• • •
Although there has been a great deal of scholarship on the emergence and development of national cinemas, the role played by film manifestos in their histories has often been marginalized. The waves and movements that arose in Europe from the rubble of World War II were greatly tied to film manifestos. There are many salient reasons for this: the destruction of the European infrastructure from six years of war and bombing meant that all industry, including the creative ones, had to be reimagined. On an economic level, the Marshall Plan meant that a majority of European screens were showing Hollywood films. And because of the war, the Hollywood studios had six years worth of backlogged films that could now be released, along with the new films they were producing (among other things, this backlog led to French critics discovering film noir). This led to at least two developments. First, many European countries wanted to counteract the influence of American culture. Second, because of the destruction wrought by the war, the various European film industries had to radically rethink the modes and means of production in their respective countries. Each country faced its own specific issues, along with the pan-European concern with Americanization. The issues facing Britain, for instance, were distinct, as the United Kingdom’s market had to compete with American films that shared a common language. In Italy the destruction brought on the country meant that new modes of filmmaking needed to be developed. In France, the country with perhaps the most cinephiles, over time an interstitial cinema developed in response to the staid “quality” films being produced. Germany, as an occupied country, had its production tightly controlled by the Allies. In the twenty-five years following the war, each of these countries developed distinct national cinema “waves.” In each case these waves were tied to manifestos.
The case of Britain in this regard is telling. One of the “victors” of the War, much of its industrial infrastructure had been destroyed, and, as noted, the British shared the English language with Americans. And like other English language countries, such as Canada, there was a turn toward documentary. The Free Cinema manifesto of 1956 was, according to Lindsay Anderson, as much an attempt to call into being the possibility of making films, and a promotional tool, as it was a coherent aesthetic movement. And while Free Cinema became, over time, international in its scope (exemplified by Polanski’s Two Men and a Wardrobe [Poland, 1958], Truffaut’s Les mistons [France, 1957], and McLaren’s Neighbours [Canada, 1952]), its key goal was to make alternative forms of filmmaking acceptable and, more important, to screen them in Britain. Yet the movement also was part of a larger change taking place in the United Kingdom centrally concerned with the promises of the war and how the country itself would change its class-bound heritage. The Free Cinema films introduced the images and voices of the British working classes to the screen. Slightly preceding the Angry Young Men of British literature and drama, Free Cinema attempted to reimagine British cinema but also to determine what kinds of images of “Britishness” would appear on the screens. The Free Cinema movement also was a key precursor and influence on the Kitchen Sink films of the late 1950s and 1960s.
European cinemas continued to respond to American hegemony of the screens. Indeed, the latest manifestation of a Euro-wave, the Dogme ’95 manifesto, is all about this history and the supposed death of European waves. For Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg the beginning of this death can be traced back to the arrival of the French nouvelle vague in 1960. Trier and Vinterberg contend that Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette were all for the overthrowing of the cinema of the past but did not make anywhere near a decisive enough break with the past to bring about a new cinema. Yet the auteur cinema of la nouvelle vague was not a consolidated film style; it did not follow uniform rules of cinematic evolution or revolution, in the manner implied by the Dogme brothers. Truffaut himself had put this vision of la nouvelle vague to rest twenty-eight years earlier, when he stated:
People who say “The New Wave has failed” without defining what they mean by that, I suppose they’re thinking of “intellectual” films which were not successful at the box-office, and with this in mind they refuse to “label” films which pleased them or were successful—an arbitrary division since the New Wave is just as much L’Homme de Rio as L’Immortelle, Le Vieil homme et l’enfant as La Musica, Les Cœurs verts as Un Homme et une femme. . . . The New Wave did not have an aesthetic programme, it was simply an attempt to rediscover a certain independence which was lost somewhere around 1924, when films became too expensive, a little before the talkies.1
It is individualism that the Dogme group sees as the failure of la nouvelle vague, yet as Truffaut points out, it is precisely the individual visions of numerous dissimilar auteurs that were the backbone of New Wave cinema. Nevertheless, it is the received idea that post-1960 cinema movements (New German Cinema, cinéma direct, British “kitchen sink” films) stultified their radical possibilities by adopting “styles” of their own. Therefore, it is this kind of stylistic individualism that Dogme contends was the downfall of the art cinemas that followed in the wake of la nouvelle vague.
If I concentrate of Dogme ’95 to such an extent here, it is because the manifesto has both revitalized film manifesto writing and inspired filmmakers from documentarians to digital activists to such a great degree over the last twenty years, as we will see throughout this book. Trier echoes these assumptions:
But I still think that Dogme might persist in the sense that a director would be able to say, “I feel like making that kind of film.” I think that would be amusing. I’m sure a lot of people could profit from that. At which point you might argue that they could just as easily profit from a different set of rules. Yes, of course. But then go ahead and formulate them. Ours are just a proposal.2
Therefore, Dogme is not the only way to make film, as Vinterberg notes: “I think to make another Dogme film right now would be suicidal, because the fine thing about Dogme is to create renewal, and to do another Dogme film right after would be creating another convention, which would be very oppressive.” The manifestos in this chapter continually reimagine the possibilities of distinct national cinemas in the face of American globalization.
Indeed, other national cinemas confronted the same problems in the face of the global juggernaut of Hollywood cinema, and in the case of colonial and postcolonial countries in Africa and the Middle East, a profound lack of infrastructure and capital with which one could produce films. These national and transnational manifestos all point to the fact that national cinemas are not simply created after the fact, like film noir, but are parts of cultural, political, and economic debates about the nature of cinema, what function it plays in national cultures, and the way in which different nation-states can have, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, a cinema of their own.
Leo Longanesi
[Originally published in Italian as “L’occhio di vetro,” L’Italiano: Periodico della rivoluzione fascista 8, no. 17–18 (gennaio-febbraio 1933) [numero speciale dedicato al cinema]: 35–45. Trans. Frank Burke.]
This manifesto by right-wing journalist and Italian fascist supporter Leo Longanesi (who, perhaps apocryphally, came up with the slogan “Mussolini is always right”) argues for an Italian realist cinema years before the same calls were made by Cesare Zavattini and other neorealist directors (see Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema” later in this chapter). Longanesi argues that other cinemas engage in social realities while Italian cinema neglects and disavows these realities. It is striking to see the importance of realism for this fascist critic because neorealism is often understood as a response to the fascist era.
I do not believe that, in Italy, there is need for set designers to make a film. We should put together films simple and unadorned in their mise-en-scène, films without artifice, directed as much as possible from the real.
It is in fact the real that is missing from our films. We need to throw ourselves into the streets, carry our cameras into byways, courtyards, barracks, and railway stations. We need only leave the beaten path, stop at some un-predetermined point, and observe what goes on during a half hour, with eyes attentive and without stylistic preconceptions, to make a natural and logical Italian film. Stop at the corner of a street downtown or in the suburbs, stay somewhat removed from what is happening around us, and observe with calm everything as if it were appearing anew--as when, getting out of bed after a long illness, we are naturally inclined to see people and objects with indulgent eyes, and everything appears so extraordinary only because we have not gazed at it for a long time. The life of any given street is truly surprising! It is marvelous how everything can move so naturally, in a harmony so unordered; one is witness to a spectacle that has no plot. People and things seem to belong more to dream than to reality; for an instant one feels a sense of extraordinary suspension, of poetic stupor, that then becomes lost at the slightest movement of our eyes. A woman who passes hurriedly and disappears behind a carriage becomes at times the extraordinary apparition of an unsuspected truth. We happen in this way to discover during brief moments a reality different from the ordinary, more profound and distinct, which we will never again know how to re-evoke.
Habit takes away every direct and innocent emotion with which we relate to reality; our gaze no longer knows how to be surprised, to hold, as it were, for a moment, what passes within its ambit. Surprise is replaced by observation and subjective analysis.
An Italian film must be conceived and constructed in this sense. It isn’t a matter of simple documentaries but of transporting onto the screen certain aspects of the seemingly pure reality that escapes the passerby and dominates at every moment the life of men and things. We happen, at times, to retrieve in some rare photograph the trace of these apparitions of which I am speaking, to be conducted back to reality as if we had forgotten it or had attempted to distance ourselves from it with fear.
American films shot outdoors have never succeeded in freeing themselves from the concept of spectacle: constructing the scene, enhancing reality, coloring the landscape, rendering luminous the images, educating the actors in a particular mimetic style. From Griffith to Murnau, American directors have not yet moved away from the film directed with criteria exclusively artistic: painting, literature, theater, and the optical are fused with mastery in their films. They move the public but don’t succeed in transporting it into a world where the cinematographic is the only reality. They are too worried about displaying their culture and talent to be able to renounce the lighting effects, the play of figures within the frame, the decorative and rhetorical elements of their cinema.
They can’t resist a beautiful horse that rears up a few steps from the lens, a cloud that appears reflected in the clear water of a lake, a shadow that divides a face, a burst of sunlight that brightens a courtyard, the puddles in a street made more luminous by the floodlights, and all the facile and complex uses of the camera. Reality interests them little: they only approximate the real, illustrating and mounting a narrative with great art, with no concern other than that of representing an event with taste and bravura. King Vidor, in The Crowd, in certain brief scenes, has arrived at a reality that is solid, simple, poetic, and without obvious stylistic aims. In Kameradschaft, Pabst achieves some extraordinary moments when he captures the crowd that, in prey to blind terror, runs towards the mine. For a few seconds, there appears onscreen a chilling landscape, in a suspended air of disaster, animated by the figures of a terrible reality; it is as if one were brought back to certain painful moments of existence, to certain fears experienced in infancy.
What Pabst has above all rendered is that instant of sudden premonition, followed by growing certainty, of a disaster that devastates one who has been unexpectedly confronted by misfortune. Premonition, fear of a dreadful event, and desperation--all of which infuse themselves in the landscape.
To encounter the face of reality, we must feel extraordinary emotion that lifts us and detaches us from ourselves; jolted by emotion, we see men and things differently, as I was saying before, in a new light, in an unsuspected reality: strange, autonomous, unwavering above all else. But reality always has this aspect; it is always beyond our time and space, even if habit has created an intimacy with it, a veil that covers our eyes. The cinema, if it can leave behind pretensions of painting-in-motion and of literature, of bizarre techniques and operetta, will increasingly seek a greater adherence to the real, carrying to the screen the secrets only a machine knows how to seize from reality.
A film is the unfolding of a motif—psychological, social, rhetorical, or poetic—through a complex of images.
The motif of a film is not only a logical succession of scenes, the elaboration of a plot, as happens in the theater (where everything is entrusted to the ability of the actors and the staging of the fiction is limited) but a particular rhythm that dominates the progression of images onscreen. Every motif has an atmosphere of its own: that is, its own poetry, expressed in the backgrounds or scenery. But a cinematic background is not only an internal or external setting ably reproduced, that remains fixed, detached from the actors; it is a series of images able, by themselves, to produce an emotion. So, in the unfolding of the plot, the development of a motif, the action of the characters must be fused with place in such a way as to generate a climate of extraordinary authenticity.
When a writer prefaces a human situation with a description of the landscape or ambience, he does in two strokes what a film can accomplish in just one. But the atmosphere is not realized exclusively with the perfect photographic reproduction of one landscape or another, with a marvelous background; it is important instead that every use of background be in rapport with the story: in such straight rapport as to fuse with it and vanish. . . .
Considering that the cinema in Italy can be polemical, to serve fascism and sustain a thesis, it is important to define with clarity what thesis it needs to demonstrate. Italian cinema, up till today, has not had any myth, more or less like its literature; our films have been and continue to be poor formal imitations of American, French, and sometimes Russian ([Blasetti’s] Terra madre) cinema. It has never encountered a thesis and tried to address it, even if only ingenuously, because a thesis didn’t exist and because the exponents of our cinema have no critique to bring to bear on Italian society. Among us, making a film is extraneous to the interests and political ideas of our country. One tries to obtain the sympathy of the Regime and of the public with expedients that are rhetorical, patriotic, and indecorous in the extreme; one does one’s best not to bump up against censorship and the mentality of the times—and, on the other hand, to conserve the old physiognomy of lighthearted-sentimental, petty-bourgeois film production.
Now, the cinema in Italy, without exercising a violent partisan polemic, as happened in Russia, should react to that particular custom, to that particular mentality, that our production houses are so obstinate in illustrating. Custom and mentality of a false class, without physiognomy, facile in improvisation, neither bourgeois nor working class. Frivolous and dilettantish, full of pretenses and vices, this custom and this mentality end up dominating public opinion and giving to the country a tone of unmerited banality.
It is not difficult to discover this small world in its various and diverse aspects: from the small fascist leader to the bureaucrat, from the bon vivant to the female readers of Domus magazine, from the beachside loungers to the dandies with mustaches à la Menjou—all part of a crowd to be judged severely. But to be able to represent this world with a touch of irony and satire does not mean belonging to it or, at the least, means not accepting it.
The American cinema has succeeded in being original and vital only because, in contrast with ours, it has, in one sense or another, exercised a moral function; it hasn’t limited itself to show to the public the joyful legs of a ballerina or the pathos on the face of an actress. David W. Griffith, in each of his films, embarks on a Quaker crusade; King Vidor, in The Crowd, shows the tragedy of the little clerk who wants to rise above the masses. Erich von Stroheim doesn’t hesitate to satirize himself, even to show the paradoxes of the old military aristocracies. He takes money from his servant, cheats at cards, gets slapped, cries with fear, violates poor girls, spies on people—yet his uniform is always impeccable. His every gesture remains austere, rigid as though in the presence of an emperor. All is allowed to a true aristocrat as long as he maintains his “style.” Stroheim is always Baron von Stroheim even in the most squalid of situations. No one succeeded better than he to represent certain types of officers who, having lost the prestige of command and uniform, experience a cataclysmic fall. All film directors from Fritz Lang to René Clair, from Chaplin to Pabst, whether they be French, German, or American, have tried to interpret reality in terms of moral criteria. Each in his way has directed social critique. Whether defending the worker or the prostitute, demonstrating the pitfalls of capitalism or the boredom of the rich, weaving an elegy on order or on the happiness of the savage. No one of them has ever distanced himself from social themes. Only Italian cinema, worthy follower of our rhetorical literature, has contented itself with making use of the camera with artistic and purely stylish pretensions.
Our cinema is too lacking in arguments to be effective; whatever story it represents does not ever succeed to get to the bottom of things. It glosses over precisely what should be addressed in depth and focuses on what should be treated in passing. It does not have problems to resolve or preferences because it has no opinions to defend. It will never know how to offer any interpretation of reality. Everything flees before its lens. A camera is a magnifying glass that one must know how to make serviceable.
None of the films made up till now in Italy have succeeded in moving us for even a moment; they have failed to demonstrate either protestation or affection. Affection: one can use this word even in terms of cinema. Affection for the character represented. (A metteur-en-scène can show affection towards the same world that he depicts ironically, as is the case with Stroheim.) Affection: a quality that is lacking to our directors.
With The Champ, King Vidor reprises with affection an old American boxing theme, showing how one can make a film without resorting to the most recent lessons of German and Russian cinema, by this point so dominant in Hollywood. The Champ is an American film par excellence, in technique, in acting style, and in mise-en-scène. Everything is resolved with a naturalness that does not hide the fiction. The film moves along without ruptures, making the public forget it is in a theater. King Vidor does not avail himself of his ability as a metteur-en-scène to show us visual variations on a theme. He doesn’t insist on highly particular descriptions of environments, and he doesn’t indulge in the cinematic magic of Mamullian [sic, Mamoulian], for example. He hides himself behind the actors, concerned only to lead them to an extraordinary and poetic interpretation of the subject matter. Every detail is attended to with artistry, but the images, the cuts, and the infinite other technical resources do not assault the viewers. The plot is advanced without expressionistic aids, without insistence, with a tranquil rhythm. It has been a while since one has been able to see such a well-made, simple, film that does not get caught up in fashionable mysteries of the subconscious. Avant-gardism has truly bored us! King Vidor succeeds in moving us without expedients, finally! . . .
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
[First written in a letter from Michael Powell to Wendy Hiller to convince her to star in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (UK,1943). First published in Kevin Macdonald, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (London: Faber, 1994): 189–190.]
The Archers’ manifesto delineates the strategy used by Powell and Pressburger to invent many of the aspects of independent cinema some thirty years before its rise in the United States. One of the key reasons that the Archers, and other UK producers, were at the forefront of independent cinema was the profound need to draw a distinction between the English-language cinema of Great Britain and that of Hollywood. It is also an avant la lettre statement of auteurist principles.
One: we owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss.
Two: every single foot in our films is our own responsibility and nobody else’s. We refuse to be guided or coerced by any influence but our own judgment.
Three: when we start work on a new idea we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more.
Four: no artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness.
Five: at any time, and particularly at the present, the self respect of all collaborators, from star to prop-man, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film they are working on.
Satyajit Ray
[First appeared in the Calcutta Statesman, 1948.]
Written the year after Indian Independence, this manifesto by Satyajit Ray laments the state of Indian cinema and the fact that Indian films never play outside of India. He claims that the language of the cinema, as it presently stands, is an American idiom but can easily be adapted to other cultures. Ray wrote this manifesto shortly before beginning Pather Panchali (India, 1955), which placed Indian realist cinema on the international map alongside Italian neorealism, a movement that greatly influenced Ray. “What Is Wrong with Indian Films” also echoes the thesis of la caméra stylo put forward by Alexandre Astruc the same year, namely that the cinema “can handle Shakespeare and psychiatry with equal facility” (see Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant Garde” in chap. 11 of this volume).
One of the most significant phenomena of our time has been the development of the cinema from a turn-of-the-century mechanical toy into the century’s most potent and versatile art form. In its early chameleon-like phase the cinema was used variously as an extension of photography, as a substitute for the theater and the music hall, and as a part of the magician’s paraphernalia. By the twenties, the cynics and know-alls had stopped smirking and turned down their nose.
Today, the cinema commands respect accorded to any other form of creative expression. In the immense complexity of its creative process, it combines in various measures the functions of poetry, music, painting, drama, architecture and a host of other arts, major and minor. It also combines the cold logic of science with the subtlest abstractions of the human imagination. No matter what goes into the making of it, no matter who uses it and how—producer for financial profits, a political body for propaganda or an avant-garde intellectual for the satisfaction of an aesthetic urge—the cinema is basically the expression of a concept or concepts in aesthetic terms; terms which have crystallized through the incredibly short years of its existence.
It was perhaps inevitable that the cinema should have found the greatest impetus in America. A country without any deep-rooted cultural and artistic traditions was perhaps best able to appraise the new medium objectively. Thanks to pioneers like Griffith, and to the vast-sensation mongering public with its constant clamor for something new, the basic style of filmmaking was evolved and the tolls of its production perfected much quicker than would be normally possible. The cinema has now attained a stage where it can handle Shakespeare and psychiatry with equal facility. Technically, in the black and white field, the cinema is supremely at ease. Newer development in color and three-dimensional photography are imminent, and it’s possible that before the decade is out, the aesthetics of film making will have seen far-reaching changes.
Meanwhile, “studios sprang up” to quote an American writer in Screenwriter, “even in such unlikely lands as India and China.” One may note in passing that this spring up has been happening in India for nearly forty years. For a country so far removed from the centre of things, India took up film production surprisingly early.
The first short was produced in 1907 and the first feature in 1913. By the twenties it had reached the status of big business. It is easy to tell the world that film production in India is quantitatively second only to Hollywood; for that is a statistical fact. But can the same be said of its quality? Why are our films not shown abroad? Is it solely because India offers a potential market for her own products? Perhaps the symbolism employed is too obscure for foreigners? Or are we just plain ashamed of our films?
To anyone familiar with the relative standards of the best foreign and Indian films, the answers must come easily. Let us face the truth. There has yet been no Indian film which could be acclaimed on all counts. Where other countries have achieved, we have only attempted and that too not always with honesty, so that even our best films have to be accepted with the gently apologetic proviso that it is “after all an Indian film.”
No doubt this lack of maturity can be attributed to several factors. The producers will tell you about the mysterious entity “the mass,” which “goes in for this sort of thing,” the technicians will blame the tools and the director will have much to say about the wonderful things he had in mind but could not achieve. In any case, better things have been achieved under much worse conditions. The internationally acclaimed post-war Italian cinema is a case in point. The reason lies elsewhere. I think it will be found in the fundamentals of film-making.
In the primitive state films were much alike, no matter where they were produced. As the pioneers began to sense the uniqueness of the medium, the language of the cinema gradually evolved. And once the all important function of the cinema—e.g., movement—was grasped, the sophistication of style and content, and refinement of technique were only a matter of time. In India it would seem that the fundamental concept of a coherent dramatic pattern existence of time was generally misunderstood.
Often by a queer process of reasoning, movement was equated with action and action with melodrama. The analogy with music failed in our case because Indian music is largely improvisational.
This elementary confusion plus the influence of the American cinema are the two main factors responsible for the present state of Indian films. The superficial aspects [of] the American style, no matter how outlandish the content, were imitated with reverence. Almost every passing phase of the American cinema has had its repercussion on the Indian film. Stories have been written based on Hollywood success and the clichéd preserved with care. Even where the story has been [a] genuinely Indian one, the background has revealed an irrepressible penchant for the jazz idiom.
In the adoptions of novels, one of two courses has been followed: either the story has been distorted to conform to the Hollywood formula, or it has been produced with such devout faithfulness to the original that the purpose of filmic interpretations has been defeated.
It should be realized that the average American film is a bad model, if only because it depicts a way of life so utterly at variance with our own. Moreover, the high technical polish which is the hallmark of the standard Hollywood products, would be impossible to achieve under existing Indian conditions. What the Indian cinema needs today is not more gloss, but more imagination, more integrity, and a more intelligent appreciation of the limitations of the medium.
After all, we do possess the primary tools of film-making. The complaint of the technician notwithstanding, mechanical devices such as the crane shot and the process shot are useful, but by no means indispensable. In fact, what tools we have, have been used on occasion with real intelligence. What our cinema needs above everything else is a style, an idiom, a sort of iconography of cinema, which would be uniquely and recognizably Indian.
There are some obstacles to this, particularly in the representation of the contemporary scene. The influence of Western civilization has created anomalies which are apparent in almost every aspect of our life. We accept the motor car, the radio, the telephone, streamlined architecture, European costume, as functional elements of our existence. But within the limits of [the] cinema frame, their incongruity is sometimes exaggerated to the point of burlesque. I recall a scene in a popular Bengali film which shows the heroine weeping to distraction with her arms around a wireless—an object she associates in her mind with her estranged lover who was once a radio singer.
Another example, a typical Hollywood finale, shows the heroine speeding forth in a sleek convertible in order to catch up with her frustrated love who has left town on foot; as she sights her man; she abandons the car in a sort of a symbolic gesture and runs up the rest of the way to meet him.
The majority of our films are replete with visual dissonances. In Kalpana, Uday Shankar used such dissonances in a conscious and consistent manner so that they became part of his cinematic style. But the truly Indian film should steer clear of such inconsistencies and look for its material in the more basic aspects of Indian life, where habit and speech, dress and manner, background and foreground, blend into a harmonious whole.
It is only in drastic simplification of style and content that hope for the Indian cinema resides. At present, it would appear that nearly all the prevailing practices go against such simplification.
Starting a production without adequate planning, sometimes even without a shooting script; a penchant for convolutions of plot and counter-plot rather than the strong, simple unidirectional narrative; the practice of sandwiching musical numbers in the most unlyrical situation; the scope, and at the same time when all other countries are turning to the documentary for inspiration—all these stand in the way of the evolution of a distinctive style.
There have been rare glimpses of an enlightened approach in a handful of recent films. IPTA’s Dharti ke Lal is an instance of a strong simple theme put over with style, honesty and technical competence. Shankar’s Kalpana, an inimitable and highly individual experiment, shows a grasp to the peak of cinematic achievement. The satisfying photography which marks the UN documentary of Paul Zils shows what a discerning camera can do with the Indian landscape.
The raw material of the cinema is life itself. It is incredible that a country which has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the film-maker. He has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears. Let him do so.
Octavio Paz
[First distributed at the Cannes Film Festival, 4 April 1951. First published in Neuvo ciné (Mexico), 1961. First published in English in Octavio Paz, On Poets and Others (New York: Arcade, 1990), 152–156. Trans. Michael Schmidt.]
For the international release of Buñuel’s third Mexican film, Los Olvidados (1950), Mexican writer, poet, diplomat, and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz wrote this manifesto on the surrealist filmmaker and his new film, which was circulated at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951, where Buñuel went on to win the Best Director prize for the film that year. Paz coxtextualizes Buñuel’s latest film in relation to his earlier works with Salvador Dalí and his surrealist documentary Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan (Land without Bread [Spain, 1933]).
