Cinema Cineast

A Selection of Marcel Hanoun’s Notes on the Written Image

In 2001, Hanoun published Cinéma cinéaste, notes sur l’image écrite, a collection of short notes on cinema written throughout his life. Guided by the question of what it means to make a film, Hanoun reflects on the filmic image and its relationship to sound, the filmmaker, the viewer, and history. Sabzian presents a selection of these notes and acknowledges Éditions Yellow Now and the Association Les Films de Marcel Hanoun for their permission to reproduce and translate them. More information about Marcel Hanoun’s films and books can be found on the website of Re:Voir.

Cinema talks about working-class speech, talks about giving voice to the working class – but does cinema provide itself with the means to give filmmakers a filmmaker’s voice, one that makes the act of filming a workers’ speech in itself?

*

To listen, just listen – to those I film, to what I film and will continue to film until the end of time and the meaning of filming. The images will leave me, will break away from me, will go far away, waiting for me, waiting for me, waiting for me, already.

*

I will speak, I will be speaking, I write.
They listen, they will be reading, 
They will watch my writing write itself.

*

The filmmaker is no more important than his work.

*

Who am I, witness to this image that watches me?

*

The paradox of the filmmaker, and of the creator more broadly, is not to reveal or unfold an apparent reality already familiar to the one who, as viewer, would perceive this apparent reality without surprise or wonder, already anticipating what is offered to him.

The filmmaker’s necessary and useful paradox is to know the unknowable, to be the first to penetrate a distant world that would be wholly foreign to him, to explore and discover it in a virtual simultaneity with the viewer, until they reach a shared awareness of a reality known to all and always, at once obvious and surprising.

*

I know that I know nothing about today’s cinema and that I have everything still to learn about tomorrow’s cinema.

*

The mystery of the film to be, to become, is what compels me to be a filmmaker.

*

Beyond the horizon lies that which, unchanged, appears on screen, represented. The film’s sole and constant horizon is the base of the frame – the projection screen – the only possible place where something new can be shown.

*

Words and images write themselves, shatter, break off into notes, become forms, colours and chiaroscuro, textual images, visible, transparent, which found sense and form our gaze.

*

Only chance and randomness can create a mise en scène without it seeming to be a mise en scène.

*

What brings a film into being: desire, the completion of the script, of the storyboard, the start or end of the shoot, the moment it is exposed to the public? What is the wholly irreversible instant of the “murderous act” which places the filmmaker in the role of denying, abjuring or avowing the film as a completed act?

Do our acts live on borrowed time? Do we only anticipate them through our images and our language? Will our cinematic deeds only be accomplished because they were first imagined, or will we imagine them based on models they have already offered us? As filmmakers, are we only capable of creating images without invention, in constant and monotonous repetition?

*

The event is not at the heart of the image, it’s at its periphery, in a utopian and timeless zone that lies inside us as we watch the film.

*

The off-camera, the voice-over, reaches towards its own plenitude, not to suggest itself, but to subtract itself – evacuating the image the better to reinvest the imagination.
The zero degree of the off-camera might be black, that of the voice-over white noise.

*

The only site of creation is that of contemporaneity itself.

*

The viewer sits, the filmmaker stands, sometimes sits, the critic lies down, and sometimes sleeps.

*

Writing lies in what slows or accelerates time, anticipates or defers it, fixes it, delays it, displaces, de-frames and diffracts space, disorients and dissociates the moment of meaning from the filmic moment, making enunciation and form the very enunciation of the film.  

*

Invited into the heart of the film, enclosed in a bubble, we persist in perceiving the image as a flat plane.

*

The film has no subject; it is the subject of the film.

*

I wake up, I want to know what’s happening in the world, I turn on the radio. I encounter a woman’s voice singing an ancient tune. I look no more: what news of today’s world could reach me better than a voice singing from out of time?

*

The unspooling of a cinema reel, of a magnetic tape, is a journey through memory.

*

A syllogism: it is said that cinema lies. To know and to say that cinema lies is true; yet, we know that all lies speak the truth, therefore cinema is true.

*

To capture images and words, to gather them, to disperse them, to let them fly on the level of meaning, to let them float very high, slowly flying over us, observing us as we watch them, as our vision becomes a gaze and flies away towards words and images.

*

Red is desire and the zoom is desire. Red is the zoom.

