Godard with the Fedayeen (L'EXPRESS, July 1970)

Interview with Michel Garin
Translated by Jonathan Mackris
First published in L’Express (27 July 1970); republished in Des années Mao aux années 80 (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 74-76

Ici et ailleurs (Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976)

The following is an interview with Jean-Luc Godard about his then-upcoming project on the Palestinian revolution, produced by Fatah. The project would undergo several changes, and the footage would eventually be repurposed in collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville as ICI ET AILLEURS (1976). This interview sheds some light on Godard's initial intentions for the project. A substantial historical account of this project was written by Rula Shawan for Senses of Cinema in 2022. - JM

L’Express: How did you get the idea to film in Amman?

Godard: The film was commissioned by the Central Committee for the Palestinian Revolution. It’s an Arab film, financed by Arabs. The idea to make it came to me after contacting some Palestinians and Frenchmen.

How did you conceive of the film?

As a Frenchman, as a film on the Arabs that was never made during the Algerian war. A film on the Arab world, which was for a long time colonized by the French and which still is, since in France a large part of the workforce is still made up of Arabs and Africans. Coming here to film isn’t to give lessons, but to receive them from people who are ahead of us. I’m trying to use my technical knowledge to express the ideas of the Palestinian revolution. 

What will the film’s title be?

The Methods of Thought and Struggle in the Palestinian Revolution. [1] It will be a political film, or more accurately a political report given in Arabic and dubbed according to broadcast requirements.

Is it a political film?

We’re not seeking sensational images. All of the sensational images were filmed by the American television channels, CBS and ORTF. We’re trying to perform a political analysis of the Palestinian revolution. We were never trained how to present political images. We’re just starting to figure it out. This film has two aims: (1) to help the people who, in one way or another, fight against imperialism in their country; (2) to present a new genre of film. A kind of political brochure. 

Could you explain what you mean by the term “political brochure”?

Our aim is not to show images, but the relationships between images. At this moment, the film becomes political because these relationships are in line with the political line of the unified command of the Palestinian revolution. In order to make it, it needs time. The Palestinians are in a state of protracted people’s war. There's no reason why the film shouldn't take its time as well. 

What difficulties have you encountered?

The difficulty came from the fact that it isn’t a film made out of political sympathy, but as a result of political discussion. Members of the Palestinian resistance participated in the making. It’s one of the aspects of their mission. The film was discussed regularly. 

Will we see the Palestinian leaders?

We’ll see some of them.

Will you talk about the internal difficulties that have emerged between the different movements?

We will speak about them, but we won’t present them as rivals like the imperialist press does. 

Has the recent crisis between Jordanians and Palestinians had repercussions on the preparation for your film? [2]

It helped to clarify things. We’re studying the methods of thought and struggle in the Palestinian revolution. The originality of this revolution inspires fear in the existing regimes in the Middle East and, in turn, their American and Russian protectors. 

Some have reproached you for working solely with Fatah, the most powerful organization.

During the last plot, the bourgeois press said plenty about the other organizations. Not enough has been said about Fatah.

From a cinematic point of view, what’s interesting about this project?

The cinema is one of the domains where imperialism is the most powerful. Until now, it has been neglected as a means of political expression. We believe we have to use it if we have the possibility.

Translator’s Notes

[1] Later, the film’s title would be Jusqu’à la victoire (“Until Victory”). Uncompleted, the footage was later repurposed in collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville into Ici et ailleurs (1976).

[2] The interviewer is referring to the conflicts between the Kingdom of Jordan and the PLO following the Six-Day War. Two months after this interview was published, these skirmishes would culminate in Black September, in which the Jordanian Armed Forces under the leadership of King Hussein killed several thousand Palestinians living in Jordan.

Heiny Srour introduces LEILA WA AL ZIAP (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 29 June 2023)

 The following is a transcript of Heiny Srour’s introduction to the screening of LEILA WA AL ZIAP (1984) that took place on 29 June 2023 at Il Cinema Ritrovato XXXVII in Bologna, Italy. The screening was preceded by the short film LES FEMMES PALESTINIENNES (Jocelyne Saab, 1973) and was programmed by festival director Cecilia Cenciarelli. [JM]

A couple of days ago, Thierry Frémaux said that you should never screen a film at four o’clock or three o’clock – it’s the biology. So, you defied the biology and you still came! I feel very flattered. 

You will notice that I’m wearing a Syrian dress. It’s black because I’m mourning the dozens or, rather, the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Syria, the place where I shot some of the most beautiful scenes of LEILA AND THE WOLVES. It is embroidered because I hope that Syria will go back to its former splendor. Yesterday, Wim Wenders was saying that he learned most from his defeat. The Syrian people have been flatly defeated, after so many years of suffering and so much destruction of their country. So, I hope that they will bounce back and that they move forward, as much forward creatively as Wim Wenders himself went.

Concerning LEILA AND THE WOLVES, it’s coming back home in some ways, because the idea strangely enough started when I was presenting THE HOUR OF LIBERATION [1974] at the Pesaro Film Festival. An Italian feminist came and told me, “Hey, come and see this monument. It’s all about the martyrs of the resistance against fascism, and there are only men. But women played an important role.” And it was very much what I was experiencing after having made a PhD in comparative study in the Sorbonne. And in, you know… the Algerian women have been very much mediatized and after that they were forgotten and their sacrifices went down the drain. 60 and 70 years after independence, it’s the same. And the Palestinian revolution was taking the same path of using women’s energy, just for the men to take power more quickly. It was the opposite of what I had filmed in Dhofar, the social experiment I filmed in Dhofar in the documentary THE HOUR OF LIBERATION, because the [Popular] Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf did exactly the same – talking to women, massive conscious raising, we liberate women here and now and we don’t wait for victory. It was the opposite in the Algerian and the Palestinian revolution, and the Lebanese national movement. According to people who make women’s film festivals, [LEILA AND THE WOLVES] is the only one so far which examines 80 years of women’s participation, that looks at 80 years of history from a feminist point of view in various situations: insurrection in a town struggle, general strike in the town, a massacre, civil war – a variety of situations where women give their blood and their energy and get nothing. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t participate, but which mean that you should put your condition and insist that the women’s liberation agenda is put here and now before our participation starts, and this is never done, unfortunately.

How did I manage to shoot this film without being shot? I don’t know, it’s a mystery to me. [Claps in the room.] We nearly got killed many times, many many times. And even, you know, in scenes that look very innocent. There is a scene where you see no faces, you just see windows. My cameraman nearly got killed, you know, the bullet came here. [Points in front of her head.] I mean, it could have come here, and I don’t know what I would have said to his family. Because shooting at dusk in Beirut is extremely dangerous. And, you know, in the final scene as well, it’s very dangerous. We nearly got shot in Syria also, all the crew nearly got machine gunned by the Syrian police who had mistaken us for the Muslim Brotherhood, who were demonstrating near us, thinking we were terrorists. So anyway, we nearly got killed a great many times, and thank goodness everyone came out alive. 

