(’Autocritique’, Cahiers du Cin??ma 126, December 1961)

Using words to discuss films is not the least of criticism’s paradoxes. If we admit that cinema is something new, then we have to recognize that literary language is ill-equipped to cope with it in a way that is either adequate or coherent. Our Indo-European languages, whose origins are lost in the mists of time and whose rules were codified around 350 BC by Aristotle, could indeed not foresee that there would be a seventh art. And so critics, drawing on an existing vocabulary, have invented (and continue to invent) new meanings as and when their individual concerns have made them necessary. Unfortunately, while they were about it, they didn’t get themselves together (and still haven’t) to produce an agreed lexicon, and have thus added to the general state of confusion, reinforcing a whole series of misunderstandings that make us question now how useful their work is. The terms ‘writing’, ‘style’, ‘mise en scene’, etc. are served up over and over again with meanings that vary from one critic to another, and yet no one seems to find it necessary to provide a definition. Using undefined terms to talk about cinema is indeed a very convenient way of exercising one’s profession: the reader has either to recognize his ‘incompetence’ or accept and pretend to understand the mystifications that are thrown at him.

The ‘technical’ description of a film provides the critic with an alternative approach which nevertheless resembles the first in that the reader doesn’t necessarily understand the production process and indeed usually knows nothing about it. In both instances he may not want to admit to being an ignoramus. But there is still the danger that he may protest and, responding to pressure from the readership, many dailies and weeklies are increasingly relying on non-specialists for their film pages. I personally can well understand that reaction. Firstly – and I wrote about this at length last year – I believe that everyone can and should engage in film criticism. Secondly, I admit to finding specialist criticism of the kind I have described above monumentally boring. When someone talks about ‘pure beauty’ in a piece on Mizoguchi, I am sorely tempted to ask him to explain to me what ‘impure’ beauty might be. When someone throws in my face an expression like ‘the highest degree of perfection’ I can’t help wondering about the ‘model of perfection’ and the ‘scale of values’ that underpin that affirmation. Similarly nothing irritates me more than critics’ obsessive need to declare X or Y ‘is’ or ‘is not’ the ‘part’ he is ‘playing’ more or less well. Compared to what? And how does the critic know that? Judgments like these really make us think that the critic sees himself as superior to the director and in some way outside the film. Pride and presumption! We can easily detect in these approaches the failings of a mode of analysis that separates out the various elements in order to assess them one after the other as though the whole was just the sum of its parts. Yet another of the traps of Aristotelian logic! How could we not approve of the spectator’s revolt against the critic?

And I become even more convinced when I look at other ways that critics have gone awry. Many writers on cinema make, for example, analogies with literature that are extraneous to the film, like an anecdote which is, when it comes down to it, completely irrelevant. And what about those hyper-specialized critics that some journals so jealously protect? You could describe their prose as a mishmash of metaphysics, aesthetic, philosophy and cinematography. This most recent of approaches often results in articles both pretentious and unreadable, and at best in texts that are hermetic. Then, of course, there are those who just summarize the screenplay: they indeed do least harm, but I can’t see why one should translate the story of a film into words; it’s treating the spectator as if he were blind! Lastly I should mention the critics whose contribution can ultimately be reduced to ‘I like it or I don’t like it’; I have nothing against them – I have too great a respect for each person’s right to express an opinion; I will just say that they seem to be pursuing a logic that proceeds by ‘yeses’ and ‘noes’, a logic that isn’t borne out by the facts.

Whatever you think, it is hard to avoid comparing film criticism to a conversation in which everyone talks and no one listens. And given its blithe tendency to present definite views of very different works, to quite philosophers and literary authorities, psychologists and academics, you would think it was in possession of the key to the universe. I can’t resist the temptation of quoting a text of Eric Satie: ‘The critic’s mind is a department store; you can find everything in it: orthopaedics, sciences, bedding, arts, travelling rugs, a large selection of furniture, writing paper, smokers’ requisites, gloves, umbrellas, knitwear, hats, sports, walking sticks, spectacles, perfume, etc. The critic knows everything, sees everything, hears everything, eats everything, confuses everything and still manages to think…’

These remarks apply of course just as much to my own writing, otherwise this article wouldn’t have been titled ‘Self-criticism’! But self-criticism involves a sincere attempt to formulate new guidelines. I will, then, make use of this opportunity to try to sort out some of the conflicting ideas that are floating around in my head as the year draws to a close.

