JB - I have been wondering what I should ask you. Often I ask
questions of directors that seem a little stupid, you see, but I don’t want to
avoid those, for finally the stupid questions are the ones to which I most want
reply. I know that it will be difficult — I don’t think I would be able to
answer very well concerning my own films — but I hope that your replies help me
to arrive at certain conclusions later. Have you understood?
PPP - Yes, I understand.
JB - You know I’m compiling a book on the directing of the
non-actor. I am meeting many directors. The book is primarily a way for me to
organize my own thinking and to take advantage of the experiences of other
directors in order to see how I may be able to create more completely a kind of
human existence in front of the camera, without the use of professional actors,
and without falling into cinema conventions. The ideas I’m looking for have
been discreetly developing for 20 years. So that’s why I’m writing this book,
to clarify my ideas. Have you understood?
PPP - Yes, very well.
JB - Let me start with a question that may seem stupid — how do you
create? Are you aware — even vaguely — of certain recurring processes? What
helps you? What pushes you to create? When you want to work, what steps do you
take to get started?
PPP - What is it that urges me to create. As far as film is
concerned, there is no difference between film and literature and poetry — there
is this same feeling that I have never gone into deeply. I began to write
poetry when I was seven years old, and what it was that made me write poetry at
the age of seven I have never understood. Perhaps it was the urge to express
oneself and the urge to bear witness of the world and to partake in or to
create an action in which we are involved, to engage oneself in that
act.Putting the question in that manner forces me to give you a vaguely
spiritualistic answer… a bit irrational. It makes me feel a bit on the
defensive.
JB - Some artists collect information on a subject, like
journalists. Do you do this?
PPP - Yes, there is this aspect, the documentary element. A
naturalistic writer documents himself through his production. Because my
writing, as Roland Barthes would say, contains naturalistic elements, it is
evident therefore that it contains a great interest in living and documentary
events. In my writing there are deliberate elements of a naturalistic type of
realism and therefore the love for real things… a fusion of traditional
academic elements and of contemporary literary movements.
JB - What brought you to The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and
once you had the idea, how did you start work on it? Why did you want to do it?
PPP - I recognized the desire to make The Gospel from a feeling I
had. I opened the Bible by chance and began to read the first pages, the first
lines of St. Matthew’s Gospel, and the idea of making a film of it came to me.
It’s evident that this is a feeling, an impulse that is not clearly definable.
Mulling over this feeling, this impulse, this irrational movement or
experience, all my story began to become clear to me as well as my entire
literary career.
JB - Once you had this feeling, what did you look for to give it
form, to make the feeling concrete?
PPP - I discovered first of all that there is an old latent
religious streak in my poetry. I remember lines of poetry I wrote when I was 18
or 19 years old, and they were of a religious nature. I realized, too, that
much of my Marxism has a foundation that is irrational and mystical and
religious. But the sum total of my psychological constitution tends to make me
see things not from the lyrical-documentary point of view but rather from an
epic point of view. There is something epic in my view of the world. And I
suddenly had the idea of doing The Gospel, which would be a tale that can be
defined metrically as Epic-lyric.
Although
St. Matthew wrote without metrics, he would have the rhythm of epic and lyric
production. And for this reason, I have renounced in the film any kind of
realistic and naturalistic reconstruction. I completely abandoned any kind of
archaeology and philology, which nevertheless interest me in themselves. I
didn’t want to make an historical reconstruction. I preferred to leave things
in their religious state, that is, their mythical state. Epic-mythic.