You will see in this film – something very important to me – is that patriarchy also oppressed men. Not just women, but men also, although it’s quite hidden and it’s not talked about. And it prevents men to fulfill their potential. I would like to say here that, you know, women under patriarchy are terribly… I mean, remarkable women are totally forgotten. I saw recently a serial film about the space conflict. Now, there is a lot of footage about the charm of Yuri Gagarin, the first one, his charming smile, his tour around the world. But, I mean, he was an officer of the Red Army! Valentina Tereshkova, who made a lot of noise in those days and was nominated for women of the year, came from… you know, she had much more merit. She was a textile worker; she wasn’t in the army. She was a textile worker and she became the first space pioneer after Yuri Gagarin. Another thing which horrified me recently - I saw a series of films on Vietnam, and I shot a film about the women of Vietnam. Now, there wasn’t a word in this series about a woman of genius, General [Nguyen Thi] Dinh. General Dinh was an illiterate woman who made her class with the Viet Cong – she learned read and write – and she was the first general of the twentieth century. In those days, Ho Chi Minh didn’t want to give them weapons because he wanted to build socialism in North Vietnam. So, she organized the “Long Haired Army”, made of women, and she liberated the first province of [Southern] Vietnam. And she started with seven old, rusted guns and defeated ten thousand men fully armed with tanks and planes. And that’s extraordinary, to change completely what is called military art – I hate the word military art, but I mean, with seven old rusted guns, she defeated ten thousand men fully armed with heavy machinery. Not a word about her. And it just gives you an idea of just how much patriarchy could be venomous. 

And that’s why my gratitude goes to the CNC, the French National Cinema Center, which is restoring women’s films and preventing them from sinking into oblivion. My gratitude goes to Béatrice de Pastre and Simone Appleby and all the team who restored the film. I really thank them from the depths of my heart, for saving for history two of my films. Thank you very much.

Tom Luddy and the Pacific Film Archive (CAHIERS DU CINÉMA, December 1978)

Serge Toubiana
Translated from the French by Jonathan Mackris
Originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, n. 295 (December 1978), 25-26

Tom Luddy (1943-2023) served as director of the Pacific Film Archive throughout the 1970s, during which he oversaw the transformation of the newly-founded cinematheque into a world-class – and world famous – home for cinema. Following his death in February 2023, the PFA (now BAMPFA) will hold a six-week series commemorating his influence on Bay Area film culture, “Ambassador of Cinema: Tom Luddy’s Lasting Influence at BAMPFA”, from June 1-July 15. In honor of this series, I am translating the two-part profile of Tom Luddy and the PFA from the December 1978 issue of Cahiers du cinéma. In this first part, editor-in-chief Serge Toubiana contextualizes the PFA within American film culture as a foil to “the cultural provincialism that surrounds Hollywood,” echoing of the critique of Hollywood seen in Cahiers throughout the seventies, most famously in the collaborative essay on Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln. The second part, to be released later, features a long interview with Luddy. – JM

What is the Pacific Film Archive? Who is Tom Luddy?

The PFA is the only cinematheque worthy of the name on the west coast of the United States, located next to the famous university in Berkeley fifteen minutes from downtown San Francisco.

The influence of the PFA goes beyond California alone. It extends through all of (cinephile) America, for which this cinematheque is a sort of model, reaching all the way to Europe – the East as well as the West. Indeed, how many European filmmakers (but also African, Middle-Eastern, and others as well) haven’t made the voyage – or should we say the pilgrimage, since they like to come back – to Berkeley, with their films, for tributes or retrospectives! 

Two reasons can help explain its influence and fame:

1. The PFA is the only location in the US, outside of New York, where it is possible for an American to see films that depart a bit from the conventional – and limited – Hollywood market. It is the only place where it is possible to see films that are rejected, both for commercial reasons but above all for reasons that have to do with the conception of cinema that reigns there, that of Hollywood cinema.

I should add, so as to not offend anyone, that there are cinephiles in multiple cities in the United States whose activities consist for the most part in programming films made outside of Hollywood, especially from Europe, in independent circuits or at universities. The major question is this: why doesn’t Hollywood preserve the memory of its cinematic past? In Los Angeles itself, there are attempts to break down the cultural provincialism that surrounds Hollywood with the Fox Theatre in Venice (a repertory theater), the annual FILMEX festival, which imports a number of foreign films, or the UCLA Film Archive run by Robert Rosen. Yet nowhere, in my eyes, is there an infrastructure as welcoming as the archives in Berkeley. 

Located an hour from Los Angeles by plane, the PFA functions a bit like a supplement to Hollywood, that extra something that puts to shame the cinematic protectionism we see in L.A., where the world’s most “powerful” and influential cinema is made. 

To use a metaphor, I will say that Hollywood resembles a factory without product support or stock. Discourse (on the films that it makes) and memory (rewatching old films) exists, but it exists elsewhere, separated from the conditions of film production. Hence the impossibility, even for us in France, of carrying out an informed reflection on Hollywood. 

However, in Los Angeles itself, there is an entire editorial machine to accompany and celebrate Hollywood cinema: books galore, sold at low prices, on the great works, on auteurs known throughout the world, on stars. This machine valorizes the myth, perpetuates the mythology of the place, the studios, the cinema, a little like the way it’s done at Disneyland. Hollywood reconstructs itself each year on the rubble of its fading past (Where are the copies? Who can see them?) without any mourning haunting the entrepreneurial spirit of the managers and producers who wield power today.

However, in Los Angeles itself, there is an entire editorial machine to accompany and celebrate Hollywood cinema: books galore, sold at low prices, on the great works, on auteurs known throughout the world, on stars. This machine valorizes the myth, perpetuates the mythology of the place, the studios, the cinema, a little like the way it’s done at Disneyland. Hollywood reconstructs itself each year on the rubble of its fading past (Where are the copies? Who can see them?) without any mourning haunting the entrepreneurial spirit of the managers and producers who wield power today.

Hollywood certainly remains the only place in the world where cinema is still strongly linked to industry (if we set aside the phenomena of mass (sub)culture such as Indian cinema or the cinema of Hong Kong) and the imperatives of universality – commercial and genre – imposed by a mass entertainment industry. To put it simply, for the most part cinema is not revered as an Art. And at the same time, Hollywood is universal. Its films, by their influence, have conquered the world cinema market. This universality of American cinema only exists in one sense, that of exportation: American films are exported, and exported with great success. Conversely, the universality of cinema – an art confronted by all cultures, becoming itself part of these cultures in a multiplicity of films, genres, languages, and nations – does not find its way to Hollywood. A well-known phenomenon of unequal exchange: we export but we do not import. Films are not equal before the marketplace of spectators – this is the general law, but it is particularly striking in the United States. 

Tom Luddy at work. Photo taken by Serge Toubiana.

