Comolli, Jean-Louis

Langlois, Henri

Ray, Nicholas

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

The Goodwill for a Meeting: That’s cinema1
Excerpts by Henri Langlois / Jean-Louis Comolli / Nicholas Ray
DOCUMENTS· Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. II · No. 5. · 2014 · 9-11
9
Henri Langlois
Silent cinema is the image. And what is the 
image? It is a diamond. A diamond which men 
learned to cut, polish and set off to advantage, but 
which always retains its irreducible nature. The 
sound film is an alloy. It is a ceramic. How can 
one fuse these two things ? 
[…]
When I lecture, I sometimes take the 
liberty of cutting off a film’s soundtrack. If you 
do this to M (Fritz Lang, 1931), the images 
become flat; switch it on again, and they 
regain their tone. This shows that M is a true 
talking picture. Deprived of sound, The Most 
Dangerous Game (Ernest B. Schoedsack and 
Irving Pichel, 1932) reveals what its soundtrack 
conceals. You see people whose lips move but 
whose eyes and faces are expressionless. They 
are in effect people talking, but saying what? 
They make a pretence of speaking, they imitate 
people talking. Do you see what I mean? It was 
through experimenting like this that I realised 
Gabin was nothing without sound. Why? 
Because he wanted to seem natural, and since 
the stress was laid on the dialogue, the result 
was naturalism. 
There is one man, just one, who succeeded 
in making a homogeneous whole out of talking 
pictures, and he is dead. Vigo. He took sound, 
image, music and dialogue and merged them 
–and I mean merged, not mixed. The result 
was L’Atalante (1934). Seeing this film you 
see why the cinema is dying from a horrible 
disease: naturalism. By naturalism I mean a 
servile imitation of reality. No film seems more 
naturalistic than L’Atalante. But only seems: in 
fact it is a stained glass window. 
[…]
The cinema is a means towards the 
acquisition of knowledge in the manner of St. 
Thomas: by touch. Read all you like about love, 
but if you haven’t made love your idea of it will 
be totally false. 
Referring to the Méliès exhibition I 
arranged at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a 
film-maker’s wife paid me the most wonderful 
compliment imaginable: ‘You guide people into 
a book which is no book. You have re-created 
an ambience which enables them, by plunging 
into it, to under-stand everything through a sort 
of osmosis.’ I would like the Musée du Cinéma 
to serve the same purpose. I do not believe in 
education in the form which we call education. 
True education is osmosis. Latin, mathematics 
and so on are useful as mental gymnastics, but 
art is a subject that cannot be taught. It is learned 
through osmosis. 
1. Jean-Luc Godard in: BACHMAN, Gideon (1984). The 
Carrots Are Cooked: A Conversation with Jean-Luc Godard. 
Film Quarterly, vol. 27, nº 3, p.132. 
THE GOODWILL FOR A MEETING: THAT’S CINEMA
Among the Eskimos, all his games prepare 
the child for living. He plays, but in fact he is 
preparing himself for the hunt, for fishing. He 
imitates his father and gradually, through his 
play, he learns. This is the opposite of a university 
education. Whether one likes it or not, moreover, 
education is still a master of class. Someone whose 
borne contains an extensive library, or who grows 
up in artistic surroundings, is enriched even if he 
rejects the environment which formed him. He 
is already a step ahead of a poor boy who learns 
everything he knows at school. Dumas did more 
for History than all the teachers put together. 
For years, all exhibitions have been based on 
the idiotic system of education by explanation, 
because people like to learn what they should 
think. But art cannot be explained, it is felt. If 
there is to be a bond between art and man, we 
must re-create umbilical cord. [1]
       