Not
desiring to reconstruct settings that were not philosophically exact — reconstructed
on a sound stage by scene designers and technicians — and furthermore not
wanting to reconstruct the ancient Jews, I was obliged to find everything — the
characters and the ambiance — in reality. And so the rule that dominated the
making of the film was the rule of analogy. That is, I found settings that were
not reconstructions but that were analogous to ancient Palestine. The
characters, too — I didn’t reconstruct characters but tried to find individuals
who were analogous. I was obliged to scour southern Italy, because I realized
that the pre-industrial agricultural world, the still feudal area of southern
Italy, was the historical setting analogous to ancient Palestine. One by one I
found the settings that I needed for The Gospel. I took these Italian settings
and used them to represent the originals. I took the city of Matera, and
without changing it in any way, I used it to represent the ancient city of
Jerusalem. Or the little caverns of the village between Lucania and Puglia are
used exactly as they were, without any modifications, to represent Bethlehem.
And I did the same thing for the characters. The chorus of background
characters I chose from the faces of the peasants of Lucania and Puglia and
Calabria.
JB - How did you work with these non-actors to integrate them into
a story that was not their own, although analogous to their own?
PPP - I didn’t do anything. I didn’t tell them anything. In fact, I
didn’t even tell them precisely what characters they were playing. Because I
never chose an actor as an interpreter. I always chose an actor for what he is.
That is, I never asked anyone to transform himself into anything other than
what he is.
Naturally,
things were a little more difficult with regard to the main actors. For
example, the fellow who played Christ was a student from Barcelona. Except for
telling him that he was playing the part of Christ, that’s all I said. I never
gave him any kind of preliminary speech. I never told him to transform himself
into something else, to interpret, to feel that he was Christ. I always told
him to be just what he was. I chose him because he was what he was, and I never
for one moment wanted him to be anyone else other than what he was — that’s why
I chose him.
JB - But to make your Spanish student move, breathe, speak, perform
necessary actions — how did you obtain what you wished without telling him
something?
PPP - Let me explain. It happened that in making The Gospel, the
footage of the characters told me almost always the truth in a very dramatic
fashion — that is, I had to cut a lot of scenes from The Gospel because I
couldn’t “mystify” them. They rang false. I don’t know what it is, but the eye
of the camera always manages to express the interior of a character. This
interior essence can be masked through the ability of a professional actor, or
it can be “mystified” through the ability of the director by means of cutting
and divers tricks. In The Gospel I was never able to do this. What I mean to
say is that the photogram or the image on the film filters through what that
man is — in his true reality, as he is in life.
It
is possible at times in movies that a man who is devious and shady can play the
part of one who is naïve an ingenuous. For example, I could have taken a
professional and given him the part of one of the three magi — an unimportant
part — and by the way it is clear that there is a deep candor in the souls of
the three magi. But I didn’t use professionals, and therefore I couldn’t have
their ability to transform themselves in to others. I used real human beings,
and so I made a mistake and misjudged a man psychologically. My error was
immediately evident in the photographed image. There is another rather
unpleasant example that has sprung to mind — for the two actors who played
those possessed by the Devil, I chose actors from the Centro Sperimentale film
school in Rome. I chose them in a hurry. Later, I had to cut the scene because
I was obvious that they were two actors from the Centro Sperimentale.
In
reality, my method consists simply of being sincere, honest, penetrating, precise
in choosing men who psychological essence is real and genuine. Once I’ve chosen
them, then my work is immensely simplified. I don’t have to do with them what I
have to do with professional actors: tell them what they have to do and what
they haven’t to do and the sort of people they are supposed to represent and so
forth. I simply tell them to say these words in a certain frame of mind and
that’s all. And they say them.
To
get back to Christ, once I had chosen the person whose essence or interior was
more or less that needed to play the part of Christ, I never obliged him to do
any specific things. My suggestions were made one by one, instance by instance,
moment by moment, scene by scene, action by action. I said to him, “do this”
and “get angry.” I didn’t even tell him how. I simply said, “you’re getting
angry,” and he got angry in the way he usually got angry and I didn’t intervene
in any way.
My
work is facilitated by the fact that I never shoot entire scenes. Being a
“non-professional” director I’ve always had to “invent” a technique that
consists of shooting only a very brief bit at one time. Always in little bits —
I never shoot a scene continuously. And so even if I’m using a non-actor
lacking the technique of an actor, he’s able to sustain the part - the illusion
— because the takes are so brief. And if he doesn’t have the technical ability
of an actor, at least he doesn’t get lost, he doesn’t freeze up.
