the comment even more amazing!
And then, at the inauguration of the monument, the banner was
only partly unfurled. A fireman… had tried to slide it open with a
flagpole, than an old man in silk gloves climbed onto a chair and,
using his umbrella, engaged in a fencing dual with the uncooperative
banner, but in vain. Finally an agile and intrepid young man climbed
up onto the monument and liberated the banner. All of this struck me
as extremely funny… but so… this part was cut out of the newsreel
in most theaters.
A newsreel can be appreciated in as many different ways as a
film, but when one has a feel for it, one can sense what will seem too
heavy or too hollow and how to find a balance in between.
In putting together a newsreel program, there is a question of
proportion and measure which is very important.
It is in this spirit and to provide diversity that I have introduced
cartoons into newsreels; they represent the news through caricature.
I have even now been able to get scientific news by using a
microscope lens, by recording infinitely small subjects when they
have news interest. In this vein I have commissioned a sequence on
buds and rising sap, etc., as spring is now upon us.
I would eventually like to make of my Newsreels not a magazine
but a newspaper with all of its sections, accidents, politics, sports,
special reports, etc.
In any case, from the point of view of "cinema", newsreels point in
a promising direction, much more so than artistic film productions
that tend to resemble theater much too closely.
On the contrary, is it not the future of cinema to reach more and
more towards life itself and is it not through Newsreels that it will
succeed at this the most?

Lyon Républicain, 18 May 1933

 THE UTILITY OF FILM SCHOOLS

Their development from a national and international point of

view

Among the problems to be solved that were posed on the

questionnaire of the French Cinema Week was this one:
"Can the aesthetic viewpoint be reconciled with the commercial
viewpoint when it comes to cinema?"
An important problem encompasses all the factors of the
advanced evolution of the art of the screen and those mentioned in
the report on film schools.
The cinema is an art, because to exist it must call on the creative
intellect and sensibility of visual authors whose minds conceive and
organize moving images. It is at the same time an industry because,
to develop, it depends materially on the willingness of financial
institutions to support it and prosper through it.
The cinema is made up of two factions: the industrial faction which
raises capital, orders the production of films according to market
demand, and the creative and technical faction that composes and
creates these same films with the ideals and originality that are
characteristic of every work of art.
The industrial faction bears responsibility for the financial side, the
"commercial" quality of a film, which, to get maximum distribution
and profitability, must appeal not just to the taste of the public of its
country of origin but to the taste of the public of the entire world. A
film conceived on an industrial scale is an expensive product whose
return on investment must be guaranteed by wide and dependable
sales and so must from its inception through its production submit to
the strictest economic rules. This is an indisputable necessity as it is
what supplies the program every evening for countless movie
theaters the world over, its profitability being nevertheless difficult if it
does not bear the stamp of American studios. We know that
Americans conceive their films for their own screens, that their
amortization and profits come from their domestic market, and that,
thanks to their powerful commercial networks, the majority of them
can be marketed at a cost so low it defies competition in foreign
markets, these same films are so preferred that they constitute an
obstacle that blocks the distribution of films from other countries. In
this way, other European producing countries, France, Germany,
England, Russia, Italy, Sweden, face enormous difficulties in
expanding their film production, especially since the huge quantity of
American films on world screens for the last fourteen years has
educated the visual sense of the international audience in a
particular aesthetic and so this audience now has trouble accepting
any cinematic form which differs from it. And this is not even taking
into account here the undeniable near-exclusivity of influence that
the invasion of these works has had on the spiritual development
and intellectual training (if we can call it that) on adolescents over
these last ten years, an invasion which constitutes the most active
form of propaganda in favor of the American mentality. This, by way
of parenthesis.
This observation brings up, in the middle of economic
considerations, a psychological problem composed of two elements:
the visual habituation of the audience to a cinematic form imposed
by the multiplication of standardized films and the industrial
impossibility for European producers to copy the America brand in
order to please audiences and compete commercially. France,
Germany, England, Russia, Sweden, Italy all express themselves
differently in moving images. A quick glance is enough to guess the
national origin of a film from any one of these countries.
A practical directive tried, a few years ago, to force the national
individualism of each country to imitate the commercially successful
American form of cinema. These efforts, after a few tests, failed as
no country was able to totally lose its expressive personality. Style
and technique thus speak louder than policy directives. The
character and quality of each race is reflected in its films whether we
like it or not!
 This experience and this observation permit us to cry foul to those
who would impose the laws of cinema as commerce above those of
cinema as art. Morally, the cinema is more an art than an industry
because, despite all the reasoned efforts, it has escaped the latter.
Whether we want it to or not, it is a reflection of the intellect and
sensibility of its country of origin, an expression that requires for its
perfect development a certain freedom for creative instincts.
An industrial product can be repeated, imitated, copied, produced.
Every film, on the contrary, possesses a personal form that always
allows it to escape the network of power and control to which it is
submitted. Its inspiration is human, separate from the precision of a
machine. Its commercial appeal derives from its sensibility, its
inspiration, its technical values, all qualities that in their essence
require thought and thus reflect a people's ethnicity.
Business requires a collective and logical effort to reproduce what
has succeeded in the past and can reasonably be expected to
succeed in the future.
Art, on the contrary, favors individualism, discovery, a path forward
which must, by its originality and personality, lead thoughts to an
ever greater blossoming.
The cinema finds itself caught between these two apparently
contradictory forces: business based on calculation, and art based
on honesty.
In industrial cinema, every renovation must be evaluated in terms
of how the public will react. In artistic cinema, every innovation must
be honest and never be the victim of the fear of displeasing.
But in art as in business, stagnation is a risk that must always be
overcome in order to live, to survive, and to grow. And cannot
imprudent art, through a reasonable alliance, come to the aid of a
fearful and exacting industry?
So many times we have seen films that were considered anti-
commercial suffer from disapproval and fail at first, but then sow a
seed of progress that enabled future productions to succeed.
Yesterday's complicated films, for example, stuffed with actions and
anecdotes, now seem outdated. But what a battle had to be fought to
bring about the attractive simplicity that has come into fashion today.
Just a few of these examples are enough to show to what degree
cinema as an art and an industry has not yet been perfected enough
to take on a determined form. Each people, like each individual,
brings its vision, its temperament, its understanding, as a vital and
personal gift to the art of the moving image. The predominance of a
one single "manner" of doing things risks being destructive to the
moral enrichment of the whole.
Because of the war, America has made an exclusive claim on the
screens of the world, got the public used to its techniques, to its
concepts alone, and this has not been a good thing as it has had the
effect of discouraging any originality in European countries,
diminishing their national personalities and, for commercial reasons,
having them accep methods that are contrary to their own strengths.
The cinematic approach of France, Germany, Russia, Italy and Great
Britain have an equal right to live on their own merits.
The American style - which is, it should be emphasized, extremely
nationalistic, making no compromise with the national customs or
ideas of other countries - brings charm and technical perfection to its
films; the German style, more pronounced, more bitter, offers an
abstract vision of people and things that is strong and mysterious;
the French style tends toward an expression free of other influences,
a delicacy of spirit, of emotion, of organization, a harmony in its
concepts; Russian cinema, a great breath of social change; and
Swedish cinema, visual details that humanize every subject. The
style of British and Italian films is true to their national spirits. These
styles, both in their successes and in their failures proportionate to
their production, have no reason to be jealous of each other, they
support, complement, and broaden the scope of each other. It is
therefore unjust that one of them crushes the others. These styles,
which reflect the temperament and the spirit of their respective
countries, contribute to broadening cinematic expression through the
diversity of their viewpoints. It would be desirable for the works of
every national style to be equally visible on the screens of the world
so that the public, freed from the domination of a single technical
approach - which, however good, should not be unique - can acquire
a broader understanding of cinematic forms.
 In France, the cinema at first sought inspiration from American
methods. Recognizing that this had failed, it tried to internationalize
its concepts in the manner of other countries. But France, which has
its own very particular intellectual qualities, was unable, unlike
Germany, Russia or Sweden, to bend to standardized formulas.
Germany, which earlier had a very independent form of expression in
visual images, had wanted to align its productions with aesthetic
practices that were foreign to its own nature, and so fell victim to an
undeniable artistic decline. Similarly, Sweden saw the volume of its
production diminish after American films invaded its market. And yet
Sweden had a first-rate cinematic aesthetic that was admired across
all of Europe.
An observation is called for. Since each country can only exist
cinematically if it expresses itself visually in an honest way (America
is an example), why not encourage each people to develop their
moving images in their own way, without nationalistic feelings
spoiling their exchanges? In films made for these sorts of
exchanges, only the technical approach or certain local customs may
be surprising, but not the underlying emotions, given that the cinema
is the art of humanity in its broadest sense.
Each culture can only be perfect by remaining true to its own
nature. The innate value of honest films, made according to this
principle, will break down national boundaries.
So I would like to express this wish: that films in theaters be
presented by national identity, in order to free the film-going public
from the American identity imposed upon them. An agreement
should be concluded between the European countries for the
attainment of a broad-based internationalism, founded on close
commercial ties and a great respect for the thought and culture of
each country. In the same way, in France, a general policy applied to
specific projects according to their financial potential should favor to
the greatest degree a diversity of cinematic styles.
It is not the different styles that are bad but their economic
constraints. Up to now, certain of them, rebuked, have not been able
to develop. Standardizing feelings, repressing initiatives, means
narrowing the principles on which a production can succeed. It is
better to explore the use of new styles than to restrict them.
Already there is a theater circuit of what we could call outsider
cinemas that live and prosper by intelligent programming of films of
different styles. Encouraging this circuit by creating original films for
it is to envisage a cinema with a wider eye, it is to permit all styles to
live. It is with this second vow that I would like to close this report.
To summarize: bring discipline to innovations for the sake of
business but, in the name of art, never suppress them.

