Introduction and translation by Richard Abel

Uploaded 15 September

We could begin by studying the laws by which cinema is able to express itself; we could attempt to discern cinema’s connections with the aesthetics of the past, present, and future.

Whether or not it is a seventh art, a synthetic art, or even an art, the cinema exists. And its existence is prophetic because it hails, in Pierre Scize’s [1] words, “a new era of humanity.” Have all the consequences of that assertion been anticipated? Marcel L’Herbier [2] makes one thing quite explicit: “Until recently a mere toy, tomorrow a formidable tool in the hands of impending democracies, the cinematograph must come to know what it is about, in the service of the future, disinfected of that which has been . . . A cavalier Elsa wants to slit open the belly of France, separate out the organs, examine them, then carefully replace them, but ‘not in the same order . . .’ Each day, the twentieth century comes under the scalpel of such an invisible cavalier. Assume that art has been the product of the old world and its ways – would you not want the cinematograph to be in the service of something new?”

In passing, let’s salute the static visual arts that, little by little, are becoming exhausted, close to collapse, no longer capable of arousing in us an emotion related to the pathos of the present moment. A kind of selection is taking place, and the mediocre, the passable, the “just good enough” are intolerable: when the dynamism of a work of art no longer shares in the dynamism of our life, we accept only what is most perfect: the masterpiece. There is no time to lose.

If Marcel L’Herbier has situated the cinematograph in opposition to the static visual arts, we are among those who elsewhere have tried to explain the reasons for that. Not for the need of adventure: today adventure is divided into time zones by the airline companies and into itineraries, whether those of Cooks agencies or Citroën missions that cross Africa [3] on straightened roads and bridges carefully maintained even in the heart of the Oubangui. We have tried to analyze the cinematograph with the help of logic and because we no longer have the privilege of not knowing where we are going. The roads are full of potholes and the bridges wrecked no farther than Asnières. No one yet has examined the problem under its true aspect. That brings us to the deadly side of the ascent, the dangerous sheer face, an approach which, if taken in preference to wiser, more comfortable routes, risks being greeted with irony if not pity from the observing crowd. I myself have no fear of such dangers. And that’s why I repeat that the conclusions of this methodical journey, prepared with care and organized in detail, are not meant to reassure the timorous or the timid, for they upset long-standing prejudices and convictions and threaten the established order of things. They demand volunteers.

First of all, let’s recall certain facts concerning the particular features of our present epoch, facts often enough already expressed.

Man has created the machine in his own image in order to capture forces that otherwise would escape his control.

Speed and complexity are characteristic of modern life. This has led us to create instruments that extend our senses, our faculties of understanding and feeling, that finally make us masters of Space and Time, whose values have fluctuated strangely for the past century. It has led to accelerated motion that makes it easier to see ahead and slowed motion, to comprehend. We can do nothing to counter this. It would be like trying to deny life. But if we can do nothing against, we can do something for and with.

Let’s continue to pursue this logic. Since our societies are organized and hierarchized just like our universe, and since authority is distributed from the highest to the lowest so that everything’s role is specific, restricted (within the chain of families, genres, and space), with the result that the capacity to flourish decreases in relation to comprehension, there is then between the morphology of our universe and that of our societies – or inversely – a powerful parallel that illuminates the failure of divine right, religion, and many other things that – once having served as powerful aids to the progress of men towards unity – now particularly hinder that progress. We are discovering the great truth of modernity. In the middle of the last century, that already was revealed to a man whom I have often cited, so much does the elevation of his spirit, the quality of his intelligence, the acuity of his vision command our admiration. He is Count de Laborde, [4] Minister of Fine Arts under the Second Empire and an exponent of the first International Exposition that took place in London in 1851. His report for the exposition, an astonishing monument, contains the essentials of a philosophical reality that, in most of its points, well suited its epoch. Count de Labordeanticipated everything, but he remained unconscious, unlike Karl Marx, of the need to draw conclusions. In his report, he wrote this:

The trajectory of Society is to have the greatest number participate in sharing the pleasures previously reserved to the few . . .

