Writing Cinema, Thinking Cinema ...

Víctor Erice

It was like this - through writing - that one day I began to think about cinema, and discovered another way of prolonging its vision, of realising it. It was in the summer of 1959, after having seen The 400 Blows at the San Sebastian Film Festival. At the end of the screening, I came out onto the street, moved. And that same night I felt the need to put into words the ideas and feelings that had been awoken in me by François Truffaut’s images. It was the first time that such a thing had happened to me. The years have passed and, though I have been able to shoot a few films, I continue to write every now and then.

I think that among the arts, cinema is the least known. Its history is generally ignored, and so is, above all, its real nature. As cinema is the most secret of all artistic languages, it is also the least understood. For some time, to show an interest in its essence meant, in one way or another, to propose the question once raised by André Bazin: what is cinema? Why is it then that we sense today that this question, and the reflection that accompanies it, seems ever rarer and more improper, out of place even among professionals? When one tries to find explanations for this fact, one can speak, depending on the cases, of ignorance, intellectual laziness, or plain conformity. But in the end these motives do not seem to say it all; they give the impression of silencing the simplest explanation, one that could be stated in the following way: it makes no sense to inquire into what cinema is, since it not only lacks a future, but rather, in a certain way, has already ceased to exist; instead, what we must speak of is the Audiovisual.

If, to quote Louis Lumière, ‘cinema is an invention without a future’, and if that future belongs to others, does it make any sense to continue asking about the essence of what was once dubbed the seventh art? Both conservatives and apocalyptically minded individuals will agree on this point. And nevertheless, in the end, if we want to know what cinema may today be, why not start by asking about what cinema has been, about that which we once thought it was, and about what it truly was? We are dealing with a horizon that is larger than it seemed at first glance, because reviewing that past leads us to consider two histories, which are so intimately tied that they do in fact constitute a single history: the history of Cinema and the history of the twentieth century.

We did know it, without a doubt, though perhaps we forgot: ‘Cinematography, art of the Century’. This is precisely what was once said of cinema when, in a gesture not exempt from bad faith, justice was sought by virtue of bestowing upon cinema all the privileges conferred by social recognition. Never, not even at that solemn moment, did we imagine that with the passing of years cinema would become an essential element of our memory, the container capable of holding the images that best reflect the human experience of the century that has just died. How could we not find in that gaze that we project backwards, suspended in the air, the figure of the angel of melancholy! It is, in some way, inevitable. Since that single history, that of cinema and the twentieth century, is confused, irremediably, with our own biography. I am referring to the people of my generation, born in the time of silence and ruin that followed our civil war. Orphans, real or symbolic, were adopted by cinema. It offered us an extraordinary consolation, a sense of belonging to a world: precisely that which, paradoxically, Communication, in its present state of maximum development, does not offer.

Cinema nowadays, since it is based on technical reproducibility and universal dissemination, features accelerated by the effects of video and television (both capable of multiplying these aspects ad infinitum); cinema as product and nothing more than product (according to the rules of the Market – more unrelenting than ever, to the extent that it has accomplished the alienation of the notion of the author), is merely allowed, socially and on a global scale, by the established powers, a sole destiny: a destiny proper to the entertainment industry [la industria del espectáculo]. It is for this reason that, at the present crossroads, cinema may have no alternative other than to fall back on itself so that it may, once it has assumed its solitude, affirm itself in its dignity: a dignity conferred onto it by virtue of being the last of the artistic languages invented by man. This is its differentiating quality, what truly distinguishes it from other audiovisual communication media.

1. Jean Louis Schfer, L’homme ordinarie du cinéma (Cahiers du cinéma/Gallimard, 1980).

2. Jean-Luc Godard, on-screen inscription in Histoire(s) du cinéma, section 2B.