 
Jean-Louis Comolli
Does what stated under the name ‘cinema’ 
propose a different logic from that of the 
spectacle at any cost; not the logic of rejection of 
any spectacular dimension, but rather its rigorous 
control through the mise-en-scène, a writing 
system, which hides to better show, instead of 
showing more to ‘fill the eyes’? To suppose cinema 
is an ‘art’ means only that: an active space for the 
spectator. The cinematographic gesture do not 
pretend to merely be in accordance with its time, 
but to shed lights on it; to make the keys, rather 
than to drive the short euphoric drunkenness 
which wants to ‘force to forget’ the common 
alienations.  In such an old debate, as old as 
cinema itself, which would be, which should be 
the place for a film school? 
Renounce to cinema? Lessen its relevance? 
The question is stated. Already from the first 
insignia (IDHEC, Institute for Advanced 
Cinematographic Studies) to the second (La 
Fémis, European Foundation for Image and 
Sound Professionals), what disappears is the 
word ‘cinema’2. What a pity! Teaching technical 
professions never fulfilled anyone. Starting from 
the technicians themselves, who generally are 
eager to make artistic work or to collaborate with 
it, and expect issues such as sense, pertinence, 
historicity, and exemplarity to work strongly, way 
beyond the issue of the ‘craft’ to be achieved or 
transmitted. Craft? What for? Whom for? Whom 
with? Whom against? Professionalism is not 
morals, further less a reason of being. Regarding 
technicians, they are not robots. Gifted with a 
head to think and a body to feel, they love and 
desire. Nothing will make them renounce to 
the aesthetic dimension of cinema to settle for a 
technological training from which they see, better 
than anyone else, the final inanity. Once the 
excitement is over, a terrible absence of thought 
finds its way. 
Learning, therefore, starts from 
experimenting in the difficult exercise of the artistic 
practice (to write a film, to stage, to construct, 
to edit), with its zones of doubts and shadows, 
the validity of the theoretical and historical facts, 
which without this practical confrontation would 
be dead word. Whatever his grounding might be, 
no filmmaker apprentice stays out of cinema as 
it has been elaborated until him. To verify that 
in the practice is to discover his own relationship 
with one cinematographic family or another. It 
is as well to understand that filming has nothing 
–truly– innocent. Is it not within the educational 
background, protected from blackmailing and 
immediate profitability, where learning can be 
centred on what matters: the place of the subject 
–the student, the technician, the instructor, the 
artist– in the creation of sense, the sense of a work 
that will confront society, that will venture into 
the world? [2]
10 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. II · No. 5 · Winter 2014
2. The Institut des hautes études cinématographiques 
(IDHEC) was founded in 1943 and restructured in 1986 to 
become, the Foundation européene des métieres de l’image 
et du son (La Fémis).
Nicholas Ray
The cinémathèques, the archives around 
the world, are the places where you as film buffs, 
as serious students, as participants in the art of 
making films, can go to attach yourselves to 
films, to reject or revolt against other films, or to 
contradict that process. Thanks to cinémathèques 
and archives, works that you feel attached to are 
preserved, so that you can exploit the opportunities 
they offer for your own artistic growth. 
[…]
I would like to help create a new concept of 
film as a living, continuously breathing thing, so 
you see the molecules of thought and emotion 
and experience working all the time, and in a 
kind of wonderful disorder that permits the 
audience to participate in creating its own order 
and drawing their own conclusions from what 
they experience.
 
[…]
I long for the day when I can be certain 
there’s a filmmaker in every family, when the form 
of communication is not limited to the word 
or the page, when each kid can have a crack at 
giving a full expression to something of himself. 
How much richer the neighborhood would be, 
just one square block. We should be equipped 
and surrounded with the materials that creative 
activity calls for. 
[…]
I’m very happy teaching. I love the process of 
discovery in other people, and when it happens to 
me I feel I’ve had a great big gift. And I want to 
make films, desperately. But not any film. I don’t 
want to make a film that looks like all-weather 
paint splashed against a barn wall. [3] •    
EXCERPTS BY HENRI LANGLOIS / JEAN-LOUIS COMOLLI / NICHOLAS RAY
11Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. II · No. 5 · Winter 2014
[1]  Excerpt from ‘Entretien avec Henri Langlois’, by Rui 
Nogueira, interview made in 1972, originally published 
in Sight and Sound (Fall, 1972). The French version 
in Zoom (nº25, June-July 1974). Extracted from: 
LANGLOIS, Henri (1986). Henri Langlois. Trois 
cent ans de cinéma. Écrits. Paris. Cahiers du cinéma, 
Cinémathèque Française, FEMIS, pp. 96-99.
[2] Excerpt from ‘Should La Fémis Be the School of 
Conformity?’, published in Libération, May 31st, 1996. 
Compiled in: COMOLLI, Jean-Louis (2004). Voir et 
pouvoir. L’innocence perdue : cinéma, télévision, fiction, 
documentaire. Paris: Verdier, pp. 347-350. Spanish 
translation in: COMOLLI, Jean-Louis (2007). Ver 
y poder. La inocencia perdida: cine, televisión, ficción, 
documental. Buenos Aires. Aurelia Rivera: Nueva 
Librería, pp. 338-339.
[3] RAY, Nicholas (1995), I was interrupted. Nicholas Ray 
on making movies. RAY, Susan (ed.). Berkeley and Los 
Angeles. University of California Press, pp.152-155.
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