Although
I was able to find characters analogous to the wise men or to an angel or to
Saint Joseph, it was extremely difficult to find a character analogous to Jesus
Christ. And so I had to be content with finding someone who at least came close
to resembling Christ externally and interiorly, but actually I had to construct
Christ in the cutting room.
Although
other directors make tests, I never make them. I had to make one for Christ,
though — not for myself — but for the producer who wanted a certain guarantee.
When I choose actors, instinctively I choose someone who knows how to act. It’s
a kind of instinct that so far hasn’t betrayed me except in very minor and very
special cases. So far I’ve chosen Franco Citti for Accattone and Ettore
Garofolo for the boy in Mamma Roma. In La Ricotta, a young boy from the slums
of Rome. I’ve always guessed right, that from the very moment in which I chose
the face that seemed to me exact for the character, instinctively he reveals
himself a potential actor. When I choose non-actors, I choose potential actors.
Naturally,
Christ was a more difficult thing for me than Franco Citti because Franco,
after all, was to play a part that was more or less himself. First of all, this
young Spanish student at the beginning was inhibited about playing the part of
Christ — he wasn’t even a believer. And so the first problem was that I had
playing Christ a fellow who didn’t even believe in Christ. Naturally this cause
inhibitions. This young student wasn’t an extrovert or a simple, normal type of
person. He was psychologically very complex, and for this reason it was
difficult the first few days to get him to win out over his timidity, his
restraint, his inhibitions, while for the other actors I didn’t have this
problem. The very minute I put them in front of the camera, they acted the way
I wanted them to.
JB - What did you do with your Spanish non-believing non-actor to
get the results you wanted?
PPP - Nothing really. I simply appealed to his good will. He was a
very intelligent and a very cultured young man who became bound to me by the
friendship that grew up between us in those few days — however, he had the
basis of an ideological background and a rather strong desire to be useful to
me. It was by this means that he succeeded in overcoming his timidity.
As
far as the rest goes, I had him perform in very small segments, one at a time,
without even preparing them first. I would suggest the expressions while he
acted. Inasmuch as we were shooting without sound, I could talk to an actor
while he was performing. It was a little bit like a sculptor who makes a
sculpture with little improvised blows of the chisel. While the actor was
acting, I said to him “Look here” - and I told him each expression, one by one,
and he followed them almost mechanically. I shot everything that way. He had
the speech memorized more or less, and he began to say it. He had to - for
example - take 10 steps forward, or move, or look at someone. I never told him
beforehand, except in a very vague way, what it was all about, and gradually as
he performed, I said, “now look at me… now look down there with an angry
expression… now your expression softens… look toward me and soften your
expression slowly, very slowly. Now look at me!” And so while the camera
rolled, I told him these things. I prepared the action beforehand, in a very
vague way, so that he would know more or less what he was supposed to do and
where he was supposed to go. Whatever the nuances, the little movements, I
suggested to him one by one. Prior to the shot, I gave him general movements
and told him more or less what he was supposed to do. Then I explained these
things more precisely while we shot. Once in a while I would surprise him — I
would say to him, “Now look at me with a sweet expression on your face.” And
while he did this I would say suddenly, “Now get angry!” And he obeyed me.
JB - Didn’t this request make him attempt to imitate the way an
actor he had seen got angry?
No. Actors would be tempted to do
this, but one who is not an actor — for example, those whom I chose — would
never do this. It’s not possible, because they have never confronted themselves
with the technical problems of an actor — that is, he doesn’t have a technical
idea of “anger,” he has a natural and genuine idea of anger.