*

And it is not just the angle that produces the just angle; it’s just the dihedral of thought and the desire to write the image.

*

To create beautiful images; but beautiful images are often nothing more than just images.

*

A paradox: from afar, a man approaches a camera until he appears in close-up, yet he is moving towards his disappearance…

*

Time flows toward the future, but moves toward the film’s past.

The economy of film: just through the empty gesture, to obtain the substance of the gesture.

*

At daybreak, birds sing in abundance – it’s not for viewing figures.

*

Must one, as a filmmaker, look at one’s subject from above, from below and from the side, successively, or see it from all these angles at once, in a single glance?

*

Images are unearthed from abyssal depths and brought back to the light to tell ancient tales.

*

The one who, during the performance, abandons their role as spectator, gets up and leaves the screening room is less free than the one who never entered; he becomes a prisoner of the outside world.

*

To close one’s eyes the moment one begins a film, and open them again for the screening of the rushes, to see: nothing needs to be re-done, everything is still to be done.

*

Must the life of an image come down to nothing but its extinction?

*

Light comes from a film; it does not illuminate it.

It is almost futile to speak of cinema except to say nothing about it.

*

A film’s twists and turns are those of our thoughts, going against the current.

*

The image which neither exceeds nor prolongs the moment of looking is an image without a gaze.

*

Captive image of the bird, bound by the film, unable to fly high and far, as far as the eye can see.

*

The image subtracted from the image is enriched by its poverty.

*

Film is a polished pebble more than a branch in bloom.
A cold pebble, unlike a flower or folly, does not wither.

*

In my films I don’t combine words and images; I take images from my words, I pass from word to image without seeming to do so, I speak them in the same writing, in the same language.

*

It would be a film without shadows, lit vertically, yet full of depth.

*

By dint of telling stories, cinema becomes lived experience. By dint of being lived, it becomes true. By dint of being true, it becomes fiction.

*

Having music in one’s film is the mark of a great freedom; not having any is an even greater freedom.

There is no true film music except the music of the film itself.

*

Cinema makes insufficient use of ellipsis; it doesn’t know how to show a woman sleeping to suggest she’s eating.

*

The camera that observes can only make the observed reality dream.

*

Erasing the image’s invisibility makes the film appear.

*

Is the excitement and spectacular upheaval of a shoot proportionate to the film’s fullness, or is it just its flipside – the gestural expression of its emptiness and vanity?

*

The frame of the image is merely the confinement of the story and its unfurling. What appears on-screen is its enclosed geographical setting. The off-screen is the timeless utopia from which the film’s reality – its most improbable, least expected, most accurate reality – is extracted, isolated and invented, for cinematically it is as close as possible to the concept and its realisation.

*

Between projections, is the screen nothing more than the texture of a blank canvas awaiting wonder and colour?

*

From the camera’s writing to the film’s viewing, there is only the continuity of a gaze.

*

It is not a matter of adding a sound to an image; it is a matter of opening a window off-screen to let in a sound which was already there.

*

This filmmaker is accused of a film he did not commit.

*

Every film is a long, distant voyage, distress, hope, a thread woven, braided, re-woven, unwoven, while we wait for meaning to return.

There will always be a blind rabble to shoot at the light.

*

In the darkness of my night and my sleep a thought comes to me, awakens me, and I want to hold onto it. Without light, fumbling around, I find the sheet of paper and the pencil. On this sheet, black yet white, I continue to keep my idea illegible; I will transcribe it tomorrow. Blind, my writing has extended beyond the sheet, continued off-screen, outside the field of vision, extending beyond the frame that every camera assigns to writing.

*

The only cinematic obstacle is to amplify the obstacle.
The only obstacle is to will it.

*

Our cinematic desire is one of overabundance and excess. We create a desert with neither horizon nor dream.

*

Is the film’s viewer the one it’s projected at?

*

The filmmaker’s cry is the cry of a night owl waiting for the light.

*

The induction of a film happens through each of its humblest details, so that they are mechanically and harmonically linked, and so that the movement of each of the film’s microstructures multiplies, from the quiver of a voice or a glance, to an imperceptible, non-existent movement of the camera.

*

To aim accurately is a matter of chance; it’s that chance which one must aim for.

*

I don’t like horror films; they frighten me.