When all peoples circulate easily by means of railroads, when they speak from one pole to another by means of electric wires, when their frontiers are erased, their customs offices dismantled, when no one can imprison Shakespeare on his island, chain Tasso in Italy or Camoens in Lisbon, and halt Schiller at the Rhine, the result, I am certain, will be not minglings of the common sort but lively connections between superior intelligences and between each country’s long, accumulated experience of national activities, a new social force for the arts, letters, and sciences that will spin these multiple threads, weakly charged in isolation, into a powerful strand.

I will accept objections [he adds] if this turns out to be a superficial tendency, a false movement; but this transformation of the arts is coming about with the aptness of all such discoveries: not one that fails to upset or disturb the established order, but one that comes to fruition to fulfill a signaled need and to develop a sought-after happiness, much like writing did after speaking, printing did after writing, and rapid communication did after printing, whether the latter came through postal relays, railroads, electricity, or ariel flight, all of which coalesced as ways of extending every intellectual and material conquest . . .

Don’t forget that we are in 1853 and Count de Laborde is a high official of the Empire. Behind this revolutionary phrasing, there is a clairvoyance, an audacity, and a purity that is poignant for those of us only now beginning to realize what these two recent inventions, Cinema and Radio, mean as signals of the time to come, so long at least as we always agree to proceed with caution as well as confidence. Let’s agree then that it is useful, initially, to disregard fundamental questions in order to examine the aesthetic laws capable of regulating a new mode of expression (again, it should be recognized beforehand that indeed the question is one of a new mode of expression, and this recognition has not come without trouble and controversy!), that, in order to make works practical and efficacious, we absolutely must return to life, for what concerns art also concerns the cinema: one has to study its essentials not by rereading its history but by regarding life itself.

Agreements, misgivings, and even certain attacks of conscience already are widespread. Certainly we do not lack for assertions. I myself have made some. It is easy to find a new one in this phrase from Dominique Braga: “[Printing] . . . permitted the diffusion of a certain culture – one we could call historical in that it’s the culture of our grand-dads from the Renaissance through the end of the 19th century. But what’s lacking in this culture of the book has become clear to us. Thanks to the cinema, we are seeing another, modern form of culture develop, one that we could qualify as geographical.” If our societies still do not accept this as reality and opposition continues to emerge and take shape, it is because “whereas the spirit of the individual is innovative, the rational nature of society is conservative.”

However, we reach the heart of the matter with René Clair, the author of Entr’acte and Le voyage imaginaire, for he places the cinema clearly in its social sphere, outside of which everything else is merely intellectual speculation: “A film only exists on the screen. Yet, between the mind that conceives it and the screen which reflects it, there looms a huge industrial organization and its craving for money . . . It seems futile to anticipate the existence of a pure cinema, consequently, as long as the material conditions of the cinema remain unaltered and as long as the public taste does not advance . . .” [5] (See also Blaise Cendrars, [6] L’ABC du cinéma ) Let’s move on then to the conclusion of our thinking and say: in its essence and its deepest realities, cinema corresponds to the greatest forms of collective expression: an art of space and time, universal and international, it logically has to be freed of the foreign influences enslaving it and truly thrive through the independence of a new economic system formed on the base of a new social order. This condition is a direct extension of the problem that Count de Laborde already posed in 1853: the Union of Art and Industry. A chimera vainly pursued ever since, up to and including the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, which constituted the most glaring demonstration of the impossibility of such a union: because of the irreparable antagonisms between capital and labor.

Ceaseless scientific discoveries have produced mechanical inventions that, in turn, have transformed our technical means; they now demand that we have constantly improving tools and an organization answerable to ever accumulating demands, on the universal as well as the national and international levels, for the same reasons given by Count de Laborde and cited previously. From this follow ever increasing outlays of working capital and ever more unreasonable demands – and logic decrees it be so. But because of this also the chasm widens between an art that is dependent on the means provided by industry and the artists themselves. Because of this heightened necessity to acquire industrial means, all those characteristics that the other arts already possess to some degree – in order to create – the cinema has gathered together and elevated to their maximum power. This has led to the overhasty conclusion that the other arts are different from the cinema, by reason of their conditions of existence.

