Spirit of Truth

The Gaumont cinema in Paris, rebuilt in 1931 with an Art Deco façade.

Spirit of Truth!1

Here, too, and fundamentally. In the cinema: spirit of truth.
I have claimed it insistently for architecture; and, in 1924, at the time of the preparations for the International Exposition of Decorative Arts, I intimated clearly by that insistence that decorative art had no right to exist—at least as the distressingly encumbered, bloated facade that it had become.
The splendor and drama of life emerges from the truth; and 90 percent of the cinema’s production is delusion. It simply exploits a remarkable technical advantage: the elimination of transitions, the easy possibility of suppressing “dead spaces.” Thus, it soothes us with images, sometimes engaging ones. And we wait patiently, we wait.

We await the truth.

Assuredly, everything is architecture, that is, ordered or arranged according to proportions and the selection of proportions: intensity. But intensity is possible only if the objects considered are precise, exact, sharply angled (a fog bank can not very well be considered as a precise event).

Therefore, it’s necessary to conceive and then to see. It’s necessary to have the notion of vision. For, to seek out men who see is to test the experiment of Diogenes.

The theater and theater people who tell stories have led the cinema into perdition. These people who are so full of bombast and grandiloquence have interposed themselves between us and the true voyeur: the lens.

Since we have fallen so low, it would be useful, for a time, to put our trust once again in technique itself, in order to return to essential things. To the basic elements. To culminate, consequently, in a recovery of the consciousness of the possibilities of the cinema.

And thus to be able to discover life, in what there is that’s true, in what it contains that’s so prodigiously intense, varied, multiple.
The base is the apparatus of physics, the lens of the camera—as eye.
An eye which is impassive, insensitive, implacable, pitiless, insusceptible to emotion.
This eye sees differently from our own, and here’s why:
The recording instrument of our human vision is perhaps the most wonderful and perfect optical machine. But what it sees is only perceived by means of our understanding, the keyboard of the totality of human sensation, which is theoretically infinite in its range.

Here we are limited in the recording of our vision, however, by the simultaneous presence of other perceptions intervening at the same moment, encumbering our keyboard, overwhelming it, deluging it. If everything, for us, is symphonic, synthetic, synchronic, everything also exists only according to an ordinary measure, to human scale: a kind of central zone which circumscribes our understanding. And we know how much it is limited. And what efforts those whom we call scientists or geniuses must make in order to extend some path farther, whether to the left or the right.

But if, through a fortunate conjunction, some discovery is made, we can appreciate the beacon of light it projects beyond the things we accept as given. Science and its still youthful daughter, the Machine, have extended certain of our means of perception and have thrown out bridges beyond the impassable zones of our senses and our skills.

Thus, the various calculating machines, created in the last few years, have allowed us to undertake series of calculations previously considered inaccessible and suddenly have propelled certain investigations far ahead. Without the machine, such calculations had been chimerical. The scientist who previously attempted such an adventure had to suffer weeks of wear and tear in order to come up with just one of the terms of a still indecisive equation. So fatiguing was the effort that the imagination, the spiritual impulse, which had launched the enterprise, dissipated, drained away, and disappeared; reasoning was exhausted in the steady march of days, weeks, and months, engulfed in weighty calculations.

A mechanical creation: the impassive, indefatigable machine … and it liberates thinking. In several days, the scientist clinches the parabolic coordinates of his hypothesis; he concludes, sets forth an opinion, then a formula. A law emerges. And infinite consequences can result from that for men’s lives.

The lens of the camera is one of these machines which dispel fatigue. While you suffer the effect of contingencies, you’re hot or cold, you’re fatigued or distracted, your own consciousness is weighted down by internal events, you’re overwhelmed by the tumult or silence, etc., etc… . a single lens and a sensitive filmstock go on working brilliantly.

A god’s eye, demiurge, while you yourself are only a poor good-natured fellow assailed by life.

Documentary, especially the scientific kind (Painlevé, or the miraculous films on the growth of seeds and plants), has revealed mysteries of the universe which previously have been beyond our perception.

But I want the lens now to disclose the intensity of human consciousness to us through the intermediary of visual phenomena which are so subtle and so rapid in nature that we have no means ourselves to discover and record them: we are unable to observe them, we simply feel their radiance.

Yet, when some pleasure arises in us, within us, when restlessness oppresses us, when anxiety fills all the planes of our sensibility, whether on the street or at home, we seem to encompass so many diverse, almost immaterial events—faces, gestures, attitudes—as if we were a mold or a vessel. And the friend we meet says to us: “Do you feel this way? Do you feel that way?” He has known it from perceptible signs: the nuance, the infinite nuances of the game of life, within us. This unexpected meeting with a friend represents precisely the distance needed to establish a sense of proportion.

I say, therefore, that the nerveless, soulless lens is a prodigious voyeur, a discoverer, a revealer, a proclaimer.

And through it, we can enter into the truth of human consciousness. The human drama is wide open to us.

That’s what interests me.

On the one hand, the spectacle of the world (where the airplane, the microphone, slow motion, the electric light, etc…. bring their immense resources to the cinema), the spectacle of the world can be accessible to us. On the other hand, the truth of our consciousness can be shown, more than that, it can be revealed by means of our very own selves.

Nature and human consciousness are the two terms of the equation, which interests us. Nothing else is needed, everything is there.

Let us construct [the cinema] on these realities, on these truths: composition, balance, rhythm! Let lyricism infuse it in order that this quest be carried out on the terrain of creative work!

I believe I’ve shown that from now on the cinema is positioning itself on its own terrain. That it is becoming a form of art in and of itself, a kind of genre, just as painting, sculpture, literature, music, and theater are genres. And that everything is open to its investigation.

It’s no longer appropriate to dream of magnificent mise-en-scenes in the studios, of expensive paraphernalia, of superfilms and superproductions.

Great art employs limited means.

Great art, in truth, is only a matter of proportions.

The cinema appeals “to the eyes that see.” To the people sensitive to truths. Diogenes has found a light for his lantern: no need for him to embark for Los Angeles.