Presentation of Zéro de conduite

I’m a bit surprised to find myself alone on this stage.

Given the spirit in which Zéro de conduite was made, I would have preferred to offer you, like the anonymous girls,1 as a fleeting preface to the film’s screening, a choreographed greeting together with all my collaborators. A round dance would, I believe, have favourably replaced any stammered words.

I also considered bringing you a few members of the French censorship board, who most often end up, with their scissors, becoming the true authors of a film. But I feared they might get damaged during the trip.

Let it suffice for me, in citing these latter, to pay tribute to the greatest admirers of Zéro de conduite.
“This film,” they confessed to me with a greedy gleam, “must not be sullied by any gaze other than our own beautiful eyes.”
What a charming exclusivity!

Acknowledge with me that I would be wrong to complain, and that at most I can only reproach these gentlemen for their kindly selfishness and their good taste.
For until now, you may have believed that the film was banned outright for less honest reasons; under the pretext, for example, that it is anti-French in spirit – which means nothing. This, moreover, has already caused astonishment in France among anyone who attended a screening of the film, and it was never officially proclaimed, the decisions of the Censorship having no need to be justified. And if I am to tell you everything, know that the President of this independent Censorship replied to a friend, who was planning to visit him in secret about this veto: “We received a memorandum ordering us to ban Zéro de conduite, even before my colleagues and I had been able to see it and judge it impartially.”

No, one must not believe what should not be believed. And I am here to dispel any misunderstanding that might arise in your mind.
I have no doubt, then, that this film will obtain its certificate.
Consider this for a moment: the film is banned in its entirety. I emphasize the word entirety.
Could this be proof of a lack of discernment on the part of our censors, whom one cannot, in any case, accuse of being unable to select, among the images of a film, at least a few meters of insignificant scenes that could, at a stretch, be shown to the public otherwise than as if they were a bomb?

Should one admit that this commission of artistic morality exists solely to disgust the last remaining capitalists, who, despite repeated setbacks, still consent to take an interest in the imperilled Film Industry?

Might we not be very quickly led to suspect suspecting that this tribunal serves some commercial or opportunistic political interests? And would not one example seem to confirm this opinion; the works of the great Russian filmmakers, banned without comment two years ago, and today authorised in their same complete, original versions? Shall we forget that just a few months ago a Soviet documentary failed to obtain its certificate, the young Russian people appearing far too smiling, well-fed, and so unlike that curious image one has of abandoned children in the U.S.S.R. by a man bearing a knife between his teeth,2 and who grown-ups eat in broad daylight in red corners? Whereas today all the Pathé-Natan theatres allow us, every week, to hear The Internationale performed in its entirety.

No, I repeat to you, one must not believe what should not be believed.

It would truly be to despair of the intelligence of high-ranking, qualified officials, policemen, desk-bound bureaucrats, failed writers in need – who make up the Areopagus3 of a caducous and Jesuitical institution – to suppose for a moment that these peaceful civilians, ever on alert, are incapable of seeing beyond the end of their bayonet, unable to tear the tricolour film from their eyes, and constantly fearing any allusion to their Home Country, and to it alone. Everything for it. That would be extremely arrogant.

If, despite my intentions, merely by the fact that I allowed myself no literature, no invention in this film, having only to lean slightly to recover memories, certain episodes of Zéro de conduite nonetheless verge on satire, I still see no reason why, faced with these non-situated images, the French government should feel so offended as to blow its nose spontaneously and with such éclat. What’s the point of caricaturing this or that government, this or that nation? With the exception of one, they are all the same.

I have no intention of leading you into a world to be remade, like the guides of the Cook agency who lead tourists through the tubercular alleys of poor and picturesque neighbourhoods.

The problem for me is, unfortunately, more serious. My concern is broader and purer.

Childhood. Kids who are abandoned on an October Back-to-school evening in a court of honour [cour d’honneur] somewhere in the Provinces, under whatever flag, but always far from Home, where they hope for a mother’s affection, a father’s camaraderie, if he is not already dead.

And then, I feel a wave of anguish. You are going to watch Zéro de conduite, I will watch it again with you. I saw it grow. How frail it seems to me! Not even convalescent, like my own child, it is no longer my childhood. I widen my eyes in vain. My memory no longer quite recognizes itself in it. Is it really so distant already? How did I dare, having become a man, to run all alone, without my playmates and school friends, along the paths of Le Grand Meaulnes?4 No doubt, in the railway compartment that scatters the children for the holidays, I do find again the two friends of the Return to School in October. Of course, there it stands, with its thirty identical beds, the dormitory of my eight years of boarding school, and I also see Huguet, whom we loved so dearly, and his colleague, the supervisor “Pète-Sec,” and that silent head supervisor with his ghostlike crepe-soled shoes.5 In the dim glow of the gas lamp left burning, will the little sleepwalker still haunt my dreams tonight? And perhaps I shall see him again at the foot of my bed, as he stood there on the eve of the day when the Spanish flu carried him off in 1919.
The little sleepwalker, whose coffin was carried down into the schoolyard for the priest’s blessing, as he waved with his aspergillum the devil we were all so afraid of.

