![]() ![]() This, in a way, is the role of the screen- to practice a kind of hypnotism on the public and enable a large number of people to dream the same dream together. He could make his audience see a marvelous show, and moreover could order them not to forget it on waking. I have often thought that it would be not only economical but admirable if a fakir were to hypnotize an entire auditorium. But it is a first-class vehicle of ideas and of poetry that can take the viewer into realms that previously only sleep and dreams had led him to. The danger with films is that we get used to seeing them without paying the same attention we would pay to a play or a book. At those times, I forced myself to condemn my own judgment and to tell myself that if the film wanted it that way to begin with, it must have had its reasons, or that reason had nothing to do with it. “Either what I’m seeing doesn’t mean anything, or else it means something different from what I am seeing, and that something different may be hiding a symbolic meaning.” For instance, while in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt the realistic actions, through the intervention of the hero’s imagination, sweep the play along with a procession of symbols and political allusions, my film, though at times it may be reminiscent of Peer Gynt, differs from it in that the mysterious actions that it presents are supposed to correspond to the ceremony of another world, but in fact correspond to nothing in our world, and above all, in my mind, to nothing that I wish to talk about on film.Often, while making the film, I understood so little of what I was producing that I was tempted to call it absurd and to cut it out. “I don’t understand, therefore it must be a symbol,” is a typically French way of thinking. When a Frenchman no longer understands he never asks himself if it is necessary to understand-he either gets angry or he takes refuge in symbols. This film may be the first attempt at transmuting words into acts, at organizing these acts instead of organizing the words of a poem, a syntax of images instead of a story accompanied by words. And I flatter myself that, thanks to my own long-ago research, I am no longer the only archeologist of my darkness. The progress that interests me is of a different, interior kind. Technical progress has now brought that career within everyone’s reach. This is why I am abandoning the career of filmmaker. On the contrary, they are able to find their way unafraid or else with an adorable childish fear. But, looking back I am convinced that there is quite a considerable public who wish to go beyond the plot and do not try to flee the obscure. I later orchestrated this method with the film Orpheus. Exegesis, which is a Muse, is still examining it, and the psychoanalyst is discovering what the shadowy part of me unknowingly expressed long ago. ![]() My first attempt of this kind was The Blood of a Poet, and that old film is still puzzling people everywhere. In short, it is Cartesian by means of anti-Cartesianism. It brings into play a form of logic that reason does not recognize. The film disobeys dead rules, paying homage to all who wish to remain free. In addition, it is realistic, if realism means a detailed painting of the intrigues of a universe that is personal to every artist and is totally unrelated to what we are used to accepting as reality. This film has nothing to do with dreams except that it borrows the rigorous illogicality of dreams, their way of giving during the night, a kind of freshness to the falsehoods of the day that is dulled by routine. (I have said in The Potomak that if a housewife were given a literary work of art to rearrange, the end result would be a dictionary.) The film offers the viewer hieroglyphics that he can interpret as he pleases so as to quench his inquisitive thirst for Cartesianism. The Testament of Orpheus is simply a machine for creating meanings. The sentry of his mouth has fallen into a deep and imprudent sleep, and words escape that do not know the password. Aman who dozes, his mouth half open, in front of a wood fire, lets slip some secrets from that night of the human body that is called the soul, over which he is no longer master. ![]()
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