La Revue d'Économie Internationale, 1933

 NEWSREELS

Newsreels are very much in fashion. They are talked about…they

are shown, and, above all, they are denigrated. The human spirit is
like this, it finds criticism a pleasant activity.
The public is sometimes surprised by what the weekly newsreels
choose to cover, by the uniformity of their subjects…too many
bicycle races, too many sporting events, too many political
speeches, too many inaugurations, but these are the popular
preoccupations of the moment…sports and politics and let's not
forget Sunday outings. Among all these classic subjects, new
inventions, exhibitions that are too static for the cinema, major
building projects, scientific discoveries, can all be slipped in. But if
too much use is made of them, newsreels are accused of being
pedantic, and what is picturesque is rarer than we think.
It is not surprising to read in a print newspaper little pieces of news
such as: the Ambassador of X arrived at the Gare du Nord... A car
was sideswiped by a bus, there are injuries and fatalities, a thief has
broken the shop window of a jeweler and stolen one million francs’
worth of jewelry…Newsreels are issued weekly, they cannot focus
on the little events that fill our daily newspapers, they have to sort
out more general events that define "the week." And to "define" "a
week" is no easy task. Most often, the week cannot be "defined."
And, it must be said, the public is hard to please. They can be shown
a German or Italian newsreel, whose sumptuous grandiosity might
have sprung from the imagination of a Max Reinhardt, and they
whistle and boo because they don’t like Hitler or they dislike
Mussolini's policies. The negative reactions worry the police…they
call the theater manager who rushes to cut out the innocent scene
"which is causing the disturbance.” And thus the poor little newsreel
is deprived of a scene which had a bit of substance.
Do we want coverage of major courtroom dramas as in America?
Newsreel crews are not allowed into the superior court in Paris…not
treated as favorably as photographers. Obviously the poor
filmmakers need to haul around huge lamps and heavy cameras.
The camera noise, the glaring lights annoy people. In France major
deployments of equipment are not the rule. We work simply,
democratically, without a lot of staging. And then, in France,
newsreels are considered unwelcome.

An example:
Two weeks ago in the provinces, three production companies
wanted to film a conference whose debates were filling newspaper
columns. A major speech was to conclude the session, an important
speech for domestic and foreign policy. The filmmakers had obtained
all the required authorizations and installed their cameras and
lighting…Just as they were about to start filming, they were told "Get
out immediately." "Orders from the top." And so the three newsreel
crews quickly packed up their gear. In another country they would
have been ordered to stay.
In America, President Roosevelt authorizes the installation of a
film production truck at the White House. He disciplines himself to
stand directly in front of the camera at the right moment without
complaint.
In Germany, cameras record the slightest action and gesture of
the Führer, in Italy of the Duce, newsreels portray, for the entire
world, the life of each of these countries. Powerful propaganda…
In France "Get out." The words are fateful.
And here is how newsreels record what they can. Before choosing
an event, they first look for a place where they are welcome.
There is no reason to be pessimistic…little by little, we are
beginning to slowly understand the importance of the communication
of ideas through newsreels.
But you, the public, must be tolerant and not object to the showing
of an event, either abroad or in France, of which you disapprove. It is
our duty to relay news. The journalistic film is a new form of press.
Before you whistle and boo, think of all the trouble we went through
to put together our report.
 To go beyond inaugurations and other trivialities which you
disapprove of, your support is needed, which is to say your silence
when confronted with certain events we report on… Then we will be
able to give you something more!

Le Levant Illustré, June 1934

 NEWSREELS ARE NOT ALWAYS WHAT THEY
SHOULD BE

- If I have accepted, on behalf of the Association of Revolutionary

Writers and Artists, to speak on a subject close to my heart, it is
because I have been able to observe just how ignorant the public is
about the conditions of newsreel and film news reporting production.
To speak about a quasi personal subject which, in its daily execution,
both occupies and preoccupies me, would make it seem like I am
pleading on my own behalf and constantly repeating: "One can't do
this…one can't do that," sounding like self-serving excuses. And
yet…
But first a few definitions. What is a newsreel? It's a daily event,
captured in its motion and its life, so with truth, by a camera and a
microphone. What is a newsreel journal? It is a collection of these
different events on a national scale to which are attached ready-to-
show filmed chronicles from abroad. Obviously, we do not receive
these documents in their entirety. Censorship of exported films is
exercised in almost every country.
Before being actively expressed as cinema, ideas are worked out
inside each country in secret conferences, meetings, conversations,
newspaper articles. Obviously it is possible to cheat by emphasizing
the network of material, thus visual, circumstances which provoke
these ideas, by conducting surveys, camera and microphone in
hand. This, in my view, is a good form for newsreels. But it is a
challenge to find the exact illustration of an idea.
To all of these difficulties must be added the technical challenges.
A reporter is able to sneak in anywhere, as is a photographer with
his small camera and magnesium lights. But a movie camera
operator can hardly pass unnoticed with his large camera and
microphone. In addition, he is dependent on light, he needs to plug
in his lighting equipment inside, light up blinding floodlights outside if
it is dark.
 Let’s now move on to the composition of the newsreel journal.
Next to visually important weeks, but from which we can only retrieve
fragments or sidelights due to a lack of light or the consent of a
subject, there are empty weeks where nothing interesting happens.
Since, whatever happens, we must produce something anyway, we
are sometimes forced to fall back on sporting events, funerals,
inaugurations and the "magazine," in other words, things that are not
really news. And then the journal is criticized as mediocre. But what
can we do? The programs we receive from abroad also have both
their interesting moments and lamentably empty ones.
And, also, inaugurations, funerals, sporting events can be
mentioned in the printed press in just a few lines. But in moving
images they take on considerable importance, whatever their
subject.
Finally, I have just two more explanations I’d like to give you.
Here’s the first. In France, it seems like the cinema is frightening, we
seem to fear the truth. While everywhere else, America, Germany,
the presence of movie cameras is considered obligatory and they
are positioned, with all the facilities they need, in the most propitious
place; here, in France, the cameraman seems to be annoying, to be
unwanted. He has to plead, to beg to be allowed to position himself
off in a corner.
As for my final explanation, it can be contained in a single word:
censorship. I know that officially there is no censorship of newsreels
and that this feigned permissiveness only makes censorship more
dangerous. It is unacknowledged censorship, polite expressions of
wishes masking strict orders…
I am not asking you to not criticize newsreels. I am not pleading
"Not Guilty" either. I just wanted to briefly give you some elements to
take into consideration. However, the camera is always filming, and
in the secret vaults of our film libraries, believe me, are films that
show the reality of modern life, even if we are not always allowed to
project them.