PPP - I’ve done this rather often in other films. For example, I
would have the person say a line that was not what it was supposed to be in the
text. If he was supposed to say “I hate you,” I would have him say “Good
Morning,” and then when I dubbed I would put in “I hate you.” Normally, I
should have said to him, “All right now, say ‘I hate you’ as if you were saying
‘good morning.’” But this is pretty complicated reasoning for a person who is
not an actor. So I simply tell him to say “Good morning,” and then in the
dubbing I put in his mouth “I hate you.”
JB - For dubbing, do you use non-actors or professionals?
PPP - I do both. That is, I take non-actors who generally reveal
themselves to be splendid dubbers. For Christ, I was obliged to use a
professional actor, so it depends on the circumstances. More than anything
else, I try to balance everything out between the professional and
non-professional performances. For instance, the boy in Mamma Roma did his own
dubbing. But Franco Citti could not do his own dubbing, for even though he was
bravissimo his voice was rather unpleasant. So I had him dub another character.
JB - If you don’t give the non-actor much explanation of character,
do you at least tell him the story?
PPP - Yes, I do, in two words. Just out of curiosity. But I never
go into a serious discussion with him. If he has any doubts… if he says to me
“what do I have to do here,” I try to explain to him. But always point by
point, particular by particular, never the whole thing.
JB - Do you add expressive gestures, which are not normally a part
of the non-actor’s personal comportment?
PPP - No, I never have him do gestures that are not his. I always
let him use the gestures that are natural to him. I tell him what he has to do —
for example, slap someone or pick up a glass — but I let him do this with the
gestures that are natural to him. I never intervene regarding his gestures.
If
I want to underline some act, I do so with my own means, with technical means —
with the camera, with the shot, with editing. I don’t have him emphasize it.
Actually, I am very careful not to indicate to him the “intention,” because
these “intentions” are the phony part of the actor.
JB - Do you trick at all, in order to produce emotional responses?
PPP - Up to now it has never happened. If it were necessary, I’d do
it. It’s never happened to me because my actors do not have petit-bourgeois
inhibitions. They don’t care. They do what I tell them, generously. Franco
Citti, Ettore Garofolo, the protagonist of La Ricotta, and my Christ as well — they
gave of themselves completely, blindly. They don’t have that conventionality or
false modesty of hypocrites, so I’ve never had to do this. However, if I had to
trick, I’d do it.
JB - Do you see a way of directing the bourgeois-class person who
is a non-actor?
PPP - I was faced with this problem filming The Gospel. Whereas in
my other films my characters were all “of the people,” for The Gospel I had
some characters who were not. The Apostles, for example, belonged to the ruling
classes of their time, and so obeying my usual rule of analogy, I was obliged
to take members of the present-day ruling class. Because the Apostles were
people who were definitely out of the ordinary, I chose intellectuals — from
the bourgeoisie, yes — but intellectuals.
Although
these non-actors as Apostles were intellectuals, the fact that they had to play
intellectuals removed, no instinctively but consciously, the inhibition of
which you spoke. However, in the case of one’s having to use bourgeois actors
who are not intellectuals, I think that you can get what you want from them,
too. All you have to do is love them.
JB - How did you work with the intellectuals to rid them of their
inhibitions?
PPP - The process was identical with that for the lower-class
performers. With the former naturally, I used a language that was on a more
elevated level. But my methods were the same.
JB - Do you feel the need of knowing your people a long time before
shooting, to make friends with them, to learn their natural gestures in order
to use them later?
PPP - I had known Franco Citti for years, because he was the
brother of a friend. I knew his character more or less. On the other hand,
Ettore Garofolo of Mamma Roma — I saw him once in a bar where he was working as
a waiter. I wrote my whole script around him without speaking to him further.
Because I preferred not to know him. I took him and began to shoot after having
seen him for just that one minute. I don’t like to make an organized and
calculated effort to know someone. If you can intuit a person, you know him
already.
Generally
I have very precisely in mind what I’m going to do. Because I’ve written the
script myself, I’ve already organized the scene in a given way. I see the scene
not only as a director but also with the different eyes of the scriptwriter. In
addition, I choose the settings. I go to these places and make an adjustment of
what I’ve written in my script to fit the place where we are going to shoot.
