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My decision is a mask, behind which there is disorder, apeiron.

— Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema (Book 1: Miscellanies, p. 23), translated by Brian Holmes, 2005

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“What kind of boredom are we talking about? Take a classic example. A fair number of human beings who have passed the age of forty and who decline to take sedatives find themselves waking up every night around 4 A.M. Most enjoy two activities: remembering things past and thinking ahead to what must be accomplished the following day. In Milanese dialect there is even a word to describe the first of these activities: calendare. Perhaps Bergson, who tended to doubt the importance of a present which was always seemed to vanish in the ebb and flow of past and future time, would have looked into this privileged moment when past and future part like the waters of the Red Sea before an intense feeling of being here and now, in active rest. This privileged moment, which early theologians called «Saint Gregory’s paradox,» occurs when the soul is both at rest and yet turns on itself like a cyclone around its eye, while events in the past and the future vanish in the distance. If I propose this modest defense of ennui, it is perhaps because the films I am interested in can sometimes provoke this sort of boredom. Those who have seen films by Michael Snow, Ozu, or Tarkovsky will know what I mean. The same goes for Andy Warhol, or Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.”

—Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema (Book 1: Miscellanies, p. 13), translated by Brian Holmes, 2005

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“What do we mean by boredom? In about the fourth century A.D., Cassanius and some other early Christian fathers reflected on a phenomenon which they considered the Eighth Capital Sin. They called it tristitia, or sadness. It is induced by the noonday demon. Most of his victims are monks, isolated from the rest of the world. The phenomenon starts towards midday, when the light is at its strongest. The monk is concentrating on his meditation; he hears steps, runs to the window; there’s no-one about, but there is a gentle knocking at the door of his cell; he checks there’s no-one there, and suddenly he wants to be somewhere else, anywhere, miles away. This happens again and again. He cannot meditate, he feels tired, hungry, sleepy.

We have no difficulty in discerning the three stages of ennui or boredom: a feeling of imprisonment, escape through sleep, and finally anxiety, as though we were guilty of some awful deed which we have not committed. The Abbot’s cure for this is not a million miles from what today’s entertainment experts say is the right thing to keep people alert at the workplace: distract distraction by means of distraction, use poison to heal.

[…]

Back in his cell, he’s astonished to discover that traveling has only made things worse. He’s even more bored than before and now his boredom has ontological weight. We will call this dangerous new sentiment melancholy. […] Soon the cell itself, his brother monks, and even communion with God becomes an illusion. His world has been emptied by entertainment. Some one thousand two hundred years later, in France, Blaise Pascal, in the chapter of his Pensées devoted to entertainment, warns «All the evil in men comes from one thing and one thing alone: their inability to remain at rest in a room» — be it for no more than an hour. So perhaps boredom is a good thing.”

—Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema (Book 1: Miscellanies, pp. 12-13), translated by Brian Holmes, 2005

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“Ten years later, in Santiago, I decided to study theater and cinema and began thinking about so-called dramatic construction. The first surprise was that all American films were subject to a system of credibility. In our textbook (John Howard Lawson: How to Write a Script) we learned that the films we loved the most were badly made. That was the starting point of an ongoing debate between me and a certain type of American cinema, theater, and literature, which is considered well made. What I particularly dislike is the underlying ideology: central conflict theory. Then, I was eighteen. Now I’m fifty-three. My astonishment is as young now as I was then. I have never understood why every plot should need a central conflict as its backbone.

I remember the first statement of the theory: a story begins when someone wants something and someone else doesn’t want them to have it. From that point on, through various digressions, all the elements of the story are arranged around this central conflict. What I immediately found unacceptable was this direct relation between will, which to me is something dark and oceanic, and the petty play of strategies and tactics around a goal which if not in itself banal, is certainly rendered so.”

—Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema (Book 1: Miscellanies, pp. 11), translated by Brian Holmes, 2005

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“Evil is whatever distracts.”

— Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

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“There are lots of forces today which aim to deny all distinction between the commercial and the creative. The more this distinction is denied, the more amusing, understanding and well-informed people think they are. In fact, they are only translating capitalism’s demand for rapid rotation.

When advertising people explain that advertisements are the poetry of the modern world, this shameless proposition forgets that there is no art which aims to compose or reveal a product which corresponds to public expectations. Advertising can shock or want to shock, it corresponds to a presupposed expectation. An art, on the contrary, necessarily produces the unexpected, the unrecognized, the unrecognizable. There is no commercial art; it’s a meaningless phrase. There are popular arts, of course. There are also arts which require more or less financial investment, there is a commerce of arts but no commercial arts.

What seems to complicate everything is that the same form serves creative and commercial aims. We can already see it on the level of the book-form, it’s the same for the Harlequin collection and for a Tolstoy novel. You can always put airport books and great novels in competition with each other, it’s inevitably the airport book or best-seller which will win in a single market of rapid rotation, or, worse, they themselves will lay claim to the other’s qualities and take it hostage. It’s what is happening on television, where aesthetic judgement becomes ‘it’s delicious,’ like a little snack, or ‘it’s a breakthrough,’ like a football penalty. It’s a promotion that uses the lowest standard (une promotion par le bas), it’s an alignment of all literature with mass consumption.

‘Auteur’ is a function which refers to the work of art (and in other conditions to a crime). For other products, there are other names, which are just as respectable: editor, programmer, director, producer… People who say ‘there are no more auteurs today’ assume that they would have been capable of recognizing yesterday’s, at the time when they weren’t yet known. It’s very conceited. There is no art which can live except on the condition of a dual domain, the still-current distinction between the commercial and the creative.”

— Gilles Deleuze, The Brain Is the Screen (1989)

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“It’s that something bizarre struck me in cinema: its unexpected ability to show not behavior but spiritual life (at the same time as aberrant behaviors). Spiritual life is not the dream or the fantasy, which have always been dead-ends for cinema, rather it’s the domain of cold decision, of absolute determination (entêtement), of a choice of existence. […] Dreyer, Sternberg, Bresson, Rossellini, Rohmer today. It’s curious the way Rohmer assigns to cinema the study of spheres of existence, aesthetic existence in La Collectionneuse, ethical existence in Le Beau mariage, religious existence in Ma nuit chez Maud: it’s close to Kierkegaard who, well before cinema, already felt the need to write in strange synopses. In short, cinema not only puts movement into the image, it also puts it into the spirit. Spiritual life is the movement of the spirit. One goes quite naturally from philosophy to cinema, but also from cinema to philosophy.”

— Gilles Deleuze, The Brain Is The Screen (1989)

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Interviewer: It is curious that men play subsidiary roles in Céline et Julie… Does this have anything to do with what you term ‘individual expression’?

Juliet Berto: I couldn’t really answer that. It is hard though to find actors who bring original ideas to film. They somehow aren’t interested in innovative research and challenge. Secure in their social position, they refrain from taking too many risks. Women have nothing to lose and it is from our socially deprived position that we emerge as powerful individuals in the film. It is a unique situation and one that is reflected by the fact that men are inevitably weaker in their profession as actors. Male actors possess an ambivalence, since acting for them implies the exposure of a narcissistic and feminine side of their personalities.

Dominique Labourier: We are certainly interested in expressing ourselves as women in the film. In fact, the first thing we wrote about the characters was derivative of Bergman’s Persona. For the first few days he was constantly on our minds.

Interviewer: I gather then that the film was ultimately rewarding for you both as individuals and as actresses.

Juliet Berto: For me it wasn’t only a positive experience but a complete one as it closed a whole cycle for me in my profession as an actress.

Dominique Labourier: It was a very happy experience for me as well. As actresses and women in films dominated mostly by male criteria, we emerged as powerful individuals and creators in our own right.

Extract from interview in Film, March 1975

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Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

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Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

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Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

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Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

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Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

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Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

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Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

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Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

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Andrey Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer (Andrey A. Tarkovsky, 2019)