Rid myself of the accumulated errors and untruths. Get to know my resources, make sure of them.
Master precision. Be a precision instrument myself.
Metteur-en-scene, director. The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself.
No actors. (No directing of actors). No parts. (No learning of parts). No staging. But the use of working models, taken from life. BEING(models) instead of SEEMING(actors).
HUMAN MODELS: Movement from the exterior to the interior. (Actors: movement from the interior to the exterior.) The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them. Between them and me: telepathic exchanges, divination.
Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create.
CINEMATOGRAPHY’ IS A WRITING WITH IMAGES IN MOVEMENT AND WITH SOUNDS.
An actor in cinematography might as well be in a foreign country. He does not speak its language.
Nothing rings more false in a film than that natural tone of the theater copying life and traced over studied sentiments.
To think it more natural for a movement to be made or a phrase said like this than like that is absurd, is meaningless in cinematography.
No possible relations between an actor and a tree. The two belong to different worlds. (A stage tree simulates a real tree.)
No marriage of theater and cinematography without both being exterminated.
Cinematographic film, where expression is obtained by relations of images and of sounds, and not by a mimicry done with gestures and intonations of voice (whether actors’ or non-actors’). One that does not analyze or explain. That recomposes.
Cinematographic film, where the images, like the words in a dictionary, have no power and value except through their position and relation.
If an image, looked at by itself, expresses something sharply, if it involves an interpretation, it will not be transformed on contact with other images. The other images will have no power over it, and it will have no power over the other images. Neither action, nor reaction. It is definitive and unusable in the cinematographer’s system. (A system does not regulate everything. It is a bait for something.)
On the choice of models. 6 His voice draws for me his mouth, his eyes, his face, makes for me his complete portrait, outer and inner, better than if he were in front of me. The best deciphering got by the ear alone.
Who said: “A single look lets loose a passion, a murder, a war”?
To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks.
Two persons, looking each other in the eye, see not their eyes but their looks. (The reason why we get the color of a person’s eyes wrong?)
On two deaths and three births. My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
A model. Enclosed in his mysterious appearance. He has brought home to him all of him that was outside. He is there, behind that forehead, those cheeks.
To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.
Radically suppress intentions in your models.
To your models: “Don’t think what you’re saying, don’t think what you’re doing.” And also: “Don’t think about what you say, don’t think about what you do.”
Your imagination will aim less at events than at feelings while wanting these latter to be as documentary as possible.
You will guide your models according to your rules, with them letting you act in them, and you letting them act in you.
One single mystery of persons and objects.
Shooting. Put oneself into a state of intense ignorance and curiosity, and yet see things in advance
Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle
In a mixture of true and false, the true brings out the false, the false hinders belief in the true. An actor simulating fear of shipwreck on the deck of a real ship battered by a real storm – we believe neither in the actor, nor in the ship nor in the storm.
No music as accompaniment, support or reinforcement. No music at all.
The noises must become music.
Shooting. No part of the unexpected which is not secretly expected by you.
Draw from your models the proof that they exist with their oddities and their enigmas.
You shall call a fine film the one that makes you think highly of cinematography
Models who have become automatic (everything weighed, measured, timed, repeated ten, twenty times) and are then dropped in the middle of the events of your film – their relations with the objects and persons around them will be right, because they will not be thought.
Models automatically inspired, inventive.
CINEMA draws on a common fund. The cinematographer is making a voyage of discovery on an unknown planet.
Where not everything is present, but each word, each look, each movement has things underlying.
To shoot ex tempore, with unknown models, in unforeseen places of the right kind for keeping me in a tense state of alert.
Catch instants. Spontaneity, freshness.
Set up your film while shooting. It forms for itself knots (of force, of security) to which all the rest clings.
A sigh, a silence, a word, a sentence, a din, a hand, the whole of your model, his face, in repose, in movement, in profile, full face, an immense view, a restricted space…. Each thing exactly in its place: your only resources.
A flood of words does a film no harm. A matter of kind, not quantity.
It would not be ridiculous to say to your models: “I am inventing you as you are.”
The insensible bond connecting your images which are furthest apart and most different is your vision.
Cinematography: new way of writing, therefore of feeling.
Model. Two mobile eyes in a mobile head, itself on a mobile body.