2. The other reason has undoubtedly to do with Tom Luddy, the indefatigable curator and head of programming, who tries to make Berkeley a hub for cinema. Films come, one after another, to meet their audience, and filmmakers get to know the small community of American filmmakers based in San Francisco.

If there is someone who understands the spirit of Langlois, it is Luddy. The principle is simple: show everything and censor nothing. Be in search of something rare, something forgotten, something at risk of disappearing with the destruction of innumerable copies of films that occurs every year. In this way, we can rediscover something of the universality of cinema that travels across multiple films, their diverse origins, their different languages, and their intermingled nationalities.

In the interview that follows, Luddy explains why this enterprise is possible in San Francisco, where multiple national and linguistic communities live together. 

Jean-Louis, or the Good Days: Interview with Jean Narboni (CAHIERS DU CINÉMA, August 2022)

Interview with Jean Narboni
Translated from French with additional annotations by Jonathan Mackris
Interview by Marcos Uzal, published in Cahiers du cinéma, n. 789, July-August 2022

The editorial staff at Cahiers under Rivette, from left to right: Jean-Andre Fieschi, Jean Narboni, Philippe Carles (from Jazz Magazine), Jean-Louis Comolli, and Jacques Bontemps (1965)

Jean Narboni knew Jean-Louis Comolli for several years before their respective entry to Cahiers du cinéma, and far from Paris. When Jacques Rivette took over as head of the magazine in 1963, he made them his closest collaborators. Comolli became editor in chief in 1965 and Narboni co-editor in chief in 1968. Thus, in evoking his friend, the latter likewise revisits an essential period in the history of Cahiers. (Marcos Uzal)

From Algeria to Cahiers

Jean-Louis and I got to know each other in Algiers in 1958, en pleine guerre. The blows of friendship were immediate. We frequented the ciné-club directed by Barthélémy Amengual, a major programmer and author of some important work. As a communist, he was very focused on realist cinema and that of the countries of the East, which did not prevent him from taking his disciples in the opposite direction by writing a memorable text on Vertigo. Within the ciné-club, Jean-Louis and I were the “cahieristes” – we read Cahiers, though only understanding one out of every three articles since they often spoke of films we had not seen. But we loved the magazine. Amengual was open enough to allow us to propose and host series on Tourneur and Nicholas Ray, among others. 

On the pretext of wanting to pursue his studies, which he never completed, Jean-Louis left Algeria in 1961 for Paris, one year before me. He got to know the people at Cahiers at the Cinémathèque on the rue d’Ulm and joined it under Rohmer. In the beginning, he was completely in agreement with the positions of the latter and also of Jean Douchet, both their best (Hitchcock and Hawks) and their most debatable ones (Antonioni or Buñuel). One of the first texts by Jean-Louis, “The Ironical Howard Hawks” [1], attests to this. When Rivette became editor in chief, following the conflict we all know [2], he asked Jean-Louis and myself to become editors, having accepted our first articles. And when he left to make La Religieuse, Jean-Louis became editor in chief. Jean-André Fieschi (a Rohmerian defector), followed by Jacques Bontemps became editors. The team was then reinforced with collaborators who, when we judge it today, are not insignificant: Téchiné, Kané, Biette, Bonitzer, Claude Ollier, Daney, Eisenschitz, Sylvie Pierre, Jacques Aumont, etc. I am convinced Rivette had been impressed, among other qualities, with Jean-Louis’s enormous work ethic. He was able to be interested in a thousand things at once, without one harming or repressing the other. He was notably passionate about jazz. In Algiers, he met Philippe Carles as well, who later became editor in chief of Jazz Magazine, published by Filipacchi, our majority shareholder at the time. Jean-Louis wrote a dictionary on jazz with him, along with their famous Free Jazz, Black Power (1971).

The Red Years at Cahiers

When Jean-Louis became editor in chief, he did not impose a position. He had nothing Jupiterian about him (he was closer to Bacchus), nor did he have a taste for verticality: the work was totally collegial. The political evolution of the magazine was progressive, contrary to the legend of a “coup” after May ‘68. It was Rivette who initiated Cahiers’ turn to the left. We see this beginning with n. 138, where, in an entry in the petit dictionnaire titled “162 New French Filmmakers,” he wrote, under Rohmer and without a signature, a note on October à Paris, the film on the massacre of Algerians in 1961. [3] 

I also want to point out that the account given of the Comolli-Narboni period, from 1965-1973, is often very unfair (partial and incomplete, because it is uninformed or, frankly, malicious). The tree of a year and a half of drift, or of Maoist vertigo or delirium (let’s say 1972 to the first half of 1973) obscures the very rich forest of the prior seven years. For example, in the four lines of her homage to Jean-Louis for Libération, the excellent Camille Nevers does not fail to recall with pleasure the song “Mao-mao” from La chinoise. Seven crucial years in the history of the magazine, first in terms of re-evaluations of auteurs not as popular with the Cahiers jaunes, but especially in terms of discoveries. Jean-Louis wrote often on John Ford, whose immensity we assessed during a retrospective at the Cinémathèque française, followed assiduously by Rivette. [4] His great final film, 7 Women, rejected by most seasoned Fordians, was the subject of two articles, one by Jean-Louis and the other by me. Between 1965 and 1971 we had the privilege to live in a moment that will never be reproduced, where multiple layers of the history of cinema, multiple generation, coexisted: the final films of the pioneers (Chaplin, Ford, Dreyer, Walsh, Renoir…); the Bergman generation, Antonioni at full speed, Bresson and Rouch of course; and last but not least the young cinemas that have sprung up all over the world with filmmakers such as Bellocchio, Bertolucci, Olmi, Bene, Skolimowski, Jancso, Iosseliani, Tanner, Perrault, Forman, Chytilova, Ousmane Sembene, Brault, Groulx, Makavejev, Glauber and Paolo Rocha, Ôshima, Imamura, Yoshida, Hani, Moullet, Garrel, Eustache, Kramer, etc. This is to say nothing of Straub-Huillet, and there we were really alone. Our greatest omission, and I cannot explain it, was Fassbinder, but apart from him I don’t think we missed much. It’s in this period as well that Pasolini, Metz, Barthes wrote texts that made history. 

At the end of ’68, rather than devote the Christmas issue to the militant mediocrities filmed during the movement that we were pressured to promote, we decided to devote a special issue to Dreyer. And not just to be contrarian, but because we really considered him to be a politically important filmmaker, beside his genius. The first version of Jean-Louis’ editorial was even titled “Dreyer, leftist?” (I am not sure about the question mark!) Over this period, a huge number of texts signed by Jean-Louis, such as the series “Technique and Ideology,” were the product of his irreducible inclination as a theorist. Whatever the subject or film addressed, he tried to extract a general view on cinema. I admit that I prefer texts like “Two Fictions on Hate”, on To Be or Not to Be (n. 288), or the one on La Marseillaise and the king’s “excessive body” (n. 277), less obviously ambitious but more concrete, direct, vibrant.

