tive judgement ...which certain contradictions ...

which comes about through thi s terrorism which has been imposed through economic interests. And then there s so mething even worse: the total ignorance of producers, of the people responsible for making films. They are total illiterates when it comes to films not all of t hem, but 99%. They don t even know the basic mechanics of the thing ... Jancs: No, it s not because of this. For these people, the cinema is something alto gether different. It s power, it s ... Clmenti: For the people, the cinema is what they don t see on TV. Because if TV bro ught them what they usually got from the cinema, sooner or later they wouldn t bud ge from their homes. They d go straight to the factory. TV will be the new God-Mac hine which will provide for them, which will fulfil their every desire. The cine ma will disappear. This is a possibility because I m sure that if TV is taken over by very intelligent people, it will have to become something very powerful, eve n fabulous, colossal. When TV discovers all its powers, it will put everyone int o a ghetto, everyone who works. It will alienate whole nations, people will neve r go out, except to the factory they will be completely alienated by a machine, which will take the place of religion, of stories, those beautiful stories. I be lieve the only art capable of fighting this today is the cinema. At least the ci nema as a logical extension of what it is today. Hartog: There are many young people today who make films outside the structure o f the industry. They claim that the idea of a ninety-minute film is a commercial idea. So they make underground movies, or newsreels, or something similar. Do y ou find this an intelligent direction or not? Clmenti: I find that even in the field of positive cinema, there are negative ele ments. When people see an underground film, they suddenly realise that they coul d do the same, or better. And this is the stimulus they need to buy a small came ra. These young filmmakers who take one or two years to find the money to finish their films ... I feel that a Super 8 or 16mm camera enables them to do any sor t of film they want and, if only because of this, the underground cinema is revo lutionary. And the underground cinema is positive as well as in the way it relea ses ... makes something click in the human consciousness. Rocha: I go along with Pierre most of the way, but there are two ways of looking at the cinema. One is as a means of expression, the same as literature, which e veryone has access to, and the other is as a profession. When cameras are as eas y to own as typewriters or pens, people will use sound and images to write lette rs even. But in literature you ve got people writing poems, essays, novels, plays ... Me, I m a professional. Straub: And it was just for this reason that I wanted to do my last film (Othon, 1970) in 16mm. Just to point out that it s not someone playing such and such a ro le in such and such a film, but that anybody can do it. It s not hard anyone at al l could have done a film like that. Rocha: You must see this film. It s very important. It s an evolution of technology ... Straub: And there were no sets we shot it all outside. The only danger in underg round cinema is that it is underground. Already there are monopolies and trusts which plan on taking over, transforming ... Clmenti: But that s already happened. Books are finished. Books will disappear to m ake way for a Super 8 film-library . In America now there are Super 8 cameras which develop at 1000 ASA and blow up to 35mm. So I m sure the film industry is going t o change completely, and is going to get past this ...

Straub: It s going to colonise the underground ... Rocha: In the same way that you can t show an underground movie on Broadway, you c an t get a Hollywood film onto the American campuses. Because that s where the under ground market is already ... Clmenti: You can show underground films on all American campuses. Rocha: But already, you see, it s a system, an industry ... Clmenti: It s an alternative society which is still in its formative stages, and wh ich attacks the system it doesn t matter if it s negative or positive. For the momen t, it s positive. Rocha: No, for the moment I feel that everything is against Hollywood. It s very p ositive ... Clmenti: I think all the giants like Paramount are crumbling at the moment. Becau se of what? Because people have been making small budget films and earning milli ons from them. The big studios just don t know what to do any more. They re finished . Rocha: But I feel the crisis in the American industry is only an illusory crisis , because underneath they ve got it all very well ... Clmenti: No, it s fucked, the American cinema ... until it finds, until it reinvent s a new filmic language. But under current conditions, all the big studios are w iped out. Straub: Yes, but they ve been fucked for five years now. And it will take another ten for them to give up. Jancs: This is a very important problem for us we re always blocked by the worldwid e distributors. It s the truth, it s obvious. I don t know what we should do. But we h ave to do something. We have to destroy ... Rocha: So in the end it becomes a political problem. Clmenti: At the moment I can tell you that ten million copies are being produced of one record, and there ll be ... Rocha: Next year with cassettes coming on the market, they ll be a system for dist ributing films the way books are handled now. Clmenti: Yes, there will be this system, but it will only be for consumer films, that is, films which have contaminated everybody, the whole of human nature. Mor e and more the cinema is becoming an industry of cretinisation. Except for a maj ority cinema which is related to cine-clubs and that sort of thing, where everyt hing that gets projected is completely negative, because you can t hear the sound, the image is heavy, the prints are terrible. Why? Because the young distributor s don t have the money to make good prints, or don t believe in them. And so you ll ha ve bookshelves of Super 8 films, fifteen three-hour films, millions of copies of them. I believe it s just about the end of the film industry ... All these revolu tionary shake-ups there ve been. The cinema in France is becoming more and more al ienated, more in harmony with TV, with the television chains. And I feel that a cinema that is really trying to relate to people, to alter their consciousness, will be pushed to one side. The worker who wants to buy a book, will buy a film. But this will be isolated, because society knows very well that ... Rocha: I feel there will always be a dominating system. Even in the field of lit