Don’t let your backgrounds (avenues, squares, public gardens, subway) absorb the faces you are applying to them.
Forms that resemble ideas. Treat them as actual ideas.
Shooting. Stick exclusively to impressions, to sensations. No intervention of intelligence which is foreign to these impressions and sensations.
NEITHER DIRECTOR NOR SCENARIO-WRITER. FORGET YOU ARE MAKING A FILM.
Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.
Sudden rise of my film when I improvise, fall when I execute.
X’s film. Two wicked eyes, trying to be good; a bitter mouth made for silence, which never stops talking and contradicting the words as soon as said: Star-system in which men and women have a factual existence (as phantoms).
THE SOUNDTRACK INVENTED SILENCE.
Model. What you make known of yourself by coincidence with him. Let each image, each sound exert its weight not only upon your film and your models, but upon you.
A small subject can provide the pretext for many profound combinations. Avoid subjects that are too vast or too remote, in which nothing warns you when you are going astray. Or else take from them only what can be mingled with your life and belongs to your experience.
Of lighting. Things made more visible not by more light, but by the fresh angle at which I see them.
Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.
Model. Over his features thoughts or feelings not materially expressed, rendered visible by intercommunication and interaction of two or several other images.
A single word, a single movement that is not right or is merely in the wrong place gets in the way of all the rest.
A thing that has failed can, if you change its place, be a thing that has come off.
An actor needs to get out of himself in order to see himself in the other person. YOUR MODELS, ONCE OUTSIDE THEMSELVES, WILL NOT BEABLE TO GET IN AGAIN.
Acting. The actor: “It’s not me you are seeing and hearing, it’s the other man.” But being unable to be wholly the other, he is not that other.
CINEMA films controlled by intelligence, going no further.
Model. His pure essence.
The exchanges that are produced between images and images, sounds and sounds, images and sounds, give the people and objects in your films their cinematographic life and, by a subtle phenomenon, unify your composition.
Images, conductors of the gaze. BUT THE ACTOR’S ACTING THROWS THE EYE
Make yourself homogeneous with your models, make them homogeneous with you.
Models mechanized externally, internally free. On their faces nothing wilful. “The constant, the eternal beneath the accidental.”
Return the past to the present. Magic of the present.
Model. Soul, body, both inimitable.
An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.
To find a kinship between image, sound and silence. To give them an air of being glad to be together, of having chosen their place. Milton: Silence was pleased
Images. Like the modulations in music.
Shooting. Your film must resemble what you see on shutting your eyes. (You must be capable, at any instant, of seeing and hearing it entire.)
What is for the eye must not duplicate what is for the ear.
When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.
If a sound is the obligatory complement of an image, give preponderance either to the sound, or to the image. If equal, they damage or kill each other, as we say of colors.
The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way. Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.
Actors. The nearer they approach (on the screen) with their expressiveness, the further away they get. Houses, trees come nearer; the actors go away.
Belief. Theater and CINEMA: alternation of believing and not believing. Cinematography: continually believing.
To your models: “One must not act either somebody else or oneself. One must not act anybody.
Models. Letting themselves be led not by you, but by the words and gestures you make them say and do.
Rhythms. The omnipotence of rhythms. Nothing is durable but what is caught up in rhythms. Bend context to form and sense to rhythms.
IN THIS LANGUAGE OF IMAGES. ONE MUST LOSE COMPLETELY THE NOTION OF IMAGE. THE IMAGES MUST EXCLUDE THE IDEA OF IMAGE.
Your film is not readymade. It makes itself as it goes along under your gaze. Images and sounds in a state of waiting and reserve.
The persons and the objects in your film must walk at the same pace, as companions.
The persons and the objects in your film must walk at the same pace, as companions.
X’s film, in which the words are not bound to the action.
THE BONDS THAT BEINGS AND THINGS ARE WAITING FOR, IN ORDER TO LIVE.
The eye (in general) superficial, the ear profound and inventive. A locomotive’s whistle imprints on us a whole railroad station.
Your camera passes through faces, provided no mimicry (intentional or not intentional) gets in between. Cinematographic films made of inner movements which are seen.
The true is inimitable, the false, non transformable.
To your models: “Speak as if you were speaking to yourselves.” MONOLOGUE INSTEAD OF DIALOGUE.