L'Étoile Belge, 29 August 1934

 THE SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGE
OF NEWSREELS

The cinema is only forty years old. Forty years: the age of
maturity for a human being, early childhood for inventions which
always depend, for their progress, on how quickly they are adapted
by the minds that successively take advantage of them.
When the cinema first appeared, was discovered and perfected
mechanically and technically by the Lumière brothers, it surprised a
world that was in no way prepared to welcome it.
When the printing press was invented, it certainly brought major
change, a new way to distribute printed thoughts, but it did not create
a new form of expression, it simply responded to a practical
necessity. By propagating literary works, substituting a faster method
for the slow hands of calligraphers, the printing press made an
intellectual and sensory world accessible to everyone, without
stirring any profound revelations. But, on the contrary, nobody was
expecting cinema. When it appeared, there was no great demand.
Did not newspapers already deliver the news? Did not theaters
already put on shows? What new advantage could moving
photographs bring to knowledge or art? Little attention was paid to
their artistic, scientific, or social value, the rich, varied treasure they
contained was ignored. But, in any case, since the first movie
camera had been made, it had to be reproduced. A new era began
for engineers, mechanics, and opticians. Long strips of film were
needed, they had to be manufactured and a way found to process
them, to infinitely multiply the images they recorded; chemists went
to work. To handle these devices, new professions emerged,
photographers became "crank turners." Projectionists were also
needed and, in a more "literary" vein, authors to write sketches,
directors to compose and connect the images, actors to interpret
roles.
 From these diverse interests, different spirits gathered
haphazardly around cinema from its birth to begin a tradition of
economic, social, and artistic life. Merchants, businessmen, clever
showmen, actors, artisans, all found their divergent aspirations tied
to the same effort. They did not really understand its potential, just
that they had been given a new way to make money, a new business
opportunity.
Too young for its first babblings to be considered a way to express
thought, the cinema grew up intellectually in fits and starts, without a
coherent direction, even though commercially it was being built on a
solid foundation. It thus reached the pinnacle of its popular and
economic development before its spirit had really been defined.
Salesmen created "demand" before artists had even had time to
think about what the demand was for.
It is not for me here to philosophize on how dramatic films embody
the lofty principles of cinematic expression. But I do want to call
attention to a defect in this way of looking at things. The dramatic
film is one application of cinematic art but hardly an illustration of its
fundamental nature which is much better revealed by scientific films
and newsreels.
Scientific films and newsreels - the former by their demonstrative
power, the latter by their social reach - have perhaps better grasped
the real spirit of cinema by capturing life in all its instinctive and
diverse motion. A bit forsaken by commercial interests, having grown
up far from the fortunes of spectacular productions and unaffected
by censorship, scientific films and newsreels have been able to be
more honest than dramatic films - which are subject to a severe,
arduous, and oppressive discipline - in producing the universally
human, social, and truthful visual character of cinema.
The dramatic film has thus developed in a rational commercial
way, assuming an economic predominance over the always marginal
educational film and the newsreel, considered as a tool of
propaganda, information, teaching, but not as a commodity needing
good management…Their distribution is still poorly established.
Theater managers take little interest in them. Only the recently
created theaters devoted to newsreels and documentaries are
beginning to accord them the importance they deserve.
But, nevertheless…the newsreel cinema, which we are concerned
with here, is today's great social educator. Enabling the most diverse
minds, the most distant peoples, to communicate with each other by
a magnetic current, it circles the globe. Does it not reveal to
everyone the intimate face of a country and its people, behind the
official face and imaginary history?
Like the scientific film, newsreels uncover the truth of universal life
that one cannot guess at through the commentary, books,
newspapers, manuals. Considered like this, the cinema is an
individual experience that permits one to see, to live, and not just to
try to imagine. Through newsreels, classes and people interact
directly without intermediaries. With its feelings, gestures, joys,
humanity rises above the particularities of individual character and
the newsreel, bringing understanding, makes people little by little
forget their hatreds.
The newsreel is composed from day to day, it is not premeditated.
It captures events and reflects them accurately, along with the
characters and small events that illustrate them. It goes to the heart
of their moral and sentimental nature. Newsreels are the mirror of a
country, its work, its pleasures, its concerns, exposing both
agreement and disagreement. From the farthest latitudes and
longitudes, newsreels bring fragments of the true life of the world as
seen in its beliefs, its struggles, its worries, its ideals.
Newsreels from the world over are accepted in movie theaters on
the first part of their programs, put together as virtual newspapers,
with a multitude of short highly varied articles. They touch on all
subjects because their objective is to report on national and
international events, whether they be of a political, judicial, scientific,
or artistic order. Thanks to them, we become familiar not just with
figures on the national stage but great international figures as well.
We have seen politicians who were viewed negatively on the
screens of certain countries become highly popular on these same
screens (by the repeated actions seen in newsreels in which they
played a role).
 Public esteem for them increases as the figures change their
attitudes, their style of dress, their gestures. Sympathy born of
familiarity is thus brought about by moving images and, perhaps, an
understanding of ideas. Knowledge leads to more positive
judgements, walls are broken down. The lack of precision in words
can be destructive. Cinematic precision brings clarity and
truthfulness.
Thanks to newsreels, audiences enter into diplomatic discussions,
into the disputes and alliances between peoples and customs. One
sees others in their native environment. And, by little details, small
actions that often have nothing to do with larger issues, bonds are
created, people are brought closer together. Whether we like it or
not, newsreels circulate ideas and joys and make them less lofty,
less abstract. Newsreels, by spreading knowledge of the world as a
whole, succeed at separating isolated emotions from the overall
character of humanity.
Newsreels also reflect industries and the arts. Through them we
learn of the work involved in the manufacturing of a certain object
that comes to us from the other side of the earth, and we can place
this object in the context of the ideal of work that it represents. From
this arises brotherhood. Each subject has its place, hygiene, sports,
scientific discoveries, new educational methods; and this not just in
one country but in every country. Newsreels are the mirror of the
whole civilization of a generation and its concerns, not only, I repeat,
in one corner of the world, but in the entire world. Every country's
entire enthusiasm or misery…life itself, is revealed to us by these
films.
Newsreels break down walls; they must be indiscreet, truthful,
informative, and exact, without literary conceit.
Do not forget that a national invention can be rendered
international and popular by newsreels as can every conquest of the
spirit or of science. Through newsreels, what yesterday was the
exclusive property of specialists or researchers can now be shared
by the least sophisticated spectator sitting in a movie theater whose
only effort need be to watch attentively.
 It’s important to emphasize: we portray an action, we make it part
of an imaginary spectacle. The action is thereby deformed.
With newsreels, the filmgoer who buys a ticket to a movie theater
is in direct contact with events, people, things, a contact so direct
that the filmgoer sometimes begins to express their approval or
disapproval of certain images. It could be said that he feels himself
to be a participant in the event…it’s a whole world view that happens
in theaters during the short quarter of an hour that is devoted to the
newsreel, a whole circle of affinity or repulsion that is formed.
Newsreels are now in great favor with the filmgoing public in every
country. But they are not yet really a form of journalism: they still
tend towards the ordinary forms of popular film from which they
should be totally separate. In most countries, newsreels change
every eight days, sometimes they change twice a week. In America,
they change every day. In terms of exportation, sometimes the
newsreels are produced directly by foreign companies who then
distribute them in their respective countries, (this is what the
Americans do), sometimes it is the opposite, foreign reporters do not
have the right to film national events. Sometimes companies
collaborate, each working in their own country. In any case,
exchanges or sales determine whether a newsreel of a country is
seen outside its borders. Inside the country, the system is based on
rentals.
Newsreels cannot handle information as fluidly as the printed
press because the laboratory processes and the distribution of film
prints are not as fast as the distribution of newspapers.
Nevertheless, newsreels aspire to rapid journalism. They depend on
cinema in their technical methods, their filming, but in the future, their
spirit will be, as it should be, much closer to journalism.

As a conclusion to this report, I would like to express several

wishes:
1) That every means should be explored to separate the
distribution of newsreels from the current patterns of film distribution
in order to give them the mobility they deserve. If we are struggling
with outdated distribution methods today, this does not mean that the
future will not bring us progress tomorrow. The speed of information
delivery will bring a bigger and bigger audience closer to the news.
2) To be well-informed, a newsreel program must include news of
the entire world. Cannot newsreels be exempted from customs
regulations and cross borders freely? The customs duties imposed
on newsreel programs can make their distributors decide against
exporting them.
A newsreel is not a commercial commodity, but an exchange. Its
short form makes it useable only when incorporated into a program.
We should thus not be subjected to the export restrictions imposed
on films.
3) Strive to perfect the international spirit and objectivity of
newsreel programs. By varying its sections, we can make it a
channel of education and information that can attract the attention of
all classes of society in all countries.
4) Assign the exchange of newsreels between different countries
to those in each country rather than through a branch of a foreign
company.
5) Organize things with different governments so that newsreel
filmmakers have everywhere the same ease of access as print
journalists and photographers, despite the cumbersome size of their
electrical generators and complicated cameras.
Do not forget that newsreels are the greatest form of
communication between different peoples and social classes, the
greatest medium of propaganda, of culture and progress, and that
the events presented in newsreels remain in people's minds longer
than phrases in a newspaper. To watch a newsreel is truly for every
viewer to be present at an event, to live through it. The newsreel is,
for the humble spectator, a way to participate in the life of the world.
So the problems involving newsreels should be seen as international
and social issues for newsreels embody the true spirit of cinema.

Revue Internationale du Cinéma Éducateur, August 1934

 THE NEW DRAMATIC ART OF COLOR

The cinema is an art of feelings. Consequently, every innovation

that could result in increasing its dramatic impact is precious. From
this point of view, the tendency to make films in color just for the
sake of color, for the pleasure of covering the screen with blotches of
different colors, is completely wrong; it distances us from what is
essential. What we should aim for is the fullness of atmosphere. To
attain this, we must once again confront the unknown and learn a
new technique step by step, patiently seeking the dramatic art of
color.
My principle is this: color has no value for filmmakers if it is not
integrated organically into the fabric of a film, if it does not have its
own dramatic structure.
Having worked in 1920 in the U.S., I saw a sequence made by
D.W. Griffith which, while conceived in black and white, nevertheless
bore a red stain painted with a brush: it was the dress that one of the
characters wore in every scene. By being perceived separately, this
red dress had a striking effect on the woman wearing it: it
emphasized her character even more. Here was a discovery that
should inspire us. Colors can in fact provide unexpected notes,
special accents. If it is necessary, for example, to attract the attention
of the audience to a flower, isolated in a vase in the foreground of a
set, color would help. The sorrow of a man dressed in black would
have a highly dramatic effect, the black, drifting in a sea of bright
colors, becoming in this case the dominant motif. In addition, color
allows us to better filter light and render volumes more three-
dimensional.
Of course these few suggestions are a long way from exhausting
the possibilities offered by the use of color. The new dramatic art
which I have been trying to describe is infinitely more vast and
complex. I just wanted to repeat that its definitive implementation will
hardly be easy.
 Film to the Filmmakers!

It is thought that in general color film and its commercial use will
bring disruptions to the cinema world as violent as those brought by
the advent of sound. This is wrong. Regardless of how important the
adoption of color is, it is not as significant as that of the addition of
sound and voice. There was talk about a new beginning with color,
but at present it amounts to just another step forward. If I’m not
mistaken, we will see a much more significant change when 3D films
have been perfected.
Another point: I'm tired of hearing it constantly said that with color
film, painters "will finally get to say their word!"…On the contrary, I
think their role will be minimal. It's curious, by the way, to observe
that other artists, regardless of what medium they come from, see
the cinema as the goose that laid the golden egg, and impatiently
await the opportunity to take it over. But the cinema is a rigorously
independent art, with its own rules, its own forms of expression,
speaking its own language. It is not for "other artists" to bend it
towards its true direction, it belongs to filmmakers, in other words to
those born with a sense of cinema, who have learned at the price of
hard work and perseverance what can genuinely contribute to its
development. Do they often make mistakes? ... Of course, but are
there any creators who never make mistakes? I have to admit that I
prefer an awkward filmmaker to a perfect novelist, painter, or theater
director, because the former, even with his awkwardness, will also
make real cinema, whereas the latter, armed with all their perfection,
will only flail around it. To serve the cinema, you have to have it in
your blood.

A rebellious medium

This does not in any way mean that we filmmakers can from now
on be satisfied with ourselves. Undeniably, progress has been made
recently, but we are still a long way behind the homogeneity and
dynamism that was achieved in the best moments of the "silent" film
era.
 We have too many contradictory means at our disposal, too many
disparate elements which, as long as they are so far from being
integrated, cannot breathe new life into our art. We will succeed, I
am sure. The truth remains that today, instead of mastering the
cinema, we are being mastered by it.