A Romantic Anarchist

Later on, Cahiers defended La Cecilia. The film was in step with the aftermath of 1968 and fervently depicted the realization and failure of a utopian community, a theme dear to Jean-Louis. In 1981, when I was in charge of publishing, I devoted a special edition to his second feature, L’ombre rouge, with the cartoonist Ted Benoit. After the failure of Balles perdues (1983), he abandoned the field of fiction filmmaking and cut himself off from the world of cinema entirely to focus on his important documentary work and his books. He became immovable, in a way, and sometimes paid the price for it. The notion of a “grand family of cinema,” for example, filled him with horror. He remained a romantic anarchist, very active and very militant. He was less interested by what was released in theaters, but he continued to watch and rewatch many films. He was always awake and alert – even while sick, tired, exhausted – to his final day. The evening before he entered the coma, he spoke to me over the phone and asked to meet the week after, telling me “I have just added the word ‘end’ to a few pages.” The text, still to be published, is titled “Waiting for the Good Days.” [5] The class…

Interview by Marcos Uzal in Paris, 11 June 2022

[1] “H.H., ou l’ironique,” Cahiers du cinéma, n. 160 (1964), pp. 49-52. Translated as “The Ironical Howard Hawks.” Trans. Norman King. In Cahiers du cinéma, 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood, ed. Jim Hillier. London: Routledge, 1986, pp. 181-186.

[2] Narboni is referring to the ousting of Rohmer from the position of editor in chief in June 1963 by Rivette, aided by Truffaut, Doniol-Valcroze, and several of the younger staff, owing to the swing of the magazine to the far right under Rohmer’s stewardship.

[3] In his biography of Rohmer, Antoine de Baecque writes that the inspiration for Rivette’s capsule review of Octobre à Paris (Cahiers n. 138, December 1962, pg. 83) came from his belief that Cahiers was, under Rohmer’s leadership, indifferent to racism and to the Algerian War. The full text of Rivette’s review reads:

Réalisé sous l'égide du Comité Maurice-Audin, ce film est avant tout un irremplaçable témoignage sur la condition des Nord-Africains en France, et sur leur combat durant l'hiver 61-62: un pathétique reportage au bidonville de Nanterre, quelques interviews (en français) de travailleurs musulmans, une longue discussion (en arabe) entre responsables locaux du F.L.N., enfin un compte rendu, par force partiel, des grandes manifestations d'octobre 1961 et de leurs suites, policières et politiques — tels sont les éléments-clefs de ce document capital pour l'histoire de notre temps.

"Made under the aegis of the Committee Maurice-Audin, this film is before anything else an invaluable testimony on the condition of North Africans in France, and on their struggle during the winter of ’61-62: a simple report in the slums of Nanterre; some interviews (in French) with Muslim workers; a long discussion (in Arabic) between local leaders of the FLN; and finally a record, partially by force, of the enormous manifestations of October 1961 and their aftermath, for the police and for politics – these are the key elements of this essential document of the history of our time."

[4] In an interview with Daniel Fairfax, quoted in the following passage, Narboni expands on the impact of this retrospective: “If there is one figure, however, who can claim ultimate responsibility for Cahiers’ change in position on Ford, then it is Rivette. In spite of the fact that Rivette never wrote a single word in Cahiers on Ford, Narboni explains that the journal’s “hyper-Fordian turn came about under Jacques Rivette.” The key moment in this transformation took place during Langlois’ Ford retrospective: “I remember that after the screening of The Wings of Eagles, we spoke with Rivette about the film in front of the cinémathèque, and we were absolutely awestruck—it’s a sublime film. And after that, Cahiers became extremely Fordian.” The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma, Vol. 1, pg. 100

[5] This book, En attendent les beaux jours, would be published in January 2023 by Éditions Verdier, Comolli's publisher for over a decade.

Casting out the eights: John Ford's SEVEN WOMEN

Jean Narboni

Translated from French by John Caughie and Norman King

Originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, n. 182, September 1966; translated in Theories of Authorship, edited by John Caughie (London and New York: Routledge, 1981), 117-120.

Narboni can be associated with Comolli not only as editor of Cahiers but also as representative of the magazine's development away from the politique, towards a more complex view of the author as a problematic figure, the site of contradictions and repressions. Seven Women had been an almost universal disappointment, even to critics sympathetic to Ford (the exception being Andrew Sarris, who defends it as a 'genuinely great film': The John Ford Movie Mystery, p. 184). Narboni's title is "La preuve par huit," a play on the expression la preuve par neuf ('casting out the nines'), a mathematical proof for checking multiplications by a process of adding together the sums of the various digits after eliminating all the nines.  [John Caughie]

If we agree to count Miss Ling as one of the members of what used to be called the 'fair sex', whose number and presence provides John Ford's latest film with its title (and the fact that we are once again dealing with an outsider would seem to be a strong incentive for us to do that), we have to admit that these seven women in fact become eight. Namely: Agatha Andrews, the woman in charge of the mission, concealing beneath an armour of excessive piety a horrific combination of repressed sensuality and deeply felt vacuity; her shadow and ghost, the impalpable Miss Russell, smoky grey and got up later on, when rebellion and disrespect win her over, in a ridiculously oversized raincoat; Emma Clark, the young missionary, the object of every kind of tenderness, even the most perturbing; Flora Peter, making the mission vibrate with her continual screaming, in which the natural nervousness of the pregnant woman is in competition with the terrifying but thrilling prospect of being attacked by Mongol marauders; Dr. Cartwright (Anne Bancroft), tender, coarse, concealing her wounds, the archetype of the positive Fordian character; then two English women pursued by outlaws, Miss Bins and Jane Argent; lastly, Miss Ling.

Miss Ling is first of all the outsider, the absent one, everywhere a displaced person. Perhaps, we are told, a descendent of deposed Chinese princes, she accompanies the two English women as far as the mission. Silent, unseeing, isolated from the seven women, she waits. When Anne Bancroft says to Sue Lyon, 'You are the only one who can get away from here', the framing brings together the blond missionary and the impassive Chinese woman who is no more concerned or animated than a table or a plate. Then the Mongols arrive - and they are even more anti-Chinese than anti-American. Torn away from a group of which she wasn't really - or wasn't yet - a part, she is now subjected to all kinds of humiliation, demeaned, scoffed at, mauled, reduced to the position of slave and object.

One frequently finds, you may say, in Ford's films situations like this, in which two civilizations, two hostile, or at least foreign, racial universes are in conflict, interweave or interpenetrate: whites and Indians, Europeans and Polynesians, westerners and orientals. With, between the two, a whole interplay of exchanges, of difficult adoptions, of abductions and retrievals; a whole series of transfers and transitions, from exclusions to false recognitions, from treacherous reunions to repeated captures. Whites forced to become Indians, restored to their own civilization only to be rejected by the very people who sought their release (The Searchers, Two Rode Together); or the free choice and adoption of another world, of a new homeland (Donovan's Reef). It would be inviting, and much too easy, in that case, claiming to know Ford, to label Miss Ling as the classic type of the victim of racial ostracism, banished and despised. The diabolical structuring of the film, by declaring her 'out of play', makes it impossible to allocate to her the number Eight and thus to skirt round the problem.