The release of L’Age d’or and Un chien andalou signals the first considered irruption of poetry into the art of cinematography. The marriage of the film image to the poetic image, creating a new reality, inevitably appeared scandalous and subversive—as indeed it was. The subversive nature of Buñuel’s early films resides in the fact that, hardly touched by the hand of poetry, the insubstantial conventions (social, moral, or artistic) of which our reality is made fall away. And from those ruins rises a new truth, that of man and his desire. Buñuel shows us that a man with his hands tied can, by simply shutting his eyes, make the world jump. Those films are something more than a fierce attack on so-called reality; they are the revelation of another reality which contemporary civilization has humiliated. The man in L’Age d’or slumbers in each of us and waits only for a signal to awake: the signal of love. This film is one of the few attempts in modern art to reveal the terrible face of love at liberty.
A little later, Buñuel screened Land Without Bread, a documentary which of its genre is also a masterpiece. In this film Buñuel the poet withdraws; he is silent so that reality can speak for itself. If the subject of Buñuel’s surrealist films is the struggle of man against a reality which smothers and mutilates him, the subject of Land Without Bread is the brutalizing victory of that same reality. Thus this documentary is the necessary complement to his earlier creations. It explains and justifies them. By different routes, Buñuel pursues his bloody battle with reality. Or rather, against it. His realism, like that of the best Spanish tradition—Goya, Quevedo, the picaresque novel, Valle-Inclán, Picasso—consists of a pitiless hand-to-hand combat with reality. Tackling it, he flays it. This is why his art bears no relation at all to the more or less tendentious, sentimental, or aesthetic descriptions of the writing that is commonly called realism. On the contrary, all his work tends to stimulate the release of something secret and precious, terrible and pure, hidden by our reality itself. Making use of dream and poetry or using the medium of film narrative, Buñuel the poet descends to the very depths of man, to his most radical and unexpressed intimacy.
After a silence of many years, Buñuel screens a new film: Los Olvidados. If one compares this film with those he made with Salvador Dali, what is surprising above all is the rigor with which Buñuel takes his first intuitions to their extreme limits. On the one hand, Los Olvidados represents a moment of artistic maturity; on the other, of greater and more total rage: the gate of dreams seems sealed forever; the only gate remaining open is the gate of blood. Without betraying the great experience of his youth, but conscious of how times have changed, that reality which he denounced in his earlier works has grown even more dense—Buñuel constructs a film in which the action is precise as a mechanism, hallucinatory as a dream, implacable as the silent encroachment of lava flow. The argument of Los Olvidados—delinquent childhood has been extracted from penal archives.
Its characters are our contemporaries and are of an age with our own children. But Los Olvidados is something more than a realist film. Dream, desire, horror, delirium, chance, the nocturnal part of life, also play their part. And the gravity of the reality it shows us is atrocious in such a way that in the end it appears impossible to us, unbearable. And it is: reality is unbearable; and that is why, because he cannot bear it, man kills and dies, loves and creates.
The strictest artistic economy governs Los Olvidados. Corresponding to this greater condensation is a more intense explosion. That is why it is a film without “stars”; that is why the “musical background” is so discreet and does not set out to usurp what music owes to the eyes in films; and finally, that is why it disdains local color. Turning its back on the temptation of the impressive Mexican landscape, the scenario is reduced to the sordid and insignificant desolation, but always implacable, of an urban setting. The physical and human space in which the drama unfolds could hardly be more closed: the life and death of some children delivered up to their own fate, between the four walls of abandonment. The city, with all that this word entails of human solidarity, is alien and strange. What we call civilization is for them nothing but a wall, a great No which closes the way. Those children are Mexicans, but they could be from some other country, could live in any suburb of another great city. In a sense they do not live in Mexico, or anywhere: they are the forgotten, the inhabitants of those wastelands which each modern city breeds on its outskirts. A world closed on itself, where all acts are reflexive and each step returns us to our point of departure. No one can get out of there, or out of himself, except by way of the long street of death. Fate, which opens doors in other worlds, here closes them.
In Los Olvidados the continuous presence of the hazard has a special meaning, which forbids us from confusing it with mere chance. The hazard which governs the action of the protagonists is presented as a necessity which, nonetheless, could have been avoided. (Why not give it its true name, then, as in tragedy: destiny?) The old fate is at work again, but deprived of its supernatural attributes: now we face a social and psychological fate. Or, to use the magical word of our time, the new intellectual fetish: an historical fate. It is not enough, however, for society, history, or circumstances to prove hostile to the protagonists; for the catastrophe to come about, it is necessary for those determinants to coincide with human will. Pedro struggles against chance, against his bad luck or his bad shadow, embodied in the Jaibo; when, cornered, he accepts and faces it, he changes fate into destiny. He dies, but he makes his death his own. The collision between human consciousness and external fate constitutes the essence of the tragic act. Buñuel has rediscovered this fundamental ambiguity: without human complicity, destiny is not fulfilled and tragedy is impossible. Fate wears the mask of liberty; chance, that of destiny. Los Olvidados is not a documentary film. Nor is it a thesis, propagandistic, or moralizing film. Though no sermonizing blurs his admirable objectivity, it would be slanderous to suggest that this is an art film, in which all that counts are artistic values. Far from realism (social, psychological, and edifying) and from aestheticism, Buñuel’s film finds its place in the tradition of a passionate and ferocious art, contained and raving, which claims as antecedents Goya and Posada, the graphic artists who have perhaps taken black humor furthest. Cold lava, volcanic ice. Despite the universality of his subject, the absence of local color, and the extreme bareness of his construction, Los Olvidados has an emphasis which there is no other word for but racial (in the sense in which fighting bulls have casta). The misery and abandonment can be met with anywhere in the world, but the bloodied passion with which they are described belongs to great Spanish art. We have already come across that half-witted blind man in the Spanish picaresque tradition. Those women, those drunks, those cretins, those murderers, those innocents, we have come across in Quevedo and Galdós, we have glimpsed them in Cervantes, Velásquez and Murillo have depicted them. Those sticks—the walking sticks of the blind—are the same which tap down all the history of Spanish theater. And the children, the forgotten ones, their mythology, their passive rebellion, their suicidal loyalty, their sweetness which flashes out, their tenderness full of exquisite ferocity, their impudent affirmation of themselves in and for death, their endless search for communion—even through crime—are not and cannot be anything but Mexican. Thus, in the crucial scene in the film—the “libation” scene—the subject of the mother is resolved in the common supper, the sacred feast. Perhaps unintentionally, Buñuel finds in the dream of his protagonists the archetypal images of the Mexican people: Coatlicue [Aztec goddess of death and fertility] and sacrifice. The subject of the mother, a Mexican obsession, is inexorably linked to the theme of fraternity, of friendship unto death. Both constitute the secret foundation of this film. The world of Los Olvidados is peopled by orphans, by loners who seek communion and who do not balk at blood to find it. The quest for the “other,” for our likeness, is the other side of the search for the mother. Or the acceptance of her definitive absence: the knowledge that we are alone. Pedro, the Jaibo, and his companions thus reveal to us the ultimate nature of man, which perhaps consists in a permanent and constant state of orphandom.
Witness to our age, the moral value of Los Olvidados bears no relation at all to propaganda. Art, when it is free, is witness, conscience. Buñuel’s work proves what creative talent and artistic conscience can do when nothing but their own liberty constrains or drives them.
Serge Berna, Guy Debord, François Dufrêne, Monique Geoffrey, Jean-Isidore Isou, Yolande du Luart, Marc’O, Gabriel Pomerand, Poucette, and Gil J. Wolman
[Tract first distributed in French as “Fini le cinéma français” at the 5th Cannes Film Festival, April 1952. Published in French in Guy Debord, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 59. First published in English in Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” in Thomas McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 340–341. Trans. Thomas Y. Levin.]
This tract, distributed at the Cannes Film Festival, appeared at the same time as the first and only issue of Ion, the Lettriste journal dedicated to cinema, which also included Guy Debord’s first published work (see Debord, “Prolegomena for All Future Cinema” in chap. 1 of this volume). The Lettristes, self-described “men of the new cinema,” disrupted the festival to such an extent that they were arrested.
A number of men, dissatisfied with what they have been given, surpass the world of official expressions and the festivals of its poverty.
After L’ESTHETIQUE DU CINEMA by Isidore ISOU, TAMBOURS DU JUGEMENT PREMIER, the essay in imaginary cinema by François DUFRENE, systematizes to the utmost extreme the exhaustion of filmic means, by locating it beyond all of its technology.
Guy-Ernest DEBORD with
HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE arrives at the end of cinema in its insurrectional phase.
After these refusals, definitively outside the norms which you like, the
CINEMA NUCLEAIRE by MARC’O. integrates the exhibition space and the spectator into the cinematographic representation.
From now on, cinema can no longer be anything but NUCLEAR. Thus we want to go beyond these derisory competitions of sub-products between little businessmen who are already either illiterate or destined to soon become so. Our mere presence here makes them die.
And here are the men of the new cinema: Serge BERNA, G.E. DEBORD, François DUFRENE, Monique GEOFFROY, Jean Isidore ISOU, Yolande du LUART, MARC’O., Gabriel POMERAND, POUCETTE, Gil J. WOLMAN.
Cesare Zavattini
[First published in Italian as a recorded interview in La revista de cinema italiano 2 (1952). First published in English in Sight and Sound 23, no. 2 (1953): 64–69. Trans. Pier Luigi Lanza.]
Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini’s manifesto for neorealism stands as both a descriptive and philosophical statement on the nature of the movement and on cinema’s possibilities in capturing the “real,” echoing in some ways André Bazin’s “Ontologie de l’image photographique” (1945). Zavattini’s manifesto harkens back to Longanesi’s “The Glass Eye” in many ways, but whereas Longanesi celebrated aspects of American cinema, Zavattini deplores it.
No doubt one’s first and most superficial reaction to everyday reality is that it is tedious. Until we are able to overcome some moral and intellectual laziness, in fact, this reality will continue to appear uninteresting. One shouldn’t be astonished that the cinema has always felt the natural, unavoidable necessity to insert a “story” in the reality to make it exciting and “spectacular.” All the same, it is clear that such a method evades a direct approach to everyday reality, and suggests that it cannot be portrayed without the intervention of fantasy or artifice.
The most important characteristic, and the most important innovation, of what is called neorealism, it seems to me, is to have realized that the necessity of the “story” was only an unconscious way of disguising a human defeat, and that the kind of imagination it involved was simply a technique of superimposing dead formulas over living social facts. Now it has been perceived that reality is hugely rich, that to be able to look directly at it is enough; and that the artist’s task is not to make people moved or indignant at metaphorical situations, but to make them reflect (and, if you like, to be moved and indignant too) on what they and others are doing, on the real things, exactly as they are.
For me this has been a great victory. I would like to have achieved it many years earlier. But I made the discovery only at the end of the war. It was a moral discovery, an appeal to order. I saw at last what lay in front of me, and I understood that to have evaded reality had been to betray it.
Example: Before this, if one was thinking over the idea of a film on, say, a strike, one was immediately forced to invent a plot. And the strike itself became only the background to the film. Today, our attitude would be one of “revelation”: we would describe the strike itself, try to work out the largest possible number of human, moral, social, economic, poetic values from the bare documentary fact.
We have passed from an unconsciously rooted mistrust of reality, an illusory and equivocal evasion, to an unlimited trust in things, facts and people. Such a position requires us, in effect, to excavate reality, to give it a power, a communication, a series of reflexes, which until recently we had never thought it had. It requires, too, a true and real interest in what is happening, a search for the most deeply hidden human values, which is why we feel that the cinema must recruit not only intelligent people, but, above all, “living” souls, the morally richest people.
The cinema’s overwhelming desire to see, to analyse, its hunger for reality, is an act of concrete homage towards other people, towards what is happening and existing in the world. And, incidentally, it is what distinguishes “neorealism” from the American cinema.
In fact, the American position is the antithesis of our own: while we are interested in the reality around us and want to know it directly, reality in American films is unnaturally filtered, “purified,” and comes out at one or two removes. In America, lack of subjects for films causes a crisis, but with us such a crisis is impossible. One cannot be short of themes while there is still plenty of reality. Any hour of the day, any place, any person, is a subject for narrative if the narrator is capable of observing and illuminating all these collective elements by exploring their interior value.
So there is no question of a crisis of subjects, only of their interpretation. This substantial difference was nicely emphasised by a well-known American producer when he told me: “This is how we would imagine a scene with an aeroplane. The ’plane passes by . . . a machine-gun fires . . . the ’plane crashes. . . . And this is how you would imagine it. The ’plane passes by . . . The ’plane passes by again . . . the ’plane passes by once more . . .”
He was right. But we have still not gone far enough. It is not enough to make the aeroplane pass by three times; we must make it pass by twenty times.
What effects on narrative, then, and on the portrayal of human character, has the neorealist style produced?
To begin with, while the cinema used to make one situation produce another situation, and another, and another, again and again, and each scene was thought out and immediately related to the next (the natural result of a mistrust of reality), today, when we have thought out a scene, we feel the need to “remain” in it, because the single scene itself can contain so many echoes and reverberations, can even contain all the situations we may need. Today, in fact, we can quietly say: give us whatever “fact” you like, and we will disembowel it, make it something worth watching.
While the cinema used to portray life in its most visible and external moments—and a film was usually only a series of situations selected and linked together with varying success—today the neorealist affirms that each one of these situations, rather than all the external moments, contains in itself enough material for a film.
Example: In most films, the adventures of two people looking for somewhere to live, for a house, would be shown externally in a few moments of action, but for us it could provide the scenario for a whole film, and we would explore all its echoes, all its implications.
Of course, we are still a long way from a true analysis of human situations, and one can speak of analysis only in comparison with the dull synthesis of most current production. We are, rather, still in an “attitude” of analysis; but in this attitude there is a strong purpose, a desire for understanding, for belonging, for participating—for living together, in fact.
Substantially, then, the question today is, instead of turning imaginary situations into “reality” and trying to make them look “true,” to make things as they are, almost by themselves, create their own special significance. Life is not what is invented in “stories”; life is another matter. To understand it involves a minute, unrelenting, and patient search. Here I must bring in another point of view. I believe that the world goes on getting worse because we are not truly aware of reality. The most authentic position anyone can take up today is to engage himself in tracing the roots of this problem. The keenest necessity of our time is “social attention.”
Attention, though, to what is there, directly: not through an apologue, however well conceived. A starving man, a humiliated man, must be shown by name and surname; no fable for a starving man, because that is something else, less effective and less moral. The true function of the cinema is not to tell fables, and to a true function we must recall it.
Of course, reality can be analysed by ways of fiction. Fictions can be expressive and natural; but neorealism, if it wants to be worthwhile, must sustain the moral impulse that characterised its beginnings, in an analytical documentary way. No other medium of expression has the cinema’s original and innate capacity for showing things that we believe worth showing, as they happen day by day—in what we might call their “dailiness,” their longest and truest duration. The cinema has everything in front of it, and no other medium has the same possibilities for getting it known quickly to the greatest number of people.
As the cinema’s responsibility also comes from its enormous power, it should try to make every frame of film count, by which I mean that it should penetrate more and more into the manifestations and the essence of reality. The cinema only affirms its moral responsibility when it approaches reality in this way.
The moral, like the artistic, problem lies in being able to observe reality, not to extract fictions from it.
Naturally, some film-makers, although they realise the problem, have still been compelled, for a variety of reasons (some valid, others not), to “invent” stories in the traditional manner and to incorporate in these some fragments of their real intuition. This effectively has served for neo-realism for some filmmakers in Italy. For this reason, the first endeavour was often to reduce the story to its most elementary, simple, and, I would rather say, banal form. It was the beginning of a speech that was later interrupted. Bicycle Thieves provides a typical example. The child follows his father along the street; at one moment, the child is nearly run over, but the father does not even notice. This episode was “invented,” but with the intention of communicating an everyday fact about these people’s lives, a little fact—so little that the protagonists don’t even care about it—but full of life.
In fact Paisa, Open City, Sciuscià, Bicycle Thieves, La terra trema, all contain elements of an absolute significance—they reflect the idea that everything can be recounted; but their sense remains metaphorical, because there is still an invented story, not the documentary spirit. In other films, such as Umberto D., reality as an analysed fact is much more evident, but the presentation is still traditional.
We have not yet reached the centre of neorealism. Neorealism today is an army ready to start; and there are the soldiers—behind Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti. The soldiers have to go into the attack and win the battle.
We must recognize that all of us are still only starting, some farther on, others farther behind. But it is still something. The great danger today is to abandon that position, the moral position implicit in the work of many of us during and immediately after the war.
A woman is going to buy a pair of shoes. Upon this elementary situation it is possible to build a film. All we have to do is to discover and then show all the elements that go to create this adventure, in all their banal “dailiness,” and it will become worthy of attention, it will even become “spectacular.” But it will become spectacular not through its exceptional, but through its normal qualities; it will astonish us by showing so many things that happen every day under our eyes, things we have never noticed before.
The result would not be easy to achieve. It would require an intensity of human vision both from the creator of the film and from the audience. The question is: how to give human life its historical importance at every minute.
In life, in reality today, there are no more empty spaces. Between things, facts, people, exists such interdependence that a blow struck for cinema in Rome could have repercussions around the world. If this is true, it must be worthwhile to take any moment of a human life and show how “striking” that moment is: to excavate and identify it, to send its echo vibrating into other parts of the world.
This is as valid for poverty as for peace. For peace, too, the human moment should not be a great one, but an ordinary daily happening. Peace is usually the sum of small happenings, all having the same moral implications at their roots.
It is not only a question, however, of creating a film that makes its audience understand a social or collective situation. People understand themselves better than the social fabric; and to see themselves on the screen, performing their daily actions—remembering that to see oneself gives one the sense of being unlike oneself—like hearing one’s own voice on the radio—can help them to fill up a void, a lack of knowledge of reality.
If this love for reality, for human nature directly observed, must still adapt itself to the necessities of the cinema as it is now organised, must yield, suffer and wait, it means that the cinema’s capitalist structure still has a tremendous influence over its true function. One can see this in the growing opposition in many places to the fundamental motives of neorealism, the main results of which are a return to so-called “original” subjects, as in the past, and the consequent evasion of reality, and a number of bourgeois accusations against neorealist principles.
The main accusation is: neorealism only describes poverty. But neorealism can and must face poverty. We have begun with poverty for the simple reason that it is one of the most vital realities of our time, and I challenge anyone to prove the contrary. To believe, or to pretend to believe, that by making half a dozen films on poverty we have finished with the problem would be a great mistake. As well believe that, if you have to plough up a whole country, you can sit down after the first acre.
The theme of poverty, of rich and poor, is something one can dedicate one’s whole life to. We have just begun. We must have the courage to explore all the details. If the rich turn up their noses especially at Miracolo a Milano, we can only ask them to be a little patient. Miracolo a Milano is only a fable. There is still much more to say. I put myself among the rich, not only because I have some money (which is only the most apparent and immediate aspect of wealth), but because I am also in a position to create oppression and injustice. That is the moral (or immoral) position of the so-called rich man.
When anyone (he could be the audience, the director, the critic, the State, or the Church) says, “STOP the poverty,” i.e. stop the films about poverty, he is committing a moral sin. He is refusing to understand, to learn. And when he refuses to learn, consciously or not, he is evading reality. The evasion springs from lack of courage, from fear. (One should make a film on this subject, showing at what point we begin to evade reality in the face of disquieting facts, at what point we begin to sweeten it.)
If I were not afraid of being thought irreverent, I should say that Christ, had He a camera in His hand, would not shoot fables, however wonderful, but would show us the good ones and the bad ones of this world—in actuality, giving us close-ups of those who make their neighbours’ bread too bitter, and of their victims, if the censor allowed it.
To say that we have had “enough” films about poverty suggests that one can measure reality with a chronometer. In fact, it is not simply a question of choosing the theme of poverty, but of going on to explore and analyse the poverty. What one needs is more and more knowledge, precise and simple, of human needs and the motives governing them. Neorealism should ignore the chronometer and go forward for as long as is necessary.
Neorealism, it is also said, does not offer solutions. The end of a neorealist film is particularly inconclusive. I cannot accept this at all. With regard to my own work, the characters and situations in films for which I have written the scenario, they remain unresolved from a practical point of view simply because “this is reality.” But every moment of the film is, in itself, a continuous answer to some question. It is not the concern of an artist to propound solutions. It is enough, and quite a lot, I should say, to make an audience feel the need, the urgency, for them.
In any case, what films do offer solutions? “Solutions” in this sense, if they are offered, are sentimental ones, resulting from the superficial way in which problems have been faced. At least, in my work I leave the solution to the audience.
The fundamental emotion of Miracolo a Milano is not one of escape (the flight at the end), but of indignation, a desire for solidarity with certain people, a refusal of it with others. The film’s structure is intended to suggest that there is a great gathering of the humble ones against the others. But the humble ones have no tanks, or they would have been ready to defend their land and their huts.
The true neorealistic cinema is, of course, less expensive than the cinema at present. Its subjects can be expressed cheaply, and it can dispense with capitalist resources on the present scale. The cinema has not yet found its morality, its necessity, its quality, precisely because it costs too much; being so conditioned, it is much less an art than it could be.
The cinema should never turn back. It should accept, unconditionally, what is contemporary. Today, today, today.
It must tell reality as if it were a story; there must be no gap between life and what is on the screen. To give an example:
A woman goes to a shop to buy a pair of shoes. The shoes cost 7,000 lire. The woman tries to bargain. The scene lasts, perhaps, two minutes. I must make a two-hour film. What do I do?
I analyse the fact in all its constituent elements, in its “before,” in its “after,” in its contemporaneity. The fact creates its own fiction, in its own particular sense. The woman is buying the shoes. What is her son doing at the same moment? What are people doing in India that could have some relation to this fact of the shoes? The shoes cost 7,000 lire. How did the woman happen to have 7,000 lire? How hard did she work for them, what do they represent for her? And the bargaining shopkeeper, who is he? What relationship has developed between these two human beings? What do they mean, what interests are they defending, as they bargain? The shopkeeper also has two sons, who eat and speak: do you want to know what they are saying? Here they are, in front of you . . .
The question is, to be able to fathom the real correspondences between facts and their process of birth, to discover what lies beneath them. Thus to analyse “buying a pair of shoes” in such a way opens to us a vast and complex world, rich in importance and values, in its practical, social, economic, psychological motives. Banality disappears because each moment is really charged with responsibility. Every moment is infinitely rich. Banality never really existed.
Excavate, and every little fact is revealed as a mine. If the gold-diggers come at last to dig in the illimitable mine of reality, the cinema will become socially important.
This can also be done, evidently, with invented characters; but if I use living, real characters with which to sound reality, people in whose life I can directly participate, my emotion becomes more effective, morally stronger, more useful. Art must be expressed through a true name and surname, not a false one.
I am bored to death with heroes more or less imaginary. I want to meet the real protagonist of everyday life, I want to see how he is made, if he has a moustache or not, if he is tall or short, I want to see his eyes, and I want to speak to him.
We can look at him on the screen with the same anxiety, the same curiosity as when, in a square, seeing a crowd of people all hurrying up to the same place, we ask, What is happening? What is happening to a real person? Neorealism has perceived that the most irreplaceable experience comes from things happening under our own eyes from natural necessity.
I am against “exceptional” personages. The time has come to tell the audience that they are the true protagonists of life. The result will be a constant appeal to the responsibility and dignity of every human being. Otherwise the frequent habit of identifying oneself with fictional characters will become very dangerous. We must identify ourselves with what we are. The world is composed of millions of people thinking of myths.
The term neorealism—in a very Latin sense—implies, too, elimination of technical-professional apparatus, screen-writer included. Handbooks, formulas, grammars, have no more application. There will be no more technical terms. Everybody has his personal shooting-script. Neorealism breaks all the rules, rejects all those canons, which, in fact, exist only to commodify limitations. Reality breaks all the rules, which you can discover if you walk out with a camera to meet it.
The figure of a screen-writer today is, besides, very equivocal. He is usually considered part of the technical apparatus. I am a screen-writer trying to say certain things, and saying them in my own way. It is clear that certain moral and social ideas are at the foundation of my expressive activities, and I can’t be satisfied to offer a simple technical contribution. In films which do not touch me directly, also, when I am called in to do a certain amount of work on them, I try to insert as much as possible of my own world, of the moral emergencies within myself.
On the other hand, I don’t think the screenplay in itself contains any particular problems; only when subject, screenplay and direction become three distinct phases, as they so often do today, which is abnormal. The screen-writer as such should disappear, and we should arrive at the sole author of a film.