*

Film doesn’t dress itself, doesn’t clothe itself; it strips itself down, enriched by its bareness.

*

A film becomes what it is simply by having been conceived as a film to be made.

*

Film doesn’t say: “I show”; it asserts itself in the act of writing.

*

In this restaurant, from the street, I glimpse in reflection an attentive and silent reader of a text which – I don’t know why – I imagine to be sacred (the menu, perhaps, quite simply). Later, crossing the street, she will buy a cinema ticket. What sustenance has filled her day?

*

What’s more, to want to name the image is to clothe it in falsehood.

*

“It will be the night of shooting stars.” In bed, I close my eyes, I see them, I fall asleep; they are gone.

The most beautiful cinematic equations dissolve in the sleep of my dreams, lost for all time.

*

Tonight, the bird perching on the hedge shows me the backlit silhouette of its wings which quiver with light. In the same place, at daybreak, the same bird which landed wasn’t the same.

*

With each film everything is too early, everything is too late, everything is yet to be said.

*

Cinema is nourished by the irreversible, by an impossible turn backwards. Film: an arrow that cannot be pulled out.

*

The depth of an image is nothing but a mask for its flatness.

*

Sometimes, knowing the end of a film might be the best way to be surprised.

*

A film’s reality is not delivered like a message: it makes itself known, it is felt, it confronts the gaze, it resists, it attacks, it challenges. A film’s reality is its writing.

*

The pack of critics only chases farmed pheasants. It would tire itself out chasing wild ones.

*

Lacking the means to film, but filming nonetheless, is a form of richness which is the very poverty of rich cinema.

*

One doesn’t plant a camera before history as it passes by; the camera is history.

History can only become film insofar as the film creates (hi)stories.

*

My films are inevitably documentaries. 
I don’t direct my actors; they become documentary structure.

*

Film’s truth is nothing but the greatest impossibility expressed through make-believe; it’s an inchoate scream – tragic and desperate.

*

The actor who most resembles themselves is the most capable of portraying another.

*

The film actor is not, as in the theatre, the autonomous focal point of the multiple gazes which surround him; he is, under a single gaze, the prisoner of every technical parameter: the shot, angle, frame, lighting, sound, editing…

*

The mise en scène is created from everything which escapes the mise en scène. The mise en scène is created solely from everything which will bring the film into the present moment of its creation, with all its moving parts in sync.

*

The actor’s truth passes through movement, through acting style, rather than through the injunction of a psychology whispered into his ear.

*

Lost, busy, bewildered birds roam the sky.
They are our gazes, hunting for writings, in search of our lost films.

*

Daybreak. A great raven crosses the sky speaking to the two ravens which follow it. What speech does it render in two notes? Why are several images necessary when two would suffice? Why use too many images to say what can be said in one? 
Later, a great heron crosses the sky. No cry had attracted my attention. Only the slow, silent writing of its flight caught my reading-eye.

*

A film’s silence might be to interrupt its own projection, but that would make way for the whispers of the world that cinema precisely wishes to reproduce. True silence, the cut, can only be found within the film.

One day, the image should reach the metaphorical level of music and thereby have an impact which only the musical metaphor has long enjoyed (music is always present, contemporary).

*

A film:
–  money
–  a decoy
–  a well-written script
–  a beloved director
–  a handful of stars
–  a functional camera
–  musical music
–  a vigilant crew
–  an audience to capture.

Film isn’t addition; by removing the stated elements one by one, by subtracting them, the film extracts itself from its own dross and becomes a work.

*

What is a film’s place?
–  its production?
–  its development, its scripting?
–  its writing and directing?
–  its promotion?
–  its distribution?
–  its criticism?
–  its screening?

By failing to cross this final frontier – the screening – does the film exist, or is it not rather a non-place?

The image’s epicentre is neither its maker nor its viewer; it’s where the image turns with enough force to erupt centrifugally into a thousand shards, into a thousand stars that aren’t stars.

*

Some films express themselves to the crowd merely to say: listen carefully, look closely, I’m filming!

The cineast asks without saying it: “Have you ever seen what I’m showing you before?”

*

Talking about film in order to say nothing about it strikes some as more profound than saying nothing about it at all.

*

In the middle of the night, sleepless, the cineast is more sensitive to shadows and light. It’s the moment when the audience is sleeping.