It is simply that, at the opposite pole, and not at the fringes but within the group of women itself, there is Anne Bancroft, representing a second known type of undesirable, for moral rather than ethnic reasons this time; all the more disturbing for being obstinately present and active: an energetic, brutal, outspoken presence, forcibly injected into the lethargic universe of the mission. Unequivocal in her tone of voice, her conduct, her language, tolerated only because of her function, fomenting a feeling of unease, made still more intolerable by her being indispensable. Within the walls of the mission house, doubly isolated by its location and the epidemic, she wreaks salutary havoc, sows healthy devastation.

What is so fundamentally new in Seven Women, what gives this film which seems on the surface to be so calm its 'disturbing' power, its disequilibrium and its controlled instability, its incessant and unpredictable rebounds, is, then, the confrontation of two orders, two types of conflict and situation which are usually kept separate in Ford's other films. Not focusing on one or other character, but effecting between the outsider and the intruder a series of to-ings and fro-ings, of exchanges; passing from the moral to the social order, making them subtly interact and fuse, condemning the two women to the same fate. Being excluded from one group equals being solicited and integrated by the other. Substitution replaces addition; racial discrimination and puritanism reveal the same features of hatred and taboo. Chosen by Tunga Khan - and it is with diabolical skill that Ford gradually reveals that she has been chosen not as a doctor but first and foremost as a woman - seated at the chief's right hand during the circus games, when adorned in oriental costume, Miss - and no longer Dr. - Cartwright creates by her absence a lack in the group. Immediately Miss Ling is handed back. The number Seven is restored by interchangeability. The women are allowed to go free. Anne Bancroft poisons the Mongol and kills herself.

It is perhaps not an exaggeration, then, to see in this single unit, this one number too many, this superfluity that may be thought anodyne, this hardly perceptible surplus, the most developed and most dissimulated form of the excess Ford has always liked to use - and now more than ever - in order to pervert conformity and tranquility to the extent of destroying them. Thus it is astonishing to see how perplexed, not to say disappointed, some of the most resolute Fordians have been, seeing Seven Women as an aberration, an untypical film, contradicting, even, the mythology of its author. No doubt it is one of those works which are at once synthesis and crowning achievement, in which the absolute project of its author is located at the borderline between the excessive and the sublime. Yet all Ford is present, though in a tranquil immoderation. Even the story is not absolutely new: it is enough to cast your mind back to a television programme in which we were told of the misfortunes of two nuns confronted by Chinese bandits. Once again it is a group of people united by the hazards of a journey or condemned to stagnation. Prisoners of the desert or of the high seas,* a group of men or, for the first time, of women, it all comes to the same in the end. (Ford plays all the time, moreover, on sexual ambiguity: the natural status conferred on Anne Bancroft because of her profession, then her hyperfeminization; the schoolteacher mistaken for a preacher, like the whiskey drummer in Stagecoach; Margaret Leighton's ambivalent attraction toward Sue Lyon, etc.). Always the same enclosed cell, here unchangeable, ossified, fusty; an abandoned planet over which Margaret Leighton scurries with her curious walk, like a broken marionette, half scampering, half gliding; an artificial enclave, quite deliberately and pointedly designated as such by the set, swept by arbitrary, violent lighting and moonspots. And the outside, the hostile surroundings, oppressive, without clear features. In the muted opening shots, bristling with hostility and white-hot, an inhuman pattern of relationships reveals its unbearable intensity. A whole series of internal dilapidations is brought into play, the exacerbation of desires, of hates in successive scenes in which militant atheism and blasphemy become intertwined with frigid, repressed or flagrant sexuality. From surreptitious advances to brief moments of painful separation, from violent confrontations to restrained frenzy, the plot moves along towards the resolution of the threat, the materialization of the Enemy. Abstract, archetypal enough for us to be able to acquit Ford of the charge of racism: Arabs, outlaws, Indians, or Mongols, it is less the name attached to this enemy that interests him than the intervention of an external force of whatever kind which, as though secreted from the inside, seems, rather than compromising or interrupting, to bring to an almost salutary end the fraught coexistence of a group of individuals who have reached the extreme point of crisis in their confrontation. In the last scenes, finally, we see the culminating splendor of the great funeral ceremonies of the screen in which, from The Princess Yang Kwei Fei to Europa '51 and from Les Dames du bois de Boulogne to The Naked Kiss, sacrifice, shame, cruelty, and insanity (in this instance of the mise en scène) exchange their sparkling unction. 

*Narboni is referring to The Searchers (French title La Prisonnière du désert) and The Long Voyage Home 

Theatre, Cinema, Audience: LIEBELEI and LOLA MONTES

Frieda Grafe
Translated from the German by Barrie Ellis-Jones
Originally published in Die Zeit, 1968; translated in Ophuls, edited by Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1978), 51-54. 

It is held there are no unacknowledged geniuses so far as film is concerned. Because of the laws of chance which regulate the showing of old films, there now exists an opportunity of revising this prejudice.

Two films have found their way back into cinema programs, into art house programs at least, which have not been available to the public for years. They are two films by the same director, made almost a quarter of a century apart, which, now seen together, give proof of an admirable logical progression, of which those who attended their premieres could have had no idea.

Neither film meant much to them. Liebelei and Lola Montes, the fifth and twenty-second films of Max Ophuls, his last German films, the last before his emigration and the first after his return, which was also the last film he made. They are the best German films of a director who was regarded as French in his native land, as Austrian in France, but who came from Saarbrücken and spoke German for preference all his life long - the man whom French critics called a 'Balzacien', but who preferred to read Balzac in German.

Between Liebelei and Lola Montes there is a gap of twenty-three years and sixteen films: ten French - seven before and three after the war - and, in between, four American ones, one Italian, and one Dutch. Ophuls made his last film in two versions, French and German, but with the same cast. In the one version you can hear Willy Quadflieg speaking French, and in the other Martine Carol speaking German. Peter Ustinov treats both languages as foreign - that is to say, as his own.

"Die Lust am Sehen" ("The Pleasure of Seeing") is the title of one of Ophuls' magazine articles. To quite the same extent, his films both express and demand a pleasure in hearing. For him, as the Russians say about women, it was a case of love reaching him through his ears.

He chose his main actor for Liebelei without having seen him. He had heard his voice over the telephone. 'He spoke clearly and simply. His voice was warm, tangible and impressive. I became a member of an audience, and could see him at the other end of the telephone.' The fact that Wolfgang Liebeneiner spoke with an unmistakably Prussian accent did not prevent Ophuls from having him play an Imperial Austrian lieutenant. And just as little with Lola Montes does an audience wonder why an Irish girl brought up in India should, of all things, speak in a French accent.