It is really as though many critics admit to the existence of an ‘original text’ of which the film is just a translation. Thus, when they draw attention to ‘perfection’ or to ‘shortcomings’, they give an impression that they are passing judgment with reference to an absolute that is located somewhere outside the work, to some universal standard. Referring to the spoken and written language, Saussure remarked that signs taken individually signify nothing, that each of them expresses less a meaning than a ‘gap’ in meaning which distinguishes it from all the others, and that it is this ‘lateral relationship’ between signs that confers meaning on them. The ambiguities of cinematographic language are greater still. We have to cast aside the absurd illusion that the image is more accessible than ordinary language. Nothing could be more misguided! And where cinema is concerned, we could apply, word for word, what Merleau-Ponty has to say: ‘Language does not presuppose a table of concordances, it reveals its won secrets … it is just a monstrance. Its opaqueness, its obstinate self-reference, its introversion and introspection are precisely what constitute it as a spiritual power: for in its turn it becomes something like a universe, able to contain the world of things by transforming them into their meanings.’ Ultimately, it is as though the critics I am referring to gave access to an absolute cinematographic language or, at the very least, that what they think they know about cinema is a pinnacle and that if a film-maker wants to be an artist he must make use of the same tools.

There exists, of course, a basic set of procedures that constitute, as it were, the ‘empirical’ language of cinema, one that directors can draw upon as a shared inheritance. Within the appearance of the empirical language of the screen there is, however, a hidden second-degree language in which signs once more assume the ‘vagueness’ of the painter’s colours, the musician’s notes, the novelist’s words. Bergier and Pauwels are quite right to stress the reality of what they call ‘texts with several meanings’. So-called ‘commercial’ film-makers limit themselves to a ‘correct’ use (one that keeps to pre-established rules) of the ‘empirical’ language: their films are purely and simply indistinguishable from the story that is being told. They are at best translators into images [‘metteurs en images’]. They select signs for a pre-determined meaning. Although critics are often speaking about all films, I want to repeat that what I am saying here applies only to the other kind of cinema, the one in which ‘utterance’ is truly ‘expressive’ as it feels its way round an intention to signify that isn’t guided by pre-existing definitions and in which a good measure of the implied is visible at every moment. That kind of cinema necessarily strains the ‘procedures’ of the empirical language, giving them new meanings as it goes along even though everything may still look the same. One of my friends rejected L??on Morin, prêtre on the grounds, among others, that the large number of dissolves demonstrated infantilism and was in any case tiring or showed up a lack of sophistication in the narrative. Yes, of course these dissolves ‘signify’ the passage of time, but also the disarray of an individual consciousness and of an epoch, which isn’t at all what they are supposed to mean in the ‘empirical’ language of cinema. I don’t want to launch here into a critical examination of L??on Morin, prêtre. I just want to say this: if we are going to be fair to Melville, we owe it to him to look at some of the narrative devices he could have used but rejected, and to sense how they would have affected the ‘chain’ of images, how far Melville’s style was the only one possible for his meaning to be made clear.

Something happens in cinema that is in certain ways reminiscent of the ‘probability factor’ in physics. In each particular instance several possibilities present themselves and if the film-maker selects the most likely one, he has succeeded. It is up to the critic to examine the probabilities and attempt to show that the director has or has not opted for the best one. There is of course a mixture of subjective and objective factors in this task, often making hasty judgments both difficult and dangerous. However that may be, the critic should force himself to ‘shake’ the apparatus of cinematographic narrative to see if he can get a new sound out of it or lay bare the ‘lateral’ and ‘oblique’ meanings hidden within it. Marx understood that perfectly well with regard to Balzac. Let me take up here another remark of Merleau-Ponty that seems directly applicable to cinema: ‘The novel as account of events, as expression of ideas, theses or conclusions, as prosaic and evident significance, and a novel as work on style, as oblique or latent significance, exist in a relationship which is simply homonymous’. A certain way of showing modern society in a large number of American films (for example Some Came Running, Party Girl, Anatomy of a Murder, Blind Date, etc.) is more important than their stories or the message they are apparently putting across.

It is indeed right to condemn formalism. But people forget that, rather than over-rating form, it debases it by separating it off from meaning. This formalism is no different from a cinema of subject-matter that ignores form. One can’t be content to judge Stanley Kramer or Autant-Lara on their intentions alone, however laudable these may be. It isn’t enough to protest against atomic suicide or war, you still have to produce a work of art that disturbs the spectator and makes him ask questions. Otherwise you would be denying the very existence of art, you would be forgetting the fundamental truth that language is not just a simple tool in the service of an object that is outside it, that language contains within itself its own ‘metaphysics’. Language sets fearsome traps even for those who claim to be operating only on the level of art, or who say that they are uncommitted (as if art could be cut off from other social activities, as if the uncommitted was not already a precisely determined commitment). By demonstrating the structural relations between language and the laws of society, L??vi-Strauss’s studies have amply proven the vacuity of such attitudes. The infantile and un-aesthetic image that many of today’s film-makers, young and old, have of the world transpires in Le D??jeuner sur l’herbe (and in many ‘New Wave’ films). It is easier to play on false naivety than on intelligence, to celebrate the past than to look to the future. The politique des auteurs has had its day: it was merely a staging-post on the road to a new criticism.