Pour Vous, 16 April 1936

 LET US UNITE …

Intellectuals! Workmen! Together in the same union! Two groups

with different interests who cannot live together in harmony! That at
least is what is claimed by those who, raised on traditions and
prejudices, do not understand the human truth of modern progress.
Intellectuals! Workmen! On the contrary, strongly united in the face
of the laws of the workplace, a unity carved from a very solid block.
The subtlety of reasoning of the detractors who play on words to
break up this block escapes us.
The intellectual earns his living with the strength of his mind; the
workman on the strength of his arms. One complements the other in
an indivisible whole.
There are diverse techniques, multiple technicians. There are
thought technicians, hammer technicians, electrical technicians,
chemical technicians, etc., etc. But intellectuals, workmen, are all
organs of the same body, the body of society. One cannot fully live
without the other.
It is said these days that, for example, the interests of
screenwriters, directors, cameramen, have nothing in common with
their comrades in the laboratories.

First question:
What would become of the great ideas of screenwriters, directors,
photographers, the best cameramen, if the science, the work of "the
others" in the laboratories did not make their contribution?
A great effort, a beautiful shot is dependent on the skill of the
technician who, in the developing tank, reveals its intensity.
A mutual understanding, a strong collaboration is necessary to
obtain the result where the efforts of the workman and those of the
intellectual overlap.
The cinema is one of the greatest examples of that phenomenon
where a multiplicity of efforts, various techniques, distinct
professional qualities combine into a single objective: a team.
That there remain differences in the professional qualities, the
aptitudes of each branch, that individual capacities are not equal,
that some can be more adept at conceiving and creating than others,
remains, alas, the only obstacle that laws cannot resolve. But this
inequality is found in all fields, intellectual and manual, and workers
in these fields just have to organize themselves and gather all their
strengths in a way that makes the best use of their dynamism. That’s
all!
We have also heard it said: "The cinema does not belong in the
category of chemical products," for example.
Chemical products are a part of cinema, but not all of it; that’s true!
The truth lies in the Union of Film Industry Workers, a union which
encompasses all of the powers of the art of cinema, united to defend
their freedom of spirit and their daily life, united to defend cinema
itself by defending their own interests.
Cinema is a collective art where all skills, all talents, must support
each other, an art where the efforts of each are combined for the
Greater Good, an exemplary modern art because it is in itself, by its
very structure, over and above what it can express a social art,
because it is a team art.
Let us remain united. Let us be the different spokes of a well-built
wheel, and if we succeed, something will change in the cinema
industry where we, intellectuals and workmen, have common
interests, where we each feel stronger from the strength of the other
faced with the challenges we must overcome.

Le Travailleur du Film, 18 November 1936

 AN OPINION FROM GERMAINE DULAC

Cinematic expression is diverse, flexible in the unity of its

objective: surprise life, in the essence of its motion and its spirit, and
hurl it alive and kicking onto the screen.
One of the most interesting forms of cinema is certainly the
newsreel which captures an action of the everyday destiny of people,
out of the daily routine, to reproduce it exactly for audiences in
theaters who can, in this way, become participants in it.
Before criticizing the newsreel as it exists today, in a still imperfect
form, let us look at what it consists of.
An embryonic form of inventions, ideas, current societal problems,
reforms; the preoccupations of people of all nations (because
newsreels are international); political fears, societal uncertainty
reflected by diplomatic visits, the comings and goings of politicians,
the changing of cabinets; catastrophes. A chaos of events where the
greatest of them mixes with the smallest without being assigned
relative value. This is how the newsreel comes to be a faithful mirror
of the way the world looks, a mirror which can be instructive to those
who know how to look at it. The newsreel is the societal touchstone
of our time.
In the future, historians will look to newsreels as a more valuable
source than written documents. Thanks to them, they will be able to
reconstitute an event not with their imagination but by truly seeing it.
A question arises: Can a newsreel be considered an honest
documentation of society?
A newsreel – and this is the great strength of cinema – can only be
honest because it is a faithful reproduction of an event.
The camera lens cannot change an action because it records it in
passing, exactly as it is, without preparation.
The moving image is always honest. It is its commentary which
can be misleading, because it is filtered through individual feelings.
The purely cinematic part only reflects the truth.
 I was recently given an interesting letter from a filmgoer in the
suburbs:

I have just spent an afternoon at the cinema with my two small

daughters, and I am aghast at the increasingly biased way that so-
called news is presented.
I could already have made this observation a long time ago
unfortunately, but, in the last months, in the two or three times that I
have gone to the cinema, what "progress!"

And then farther down:

"Armaments," it is announced, every time completely shamelessly,

and there is a terrifying parade across all countries, without the
slightest hint of criticism, not a single word of common sense or
reason.
And the groups of children, mostly boys, are so excited to see the
latest models of machines of death, the monstrous tanks that stop at
neither rivers nor mountains…
Right afterwards, we learn that Austrian nationalists have
"achieved unanimity," or something similar, and we see them
cheering a speech by a mediocre "Führer'' – and from there, of
course, we are transported to Germany, to Berlin, to admire at our
pleasure military parades, adoring crowds, etc. …
Who should we turn to? How can we express our indignation? …

This very wise letter from an indignant filmgoer illustrates the two
points I set out earlier: the honesty of the moving images and the
bias of the commentaries.
Concerning the events presented, we can have no objection. If
they depict the world and its madness for weapons of war, it is
because, alas, this madness exists and it is disturbing - even in the
context of other subjects shown. Why does every country use its
know-how and money to build up murderous, threatening barriers
when peace and fraternity between peoples should be the glory of
our era?....The newsreel takes it in, alas! And the facts are true, real.
The cinema journalist has invented nothing. He only takes note. It is
up to us to draw a lesson from the images!
But the letter writer is right to complain about the newsreel's
commentary when it finds a humane and educational philosophy
behind these abhorrent facts. If the moving images take note, the
commentary must provide the moral of the story, warn, reassure,
conclude, and do so especially in regard to its effect on young
people.
We can see the importance of the newsreel. Newspapers can
write about armaments. Kids pay no attention. The newsreel, though,
objectifies, emphasizes, shows the world's madness…Kids react. It
is the power of moving image-life. A humane conclusion is required.
The kids marveling at the sight of "the latest models of machines
of death, the tanks that stop at neither rivers nor mountains…," how
easy it would be to educate them to the human meaning, to dampen
their enthusiasm and to inform their minds.
The letter writer does point out the role of the commentary:

Our anger, our disgust were so great to see and hear the
commentary on the events in Spain.

But the problem was not "to see!" Again, the filmmaker did not
invent, he recorded real life.
The commentary, however, was something else.
At a time like this in our society, newsreels should bear some
social responsibility.
And I would answer the letter-writer that the newsreel cannot
ignore armaments, but that it would be easy to offset this slice of
reality with others that are more comforting and more encouraging
but that newsreels too often ignore.
We need a whole series of realities to bring out a true picture of
our times, which leads us to the most critical question: how to sort
out events. This is less a question of choosing than one of reflection.
There is not just the war effort, there is the effort for peace, for
brotherhood, for justice. All of these efforts should be shown and
contrasted, then the social education of children would take place
naturally and adults would be fully informed… There would be
commentary, accompanied by the honesty of the moving image.
The newsreel is one of the greatest forms of cinema but it will take
strength and courage to look at it and use it honestly.
As they are now, newsreels are incomplete, truncated.
Add more variety, look deeply at life, teach more, and the new
cinema of newsreels will be the highest form of journalism because it
is the most honest, drawn from real life, the least subservient to the
subjective viewpoints of men.

La Critique Cinématographique, 5 December 1936

 CONSIDERATIONS ON THE CINEMA NEWSREEL

Cinema is an art – yes, an art – of multifarious expressions and

broad possibilities As spectacle, it distracts us; as documentary, it
succeeds at transporting us out of our routine customs and habits
and into the farthest corners of the world, even to the depths of the
ocean and into the sky; as a scientific tool, it extends our perception
to the point where we can penetrate the domain of invisible microbes
and into the no less mysterious domain of plants. In the whirlwind of
its mobility it reveals what we dream of and what has escaped our
knowledge.
The newsreels, which countries exchange with each other every
week, are not the least of cinema’s aspects.
But what is a newsreel, so often decried and yet so important? Not
just dry information from a newspaper, the simple evocation of an
event, but the event itself captured in the truth of its motion and spirit
at the very instant it occurs. A "living", palpitating slice of life
communicated by one country's people to another, giving the gift of
ubiquity to every individual.
Does the newsreel, as it is conceived today, satisfy us? Because
its contents consist of the truth of an action, we should place it above
any criticism. We do not criticize an event, it just happens to us; we
accept it and react. But does every action interest us? No. And this is
the crucial point. Newsreels are so intensely alive and truthful that
we always want them to bend to our wishes and our curiosity
because they involve us in an event rather than simple recounting it.
We follow or disapprove to the degree that the event satisfies or
doesn’t satisfy our need for knowledge and our feelings.
Magdeleine Paz has forwarded me a letter and I want to read
some passages from it:

…When we saw and heard the commentary on the events in

Spain, our indignation, our disgust were so great that my husband
and I left the theater a little while ago. Since then, I have wanted to
write to you. Now days have passed and today I see that the evil has
only gotten worse…Armaments, we are told every time
shamelessly… And the groups of children, mostly boys, are so
excited to see the latest models of machines of death, the monstrous
tanks that stop at neither rivers nor mountains…
Mothers, teachers, will we let them poison our youth! ...

I agree with this letter from my correspondent Magdeleine Paz.