For Ophuls language was not a vehicle of predetermined content. He made it carry no messages and did not make it responsible for the past, class or character of the speaker. It is rather that his characters reveal themselves to each other and to the audience in speech in an involuntary, more than deliberate way. 'The highest reaches of the actor's art,' he wrote, 'begin, I believe, at the point where words cease to play a part... I mean that what goes on inside a character, behind the words, is often more powerful than words themselves can be - and sometimes less powerful; that it can sometimes contradict the words, and that dialogue limps along behind emotions. I mean that experience begins long before words and continues long after words.'

Ophuls could - as Josef von Sternberg, the most closely compatible with Ophuls of any film auteur in the world, actually did - have made a film in Japanese without understanding a word of the language. In any case, the language in Lola Montes sounded Japanese to the film's contemporaries. 'You hear, you notice, that someone is speaking. But you are not meant to understand what is being said." So said Friedrich Luft. He meant it in a negative sense: 'Too many experiments! Ophuls is trying to achieve too much. His basic idea falls apart in his hands.'

'There was not much speech, and you could not understand what speech there was. And if you did not understand it, then the quality of the dialogue was such that it would have been better for you not to have understood it. The chief impression was of noises.' That was not written by Luft, but by Ophuls himself, not about Lola Montes, but about the first sound films he saw, and he meant it by no means in a negative sense. 'I saw the screen no longer as the enemy of the theatre, but as the continuation of theatre. And from that evening on I wanted to work in film.'

Ophuls sensed antagonism to theatre in film because he feared the latter's ability to subsume artistic representation into what was represented. He never deviated from this fear. As in his use of speech, so, with his increasingly sophisticated use of the moving camera, with the scenery of studio sets and properties to identify the world of film with that of reality, he fought against the blackmailing of art by reality. For him film was a spectacle, not a document of life. But never from the outset did 'the continuation of theatre' mean for him the preservation of stage plays. It meant making them dynamic.

For Ophuls the stage was no longer an autonomous artistic dream in front of an audience. Stage and stalls were seen as aspects of the same reality. They represented two perspectives which were interchangeable. Ophuls object was to create complicity between actor and audience, at first in a playful way, later in a critical, even polemical way.

Liebelei begins at the opera. The first act of The Abduction from the Seraglio is over. The stage manager is looking out through the cap in the curtains into the auditorium. Perspectives are reversed. Then the great chandelier in the auditorium is switched on, as a sign that the Emperor is coming. The audience rises, turns its back on the stage, and looks up at the Emperor's box, which is now the stage, while the stalls have changed their function for a second time. The visual attention of the audience in the cinema is activated by seeing the people in the stalls first as subject, then as object, then as subject again; the object being first the stage, then the auditorium, and then the Emperor's box.

The first scene of Liebelei is not the only example of how stage and auditorium are reversible and how this relationship continues into the cinema, into the imagination of its audience. The interchange between stage and auditorium became increasingly a stylistic device and a theme in Ophuls' films. In the final scene of Lola Montes the circus audience crowds in front of the cage in which Lola is on show, to lick her hand for a dollar. The camera draws back above their heads, so that for a minute the screen looks like the doorway through which the public is leaving the cinema. Here, clearly, the play with perspectives becomes a means of criticism - criticism of the public and criticism of show business.

Mizzi and Christin, the Viennese girls in Liebelei, snatch the opera glasses out of each other's hands so as to see the Emperor in the flesh. This is shown with sympathetic irony - but to an audience that has seen Lola Montes the two girls must appear related to the crowd of circus-goers. And in them the audience in the cinema must feel itself represented. The interest of the circus audience in Lola is the same as that of film fans in their stars. It is directed at the outward person, not the character, and tends to identification. The view through the opera glasses, which magnify the figure of a supreme ruler, becomes the use of the camera, which completes the process of making the audience into voyeurs. 

In Ophuls memoirs of 1946 his attitude to the audience is still at odds with itself, a product of tradition, but attacked by doubt. 'The theatre [of the Weimar Republic] did not follow the herd. The terrorism of taste by the proletariat did not take place in Germany. On the other hand I do not know whether its audience was always an audience... In the same way as he washed his hands before a meal, so a respectable person would go at least once a week to the theatre. In this stolid fulfillment of duty and cultural reverence he must also have swallowed and even applauded a lot of things that he really did not want to.' When, ten years later and shortly before his death, he was interviewed by François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, he had come to realize that: 'there is practically no such thing as an audience anymore. There is a mass of consumers, that is all. They are no longer individuals, prepared to be receptive; they are just people who turn up to consume and who destroy what they want to consume.'

'I love people en masse as a spectacle, but not as spectators. If I had the resources I should make a film with twenty-thousand actors and show it in a tiny cinema.' Such a statement as this, which his costume designer, Georges Annenkov, recalls in his memoirs, makes one suspect Ophuls of being a supporter of a reactionary ideal of cultural elitism. But his films show the historical bankruptcy of such ideals. 

Ophuls' films are historical films - not because they set out to reconstruct the past (this is precisely what they do not do), but in that they mediate between historical periods. In Lola Montes it is not only the relationship between the present and the past of the characters that is fluid, but even the past in which Ophuls' films appear to be set is open to the present of his audience. The Vienna of Liebelei is not the real, past Vienna of Arthur Schnitzler, so much as the Vienna of the present, which Ophuls first came into contact with in 1926, and of which he wrote: 'I felt as if I had not arrived in a city, but in one of Schnitzler's chapters or one of Raimund's scenes.' And the circus in Lola Montes certainly does not evoke the illusion of nineteenth century America. Instead, one is reminded of Wedekind, whose prologue to the Earth Spirit is imitated by Ustinov. In so far as theatre turns into circus it points forward to the future of show business.

The language of the theatre as a means of conveying ideas is used again here, but as heralding the language of the advertising copywriter. Linguistic anachronisms like 'star' and 'commercial' activate the audience's conception of time just as the travelling shots activate its conception of space. Ophuls' interest in making the film was aroused by reports of the fate of Judy Garland. He shows the young Lola as having an impulsive nature, whose every flash of temperament becomes a piece of successful personal publicity. She abominates advertising, sees herself as an artist, but the circus owner knows that: "it doesn't matter a bit whether she has any talent or not. What matters is something else entirely - personality, audience-impact, and of course, beauty.' For the late bourgeoisie, personality is not something that flourishes unseen. It goes with 'audience-impact.' And beauty does not provoke recognition, but possession. 'I know the men don't come to see her dance. They come to wait for her at the stage door.'

Ophuls encourages his audience to become aware of the present in the past, and to see that established practices had been subject to development. His critique of the present is a critique of a past that had allowed the present to come about. Even as a representative of that past, first as a stage director, then as a film author, he makes both himself and his profession the medium and subject of his critique.

