"Making films" is for me a necessity of nature, a need comparable to hunger and thirst. Some achieve self-expression by writing books, climbing mountains, beating their children, or dancing the samba. I happen to express myself by making films.

In The Blood of a Poet, the great Cocteau shows us his alter ego staggering down a nightmarish hotel corridor and makes us peer behind every door at those hallucinatory self-projections which constitute his "I."

Without pretending today to equate my personality with Cocteau's, I have thought of conducting you on a tour of my interior studios, there where my films unfold invisibly. I fear this visit will disappoint you: The equipment is always scattered about because the proprietor is too taken up with business problems to find the time to arrange things in order. In addition, the light is rather bad in certain places, and some doors feature signs boldly lettered: "PRIVATE." Finally, the guide himself sometimes wonders what there is worth showing.

Be that as it may, we will push a few doors ajar. That is not to say that you will find exactly the answer to the questions you have put to yourself, but perhaps, despite all, you may be able to assemble some pieces of a complicated puzzle that represents the unfolding of a film.

If we consider the most fundamental element of cinematographic art, the perforated strip of film, we note that it is composed of small rectangular images–fifty-two to the metre–with each separated from its neighbours by a black band. Looking more closely, we discover that these tiny rectangles, which at first glance seem to contain the same details, differ one from the next only by an almost imperceptible modification of these details. And when the feeding mechanism of the projector presents these successive images on the screen in such a manner that we see each image for only one twenty-fourth of a second, we have the illusion of movement.

Between each of these little rectangles the aperture passes before the lens and plunges us into complete darkness before restoring us to full light with the following rectangle.

When I was ten years old and I operated my first magic lantern–with its chimney, its petrol lamp, and its constantly repeating films–I found the above phenomenon exciting and mysterious. Even today, I feel in myself the nervous excitement of childhood when I realize that I am actually an illusionist, since cinema exists only because of an imperfection in the human eye, its inability to perceive separately pictures that follow one another rapidly and are essentially similar.

I have calculated that if I see a film that lasts an hour, I am in fact plunged into absolute blackness for twenty minutes. In making a film, I am thus guilty of fraud; I make use of an apparatus built to take advantage of a human physical imperfection, of an apparatus thanks to which I carry my audience, as if on a pendulum, from one mood to another mood at the opposite extreme: I make it laugh, cry out with fright, smile, believe in legends, become indignant, take offense, become enthusiastic, become bawdy, or yawn with boredom. Thus, I am no better than a fraud, no better than–considering that the public is aware of the deceit–an illusionist. I mystify, and I have at my disposition the most precious and the most amazing magical apparatus that has ever been, in all the history of the world, in the hands of a mountebank.

There is here, or there ought to be here, for all those who make or sell films, the source of an insoluble moral conflict.

As for our commercial partners, this is not the moment to go into the mistakes that they have made from one year to the next, but it would be worthwhile if a scientist would one day discover a system of weights or measures capable of computing the amount of natural gifts, of initiative, of talent and creative force which the film industry has mangled in its formidable machinery. Clearly, he who wishes to enter the race must accept the rules in advance, and there is no reason why work in the cinema should be more respected than work in any other field. The difference seems to be chiefly that, in our specialty, brutality manifests itself more openly, but in a way this is an advantage.

Loss of equilibrium has consequences more dire for the conscientious film-maker than for a tightrope walker or an acrobat who performs under the circus tent without a net. For the film-maker and the tightrope artist, the risk is of the same order: Falling and killing oneself. Doubtless you think this an exaggeration: making a film is not nearly so dangerous! I nevertheless I stick to my statement: The risk is equal. Even if, as I said, one is somewhat of a magician, one cannot deceive the producers, the bank directors, the theatre owners, or the critics when the public will not go to see a film and pay out the money from which the producers, bank directors, theatre owners, critics, and magicians must earn their livings.