But this array of armaments, described so accurately, should we
deny it, cover our eyes so as not to see it? The lens of our roving
newsreel cameramen does not invent, it records. Newsreels, I
repeat, can only be honest, can lie only by omission, by turning away
from important highly consequential actions as if they were
secondary or undesirable. But our correspondent is right when she
speaks about the commentary. Even if the images are real, the
commentary which accompanies them, however objective or
necessary it is, brings an element of pre-imposed interpretation to
the visual facts. An adverb, an adjective, can bring an element of
doubt to an image whose veracity is visually unquestionable.
To be totally honest, the newsreel should record everything and
bring us the true face of the world without neglecting any aspect of
its features.
As I write this article, I keep thinking of this phrase. "The groups of
children, mostly boys, are so excited to see the latest models of
machines of death, the monstrous tanks that stop at neither rivers
nor mountains…" Alas, Madame, the newsreels of that week were
no doubt devoted to parades of armaments; but if I go back several
weeks, I can observe that there were diplomatic meetings whose
goal was to come to mutual understanding. If you look at these two
weeks of newsreels together, you will see both the poison and the
antidote. But the lesson has been diluted. The commentaries which
we criticize and which sometimes bother us could be a useful means
of calling up and bringing together divergent currents!
By the very nature of their cinematic technique, newsreels reveal
the face of the world, but the true face cannot appear if we omit
actions and trends; so this splendid time of societal courage that we
are living through will reach its full breadth in newsreels.

Le Populaire, 19 December 1936

 THE WORK OF CINEMA IS FINISHED WHEN THE
SHOW BEGINS

Anything goes! What cynical attacks are we filmmakers not

subjected to?
Your work should not be classified as a chemical product? ''There
is no real way to defend your interests. You are the scriptwriter, the
director, nothing connects you to a labor union which has nothing to
do with the problems of your profession.''
How many times have we heard this phrase ever since we have
made common cause with our comrades in the film laboratories!
I have no wish here to start an artistic debate. In our newsletter,
we have asked a few clear, practical, vital questions, and have
avoided questions of aesthetics, even those that concern the
structure of a film.
But what we put on film and our ideas for moving images are
particularly at risk when we are told: "You have nothing in common
with the laboratories."
Please join me, my contradicters, in reflecting for a moment, and
stop to think about this question: what is a work of cinema? It is a
story where only the moving images count and where words are just
a human sound determined by the images.
The cinema is moving images, uniquely images.
What are the material elements of the image? First, film; then, in
the studio, the sets in which the actors develop their roles, the light
which gives a scene its meaning, the performance and its tone. And
here already the role of chemical products becomes a factor for the
filmmaker with the appearance of the film as the very basis of his
work. Without film, what could we do? It is the film which records our
thought. So?
The film is in no way analogous to the sheet of paper where a
writer's ideas are born. For a writer, the raw material is words which
express a thought; the quality of the paper he records them on
doesn't matter. But we filmmakers, we work with film, we handle it,
we develop it. Film is the primordial element of the inspiration on
which the team in the studio collaborates.
And suddenly, while speaking of laboratories and studios, in spite
of myself, I evoke our whole union, the whole structure which brings
us all together in our common work: the creation of the moving
image.
The contradicters who do not understand the connection between
filmmakers and chemical products are without a doubt caught up in
the idea that cinema is a form of theater, because the author
participates. They forget that technically cinema is absolutely
different from theater. An actor must forget stage lighting when he
plays in front of the camera. There is a cinematic dimension and this
dimension only exists because of the architecture of the image-
making process that supports it.
How many times have we filmmakers fought to defend this idea
and this truth that the cinema and the theater are two different art
forms?
Why are there so many bad films? Because we forget the truth,
and because it is easier to make a theatrical film than a truly
cinematic one.
Only those who have never made a film think that the studio
technicians, the set decorators, the electricians, could be grouped
together with their colleagues in the theater, and this is true even for
the material tasks.
In the studio, the technician comes and goes, transforming parts of
the set in the course of his work, while the electrician follows step by
step continually making adjustments, both of them changing the
meaning of the moving images created. And when the cameraman
gives the film to be processed to his assistant to take to the
laboratory, he and the director are both anxious about the chemical
operations. And the filmmaker's work is not over when he is finished
in the studio. As I've said, the filmmaker builds the moving image;
working with the film that comes back from the laboratory, he and the
editors are going to draw from it the expressive elements that will
give the finished film its character and rhythm. Will these elements
just be thrown onto the screen after simple editing? No. There are
ways of combining shots; ways to intensify the actor's performance,
techniques which we come up with and that laboratories execute
with ever more sophisticated techniques. For the filmmaker, the
laboratory is not an unknown part of the factory; it is, like the studio,
a part of it where his image creation continues.
The studio, the laboratory, the editing room, are for the filmmaker
all part of the same crucible in which, thanks to the effort of all, a film
is forged. This must be understood and no one should find it
surprising how integral to the process the chemical products of the
laboratory are.
For twenty years, we filmmakers have said to our counterparts in
the theater: let there be no confusion; there is the dramatic style of
the stage and the dramatic style of the screen. Each possesses a
unique form of expression. If the two get mixed up, they damage
each other.
Cinema has a life of its own, its own rules, its new artistic code,
and work rules of its own. And within this moral code and these work
place rules, laboratories have a major role.
I remember visiting the great film director D.W. Griffith in 1920,
who was one of the first modern filmmakers, and witnessing a very
moving scene. Griffith was starting production on a great film. To
interview him, I had to travel a long way to the banks of the Hudson
River where he had set up a compound with his studio and his
laboratories. Griffith spent a lot of time here and, showing me around
his work camp – I say "camp" because it really was a camp where
everyone pitched their tent to prepare for a battle: the film to be
made. He pointed a big room out to me:

For three weeks, every day, before we start shooting, my whole

team meets here: actors, cameramen, mechanics, electricians, lab
technicians, special effects experts. We study the script: we look at
the details of each scene; we put ourselves into it, and, when we go
down to the studio, everyone knows as much as I do and has their
personal contribution to make; we experience everything together
and are united in spirit.
 Griffith knew it well: a cinematic work is a united effort which
should not be divided; a cinematic work is a unified block, this block
exists with our union, it must be unshakeable.
For us, the task is finished when the show begins!

Le Travailleur du Film, 26 January 1937

 INDEX

For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index of the French version are
listed below. Please use the Kindle search function to search for terms of interest.

Âge d'or, l' (Bufiuel)

A Girl in Every Port (Hawks)
Adventures of Dolly, The (Griffith)
Agriculteurs, les
Âme d'artiste (Dulac)
Âmes de fou (Dulac)
AMIEL, Denys
ANDREYOR, Yvette
Antoinette Sabrier (Dulac)
Apprenti sorcier, l' (Dukas)
A propos de Nice (Vigo)
Arabesques (Dulac)
ARON, Robert
ARQUILLERE, Alexandre
ARTAUD, Antonin

Ballet mécanique, le (Léger)

BARTHELMESS, Richard
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
Belle dame sans merci, la (Dulac)
BENOIT-LEVY, Jean
Birth of a Nation, The (Griffith)
Blue Angel, The (Sternberg)
BLUM, René
BONARDI, Pierre
Boule de suif (Maupassant)
BOUQUET, Jean-Louis
BOURDEL, Léone
BRAUNBERGER, Pierre
Bridge, The (Ivens)
Broadway Melody (Beaumont)
Brumes d'automne (Kirsanoff)

Cabinet des figures de cire (Leni)

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (Wiene)
Cachet rouge, le (Vigny)
Cahiers du mois, les
 Carmen du Klondyke (Barker)
CARNE, Marcel
CAVALCANTI, Alberto
Ce cochon de Morin (Tourjansky)
CHAPLIN, Charlie
Chanson du rail, la (Gance)
Chant du prisonnier, le (May)
CHATAIGNIER, Jean
CHATAIGNIER, Jean-Pascal
Chien andalou, un (Buñuel)
Chute de la Maison Usher, la (Epstein)
Cigarette, la (Dulac)
Ciné-clubs
Cinémagazine
Cinq minutes de cinéma pur (Chomette)
Cinquième danse, la (Brahms)
CLAIR, René
CLOUZOT, Henri
Coeur fidèle (Epstein)
Comoedia
Coquille et le clergyman, la (Dulac)
Crainquebille (Feyder)
Critique indépendante, la

DALADIER, Edouard,
DEBUSSY, Claude
DELBOS, Yvon
DELLUC, Louis
DEMPSTER, Carol
DESCLAUX, Paul
DE REUSSE, André
Dernier avertissement (Leni)
Dernier des hommes, le (Murnau)
Dernier fiacre de Berlin (Boese)
Diable dans la ville, le (Dulac)
Disque 957 (Dulac)
Dressed to Kill (Cummings)
DUMAS Fils
EGGELING, Viking
EISENSTEIN, Serguei
Eldorado (L'Herbier)
Emak Bakia (Man Ray)
Emprise, l' (Dulac)
Entr'acte (Clair)
Essais en couleur (Clair)
Essence de verveine (Caballeros)
Etoile de mer, l' (Man Ray)
 Faits divers (Autant-Lara)
Fantomas (Feuillade)
FESCOURT, Henri
Fête espagnole, la (Dulac)
FEYDER, Jacques
Fièvre (Delluc)
Filmliga
Finis terrae (Epstein)
FISCHINGER, Oskar
Folie des vaillants, la (Dulac)
Forfaiture (De Mille)
14-01 (Crisp)
FRANCIS, Eve
FULLER, Loïe

GANCE, Abel
Gaumont
Géo le mystérieux (Dulac)
General Line, The (Eisenstein)
Glace à trois faces, la (Epstein)
GORKI, Maxime
Gossette (Dulac)
GRAVES, Ralph
Greed (Von Stroheim)
GRIFFITH, David Wark
GRIMOIN-SAMSON, Raoul
GUILLON, Jacques
GUITON, Paul
GUY, Edmonde

Hallelujah! (Vidor)
Hallucinations du Baron de Münchausen, les
(Méliès)
HERRIOT, Edouard
HITLER, Adolf
Homme aux yeux clairs, l' (Hillyer)
Horloge, l' (Silver)
HOURY, Henry
Intolerance (Griffith)