The character of the circus owner, which Peter Ustinov plays in Lola Montes, is at one and the same time a beautiful homage to the pioneers of show business, and an extremely accurate reckoning of accounts with them - by someone who saw himself as a man of the circus.

A Conversation with Raffaello Matarazzo

Bernard Eisenschitz
Translated from Italian by Alexandra Tatiana Pollard
Originally published in Positif, n. 183/4, 1976; translated in Cinegrafie, n. 20, 2007

The following interview is the only one in which Raffaello Matarazzo spoke extensively about his work and his concept of film. Bernard Eisenschitz conducted this interview in March 1964 when he was just a young critic, and it appeared only in 1976, in issue 183/4 of Positif. It was promptly translated in Italian and that same year became part of the first volume of Raffaello Matarazzo. Materiali, published by the Movie Club of Torino. The following is the English translation of a revised and slightly modified version, though basically the same, of that (unsigned) Italian translation.

How did you start directing?

I was a journalist and not interested in film. IN 1929, with the arrival of sound film, I participated in a lot of discussions about the future of film and that is how I ended up meeting people like Camerini and Bragaglia. At the time people were saying that sound film had no future, that it was just some American invention... I remember the last silent film I saw was Asphalt by Joe May, and there were only two or three captions in the entire film. Of course there is always the danger of giving in to too much symbolism, of not being direct enough. 

Anyhow, I met Bragaglia who asked me to write him a screenplay, and so I did. They bought it from me, but it was never shot. I was an assistant for Steinhoff and for Camerini; Camerini really taught me a lot about editing and découpage. Then there were two documentaries that I was not really interested in because I was anti-fascist. But I was very young, and it would have been difficult to say no, they would have asked me for an explanation.

What happened with your first film?

We shot all of Treno popolare [Middle-Class Train] in Orvieto because we did not have the money for a studio. As a result the film was obviously simpler, more truthful and honest. But at the premiere of the film - I remember it was at the Barberini - the audience, who saw these things for the first time, shouted and whistled like I had never seen before: they turned red from blowing so hard through keys, through whatever. I was twenty-three years old and the film is what was later called neo-realism. And so it was a very sad night for me. It was a film that showed people as they were, dressed poorly if they dressed that way. The fascists could not admit to such things because the truth is always the last thing to be said and so they protested against the film. Later on when the film came out in Milan, Filippo Sacchi, who was the critic as "Corriere della Sera," was the first person to defend it. And since we had a small budget, the film ended up recovering all the money we had put into it. It is still my favorite film today (unfortunately there are no copies left of it).* There is another film of mine from before the war that I like: L'avventuriera del piano di sopra [The Adventuress from the Second Floor]. One of the the things I like most about this film is the joke played on censors: you were not allowed to talk about adultery, and, in the last fifteen minutes, I make the audience understand, without saying it, that the man is about to leave his wife for another woman.

Treno Popolare (1933)

Before the war you also wrote plays. Did you become interested in theater because of film or is there no connection between the two?

I cannot say that film brought me to theater, it was different. At a certain point there was something distressing me within that I had to free myself from and I wrote this play Simmetria in ten or fifteen days, just for me. Then one day I showed it to Anton Giulio Bragaglia, the brother of Carlo Ludovico, who was really significant for Italian theater, and he told me he would take it without any changes. In 1959 my friend Franca Dominici, who directed a theater company, asked me to write and this time direct two plays. I would like to direct again in theater, just not stories written by me but modern comedies. With film, however, I feel much more comfortable with my own screenplays.

Did commedia dell'arte influence you at all in your films or in these theatrical works?

Commedia dell'arte is not simply an influence because it is our national form of theater; it is something that has marked everyone. Being influenced by an individual is possible, by Pirandello, but commedia dell'arte is a cultural atmosphere. It is something that corresponds to an Italian reality; the central character is someone who does not know how he will eat the next day, and in Naples, where commedia dell'arte was born, that was something that often happened, even recently.

What are the extensions of commedia dell'arte in the performing arts today in Italy? Eduardo?

I wouldn't say that Eduardo De Filippo is the modern heir of commedia dell'arte. You can fell that his works are entirely written, very structured, that they move toward something. In theater today that atmosphere of improvisatonn can only be seen in Peppino De Filippo, whose work Le metamorfosi di un suonatore ambulante you have seen in Paris; whereas twenty years ago this could still be seen in the cinema with the variety show, today only two or three places in Rome have it. The case of Gassman is a different story. He was a highly regarded dramatic actor; in film he had almost only played traitor roles. One day Monicelli told his producer, to his great surprise, that he wanted Gassman for a comic role in I soliti ignoti [Big Deal on Madonna Street]. It was such a success that Gassman decided to continue; after he did Il mattatore [Love and Larceny] that he had already showed in television, and everyone realized that he was truly an extraordinary actor, able to do everything. In film the only representative of this tradition is undoubtedly Totò.

What was the situation when you shot La fumeria d'oppio [The Opium Den]?

I had spent two years in Spain, and when I came back Rome was foreign to me. I no longer spoke the same language, everything had changed. You cannot imagine what happened in '43 and '44. Going to the middle of Africa and not understanding the language there is normal; but here I was so shocked that I was afraid of reality and I wanted to go as far away as possible making La fumeria d'oppio, then they had me make Catene [Chains] and the whole series. The producer, Lombardo's father, made use of my ability and trade, but the idea for the film and its concept were his. Afterwards, due to the public success of these films, I had to keep going on and only now I have managed to understand a little bit, now that I have seen little by little, through what they have told me about it, of what happened. I am beginning to return to what I was before. I read a lot. I am going back to the classics, the French classics. The 1800's in France were an amazing century. I have here the complete works of Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, I have everything. I am under the impression that our century has forgotten humanism. We are coming towards the end of the century, there is incredible technological progress and, on the other hand, in literature there is nothing comparable to the 1800's in France, Flaubert, Courteline... I have also realized that intellectuals travel a lot less today when everything is possible in less than a day, than in the Middle Ages when a trip from Paris to London really meant something!

Where does your film La risaia [Rice Girl] stand in relation to the period you are talking about?

With La risaia I believe I began to get in touch again with Italy. On the other hand, the beginning was almost a documentary. It was a pleasure to make that film for many reasons: there were between five and six hundred walk-ons to direct who came every morning from the surrounding area by bus or by car; it was my first film shot in CinemaScope and so I had to learn a new technique, with long crane shots without getting too close to the characters. I also tried to make shots that worked with the format, like the one in the love scene when Elsa Martinelli is lying down and Rick Battaglia is seated, a scene that I think is successful in that respect. But I am not sure that it is always a good thing that a format makes you devise new but somewhat forced solutions. I do not think that CinemaScope is an ideal format. Whereas VistaVision is: it is almost the old format, but larger. In short, La risaia was a difficult but exciting film, we did eleven weeks of shooting in the area of Novara, and the film made 600 million despite that Minerva, the distributor, went bankrupt. It was the first part played by Elsa Martinelli in Italy.