The house will burn down while the firemen play cards – upping the ante for the pot – naturally.

Now, everyone who even briefly considers the present situation of the cinema, gripped as it is by commercialism, poses the same question. The only answer – which is logical, strikingly logical -makes them uneasy or frightens them in that it shocks their habitual ways, their education, or their class biases. For myself, I have often found evidence of this among my correspondents. They can be summarized like this:

Monsieur, the cinema is less disinterested than the other arts. Perhaps it’s this lack of freedom that has offended our intelligence up until now; undoubtedly that’s why we have refused to grant it our approval. Don’t the Ciné-Club de France, the Cahiers du mois, the Vieux-Colombier, and the Studio des Ursalines [7]  all act in such a way as to lance a wound that cannot be healed; don’t they seek to heal it in spite of that?

Or like this:

Besides the fine notions which I share with you, Monsieur, I want to make you aware of the concerns that I believe constitute an essential part of the problem. Vis-a-vis the few sous needed by a writer or the few francs which satisfy a painter or sculptor, you have stressed the considerable outlay of capital which the cinegraphic work requires and which puts it totally at the mercy of money interests. Isn’t that an irreparable defect that disfigures the new art? To hope for the independence of a better social condition, you must concede, is to indulge in excessive optimism and to believe in an awfully long-range payoff! For, to return to first principles, the cinéaste of tomorrow – like the scriptwriter, poet, architect, musician, photographer, painter, physician, industrialist–must also find the capital with which to sustain his activity. If it doesn’t come from a huge personal fortune, how will he safeguard his independence? And, if young and unknown, how will he find the financial means that will allow him to realize his ideas, to assert his mastery the first time around . . . ? I’m simply afraid that, in the current state of social relations, you cannot convince me, Monsieur, of this revelation (which I too wish for) of making an art come alive within the bounds of an industry . . .

Here’s an answer.

All art essentially comes about through the disinterestedness of the artist; he is solely preoccupied with his creation and, to make that creation complete, lets go of it for the benefit of all – thus in the past, when the arts required of the artist rather limited material means for working, the force of genius supplied everything; it overcame obstacles, created the means itself; and, when necessary, the artist gave up a little of his own blood. But we now find that the arts – where we are discovering equivalences and facile comparisons – are opposed, theoretically, to the cinema in practice. They say that especially in the case of Music and Radio. They play freely on words (what else do you expect) and say arts and Art. They confuse ends and means. So that art proper is not only a new material such as aluminum or rubber but ‘the consciousness of man which has come into the world with man and which is still taking shape’.

Certainly, in the current social conditions, the cinegraphic work is totally at the mercy of money interests. But this acknowledgment calls for a line of reasoning which leads to the question of all or nothing. In order for the cinema to realize its potential, it has to be freed from the domination of capital. What will do that? The system of production of a socialist economy. And since this socialist economy is only possible through revolutionary means, we await the Revolution – or prepare ourselves for it, according to the degree of our courage. We cannot go against that. It’s a mathematical springboard. We will not avoid the perilous triple somersault in space between two drum rolls. It’s only a question of landing on one’s feet and setting out again straight ahead.

There is something else. Some are too used to thinking that the material conditions of the cinematograph are immutable. That shows a lack of imagination. We are continually looking for discoveries. They are expected, necessary, inevitable.

I will cite only two, the first is still in a state of transition and not without practical problems.