I can cite you the example of a recent experience, the memory of which still makes me tremble and in which I nearly lost my own equilibrium. An unusually courageous producer invested money in one of my films that, after a year of intense activity, appeared under the title The Naked Night (Gycklarnas afton). The critics were generally unfavorable, the public stayed away, the producer calculated his losses, and as for me, I had to wait several years before I could get another project.

If I make two or three more films that show a financial loss, the producers will conclude justifiably that it would be better to stake no more money on my talents.

Thus I would become immediately suspect, a loser, and I would be able to reflect at leisure how to use my so-called artistic gifts: the magician would be deprived of his apparatus.

When I was younger, I did not resent these uncertainties. The work was an exciting game for me, and whether the results were successful or unsuccessful, I rejoiced in my activities like a child with his castles of sand or clay. The performer danced on his rope, unconscious of and therefore careless of the abyss and the hard ground of the circus ring.

The game has changed into a bitter struggle. The walk along the tightrope is made now with full knowledge of danger, and the points to which the cord is attached are called fear and incertitude. Each work calls forth all my resources of energy. Creation has become, under the effect of causes not so much interior as exterior and economic, a demanding duty. Failure, criticism, public indifference today make more painful wounds. The wounds take time to heal, and the scars are deeper and last longer.

Before undertaking a project or after having started it, Jean Anouilh used to concentrate on a little game in order to exorcise fear. He said to himself: "My father is a tailor. He takes deep pleasure in what his hands have created, handsome trousers or an elegant coat. It is the pleasure and satisfaction of the artisan, the pride of a man who knows his trade."

I do this also. I recognize the game, I play it often and I succeed in fooling myself and others, even though this game is played only as an ineffective sedative: "My films are good work. I am dedicated, conscientious, extremely attentive to details. I work for my contemporaries and not for eternity; my pride is the pride of the artisan."

However, I know that, if I speak this way, it is in order to deceive myself, and an uncontrollable restlessness cries: "What have you made that can last? Is there in your films a single metre of film worth passing on to posterity, a single line, a single situation that is really and indisputably true?"

To this I must reply–perhaps still under the effect of an ineradicable disloyalty, but most sincerely: "I don't know, 1 hope so."

You must excuse my having described at such length and with so much commentary the dilemma which is imposed on the creators of films. I wanted to try to explain to you why so many of those who work in the cinema succumb to a temptation that is invisible and difficult to explain. Why we fear, why sometimes we lose heart in the work, why we become stupid and allow ourselves to be annihilated in tarnished and poisoned compromises.

I would like however to linger a little longer on one of the aspects of the problem, on the most important and the most difficult to grasp, the public. The creator of films deals with a medium of expression that interests not only himself but also millions of other people, and most of the time he feels the same desire as other artists: "I want to succeed today. I want fame now. I want to please, to delight, to move at once."

Midway between this wish and its realization is the public–and they want only one thing from a film: "I've paid. I want to be diverted, caught up, involved. I want to forget my troubles, my surroundings, my work. I want to get away from myself. I am here, seated in the darkness, and like a woman about to give birth, I want to be delivered."

The film-maker who recognizes this need and who lives off the public's purse is placed in a difficult situation that imposes certain obligations. In making his film, he must always take into consideration the reaction of the public. For me personally, I continually ask myself the question: "Can I express myself more simply, more purely, more briefly? Will everyone be able to understand what I am saying now? Will the most simple soul be able to follow the line of action? And this, which is the most important: Up to what point have I the right to compromise, and where does my obligation to myself begin?"

All experimentation necessarily implies great risk, because it always alienates the public. But, the alienation of the public can lead to sterility, to isolation in an ivory tower.

It would be wonderful if producers as well as other directors of film techniques put laboratories at the disposition of the creators. But this is never the case in our day. Producers trust only engineers and imagine stupidly that the health of the film industry depends on invention and technical complications.

Nothing is easier than to frighten a spectator. He can be literally maddened, for most people have in some part of their being a fear always ready to come forth. It is much more difficult to make him laugh, to make him really laugh. It is easy to put a spectator into a state worse than the one he arrived in, it is difficult to put him into a better state; still it is this that he wants each time he goes into the darkness of the cinema. But how often and by what methods do we give him this satisfaction?