Invitation au voyage, l' (Dulac)

IVENS, Joris

Jardin sous la pluie, le (Debussy)

JARVILLE, Robert
Jazz (Cruze)
Jazz Singer, The (Crosland)
Joyless Street, The (Pabst)
Juif errant, le (Méliès)

Kean (Volkoff)
KEATON, Buster

LEGER, Charles
LENI, Paul
Lumière et ombre (Sandy)
LUMIERE, Frères
LUMIERE, Louis
Broken Blossoms (Griffith)
Lys de la vie, le (Fuller)

Madame Bovary (Dulac)

MANES, Gina
MANEVY, René
MAN RAY
Marche des machines, la (Deslaw)
Ma Revue
MAUCLAIR, Jean
MAUPASSANT, Guy de
MELIES, Georges
Mélodie du monde, la (Ruttmann)
Ménilmontant (Kirsanoff)
MIRBEAU, Octave
MISTINGUETT
Moana (Flaherty)
Montagne sacrée, la (Fanck)
Mort du soleil, la (Dulac)
Mor-Vran (Epstein)
MOSJOUKINE, Ivan Illitch
Mother (Poudovkine)
MOUSSINAC, Léon
MURNAU, Friedrich Wilhem
MUSSOLINI, Benito
MYRGA, Laurence
Mystère d’une âme, le (Pabst)

NALPAS, Alex
Newsreels
NOAILLES, Mme de
Noce de l'ours, la (Gardine, Eggert)
Nogent, eldorado du dimanche (Camé)
Nuits électriques, les (Deslaw)
OBEY, André, 36
OEil de Paris, l'
Oublié, l' (Dulac)

Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, la (Dreyer)

Pathé
PAZ, Magdeleine
PETROVITCH, Ivan
PIRANDELLO, Luigi
POIRIER, Léon
POULAILLE, Henri
POULTON, Mabel
Poupée du milliardaire, la (Fescourt)
Prélude de la goutte d'eau, le (Chopin)
Premier Amour (Ray)

Rain (Ivens)
Reflets de lumière et de vitesse (Chomette)
REINHARDT, Max
Revue du cinéma, la
RICHTER, Hans
Rien que les heures (Cavalcanti)
RIVAROL
Roman merveilleux, le (Coulevain)
Roue, la (Gance)
RUTTMANN, Walter

Sang d'un poète, le (Cocteau)

Schémas
SILVER, Marcel
SJÖSTRÖM, Victor David
Skyscraper (Higgins)
Soeurs ennemies, les (Dulac)
Solitude (Féjos)
Son homme (Gamett)
SORRÈRE, Gaby
Souriante Madame Beudet, la (Dulac)
Studio des Ursulines
Studio 28
Symphonie nuptiale (Von Stroheim)

Tabu (Flaherty, Murnau)

TALLIER, Armand
TEDESCO, Jean
Terre, la (Dovjenko)
Thèmes et variations (Dulac)
Threepenny Opera, The (Pabst)
Tour, la (Clair)
Tour au large (Grémillon)
TOURJANSKY, Victor
Trader Horn (Van Dyke)
Tragédie de la mine, la (Pabst)
Tragédie de la rue, la (Rahn)
Trois dans un sous-sol (Room)

VALLEE, Jean
Variétés (Dupont)
Venus Victris (Dulac)
Vieux-Colombier, Théâtre du
VIGO, Jean
VOLKOFF, Alexandre,

Way Down East (Griffith)

Wasser (Blum)
White Shadows in the South Seas (Van Dyke)
 Biographies

Germaine Dulac (1882-1942)

Born in 1882, in Amiens, France, Germaine Saisset-Schneider spent most of her

adolescent years in Paris. In 1905, she married Albert Dulac. In 1909, she began work as a
journalist, notably for the feminist revue, La Française. She wrote plays for the theater,
some of which were produced.

Her interest in cinema started gradually and, in 1916, she made her first film The
Enemy Sisters (Les Sœurs Ennemies). After several minor works, she had a fateful
collaboration in 1919 with Louis Delluc whose scenario of The Spanish Fiesta (La Fête
Espagnole) she brought to the screen. Over twenty films were to follow: from The Smiling
Madame Beudet (La Souriante Madame Beudet), undoubtedly her most successful work, to
The Seashell and the Clergyman (La Coquille et le Clergyman) based on a scenario by
Antonin Artaud, which was attacked by the Surrealists. In 1928-29, she made three
rhythmic studies in a non-narrative vein which concluded her career as a film director. In
1930 she began working in the newsreel industry and became director of the Gaumont
newsreel division, Actualités Gaumont.

In parallel to her career as a filmmaker, Germaine Dulac worked tirelessly in all areas of
the film world, most importantly by writing theoretical articles in support of Louis Delluc and
Jean Epstein, and then in official positions at the head of a number of cinema bodies such
as the Société des Auteurs. She participated in the establishment and development of the
"Ciné-club" movement and was president of its national federation, was engaged in the
promotion of the educational role of cinema, and supported plans to create a national
Cinémathèque. And of course her work as a Feminist fighting for women's rights in society,
particularly the right to vote, must not be forgotten. After a long illness she died in 1942.

Prosper Hillairet, filmmaker and film historian, taught at the Université Paris 8 – Saint-
Denis and in the Art Department of the Université d'Amiens. Specialist of the 1920s avant-
garde, he is the author of numerous articles and a monograph on Jean Epstein, Coeur
fidèle de Jean Epstein (2008).

Christian Lebrat, photographer, filmmaker and film historian, founded and directs the
publishing company Paris Expérimental, devoted exclusively to writings on and by
experimental and avant-garde filmmakers. He is the author of Cinéma radical (2008) and
co-editor of Jeune, dure et pure : une histoire du cinema d’avant-garde et expérimental en
France (2001).

Tami M. Williams, film historian, associate professor of English and film studies at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and president of Domitor - the International Society for
the Study of Early Cinema, she is the author of Germaine Dulac: A Cinema
of Sensations (2014) and co-editor of Global Cinema Networks (2018).
 Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments (2018)

Many thanks to Marie-Hélène Hammen and Scott Hammen for the care and attention
they gave to Germaine Dulac's text and for their English translation, and to Mélanie Forret,
Nicolas Droin, and Christophe Wall-Romana for their proofreading of the 2018 Preface.
Thanks also to Béatrix de Koster for her observations, patience and proofreading of the
English text. And of course many thanks to Christian Lebrat for his loyalty to this project,
which would not have been possible without him.

Acknowledgments (1994)

Thanks to Dominique Païni, director of the Cinémathèque Française, and Marc Vernet,
Executive Officer of the Bibliothèque de l'Image for allowing access to the Dulac archives;
Nadine Taneze and Valdo Kneubuhler of the Bibliothèque de l'Image; Fréderic Dumas for
guiding us through the manuscripts; Michel Puyau for the transcriptions; Raymond Ghirardi
and Bernard Gruchy for their help in producing this publication.
 Colophon

© 1994 (first French printed edition)

© 2018 (first French e-book edition)
© 2018 Paris Expérimental (first English e-book edition)
All rights reserved

Programme manager: Christian Lebrat

Author: Prosper Hillairet

Foreword: Tami M. Williams

Translated from the French by Scott Hammen

Proofreading : Beatrix De Koster, Marie-Hélène Hammen, Christophe Wall-Romana

www.paris-experimental.asso.fr
 [1]
Amongst a rare few works on Dulac’s cinema are the wonderful studies of Richard
Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire
Differently: Feminism and French Cinema. While each addressed two or three of Dulac’s
films, which at the time were largely inaccessible, these pioneering works along with early
English language translations of Dulac’s writings by Richard Abel and Stuart Liebman have
played an essential role in discovering Dulac’s work especially outside of France.

[2]
Ado Kyrou, Le Surréalisme au cinéma, Le Terrain vague, 1963. New edition for the
collection Ramsay Poche Cinéma, 1985.

[3]
The italics are Ado Kyrou’s own. It is easy to see that under his pen this qualifier is not
positive, to say the least.

[4]
Alain Virmaux retraces this whole affair of the relationship between Germaine and
Antonin Artaud, which is more complex than appears at first sight, in his book La Coquille et
le Clergyman, Essai d'élucidation d'une querelle mythique, published by Paris Expérimental
in 1999; the same publisher brought out a new, enhanced edition in 2009, which was
included in the box set of Dulac’s film, co-published with Light Cone. We evoked once
again, with Alain Virmaux, the premiere of February 9, 1928 in situ in the studio des
Ursulines while making the film Tumulte aux Ursulines (directed by Alexandre Deschamps,
Nicolas Droin and Laurent Navarri). This documentary is one of the bonus films included in
the La Coquille box set, along with another film by Nicolas Droin (Prosper Hillairet
interviews) Surimpressions, on the genesis and different aspects of Dulac's film.

[5]
Just looking at what was available in VHS and later in DVD during the 1980s and
1990s is instructive: it was easy to find the great German expressionist films and Soviet
films of the 1920s, but not the French masterpieces. Without being ideal, the situation has
evolved since then, and many DVDs, publications and academic studies are now filling this
gap. It would be interesting to conduct a study on how French film of the 1920s has been
received and appreciated in France itself – and how much is known about it since the end of
the Second World War.

[6]
Charles Ford, Germaine Dulac, Anthologie du Cinéma, n° 31, supplement of l’Avant-
Scène Cinéma, n° 77, January 1968. By chance, Charles Ford was my teacher in the early
1970s at the Conservatoire libre du cinéma français, then located on the rue du Delta. He
taught history and aesthetics. I remember that he often cited Eisenstein but I cannot
remember if he had told us about Dulac, whom I did not know at the time. By another
coincidence, the very first book on film that I had read was his Histoire illustrée du cinéma
(Marabout University, 1966), co-written with René Jeanne. Going through this book more
recently, I found a section on the impressionist French school of cinema and a chapter on
Germaine Dulac.