*

Is the violence of images stronger than the image of violence?

*

The film’s critical scope opens up towards – and is circumscribed by – the largest possible audience, whereas it would broaden out if it were to begin by appealing to the smallest.

*

“Smile!” certain images seem to say to the viewer: “you’re being filmed”.

Give it a foothold and the image lifts up the viewer.  

*

Images that you don’t explain to yourself because you don’t understand them: understand them by explaining them to yourself.

The image’s capacity to move shouldn’t exploit the viewer’s capacity to be moved.

*

The script only exists after the film.

A good project is nothing but the extension of a bad film already made.

There is no such thing as a good film, or a good script; there is only a film in writing. 
There is no time for writing, no preparatory time, no time for directing, no time for editing; there is only the unique, infinitesimal moment of the film’s unveiling – the moment of being surprised by it and of catching the secret rhythms that dwell within us.

*

“The long-awaited film” – What is it that makes us await a film? Its content, be it secret or revealed; its as yet unveiled form; its author; its production costs; media hype, swirling from where, sustained how, by whom? – Are there only films we wait for? Can there never be a film – naked, not awaited – gestated purely by the surge of its own desire?

*

At the cinema, true violence lies in the interruption of violence.

*

Cinema: as though we are ordered to watch, whereas what we watch ought to look back at us, call out to us, say:
“Hey! It’s you we’re watching, it’s us you’re watching: you are the real show! Don’t just sit there, move, get up, walk, make the film!”

Images that would turn the viewer into a true dreamer, a dreamer of realities.  

*

The camera at work, which chooses to receive, to capture and film death live, to send it back, to show it, to review and re-show the image of a young Palestinian boy’s death – this camera ignores, it laterally forgets the image of the one doing the killing. It has put itself in the position of shooting, in the blind spot that protects it and shelters us. Viewers, we are in the backdrop, in the crosshairs of the filmer’s sights: anticipating death, we’ve triggered the camera, just before the gunman’s click. We are witness and accomplice to a double murder – by gaze and by fire – and we try, in the blind spot of a morality that increasingly escapes us, to shrug off responsibility. We prefer the fickle spectacle of the death received to the injustice of the death dealt.

*

If we could look at ourselves and look at others, projected on screen, without passion, serenely, without violence, without indulgence, we would go very far, we would fly very high, we would discover our own qualities in the other and the other’s faults in ourselves, and we’d move as fast as the light which, on screen, only ever sends us back a reflection of our own inner image, over there.

*

Do we not know, do we only recognise, that which is already known?

*

Memory is just the instant of a recovered present, projected towards a future that shies away and draws closer, ceaselessly. Memory is the film in progress that comes into being before our eyes and our senses, and eludes our pursuit.

*

In cinema, whoever can do the least can also achieve the most, but whoever can do the most cannot necessarily do the least.

*

Cinematic images are shards of intermittent light punctuating the night with film. They can be rapid and dazzling, spaced out, short or long. 
The most precise are those that allow the film a moment of prolonged darkness, the darkness of the imaginary, with its silences.

Is continuous blackness the perfect film?

*

What is going to happen, there, on the screen, has already happened; it will happen again.

*

Can one remember what one has never seen, can one remember only the instant of the death to come?

*

Is there a cinematic style unique to each era? What is modernity? Aren’t we always modern merely by being in our own present?

*

Everything I don’t know, everything I’ve forgotten, I imagine it – I imagine it as even more beautiful than everything you think you know.

Just to know, in total ignorance.

*

As a lie, a film half-belongs to the one who is watching it.

The body writes the film as much as thought does.

Memory is only the act of discovering memory.

*

I know no more beautiful love scene than the one glimpsed in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille: a man encircles a woman’s body from behind, holding her hands beneath his; with a blind caress, he lets her discover the forms of a blind sculpture. In her ear, he softly whispers words that I can neither hear nor see.

*

Can every film be archaeological, with scratches, breaks, faded colours, sound cuts, and thus be, without further modification, just as it is, a completed work – accepted, definitive, new, without origin or reference point, exemplary?

*

The image can only be flight, verticality, height, ascent; it must be a rupture from the calm horizontality of the narrative.

*

Let the written word here take over, provisionally, the place of silenced images.

There is a very short path in cinema that few dare to take because they don’t know that beyond it the path never ends.