And so when I go to shoot, I more or less know already how the scene is going
to go.
I
did this for every film except The Gospel. With The Gospel, the thing was so delicate
that it would have been easy to fall into the ridiculous and the banal and the
typical costume film genre. The dangers were so many that it wasn’t possible to
foresee them all. And it being so difficult, we had to shoot three or four
times more material than necessary. In effect, most of the scenes I created in
the cutting room. I shot the whole Gospel with two cameras. I shot every scene
from two or three angles, amassing three or four times more material than
necessary. It was as if I had done a documentary on the life of Christ. By
chance. With the moviola, I constructed the scene.
JB - Did you seek a particular style in the framing, and was this
possible with two cameras going?
PPP - Yes, I always have a rather clear idea of the shot I want, a
kind of shot that is almost natural to me. But with The Gospel I wanted to
break away from this technique because of a very complicated problem. In two
words it’s this: I had a very precise style or technique with which I had
experimented in Accattone, in Mamma Roma and in the preceding films, a style
which is, as I said before, fundamentally religious and epic by its very
nature. And so I thought that my style — possessing naturally these qualities
of sacredness and epicness — would go well with The Gospel also. But in practice,
that was not the case. Because in The Gospel this sacredness and epic quality
became a prison, false and insincere, and so I had to reconstruct my whole
technique and forget everything I knew, everything that I had learned with
Accattone and Mamma Roma, and begin from the beginning. I relied on chance, on
confusion, and so forth.
All
this was due to the fact that I am not a believer. In Accattone, I myself could
tell a story in the first-person because I was the author and I believed in
that story, but I could not tell the story of Christ — making him the son of
God — with myself as the author of this story, because I’m not a believer. So I
didn’t work as an author. And so this forced me to tell the story of Christ
indirectly, as seen through the eyes of one who does believe. And as always
when one tells something indirectly, the style changes. While the style of a
story told directly has certain characteristics, the style of a story told
indirectly has other characteristics. That is, if in literature I am describing
Rome in my own words, I describe it in one style. But if I describe Rome — using
the words of some Roman character — the result is a completely different style
because of the dialect, the popular language, and so forth. The style of my
preceding films was a simple style — almost straightforward, almost hieratic — while
the style of The Gospel is chaotic, complex, disordered. Despite this
difference in style, I shot all my films in little pieces all the same. Except
the frame, the point of view, the movements of the extras were changed.
JB - I have read that you have said that you have trouble with
actors. Why is that?
PPP - I wouldn’t like people to take this too literally, not in a
dogmatic way. In La Ricotta I used Orson Welles and I got along beautifully
with him. In the film I’m making now I’m going to use Totò, a popular Italian
comic, and I’m sure everything will work out fine. When I say I don’t work well
with actors I’m uttering a relative truth — I want to be sure that this is
clear. My difficulty lies in the fact that I’m not a professional director, and
so I haven’t learned the cinematographic techniques. And that which I have
learned least of all is what they call the “technique of the actor.” I don’t
know what kind of language to use to express myself to the actor. And in this
sense, I’m not capable of working with actors.
JB - After your directing experiences with Anna Magnani in Mamma
Roma and Orson Welles in La Ricotta, what have you learned about using
professional actors as distinct from non-actors?
PPP - The principal difference is that the actor has an art of his
own. He has his own way of expressing himself, his own technique which seeks to
add itself to mine — and I cannot succeed in amalgamating the two. Being an
author, I could not conceive of writing a book together with someone else, and
so the presence of an actor is like the presence of another author in the film.
JB - With Welles, how did you get a result you felt was fruitful?
PPP - For two reasons — first of all in La Ricotta Welles did not
play another character. He played himself. What he really did was a caricature
of himself. And also because Welles, in addition to being an actor, is also an
intellectual — so in reality, I used him as an intellectual director rather
than as an actor. Because he’s an extremely intelligent man, he understood
right away and there was no problem. He brought it off well.. It was a very
brief and simple part, with no great complications. I told him my intention and
I let him do as he pleased. He understood what I wanted immediately and did it
in a manner that was completely satisfying to me.