We know that film stock – positive and negative – is actually very expensive and extremely fragile. That has consequences: 1) film projection has to be entrusted to specialists capable of procuring its maximum value; 2) the creation of projection spaces where the revenues of exhibition will be sufficient not only to amortize the capital required for the production of a film but also for printing copies of it. We know that the educational film, which will be called on to play a considerable role in the future, right now enjoys a mediocre circulation that’s getting worse for the simple reason that film stock is so expensive and fragile. Imagine that tomorrow a chemist creates an ideal film base: solid, unscratchable, non-flammable, and marketable. At once, all the material conditions of cinema production are overturned, resolved. Likewise, imagine that a mechanic creates a practical projector, equally marketable, and available for purchase by a large number of clubs, groups, etc. . . For an interesting film, this would soon prompt the printing and circulation of numerous copies to fully satisfy the needs of a clientele extending throughout the world, whether copies were bought directly to form a library, somewhat in the manner that one now buys phonographs, or they were rented for private or public cinémathèques. Exhibition venues would not cease to exist because of that, just as symphonic concerts have not ceased to exist ever since Radio. However, their role would tend more to be one of specializing, in unusual films or a repertory of films.

But that is only in a state of transition, and it is time to broach a second discovery.

It is common now to expect an invention that will allow a film to be transmitted at a distance. For some time, static images have been transmitted without wires. It is logical to think that the improvement of this system will prompt the discovery of means to transmit a moving image – that is, a film – without wires as well. In this case, it means the creation of transmitting stations that, much like the improved T.S.F., would allow all those who possess a receptor screen a choice of programs. It is evident as well in this case that all the conditions of the cinema would be unsettled – from production to exhibition. It is no less evident that these discoveries would correspond to a new organization of national and international economies, for they would demand an order, a method, and a form of centralization (initially) that the current system of social economy could not assure without destroying itself. To realize that, we don’t have to reread Karl Marx or Lenin. We already understand that, logically, the present trajectory of all social, economic, and political phenomena propels us toward and compels these events and this future. [Translator’s note] [8]

Let no one retort that reason and feeling rebel against this perspective. That is an initial move that must be overcome in order to be able to think productively. Life does not reveal itself without drama. Prejudices and customs have to be confronted; personal interests and pleasures, sacrificed. Here, cold reason guides our emotions.

Besides, Count de Laborde (one can continually return to him since antecedants partly serve to guarantee a sense of bourgeois security) had anticipated such an initially indispensable centralization when he declared that it was neccessary to establish a national factory as a creative model that gathered the best artists together and, thanks to the State authority, permitted a progressive public education. The only thing Count de Laborde could not foresee was that it was impossible for a political State like the bourgeois State to do that in conditions productive to the national interest. Count de Laborde shared the idealism of our grandfathers. His utopianism was somewhat blind in that it believed that, in such a State, money interests alone would not determine activity, especially during a period of acute crisis when unchecked egoism went on a stampede for profit.

In order to create such a powerful centralization, we must safeguard what survives on this other raft of Medusa and from what springs an omniscient and disinterested force: that is, a provisional political State that will gradually wither away according to the actions of the new economic order and that, before it disappears, initially will take control of the money interests to use them fully for its profit. [9]

Conceived well ahead of the time over which it will rule, along with other forms of expression, whether known or yet unknown, the cinema, the firstborn of the cinematic arts, can only suffer severely, and more so than all other organisms of production, from the crisis of the social economy which has become impotent and obsolete because of recent events and which already has outlived its usefulness. It’s only a question of time and more painful suffering for eyes to be opened. Everything in the present holds it up to the light and condemns it, as we have seen. But time is not wasting and knows what to do in this waiting. The heroism of true cinéastes – already there are several in the world – now assures the cinema of its theoretical and practical preparation. This comes thanks to improving technical means and fragmentary accomplishments that have succeeded in spite of and sometimes in opposition to business partners, stars and their hangers on, producers, distributors, and exhibitors. Here, too, exceptions prove the rule. So let’s support the cinéastes for their cunning and their courage in holding out and fighting on, against the French film serial, the American trust, and the corrupt press consortia. They are gradually perfecting an instrument that will soon be ready for great tasks.

The cinema then isn’t disfigured with an irreparable defect. Nor is it marked by an excessive optimism. And if the payoff, to which the correspondent I cited earlier alluded, is more or less a long way off, is that any reason to stop working together? Then – and only then – will the cinéaste have no need of a personal fortune. Spiritual assets will have a value that material assets have not known. The community will guarantee the artist his independence because that will be in the interest of the community. To each according to his needs.