Everything becomes flexible when only one person is making a film, everything continually possible, not only during the shooting, but during the editing, the laying of tracks, the post-synchronization, to the particular moment when we say, “Stop.” And it is only then that we put an end to the film.
Of course, it is possible to make films in collaboration, as happens with novels and plays, because there are always numerous bonds of identity between people (for example, millions of men go to war, and are killed for the same reasons), but no work of art exists on which someone has not set the seal of his own interests, of his own poetic world. There is always somebody to make the decisive creative act, there is always one prevailing intelligence, there is always someone who, at a certain moment, “chooses,” and says, “This, yes,” and “This, no,” and then resolves it: reaction shot of the mother crying Help!
Technique and capitalist method, however, have imposed collaboration on the cinema. It is one thing to adapt ourselves to the imposed exigencies of the cinema’s present structure, another to imagine that they are indispensable and necessary. It is obvious that when films cost sixpence and everybody can have a camera, the cinema would become a creative medium as flexible and as free as any other.
It is evident that, with neorealism, the actor—as a person fictitiously lending his own flesh to another—has no more right to exist than the “story.” In neorealism, as I intend it, everyone must be his own actor.
To want one person to play another implies the calculated plot, the fable, and not “things happening.” I attempted such a film with Caterina Rigoglioso; it was called “the lightning film.” But unfortunately at the last moment everything broke down. Caterina did not seem to “take” to the cinema. But wasn’t she “Caterina”?
Of course, it will be necessary to choose themes excluding actors. I want, for example, to make a report on children in the world. If I am not allowed to make it, I will limit it to Europe, or to Italy alone. But I will make it. Here is an example of the film not needing actors. I hope the actors’ union will not protest.
Neorealism does not reject psychological exploration. Psychology is one of the many premises of reality. I face it as I face any other. If I want to write a scene of two men quarrelling, I will not do so at my desk. I must leave my den and find them. I take these men and make them talk in front of me for one hour or for twenty, depending on necessity. My creative method is first to call on them, then to listen to them, “choosing” what they say. But I do all this not with the intention of creating heroes, because I think that a hero is not “certain men” but “every man.”
Wanting to give everyone a sense of equality is not levelling him down, but exalting his solidarity. Lack of solidarity is always born from presuming to be different, from a But: “Paul is suffering, it’s true. I am suffering, too, but my suffering has something that . . . my nature has something that . . .” and so on. The But must disappear, and we must be able to say: “That man is bearing what I myself should bear in the same circumstances.”
Others have observed that the best dialogue in films is always in dialect. Dialect is nearer to reality. In our literary and spoken language, the synthetic constructions and the words themselves are always a little false. When writing a dialogue, I always think of it in dialect, in that of Rome or my own village. Using dialect, I feel it to be more essential, truer. Then I translate it into Italian, thus maintaining the dialect’s syntax. I don’t, therefore, write dialogue in dialect, but I am interested in what dialects have in common: immediacy, freshness, verisimilitude.
But I take most of all from nature. I go out into the street, catch words, sentences, discussions. My great aids are memory and the shorthand writer. Afterwards, I do with the words what I do with the images. I choose, I cut the material I have gathered to give it the right rhythm, to capture the essence, the truth. However great a faith I might have in imagination, in solitude, I have a greater one in reality, in people. I am interested in the drama of things we happen to encounter, not those we plan.
In short, to exercise our own poetic talents on location, we must leave our rooms and go, in body and mind, out to meet other people, to see and understand them. This is a genuine moral necessity for me and, if I lose faith in it, so much the worse for me.
I am quite aware that it is possible to make wonderful films, like Charlie Chaplin’s, and they are not neorealistic. I am quite aware that there are Americans, Russians, Frenchmen and others who have made masterpieces that honour humanity, and, of course, they have not wasted film. I wonder, too, how many more great works they will again give us, according to their particular genius, with actors and studios and novels. But Italian film-makers, I think, if they are to sustain and deepen their cause and their style, after having courageously half-opened their doors to reality, must (in the sense I have mentioned) open them wide.
François Truffaut
[First published in French as “Une certaine tendance dans le cinéma français,” Cahiers du cinéma 31 (1954): 15–29. First published in English in Cahiers du cinema in English 1 (1966): 31–41.]
François Truffaut loved American cinema and despised much of what French cinema had become. His “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema” became a foundational document of auteur theory and, indeed, of the French nouvelle vague; it was a scorched-earth assault on the cinéma du qualité or, more derisively, la cinéma du papa that dominated postwar French cinema. This led, in the first instance, to the valorization of American auteur cinema and, soon thereafter, to a new kind of French cinema, one that was intensely devoted to the history of cinema in all its forms. If Zavattini looked for truth in the real, Truffaut looked for it in Hollywood and in the work of a few key French directors, such as Robert Bresson. Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer all began, in strikingly different ways, to make films infused with, but nevertheless undercutting, themes from Hollywood. And this sensibility emerged, in large part, from Truffaut’s manifesto. As a filmmaker, Truffaut would often later be criticized for the sentimentality of his films—Godard at the front line of this criticism in the 1970s when Truffaut released La nuit américaine (Day for Night [France, 1973])—but in his early writings Truffaut was as brutal as Godard would ever become.
These notes have no other object than to attempt to define a certain tendency of the French cinema—a tendency called “psychological realism”—and to sketch its limits.
If the French cinema exists by means of about a hundred films a year, it is well understood that only ten or twelve merit the attention of critics and cinephiles, the attention, therefore of “Cahiers.”
These ten or twelve films constitute what has been prettily named the “Tradition of Quality”; they force, by their ambitiousness, the admiration of the foreign press, defend the French flag twice a year at Cannes and at Venice where, since 1946, they regularly carry off medals, golden lions and grands prix.
With the advent of “talkies,” the French cinema was a frank plagiarism of the American cinema. Under the influence of Scarface, we made the amusing Pépé Le Moko. Then the French scenario is most clearly obliged to Prévert for its evolution: Quai des Brumes remains the masterpiece of poetic realism.
The war and the post-war period renewed our cinema. It evolved under the effect of an internal pressure and for poetic realism—about which one might say that it died closing Les Portes de la nuit behind it—was substituted psychological realism, illustrated by Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Dellannoy, René Clement, Yves Allégret and Marcel Pagliero.
If one is willing to remember that not so long ago Delannoy filmed Le Bossu and La Part de l’ombre, Claude Autant-Lara Le Plombier amoureux and Lettres d’amour, Yves Allégret La boite aux rêves and Les demons de l’Aube, that all these films are justly recognized as strictly commercial enterprises, one will admit that, the successes or failures of these cineastes being a function of the scenarios they chose, La Symphonie Pastorale, Le Diable au Corps, Jeux Interdits, Manèges, Un homme Marche dans la ville, are essentially scenarists’ films.
After having sounded out directing by making two forgotten shorts, Jean Aurenche became a specialist in adaptation. In 1936, he was credited, with Anouilh, with the dialogue for Vous n’avez rien a declarer and Les De Gourdis de la île. At the same time Pierre Bost was publishing excellent little novels at the N.R.F. Aurenche and Bost worked together for the first time while adapting and writing dialogue for Douce, directed by Claude Autant-Lara.
Today, no one is ignorant any longer of the fact that Aurenche and Bost rehabilitated adaptation by upsetting old preconceptions of being faithful to the letter and substituting for it the contrary idea of being faithful to the spirit—to the point that this audacious aphorism has been written: “An honest adaptation is a betrayal” (Carlo Rim, “Traveling and Sex-Appeal”).
In adaptation there exists filmable scenes and unfilmable scenes, and that instead of omitting the latter (as was done not long ago) it is necessary to invent equivalent scenes, that is to say, scenes as the novel’s author would have written them for the cinema.
“Invention without betrayal” is the watchword Aurenche and Bost like to cite, forgetting that one can also betray by omission.
The system of Aurenche and Bost is so seductive, even in the enunciation of its principles, that nobody even dreamed of verifying its functioning close-at-hand. I propose to do a little of this here.
The entire reputation of Aurenche and Bost is built on two precise points: 1. Faithfulness to the spirit of the works they adapt: 2. The talent they use.
Since 1943 Aurenche and Bost have adapted and written dialogue for: Douce by Michel Davet, La Symphonie Pastorale by Gide, Le Diable au corps by Radiguet, Un Recteur a l’île De Sein (Dieu A Besoin Des Hommes) by Queffelec, Les Jeux Inconnus (Jeux Interdits) by Francois Boyer, Le blé en herbe by Colette.
In addition, they wrote an adaptation of Journal d’un Curé de campagne that was never filmed, a scenario on Jeanne D’Arc of which only one part has been made (by Jean Delannoy) and, lastly, scenario and dialogue for L’Auberge Rouge (directed by Claude Autant-Lara).
You will have noticed the profound diversity of inspiration of the works and authors adapted. In order to accomplish this tour de force which consists of remaining faithful to the spirit of Michel Davet, Gide, Radiguet, Queffelec, François Boyer, Colette and Bernanos, one must oneself possess, I imagine, a suppleness of spirit, a habitually geared-down personality as well as singular eclecticism.
You must also consider that Aurenche and Bost are led to collaborate with the most diverse directors: Jean Delannoy, for example, sees himself as a mystical moralist. But the petty meanness of Garçon Sauvage, the shabbiness of La minute de vérité, the insignificance of La Route Napoleon show rather clearly the intermittent character of that vocation.
Claude Autant-Lara, on the contrary, is well known for his non-conformity, his “advanced” ideas, his wild anti-clericalism; let us recognize in this cineaste the virtue of always remaining, in his films, honest with himself.
Pierre Bost being the technician in tandem, the spiritual element in this communal work seems to come from Jean Aurenche.
Educated by the Jesuits, Jean Aurenche has held on to nostalgia and rebellion, both at the same time. His flirtation with surrealism seemed to be out of sympathy for the anarchists of the thirties. This tells how strong his personality is, also how apparently incompatible it was with the personalities of Gide, Bernanos, Queffelec, Radiguet. But an examination of the works will doubtless give us more information.
Abbot Amédée Ayffre knew very well how to analyse La Symphonie Pastorale and how to define the relationship between the written work and the filmed work:
“Reduction of Faith to religious psychology in the hands of Gide, now becomes a reduction to psychology, plain and simple . . . with this qualitative abasement we will now have, according to a law well-known to aestheticians, a corresponding quantitative augmentation. New characters are added: Piette and Casteran, charged with representing certain sentiments. Tragedy becomes drama, melodrama.” (Dieu au Cinéma, p. 131).
What annoys me about this famous process of equivalence is that I’m not at all certain that a novel contains unfilmable scenes, and even less certain that these scenes, decreed unfilmable, would be so for everyone.
Praising Robert Bresson for his faithfulness to Bernanos, André Bazin ended his excellent article “La Stylistique de Robert Bresson,” with these words. “After The Diary Of A Country Priest, Aurenche and Bost are no longer anything but the Viollet-Leduc of adaptation.”
All those who admire and know Bresson’s film well will remember the admirable scene in the confessional when Chantal’s face “began to appear little by little, by degrees” (Bernanos).
When, several years before Bresson, Jean Aurenche wrote an adaptation of Diary, refused by Bernanos, he judged this scene to be unfilmable and substituted for it the one we reproduce here.
“Do you want me to listen to you here?” He indicates the confessional. “I never confess.”
“Nevertheless, you must have confessed yesterday, since you took communion this morning?”
“I didn’t take communion.” He looks at her, very surprised. “Pardon me, I gave you communion.”
Chantal turns rapidly towards the pri-Dieu she had occupied that morning. “Come see.”
The curé follows her. Chantal indicates the missal she had left there.
“Look in this book, Sir. Me, I no longer, perhaps, have the right to touch it.” The curé, very intrigued, opens the book and discovers, between two pages, the host that Chantal had spit out. His face is stupified and confused.
“I spit out the host,” says Chantal.
“I see,” says the curé, with a neutral voice.
“You’ve never seen anything like that, right?” says Chantal, harsh almost triumphant.
“No, never,” says the curé, very calmly. “Do you know what must be done?”
The curé closes his eyes for a brief instant. He is thinking or praying, he says, “It is very simple to repair, Miss. But it’s very horrible to commit.”
He heads for the altar, carrying the open book. Chantal follows him.
“No, it’s not horrible. What is horrible is to receive the host in a state of sin.”
“You were, then, in a state of sin?”
“Less than the others, but then—it’s all the same to them.” “Do not judge.”
“I do not judge, I condemn,” says Chantal with violence. “Silence in front of the body of Christ!”
He kneels before the altar, takes the host from the book and swallows it.
In the middle of the book, the curé and an obtuse atheist named Arsène are opposed in a discussion on Faith. This discussion ends with this line by Arsène, “When one is dead, everything is dead.” In the adaptation, this discussion takes place on the very tomb of the curé, between Arsène and another curé, and terminates the film. This line, “When one is dead, everything is dead,” carries, perhaps the only one retained by the public. Bernanos did not say, for conclusion, “When one is dead, everything is dead,” but “What does it matter, all is grace.”
“Invention without betrayal,” you say—it seems to me that it’s a question here of little enough invention for a great deal of betrayal. One or two more details. Aurenche and Bost were unable to make The Diary Of A Country Priest because Bernanos was alive. Bresson declared that were Bernanos alive he would have taken more liberties. Thus, Aurenche and Bost are annoyed because someone is alive, but Bresson is annoyed because he is dead.
From a simple reading of that extract, there stands out:
1. A constant and deliberate care to be unfaithful to the spirit as well as the letter;
2. A very marked taste for profanation and blasphemy.
This unfaithfulness to the spirit also degrades Le Diable au corps—a love story that becomes an anti-militaristic, anti-bourgeois film, La Symphonie Pastorale—a love story about an amorous pastor—turns Gide into a Beatrix Beck, Un Recteur a l’ile de Sein whose title is swapped for the equivocal one of Dieu a besoin des hommes in which the islanders are shown like the famous “cretins” in Bunuel’s Land Without Bread.
As for the taste for blasphemy, it is constantly manifested in a more or less insidious manner, depending on the subject, the metteur-en-scène nay, even the star.
I recall from memory the confessional scene from Douce, Marthe’s funeral in Le Diable, the profaned hosts in that adaptation of Diary (scene carries over to Dieu a besoin des hommes), the whole scenario and the character played by Fernandel in L’Auberge Rouge, the scenario in toto of Jeux Interdits (joking in the cemetery).
Thus, everything indicates that Aurenche and Bost are the authors of frankly anti-clerical films, but, since films about the cloth are fashionable, our authors have allowed themselves to fall in with that style. But as it suits them—they think—not to betray their convictions, the theme of profanation and blasphemy, dialogues with double meanings, turn up here and there to prove to the guys that they know the art of “cheating the producer,” all the while giving him satisfaction, as well as that of cheating the “great public,” which is equally satisfied.
This process well deserves the name of “alibi-ism”; it is excusable and its use is necessary during a time when one must ceaselessly feign stupidity in order to work intelligently, but if it’s all in the game to “cheat the producer,” isn’t it a bit scandalous to re-write Gide, Bernanos and Radiguet?
In truth, Aurenche and Bost work like all the scenarists in the world, like pre-war Spaak and Natanson.
To their way of thinking, every story includes characters A, B, C, and D. In the interior of that equation, everything is organized in function of criteria known to them alone. The sun rises and sets like clockwork, characters disappear, others are invented, the script deviates little by little from the original and becomes a whole, formless but brilliant: a new film, step by step makes its solemn entrance into the “Tradition of Quality.”
They will tell me, “Let us admit that Aurenche and Bost are unfaithful, but do you also deny the existence of their talent . . . ?” Talent, to be sure, is not a function of fidelity, but I consider an adaptation of value only when written by a man of the cinema. Aurenche and Bost are essentially literary men and I reproach them here for being contemptuous of the cinema by underestimating it. They behave, vis-à-vis the scenario, as if they thought to reeducate a delinquent by finding him a job; they always believe they’ve “done the maximum” for it by embellishing it with subtleties, out of that science of nuances that make up the slender merit of modern novels. It is, moreover, only the smallest caprice on the part of the exegetists of our art that they believe to honor the cinema by using literary jargon. (Haven’t Sartre and Camus been talked about for Pagliero’s work, and phenomenology for Allegret’s?)
The truth is, Aurenche and Bost have made the works they adapt insipid, for equivalence is always with us, whether in the form of treason or timidity. Here is a brief example: in Le Diable au corps, as Radiguet wrote it, François meets Marthe on a train platform with Marthe jumping from the train while it is still moving; in the film, they meet in the school which has been transformed into a hospital. What is the point of this equivalence? It’s a decoy for the anti-militarist elements added to the work, in concert with Claude Autant-Lara.
Well, it is evident that Radiguet’s idea was one of mise-en-scène, whereas the scene invented by Aurenche and Bost is literary. One could, believe me, multiply these examples infinitely.
Secrets are only kept for a time, formulas are divulged, new scientific knowledge is the object of communications to the Academy of Sciences and since, if we will believe Aurenche and Bost, adaptation is an exact science, one of these days they really could apprise us in the name of what criterion, by virtue of what system, by what mysterious and internal geometry of the work, they abridge, add, multiply, devise and “rectify” these masterpieces.
Now that this idea is uttered, the idea that these equivalences are only timid astuteness to the end of getting around the difficulty, of resolving on the soundtrack problems that concern the image, plundering in order to no longer obtain anything on the screen but scholarly framing, complicated lighting-effects, “polished” photography, the whole keeping the “Tradition of Quality” quite alive—it is time to come to an examination of the ensemble of these films adapted, with dialogue, by Aurenche and Bost, and to research the permanent nature of certain themes that will explain, without justifying, the constant unfaithfulness of two scenarists to works taken by them as “pretext” and “occasion.”
In a two line resume, here is the way scenarios treated by Aurenche and Bost appear:
La Symphonie Pastorale: He is a pastor, he is married. He loves and has no right to.
Le Diable au corps: They make the gestures of love and have no right to. Dieu a besoin des hommes: He officiates, gives benedictions, gives extreme unction and has no right to.
Jeux Interdits: They bury the dead and have no right to.
Le Blé en herbe: They love each other and have no right to.
You will say to me that the book also tells the same story, which I do not deny. Only, I notice that Gide also wrote La Porte Etroite, Radiguet La Bal Du Comte d’Orgel, Colette La Vagabonde and that each one of these novels did not tempt Delannoy or Autant-Lara.
Let us notice also that these scenarios, about which I don’t believe it useful to speak here, fit into the sense of my thesis: Au-Delà Des Grilles, Le Château De Verre, L’Auberge Rouge . . .
One sees how competent the promoters of the “Tradition of Quality” are in choosing only subjects that favour the misunderstandings on which the whole system rests.
Under the cover of literature—and, of course, of quality—they give the public its habitual dose of smut, non-conformity and facile audacity.
The writers who have come to do film dialogue have observed the same imperatives; Anouilh, between the dialogues for Dé Gourdis de la Ile and Un Caprice De Caroline Cherie introduced into more ambitious films his universe with its affection of the bizarre with a background of Nordic mists transposed to Brittany (Pattes Blanches). Another writer Jean Ferry, made sacrifices for fashion, he too, and the dialogue for Manon could just as well have been signed by Aurenche and Bost: “He believed me a virgin and, in private life, he is a professor of psychology!” Nothing better to hope for from the young scenarists. They simply work their shift, taking good care not to break any taboos.
Jacques Sigurd, one of the last to come to “scenario and dialogue,” teamed up with Yves Allégret. Together, they bequeathed the French cinema some of its blackest masterpieces: Dêdée D’Anvers, Manèges, Une Si Jolie Petite Plage, Les Miracles N’Ont Lieu Qu une Fois, La Jeune Folle. Jacques Sigurd very quickly assimilated the recipe; he must be endowed with an admirable spirit of synthesis, for his scenarios oscillate ingeniously between Aurenche and Bost, Prévert and Clouzot, the whole lightly modernized. Religion is never involved, but blasphemy always makes its timid entrance thanks to several daughters of Mary or several good sisters who make their way across the field of vision at the moment when their presence would be least expected (Manèges, Une Si Jolie Petite Plage).
The cruelty by which they aspire to “rouse the trembling of the bourgeois” finds its place in well-expressed lines like: “he was old, he could drop dead” (Manèges). In Une Si Jolie Petite Plage, Jane Marken envies Berck’s prosperity because of the tubercular cases found there: Their family comes to see them and that makes business good! (One dreams of the prayer of the rector of Sein Island.)
Roland Laudenbach, who would seem to be more endowed than most of his colleagues, has collaborated on films that are most typical of that spirit: La minute de vérité, Le bon Dieu sans confession, La Maison du silence.
Robert Scipion is a talented man of letters. He has only written one book; a book of pastiches. Singular badges: the daily frequenting of the Saint-Germain-des-Près cafes, the friendship of Marcel Pagliero who is called the Sartre of the cinema, probably because his films resemble the articles in “Temps Modernes.” Here are several lines from Amants De Brasmort, a populist film in which sailors are “heroes,” like the dockers were in Un Homme Marche dans la ville:
“The wives of friends are made to sleep with.”
“You do what agrees with you; as for that, you’d mount anybody, you might well say.” In one single reel of the film, towards the end, you can hear in less than ten minutes such words as prostitute, whore, slut and bitchiness. Is this realism?
Considering the uniformity and equal filthiness of today’s scenarios, one takes to regretting Prévert’s scenarios. He believed in the Devil, thus in God, and if, for the most part, his characters were by his whim alone charged with all the sins in creation, there was always a couple, the new Adam and Eve, who could end the film, so that the story could begin again.
There are scarcely more than seven or eight scenarists working regularly for the French cinema. Each one of these scenarists has but one story to tell, and, since each only aspires to the success of the “two greats,” it is not exaggerating to say that the hundred-odd French films made each year tell the same story: it’s always a question of a victim, generally a cuckold. (The cuckold would be the only sympathetic character in the film if he weren’t always infinitely grotesque: Blier-Vilbert, etc. . . . ) The knavery of his kin and the hatred among the members of his family lead the “hero” to his doom; the injustice of life, and for local color, the wickedness of the world (the cures, the concierges, the neighbours, the passers-by, the rich, the poor, the soldiers, etc. . . .).
For distraction, during the long winter nights, look for titles of French films that do not fit into this framework and, while you’re at it, find among these films those in which this line or its equivalent does not figure, spoken by the most abject couple in the film: “It’s always they that have the money (or the luck, or love, or happiness). It’s too unjust, in the end.”
This school which aspires to realism destroys it at the moment of finally grabbing it, so careful is the school to lock these beings in a closed world, barricaded by formulas, plays on words, maxims, instead of letting us see them for ourselves, with our own eyes. The artist cannot always dominate his work. He must be, sometimes, God and, sometimes, his creature.
You know that modern play in which the principal character, normally constituted when the curtain rises on him, finds himself crippled at the end of the play, the loss of each of his members punctuating the changes of acts. Curious epoch when the least flash-in-the-pan performer uses Kafkaesque words to qualify his domestic avatars. This form of cinema comes straight from modern literature—half Kafka, half Bovary!
A film is no longer made in France that the authors do not believe they are re-making Madame Bovary.
For the first time in French literature, an author adopted a distant, exterior attitude in relation to his subject, the subject becoming like an insect under the entomologist’s microscope. But if, when starting this enterprise, Flaubert could have said, “I will roll them all in the same mud—and be right” (which today’s authors would voluntarily make their exergue), he could declare afterwards “I am Madame Bovary” and I doubt that the same authors could take up that line and be sincere!
The object of these notes is limited to an examination of a certain form of cinema, from the point of view of the scenarios and scenarists only. But it is appropriate, I think, to make it clear that the metteurs-en-scène are and wish to be responsible for the scenarios and dialogues they illustrate.
Scenarists’ films, I wrote above, and certainly it isn’t Aurenche and Bost who will contradict me. When they hand in their scenario, the film is done; the metteur-en-scène, in their eyes, is the gentleman who adds the pictures to it and it’s true, alas! I spoke of the mania for adding funerals everywhere. And, for all that, death is always juggled away. Let us remember Nana’s admirable death, or that of Emma Bovary, presented by Renoir; in La Pastorale, death is only a make-up job and an exercise for the camera man: compare the close-ups of Michèle Morgan in La Pastorale, Dominique Blanchar in Le Secret De Mayerling and Madeleine Sologne in L’eternel Retour: it’s the same face! Everything happens after death.