[7]
It should be mentioned, however, that in the same year the Cahiers du cinéma (n° 202,
June-July 1968), published an issue entitled De la Première Vague (L’Herbier, Epstein,
Dulac, Delluc) à la Nouvelle Garde, that included, among others, articles by Henri Langlois
(L’Avant-garde française) and Noël Burch-Jean-André Fieschi (La Première vague). That
there was an echo between these two periods favorable to the avant-gardes is made clear
enough, but there was little follow-up in the journal to what remained for a long time a
singularity (this very subjective review of work on Dulac obviously did not aim to be
exhaustive; here, too, a complete overview would be welcome).

[8]
It is also worth mentioning the pages that Henri Agel dedicates to Germaine Dulac in
his Esthétique du cinéma (Collection “Que sais-je ?” 1966), in the chapter Promotion du
rêve.

[9]
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently, Feminism and the French Cinema,
University of Illinois Press, 1990; revised and augmented new edition, Columbia University
Press, 1996.

[10]
In those same years two books were published by Paris Expérimental that devoted pages to
Germaine Dulac: in 1994, appeared a translation of Standish D. Lawder's book Le Cinéma
cubiste (1975), and in 1995, there was an entire chapter in Noureddine Ghali's book
L'avant-garde cinématographique en France dans les années vingt.

[11]
In this discreet and discontinuous but definite development, one could also include
Paule Lejeune, in Le Cinéma des femmes (Éditions Atlas-L'Herminier, 1987), chapter
“Germaine Dulac et l'art nouveau”, and Catherine Silberschmidt, La femme visible :
Germaine Dulac, Études de lettres, University of Zurich, April-June 1993. These texts were
so discreet that I only became aware of them, as well as that of Sandy Flitterman-Lewis,
after Dulac’s Écrits were published and their authors manifested themselves. Friendships
were thus formed.
Also worth noting is the documentary film devoted to Dulac made by Raphaël Bassan
for the televised program L'Éclaireur, shown on April 9, 1992 on channel La Sept. And in
1998, Ester de Miro made a film about Dulac, La Visite.

[12]
Alain Virmaux, Germaine Dulac, Écrits sur le cinéma, Jeune Cinéma, n° 232, June
1995; Pascal Auger, Écrits sur le Cinéma de Germaine Dulac, Cinémathèque, n° 8, Autumn
1995 (note that the French Cinémathèque was for a time associated with this project);
Libération, May 18, 1995.
 [13]
Among which can be cited a new study by Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Sisters in
Rebellion, The Unexpected Kinship of Germaine Dulac and Virginia Woolf (Reclaiming the
Archive: Feminism and Film History, Wayne State University Press, 2010), where the author
beautifully interweaves and links the destinies of the filmmaker and the writer in the context
of their tragic end.

[14]
Colloquium hosted by Laurence Schifano and Laurent Véray at the Université Paris X –
Nanterre.

[15]
Germaine Dulac, au-delà des impressions, under the direction of Tami M. Williams, with
the collaboration of Laurent Véray, 1895, Revue de l’AFRHC, special supplement, 2006.

[16]
Especially the retrospective was well received by the press. There were articles in Le
Monde, L’Humanité, Libération (2 pages); articles also appeared in the journal Bref (n° 66,
May-June 2005) by Rodolphe Olcèse, in Cahiers du cinéma (n° 602, June 2005) by
Catherine Silberschmidt, and in the journal Europe (n° 918, October 2005) by Raphaël
Bassan. It should also be mentioned that the TV channel Arte showed L'Invitation au
voyage et La Coquille et le Clergyman in June 2005. In addition, there was a Dulac
workshop and retrospective organized by Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramann in
Frankfurt in 2002.

[17]
This was preceded by the restoration of Dulac’s film and the 80th anniversary of its
premiere, celebrated in the very same cinema where La Coquille was shown for the first
time - the Studio des Ursulines - but now presented in a ciné-concert with music by
François Hadji-Lazaro. Tumulte aux Ursulines was shown during the first part of the
program. La Coquille was unanimously acclaimed and given the credit it deserves. I
remember many commentaries from spectators (who had initially come for the music)
admitting that they had had a negative preconceived opinion about Dulac but now were
enthusiastic about her.

[18]
Again there were articles in Le Monde and in L'Humanité, in Bref (n° 89, September-
October 2009), La Quinzaine littéraire (n° 1002, November 1-15, 2009), Le Magazine
littéraire (n° 492, December 2009), and in Europe (n° 978, October 2010) written by
Raphaël Bassan, who also wrote the article on Dulac for the Encyclopædia Universalis.

[19]
 These included the book by Alain Virmaux, the films Tumulte aux Ursulines and
Surimpressions (see footnote 3) presenting contributions by Sandy Flitterman-Lewis,
Prosper Hillairet, Alain Virmaux, and Tami M. Williams.

[20]
I gave a presentation of La Coquille at the British Film Institute in London in April 2010,
and a lecture on Dulac’s “rhythmic films” in 2012 at the Bibliothèque François Truffaut:
Disque 957, Étude cinématographique sur une arabesque, Thèmes et variations.

[21]
To be noted, (in 2006) the film by Anne Imbert: Germaine Dulac. Questions de cinéma.

[22]
Like the introduction by Francis Lacassin (although author of Pour une contre-histoire
du cinéma) to a text in the form of a dialogue (that took place in 1925) by Henri Fescourt
and Jean-Louis Bouquet, reproduced in the journal Archives (n ° 99, November 2006),
where he attacks Dulac, thus distorting and hardening Fescourt-Bouquet’s words. Lacassin
writes: “Germaine Dulac did not escape this mixture of candid naïveté and arrogant
messianism that afflicts all modernists.” The historian is less inspired than the actor Gérard
Jugnot who declared in the magazine Télérama (February 23, 2005): “When I used to go to
film clubs I saw films by Dreyer and Murnau, and I even thought it was elegant to say
‘Germaine Dulac is wonderful!’”

[23]
Tami M. Williams, Germaine Dulac. A Cinema of Sensations, University of Illinois
Press, 2014.

[24]
All three are cited in the Acknowledgements at the end of the book. However, I take this
opportunity to correct an error, an oversight: I would like to express my thanks to yann
beauvais for having given us the permission to publish Dulac’s texts.

[25]
I always wondered what a Dulac day would be like. It would be one of writing. While
working on a film about Colette, with Alain Virmaux and Nicolas Droin, I asked myself the
same question about this writer, who also had a thousand incarnations.

[26]
In particular her collaboration at the feminist newspaper La Fronde, or her articles
written in the 1930s.

[27]
For a long time I have argued, and I still partially do, that Germaine Dulac's two
struggles - for a certain idea of the cinema and for the cause of women - were quite
distinct. She did not push for a “feminist” cinema (nor, for that matter, any other cinema “in
the name of…”) but worked to defend film on the one hand and women in society on the
other (and in this action the cinema could play a pedagogical role). When I look back on
certain of her lectures and conferences, it seems to me now that her lines of thinking on
these issues do intersect at times, but I maintain the thesis that she fought these two battles
in parallel.

[28]
In the years 2011-2012, when the book was already no longer available, we tried to
relaunch a new edition with the help of Victor Gresard, which would have had more articles,
and especially conferences (the 1994 edition was limited to published texts), and film
reviews. For various reasons this attempt was unsuccessful.

[29]
So we had to choose, both for economic and editorial reasons. We decided to include
some of these repetitive texts in our selection, but no doubt failed to specify sufficiently that
all these texts were chosen deliberately. But, of course, the main texts are all there and
Dulac’s thought is fully presented in the book.

30]
The typographic errors (coquilles in French!) in the paper version have of course been
corrected.

[31]
On Saturday, March 31, 2018, while I was writing these lines and listening to a radio
program on France Culture about Joris Ivens, I hear Dulac’s name cited. Simple
coincidence?

[32]
The title of a speech given by Germaine Dulac at the club du Faubourg in April 1925,
reported by Robert de Jaroille in Cinémagazine, 17 April 1925.

[33]
Mon Ciné, 21 January 1926.

[34]
See Ricciotto Canudo, l'Usine aux images, Paris, Etienne Chiron, 1926. The speech
"Le Manifeste des 7 arts" dates from 1911.

[35]
Canudo does not include theater as one of the arts that are blended into cinema, and in
his violently anti-theatrical writing, his aim is to take cinema out of the theatrical realm just
as Dulac wishes to take it out of the literary realm.
 [36]
In her article "Comment je suis devenue 'metteur en scène' cinématographique", ("How
I Became a Film Director,") Eve, 31 August 1924, Dulac enumerates her artistic passions
before discovering cinema. Among them are photography, literature, theater, painting, and
music. It was as if all of these activities had nevertheless been necessary to make films: "I
realize that everything that has happened, everything that has brought me joy, the things I
like most, form pieces of this art form which I have taken up, that all of my attempts, all my
tentative works, were like unconscious apprenticeships, and that this career as a filmmaker,
which I am devoting myself to, is the true answer to all my wishes, the synthesis of all my
capabilities.”

[37]
"Quelques réflexions sur le 'cinéma pur'" ("Some thoughts on ‘Pure Cinema'") Le
Figaro, 2 July 1926.

[38]
"Le cinéma, art des nuances spirituelles" ("Cinema, the art of spiritual nuances") Cinéa-
ciné pour tous, January 1925)

[39]
"Quelques réflexions sur le 'cinéma pur'", idem.

[40]
"Le cinéma, art des nuances spirituelles", idem.

[41]
This feeling, that what we call "Cinema" is not "Cinema" and that a new concept - the
very principle on which Cinema was invented - is necessary, is a characteristic of the avant-
garde. The cinema of the future, the cinema "as it must be," is only possible by returning it
to its origins.