Some would object: it’s best to distrust theories and not be duped by a universal explanation. To which it is easy to reply: the critical interrogation and practical analysis of human societies lead us to the same conclusions, unless we deny ourselves historical virtue. We only have to accept these conclusions openly, before they impose themselves on us. Philosophically, with respect to what I will call the future in the long term, if we maintain the poignant pessimism that Elie Faure [10] recently expressed in an essay published in Europe, a sort of novel, broader “above the masses” position, there would be even less need for a firm optimism about the future in the short term. Yet it is this optimism that can push man to action, and only action conveys a vibrant rhythm. Elie Faure writes: “Everyone lies, those who are enveloped in the shroud of the past, those who carry in their bellies the embryo of the future. Undoubtedly, because the lie is a permanent moral weapon that seeks to slyly substitute for a reality considered too atrocious a sentimental pretext capable of rallying almost everyone who is unable to look their frightening destiny in the face . . . Man is a Sisyphus in truth. If he persists in obeying the power that makes him ever rise from the ashes, he must remain a Sisyphus to the end . . . Those who believe in doing away with ‘evil’ merely displace it by doing away with a pretext of ‘evil,’ working at feeling good as they trudge through life, keeping up an anxious enthusiasm so necessary for the journey. As they destroy moribund illusions, they create new ones. Peace be with them then, even into the bloody midst of war.” The eternal, ever renewed truism that provokes Elie Faure’s desperate cry – there is no use correcting this consolation card that he accords men, this benediction from the hand of a wise man who has withdrawn onto the highest of summits – is what moves us so much and invites us even more to pursue our task. This eternal return being life itself, we seek to engage in it with all our naked strength. Because we love life, all that it takes from us as well as gives to us. And in that, as intelligence merges with sensibility, we are alternately (or simultaneously) triumphant or slaughtered, we discover precisely the supreme justification of our optimism. The cinema hails something new: we love it less for what it offers than for what it promises. We are razing the old towers that once served as boundary markers. We are erecting in their place endless spirals that offer escape routes. We have discovered in the cinematograph a powerful means of participating more deeply and more intimately than ever in the profound life of man, from his baseness to his crowning glory: that suffices, to our way of thinking. We love Charlot [Chaplin] as he loves us. Don’t say that poetry is dead! Rather say that a kind of poetry is dead and another is being born. Elie Faure writes, “Sisyphus.” Sisyphus lives. Sisyphus exhausts himself rolling a rock toward the mountain’s summit and if, each time he believes he has reached the summit, he suffers terribly in being deceived and yet still he begins his task all over again, it is because there remains in his heart and soul the hope of succeeding one day. Shame on those who wish to destroy Sisyphus’s hope! Shame on those who would strip away the certitudes from man’s soul and destroy the love in his heart! Shame on those who no longer have faith! In its vertiginous descent, Sisyphus’s rock will flatten them!

Now to summarize and conclude. Our imagination must suffice to make up for our impatience. Cataclysms should neither astonish nor frighten us: they are unfortunate outbursts, awaited because of their radiance and the human leaps they announce. The cinema is being born. It is being born at a time that does not yet correspond, we have seen, with announcing the secret impulses of a moment that is going to emerge with it. It suffers from an individualism that consumes and exasperates. It is developing in the midst of a system of hostile and indifferent forces that soothe and smother it. The whole social economy is allied in working against their blundering attention and abnegation. That is because, as is well known, we want it to serve life rather than the reverse.

All our wills combined do not create a style, but thinking and feeling create art. There is no artistic work as long as the artist is not disinterested in the face of the work. And film, more or less, like the collective constructions it resembles, as much by this feature as by the originality and authority called for in the master, will be anonymous or will not be at all. The cinema, it’s worth repeating, speaks of human unity. It is born for that. Its international character is its initial virtue.