It is thus that I reason, at the same time knowing very well and with absolute evidence that this reasoning is dangerous, that it takes the risk of condemning all failure, of confounding idealism with pride, of considering as absolutes the frontiers that the public and the critics mark out for you even when you do not acknowledge them and they are not your own, since your personality is always in evolution. On the one hand, I am tempted to adopt myself, to make myself what the public wants me to be, but on the other hand, I sense that this would be the end of everything, this would suppose total indifference in me. Also I count myself happy not to have been born with exactly as much intelligence as feeling; it is nowhere written that a film-maker must be content, happy, or satisfied. Who has said that he must not make noise, break barriers, battle against windmills, send robots to the moon, have visions, play with dynamite, or tear pieces of flesh from himself or others? Why can't someone frighten film producers? It's their job to be frightened; they are paid for their stomach ulcers!

But "film-making" is not only running up against problems, dilemmas, economic cares, responsibilities, and fears. There are also games, dreams, secret memories. It often begins with a picture: a face suddenly and forcefully illuminated, a hand lifting, a moment at dawn with some old women seated on a bench, separated by a sack of apples. Or sometimes it is an exchange of words: two persons, suddenly, say something to each other in a completely personal tone of voice; perhaps their backs are turned, I cannot even see their faces and thus I am forced to listen, to wait until they speak again, till they repeat the same words, unimportant but charged with a secret tension, a tension of which I am not yet c1early conscious but which acts like a surreptitious filter. The illuminated face, the hand lifted as if for an incantation, the old women in the square, the banal words, all these images come to attach themselves to my line like brilliant fish, or more exactly, I myself am caught by a line the texture of which I happily ignore.

Soon enough, well before the theme is entirely drawn out in my mind, I submit the games of my imagination to the test of reality. I pose, as in a game, my sketch, still very fragile and incomplete, on an easel in order to judge it from the point of view of all the technical resources of the studios. This imaginary test of "viability" acts on the motif like a coating of rust. Does it hold up? Will the motif hold onto its worth when it is plunged into the daily and murderous routine of the studios, far from the shadowy bright dawns in the games of the imagination?

Some of my films come to fruition very quickly and are quickly finished. These are the films that come up to general expectation. The children are always undisciplined, but always healthy; one can at once predict that they will carry on the family line.

Then, there are the other films–those that come slowly, that take years, that refuse to let themselves be imprisoned by a technical or formal solution, that usually refuse any concrete solution. They stay in the shadow; if I want to find them again, I must follow them, find a context, persons, situations. Here, the faces turned away start to speak, the roads are strange, some few persons glance out through the casement window, an eye gleams in the twilight or changes itself into a carbuncle, then bursts with the sound of a shattering crystal. The square, on this autumn morning, is a sea, the old women have transformed themselves into ancient trees, and the apples are children who build cities of sand and stone near the spray of the waves.

What is it then to "shoot a film"? If I asked all of you this question, I would doubtless get somewhat different replies, but you would agree perhaps on one point: To shoot a film is to do what is necessary to put the contents of the script on film. In this you would say much, and at the same time too little. For me, shooting a film represents days of inhumanly maddening work, backaches, eyes full of dust, smells of makeup, sweat and lights, a never-ending series of tensions and delays, an uninterrupted battle between will and duty, between vision and reality, conscience and laziness. I bear in mind the morning risings, the nights without sleep, of the most acute sentiment in life, a sort of fanaticism centred around the one work, by means of which I finally become an integral part of the film, an apparatus, ridiculously small, whose sole fault is to require food and drink.

It happens sometimes that in the middle of this excitement, when all the studios buzz with so much life and work that they seem ready to burst, I find the idea for my next film. You would be wrong, however, if you think that the activity of a film-maker takes on at this moment a sort of ecstatic vertigo, an uncontrollable excitation, and a dreadful disorganization. To shoot a film is to undertake to train a hard-to-handle horse for the grand prize; one must have a clear head, meticulousness, firm and exact calculations. Add to this an always even disposition and a patience that is not of this world.