Let us cite, lastly, that declaration by Delannoy that we dedicate, with perfidy, to the French scenarists: “When it happens that authors of talent, whether in the spirit of gain or out of weakness, one day let themselves go to ‘write for the cinema,’ they do it with the feeling of lowering themselves. They deliver themselves rather to a curious temptation towards mediocrity, so careful are they to not compromise their talent and certain that, to write for the cinema, one must make oneself understood by the lowliest” (“La Symphonie Pastorale ou L’Amour Du Métier,” review Verger, November 1947).
I must, without further ado, denounce a sophism that will not fail to be thrown at me in the guise of argument: “His dialogue is spoken by abject people and it is in order to better point out their nastiness that we give them this hard language. It is our way of being moralists.”
To which I answer: it is inexact to say that these lines are spoken by the most abject characters. To be sure, in the films of “psychological realism” there are nothing but vile beings, but so inordinate is the authors’ desire to be superior to their characters that those who, perchance, are not infamous are, at best, infinitely grotesque.
Well, as for these abject characters, who deliver these abject lines—I know a handful of men in France who would be incapable of conceiving them, several cinéastes whose world-view is at least as valuable as that of Aurenche and Bost, Sigurd and Jeanson. I mean Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophuls, Jacques Tati, Roger Leenhardt; these are, nevertheless, French cinéastes and it happens—curious coincidence—that they are auteurs who often write their dialogue and some of them themselves invent the stories they direct.
“But why,” they will say to me, “why couldn’t one have the same admiration for all those cinéastes who strive to work in the bosom of this “Tradition of Quality” that you make sport of so lightly? Why not admire Yves Allégret as much as Becker, Jean Delannoy as much as Bresson, Claude Autant-Lara as much as Renoir?” (“Taste is made of a thousand distastes”—Paul Valéry).
Well—I do not believe in the peaceful co-existence of the “Tradition of Quality” and an “auteur’s cinema.”
Basically, Yves Allégret and Delannoy are only caricatures of Clouzot, of Bresson. It is not the desire to create a scandal that leads me to depreciate a cinema so praised elsewhere. I rest convinced that the exaggeratedly prolonged existence of psychological realism is the cause of the lack of public comprehension when faced with such new works as Le Carrosse d’or, Casque d’or, not to mention Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne and Orphée.
Long live audacity, to be sure; still it must be revealed as it is. In terms of this year, 1953, if I had to draw up a balance-sheet of the French cinema’s audacities, there would be no place in it for either the vomiting in Les Orgueilleux or Claude Laydu’s refusal to be sprinkled with holy water in Le Bon Dieu Sans Confession or the homosexual relationships of the characters in Le Salaire de la Peur, but rather the gait of Hulot, the maid’s soliloquies in La rue de L’Estrapade, the mise-en-scène of La Carrosse d’or, the direction of the actors in Madame de O, and also Abel Gance’s studies in Polyvision. You will have understood that these audacities are those of men of the cinema and no longer of scenarists, directors and literateurs.
For example, I take it as significant that the most brilliant scenarists and metteurs-en-scène of the “Tradition of Quality” have met with failure when they approach comedy: Ferry-Clouzot Miguette et sa Mère, Sigurd-Boyer Tous les chemins mènent a Rome, Scipion-Pagliero La Rose Rouge, Laudenbach-Delannoy La Route Napoléon, Auranche-Bost-Autant-Lara L’Auberge Rouge or, if you like, Occupe-toi d’Amelie.
Whoever has tried, one day, to write a scenario wouldn’t be able to deny that comedy is by far the most difficult genre, the one that demands the most work, the most talent, also the most humility.
The dominant trait of psychological realism is its anti-bourgeois will. But what are Aurenche and Bost, Sigurd, Jeanson, Autant-Lara, Allégret, if not bourgeois, and what are the fifty thousand new readers, who do not fail to see each film from a novel, if not bourgeois?
What then is the value of an anti-bourgeois cinema made by the bourgeois for the bourgeois? Workers, you know very well, do not appreciate this form of cinema at all even when it aims at relating to them. They refused to recognize themselves in the dockers of Un Homme Marche Dans La Ville, or in the sailors of Les Amants De Brasmort. Perhaps it is necessary to send the children out on the stairway landing in order to make love, but their parents don’t like to hear it said, above all at the cinema, even with “benevolence.” If the public likes to mix with low company under the alibi of literature, it also likes to do it under the alibi of society. It is instructive to consider the programming of films in Paris, by neighbourhoods. One comes to realize that the public-at-large perhaps prefers little naive foreign films that show it men “as they should be” and not in the way that Aurenche and Bost believe them to be.
It is always good to conclude, that gives everyone pleasure. It is remarkable that the “great” metteurs-en-scène and the “great” scenarists have, for a long time, all made minor films, and the talent they have put into them hasn’t been sufficient to enable one to distinguish them from others (those who don’t put in talent). It is also remarkable that they all came to “Quality” at the same time, as if they were giving themselves a good address. And then, a producer—even a director—earns more money making Le blé en herbe than by making Le Plombier Amoureux. The “courageous” films are revealed to be very profitable. The proof: someone like Ralph Habib abruptly renounces demi-pornography, makes Les Compagnes De La Nuit and refers to Cayatte. Well, what’s keeping the André Tabets, Companeer, the Jean Guittons, the Pierre Vérys, the Jean Lavirons, the Ciampis, the Grangiers, from making, from one day to the next, intellectual films, from adapting masterpieces (there are still a few left) and, of course, adding funerals, here, there and everywhere?
Well, on that day we will be in the “Tradition of Quality” up to the neck and the French cinema, with rivalry among “psychological realism,” “violence,” “strictness,” “ambiguity,” will no longer be anything but one vast funeral that will be able to leave the studio in Billancourt and enter the cemetery directly—it seems to have been placed next door expressly in order to get more quickly from the producer to the grave-digger.
Only, by dint of repeating to the public that it identified with the “heroes” of the films, it might well end by believing it, and on the day that it understands that this fine big cuckold whose misadventures it is solicited to sympathize with (a little) and to laugh at (a lot), is not, as had been thought, a cousin or neighbour down the hall but itself, that abject family its family, that scoffed-at religion its religion—well, on that day it may show itself to be ungrateful to a cinema that will have labored so hard to show it life as one sees it on the fourth floor in Saint-Germain-des-Près.
To be sure, I must recognize it, a great deal of emotion and taking-sides are the controlling factors in the deliberately pessimistic examination I have undertaken of a certain tendency of the French cinema. I am assured that this famous “school of psychological realism” had to exist in order that, in turn, The Diary of a Country Priest, La Carrosse d’or, Orpheus, Casque d’or, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday might exist.
But our authors who wanted to educate the public should understand that perhaps they have strayed from the primary paths in order to become involved with the more subtle paths of psychology; they have passed on to that sixth grade so dear to Jouhandeau, but it isn’t necessary to repeat a grade indefinitely!
Juan Antonio Bardem
[First published in Spanish in Objetivo (Spain) 6 (1955). First published in English in Vincent Molina-Foix, New Cinema in Spain (London: BFI, 1977), 11, 45–47. Trans. Vincent Molina-Foix]
The Salamanca conference came together through the work of a group of writers from the leftist film journal Objetivo, who were greatly influenced by neorealism. The conference outlined the problems with Spanish cinema and endeavored to offer a way forward for filmmakers working under a repressive regime. Below is an excerpt from the manifesto proper and the conclusions of the Congress. As a consequence of this conference, the Francoist state shut down Objetivo.
Spanish cinema lives in isolation. Isolated not only from the world but from our own reality . . . Spanish cinema is still a cinema of painted dolls. The problem with Spanish cinema is that it has no problems, that it is not that witness of our time which our time requires of every human creation. . . . Our purpose must be to give content to this uninhabited body of Spanish cinema, a content which must be inspired by our general traditions (painting, theatre, fiction). This is plainly a program for Spanish cinema! It will enable it to save its soul, which is today on sale to any poor devil. Our mission is not easy. Centuries of feat have preceded “novelty.” But “novelty” must now mean raising the cinema to the level of what a Ribera and a Goya, a Quevedo and a Mateo Alemán, created in their day. And to make it “new” with respect to the problems of today, which are themselves new.
The present Spanish cinema is:
1. Politically futile
2. Socially false
3. Intellectually worthless
4. Aesthetically valueless
5. Industrially paralytic
Gathered in Salamanca and in the University of that city for the First National Film Congress “we believe that our cinema should acquire a national character, producing films reflecting the social condition of the Spaniard, his conflicts and his reality” in the past and, above all, in our time.
1. The state must formulate and apply a policy corresponding to its true principles and not to those which have been applied to the cinema hitherto. It must provide a stimulus for a cinema which serves these principles and which is aesthetically valid.
2. Economic aid for the Spanish cinema must be concentrated on films of artistic quality and national interest.
3. Greater juridical authority must be used to determine clearly the subjects to be prohibited. Sufficient broadness of mind must be retained to enable Spanish cinema to deal with important topics. This Code will be applied to all films, whatever their provenance, shown on national territory and in the colonies. Representatives of the professional film industry must participate both in drawing up and in applying this Code.
The decrees of the precensor must be restricted to the field concerned, while those of the actual censor must be definite, excluding the possibility of subsequent interventions by any organ or organisation.
There must be a legal system of appeal against the dispositions of the censor. . . .
1. Spanish cinema requires the economic protection of the state.
2. The present system of protection has not fulfilled its purpose, as is proved by its failure to produce a stable film industry.
[ . . . ]
5. Financial credits preceding production must preferably be given to new producers, with sufficient guarantees, and must not be restricted to those who have already made a film. They must not be given to producers who possess, or who should possess, a consolidated industrial framework.
6. Financial aid to films already made must depend on the quality of these films, to be judged by a constituted assembly. Through the number of members of this Assembly and their frequent variation, all possibility of pressure or arbitrary judgment must be avoided. The said aid must be limited to a part of the cost of the film.
[ . . . ]
8. The distribution of national films must be ensured by obliging distributors to take them on according to percentages established by the needs of the moment.
9. The state must encourage the creation, and contribute to the functioning, of some organisation devoted to the distribution of Spanish films abroad.
10. As an additional means of protection, the taxes on cinemas must be reduced or abolished for the showing of national films in view of the fact that the cinema is an art more than an industry and that there is no reason to refuse to the cinema a privilege enjoyed by the dramatic theatre.
11. Dubbing must be progressively restricted by the reduction of the corresponding permits in such a way as to familiarise the public with the system.
12. 16mm films must be encouraged so as to expand our home market.
13. Co-productions must be scrupulously controlled so as to ensure the expansion of our market and a reasonable participation of our film industry.
14. A radical distinction must be made between purely commercial cinema and a cinema which, owing to its artistic qualities or its religious, national or social values, deserves special protection, although this protection should be extended to certain commercial films with artistic merits.
1. We need an honest and free system of criticism which takes into account the basic ethical, aesthetic and social principles regulating the art of the cinema in our time.
2. We propose that the editors of Spanish publications should select as critics intelligent, honourable men acquainted with the aforesaid principles.
3. We request the Under-Secretary for the Press to guarantee the dignity of the critical function of the Press, and to prevent with the utmost rigour any confusion between criticism and publicity. We demand that the Law of the Press at present under examination clearly adopt this distinction.
4. In order to guarantee the realisation of these requests and the integrity of criticism, we propose the creation of an independent Association of Film Critics which would have, among others, the following objects:
(a) The defence of the Spanish cinema.
(b) The corporate defence of Spanish critics. The Association will make sure that no critic is subjected to any form of coercion and reprisal in the honest and free performance of his duties.
(c) The guarantee of freedom of expression for critics.
(d) The securement of professional training and information obtainable through the Institute de Investigaciones y Experimentaciones Cinematograficas [Institute of Film Research and Experimental Cinema], the School of Journalism, special lecture courses or any other means. The appointment of persons intended to work as critics may then be made with these educational criteria in mind. We therefore propose also that the Under Secretary for the Press make of film criticism a recognised journalistic specialisation.
(e) Finally the safeguard of professional ethics to guarantee at all times the noble execution of our mission and to prevent even ourselves from turning criticism into a personal instrument for our own benefit. [ . . . ]
1. Our documentary cinema must acquire a national character, creating films which fulfil a social purpose and reflect the social condition of the Spaniard, his ideas, his conflicts and his reality in our time.
2. We request the abrogation of the present legislation which accords the monopoly of newsreels to the organisation “Noticiarios y documentales no-do,” and of the legislation which makes it obligatory to show these films. We demand the establishment of a system of free competition duly guaranteed and by which the state will ensure the liberty to include a percentage of news items of general interest to the nation.
3. We request the exclusion of the organisation “no-do” from all transactions preceding the permit now authorising the making of documentaries and short films and from all boards responsible for classification and the award of prizes.
4. Documentaries and short films must enjoy the following privileges:
(a) The compulsory showing of a Spanish documentary in every programme composed of one or two feature films.
(b) This showing is to be independent from the showing of newsreels.
(c) By Spanish documentaries we mean documentaries made entirely by teams of Spanish technicians.
(d) The extension to documentaries and short films of all those privileges granted to feature films and which have not been included in the above paragraphs.
Spanish universities must participate in the activity of our cinema and should produce a significant number of contributors.
With this in mind, and until the day when this art is duly incorporated in the university faculties, we propose:
1. The creation of a professorship of film history at the University of Salamanca and the oganisation of lectures by the most qualified Spanish and foreign personalities.
2. That the Spanish universities should protect more effectively the cinematographic activities of the students, such as film clubs, and above all that they should organise lecture courses on the cinema.
3. The examination of the possibility that our universities should create artistic, scientific and experimental films on their own.
4. That the Sindicato Español Universitario [Spanish Union of Students] should provide a sufficient number of grants to facilitate the professional education in the main Centres in Spain and abroad of those university students who have given some proof of their vocation for the cinema and their capacity in this, the art of our time.
Committee for Free Cinema
[First distributed at Free Cinema screenings at the National Film Theatre, London, on 5 February 1956, 25–29 May 1957, and 18–22 March 1959.]
Free Cinema was a series of six screenings organized by Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lorenza Mazzetti at the National Film Theatre in London. Emerging shortly after the Festival of Britain in 1951 and at the same time as the “Angry Young Men” plays of John Osborne and novels of Kingsley Amis, the screenings, three of which featured UK work (the other three showing international shorts by François Truffaut, Norman McLaren, and Roman Polanski, among others) spotlighted working-class culture in the United Kingdom and a new form of documentary cinema in Britain. The manifestos from the UK screenings are provided here. Free Cinema also championed a DIY aesthetic at odds with Hollywood and British feature films and the tradition of the Griersonian documentary, turning instead to UK documentary iconoclast Humphrey Jennings for inspiration.
Lorenza Mazzetti, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson
These films were not made together; nor with the idea of showing them together. But when they came together, we felt they had an attitude in common. Implicit in this attitude is a belief in freedom, in the importance of people and in the significance of the everyday.
As filmmakers we believe that
No film can be too personal.
The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments. Size is irrelevant.
Perfection is not an aim.
An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude.
The Committee for Free Cinema
This program is not put before you as an achievement, but as an aim. We ask you to view it not as critics, nor as a diversion, but in direct relation to a British cinema still obstinately class-bound; still rejecting the stimulus of contemporary life, as well as the responsibility to criticize; still reflecting a metropolitan, Southern English culture, which excludes the rich diversity of tradition and personality which is the whole of Britain.
With a 16mm camera, and minimal resources, and no payment for your technicians, you cannot achieve very much in commercial terms. You cannot make a feature film, and your possibilities of experiment are severely restricted. But you can use your eyes and ears. You can give indications. You can make poetry.
The poetry of this program is made out of our feelings about Britain, the nation of which we are all a part. Of course these feelings are mixed. There are things to make us sad, and angry; things we must change. But feelings of pride and love are fundamental, and only change inspired by such feelings will be effective.
“We have the Welfare State and the domestic upheavals of the Huggetts . . . Bleak, isn’t it . . .” So someone wrote in a letter to the Observer, “explaining” why vital art is no longer possible in this country. This kind of snobbish, self-derisive, pseudo-liberalism is the most pernicious and sapping enemy of faith. We stand against it.
To work on 16mm film, is of course not enough—though there is room for far more enterprise in this field from young film makers with something to say. We feel, therefore, the sponsorship of Every Day Except Christmas by the Ford Motor Company is something of particular importance. We are grateful to Fords [sic] for their enterprising policy which made this film possible; and for letting us show it in this program. We hope other sponsors, and other film makers will follow the lead. First to look at Britain, with honesty and with affection. To relish its eccentricities; attack its abuses; love its people. To use the cinema to express our allegiances, our rejections and our aspirations. This is our commitment.
Lindsay Anderson, John Fletcher, Walter Lassally, and Karel Reisz
It is just over three years since we presented our first FREE CINEMA program at the National Film Theatre—as a Challenge to Orthodoxy. It made something of a stir. We were called “White Hopes” . . . “Rebels” . . . “A serious venture of enormous promise. . . .” Audiences were large and enthusiastic. And, largely as a result of this favorable response, the thing became a movement. Now it is the sixth of these programs. It is also the last. We have decided that this movement, under this name, has served its purpose. So this is the last FREE CINEMA.
Some will be glad. Others may regret. Ourselves, we feel something of each emotion. The strain of making film in this way, outside the system, is enormous, and cannot be supported indefinitely. It is not just a question of finding the money. Each time, when the films have been made, there is the same battle to be fought, for the right to show our work. As the madman said as he hit his head against the brick wall—“It’s nice when you stop . . .”
But our feeling is not one of defeat. We have had our victories. FREE CINEMA films have won awards for Britain at Cannes (Together, 1956), and Venice (Nice Time, special mention; Every Day Except Christmas, Grand Prix 1957) and America (O Dreamland, First Prize Cleveland Experimental Festival 1957). The programs have been shown, and acclaimed, in Paris and New York; in Italy, Finland, Denmark and Japan; in Moscow and Hampstead. What started, in fact, as a single program of films has grown into a movement that already has its place in the history books of the cinema. It remains only for us to thank the Experimental Fund of the British Film Institute for their assistance throughout the venture; Leon Clore of Graphic Films for his unfailing support and help with facilities; and the Ford Motor Company, whose sponsorship of Every Day Except Christmas and We Are the Lambeth Boys, we feel to be among the most enlightened and imaginative acts of patronage in the records of British documentary.
In making these films, and presenting these programs, we have tried to make a stand for independent, creative film-making in a world where the pressures of conformism and commercialism are becoming more powerful every day. We will not abandon those convictions, nor attempt to put them into practice. But we feel that this movement, under this particular banner, has one [sic] its job. Another year, and FREE CINEMA itself might be just another pigeon-hole. We prefer to end in full career.
And the situation itself is changing. Superficially it may seem for the worse—how many cinemas have closed in the last three years—and how many today are scheduled for transformation into dance halls or skittle alleys? But we do not believe that this is the end of the cinema, we prefer to regard it as the death agony of a bad system. And the sooner it dies, the better. Already there are signs of a healthier atmosphere in British features. Room at the Top is a beginning; and Look Back in Anger is to come. (And there is some significance in the fact that Tony Richardson, the young director of Look Back in Anger, was a contributor to the first FREE CINEMA program, as codirector with Karel Reisz of Momma Don’t Allow).
Even British documentary is beginning to stir. A voluntary Social Documentary group has formed with the A.C.T. and has already started work. A film like March to Aldermaston shows a revival of courage, initiative and vitality among young technicians. This last FREE CINEMA show includes the first work of two new outlaw directors, Elizabeth Russell and Robert Vas and a whole group of new technicians involved for the first time in this sort of venture—Louis Wolfers, Allan Forbes, Michael Tuchner, Jack Gold, Robert Allen. And most significant of all, we feel, is the birth of unit five seven, the group of young Granada Television technicians in Manchester, whose fine first production, Enginemen, we are happy to be able to present in this program. With twelve members, mostly under 25, this group already has half a dozen projects under way; the accent is independent, poetic, social and humane. We believe that unit five seven will also grow into something important. We greet them with heartfelt thanks.
FREE CINEMA is dead, long live FREE CINEMA!
Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Bodo Blüthner, Boris von Borresholm, Christian Doermer, Bernhard Dörries, Heinz Furchner, Rob Houwer, Ferdinand Khittl, Pitt Koch, Walter Krüttner, Dieter Lemmel, Hans Loeper, Ronald Martini, Hansjürgen Pohland, Raimond Ruehl, Peter Schamoni, Detten Schleiermacher, Fritz Schwennicke, Haro Senft, Franz-Josef Spieker, Hans Rolf Strobel, Heinz Tichawsky, Wolfgang Urchs, Herbert Vesely, and Wolf Wirth
[First distributed in German as “Oberhausener Manifest” at the 8th Oberhausen Short Film Festival, 28 February 1962. Published in English in Eric Rentschler, ed., West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 2. Trans. Eric Rentschler.]
A central precursor to what would shortly become Young German Cinema and New German Cinema, the “Oberhausen manifesto” was, like Truffaut’s “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” a repudiation of the old ways of making film and an argument for experimentation and risk-taking using the short film as a Petri dish for developing new forms of feature films in West Germany. The “Oberhausen manifesto” haunted German cinema in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, as evidenced by the number of times the manifesto is referenced and debated in subsequent documents, such as the untitled Oberhausen manifesto of 1965, “The Mannheim Manifesto” and the “Hamburg Declaration.”
The collapse of the conventional German film finally removes the economic basis for a mode of filmmaking whose attitude and practice we reject. With it the new film has a chance to come to life.
German short films by young authors, directors, and producers have in recent years received a large number of prizes at international festivals and gained the recognition of international critics. These works and these successes show that the future of the German film lies in the hands of those who have proven that they speak a new film language.
Just as in other countries, the short film has become in Germany a school and experimental basis for the feature film.
We declare our intention to create the new German feature film.
This new film needs new freedoms. Freedom from the conventions of the established industry. Freedom from the outside influence of commercial partners. Freedom from the control of special interest groups.
We have concrete intellectual, formal, and economic conceptions about the production of the new German film. We are as a collective prepared to take economic risks.
The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.
Jean-Marie Straub, Rodolf Thome, Dirk Alvermann, Klaus Lemke, Peter Nestler, Reinald Schnell, Dieter Süverkrüp, Kurt Ulrich, Max Zihlmann
[First released as a pamphlet at the Oberhausen Film Festival in February 1965. First published in Ralph Eue and Lars Henrik Gass, eds. Provokation der Wirlichkeit: Das Oberhauser Manifest und die Folgen (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2012), 80. Trans. Paul Kelley.]
This second, untitled, Oberhausen manifesto, which is previously untranslated, demonstrates that the three years following the first Oberhausen manifesto still left a great deal of filmmakers out of circulation. Peter Nestler, for instance, who made some brilliant documentaries in the early 1960s, was left out of the festival because his work was documentary and engaged with social realities. This manifesto, propelled by Jean-Marie Straub and released the same year as his groundbreaking film Nicht versöhnt (Not Reconciled, codirected with Danièle Huillet [West Germany, 1965]), attacks the rise of fictional art cinema that evades and elides reality.
[West German] Short Film Days have a meaning only when they help to discover still unknown [West German] filmmakers.
Lenica, Kristil, Kluge, and so on, are no longer discoverable.
However, for three years in this country, Peter Nestler, the truest and most reliable filmmaker, has had three of his films, Aufsätze [Essays], Mülheim (Ruhr), and Ödenwaldstetten rejected by the Selection Committee.
The same happened to the very good-looking (first) film, Die Versöhnung [The Reconciliation], by Thome-Lemke-Zihlman.
And there are still others.
J.-M. S.
This year the Selection Committee has rejected films whose authors dared to take reality into serious consideration. The Selection Committee thus held strictly to the rule of recent years to select only those films that correspond to its conception of film art: subtle or violent distortion of reality. This procedure supports a fashion the source of which is either contempt or stupidity or helplessness. It is understandable that many directors of short films pay homage to it; it requires neither experience nor engagement (only a little formal skill). It suits the Federal Republic, and it will prevail.
Today this fashion is already becoming a dictatorship. It has a large international festival. It shows a few films and says: This is German film, and that’s all, and it pleases us.
Whether Mannheim, whether Oberhausen, whether the Gloria or Constantin Production Company––they are the same thing at the same level.
O, it is such a progressive critique of society!
It is called the art of camouflage, a lie. The bad makes conscience sensitive: honesty becomes affront.
Joseph von Sternberg, Alexander Kluge, Jacob Heidbüchel, Reiner Keller, Fee Vaillant, Herbert Pötgens, K.F. Göltz, Walter Talmon-Gros, Edgar Reitz, Hans Rolf Strobel, Norbert Kückelmann, Michael Lentz, Heinrich Tichawsky, Peter M. Ladiges
[First released at the International Film Festival, Mannheim-Heidelberg, 1967. Published in English in Eric Rentschler, ed., West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 2. Trans. Eric Rentschler.]