Anonymous. Please understand me. A signature, in the cinema, means less than a date; any personality film reveals will be expressed through a synthesis. The screen restores to us a simplicity and purity of feeling in its plenitude. It reveals phases unknown to us and, in slow motion, condensed riches. Film will gather the impulses, the desires, the joys, the sufferings, the enthusiasm of crowds, since crowds will be of one mind. It will realize, in a second, in minutes, in an hour, a shared interest that is powerful and widespread. In short, it will make the same cry ring from one pole to the other. That’s the great fact being hailed. And it is being hailed in several films today.

It is useless to speak of aesthetics; no longer are we the dupes of words. Realities are what we want, not the quarrels of shops and shopkeepers; ventures that are treated with honor, more or less, and that are done in collaboration and not by artists indulging themselves secretly. For the cinema must thrive. If the cinema is not alone in suffering from the current state of things created by capitalism, it may well be the most important victim, because the most attacked and, at the same time, the most triumphant. At the far end of Europe is a child-like people, a new world, another world. Here, separate and isolated, and consequently in a very precarious situation, a number of men of good will understand and go on struggling, but they are few. Awaiting the flames on the façade: imports and exports, 100 for 100, defenses of the French or European film, etc. Economy reduces aesthetics to something of little value or weight. It’s a question of urgency. Let’s stop there.

The Cinema will be.

Footnotes:
[1] Pierre Scize was a journalist and film critic who wrote for Bonsoir in the 1920s and was a member of the earliest ciné-club, Ricciotto Canudo’s CASA.
[2] Marcel L’Herbier was a major French filmmaker, best known for Eldorado (1921) and L’inhumaine (1924), who also frequently lectured for the ciné-club movement and wrote “philosophical” essays about film. His essay, “Le Cinématographe et l’espace,” preceded Moussinac’s in volume 4 of L’art cinématographique (1927)
[3] Probably a reference to the Citroën-sponsored automobile race across Africa (from Morocco to Madagascar), from 28 October 1924 to 26 June 1925, documented by Léon Poirier and Georges Specht in La Croisière noire (1926).
[4] Marquis Léon de Laborde(1807-1869) was a French archaeologist who explored Asia Minor and the Nile Valley. Moussinac is quoting from his famous paper extolling the “applied arts,” published in conjunction with the 1855 International Exposition in London.
[5] Quoted from René Clair, “Cinéma pur et cinéma commercial,” Les cahiers du mois 16-17 (1925). At the time, Clair was about to go into production on what would be his finest silent film,Un chapeau de paille d’Italie(1928).
[6] Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) was a devoted traveler, writer, and editor (Editions de la sirène), whose poetry was second only to Apollinaire’s in importance during the 1910s. Cendrars assisted Abel Gance in scripting, directing, and editing J’accuse (1919) as well as La roue (1922) and collected his own essays on film in L’ABC du cinéma(1926).
[7] Jean Tedesco’s Théâtre duVieux-Colombier and Armand Tallier’s Studio des Ursulines were the first repertory cinemas in Paris, opening in 1924 and 1925, respectively.Jean Tedesco’s Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier and Armand Tallier’s Studio des Ursulines were the first repertory cinemas in Paris, opening in 1924 and 1925, respectively.
[8] [Translator’s note]: L’Herbier’s L’inhumaine represents just such an experimental television system in one sequence, but it seems to work perfectly within the bourgeois capitalist economy that Moussinac adhores here
[9] The Russia of Soviets, one will ask? Isn’t it admirable that we already can respond with The Battleship Potemkin by Eisenstein and Mother by Pudovkin, two masterpieces of the cinema, the first practical and indisputable products of a system of organization that only the soviets have made possible, two films that have entered cinematographic history because at the same time they have entered revolutionary history?
[10] Elie Faure (1873-1937) was an art historian, biographer, and critic, best known for Histoire d’art, published originally in four volumes between 1909 and 1921 and then released in a revised edition in 1924. His one important essay on the cinema, “De la cinéplastique,” appeared in L’arbre d’Eden(1922).