With
Magnani, it was much more difficult. Because she is an actress in the true
sense of the word. She has a whole baggage of technical and expressive notions
into which I was unable to enter, because it was the first time I had any kind
of contact with an actor. At present, I’ve had a little bit of experience and
at least can face the problem — but at that time, I couldn’t even face it.
JB - Now that you have experience, have you thought how you may
overcome this acting “baggage” of the professional performer? You said you are
using Totò in your next film — have you reflected upon your way of directing
him?
PPP - Yes, I think the way to get around this problem is to use the
fact that they are actors. Just as with a non-actor I use a whole series of
things unexpected and unforeseen — leaving them to their own vital confusion
(for example, when I tell them to say “Good morning” instead of “I hate you”),
leaving them to the ambiguousness of their being — so I must use the actor
specifically for his actor’s baggage. If I try to use an actor as if he were
not an actor, I would be wrong. Because in the cinema — at least in my cinema —
the truth always comes out sooner or later. On the other hand, if I use an
actor knowing that he is an actor, and therefore using him for that which he is
and not for that which he is not, I hope to succeed. Naturally, the character
whom he interprets must be adapted to this idea.
It
just happens that the characters in my new film are all ambiguous characters
who have something real, human, profound about them, and at the same time
something invented, absurd, clownish and fable-like. The double nature of the
actor, Totò-man and Totò-Clown, this double nature can be used by me for my
character. In Totò himself this double nature — man and clown, or man and actor
— functions because it corresponds to the double nature of the character in the
film.
JB - Do you plan to explain to Totò this double nature you’ve
outlined?
PPP - Yes, of course. As soon as I met him I explained that I
needed a character just like himself. I needed a Neapolitan. Someone profoundly
human, who as at the same time this art that is clownish and abstract. Yes, I
told him right away.
JB - Are you not afraid that now that he knows, Totò will try to
play both the clown and the human being?
PPP - No, I told him to make him feel freer. Because I saw that he
would worry about it. It’s the first time that he has worked on a film that has
this kind of ideological content. Of course, he has made several good films,
but they were always on an artistic level, without political commitment. So
probably he was a little worried. In order to leave him completely free, I told
him — so that he could go on doing what he had always done, so he won’t have to
do anything different.
JB - Do you rehearse a lot or do you shoot immediately?
PPP - I never rehearse. I shoot right away.
JB - Does this impose simple camera work?
PPP - My camera movements are very simple. For The Gospel, I used
camera movements that were a little more complicated, but I never use a dolly,
for example. I’ve always shot in pieces. Shot by shot,. A few pans and very
simple tracking shots but nothing more.
JB - What are your observations about the aesthetic and technical
characteristics of film as you have gained experience?
PPP - My lack of professional experience has not encouraged me to
invent. Rather it has urged me to “re-invent.” For instance, I never studied at
the Centro Sperimentale or any other school, and so when the time came for me
to shoot a panoramic shot, for me it was like the first time in the history of
cinema that a panorama was shot. And so I re-invented the panoramic.
Only
a person with a great deal of professional experience is capable of inventing
technically. As far as technical inventions go, I have never made any. I may
have invented a given style — in fact, my films are recognizable for a
particular style — but style does not always imply technical inventions. Godard
is full of technical inventions. In Alphaville there are four or five things
that are completely invented — for example those shots printed in negative.
Certain technical rule-breakings of Godard are the result of a pains-taking
personal study.