Yes, I know, my pals Caussat, Bruel, Colin, the cook’s son, and Tabard, whom we called “the girl,” and whom the administration spied on and tormented, even though he needed an older brother, since Mother did not love him.

Present at roll call as well, the little girl of the rare Sunday out. Do you remember how I loved to see you climb onto the piano and hang, from the wire we had stretched together, brushing our hands against each other, the jar of goldfish?

Because I was looking at your chubby toddler thighs, you would cover my eyes with your handkerchief, which smelled of your mother’s lavender. And then, gently, as one does with the sick, you would remove this festive-day bandage, and the two of us would silently watch the jar of goldfish.

That very evening I returned to the College, and for how many months!

One had to be so obedient just to be allowed out for a few hours on a Sunday.

Everything is there: the dining hall with its beans, the classroom and the study room where one of us, one day, spoke aloud loud twice what we were all thinking.

So I shall witness again the reenactment of the conspiracy that gave us so much trouble, that night in the attic, the uproar it became, the crucifixion of Pète-Sec as it really happened, the officials’ celebration that we disturbed on that aptly named day of Saint Barbara.

Shall I once again leave the attic, our sole domain, across the rooftops toward a better sky?

Eh! No, that’s not it! It’s a failure. And to conclude, I want to tell you that I plead guilty before you.

My responsibility is entirely engaged. Certainly, I suffer from not offering you a better film for a project that is my whole heart.

But I will invoke no excuse.

No filmmaker has the right, if he judges his film imperfect, to present himself before the public in order to reject the evidence of his partial or total failure, the affirmation of his impotence over anyone or anything.

Freedom! “You were not free to realise your idea as you felt it.”

Then why choose this profession at all?

By definition, in the current state of the bourgeois world, a filmmaker is a foreign body hurled into the machinery of financial schemes and other arrangements to which the film market lends itself. A film company, paradoxical as it may seem, would ideally never make a single film if it wanted to make money. Large production companies hire directors on yearly contracts and beg them to spend the whole year fishing in the countryside.

When, by chance, a film is to be exploited, it is delivered to commerce like foodstuffs of dubious quality. Fraud is compulsory: the white tin cans that contain the films are boxes of surprise, you may just as well find inside them reels that are 100 percent talkies as sonic beans.

A matter of luck. The public knows well the role of chance in cinema. It no longer chooses its entertainments: one goes to the cinema on a fixed day, and not always to watch the film.

We know this from the start. If it doesn’t suit us, we might as well go and sell noodles.

No false excuses, crying out: “Censorship has mutilated my film: and look: what a disgrace!” On 4 October 1933, on the last page of the French newspapers, tucked away in a small corner, one could read a shameful little notice, deliberately rendered illegible by a few official typos imposed on the typesetters: “Following an agreement reached between Mr. de Monzie and Mr. Camille Chautemps, the film censorship service is transferred from the Ministry of National Education to the Ministry of the Interior.”

Bravo! Perhaps this will one day lead us to the frankness of a cynical but honest State Censorship. Henceforth, each supporter of a film must report to the judicial police, where fingerprints will be taken for each of his cinematographic crimes, and where his photograph will be shot from the angles reserved for scoundrels, and if necessary, they may even be allowed to rest in the Chamber of Spontaneous Confessions.

We learn nothing new here.

And do not shout so loudly: “That production director is an idiot. He replied, ‘Above all, no documentary!’”

No doubt we are not unaware that such a director raises a flag above the studios whenever he deigns to be there.

And then what!!! Do you pay at the box office? Do you make another film? Yes? Do you botch that one as well, like the previous one? Yes.

Then be quiet and consider yourself solely responsible.

That is what I would like you to retain today from this overlong chatter. The culprit is here; his accomplices stand with him. No one and nothing came to hinder our work. Yet the film drags along its 1,200 meters of heavy flaws, which you will judge. I suffer from it a little. I apologize profusely, as one would for a bad joke played on friends.

• 1Referring to the group of young female dancers who performed stylised, synchronised routines in cabarets and revues. [Translator’s note]
• 2In the context of Western and anti-communist propaganda after the Russian Revolution and during the interwar period, this type of imagery was often used to portray communists and Bolsheviks as excessively violent and “inhuman.” See also this political cartoon from the satirical weekly Le Rire (Paris, 27 July 1935). [Translator’s note]
• 3The Areopagus was originally a council of elder aristocrats in ancient Athens that oversaw justice and legislation. [Translater’s note]
• 4Le Grand Meaulnes is a French novel by Alain-Fournier (1913) that depicts idealistic, adventurous youth. In this passage, it refers to the loss of youthful innocence and the nostalgic memory of friendship and discoveries that one can no longer relive as an adult. [Translator’s note]
• 5Huguet and Pète-Sec are also the names of school supervisors in Zéro de conduite, played by Jean Dasté and Robert le Flon. [Translator’s note]