Louis Louie

Adrian Martin and Guillaume Ollendorff

Skorecki constantly mythologises his own origins, his own history as a cinephile. In 1957, as he tells us in his little book Raoul Walsh and Me (which collects his newspaper columns on this director), as a very young teenager, he was in a class taught by Henri Agel, one of the great historians and critics of cinema in the Bazin-Sadoul era in France. Unforgivingly, Agel would set his young charges essay topics such as this: ‘Discuss the relation between the cinema of Raoul Walsh and the sense of the sacred, viewed from the perspective of Shakespearian tragedy and the notion of potlatch.’ (And we believe Skorecki on this.) Who of us had a secondary school education like that? Skorecki goes on: his best schoolmate, at the adjacent desk in 1957, was the equally young Serge Daney, who is today, fourteen years after his death, a fully mythic film-critic figure; and according to Skorecki, ‘Daney already knew it all. He even knew by heart the lessons that Agel had not yet given.’ (And this we believe, too.)

By 1963, Skorecki (who often went under a fake name) and Daney had their own little magazine going, Faces of Cinema. Skorecki collected autographs from famous people (such as his revered movie stars) at the time, but he is quick to distinguish this from the grubby pack signature-hunting of our time: it was, he tells us, ‘a more solitary and clandestine activity than it is today’. Skorecki and Daney travelled to America as intrepid cinephile explorers and interviewed Sam Fuller, Raoul Walsh, George Cukor and other greats of the classic era. Fifteen years after that period, when Daney was the editor of Cahiers du cinéma, he recalled a kind of nightmarish primal scene from those years:

When I was a kid, I had a severe grandfather. He had two phalanx missing from a work accident, and his white hair was cut very straight. He was the kind of good man who terrorises the brats running through his house, by his manners and his principles. My grandfather was the last of an old race. A man of ground and earth, who fought in World War I and was exempted from WWII because he was a father of seven. More than this, he was a religious man; his whole life was built upon a world now gone. God and duty.

My grandfather, in this way, is (was) Louis Skorecki. Skorecki has no God to believe in, but he has Cinema. And he is a man of duty. Skorecki does much more than simply write about cinema. He weeps it.

Does he know too much? Because he knows more about ‘cinema’ (the quotes are there out of respect to how he writes the word) than anybody I know. He is the Jiminy Cricket, the consciousness of a Cinema that – they say, he says – once existed. He is the last man to think about this pure Cinema that we – we who are born somewhat later, who are drowned in the mass marketing society of new capitalism – have trouble imagining. What the hell is this ‘cinema’?

You could answer, ‘Just go and watch those movies he talks about’. But I know, I know very well, and Skorecki knows all too well (this is why he weeps and wails), that I will never see the same movie as he. It is not the movies that are gone, it is far, far worse than that: we have lost the ability to read them, to see them, to ‘get’ them. At least, that is what I read Skorecki saying, between his lines.

We, the brats that run through his legs as he reads in his big armchair: we respect Skorecki, we gaze upon him with frightened eyes when he speaks with his grave voice. We are a little ashamed that we did love The School of Rock, Starship Troopers, even Herzog and Terrence Malick. But can we say that we understand him? And worse, that we dare intend to follow any of the old man’s groanings? What did you do when your old man told you not to smoke?

Skorecki writes only this tiny TV column. That is the only way for him to give you, every day or so, a real tour of his universe. TV is the cinema’s gravedigger, but also its archaeologist. This TV chronicle of the film-of-the-day helps him to write, bitch, weep, get angry about ‘his’ great movies. What is this ‘pure’ cinema, these ‘great’ movies or directors, this pure Platonic idea of an ideal ‘cinema’? Did it ever exist? Any more than the Platonic idea of a washing machine? Is it all just an invention out of the desperate brain of the Last Mohican?

In every diner in town, it's the same old story. He goes on and on about his war stories. Or rather, his guerrilla stories. Because ‘cinema’ died in 1955 (the year of Moonfleet) – he knows it, don't even bother arguing – and those who fight for him now are like those Japanese soldiers they forgot on an island somewhere, who never heard about the peace agreement. They keep the faith overtime. Aren't they pathetic? But more than that: aren't they beautiful?