As
for me, I never dared to try experiments of this kind, because I have no
technical background. And so my first step was to simplify the technique. This is
contradictory, because as a writer I tend to be extremely complicated — that
is, my written page is technically very complex. While I was writing Una Vila
Violente — technically very complex — I was shooting Accattone, which was
technically very simple. This is the principal limitation of my cinematic
career, because I believe that an author must have complete knowledge of all
his technical instruments. A partial knowledge is a limitation. Therefore, at
this particular moment, I believe that the first period of my cinematic work is
about to close. And the second period is about to start, in which I will be a
professional director also as far as technique in concerned.
JB - But what have you discovered about film in an aesthetic sense?
PPP - Well, to tell the truth, the only thing I discovered is the
pleasure of discovery.
JB - You’re talking like Godard now.
PPP - I answered like Godard because the question is impossible to
answer. Look, if I believed in a teleology of the cinema, in a teleology of
development, if I believed in an end-goal of development, in progress as
improvement… but I don’t believe in a “bettering,” an improvement. I think that
one grows, but one does not improve. “Improving” seems to me an hypocritical
alibi. Now, believing in the pure growth of each one of us, I see the
development of my style as a continuous modification about which I can say
nothing.
JB - How do you conceive the structure of your films, what makes
them move from one end to another?
PPP - It’s too demanding a question. For the moment it’s impossible
to answer. But I would like for you to read in Cahiers an article I wrote. This
question implies not only an examination of my films and my conscience, it
brings up the question of my Marxism and my whole cultural struggle during the
Fifties. The question is too vast. It’s impossible.
But
let me say this now in a very schematic fashion. At this point, the cinema is
dividing itself into really two large trunks, and these two different types of
films correspond to what we already have in literature: that is, one type on a
high level and another type on a low level. While cinema production until now
has given us films of both a high and low level, the distribution apparatus has
been the same for both. But now the organization or structure of the cinema industry
is starting to differentiate… the cinema d’essai is becoming more important and
will soon represent a channel for distribution through which certain films will
be distributed, whereas the remainder of the distribution will take place
normally. This will bring about the birth of two completely different cinemas.
The high level of cinema — that is, the cinema d’essai — will cater to a
selected public and will have its own history. And the other level will have
its own story.
In
this important change, the selection of non-actors will be one of the most
important structural aspects. Probably the structure of this high level cinema
will be modified by the fact that no longer will there be an industrial
organization hanging over it. And so all kinds of experiments will be possible,
including that of using non-actors, and this will transform the cinema even
stylistically.
JB - In Cahiers, do you speak of aesthetic structure?
The structure of cinema has a
special unity. If the structuralist critic were to describe the structural
characteristics of the cinema, he would not distinguish a story cinema from a
non-story cinema. I don’t believe that this story distinction affects the
structure of cinema; rather it affects the superstructure — I mean the style.
The lack or the presence of a story is not a structural factor. I know that
some of the French structuralists have attempted to analyze the cinema, but I
don’t believe that they have succeeded in making these distinctions.
Literature
is unique, it has unity. Literary structures are unique and include both prose
and poetry. Nevertheless, there is a language of prose and a language of
poetry, although the literary structure is one. In the same way, the cinema
will have these distinctions. Obviously, the structure of cinema is one. The
structural laws regarding any film are more or less the same. A banal western
or a film by Godard have structures that are fundamentally the same. A certain
rapport with the spectator, a certain way of photographing and framing are the
identical elements of all films.
The
difference is this: the film of Godard is written according to the typical
characteristics of poetic language; whereas the common cinema is written
according to the typical characteristics of prose language. For example, the
lack of story is simply the prevalence of poetic language over prose language.
It isn’t true that there isn’t a story; there is a story, but instead of being
narrated in its integrality, it is narrated elliptically, with spurts of
imagination, fantasy, allusion. It is narrated in a distorted way — however,
there is a story.
Fundamentally,
the distinction to be made is between a cinema of prose and a cinema of poetry.
However, the cinema of poetry is not necessarily poetic. Often one may adopt
the tenets and canons of the cinema of poetry and yet make a bad and
pretentious film. Another director may adopt the tenets and canons of the prose
film — that is, he could narrate a story — and yet he creates poetry.