This manifesto is a riposte to a new Film Funding Law in West Germany, which the signatories felt would return the nascent German cinema to the conventionality and stagnation of the past.
Six years have passed since the Oberhausen Declaration. The renewal of German film has not yet taken place. The initial international successes have suggested new directions. Before one can move in these directions they are already being blocked off again.
The undersigned repeat the Oberhausen demand for the renewal of German film. They wish to intervene in the international duping of the public and declare:
1. A film industry even in business matters cannot do without imagination. For that reason there is no such thing as strictly business matters.
2. The future of an industry is only as good as its younger generation.
3. An industry dare not be only a closed club for the established few.
The Oberhausen Declaration proclaimed:
The collapse of the conventional German film finally removes the economic basis for a mode of filmmaking whose attitude and practice we reject.
Those who signed the document were not wrong. But the attitude they rejected at that time once again is becoming prominent. By gaining influence over the legislative powers this attitude seeks to gain a new economic basis.
The planned Film Subsidy Law one-sidedly demands large distributors and large-scale productions.
It discriminates against the typical economic patterns of film culture and young directors (“small budgets”).
We reject the law in its present form.
Manuel Revuelta, Antonio Artero, Joachin Jordà, and Julián Marcos
[First released in Spanish at the First International Congress of Film Schools, Sitges, Spain, October 1967. First published in English in Vicente Molina-Foix, New Cinema in Spain (London: BFI, 1977), 23. Trans. Vicente Molina-Foix.]
The Sitges conference amounted to the first public forum to talk about the cinema in Spain in the twelve years since the Salamanca conference in 1955. The “Sitges Manifesto,” a.k.a. the “Barcelona School Manifesto,” is in actuality a statement of principles for the Barcelona School, which saw itself irrevocably at odds with New Spanish Cinema—the outcome of the Salamanca conference—and with Francoist models of cinematic production. The conference was polarizing enough that the State police shut it down before its conclusion. The Barcelona School became the center for politically engaged, leftist and experimental cinema in Spain in the late 1960s.
Conclusions of the First International Congress of Film Schools, Sitges, October 1967:
1. We advocate the creation of an independent cinema, free of any industrial political or bureaucratic constraint.
To obtain this the following conditions are indispensable:
(a) Free access to professional activity, with the following implications.
(b) The abolition of the Sindicato Nacional del Espectáculo [National Entertainment Syndicate] and the setting-up of a truly democratic union.
(c) The abolition of the “prior permit” for shooting a film and of any other kind of permits.
(d) Freedom to show films without control by the government or any other official body.
(e) The abolition of the pre-censorship, the censorship of finished films and any other form of censorship.
(f) The abolition of the “interes especial” [special interest films] and of any other type of subsidy as a means of control.
(g) Control by the Democratic Union of the means of production, distribution and exhibition.
(h) All resources for professional education must be in the hands of the Democratic Union. This implies the transformation of the present structure of the E.O.C. [Official Film School].
In this new school the students would be full members of the Democratic Union.
2. The following points have been resolved:
(a) To continue this Congress in the future.
(b) To inform the other film schools about the activities and outcome of this Congress.
(c) To organise the next Congress on a democratic and elective basis, appointing the various committees in charge of the procedure.
Goals of the Barcelona School subsequently published by Joachin Jordà:
1. Self-financing and co-operative system of production.
2. Team work with constant interchange of functions.
3. Preponderantly formal preoccupation referring to the field of the structure of the image and the structure of the narrative.
4. Experimental and avant-gardist in character.
5. Subjectivity, within the limits allowed by censorship, in the treatment of themes.
6. Characters and situations different from those of the cinema of Madrid.
7. Use, within the limits of union regulations, of non-professional actors.
8. Film production outside the distribution outlets, not something we desire but something we are forced to accept by the circumstances and narrow-mindedness of most distribution companies.
9. Apart from a few exceptions the non-academic, non-professional training of directors.
Guy Glover
[First published simultaneously in English and French in André Pâquet, ed., How to Make or Not to Make a Canadian Film (Montréal: La Cinémathèque canadienne, 1967); Comment faire ou pas faire un film canadien (Montréal: La Cinémathèque canadienne, 1967).]
The following two manifestos from Guy Glover and Claude Jutra point to the profound influence of the French nouvelle vague on Québécois and Anglo-Canadian cinema in the 1960s. Both men worked for the National Film Board of Canada/Office national du film—Glover mostly as a producer of animated and documentary films; Jutra as a director, most notably of Mon oncle Antoine (1971). These two manifestos also foreground the importance of cinéma direct and DIY aesthetics on the nascent cinemas of the country.
*
It is understood that when one speaks of “a Canadian film” one has in mind only:
(a) a feature-length film; or
(b) a multi-screen presentation of unspecified complexity but tending to the “total.”
* *
A film is not a piano. Anyone can “play” a film without being obliged to learn or practice it. The less you know about the rules and technique the better.
* * *
A young man makes better films than an older man.
An adolescent makes better films than a young man.
A child, if not discriminated against by the educational system, would make better films than an adolescent.
In the future we can foresee a technology permitting the creation of foetal films—the ultimate unsocialized perceptional expression.
1. It is difficult to be dogmatic about the type of subject matter which should be treated in a Canadian film except to say that it should reflect the preoccupations of the director and will usually be autobiographical or confessional in nature. The Fiction Film is an infantile practical joke—a fake cigar with a charge of fake gunpowder. The Confessional Film substitutes real, for fake, gunpowder, the film-maker (in authentic cases) rather than the audience, “losing face.” Much to be recommended.
Youth in revolt is a perfect subject-area. Post-teens in revolt is perfect for a post-teens director.
Departures from mental and sexual norms (so-called) are especially desirable.
Documentary is decrepit.
The “Candid” record (or “Witness-film”) is, however, acceptable. This is not so much a technique as a state of mind. It sometimes unfortunately falls into sequential order, but the editor will know how to remedy this (see para. 9 below).
2. The script (which has been written preferably by the director) should, having been used to sell the product to a financier and/or distributor, be thrown away. It is better working without a script, or as little script as possible to avoid having a plan for shooting. Improvisation, here, (see below) is all-important. The director see *** above) should be committed to as little as possible before shooting (see Editing).
3. Actors also (when they are used) who have no talent for improvisation should, nevertheless, be obliged to improvise. Where improvisation extends to dialogue, improvisational incompetence is a virtue much to be prized since with verisimilitude it depicts the incompetence of the actors and any verisimilitude is better than none.
4. Any attempt to build into your composition a “normal” chronological sequence, since it is naive anyway, should be rejected. Continuity (spatial and temporal) should be as novel as possible: only the unexpected will function with an image-sated and time-sated audience. “It’s not so much where you are, as what you are” and “It’s not so much what you say but when you say it”—these principles, applied forcefully, have a tonic effect on the audience’s organs and muscles. The medium is the massage.
5. A 50:1 shooting ratio is at least ten times as auspicious as a 10:1 shooting ratio. (Film Mathematics: Theorem 1). A special characteristic of Film Math is that a number may be assigned either a plus, or a minus, value according to the age and experience of the director. (See *** above.)
6. It is important not to pay too much attention to the real movement of actors or personages in front of the camera, or to the movement as it will appear finally on film. This would interfere with the freedom of the director to say nothing of the freedom of the actors and cameraman—all of whom should be as free as possible. Total freedom in all parts of the film-making “event” should be the aim. Only the unpremeditated is true.
7. Poor picture-quality is more authentic than good picture-quality. Raw-stock should be used in unlimited quantities (see 5, above). The camera should be as small as possible. A tripod should never be used. Telephoto lenses are required accessories.
Ambient light only to be used.
Colour film—aesthetically and technologically—has had a contemptible history and should be treated with contempt.
According to the theory of Colour Degradation, colour film can be made (by choice of light, by exposure and printing) to look very like black and white.
On the other hand, black and white film, printed through colour filters, can be made to look like colour film.
The director should give the cameraman more or less freedom according to
1) his (the director’s) age
2) the cameraman’s age.
The cameraman may, or may not, know the subject of the film. If he does not know, the chances are he may, in deciding for himself what the subject is, shoot a better film than the director had in mind (or partly in mind) (see para. 1).
8. Poor sound quality is more authentic than good sound quality. The desirable poor-quality can be easily achieved even with so-called “good equipment.” An alert sound man can spot ambient sound sources upon which to focus his microphones, putting dialogue (according to well-understood theory) squarely “in place.” The cameraman can aid in refusing to use a blimped camera and a director can further help matters by a number of simple steps including “free” or random slating and requiring the actors to reduce voice levels to below that of the ambient sound. Giving the sound-man a half a day’s holiday has been known to produce interesting results especially if the required post-synching is good (i.e. “bad”). Post synch which is out-of-synch is more sincere than the more mechanical perfection of precise synchronization.
9. Editing rules need not (indeed should not) be observed.
Film punctuation devices (fades, dissolves, etc.) should be the first to go. All traces of rhythm or rhythmic structure should be avoided as exercising an intolerable artificiality on the natural rhythm of the subject. Action is continually reactionary and, in any case, has been often rendered impossible by the director. Where the director has for some reason achieved non-continuity, a number of obvious alternatives are open to the enterprising director.
* * * *
Unconventional films are by film-makers under 25 years of age. Here, there are no bad films; only bad audiences.
Between 25 and 30 years (the difficult age) film-makers frequently make good-bad films or bad-good films—which are acceptable. If these film-makers survive, their future is certain and neither hair-dye, plastic surgery nor hormone therapy will for long turn back the clock. Conventional films are by film-makers over 30 years of age and are bad. For these individuals, death would be the kindest fate—however since this is unlikely, forcible restraint and ejection from film-making establishments are the most practical alternatives
* * *
In general, the film-maker is always Right. All others—especially the man who puts up the money—are always Wrong.
* *
Disorder is merely a not-yet-emerged order.
*
Box-office success is always failure; box-office failure is success.
Claude Jutra
1) Choose an uncommercial subject, so intimate as to be indecent, uninteresting, futile, immoral, sordid, etc. . . .
2) Make yourself a big star, and crowd around with old pals.
3) Don’t write a line of script, but improvise day by day, not too seriously, but convincing yourself the result will be coherent and significant.
4) Shoot everything in 16mm black and white, with makeshift equipment.
5) Have your best friends participate, call them to meetings with only a few minutes’ notice at any hour of the day or night; make them understand they’re working for the sake of Art, and not at all for vile pecuniary considerations.
6) For the inevitable expenditures, borrow money from the bank and have your loan endorsed by members of your family and their friends; get what you need as credit, and if that isn’t enough, find a friend who’s rich enough and idiotic enough to invest a few thousand dollars of his own in the doubtful enterprise.
7) Most of all, don’t worry about getting distribution guarantees.
If you take good care not to commit any of these horrible mistakes, you’ll avoid the following vexations:
a) wasting many precious years of your life;
b) being in debt for many years to come;
c) looking desperately for someone to whom to “sell” your film;
d) suffering shame from the critics, or what’s worse, humiliation from an indifferent public;
Nevertheless . . .
a) if these drawbacks are overcome by your passion for cinema;
b) if creative freedom gives you an inexpressible joy;
c) . . . and if succeeding in an enterprise that common sense has already condemned gives you an exquisite enjoyment;
d) if you are willing to put your friendships to the test in the hope of making them closer at the end;
e) if modesty is not one of your handicaps;
f) or if you simply want to make a Canadian film . . .
here is my advice:
1) Choose an uncommercial subject, so intimate as to be indecent, etc., etc., etc. . . .
Thierry Derocles, Michel Demoule, Claude Chabrol, and Marin Karmitz
[First published in French as “Etats généraux du cinéma français,” Cahiers du cinéma 203 (1968): 42–60. First published in English in Screen 13, no. 4 (1972–1973): 58–89.]
In the aftermath of May ’68, French film directors (whose actions in many ways precipitated the events of May with the uprisings around l’Affaire Langlois in February 1968) came together to radically reimagine the French cinema in light of the recent student and workers strikes. Below is perhaps the most utopian and anticapitalist report in the series issued by the Estates General in its call for a new, egalitarian, politically engaged cinema.
Proposed by Thierry Derocles and drawn up by Michel Demoule, Claude Chabrol, Marin Karmitz. This was considered to be totally utopian by some and by others (a growing number, it’s true) as the only truly revolutionary project presented. It was to this uniqueness that it owed its extremely positive role of stimulus, agitation, and provocation of bad faith. But its role was also in some senses a negative one. Its defenders opposed the final project so violently that they prevented any serious debate, and this hinged on a confusion which was never brought out: should the new structures in question at Suresnes be concerned with a militant, politicised and revolutionary cinema, or should they rather simply organise and improve the conditions of that same consumers’ cinema—albeit coloured by political consciousness—which we have to deal with in France. (Cahiers du Cinéma)
It is just and proper that every person should have the right to participate with his fellows in the development of all. The breadth and content of the events of May ’68 have made it impossible to go on accepting past alienations. This is what gives these events a revolutionary significance. As a participant in the cultural development of all, the audio-visual area must revolutionise its way of existing. This is what the following project proposes.
The audio-visual area must become a public service, independent of the Government, within the framework of an Office which brings film and television together on a national level and establishes:
—free access to its presentations;
—a genuine decentralisation of culture;
—an opportunity for all to become professionals;
This Office would be divided into two services: one for television, the other for the cinema. While these two sections have to overlap in the brief of the Estates General, we have nevertheless confined ourselves to a consideration of the cinema.
The cost of a system of free admission and of production (film stock, salaries, etc.) is met through the participation of the country as a whole.
For example, an annual fee of 10F (about £8) for every five inhabitants establishes an annual budget of one thousand million francs (about £80 million) which generously exceeds the present finances available to the French film industry. The spectators become producers.
This system of financing allows for an increase in the number of films produced and consequently in the numbers of jobs available, thus militating against unemployment.
The average cost per production will be calculated annually. Any budget that is less than or equal to this average cost is accepted automatically. Every budget higher than the average cost will be discussed by a committee composed of film workers and spectators.
The budget of a film is drawn up by all those involved in its production, and responsible for it from the initial stage to release.
The Office will buy foreign films and sell French films abroad.
The Office will organise and administer the distribution of these films and their exhibition through the cinemas, whose directors will become managers appointed by the Office.
From the moment he starts work on his first film the film worker will be paid a uniform monthly salary.
He will receive a second salary calculated on the basis of qualifications for every film he works on. A minimum work standard can be established.
Where a film is sold abroad, the sale price is divided equally between the Office and the production team. The sum received by the production team is divided equally among all the members of the team and is in addition to the two previously mentioned salaries.
The cinema must search out its public and its workers in their own environment.
The regional centres of the Office must therefore not only provide for film exhibition, but also for film production and professional training in all regions of the country.
Film studios must be created at each of these regional centres. New cinemas must be established, but mobile projection units must also be set up so that films may reach factories and rural communities where a cinema would not be appropriate.
Genius and talent are not learnt. Technique is acquired by experience. Therefore all traditional notions about schools have to be abandoned. Direct contact with the profession before professional training has been acquired will discourage doubtful vocations. To this end all potential candidates would go through two stages:
—a first stage of basic information completed by discussions among the trainees;
—a second, during which the student would take part in a school production and in discussions with professionals.
These two stages can be organised in any centre of the Office, but the students will be financed by the Ministry of Education as laid down by the new University structures. After these two stages the students will take part in two all-student productions, work on which will have included discussions by the students among themselves and with professionals. These films will be financed by the Office. While working on them students will be in receipt of a uniform monthly pre-salary. On completion of the two films, the students will be considered professionals and will enjoy the same conditions.
An experimental centre for professional film workers open to students must be created:
—to allow for pure research;
—to provide technicians with training for the new techniques which may emerge during their career;
—to prevent excessive isolation into specialisations and provide for a genuine advancement within the profession.
The authors of this project are aware of the utopian air of this document. They nevertheless give their assurance that this utopia is realisable practically in any economic system, and they consider its apparent insanity as the very proof of its seriousness. They are prepared to defend and explain it in any circumstances.
Arun Kaul and Mrinal Sen
[First published in Close Up (India) 1 (July 1968).]
Twenty years after Satyajit Ray’s “What Is Wrong with Indian Films?” the “Manifesto of the New Cinema Movement,” by Arun Kaul and Ray disciple Mrinal Sen—director of such films as Akash Kusum (Up in the Clouds, India, 1965) and Bhuvan Shome (India, 1969)—calls for a New Cinema movement to emerge in India. Kaul and Sen propose not only the creation of a new form of Indian cinema, similar to la nouvelle vague in France and the American underground film (an admittedly strange combination, in the first instance), but also new forms of production and distribution to allow these films to be seen and to circulate. Based in the first instance in Bombay, this New Cinema Movement allows for low budget features to be made that will then cross-subsidize the distribution of shorts and documentaries.
The Indian film, especially Hindi Cinema, is at its lowest ebb today. Spiralling costs of production, rocketing star prices, exorbitant rates of interest charged by financiers, widespread acceptance of “black money” transactions in all sectors of the film industry—all this, together with the inane stress of non-essential and an incredible dearth of ideas and imagination in creative matters, has reduced the Indian film industry to a sorry mess. Most of the film-makers—directors, writers and all—seem to have stopped thinking. Almost to everybody, making a film seems to be just a mechanical business of putting together popular stars, gaudy sets, glossy colour and a large number of irrelevant musical sequences and other standard meretricious ingredients. Hardly anyone conceives of a film in terms of aesthetic experience and creative expression. In the prevailing conditions, even a film maker finds it possible to make a film of some artistic aspiration, the problem of finding a channel for circulating it continues to stare him in the face. Theoretically it would mean that in order to find and reach the audience for his kind of film, the maker of an off-beat film must not only be his own producer but also assume the role of a distributor to circulate his film, and then proceed to hire a theatre where he can run it. And even this effort of the film-maker to combine these three roles would not guarantee a sufficient number of spectators will be attracted to the theatre. The experience of many a good off-beat film playing in nearly empty houses, has inhibited conscientious film makers from attempting truly artistic significant films. If the number of discriminating spectators appears, at first sight, to be heartbreakingly small, the reason is that the established film industry, motivated by the grossest economic considerations, has been for decades dishing out crudest vehicles of their notions of mass entertainment and thus conditioning the tastes of the majority of film goers.
A reaction to the vulgarities of the established commercial cinema has been in existence for several years in a large number of film-making countries, crystallising in many places, into a regular, conscious movement for better cinema. This New Cinema Movement (NCM), as it might be termed has manifested itself through the “New Wave” in France, the “Underground” in America, and other yet unlabelled currents in other countries. The time for launching such a movement in India is now ripe, for, we believe, that the climate needed to nourish it obtains today.
It would be impossible to find a completely satisfactory definition of New Cinema. New Cinema is not only a matter of finished results and effects, it also involves methods and conditions of film-making, the relationship between the creative artist and his audience, awareness of the changing grammar, expanding powers and soaring ambitions of the film medium. New Cinema offers the film-maker, above all, the indispensable freedom to realise his vision, untrammelled by all considerations except creative and aesthetic. New Cinema looks upon a film as the personal expression of an individual artist. New Cinema aspires to the conditions in which a film would bear the distinct stamp of the creative artist behind it and not of a studio.
New Cinema stands for a film “with a signature.” New Cinema engages itself in a ruthless search for “truth” as an individual artist sees it. New Cinema lays stress on the right questions and bothers less about the right answers. New Cinema believes in looking fresh at everything including old values and in probing deeper everything, including the mind and the conditions of man.
New Cinema seeks the clues to mankind’s riddles in men’s personal relationships and private worlds. New cinema encourages film-makers to bring to their work improvisation, spontaneity and youthful enthusiasm. New Cinema expects of its audience the kind of participation and involvement which modern art demands.
To ensure that New Cinema films will be made and seen by people, it is necessary to evolve an elaborate scheme that will cut across the various vicious circumstances which inhibit the growth of New Cinema. In this scheme, New Cinema Movement is conceived as a self-sufficient structure embracing all three branches of film-making: production, distribution and exhibition. Taking it upon itself to produce films as well as distribute and exhibit them, the Movement has to strive for not only making new types of films but also for developing a new kind of audience. The Movement must eliminate the situation in which exhibitors and distributors finance film-making and by virtue of that circumstance claim the right of interference with the process of film-making.
The two major constituents of the New Cinema Movement are: the enlightened film-maker and the enlightened audience. The latter, thanks to the dedicated work done by film societies the world over, is a rapidly growing phenomenon. In India, about one hundred active film societies have succeeded in creating a new discriminating audience which demands better cinema and is ready to go to take some pains to secure it. But in terms of total numerical strength, film societies are not enough to sustain the new film-maker. They have to be supplemented by a new force: “art theatres.”
An Art Theatre, generally, is a modest size auditorium where discriminating audiences can, for a moderate admission fee, hope to see a better film which would not, in common course, find a place on the usual exhibition circuit. The screens of Art Theatres will also be to the superior product of the commercial cinema.
The New Cinema Movement in India will start a chain of Art Theatres to begin with, in Bombay where apart from showing the selected best films from commercial and non-commercial in India and abroad, all films made by film-makers belonging to the New Cinema Movement shall be released. The Movement ultimately aims at recovering the entire investment of the New Cinema films from the revenue of the Art Theatre chain.
To keep the Movement afloat, it is perhaps necessary that films should be able to recover the invested capital. And since the audience from which it is hoped to get this money is a limited one—the essential minority audience of the off-beat cinema—it is obvious that the New Cinema Movement films must be made at the lowest possible cost. Shooting on actual locales, “post-dubbing” and, as far as possible, a continuous schedule of shooting will be factors which will help keep the budget low. This has been the practice over the world—on the Continent as well as among the young rebels in the USA. We in India have to take lessons from the successful exciting experience and equip ourselves accordingly.
Moderate length feature films will help the Movement to circulate short films and documentaries which it also intends to produce from time to time. In the support of short films and documentaries, the Movement aims at supporting “Avant Garde” and experimental efforts of a new kind which would normally be denied sponsorship elsewhere in India. These films will normally be of 10–20 minutes in duration. With the length of the feature films being moderate, it will be easy to exhibit these shorts along with the Movement features.
NCM will have a special panel which will examine the scripts proposed to be filmed and give its opinion on whether they deserve to be taken up by the NCM or not.
There shall be a separate panel for recommending the circulation on NCM circuit films acquired from other agencies. NCM’s films will be director oriented, that is to say that the director shall be the arbiter of the film’s quality and the principal architect responsible for its shape. He will have the freedom to choose subjects of his own liking and transform them into films of the manner that conforms most to his aesthetic values. Subjects in human as well as cinematic values—whether based on reputed literary works or originally written—will be favoured for filming.
To begin with, it shall take the form of Sunday Morning Shows at the various theatres in the city of Bombay. The circuit will in time be extended to small theatres and suitable halls (for 35 and 16mm projection), available in the city of Bombay. This scheme can later be established in other cities, also.
The films (both Indian and foreign) shown by the Art Theatres will be of artistic value. Apart from the usual public participation, the Academy Cinema will have a membership. This membership will be open to the public on the payment of Rs. 10/- per person per year. The membership will entitle the members to various benefits not available to the general public.
As mentioned in the Manifesto, NCM’s Academy Cinema in Bombay (before it is extended to other cinemas) will take the shape of Sunday morning (and holiday) screenings in a selected few regular commercial theatres in the city. As soon as arrangements are complete, the Chain will be enlarged to include assembly halls belonging to schools, colleges and charitable, cultural and social organisations, which could be converted into art theatres for two shows, on Saturday and Sunday evenings.
NCM plans three categories of distribution. In the first category, films (35mm and 16mm) will be acquired, hired or purchased for its own Academy Cinema chain. In the second category, films will be acquired, hired or purchased for distribution on the Film Society Circuit, among universities, college and school clubs as well as clubs showing children’s films. In the third category, NCM’s own films, off-beat films made by independent film-makers as well as foreign films of proven merit will be offered for release on regular commercial circuits in all film territories on normal business terms.
Jean-Luc Godard
[First published in English and French in Afterimage (UK) 1 (1970): 10–16. Trans. Mo Tietelbaum.]
Written at the request of Peter Whitehead for the first issue of the radical UK film journal Afterimage, this manifesto, one of Jean-Luc Godard’s many, exemplifies the kind of dialectical thinking the filmmaker embraced during his Maoist, Dziga-Vertov Group period. Godard illustrates what is to be done through an analysis of his recent film British Sounds (UK, 1970).
1. We must make political films.
2. We must make films politically.
3. 1 and 2 are antagonistic to each other and belong to two opposing conceptions of the world.