To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe, but the chief elements are the industry, the money, the fabrication, the point of view, the development and the print, a schedule to follow, though it is rarely followed, a meticulous plan of action in which irrational factors make up the highest percentage. The sentry has on too much eye makeup–fifteen thousand dollars to begin the scene again. One day the water from the pipes has too much chlorine in it: the negatives are spoiled–begin again! Another day, death does you the bad turn of removing an actor–begin again with another–and there are millions of other pitfalls waiting for you. It thunders, the electric transformer has a breakdown, and we wait, all covered with makeup, in the pale daylight while the hours roll by and the money rolls by with them.

Idiotic examples, taken at random. But they are able to be idiotic because they touch on the great and sublime idiocy: that of transforming shadowy dreams, dividing a tragedy into five little pieces, playing with each one of them, then putting together all these pieces in such a way as to reconstitute a unity that will be once again a tragedy: that of fabricating a tape of 2,500 metres that conforms to the life and soul of actors, producers, and directors. To shoot a film is all that, but is still more, and it is still worse.

To make films is also to plunge again by its deepest roots down to the world of childhood. Let us descend, if you would like to, into the interior studio situated in the most intimate recess in the life of the director. We open for a moment the most secret of his rooms to see there a picture of Venice, an old window-blind, and the first magic-lantern apparatus.

At Upsala, my grandmother lived in a very old apartment. I slid along there under the dining room table, dressed in an apron with a pocket in front, and there I listened to the voice of the rays of sunlight that came in through the immensely high windows. The rays of sun moved continually, the bells of the cathedral resounded; the rays moved and their movement engendered something like a special sound. It was a day between winter and spring; I had had the measles, and I was five years old. In the next-door apartment someone was playing the piano–always waltzes–and on the wall hung a large picture representing Venice. As the sun rays and the shadows passed in waves over the picture, the water in the canal began to flow, the pigeons to rise above the pavement of the square, the people to talk to each other noiselessly with gestures of their hands and heads. The sound of bells came not from the cathedral, but from the picture, the same with the piano tunes. This picture of Venice had something altogether strange about it. Almost as strange as the fact that the rays of sunlight in my grandmother's salon were not silent, but had a sound. It was perhaps all those bells...or maybe the big pieces of furniture that talked with each other in a continual murmur.

I think I can remember, however, an experience even older than that of the measles year, the perception–impossible to date–of the movement of a window-blind. It was a black window-blind of the most popular type that I saw in my child's room, at dawn or in the evening, when everything becomes alive and a little frightening, when even the playthings turn into hostile things, or simply strange and indifferent things. So the world was no longer the everyday world with my mother's presence, but a silent and dizzying solitude. It was not that the window-blind moved; no shadow appeared there. It was on the surface itself that the shapes were found: not men, not animals, not heads, nor faces, but things for which there is no name! In the dimness crossed with bars of light, these shapes detached themselves from the blind and advanced toward the green screen or toward the desk with its carafe of water. They were unpitying, impassive, and frightening: they disappeared only when it became really dark or really light or when sleep overtook me.

He who, like myself, is born into a minister's family learns very early to look behind the scenes at life and at death. Father has a burial, a marriage, a baptism, a retreat, he writes a sermon. One makes a very early acquaintance with the devil; one needs to give him a concrete form. But it is here that the game of the magic lantern comes in, the little iron box with the gas lamp (I can still smell the odour of the heated iron) and the colour projections. There was, among others, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. The Wolf was the devil, a devil without horns, but with a tail and bright red jowls, a devil curiously palpable and at the same time ungraspable, the representative of evil and persecution on the flowered paper of a child's room.

The first film that I had in my possession was three metres long and was brown. It represented a young girl asleep in a field; she awoke, stretched, got up, and, arms outstretched, disappeared on the right side of the picture. That was it. On the box in which the film was put again was drawn a blushing picture with the words "Frau Holle." No one in my circle knew who Frau Holle was, but it hardly mattered; the film was a great success and was played every evening until it disintegrated to the point where it could no longer be repaired.