erature it s the same thing. There s Joyce, there s the malavita ... Straub: But the domination will be more intense. It will get to the point that . .. Rocha: But the problem is this. It doesn t matter who the publisher is. Even in Br azil he takes a risk today whoever comes across a young unknown author who might write a novel much better and more modern than Ulysses. But even Joyce has beco me a commodity, with a market value, in this society. The problem lies in the st ructure of capitalist society, and unfortunately Socialist society too. It comes back to general consumer politics. You can cretinise the public on several leve ls. Because when the public has reached the stage of consuming intellectual prod uction, it is on this level that the public needs much more critical, more diale ctical, more revolutionary stimuli, to open the doors to a knowledge of human ex perience. And it s at this point that the system will always impose itself, becaus e it becomes a question of structure ... Straub: The system has its own instincts of self-preservation ... Clmenti: I m and not wait ends eight to y, I must see beginning to feel more and more that it s necessary to go to the people, for them to come to you. Why? Because of the fact that a worker sp nine hours a day in a factory, and just doesn t get the chance to sa such and such a film. The whole system has to be rebuilt.

Straub: But these people are walking clocks, clocks ... Clmenti: No your films will always be made for a privileged minority of intellect uals, who ll be the only ones to see them. While the films are supposed to be for the people, the millions of people ... Straub: But that s why I shot the Corneille (Othon) in sixteen ... I had the wild dream of taking it round and showing it in factories. But this is just as much a n abstraction since you can t load people with films when they ve been working nine hours a day ... Clement: I think these films should be handled by cooperatives, which are just b eing formed in Europe now and already exist in America. Straub: Yes, but if we re going to have these cooperatives we ve got to start them n ow, because there are others who are already trying to take over. Cassavetes and all that ... Clmenti: Because this whole deal of art films will always be a minority ... Rocha: But it s not a question of going to the factories, because if you take your films to the people there, you have to realise that they re the same people who g o to the cinema. They re people conditioned by this. It s a question of a much more profound cultural revolution which must be brought about by a political revoluti on. This is the big problem we re facing today, because after all everyone talks o f the technological society today, the consumer society. It s the same in Russia a s in New York. This discussion for example, is ultimately useless, because we re j ust a few people knocking a system which couldn t give a stuff ... Clmenti: The revolutionary actions of a whole American generation, the youth of A merica, have overthrown a system which was one of America s greatest strengths. If the people were able to overthrow this system, it means it was something positi ve. While in Europe, nothing happens. Rocha: I don t agree.