4. 1 belongs to the idealistic and metaphysical conception of the world.
5. 2 belongs to the Marxist and dialectical conception of the world.
6. Marxism struggles against idealism and the dialectical against the metaphysical.
7. This struggle is the struggle between the old and the new, between new ideas and old ones.
8. The social existence of men determines their thought.
9. The struggle between the old and the new is the struggle between classes.
10. To carry out 1 is to remain a being of the bourgeois class.
11. To carry out 2 is to take up the proletarian class position.
12. To carry out 1 is to make descriptions of situations.
13. To carry out 2 is to make concrete analysis of a concrete situation.
14. To carry out 1 is to make British Sounds.
15. To carry out 2 is to struggle for the showing of British Sounds on English television.
16. To carry out 1 is to understand the laws of the objective world in order to explain that world.
17. To carry out 2 is to understand the laws of the objective worlds in order to actively transform that world.
18. To carry out 1 is to describe the wretchedness of the world.
19. To carry out 2 is to show people in struggle.
20. To carry out 2 is to destroy 1 with the weapons of criticism and self-criticism.
21. To carry out 1 is to give a complete view of events in the name of truth in itself.
22. To carry out 2 is not to fabricate over-complete images of the world in the name of relative truth.
23. To carry out 1 is to say how things are real. (Brecht)
24. To carry out 2 is to say how things really are. (Brecht)
25. To carry out 2 is to edit a film before shooting it, to make it during filming and to make it after the filming. (Dziga Vertov)
26. To carry out 1 is to distribute a film before producing it.
27. To carry out 2 is to produce a film before distributing it, to learn to produce it following the principle that: it is production which commands distribution, it is politics which commends economy.
28. To carry out 1 is to film students who write: Unity—Students—Workers.
29. To carry out 2 is to know that unity is a struggle of opposites (Lenin) to know that the two are one.
30. To carry out 2 is to study the contradiction between the classes with images and sounds.
31. To carry out 2 is to study the contradiction between the relationships of production and the productive forces.
32. To carry out 2 is to dare to know where one is, and where one has come from, to know one’s place in the process of production in order then to change it.
33. To carry out 2 is to know the history of revolutionary struggles and be determined by them.
34. To carry out 2 is to produce scientific knowledge of revolutionary struggles and of their history.
35. To carry out 2 is to know that film making is a secondary activity, a small screw in the revolution.
36. To carry out 2 is to use images and sounds as teeth and lips to bite with.
37. To carry out 1 is to only open the eyes and the ears.
38. To carry out 2 is to read the reports of comrade Kiang Tsing.
39. To carry out 2 is to be militant.
Denys Arcand, Colin Low, Don Shebib, David Acomba, Linda Beth, Milad Bessada, Kirwan Cox, Jack Darcus, Martin DeFalco, Sandra Gathercole, Jack Grey, Ági Ibrányi-Kiss, Len Klady, Peter Pearson, Tom Shandel, Jean-Pierre Tadros, Frank Vitale, Les Wedman, John Wright
[First launched at the Canadian Film Symposium in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on 8 February 1974. First published in Cinema Canada 13 (1974): 14–15.]
One of the only film manifestos to emerge from Canada to contain both Anglophone and Francophone signatories, along with filmmakers from both the private and public sectors, “The Winnipeg Manifesto” echoes the Québécois APCQ manifesto from 1971 (see Association professionnelle des cinéastes du Québec, “The Cinema: Another Face of Colonised Québec,” in chap. 3 of this volume), demanding a publically funded alternative to private sector filmmaking. This goal was realized to some extent with the transformation of the CFDC (Canadian Film Development Corporation, founded in 1967, and the “half-hearted” measure decried herein) into Telefilm Canada in 1984. The Winnipeg Symposium also led to the emergence of the Winnipeg Film Group, whose filmmakers, most notably Guy Maddin, would go on to great acclaim in the 1980s and 1990s.
We the undersigned filmmakers and filmworkers wish to voice our belief that the present system of film production/distribution/exhibition works to the extreme disadvantage of the Canadian filmmaker and film audience. We wish to state unequivocally that film is an expression and affirmation of the cultural reality of this country first, and a business second.
We believe the present crisis in the feature film industry presents us with an extraordinary opportunity. The half-hearted measures taken to date have failed. It is now clear that slavishly following foreign examples does not work. We need public alternatives at every level in the film industry. We must create our own system to allow film-makers the option of working in the creative milieu of their choice.
We insist that the various governments of Canada implement the necessary policies to provide an alternative and a complement to the private production capacity in the Canadian feature film industry by providing a public mechanism and the resources to fully finance Canadian features.
Therefore, we call on the federal government in cooperation with the provincial governments:
1. To create a public production capacity that will allow full financing of Canadian feature films.
2. To create a public distribution organization with broad responsibilities for promotion and dissemination of Canadian films here and abroad.
3. To create a quota for Canadian films in theatres across the country.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and fifty-seven others
[First distributed at the Hamburg Film Festival in September 1979. First published in German as “Die Hamburger Erklärung,” medium (Germany) (November 1979): 27. First published in English in Eric Rentschler, ed., West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 4. Trans. Eric Rentschler.]
In 1979, West German film culture had changed dramatically from the time of Oberhausen, with New German Cinema cresting on a wave of international successes. This manifesto reflects the solidarity and optimism on the part of West German filmmakers, while eliding some divisions: that most West German films were firmly ensconced in the narrative tradition, and that women were largely left out of the New German Cinema. The latter led to the “Manifesto of the Women Filmmakers” (see chap. 4 of this volume), released as a response to this manifesto.
On the occasion of the Hamburg Film Festival we German filmmakers have come together. Seventeen years after Oberhausen we have taken stock.
The strength of the German film is its variety. In three months the eighties will begin.
Imagination does not allow itself to be governed. Committee heads cannot decide what the productive film should do. The German film of the eighties can no longer be governed by outside forces like committees, institutions, and interest groups as it has been in the past.
Above all:
We will not let ourselves be divided
—the feature film from the documentary film
—experienced filmmakers from newcomers
—films that reflect on the medium (in a practical way as experiments) from the narrative and commercial film
We have proved our professionalism. That does not mean we have to see ourselves as a guild. We have learned that our only allies can be the spectators:
That means the people who work, who have wishes, dreams, and desires, that means the people who go to the movies and who do not, and that also means people who can imagine a totally different kind of film.
We must get going.
Lars von Trier
[First published 3 May 1984 for the Danish premiere of The Element of Crime.]
Among his many accomplishments Lars von Trier is largely responsible for newfound interest in film and moving image manifestos, especially the plethora that have popped up on the Internet in the last ten to fifteen years. In the next three manifestos, written partly as statements of purpose, partly as publicity, Trier outlines some perhaps enigmatic concerns about his “Europe trilogy”, The Element of Crime (Denmark, 1984), Epidemic (Denmark, 1987), and Europa (Denmark/France/Germany, 1991). Trier emphasizes the generational aspects of filmmaking in the first two manifestos, which foreshadow Dogme ’95, and introspects on his own self-described onanistic creativity in the final manifesto.
Everything seems to be all right: film-makers are in an unsullied relationship with their products, possibly a relationship with a hint of routine, but, nonetheless, a good and solid relationship, where everyday problems fill the time more than adequately, so that they alone form the content! In other words, an ideal marriage that not even the neighbours could be upset by: no noisy quarrels in the middle of the night . . . no half-baked compromising episodes in the stairwells, but a union between both parties: the film-maker and his “film-wife,” to everyone’s satisfaction . . . at peace with themselves . . . but anyway . . . We can all tell when The Great Inertia has arrived!
How has film’s previously stormy marriage shrivelled up into a marriage of convenience? What’s happened to these old men? What has corrupted these old masters of sexuality? The answer is simple. Misguided coquetry, a great fear of being uncovered (what does it matter if your libido fades when your wife has already turned her back on you?) . . . have made them betray the thing that once gave this relationship its sense of vitality: Fascination!
The film-makers are the only ones to blame for this dull routine. Despotically, they have never given their beloved the chance to grow and develop in their love. . . . Out of pride they have refused to see the miracle in her eyes . . . and have thereby crushed her . . . and themselves.
These hardened old men must die! We will no longer be satisfied with “well-meaning films with a humanist message,” we want more—of the real thing, fascination, experience—childish and pure, like all real art. We want to get back to the time when love between film-maker and film was young, when you could see the joy of creation in every frame of the film!
We are no longer satisfied with surrogates. We want to see religion on the screen. We want to see “film-lovers” sparkling with life: improbable, stupid, stubborn, ecstatic, repulsive, monstrous and not things that have been tamed or castrated by a moralistic, bitter old film-maker, a dull puritan who praises the intellect-crushing virtues of niceness.
We want to see heterosexual films, made for, about and by men.
We want visibility!
Lars von Trier
[First published 17 May 1987 to coincide with the premiere of Epidemic at the Cannes Film Festival.]
Everything seems fine. Young men are living in stable relationships with a new generation of films. The birth-control methods which are assumed to have contained the epidemic have only served to make birth control more effective: no unexpected creations, no illegitimate children—the genes are intact. These young men’s relationships resemble the endless stream of Grand Balls in a bygone age. There are also those who live together in rooms with no furniture. But their love is growth without soul, replication without any bite. Their “wildness” lacks discipline and their “discipline” lacks wildness.
LONG LIVE THE BAGATELLE!
The bagatelle is humble and all-encompassing. It reveals creativity without making a secret of eternity. Its frame is limited but magnanimous, and therefore leaves space for life. Epidemic manifests itself in a well-grounded and serious relationship with these young men, as a bagatelle—because among bagatelles, the masterpieces are easy to count.
Lars von Trier
[First published 29 December 1990 to coincide with the premiere of Europa.]
Seemingly all is well: Film director Lars von Trier is a scientist, artist, and human being. And yet I say: I am a human being. But I’m an artist. But I’m a film director.
I cry as I write these lines, for how sham was my attitude. Who am I to lecture and chastise? Who am I to scornfully brush aside other people’s lives and work? My shame is only compounded by my apology that I had been seduced by the arrogance of science falling to the ground as a lie! For it is true that I have been trying to intoxicate myself in a cloud of sophistries about the purpose of art and the artist’s obligations, that I have thought up ingenious theories on the anatomy and the nature of film, but—and I confess this openly—I have never come close to disguising my innermost passion with this pathetic smoke screen: MY CARNAL DESIRE.
Our relationship with film can be described and explained in many ways. We should make films with the intention to educate, we may want to use film as a ship that will take us on a journey to unknown lands, or we can claim that the goal of our films is to make the audience laugh or cry, and pay. This may all sound plausible, but I do not believe in it.
There is only one excuse for living through—and forcing others to live through—the hell of the filmmaking process: the carnal satisfaction in that fraction of a second when the cinema’s loudspeakers and projector in unison and inexplicably give rise to the illusion of motion and sound like an electron leaving its orbit and thus creating light, in order to create ONLY ONE THING—a miraculous breath of life! This is the filmmaker’s only reward, hope, and craving. This carnal experience when movie magic really works, rushing through the body like a quivering orgasm. . . . It is my quest for this experience that has always been and always will be behind all my work and efforts . . . NOTHING ELSE! There, I’ve written it, and it felt good. And forget all the bogus explanations about “childlike fascination” and “all-encompassing humility.” For here is my confession: LARS VON TRIER, A SIMPLE MASTURBATOR OF THE SILVER SCREEN.
Still, in part three of the trilogy, Europa, I have not made even the slightest attempt at a diversion. Purity and clarity have been achieved at last! Here nothing conceals reality under a sickly layer of “art.” . . . No trick is too tacky, no device too cheap, no effect too tasteless.
JUST GIVE ME A SINGLE TEAR OR ONE DROP OF SWEAT; I WILL GLADLY GIVE YOU ALL THE WORLD’S “ART” IN RETURN.
One final word. Let only God judge my alchemic attempts at creating life on celluloid. One thing is certain. Life outside the cinema can never be equaled, for it is his creation and therefore divine.
R. Bruce Elder
[First published in Canadian Forum 64, no. 746 (1985): 32–35.]
The ongoing and seemingly endless debate about what constitutes a truly (Anglo-)Canadian cinema came to a head with the publication in 1985 of experimental filmmaker and critical theorist R. Bruce Elder’s manifesto “The Cinema We Need.” Elder—whose films include The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Canada, 1979) and “1857” (Fool’s Gold) (Canada, 1981)—attacks the attempt on the part of Canadian filmmakers to make “New Narrative film”: a cinema that differs from Hollywood cinema’s desire for traditional storytelling by drawing on the aesthetics of the Canadian avant-garde. Elder claims that Canadian narrative cinema will never be able to compete with American product and that this “New Narrative film” engages in a process of vandalization and commercialization of the Canadian avant-garde tradition. Elder also claims that technology is overwhelming our ability to introduce new experiences and new insights into our conditions of living, and that this colonization is American. For this reason, Elder argues, Canada needs an avant-garde cinema that redresses this technological imperialism.
The task of achieving some clarity about our cultural situation and of developing the means to deal with the present cultural crisis is an urgent one—I believe the most important task now demanded of Canadians, even more important, all the exhortatory rhetoric to the contrary, than the formulation of social policy on employment in an era of electronic technology.
To formulate good policy on these matters, some questions about “the good itself” must first be thought through and the consequent problems—what degree of equality in the distribution of goods is proper in a just society? What would be the relationship in a just society between one’s contributions to society, in services and labour—and the material rewards one receives? Can a life of complete leisure be truly good? These questions cannot be answered until we know something about what is good for a person and of the sorts of relations with others it is good for a person to have.
If these questions seem abstract, even preposterous (certainly they are amongst the last matters which a policy maker would, in the present age, be called upon to consider), it is only because they have come to seem that way in an age when the dominant mode of thinking is a technical and managerial one, an age in which the purpose of thinking has been reduced to discovering the means of realizing some goal, not discovering whether the goal itself is good; of finding a way to subject nature and other people to our will; not finding out what the relationship of people to nature and of people to other people ought to be. After all, these unasked questions are those which any reasonable person would consider to be central to what makes us human. If they seem obscure, the darkness around them comes from our way of thinking about them, not from any murkiness in their own natures. Far from being abstract, these questions lie at the centre of our concrete existence and are answered by careful attention to our individual responses to the concrete situations in which we find ourselves.
I raise these questions not to try to answer them but to indicate what we who live in a technical age have lost and because a recognition of this loss is essential to formulating an answer to the most important question posed by this retrospective of Canadian cinema, namely, “What sort of cinema do we, as Canadians, need?”3 I also ask these questions to explain why my answer about a Canadian cinema differs so completely from those of Peter Harcourt and Piers Handling, two people who have not only thought about the question more thoroughly than anybody else but have also articulated the fullest and most informed responses to it, responses which take into account, as any strong response must, the history of our previous involvement in making films. I feel I must rebut their answers since I believe that they are not just wrong, but dangerous in their implications which, if embedded in policy, would thwart the potential of those current developments in cinema which represent the little hope our country now has for reopening the closed system of thought imposed by technique, that is to say, by the U.S.
We are creatures of the modern technical system. To say that is to claim that the horizon of our thinking is circumscribed by technique. The will to mastery has penetrated all aspects of the human personality and we have become no more than functionaries of the will to control and master. To pretend that our consciousness (and so our personality) transcends the situation in which we live, that it is the site of the origin of will and that it escapes conditioning by the situation in which it finds itself is a delusion that masks the most terrifying aspect of our modern technical system. Our “individual” wills have been brought into conformity with the will to mastery and we, ourselves, have become technique.
This penetration of technique into the deepest recesses of the human personality has resulted in our losing our capacity to think in ways other than those that develop from the will to mastery. We are so colonized by the technical empire that we cannot even think against the imperial system of technology. Our historical amnesia, to use Adorno’s phrase, our inability to even conceive of what we have lost under the aggrandizing hegemony of technical culture, is a measure of the extent to which we are dispossessed of any other realm, including that realm known to the ancients, the realm of mystery and wonder. We have lost our wonder at the gift of things, at what should be the wonder of wonders, that things are given. Consequently, we have become oblivious of values.
The power of technological domination attains its ends by encouraging us to conceive of ourselves as utterly free, by inducing us to think of ourselves as formulating projects for ourselves and as shaping ourselves into what we become. It leads us to believe that we have unlimited freedom to make the world the way we want it, since it portrays the universe as entirely devoid of values and as indifferent to the ends we choose. These delusions lie at the heart of the will to mastery. Overcoming that drive will disabuse us of these delusions, but to overcome the will to mastery, we must find some other focus for our being than wilfulness. That other focus is to be found in attuning ourselves to what is revealed to us, to what is given. This attunement is not a form of quietism, but a process of letting go, so that our experiences can, in revealing their depths to us, change us as profoundly as possible. In attuning ourselves to what is given, we surrender ourselves to that givenness and allow ourselves to be remade anew. If we are to escape the enclosure of human thoughts and beliefs, we must surrender ourselves to something wholly other. We must learn to listen for the intimation of the Good of which we have become deprived and learn to appreciate the gift of what is given in experience.
We need—urgently need, if we are to find some way out of the modern technical system—a cinema that can manifest this dynamic attuning. What characteristics would such a cinema have?
Harcourt and Handling argue that a “realistic” cinematic image of ourselves is sociologically and psychologically important because it shows us as we really are (does “realism” ever really do this?) and so engenders, or at least reinforces, our sense of identity. They argue that just as a child finds itself (that is, discovers it is a unified and bounded being) in the mirror, so we find ourselves in our imaginary relations to portraits of our “type” or our “family.” Setting aside the cavil that what we really acquire in such imaginary relations is an illusory sense of our identity, one would still have to object to this claim. For what the “realist” cinema presents are pictures of ourselves in our present condition and it presents these portraits as though they were portraits of the natural order. In this way, it suggests that the present order of things cannot be transcended.
But my objections to the Harcourt/Handling thesis run deeper. “Realism” relies on descriptions and descriptions follow experience; they are not simultaneous with it. Representations can only deal with the past. We need a cinema that can deal with the here and now. Any cinema that wishes to deal with the experience of the moment must not offer description; rather, it must reveal how events come to be in experience, that is, the dynamic by which events are brought into presence in experience. To do this, it must avoid using forms which present synoptic views of how some situation or another has come to be what it is, for views of that sort can be formulated only after the fact, after the process of creating the situation has been completed, and the explanations that they provide depend upon such disreputable intellectual abstractions as teleology and final causes.
One form that is clearly based on synoptic views of process and on teleology is the narrative. Narrative first creates and then reconciles discord. In a narrative, the end is already present in the beginning. It is obvious that such a form can be created only by looking back at the beginning from the end. Narrative, therefore, is reminiscence. We need a form that presents perceptions. We need a form that will immediately present the coming into presence (that is, the formulation) of present experience.
Given our present cultural imperatives, narratives pose a problem because they misrepresent experience. Narrative misrepresents because, in order to organize the past into comprehensible structures, it eliminates the unmanageable ambiguities and the painful contradictions inherent in experience. Only in fictions can we be certain of anything. Narrative explains how events lead up to the final event in order to clarify the past but the notion of causality on which narrative is based is all too simple and serves only to cover over mysteries.
This idea is not new. Pound, speaking through the figure of his esteemed Kung in Canto XIII, recalled a time when historians did not try to cover over gaps in their explanatory constructs:
And Kung said, “Wan ruled with moderation,
In his day the State was well kept
And even I can remember
A day when the historians left blanks in their writings,
I mean for things they didn’t know.”
But in technocracy nothing can be left uncontrolled, for technocracy is the will to mastery. Narrative is the artistic structure of technocracy. Accordingly, the cinema we need, the cinema that combats technocracy, will be non-narrative. It will not be fuelled by a rage for order—and order’s concomitant, concealment. It will accept that every discovery involves dissimulation. It will accept error and lingering mystery, for its maker’s negative capability will afford him the strength to accept what Keats terms the “Penetralium of Mystery.” If these strike you as too modest, even valueless, aspirations, perhaps your doubts can be mitigated by the idea that this cinema will also use constant repetition—not to reminisce, but to progress through states of discovery and to reveal ever more about the ordinary world around us.
Peter Harcourt and Piers Handling have been celebrating the advent of the so-called New Narrative film and advocating further work in the form. The New Narrative is a form of narrative that makes use of some of the strategies and devices usually found only in avant-garde films, especially constructions that refer to the work’s material base and its constructed character and that are less emotionally “engaging” than most narratives. According to these critics, New Narrative combines those virtues of formal complexity and self-consciousness that generally associate avant-garde film with the values of accessibility and with the potential for significant mass appeal (and so significant social value) which avant-garde films generally lack. Harcourt and Handling have argued that the best feature movies ever made in Canada were the low-budget, independent, personal features made in the years from about 1962 to 1974. These films represented an indigenous development similar in important respects to the European Art Film. Harcourt and Handling view the New Narrative film as a revitalization of the “Canadian Art Film” after the dark years of the Capital Cost Allowance films, for, like those earlier works, New Narrative films are independent, personal feature movies.4
While admittedly there isn’t much to be proud of in the Capital Cost Allowance films, I don’t for a moment believe that their failure gives us reason to praise the “Canadian Art Film,” nor do I believe that the development of the New Narrative film unites the strength of our avant-garde tradition (which is very great indeed!) with that of our “Art Film”; nor that such a cinema, if it were to come into being, would represent our best possibility for countering the hegemony of the technical/managerial system.
The reasons for my disbelief are many. One is that these films are still fundamentally narrative, while the cinema we need is not. Another is that I do not credit claims about the strength of our indigenous Art Film tradition. Nobody Waved Goodbye, for example, strikes me as a film that is interesting only for the fact that it was made here. A significant work of art it is not. Thirdly, I do not believe that the self-reflexive strategies used in some forms of avant-garde filmmaking can be comfortably accommodated within story-telling forms or that they serve important ends when they are used in that context. Self-reflexive ideas were developed to stress the autotelecity of a work of art. The notion that a work of art is autotelic is a development of the idea that every work of art is unique and that it is impossible to paraphrase or otherwise translate any work of art. But in New Narrative films, self-reflexive constructions serve primarily to create an unconventional surface—something desired for its ability to vivify perception. Unfortunately, such breaches of convention have little lasting value, for what seems unconventional one day often becomes a cliché the next, while Milton’s rhetoric, for example, has never been turned into clichés and most likely never will be.
This celebration of New Narrative angers me, too, because in Canada we have a long and very fine tradition of work in avant-garde cinema. This work has never received the attention it merits because the professors of movies at our universities have been too busy to take any notice of it. Now, after years of neglecting this form of cinema, they propose to honour it by advocating its being vandalized and commercialized, for their praise for New Narrative is tantamount to legitimating the mainstream cinema’s hijacking of the hard-won, unrewarded achievements of vanguard cinema.
But remarks thus far have been negative—an effort to clear the ground. I turn now to more positive comments—to suggesting something of about what the cinema we need would be like. It would be, in the first place, a cinema not of imagination but of perception. To escape from inwardness and domination of events by the ego, we must, even when “creating” works of art, cease to impose ideas on experience. We must rid art, and ourselves, of self-consciousness, for only when this is done can art manifest the process by which the subject-in-experience becomes identical with the subject-of-experience.
The cinema we need will be a cinema of perceptions, of immediate experiences. It will not be a cinema of ideas. Like narratives, ideas are formed only after the fact, serve only to present what is already past. We must therefore find a form that is capable of orienting us toward the present, a form not based on ideas (just as we must re-conceive morality and learn to think of it as concerned with attention, not with intention). Such a form must not depend on separating out one aspect of experience from all the others, nor on any pre- or post-conception. It would not depend, to use a few examples from recent films, on taxonomic or morphological principles, the alphabet, the structure of discourse or the Kabbalah. It will present, simply and directly, the manifold of forces and relations that come into interplay in the coming-to-presence of an event. To achieve this, the form will have to allow for multiplicity and contradiction, since contraries are present in all experience. The attempt to dispose of contraries-in-experience is due to reason, not perception. It will incorporate the full diversity of the manifold of experience by making simultaneous use of multiple images representing internal speech and a variety of auditory phenomena. It will be a polyphonic cinema, possessing several concurrent lines of development.
In order to be true to its commitment to reveal the process by which events come to presence, this form of cinema we need will reveal the process of its own emergence into being. In fact, it can truly present only its process of coming-into-being; all other emergent phenomena it can only represent after the fact. It would, therefore, include those fits and starts, those hesitancies, suspensions and reformulations, those repetitions and periphrases—what T.E. Hulme somewhere referred to as “the cold walks and the lines that lead nowhere.” Accordingly, the encounter with such a work at its best will strike one with the force of the emergence of being. In such a form, truth and method will become one.