[42]
“Speech to the Amis du Cinéma (Friends of Cinema)”, December 1924 (Cinémagazine,
19 December 1924).

[43]
Henri Chomette's approach was broadly similar to Dulac's and he followed it to the
same conclusion. Chomette starts with cinema as it is in order to, through a kind of alchemy
in which he eliminates everything that is not essential to cinema (the script, set decoration,
actors), find his philosopher's stone: the moving Substance. References to this can be
found in the article “Seconde étape” (“the Second Stage”) in Cahiers du mois n° 16-17,
1925, and in an interview given to Georges Chaperot, "le Poème d'image et le film parlé"
("the Poem of the Image and the Sound Film") in the Revue du cinéma, n° 13, August 1930.
Ideas very close to those of Dulac can also be found under what Jean Epstein called
"photogénie."
 [44]
See "Le cinéma, art des nuances spirituelles", idem. Here again a parallel can be
drawn with Epstein for whom the “photogénie” is a way of understanding the world from the
angle of variation and impermanence.

[45]
See "Quelques réflexions sur le 'cinéma pur"', idem.

[46]
See "Photographie - cinégraphie" (Stéréo-revue, 25 October 1926).

[47]
Ibidem. Here again Epstein's tone can be noticed.

[48]
Ibidem.

[49]
"The art of motion, this is what cinema is, and by motion I mean the unfolding of life
itself with its successive external actions and the motion of the spirit which causes them."
"The cinema, art of spiritual nuances," op. cit.

[50]
Canudo was the first to speak of a spirituality of the machine of cinema.

[51]
Dulac is here primarily targeting a part of American film production but it can also be
seen how far she has distanced herself from the whole Dadaist concept of art, of chance,
and the "For Nothing," of the "automatic cinema" described by Man Ray. For Dulac, there
has to be a reason for motions and their effects.

[52]
"A script created especially for cinema is still literature. The cinema can stand on its
own," she says in her speech “les Arts contre le cinéma,” ("the Arts against the cinema") op.
cit.

[53]
"Motion was put at the service of ideas for the theater, for the novel, but there was
disdain to put the idea at the service of motion," in "Le mouvement créateur d'action"
("Motion, Creator of Action") Cinémagazine, 19 December 1924.

[54]
 Underlined by the editor. "Les procédés expressifs du cinématographe" ("The
Expressive Processes of the Cinematographer") Cinémagazine, July 1924. And in this
article from 1924, entitled "Images and Rhythms:" "images composed like words in a
sentence are cut, opposed, juxtaposed, in a rhythm exclusive to cinema, and which create a
new expression of art, an unprecedented translation of interior life." See also the description
of La Roue and La Chanson du rail, in the speech "Le mouvement créateur d’action."

[55]
"Du Sentiment à la ligne" ("From a Sentiment to a Line") Schémas, February 1927. And
the following in the same article: "From vegetation, minerals, whose lines, volumes and
forms are less precise, to integral cinema, the threshold is quickly crossed, because only
motion and its rhythms create emotions and sensations."

[56]
Dulac illustrates her point with the abstract films of Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter,
Viking Eggeling (the experiments of the Futurists Corra and Ginna should also be
remembered as should the "Rythmes colorés" ("Colored Rhythms") by the painter Leopold
Survage which Dulac does not cite). She defends abstract film while acknowledging that it is
not the same as her own. Between 1928 and 1930, she made three films: Thèmes et
variations, Arabesques and Disque 957 in which she applies her ideas on rhythm based on
figurative images.

[57]
"Le cinéma pur et Mme Germaine Dulac" ("The pure cinema of Mme Germaine Dulac")
Comœdia, 2 November 1926.

[58]
"Du sentiment à la ligne", op. cit.

[59]
Ibidem. "It’s not my way of thinking to say that "integral cinema," the composed visual
rhythms made concrete in forms purified of all literal meaning, should be the “unique
cinema," but that "integral cinema" is the very essence of cinema envisaged in its general
term, its intimate reason to exist." Abstract cinema is not all of cinema, it is one of its
possibilities, but it is the very essence of cinema as pure rhythm.

[60]
"L'essence du cinéma, l'idée visuelle" ("The essence of cinema, the visual idea") (Les
Cahiers du mois, 1925).

[61]
Abstract cinema was born of the desire of painters to free painting from its static frame
and open it to motion, to time, to music. On the way from painting to music, they found
cinema with its visual and musical rhythms. This is reflected in the names they gave to their
projects and their works: Corra and Ginna's cinema as "chromatic music", Survage's
"Colored Rhythms", Eggeling's Diagonal Symphony, or Richter's series of "Rhythms".

[62]
"La musique du silence" ("The Music of Silence") Cinégraphie, January 1928.

[63]
"Le mouvement créateur d'action", op. cit. About the "Song of the Rails" in La Roue by
Abel Gance. It is worth remembering that the school of cinema which Dulac belonged to –
along with Delluc, Epstein, and L'Herbier – has sometimes been called "impressionist
cinema."

[64]
Photo-ciné, 15 January 1927

[65]
"Les esthétiques, les entraves, la cinégraphie intégrale", ("The Aesthetics, the
Obstacles, the Integral Cinema") in L'Art cinématographique, 1927.

[66]
"La formule du cinéma pur est dans le documentaire" (“The formula for pure cinema is
in the documentary”) (L'Action nouvelle, June 1932). At the beginning of the 1930s, when
Dulac became the director of the Gaumont newsreel division, Actualités Gaumont, she
explained: “because cinema and theater have now become intertwined, and as I lack the
material resources to carry on, I have chosen to continue my work by concentrating on the
only way where it is still possible for me to reconcile commerical demands with my ideas, in
other words, newsreels.” (La Libre Belgique, July 1933). Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse,
the work of "pure cinéma " by Henri Chomette, can also be seen as a documentary: the
motion of the metro and the Seine in Paris.

[67]

“Perhaps when the cinema has become a symphony of the eye, purely visual music,
swatches of color will reinforce the emotion and highlight the motion,” "Film parlant ...film en
couleur" (“Sound film…color film”) (Paris-Midi, 17 August 1928). Corra and Ginna in 1912,
Survage in 1913 already had this project in mind. On the question of color, see also "La
nouvelle dramaturgie de la couleur" (The New Dramatic Art of Color) Pour vous, 16 April
1936.

[68]

“An art form which is made of reality, and yet escapes reality by becoming one with it,”
in an interview with Pierre Desclaux (Mon ciné, 1929).
 [69]

The best elaboration can be found in the article "Du sentiment à la ligne", op. cit

[70
Ibidem. Underlined by the author.

[71]
Evolutionary films, those with a new inspiration, often contain the seeds of the future,
and are a guage of the very vitality of cinema, a new art form, that is perfecting itself every
day.” “The cinema, in its visual expression, has no limits.” (Paris nouvelles, 9 May 1931).

[72]
"Ayons la foi" (“Let Us Have Faith”) (Le Film, 15 October 1919).

[74]
M. Tallier and Mlle. Myrga, directors of the Studio des Ursulines.

[75]
Pierre Bonardi.

[76]
This evolution was distinguished by the first American films: The Cheat, Sunshine
Molly, Blue Blazes Rawden, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, from the era of 1915 to
1922. Then in France by La Fête espagnole, Fièvre. In Sweden, by all of the fine films
which we remember marveling at.

[77]
Le Docteur Caligari, Cœur fidèle, La Souriante Madame Beudet, Eldorado. Strangely
enough, enlightened producers permitted such initiatives at the time.

[78]
Les Esthétiques et les entraves. Germaine Dulac. Librairie Félix Alcan 1927.

[79]
Jean Tedesco.

[80]
Ballet mécanique by Fernand Leger, the series of films by Hans Richter, Entr'acte by
René Clair.
 [81]
Absolute films by Viking Eggeling, Opus I-IV by Ruttmann, Reflets de lumière et de
vitesse, Cinq minutes de Cinéma pur by Henri Chomette, La Marche des machines by
Deslaw, Essais en couleur, La Tour by René Clair, The Bridge by Joris Ivens, Arabesques,
Disque 957, Thèmes et variations by Germaine Dulac.

[82]
Tour au large by Jean Grémillon, Brumes d'automne by Dimitri Kirsanoff, Rain by Joris
Ivens, Nogent, Eldorado du Dimanche by Marcel Carné, À Propos de Nice, a film of social
commentary by Jean Vigo, Wasser, a mountain film by Victor Blum, The Melody of the
World by Ruttmann, Essence de verveine by Caballeros.

[83]
Jazz by James Cruze. Faits divers de Claude Autant-Lara, Emak Bakia and L'Etoile de
mer by Man Ray, La Coquille et le clergyman directed by Germaine Dulac, from a scenario
by Antonin Artaud, La Glace à trois faces by Jean Epstein.

[84]
Rien que les heures by Cavalcanti, Greed by Eric Von Stroheim, The Joyless Street
and Secrets of a Soul by Pabst, Tragedy of the Street by Bruno Rahn, Solitude by Paul
Fejos, The Blue Angel by Von Sternberg, A Girl in Every Port by Howard Hawks.

[85]
Thus we see, in addition to Nuits électriques by Deslaw and the abstract film Lumière
et ombre by A. Sandy, La Chute de la Maison Usher by Jean Epstein, Dressed to Kill by
Cummings, Dernier avertissement by Leny [sic], Skyscraper by Howard Higgins, 14-01 by
Donald Crisp, Le Juif errant and Les Hallucinations du Baron Münchausen by Méliès.

[86]
Finis terrae, the film made on the island of Ouessant by Jean Epstein, made up the fine
opening program.

[87]
La Tragédie de la mine, Son Homme and in the vein of abstract poetry: Le Sang d'un
poète by Jean Cocteau.
[88]
These two films were projected in theaters belonging to theater chains for the general
public.