La risaia (1956)

What do you think of the criticism that the film was a remake of Riso amaro [Bitter Rice]?

I do not think there is any connection with Riso amaro, which, if I remember well, was a rather chaotic and confusing story. In my film the situations and emotions are very simple. Ponti and I watched De Santis' films and we did not feel at all that we were remaking the same thing. Of course, it has a very unusual setting, but nothing else justifies putting the two films together. 

What is your idea of a historical film?

Events from the past seen in the eyes of a modern man, that is what I would like to do. Also finding what for us is unusual in the habits of those times. For example, it was completely normal that Louis XIV received ambassadors from other countries and had important discussions with them while he was sitting on a chaise percée. Or the feudal custom of the lord's right, the old nobleman that goes to take women from the countryside and chooses them in front of their husbands who cannot protest. In this respect, I think Tom Jones is a very sucessful film.

Is that the direction you were going in with Paolo e Francesca [Legend of Love]?

I do not think it was a success; we had a very small budget. La nave delle donne maledette [The Ship of Damned Women] however demonstrates what I was talking about. It was my first film in color and I was able to shoot it in 32 days, mostly because of Aldo Tonti, with whom I tried to make shots in which one color dominated, for example by matching the tone of a suit with the tone of the ground...

La nave delle donne maledette (1953)

What happens in this film at the beginning of the song's scene? Was the song planned, was it written by Nino Rota for the film?

No, Malatierra was a song in vogue at the time (by Redi). One day Flo Sandon's, a singer who had worked in America, came to record it for us, and I shot the large pan shot of the women on the boat with the song in playback. It was improvised; the scene was created from the song.

Which composers do you prefer working with?

Nino Rota wrote music for film for the first time with Treno Popolare. Now he has stopped and works for film only when Fellini manages to tear him away from the music conservatory he directs. Lavagnino specifically studied the problems of making music for film for Continente perduto [Lost Continent]. He was the first to use the sound of a single amplified instrument, something Savina did also for Amore mio (the piano theme).

And Rustichelli?

He did the music for me in Adultero lui, adultera lei. I think that they are the top three: Rota, Lavagnino, Rustichelli.

Have you ever dealt with a composer who has used the music of one film for another as Renzo Rossellini and Roberto Nicolosi often do?

No, Rossellini only worked for me for the musical arrangement of Giuseppi Verdi, but I do know a composer, whose name I will not mention, who recorded music and then he uses it by fast-forwarding and rewinding... Obviously he always ends up with a new soundtrack!

In terms of modern literature, what do you like? I see you have the records and books of Brecht, Lorca...

Yes, but I cannot say I approve of either Brecht or Lorca because I do not share their ideas - even if I like The Threepenny Opera. I agree with the ideas of Benedetto Croce, according to whom the artist and the work are inseparable. I think that if I were a thief or a pimp I would not make good films. One can't come and tell me that René Clair goes pick-pocketing at night; that just is not possible. I know that ever more frequently people think the contrary. Croce and Croce's aesthetics were very significant for us Italians. Croce made a certain number of ideas that were in the air clearer and that needed to be expressed. He had a very simple way of writing, almost anyone can read him. He called himself "his own employee" and had extraordinary work capacity and discipline. For Croce a work of art is not something transcendental; it is something strictly connected to man. Anyhow, I think it is useless to talk about Croce's aesthetics in terms of film, which is just a craft. When a painter paints a tree, he creates the whole tree; the filmmaker has to shoot the tree already existing. And there is more, in film you have two creators: the screenwriter and the director, and in my opinion the screenwriter is always the more important one. I think that the use of technology can and must always be reduced: in fact now, with smaller formats, you can practically do what you want. In 1935 they said to me: it is impossible to take a shot of a man against a wall, we cannot light him properly. Everything has changed tremendously. But overcoming these obstacles should also be a source of stimulation. You play a do, you get a mi, you have go to work that me into the rest. In my opinion film is an evolved and improved form of theater. The difference is just a question of technique. The forms of the performing arts spring from the needs and tastes of the public. In different times people wanted to relax, go into the foyer, meet up, talk; people went to the theater also for these reasons. This is why plays were divided in acts. Do you know what the theaters were like in Elizabethan times? People stood, talked out loud, walked around. The need to catch the attention of the audience led to Shakespeare's volcanic theater. Today, with the scientific development of the twentieth century, a change in technique was necessary. But in the end it is basically the same thing. In the theater the viewer, by himself, with his own mind, automatically does the découpage himself. A character moves, you follow him with your eyes. He says something important, you see only his face. He acts, the scene fills up with people: a very long shot. I cannot accept film in which the camera just goes where it wants to, starts from the left foot of the character, shoots an ashtray... Ok, film also has realism, but it is not something completely impossible to do in the theater. 

What do you think of television?

I have only had indirect contact with television; one of my works was presented on television last year. but it is something entirely different: you are no longer in touch with the audience. At the theater you are behind the scenes, you see the audience's reaction: they laugh more at a certain joke, they do not respond to another one. For the next performance you can change the joke. With film it is the same: you can orient yourself according to the reactions in the cinema. This is no longer possible with television: you are completely isolated. The following day maybe you receive letters, but those letters are not representative enough of the public in order to be able to judge.

Do you have a project that is particularly important to you? 

The film I dream about making, but unfortunately impossible, is a film about the ridiculous elements of modern life. Take a funeral for example; there is nothing funnier than a first rate funeral or a big wedding. That a man says to a woman "I love you" and they start making love is natural and therefore beautiful, but with convention we have gotten accustomed to a lot of absolutely ridiculous things. This is the film I would like to make. Treno popolare came close, in which I made use of an Italian institution: Sunday, people could buy a ticket for almost any Italian city and make a trip there and back spending almost nothing with these trains. You would see these people arrive in Orvieto, and they would go visit the cathedral where there are magnificent statues, which naturally are seen better from far away. And all of them get closer to touch the statues. In St. Peter's in Rome, there is an angel made of marble that holds up a font; one of the angel's thighs is completely black from all the people who have touched him!

Adultero lui, adultera lei was something similar, but more comic than satirical.

No, more satirical than comic because, as I said last year, it was based on an Italian law that really exists. If a married man is caught in the act of adultery, he does not really risk anything; the wife, in the same situation, gets into a lot of trouble and at the very least she goes to jail.

You have launched the careers of a lot of actors and actresses... is there a relationship between this and the fact that you have made a film about seven children?

I like working with young actors, I feel like I am working with virgin material, and it is pleasing to be the first. I was satisfied with directing children, they are natural actors; it is something that disappears early in boys, with girls it stays a bit longer, up until the age of thirteen, fourteen, then it is gone, they move toward having a career and they stop being actors. But I would not repeat the experience of I terribili sette, in the end it wore me out. It is so difficult to express yourself, to capture their attention for a long time...

March 1964

* Matarazzo was, fortunately, mistaken; extant copies of Treno Popolare do survive.