Choose your models well, so they lead you where you want to go.
Models. Their way of being the people of your film is by being themselves, by remaining what they are. (Even in contradiction with what you had imagined.
Music. It isolates your film from the life of your film (musical delectation). It is a powerful modifier and even destroyer of the real, like alcohol or dope.
Neither beautify or uglify. Do not denature.
It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.
Your film is beginning when your secret wishes pass into your models.
An actor used in a film as on the stage, outside himself, is not there. His image is empty.
Cutting. Passage of dead images to living images. Everything blossoms afresh.
See your film as a combination of lines and of volumes in movement apart from what it represents and signifies.
Model. The spark caught in his eye’s pupil gives significance to his whole person.
Image. Reflection and reflector, accumulator and conductor.
Not beautiful photography, not beautiful images, but necessary images, and photography.
Shooting. Agony of making sure not to let slip any part of what I merely glimpse, of what I perhaps do not yet see and shall only later be able to see.
Shooting. You will not know till much later if your film is worth the mountain range of efforts it is costing you.
The real is not dramatic. Drama will be born of a certain march of non-dramatic elements.
Your film is not made for a stroll with the eyes, bu t for going right into, for being totally absorbed in.
Expression through compression. To put into an image what a writer would spin out over ten pages.
Failure of CINEMA. Ludicrous disproportion between immense possibilities and the result: the Star-system.
One does not create by adding, but by taking away. To develop is another matter. (Not to spread out.)
Empty the pond to get the fish.
Against actors’ assurance, set the charm of models who do not know what they are.
To an actor, the camera is the eye of the public;
It is not a matter of acting “simple” or of acting “inward” but of not acting at all.
Cinematography films: emotional, not representational.
The CINEMA did not start from zero. Everything to be called into question.
It is with something clean and precise that you will force the attention of inattentive eyes and ears.
From the clash and sequence of images and sounds, a harmony of relationships must be born.
Shooting is not making something definitive, it is making preparations.
Transplantation. Images and sounds are fortified by being transplanted.
What our eyes and ears require is not the realistic persona but the real person.
Films whose slowness and silences are indistinguishable from the slowness and silences of the audience are ruled out.
CINEMA, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.
Model. Has become automatic, protected against any thought.
It is profitable that what you find should not be what you were expecting. Intrigued, excited by the unexpected.
Photography is descriptive, neat image confined to description.
The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.
Cinematography, the art, with images, of representing nothing.
G. divinely man, F. divinely woman (models), without any trick. The TRICK is what is hidden in them, not let out (not revealed).
The theater is something that is too much known, cinematography a thing too unknown up to now.
Your film’s beauty will not be in the postcard images but in the ineffable that they will emanate.
The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries who will shoot films by putting their last cent into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade.
The public does not know what it wants. Impose on it your decisions, your delights.
Is it for singing always the same song that the nightingale is so admired?
Proust says that Dostoievsky is original in composition above all. It is an extraordinarily complex and close-meshed whole, purely inward, with currents and counter-currents like those of the sea, a thing that is found also in Proust (in other ways so different) and whose equivalent would go well with a film.
I have dreamed of my film making itself as it goes along under my gaze, like a painter’s eternally fresh canvas.
Bach at the organ, admired by a pupil, answered: “It’s a matter of striking the notes at exactly the right moment.”
These horrible days – when shooting film disgusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the face of so many obstacles – are part of my method of work.
Be precise in the form, not always in the substance (if you can).
It is what I do not get to know of F and G (models) that makes them so interesting to me.
Ideas gathered from reading will always be bookish ideas. Go to the persons and objects directly.
Have a painter’s eye. The painter creates by looking.
Subject, technique, actors’ style go by fashion. Result, a sort of prototype, which one film every two or three years changes for a new one.
Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the unforeseen.
In the NUDE, all that is not beautiful is obscene.
Build your film on white, on silence and on stillness.
The number of films that are patched up with music! People flood a film with music. They are preventing us from seeing that there is nothing in those images.
Let nothing be changed and all be different.
What is – face to face with the real – this intermediary work of the imagination?
DIVINATION – how can one not associate that name with the two sublime machines I use for my work? Camera and tape recorder, carry me far away from the intelligence which complicates everything.