This characteristic of our proposed cinema is hardly its most radical or original feature. It would, after all, share this feature with such well-known works as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers (1953), Pierre Boulez’ Structures (1952) and Morton Feldman’s Last Pieces (1959). However, it would come to this feature by a somewhat different route and this difference in its manner of creation would mean that this feature itself would be modified. Rather than being a calculated meta-description of the “creative process” it will, literally, enact the process of its own emergence into being. The temporal development of such cinematic work will be like that of a piece of totally improvised jazz (which also enacts the piece’s emergence into being) rather than like a schematized meta-description of the manner by which a work might emerge into being, which is what Feldman or Boulez provide. As a result, as in jazz, the marks and traces of spontaneity will be valued more highly than through preconceptions.
As it happens, the dynamic by which events come to presence in experience is permeated by rhythm. Our cinema therefore should also be profoundly rhythmic. Rhythm also happens to be among the most physical of the features of any art form and that physicality, moreover, has a close relationship to the physical experience of the body. This fact points toward the importance the body will play in this form of cinema. This association of the rhythmicality of the process by which events come to presence in experience with the physicality and rhythmicality of bodily processes means that the rhythmic form of a work of art can, by uniting the pulse of the body with patterns inherent in emergent events (event phenomena), unite the mind and the body. The cinema we need will, accordingly, make extensive use of rhythmic constructions.
By dealing with immediate experience, the cinema we need would be rooted in the place where we have our being. But where we are, always, is in language, for nothing is given experience outside of language. The thing given in experience is intelligible, is a meaning-being, because it is a meaning-being. It is intelligible precisely because language belongs to its internal constitution. A word fits a thing only because the thing itself is a word-thing. What we experience, what experience intends, is made in language and it is language which establishes things in the whole. This being so, the cinema we need, a cinema devoted to enacting the process by which events emerge into presence in experience, will engage with the formative role that language plays in making present that which is given in experience. It will not be a purely visual cinema, will not be a cinema against the word, but a cinema of the power of the word.
The makers of the cinema we need will be those who have the strength to abide with doubt and uncertainty and still open themselves up to unfolding situations, allow themselves, even, to be remade by experiences the destiny of which they cannot foresee. It is only through this process that truth will arise, for truth, as Heidegger kept reminding us, is aletheia, an uncovering.
One virtue of this conception of truth is that it is more vital and more richly embedded in time than traditional Aristotelian conception. Our cinema must insist on the primordiality of temporality. The strong makers, the makers who will fashion the cinema we need, will not seek for intimations of eternity and immortality but for intimations of the interchange of being with non-being, and so, of time, for it is the process of temporality which moves something from non-being and then into non-being again.
Since the cinema we need is a cinema that is not just a cinema in time, but one of time, a consideration of some basic and obvious truths about time is, perhaps, the most direct route to identifying key features of this cinema. Here are a few of the obvious but nonetheless ineluctable and intransigent peculiarities of temporal processes:
1) It is always true, that is, true for all instants, that right now is now.
2) Many things are happening right now, of which I am aware of only a limited subset. (The partition dividing that subset from the set of phenomena of which we are aware is determined by my spatial position, my neural constitution, the extent of my anxiety and other factors. Even so, it seems accurate to say that all temporal instants are related to a multiplicity of phenomena.) Hence:
3) It is not true to say that one thing follows another. It is only true to say that many things follow many.
4) Some events just joined the past. They are gone and cannot be resurrected except in memory. Their traces, however, can be found in the present and (this is somewhat more certain than even death and taxes) in the future.
The cinema we need will build upon the formal consequences of these obvious propositions; it will be a cinema of immediacy, multiplicity; will use non-causal, non-teleological forms of instruction and will not attempt to arrest time.
A cinema that is based on openness to experience will have extremely individualistic characteristics. Will critics who love “common patterns in art” be up to dealing with such works, or will they sack and pillage them, hijacking their forms and trading them off for use in more traditionally structured works? I don’t know the answer to that question but I do know that of all the forms of cinema we have at present, it is the experimental cinema that most closely approximates the cinema I have proposed and that the critical neglect of that cinema would, in a country that cared about its arts—as Canada must learn to do if it is to become anything more than a geographic landmass within the empire of technology—be considered a national disgrace. Right now, critics are proposing to feature filmmakers that the experimental cinema is a good site to pillage. One is tempted to remark, in this period of cultural tedium and human numbness; art is brief but life is long. We endure, in a sacked city, for what?
Ola Balogun
[First published in the Guardian Sunday Supplement (Nigeria), 10 March 1985.]
Long before the rise of Nollywood, Nigerian filmmaker Ola Balogun—director of such acclaimed films as Ajani Ogun (1975); Black Goddess (1978); Cry Freedom (1981); River Niger, Black Mother (1989); and The Magic of Nigeria (1993)—argued for a locally based, inexpensive model of filmmaking for Nigeria and Africa more generally, denying the need for large studios to make local cinemas. Balogun’s model was prescient in many ways: near the end of the manifesto he claims Nigerian films can have the same dominance in Africa that Egyptian ones have in the Arab world. Filmmaking in Nigeria changed rapidly and drastically with the rise of Nollywood in the early 1990s with the rise of Betacam and then digital technology, and Nigeria’s straight-to-video industry now makes it the third largest cinema-producing country in the world. Balogun, along with pioneering Nigerian cinema in the 1960s, has also gone on to be a renowned musician.
It has long been evident that most African nations are severely handicapped in the mass communications field by the inability of our various national leaderships to grasp the crucial role of mass media in the modern era. This deficiency of long-term vision and understanding on the part of the vast majority of African leaders is further compounded by the fact that in most cases our leaders tend to rely heavily on the views and advice of Civil Service administrators who are about twenty years or so behind time in their perception of the present age, and whose heavy-footed bureaucratic logic is ill-suited to the requirements of large-scale social mobilization for genuine national development. Disastrously wrong priorities, consistently poor analysis, and repeated instances of bureaucratic bungling that inevitably lead to wasteful dilapidation of previous national resources seem to be all too frequently characteristic of the handling of national affairs in virtually all African countries since independence, irrespective of the type of government in power.
Needless to state, Nigeria has been no exception to the general rule, in spite of the extraordinary volume of resources available to our country for national development purposes, compared to most other African countries. It is therefore hardly surprising to find that in the twenty-five years that have elapsed since independence, successive Nigerian governments have remained thoroughly confused about how best to harness film and television to the nation’s needs, while much empty rhetoric over the years by government officials on the need for a film industry in Nigeria has failed to produce even the slightest practical results in this field.
Obviously, the bureaucratic and governmental approach to these issues is not getting us anywhere. It is now long overdue for the people and nation of Nigeria to turn to the views of persons who may be a little bit knowledgeable about the role of mass media in the world of today, in order to determine the best course of action for providing our country with the capacity to make suitable use of film and television in the nation-building process. It is a great pity indeed that many of those who have anything useful to contribute to this country are generally condemned as “radicals,” “trouble-makers” and “agitators” and never listened to, while mediocrity and ignorance seem to have become a prerequisite for the exercise of decisive influence on the governmental decision-making process. . . . Why does Nigeria need a film industry? Hopefully, it should not be altogether impossible for the leading lights in our society to comprehend that there is hardly any point in obliging our school children and citizens to memorize the national anthem and to wave little replicas of the national flag in the air if, when they come home in the evening from their various schools or places of work, the main ideas that are to guide them in life come from watching Dallas or F.B.I. on television, or watching Indian and Kung Fu films in the cinema houses. Surely, it does not require too much effort to understand that people who never have a chance to see their own fellow-countrymen or fellow Africans and other black people portrayed as heroes may wave the national flag as many times a day as they are required to, but will never really acquire a self-confident vision of their own nation as a source of ideas and progress.
In fact, most people in Nigeria (including many of our leaders themselves) know little or nothing about the history of our country and of the African continent. Although nationalistic fervour is constantly being urged on us, names like Jaja of Opobo, Oba Overanmwen, Sultan Attahiru, and Nana Olomu, to name a few of the heroes who played leading roles in Nigerian resistance to the imposition of British rule, are virtually unknown to most of us. In the wider African and black context, how many Nigerians have ever heard of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Marcus Garvey, Chaka the Great, Sonni Ali Ber, or Sundiata Keita? National unity is a constantly recurring leitmotif in official government speech-making, but how easy is it for Nigerians from one part of the country to learn about the culture and customs of those from another part of the country?
The question therefore becomes: Beyond sacking hapless workers for being unable to recite the national pledge, what can actually be done to instill a worthwhile vision of our goals as a nation in the minds of our people, and to create a collective sense of a shared national destiny in our land?
It may well be that those who are in charge of formulating the nation’s policies in the mass media field do not perceive any link between the need to harness our mass media capacities in a positive direction and the achievement of our overall objective of building a strong and self-reliant nation in which all citizens are effectively mobilized for the nation-building effort. It may also be that these folks are right to sit back and hope that one day, M.G.M. or Universal Television in Hollywood will come to Nigeria and make a film about Nana Olomu’s resistance to British rule, which they can then purchase during their annual jamborees to world television markets to be shown to our people in between The Incredible Hulk and the latest James Bond film. Who knows? Stranger things have been known to happen . . .
It could well happen one day also that a film producer from Hong Kong may get bored with churning out endless remakes of Bruce Lee films and decide to come to Nigeria and make a film centred on Hausa culture, so that people living in Buguma may obtain a better idea of the outlook and life of their fellow-citizens in Katsina. Who knows? According to those who know about such matters, even more wonderful miracles have been known to occur in this world, and many more will no doubt occur in the future. After all, is this not a nation in which we are accustomed to seeking revelations about the names of our future rulers in the Bible?
For those whose faith in miracles may be a bit weak, however, it may well appear evident that if we desire that mass media, like film and television, should play a meaningful role in the future evolution of our nation, we do need to take some practical steps of our own to bring about the desired results, rather than wait for miracles to drop into our laps from the skies above.
What then are the basic steps that need to be taken in order to establish a film industry in Nigeria?
In attempting to answer this question, it would perhaps be useful to begin by dispelling some of the wrong ideas and mistaken notions that have gained ground in this country over the years in connection with our requirements in the field of feature film production.
First of all, it must be pointed out that the much publicized “film village” concept has little or no relevance to the establishment of a film industry in Nigeria. This rather odd concept seems to have surfaced in various forms in the recent past, ranging from absurd projects by a gentleman based in Ondo state, who at one time claimed to be planning to establish a N100 million film village where “honeymoon couples would go to watch Nigerian films being made,” to another no less ridiculous claim about plans in hand by the still-born Nigerian Film Corporation to build a one billion naira film industry in a Nigerian Film Village located on “300 hectares of scenic property in the Shere Hills near Jos” which would form “the most comprehensive film village in Africa.”
Needless to state, however, the film village idea, whether costing one hundred million naira or one billion naira, is a red herring that need not occupy anybody’s time or attention, whether for honeymoon purposes or film production. Huge capital investment[s] in real estate development are certainly not an essential prerequisite for film production, no matter how impressive it may sound to some of us to hear of gigantic plans to sink fabulous sums of money into the establishment of so-called film villages (or white elephant villages?).
As for film studios, it is useful to bear in mind that the great majority of films that are made today in the world are no longer shot in studios. Most film makers now favour natural locations in order to stress authenticity, with a result that film studios are now mostly useful for certain types of television situation comedies, where all the action occurs within the four walls of an apartment building. Nigeria is a very diverse multi-cultural setting, and it can well be imagined that the expense of reconstructing a series of Yoruba or Nupe villages in Jos and of transporting a sufficient number of villagers from the required ethnic areas to act as film extras and occupy the villages in a convincing manner so as to provide an adequate background for filming is far more trouble than deciding to go and film in an authentic Yoruba or Nupe setting, especially as film equipment is now so compact and lightweight that filming on location does not pose as many challenges as in the past. In any case, it would be useful to point out to those who advocate the massive construction of film studios in Nigeria as a preliminary step to the establishment of a film industry that a large-sized film studio has in fact been in existence at the Federal Film Unit lkoyi for well over twenty-five years now, but has never been made use of, and is now merely used to store odd items of equipment, while it is equally interesting to recall that a fully equipped television studio existed at lbadan University’s Faculty of Education for well over ten years without once being utilized. It may also be of interest to point out that none of the numerous feature films that have been made to date in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Senegal, Niger Republic, Mali and Cameroun was made in a film studio. It is simply not true that the construction of gigantic film studios is a prerequisite for film production.
Attention also needs to be drawn to the fact that the relative paucity of technical infrastructure for film making in Nigeria at the moment is by no means an insurmountable obstacle to film production, even though it may constitute a relatively annoying handicap. For Nigerian film makers to be obliged to depend on overseas facilities for such requirements as film laboratory processing is certainly an added source of difficulty for film makers in this country, but we do not need to wait until all these facilities are provided right here in Nigeria before we proceed to make films. In fact, the foreign exchange requirements of Nigerian film makers in connection with overseas technical facilities and laboratories are certainly far smaller than what is generally issued for a single import licence to importers of sundry commercial items. At the current level of production, less than N15 million is required each year to pay for overseas technical facilities for Nigerian films, which is surely an extremely modest figure if this area of activity is considered important to the nation.
On the other hand, it is a mistake that will surely result in colossal loss of money to seek to build government-run film laboratories, since past experience has amply demonstrated that this kind of infrastructure cannot be efficiently run under bureaucratic management. It is interesting to recall that a government-owned colour film laboratory that was declared open with considerable pomp and fanfare some years ago in Port Harcourt by no less a person than the then Head of State, General Olusegun Obasanjo, has so far hardly been able to process any films at-all, due to assorted problems of lack of suitable chemicals and frequent breakdown of machinery and equipment. Anyone who has been exposed to the realities of government-run technical infrastructures in the field of film in this country will know that it is nothing but an idle pipe dream to hope that such facilities can ever be efficiently managed and maintained within a civil service set-up.
A far better approach to the issue of infrastructure would therefore be to fund the production of Nigerian films to an adequate level of output that would automatically stimulate the provision of infrastructural services by private companies. Thus, if there were for instance to be a certitude that at least twenty Nigerian feature films would be produced in a year, gradually increasing to a hundred and more, private entrepreneurs would then be motivated to establish laboratory, sound mixing and editing infrastructure for film production, and to maintain and run such services properly, contrary to what obtains in government-owned facilities, where equipment is nearly always poorly maintained and badly utilized. Colossal investment by government in technical infrastructure in this field will not really be beneficial to film makers, and will only help fill the pockets of government functionaries who specialize in receiving 20 per cent cuts from purchase of equipment.
In reality, even the already existing technical infrastructure is very much underutilized, while there has been considerable duplication in the purchase of cameras, tape recorders and lighting equipment, both by private film companies and government film units. The sad fact is that at present those private film companies which own complete sets of filming equipment rarely make use of their equipment much more than about once a year, and could therefore well afford to hire out this equipment to other film makers if there were sufficient guarantee of payment, but have so far been deterred from doing so in most cases because many of those who come to hire equipment hardly ever pay in the long run and do not take proper care of other peoples’ equipment, partly out of sheer ignorance and lack of professional experience, and partly because they simply do not care. If this kind of attitude could be overcome, there is no doubt that there are more than enough cameras and tape recorders in Nigeria at the moment to meet our needs, particularly at the level of 16mm production. What is mostly needed at the moment is an increase in existing editing facilities and the provision of sound-mixing facilities. Whatever be the case, however, the massive purchase of millions of naira worth of equipment by the Federal Government is certainly not a pre-requisite for the establishment of a film industry in Nigeria.
Another idea that needs to be laid to rest once and for all is the curious bureaucratic notion that the views and ideas of Nigerian film makers are totally irrelevant to the establishment of a film industry in Nigeria. An analysis of past steps taken by the Federal Government in connection with the proposed establishment of a Nigerian film industry will reveal the following glaring anomalies:
1) At no stage did the powers that be in the Federal Ministry of Information consult any Nigerian or African film makers on the various plans formulated by the Ministry to establish a film industry in Nigeria. Although a panel of film makers and intellectuals who had been assembled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs as far back as 1978 to review the existing Cinematograph laws, and who worked free of charge on the task for several weeks, submitted a well-thought-out blueprint for the establishment of a film industry as part of the recommendations they submitted, the Federal Government was misled by certain unpatriotic functionaries to ignore the recommendations of the Nigerian film makers.
2) Instead, the Federal Ministry of Information awarded contracts for feasibility studies to two obscure organizations, one named Francis Associates Ltd. (whose address was said to be 63–66, Martin’s Lane, London) in 1978, and another named British Films Nigeria Ltd. (a company registered in Nigeria under the Chairmanship of Alhaji Ado Ibrahim, a leading figure in the defunct N.P.N.) in 1980.5 It is noteworthy that neither of these two companies has ever been involved in feature film production anywhere else in the world. Francis Associates, for its part, is mainly noted for the fact that it brought the Ipi Tombi dance troupe to Nigeria, while British Films of London, the overseas partner (currently in receivership) of British Films Nigeria, was mainly a manufacturer of film projectors and was also occasionally involved in making documentary films for a few Third World Countries. Quite curiously, Nigeria neither sought the assistance of any of the major European or American companies involved in feature film production, such as M.G.M., Universal, Rank, Gaumont etc., nor of any governments in the west or the east that could share useful information or experiences with us in this field. Those who had pioneered feature film production in Nigeria itself were of course completely ignored in the course of the whole dubious exercise. The Nigerian Federal Ministry of Information instead chose to expend a total amount of money, close to half a million naira, in awarding contracts for bogus “feasibility studies” to two small and relatively unknown entities that are in no way connected with the production of feature films. When blind men lead the equally blind, the results can easily be predicted. It therefore comes as no great surprise to find that the original feasibility study by Francis Associates Ltd. eventually had to be discarded as a perfectly worthless document by the Federal Ministry of Information itself barely one year after it had served as the basis for the promulgation of Decree no. 61 of 1979 setting up the Nigerian Film Corporation. The second feasibility study, which was commissioned from British Films Nigeria Ltd. at an astronomic cost to this country, has equally been a disastrous failure, as a recent review by a panel set up by the current military administration has now clearly demonstrated.
3) The Nigerian Film Corporation, as established by the Federal Government was set up with a Board of Directors comprising ten members, of whom only one was supposed to represent the interests of Nigerian Film Makers. Given the absolute preponderance on the board of persons totally unconnected with films and almost completely uninformed on the subject of films, it is still not entirely clear if the aim of gathering together such a large and motley crowd of persons to serve on the Board of the Film Corporation was to constitute a football team, to act as a social club, or to help swell the number of guests at cocktail parties hosted by the Nigerian Film Corporation. All that can be said, however, is that four years after it came into existence by decree, and after two years of valiant efforts directed from a very expensive office site in Victoria Island, Lagos, the Nigerian Film Corporation has never managed to produce even five seconds’ length of film of any shape, size or description, despite total expenditure to date well in the region of N1 million, if payments for the various “feasibility studies” are taken into account.
Obviously, the past approaches by the Federal Government to the issue of setting up a film industry in Nigeria have so far not yielded much result, to state matters mildly. Hopefully, matters may improve slightly under the present government, although certain signs point to a continuing preponderance of the bureaucratic point of view. Unfortunately also, a number of uninformed persons, masquerading as media experts, have confused issues considerably by publishing various misleading articles on the situation of Nigerian film in the newspapers, and in one case, in a thoroughly fraudulent book published by the Mass Communications Department of one of the country’s leading universities. Amazingly enough, most of these self-proclaimed experts have never before set foot where a Nigerian film is being made or taken the elementary trouble of finding out how films are actually made, or seen fit to find out what the economic, social and material context of film production in Nigeria actually is. And yet all these people have theories about how a film industry should be established in Nigeria, while some of them who happen to be strategically located within the bureaucratic establishment itself actually exercise the power of decision over matters about which they are entirely uninformed!
Ironically enough, even those who are somewhat better informed on the subject, but who are hesitant to take a firm stance on such matters, are quick to castigate those who insist that the issue of the establishment of a film industry in Nigeria demands clarity of thought for displaying what is labelled as “intellectual arrogance” in such circles. Somehow, one is expected to concede that there may be several different equally correct points of view on the same issue, even after one has proved by logical analysis that many of those points of view are in fact erroneous. It is difficult to understand why a desire to remain within the scope of logical analysis in such matters should be deemed to be a display of intellectual arrogance. The fact is that, just as in mathematics, it is not possible to come up with fifty different correct answers to the same problem, there can only be one correct approach to the optimal manner of setting up a film industry in Nigeria if the problem is approached on the basis of a serious analysis of the material factors involved. It is not intellectual arrogance to be impatient with people who spring up overnight with ridiculous concepts of “film villages” as the best approach to establishing a Nigerian film industry. It is simply that after a while one gets tired of being confronted with illogical and woolly reasoning. Ideas that spring from insufficient analysis and inadequate understanding of a given problem can only be wrong. And if an idea is wrong, it is wrong. It cannot at the same time be right. Why then waste time postulating that there can be fifty different solutions to the same problem once it has been demonstrated that forty-nine are wrong and one is right? Is it “intellectual arrogance” to value clarity of thought?
Obviously, if at some stage in time, the people and government of Nigeria truly desire to see a film industry established in this country, it may prove useful for the following points to be taken into consideration as the only correct approach to the establishment of a Nigerian film industry:
1.) The basic prerequisites for a film industry in any country are:
a) People to make films,
b) Funds for the production of films, and
c) Outlets for the screening of completed films.
2.) Nigeria has abundant materials to serve as subjects for films, ranging from our folk tales to our cultural heritage, episodes of our past history, published plays and novels, original screenplays etc. Nigeria also has a wide variety of potentially proficient actors, quite a few persons capable of directing films (including some who are currently employed as television producers), a small but gradually increasing reservoir of technical personnel, and a fabulously large and enthusiastic population who are eager to watch Nigerian films. What Nigeria therefore lacks for film production to actually take off are funds for the production of films and outlets for completed films to be shown (including on television).
3.) Funds for the production of films can be provided in the following ways:
a) Direct subvention by government.
b) Tax deductions and other incentives to encourage investment in film production by the private sector. (This has been the key to the recent rapid growth of a home-based film industry in a country like Australia.)
c) Allocation of all revenue derived from entertainment tax paid by cinemagoers into a central fund to be used in financing indigenous film production. Nigerian and African films should also be exempted from paying any form of tax whatsoever in Nigerian cinema houses for as long as it takes to build up a sizeable volume of such films.
d) Additional taxation imposed on the importation of all foreign films screened in Nigeria, including on television. Such additional taxes should go to swell the funds set aside for indigenous film production.
e) Instructions to all banks and financial institutions by government to devote a small minimum percentage of their lending portfolio to activities related to the entertainment industry, including film.
f) Government guaranteed loans and other financial facilities granted to film makers to facilitate the production of films.
4.) Outlets for the screening of Nigerian films can be ensured by:
a) A reorganization of Nigerian television broadcasting to ensure that scope is provided for the screening of Nigerian films on Nigerian television. It is noteworthy that in twenty-five years of existence, Nigerian television (which sometimes screens as many as ten or more foreign films each and every weekend) has never once purchased and screened even a single Nigerian feature film.
b) Legislation to oblige all film houses in the country to screen a minimum number of Nigerian films each year, and to pay a fixed minimum percentage of gate proceeds to the producers of these films. In Brazil, for instance, each cinema house must prove that it has shown Brazilian films for 110 days out of 365 days during the preceding year in order to qualify to have its licence renewed.
c) Imposition of a quota system designed to gradually restrict the quantity of foreign films imported into Nigeria, in direct proportion to the growth of indigenous film production.
d) Strict copyright controls and outright ban of pirate video recordings.
e) Construction of more cinema houses and imposition of minimum standards of safety and comfort in cinema houses. It is noteworthy that cities like Bombay, Paris or New York have more cinema houses each than the whole of Nigeria combined, while over 95 per cent of existing cinema houses in Nigeria are so far lacking in facilities and comfort that they cannot be described as cinema theatres. Most are merely makeshift open air cinemas functioning with antiquated and poorly maintained projection equipment dating back twenty years or more in many cases.
f) Creation of a chain of low-cost 16 mm format cinema theatres integrated into civic centres or town halls all over the federation.
g) Active arrangements through Nigerian trade missions and commercial representatives to distribute Nigerian films in other African countries and in some selected overseas markets. Needless to state, Nigeria has more than sufficient ability to dominate the whole of the black Africa in the area of supply of films, in rather the same way as Egypt has dominated nearly all of the Arab world for several decades now. Undoubtedly, Nigeria stands to earn considerable foreign revenue from a judicious programme of distribution of Nigerian films across the African continent.
h) If enough outlets are provided for the distribution of Nigerian films both within and outside Nigeria, enough income will be generated to gradually make the Nigerian film industry almost entirely self-supporting in the long run.