Personally I am inclined to agree with Marcabru when he distinguishes between several different kinds of cinema. Except that instead of four kinds I see an infinite number. But that is another story. What I want to suggest is that there are different levels and that these must not be confused. You cannot speak of Autant-Lara, Cottafavi, Rossellini, Preminger and Losey in the same terms. You can of course like or dislike all of them, but they are on different levels all the same, even when they charm or irritate us. This tendency of the daily and weekly press to resort to non-specialists is not, I think, an unrelated phenomenon.

This leads me to clarify my ideas on the critic’s function. In many respects, it resembles that of the psychoanalyst. Does he not, in effect, have to reconstruct through the film the discourse of the auteur (subject) in its continuity, bring to light the unconscious that underpins it and explain the particular way it is articulated? The unconscious is indeed, as Lacan would say, marked by a gap; it constitutes as it were the censored sequence. But, as in psychoanalysis, the truth can reveal itself; it is written not in the ‘visible’ sequence of images, but elsewhere: in what we call the auteur’s ‘technique’, in the choice of actors, in the decors and the way actors and objects relate to these decors, in gestures, in dialogue, etc. A film is a kind of rebus, a crossword puzzle. Or rather it is a language which sparks off a debate, which doesn’t end with the screening of the film but engenders a real searching.

Of course, just as the psychoanalyst can let himself be lured into a false interpretation, the critic can get things wrong. When we go into darkened theatres, we take with us the whole weight of our prejudices, our education, our heredity – in short, the whole of our personality. You can’t leave your past in the cloakroom, and trying to empty your mind is a vain hope. The ideal observer exists only in fiction! The critic says as much about himself as he does about the film he has seen. He must never forget that this is how a two-way circuit is established. The act of criticism creates an opposition between two sensitivities, each of which possesses its own individual history. It would be too easy to praise a film to the skies just because the worlds of the critic and the film-maker coincide. That would not be praising the film, it would be self-congratulation! Every critic should declare his ‘metaphysics’ to his reader, making it clear where he stands with regard to the reader.

What is at stake is not guiding the reader as if the critic were adopting a kind of superior position, but explaining what we think we have noticed. And in doing this, we must not forget that the film we are discussing is never the film itself. The map, as Korzybski says, is not the terrain! The critic should make this observation his first principle. As a work that has an objective existence outside of ourselves, the film cannot be the object of an exhaustive study. Whatever we can say about it will never be the film. We extract some details and leave aside many others. We will never be able to exhaust all its meanings. A film is its auteur. And the auteur is a human being. All we can do is try to grasp his singularity, the ‘signifying structure’ he has erected.

In one sense, the critic’s problem is a problem of the language. We have to translate into the language of everyday life an artistic language which has a different logic. This ought to incite writers on cinema to resort to accepted concepts only with the greatest reticence and the greatest prudence. When we talk about films we are in a situation not unlike that of the ‘popular’ scientist attempting to explain specific relativity and general relativity to an audience that knows practically nothing about mathematics. The phenomenon of cinema involves so many things on which no serious or definite work has been done that it is impossible at the present moment to talk about it with any degree of certainty. In trying to grasp its meanings, we are groping in the dark, we are trying out theories. We have to have the courage to admit that this is the case. I can’t remember who wrote: ‘Literary justice is never in the domain of the temporal, and in the spiritual it is never absolute.’ This is even more true of film criticism.

The problems raised by film criticism are, as we see, of the same order as those raised by the seventh art itself. You cannot aspire to solve them once and for all. As soon as some are clarified, others emerge. Film criticism is still in its prehistory! I admit, then, without shame, that I frequently let myself be carried away by my own prejudices. But that does not mean I am abandoning my attempts to construct a non-Aristotelian approach to cinema. Where have I got to? That’s another story that I will perhaps write one day.

When the militants of young cinema tell me that their films are addressed only to one sector of the public, I can’t help thinking of pornographic literature. It too is addressed to a limited audience and geared to specific tastes! And it very rarely produces works that stand up to scrutiny! Besides, when an author embarks on a book or a film he always has at least an unconscious ambition to move heaven and earth. That is why I am very careful not to dismiss a work on the grounds of ‘frivolity’. It happens more often than you would think that great things are balanced on the head of a pin. But they can just as easily (and perhaps more frequently) be stood on more substantial objects. As Valery said, the world of ideas is a thousand times stronger, more fabulous and more real than the world of the heart and the senses.

Confronted by all the pitfalls that beset film criticism, some of which I have mentioned above, we just ask ourselves about the usefulness and justification of this strange activity which allows you to claim the right to state publicly what you think about a film. Let me have recourse once more to a quotation. One can apply to film-makers what Merleau-Ponty says about writers: ‘We who speak do not necessarily know better what we are saying than those who listen to us.’ To the extent that criticism also ‘speaks’, this remark applies just as much to it. What this does is open out a space for the ‘criticism of criticism’ or – which comes to the same thing – for ‘self-criticism’. But it is time I stopped.