This shaky little cinema was my first magician's box. In fact, strangely enough, the toy was mechanical, the people and things never changed. I often ask myself how it was able to fascinate me so much, that which, still today, fascinates me in exactly the same way. This thought comes to me sometimes in the studio or in the darkness of the editing room, where I have in front of me the little picture and the film passes between my fingers, or again during the fantastic childbirth that represents the recomposition when the finished film slowly unveils itself. I cannot stop myself from thinking that I handle an instrument so refined that it is possible for us to illuminate with it the human soul with a light infinitely more vivid, to unveil it still more brutally, and to add to our knowledge new domains of reality. Perhaps we will even discover a crack that will let us penetrate into the clair-obscur of surrealism to tell our tales in a new and overwhelming way. [Note: he does not mean Surrealism, the film form, but a kind of surreality.] At the risk of stating one more something that I cannot prove, I would like to say that, in my opinion, we who make films, we use only a minuscule part of a frightening power–we move no more than the little finger of a giant who is nothing if not dangerous.

But it is equally possible that I am wrong. It may be that film has attained the highest point in its evolution, that this instrument, by its own nature, is not able to conquer new ground, that we are brought up short with our noses to the wall, the road ending in a cul-de-sac. Many are of this opinion, and it is a fact that we are standing in a swamp, nose just above the water's surface, paralyzed by economic cares, conventions, foolishness, fear, uncertainty, and disorder.

I am sometimes asked what I am looking for in my films, what is my goal. The question is difficult and dangerous, and I usually reply with a lie or an evasion: "I am trying to say the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it." This response satisfies them, and I often ask myself why nobody notices my bluff, because the real response should be: "I feel an irrepressible need to express in film that which, completely subjectively, is part of my consciousness. In this case I have therefore no other goal but myself, my daily bread, the amusement and respect of the public, a sort of truth that I find to be right at that particular moment. And if I try to sum up my second response, the final formula is a not very enthusiastic: "An activity of no great significance."

I will not say that this conclusion overly embarrasses me. I am in the same position as the majority of the artists of my generation: Our activity has in the end no great meaning. Art for art's sake. My personal truth, or perhaps three-fourths of the truth or none at all, except that it has value for me.

I know that this way of looking at things is very unpopular, especially these days. Thus I will make haste to put my position more precisely by formulating the question in another way: "What would you like to have as a goal in making your films?"

They say that in the old days the cathedral of Chartres, struck by lightning, burned to the ground. Then, they say, thousands of people hurried from all the comers of the, world, people in every walk of life; they crossed Europe like migrating lemmings and began, all together, to rebuild the cathedral on its ancient foundations. They lived there until the immense building was completed, architects, workmen, artists, jugglers, nobles, prelates, and ordinary middle-class people, but their names were unknown, and even today no one knows who built Chartres Cathedral.

Without saying that this should cause you to prejudge my beliefs or my doubts–which in this context are not important–I think that art lost its significance to life at the moment when it separated itself from worship (religion). It broke the umbilical cord, and it lives its own separate life, surprisingly sterile, dulled and degenerated. Collective creativity, the humble anonymous man are relics, forgotten and buried, destitute of value. My little griefs and moral stomach aches are examined with a microscope sub specie aeternitatis. The fear of the dark that characterizes subjectivism and the scrupulous conscience has become the great thing, and we run finally into the dead end where we argue with each other on the subject of our solitude, without any of us listening to the others or even noticing that we have pressed so close to one another as almost to die of suffocation. It is thus that the individualists see themselves in their own eyes, denying the existence of what they see and invoking the omnipotent obscurity, never testing, even once, the saving grace of the joys of community (working together). We are truly imprisoned in our vicious circles, so enclosed in our own anguish that we have become incapable of distinguishing the real from the false, the ideals of gangsters from sincere abandon.

To the question asked about the goal of my film, I would be able thus to reply: "I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain. I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn't matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn't matter!"