In conclusion, it must be pointed out that Nigeria has both the means and the capacity to establish and sustain a film industry. With judicious planning, the establishment of a film industry in Nigeria requires relatively little effort. If, however, the issue continues to be approached from the point of view of bureaucratic procedures and methods, it is obvious that we will continue to grope and stumble in the dark in this field for the next twenty years without succeeding in establishing a film industry.
Young DEFA Filmmakers
[This manifesto was first written to be circulated at the 5th Congress of Film and Television Workers of the GDR in 1988. First published in German in Film und Fernsehen 10 (1990): 21. First published in English in Film History 15 (2003): 452. Trans. Roger P. Minert.]
This manifesto emerged out of discussions between filmmakers in East Germany near the very end of the Cold War. Originally, it was to be read at the 5th Congress of Film and Television workers that year, but was not, for fear of reprisals and the loss of jobs. The manifesto therefore went unmentioned at the conference. The manifesto shows the internal contradictions and political confusion in the GDR at the time, with talk of both censorship and autocritique right before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
1. Motion pictures are a medium of society. Stagnation in the control of influence over our motion pictures and the social processes evident in recent years represents principally the surrender of our responsibility, but at the same time the expression of the social condition. Society must reveal itself in every aspect to the motion pictures. It must trust this medium and challenge and support it. We declare our willingness to actively and positively cooperate in the socialistic development of our society and to assume responsibilities.
2. The motion picture theater in the GDR is in a state of crisis. This involves not only national production, but also distribution, the film experience, critique, and theory. Thus the spectator is also involved. Motion pictures are primarily an expression of the merely temperate artistic and the ideological and economical effect and result of the nation’s motion picture production. Personal involvement is in only too great opposition to the actual possibilities, affecting the public consciousness tangibly. Individual successes no longer change the situation. Only through radical questioning of existing conditions and cooperative action can we regain for the motion picture theater its place in public life.
3. Our films are devoid of extreme situations. By special emphasis we can make inroads in the processes of reality, the results of which cannot yet be determined. The goal is to re-discover the enjoyment of a provocative view. It is necessary to promote motion pictures with greater energy and to confront critical topics directly. By doing so we further the re-awakening of artistic methods that distinctly expose the conflicts and actually carry these to completion.
4. It is the social responsibility of motion pictures in a socialist country to reflect reality in a partisan manner in the spirit of national unity, and to exercise influence over this process. The prerequisite for this is independent intercourse between critique and self-critique. No critical thought in a film, about a film, or about motion picture production should be placed in the camp of enemy observations.
5. In order for a renewal and improvement of our motion picture production to take place, there must be a break with existing taboos—taboos in topics and in perspectives. The internalization of taboos has led to self-censoring, which has made a more or less serious impression on all those involved in the collective creative process and has led for all practical purposes to distinct restrictions in the effectiveness of motion pictures.
6. In order to have precise points for the actual status of DEFA motion pictures, we need true statistics on the number of theater goers as well as an accessible and differentiated analysis of the effects. From those reports a recognizable strategic and tactic review must be formulated, in order to raise the effect of our motion pictures—and above all the effect thereof on the masses.
7. The production structures of the past do not allow the production of motion pictures in the necessary thematic and design variety. Thus we propose the construction of a facility that can be managed by minimal administrative effort and can take advantage of strong personal involvement. This would be a highly-valued facility in which successive generations of production talents would find an opportunity to work, but where experienced colleagues could also make films.
8. An inevitable condition for the development of our motion pictures would be the perspective of foreign films, student travel in foreign countries, and participation in international film festivals. In short: a comparison with the outside world. In an era when mankind is threatened qualitatively by new forces and enticements, more than ever before we will have to understand and produce motion pictures and guide their effect as a system open to the world.
Colin McArthur
[First published in Sight and Sound 3, no. 8 (1993): 30–32.]
Much of Colin McArthur’s work (most notably the seminal Scotch Reels [BFI, 1982]) can be understood as series of manifestos arguing for a local, culturally engaged Scottish cinema that throws off the incessant drive to compete with Hollywood. If Scotch Reels lambastes the reliance of tartanry and kailyard as defining and self-colonizing representations of Scotland, “In Praise of a Poor Cinema” aims its sights at Scottish funding agencies’ own self-colonizing tendencies in the search for capital.
“. . . to ensure the development of a viable, vigorous, and substantial Scottish film industry designed to attract and deploy the talents of Scottish film-makers and to enable them to make films in their own country . . .” (From the 1991 Annual Report, Scottish Film Production Fund.)
This, of course, is a fantasy which has beguiled the Scottish Film Production Fund (SFPF) and its parent body, the Scottish Film Council (SFC), since its inception in 1982. As, in these post-Marxist days, babies are being thrown out with the bathwater all over Europe, many indispensable concepts are being jettisoned. One such concept, uneven development, describes perfectly Scotland’s relationship with diverse sectors of the UK economy, not least film production. To put it bluntly, Scotland is, on the film-making front, a third world country—but this is tragically misrecognised by those holding the purse strings north of the border. There have always been signs that the SFPF and SFC were on a collision course with reality. One of the earliest officers of the fund talked about discovering “the next generation of Bill Forsyths” and senior officers of the SFC, at their most delirious, have been heard to speak of “Hollywood on the Clyde.”
When the stated policy is compared with the reality of the fund’s most recent investment, Prague, the gulf is stark. Apart from the fact that producer Christopher Young, producer/director Ian Sellar and one of the principal actors, Alan Cumming, are Scots, Prague has nothing to do with Scotland and could not be remotely construed to fulfil what might be assumed to be a central impulse of a new national cinema—the exploration of the contradictions of the society from which it comes.
Individual film-makers should not be blamed for using whatever production mechanisms are available, but the Scots involved in Prague were the figleaf which allowed the project to absorb a massive proportion of the SFPF and decorated the Euro-pudding the film was to become. During the period when Prague was in development and production, the SFPF stood at about £250,000 per annum. Over two financial years it invested no less than £130,000 in Prague, having in previous years put an equally generous £100,000 into an earlier film, Venus Peter (1989), by the same production/direction team. This tendency to put available eggs into a small number of baskets is reminiscent of central Scotland’s costly dependence on a few heavy industries earlier in the century.
The precise details of the discussions between Young/Sellar and the SFPF will probably never be known, but what is clear is that Young himself would like to be making considerably cheaper films than Prague, at £1.95 million, turned out to be. Did the SFPF actively steer Prague towards inflationary mechanisms like the BBC’s Screen Two, which put up about £500,000 of the budget?
There are cultural as well as economic questions to be asked. For example, it seems that Young, in the letter which accompanied his original script submission, indicated that the central character might be American (rather than, as in the realised film, Scottish). Despite the fact that this would further distance the already tenuous connection of the project with Scotland, the SFPF did not regard it as in any way problematic. While the fund’s annual report makes much of the fact that the great bulk of Venus Peter’s budget entered the economy of the film’s location, the Orkneys, it is silent about the destination of the budget for Prague, which entered economies far distant from Scotland’s. A major insertion of French money brought Prague’s budget up to nearly £2 million and the project was designated a British/French co-production. In recompense, the French required that some 45 per cent of the budget be spent in France, a condition realised primarily by having the film processed at a French lab. As far as I am aware, none of Prague’s budget was spent in Scotland.
The main impulse of the SFPF is towards projects which will attract finance from diverse sources and consequently compete for attention on the world stage. A largely unrecognised contradiction here is that the larger the project, the less Scottish it becomes. It might be argued that the fund’s most successful area of operation has been in springboarding a handful of Scottish film-makers into international production. It has been the fund’s practice to subsidise the graduation films of Scots students at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. One such was Michael Caton-Jones’ The Riveter (1986). Caton-Jones is now comfortably ensconced in Los Angeles. In an interview in the Observer Magazine in 1991, he remarked: “In a way I had no roots. I had left Scotland at 18 and drifted to the London area. Leaving for Los Angeles was no great wrench. . . . I doubt if I’ll go back to Britain.” So much for the policy “to enable [Scottish film-makers] to make films in their own country.” Caton-Jones is currently listed as director of the forthcoming Rob Roy (producer Peter Broughan, writer Alan Sharp), which is already in receipt of development finance from the fund.
This springboarding of individual careers is joined by a complete misconception of what might constitute an appropriate production policy for Scotland’s economic and cultural circumstances. There is one statistic which should be branded on the foreheads of those who call the shots in the SFPF and the SFC: of the eight feature films analysed in the 1993 BFI Film and Television Handbook, the average budget was £1.8 million, and the average net revenue only £0.8 million. Presumably data of this order was available to the SFPF when it became involved with Prague.
The root cause of the SFPF’s and SFC’s failure to articulate a meaningful production policy lies in their surrender to an industrial model rather than in posing the question in terms of cultural need. The fund’s commitment to film as commodity is evident from the projects into which it puts the bulk of its funds and from the backgrounds of those who have recently served as part of the group which makes the funding decisions, including Roger Crittenden (NTFS); Bill Forsyth (director); Charles Gormley (director); Mamoun Hassan (producer); Liz Lochead (writer); Bernard MacLaverty (writer); Lynda Myles (producer); Bill Paterson (actor); Iain Smith (producer) and Archie Tait (producer).
Individually these are all bright and able people, but collectively, with the exception of Liz Lochead, the orthodoxy of their recent backgrounds and their commitment to mainstream and therefore expensive aesthetic forms are overwhelming. A costing of the projects in which they have been involved within recent years would be hardly likely to dip beneath the average of £1.8 million cited above and would most likely be considerably above it. The most glaring absence from the list is of any figure who could bring in a feature film (such as Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein) for around £300,000. The absence is not accidental. Like the SFC, the SFPF has from the outset set its face firmly against the aesthetic tradition of such films. One of the most unfortunate results of their freezing out of alternative voices is that public funders and potential private investors in Scotland are kept in the dark about film production practices which are not only more commercially viable, but more culturally necessary than the practices currently funded.
Institutions are rarely monolithic, and the current Director of the SFPF, Kate Swan, was herself the producer of Play Me Something (1989), an excellent film by Timothy Neat which managed, on a budget of £375,000 and in a way Prague did not, to be both Scottish and European (and a great deal more) simultaneously. To underline the lack of monolithicism, the SFPF put a small amount of money into Play Me Something. But the promising track record of the fund’s current Director and its own occasional backing of the right horse must be set against the orthodoxy of those making the funding decisions and where they have put the vast bulk of available monies.
The present board gives even less comfort to those looking for a low-budget cinematic aesthetic: Allan Shiach (Chairman); David Aukin (Head of Drama, Channel 4); Colin Cameron (Head of Television, BBC Scotland); Paddy Higson (independent producer); Sandy Johnson (independent television director); Margaret Matheson (independent film producer for television); Scott Meek (independent film producer for television); George Mitchell (Controller of Programmes, Grampian TV); Colin Young (former Director of the National Film and Television School). There is one figure in the above line-up who has recently become a key player. Under the name Allan Shiach he is a rich and prominent businessman (Chairman of the Macallan-Glenlivet whisky operation); under the name Allan Scott he is a successful Hollywood screenwriter, most notably in his collaborations with Nicolas Roeg. He is now chairman of both the SFC and the SFPF.
It is possibly not accidental that following Shiach/Scott’s entry to the Scottish film scene there should emerge Movie Makers, an event designed to explore the craft of classic Hollywood screenwriting which brought William Goldman to Scotland. The discourse about classic Hollywood screenwriting is immensely interesting and has achieved considerable prominence in recent years through manuals such as Syd Field’s Screenplay and The Screen-writer’s Workbook and through Robert McKee’s Screen Structure Course. But one of its effects is to fetishise the classic two-hour Hollywood script and forbid entry to other ways of thinking and making cinema. As such, it dovetails perfectly with the dominant ideology of film production in Scotland.
One other recently created mechanism has given the final impetus to Scotland’s head-long rush towards an industrial conception of film-making—the Glasgow Film Fund. It currently stands at £150,000 per annum, made up of contributions from the Glasgow Development Agency, Strathclyde Business Development, Glasgow City Council and the European Regional Development Fund, and will be administered by the SFPF, concentrating nearly all public funding of film-making in Scotland within a tight group of individuals working to highly exclusive policy criteria. The GFF’s terms of reference are frankly commercial, designed to stimulate film-making in the Glasgow conurbation and to pull money into the local economy. Only feature film projects with a budget of at least £500,000 are said to be eligible to apply.
It is perhaps understandable, given the career profiles of those who serve on its board, that the SFPF should lock on to an industrial model of film-making. It is more surprising that an ostensibly cultural body like the SFC should espouse the same values. It recently produced The Charter for the Moving Image in Scotland, a document of staggering banality, which, when it is not whining about inequity of public funding of the moving image in Scotland in relation to the rest of the UK, proposes utopian structures of truly megalomaniac proportions such as a Scottish Screen Agency which would subsume all existing film mechanisms and concentrate funding powers in even fewer hands. Symptomatically, during the period when the resounding phrases of the charter were being sculpted, Scotland’s only independent film studio and lab facility closed down.
All this would be serious enough, but conversations with Scottish film-makers who have had dealings with these bodies suggest a more disturbing picture in which those projects most rooted in Scottish culture and most challenging to the dominant ideology of production are actively opposed, if not as a matter of explicit policy by these bodies, then by powerful voices within them. It might indeed be asserted that the most distinctively Scottish of recent films (Silent Scream; Tickets To The Zoo; Blue Black Permanent; As An Eilean) have been made because forces outside Scotland, particularly two English commissioning editors at Channel 4, Alan Fountain and Rod Stoneman, have been prepared to put money into projects figures in the Scottish film establishment would have preferred to see die. As a footnote to that establishment’s judgment, the projects it has been most hostile to are the ones which have won awards at foreign festivals.
The absence of cultural analysis in the discourses of the SFC and the SFPF has meant that they have both been unequipped to think of alternatives to the industrial model, or to recognise the problems relating to national culture and identity that the industrial model might create. For instance, a recent article in the Scottish press indicated that research had revealed that German executives have an image of Scotland which leads them to think of it as a place to rest in rather than to invest in. In short, “dream Scotland.” To the extent that the main impulse of Scottish films is to address a wider “market”—a key principle of the SFPF—the dilemma they face is how to do so without recourse to regressive discourses such as “dream Scotland.” It might be thought, given their commitment to an industrial model of film-making and their rhetoric about attracting investment into Scotland, that the SFPF and SFC would have given some thought to how the “dream Scotland” narrative might be dislodged from the heads of German executives to be replaced by other narratives more conducive to seeing Scotland as a modern industrial nation. But there is no evidence that the SFPF and SFC are even aware of the problem. The SFC and SFPF have had too easy a ride. Mainly because film-making grew out of the sponsored documentary tradition of Films of Scotland, there have been no substantial cadres of avant-garde independents putting pressure on them, analogous to that exercised on the BFI in England and Wales. With a few honourable exceptions, local film journalists have shown no capacity to interrogate, as opposed to simply report, the initiatives of Scottish film institutions. This environment has reinforced the sleekitness of the SFC and SFPF and ensured that they would face no sustained pressure to articulate policy options and discuss them with their constituencies. Thus the industrial model of film-making simply “emerged” in Scotland, rather as the leader of the Conservative Party used to, without any proper discussion of alternatives. What, then, is to be done?
When the SFC and SFPF finally face up to the fact that film-making in Scotland of a kind relevant to questions of national identity and culture must be low-budget film-making, they are going to have to educate themselves and their constituencies into a different set of aesthetic strategies and institutional arrangements. An obvious first step would be to strengthen the workshop sector in Scotland, the only sector (apart from a handful of independents) with the necessary expertise to facilitate what could be called a Poor Scottish Cinema, that is to say poor in resources and rich in imagination. The Scottish workshops ought, in effect, to become mini-studios through which grantees from the SFPF should realise their projects. The SFPF must also begin to recruit to its board figures who have some understanding of the aesthetics and economics of Poor Cinema. One obvious such figure is James Mackay (as it happens, a Scot from Inverness), whose production credits include Ron Peck’s What Can I Do With A Male Nude? (budget £5,000), Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (budget under £250,000) and The Garden (budget £370,000), and Man To Man (budget £155,000). Mackay’s projects have consistently used Super-8 (often blown up to 35mm for cinematic release) and, increasingly, electronic imaging. Another recruit to the SFPF ought to be the man who coined the term “electronic imaging,” Colin MacLeod, a world authority on the subject working at Napier University, Edinburgh.
The SFC and the SFPF must then lead their constituencies through a process of discussion about how imaginative and culturally relevant cinema can be achieved on meagre resources. There are good examples from within Scottish film history itself, for example the Bill Douglas trilogy, the early feature films of Bill Forsyth and certain of the films of Murray Grigor, Brian Crumlish and Mike Alexander. But examples should also be drawn from further afield: Chris Marker’s La Jetée, which is wholly, and Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, which is partly, made up of still images; Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers and Dusan Makavejev’s The Switchboard Operator, which make extensive use of pre-existing footage; Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s Ludwig: Requiem For A Virgin King, which instead of built sets uses blown-up transparencies as background to the action; the austere cinema of Robert Bresson; the cinema of Derek Jarman and other English independents; third world cinemas, particularly those of Africa and Latin America.
Getting budgets below £300,000 would not only make profitability more likely for individual films, but would see many more specifically Scottish features emerging, perhaps eventually reaching the critical mass of ten features a year which the SFC is fond of canvasing. What it would produce at least is a pack of cards whereby the nature of a Scottish cinema, its recurrent themes and styles, might begin to be discerned. As things stand, the possibility of a nationally specific Scottish cinema (which need not preclude influences from Hollywood and elsewhere or fail to recognise the necessary hybridity of all national cultures in the modern world) is becoming increasingly remote as Scots film-makers are forced into contortions to raise money from American and pan-European sources.
This leads naturally to the question of how critical recognition of national cinemas is generated. Festival entry and subsidy for distribution and exhibition may not (by themselves) be the most effective or economic routes. There is a historical lesson to be learned here. Italian neo-realism, French nouvelle vague, Brazilian cinema novo and so on were internationally recognised as such mainly because they were taken up and discussed in film criticism and journalism. It is not beyond the bounds of imagination that a nouveau cinema ecossais might be similarly constructed. As is so often the case in Scotland (as with Gregory’s Girl), celebration abroad might facilitate recognition (and further funding) at home. It would be nice to think that a simple journal could be sent free of charge to every cinematheque, film festival, film magazine and Channel 4–type television network in the world which, without being a hype or lap-dog journal, would have as its main aim to outline what is happening in Scottish cinema and to construct its diverse films as some kind of collectivity. There are several historical precedents for this, for example the journals circulated by Unifrance and Film Polski.
This essay will be read perversely on several fronts. It will be suggested that it is intrinsically hostile to classic, narrative cinema, though that can be easily discounted by the most cursory glance at the author’s other critical writings. It will be suggested that the concept of Poor Cinema envisages a restricted range of aesthetic forms. Quite the reverse, as the examples cited (from the Loachian realism of Tickets To The Zoo to the Brechtian multi-textuality of Les Carabiniers) indicate. Finally, it will be suggested that it trashes the entrepreneurial efforts of individual Scots film-makers. This also is not true. One can have nothing but admiration for those Scots who have fought their way through to some kind of international recognition (well, most of them) although they may have had to pay a price in terms of the relevance of their work to Scottish culture.
As this article was going to press the SFPF did two things which encapsulate all that is wrong with its policy. It issued a press release hailing the success of the first round of short films it funds jointly with BBC Scotland. Renamed “Tartan Shorts”—appropriately, the project wraps itself in that most regressive of Scottish discourses, Tartanry—it provides for three ten-minute shorts to be funded each year at a cost of £30,000 per short. The press release is clear about the kind of films to be funded. They must be “narrative shorts” and it is envisaged that grantees will “springboard from the making of a short on to a first feature film.”
Concurrent with the press release, two young Glasgow-based film/video-makers, Douglas Aubrey and Alan Robertson, received a letter from the SFPF informing them that their request for funding to complete their feature film had been turned down. Work, Rest and Play is a bitter, Kerouacian road movie in five 20-minute parts, two of which have already been completed with £6,000 of Aubrey and Robertson’s own money and the down time of sympathetic facilities houses, independent producers and educational institutions. It is also a technological palimpsest for our time, involving video footage shot on VHS, low- and high-band U-matic, Hi8 and Betacam SP; computer graphics realised by Quantel Paintbox, Spaceword Matisse and Wavefront; and the deployment of sound samplers and digital storage systems. In short, it is a superb example of Poor Cinema.
It is scarcely credible, but at the very moment when it was passing up the chance to put £15,000 (the sum requested) towards the realisation of a feature-length Scottish road movie, the SFPF was trumpeting abroad the fact that it had invested £90,000 in three ten-minute shorts. By a cruel irony, the director of one of these shorts is Peter Capaldi, writer of the flashily empty road movie Soft Top, Hard Shoulder, which has none of the “condition of Britain” bite of Work, Rest and Play.
More than ever, the creeping centralisation of film funding in Scotland needs to be reversed and the following key issue addressed: what kind of cultural and economic (in that order) policies need to be adopted by Scottish film institutions to create in the first instance a culturally relevant and in the longer term economically viable Scottish cinema? To raise such an issue implies the possibility of change in those great lumbering dinosaurs of Scottish film culture, the SFC and the SFPF. Dream on!6
Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg
[First distributed on 15 March 1995 at Le cinéma vers son deuxième siècle conference in Paris.]
The Dogme ’95 manifesto is largely responsible for the revitalized interest in film manifestos in recent years. Lars von Trier, one of the two coauthors, had been writing manifestos to accompany many of his films. An ironic call to action, Dogme ’95 and the Vow of Chastity both invoked the supposed failures of previous aesthetic revolutions in the cinema, most notably la nouvelle vague, and at the same time, proclaimed a dogmatic list of technical constraints never found in antecedents such as neorealism, la nouvelle vague, or New German Cinema. Dogme’s greatest success was as a publicity tool, placing New Danish Cinema on the map in the process. While not a national movement per se, the critical success of the Dogme films is largely tied to the Danish ones—such as Festen (The Celebration, Thomas Vinterberg, 1998); Idioterne (The Idiots, Lars von Trier, 1998); Mifunes sidste sang (Mifune’s Last Song, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, 1999); The King Is Alive (Kristian Levring, 2000); Italiensk for begyndere (Italian for Beginners, Lone Scherfig, 2000); En Kærlighedshistorie (Kira’s Reason: A Love Story, Ole Christian Madsen, 2001); and Elsker dig for evigt (Open Hearts, Susanne Bier, 2002)—while most of the international productions were largely, and quite justifiably, quickly forgotten.
DOGME 95 is a collective of film directors founded in Copenhagen in spring 1995.
DOGME 95 has the expressed goal of countering “certain tendencies” in the cinema today.
DOGME 95 is a rescue action!
In 1960 enough was enough! The movie was dead and called for resurrection. The goal was correct but the means were not! The new wave proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck.
Slogans of individualism and freedom created works for a while, but no changes. The wave was up for grabs, like the directors themselves. The wave was never stronger than the men behind it. The anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because the foundations upon which its theories were based was the bourgeois perception of art. The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby . . . false!
TO DOGME 95 cinema is not individual!
Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the media becomes, the more important the avant-garde. It is no accident that the phrase “avant-garde” has military connotations. Discipline is the answer . . . we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition!
DOGME 95 counters the individual film by the principle of presenting an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY.
I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by dogme 95:
1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).
3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
10. The director must not be credited.
Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work,” as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.
Thus I make my vow of chastity.
Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995
On behalf of dogme 95
Dimas Djayadinigrat, Enison Sinaro, Ipang Wahid, Jay Subiykto, Mira Lesmana, Nan T. Achnas, Richard Butario, Riri Riza, Rizal Mantovani, Sentot Sahid, Srikaton, Nayato Fio Nuala
[First published in Tilman Baumgärtel, ed., Southeast Asian Independent Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 151. Trans. Dimas Djayadinigrat.]
A central manifesto for the post-Soeharto Indonesia, the “I Sinema” manifesto played a key role in the developing critical discourse of the emerging Indonesian cinema, though the manifesto was more well-remembered by filmmakers than read, and was only published for the first time in 2012, in English.
1. Film as Freedom of Expression.
2. To find a new art form and genre in Indonesian film industry.
3. To maintain originality from censorship.
4. The ability to use any film material to achieve feature film standard.
5. To maintain independence in production and distribution.