Artistic creation has always, to me, manifested itself as hunger. I have acknowledged this need with a certain satisfaction but I have never, in all my life, asked myself why this hunger has arisen and craved appeasement. In recent years, as it diminishes and is transformed into something else, I have become anxious to find out the cause of my "artistic activity."

A very early childhood memory is my need to show off my achievements: skill in drawing, the art of tossing a ball against a wall, my first effort at swimming.

I remember I felt a very strong need to draw the attention of the grown-ups to these manifestations of my presence in the world. I felt I never got enough attention from my fellow men. So, when reality was no longer sufficient, I began to fantasize, entertain my playmates with tremendous stories about my secret adventures. They were embarrassing lies that hopelessly failed against the level-headed scepticism of the world. I finally withdrew and kept my dream world to myself. A young child wanting human contact and obsessed by his imagination had been hurt and transformed into a cunning and suspicious daydreamer.

But a daydreamer is not an artist outside his dreams.

The need to get people to listen, to correspond, to live in the warmth of a community was still there. It became stronger the more I became imprisoned in loneliness.

It is fairly obvious that the cinema became my means of expression. I made myself understood in a language that bypassed the words–which I lacked–and music–which I did not master–and painting, which left me indifferent. With cinema, I suddenly had an opportunity to communicate with the world around me in a language that is literally spoken from soul to soul in phrases that escape the control of the intellect in an almost voluptuous way.

With all the child's repressed hunger, I threw myself into my medium and for twenty years I have indefatigably and in a kind of frenzy brought about dreams, mental experiences, fantasies, fits of lunacy, neuroses, religious controversies and sheer lies. My hunger has been eternally new. Money, fame and success have been amazing but, at bottom, insignificant consequences of my rampagings. In saying this I do not underestimate what I may perchance have achieved. I think it has had, and perhaps has, its importance. But security for me is that I can see the past in a new and less romantic light. Art as self-satisfaction can, of course, have its importance–especially for the artist.

Today the situation is less complicated, less interesting, above all less glamorous.

To be quite frank I experience art–not only the film art–as being meaningless. By that I mean that art no longer has the power and possibility to influence the development of our lives.

Literature, painting, music, film and theatre beget and bring forth themselves. New mutations, new combinations arise and are destroyed, the movement seems–from the outside–nervously vital, the artists' magnificent zeal to project to themselves, and to a more and more distracted public, pictures of a world that no longer cares what they like or think. In a few places artists are punished, art is considered dangerous and worth stifling and directing. On the whole, however, art is free, shameless, irresponsible and, as I said: the movement is intense, almost feverish, like, it seems to me, a snakeskin full of ants. The snake itself has long been dead, eaten, deprived of its poison, but the skin moves, filled with meddlesome life.

If I now find that I happen to be one of these ants, I must ask myself whether there is any reason to continue the activity. The answer is in the affirmative. Although I think that the theatre-stage is a beloved old courtesan who has seen better days–although I and many others find the Wild West more stimulating than Antonioni or Bergman–although the new music gives us the suffocating feeling of mathematical air rarification–although painting and sculpture are sterile and languish in their own paralyzing freedom–although literature has been transformed into a cairn of words without message or danger.

There are poets who never write poems because they form their lives as poems, actors who never appear on stage but play their lives as marvelous dramas. There are painters who never paint because they close their eyes and create the most beautiful paintings on the inside of their eyelids. There are filmmakers who live their films and would never misuse their talents to materialize them in reality.

In the same way, I think that people today can dispense with the theatre because they exist in the middle of a drama, the different phases of which incessantly produce local tragedies. They do not need music because every minute their hearing is bombarded with veritable sound hurricanes that have reached and passed the level of endurance. They do not need poetry because the new idea of the universe has transformed them into functional animals bound to interesting but, from a poetical point of view, unusable problems of metabolic disturbance.

Man (as I experience myself and the world around me) has made himself free, terribly and dizzyingly free. Religion and art are kept alive for the sake of sentimentality, as a conventional politeness towards the past, a benevolent solicitude of leisure's increasingly nervous citizens. I am still talking about my own subjective vision. I hope, and am perfectly sure, that others have a more balanced and objective conception.

If I take all this tediousness into consideration and in spite of everything assert that I wish to continue to make art, it is for a very simple reason (I disregard the purely material one).

That reason is curiosity. A boundless, insatiable, perpetual regeneration, an unbearable curiosity that drives me on, that never lets me rest, that completely replaces that past hunger for community.

I feel like a long-term prisoner suddenly confronted with the crashing, shrieking, snorting of life. I am seized by an ungovernable curiosity. I note, I observe, I keep my eyes open. Everything is unreal, fantastic, frightening or ridiculous. I catch a flying grain of dust–perhaps it is a film. What significance does it have?–none at all, but I find it interesting, and consequently it is a film. I wander round with my grain of dust and in mirth or melancholy I am preoccupied. I jostle among the other ants, together we accomplish a colossal task. The snakeskin moves.

This and only this is my truth. I do not ask that it shall be valid for anyone else, and as a consolation for eternity it is, of course, rather meager. As a basis for artistic activity in the coming years it is completely sufficient, at least for me.

To be an artist for one's own satisfaction is not always so agreeable. But it has one great advantage: the artist co-exists with every living creature that lives only for its own sake. Altogether, it makes a pretty large brotherhood existing egoistically on the hot, dirty earth under a cold and empty sky.