Clmenti: I feel that an American generation has left us a heritage, and it would be stupid not to profit by it ... Rocha: Wait a minute! I read an interview with John Frankenheimer a few years ag o it might have been in Cahiers or Positif and they asked him what he thought of the Nouvelle Vague. He replied like any worker in the American industry: As soon as we find certain of, say, Godard s experiments ... interesting, we can do the s ame things in Hollywood. That s to say, if you like, that everything on the level of the cinematic language that was being done around the beginning of the New Wa ve, around the beginning of Italian neo-realism, things like that. It doesn t matte r what director in the US Peter Yates, Mike Anderson they produce this ... toyin g around with flashbacks, editing techniques ... The underground will be absorbe d by this. For example John Schlesinger s film Midnight Cowboy (1969) it s a very co mmercial inventory of the Nouvelle Vague and the new language. Because they are in a crisis ... because Easy Rider (1969) made a fortune. They industrialised th is almost immediately, they absorbed it, you follow? What I m trying to say is tha t there is this system that has to be destroyed. I said that this discussion was useless, because we all want this, but can t do anything about it ... The politic al activists work in the fields of economics and politics ... They don t care abou t the problem. Straub: Even if we can t overthrow it, we can at least screw the system all we can just go against the rules, that s all. Godard is right in this sense. But I d like to come back to something that Jancs said a while ago. Glauber pointed out that w hat was happening here in Europe as well as in Eastern Europe was monolithism. A nd after Miklos put it nicely We are struggling in the same way, but with the arm s of others . Now I d just like to know if I m right in thinking that in Hungary there s still an opening for dialectics ... I d like him to explain his phrase. Jancs: Now we re into the real problems of the cinema today. Now I m sure that helpin g ourselves means helping others, and that there is a solution: struggle. So, if we organised ourselves to go into the factories, to give our films to the peopl e, then this doesn t depend on discussion, but on our organisation. But with us it s another situation. In our country you can really do what you want to do, or alm ost ... in the film industry. But in this situation too there is a growing petit e bourgeoisie. Both we, and the public, are faced with big problems, but the cin ema is still going. And for this we rely on our organisation. Straub: Yes, but for example, do the films you make get a normal commercial outl et? Jancs: Of course, but ... Straub: OK, your films in Hungary have the same rights as so-called commercial f ilms. Rocha: In a socialist society there is an evolution with respect to capitalist s tructure. On that level I don t think there s anything to discuss. Straub: Yes, but it s useful to point it out, because people have fallen into the habit of saying the opposite. And it s good to remind them ... Rocha: I find that Miklos is very honest when he talks about his problem. You fi nd many socialist filmmakers adopt a critical attitude towards themselves, a pet it-bourgeois attitude, which makes them come up with picturesque criticisms. But in his films Miklos tries to avoid these picturesque criticisms, and carry the discussion forward onto a more polemical level. This I find is the most importan t characteristic of his cinema, even on the level of language as well. I feel th at Socialist cinema, the cinema of eastern Europe, has become the victim of peti t-bourgeois, schematic, a bureaucratic criticism the sort you find in a lot of C

zech films, Russian films, or Hungarian too. Like Polish films proclaiming thems elves as revolutionary because they re a little to the right ... Straub: But they re social-democratic films ... Rocha: I feel that in the socialist cinema, the most important films are those w hich lead to a dialectical discussion of socialism. If the Bureaucrats don t under stand, then that s their problem ... Straub: Or else savagely cut films, which are seen to be cut but appear only poe tic that s almost blasphemy. Hartog: Do you think the cinema can play a political role? Jancs: What a question! (laughs) Straub: Of course it has a political role. Everything is political, everything y ou do in your life is political. So the cinema, which is the art with the closes t ties to life, is the most political art. That s not to say that the so-called agi tprop films are any more political often they re the least political. But the cinem a is the political art par excellence. Rocha: The American cinema is heavily political. The American cinema has to take a lot of the blame for Third World colonisation. That is to say the American ci nema created the framework for the national inferiority complexes of the peoples of the Third World. On the political level no other cinema in the world is as e fficient as the American cinema. It s a reflection of Wall Street ideology, applie d with fantastic know-how. Straub: I ve known little leftist intellectuals who dreamed who were savagely anti -communist of course, the way you have to be now who dreamed of using the means of the American film industry against the capitalist system. That is, use the ci nema in a Machiavellian way. And this was because they d perfectly understood that the American cinema is politically very efficient. But even so it s allowed more things to go on inside the system than any European cinema. For example a film l ike The Naked and the Dead (1958) by Raoul Walsh, which is virulently anti-milit ary (I don t like that word) and which would never have got past the European cens orship. Rocha: Kubrick s film Paths of Glory (1957) is still banned in France, just becaus e it says some nasty things about the French army. There, politics is always rig ht or left ... Straub: For example John Ford s movies are profoundly political. Rocha: The problem always comes back to: what is political cinema? This seems to be Godard s main preoccupation today. In all his later films he s tried to revise, to work out a definition of just what political cinema is. Now he s discussing whe ther it s Dziga Vertov, or if it s Eisenstein. This is very important. But there are so many different social structures, that you can talk about several political cinemas, or several ways of making political films. And there s no need to stress this too much, since all communication activities make up part of the psychologi cal war we live in today, this information war ... and why not go the whole way, this armed war. Because logistic propaganda is the key to armed struggle, to re volutionary struggle, you see ... It s always political ... the cinema, the press, television, pamphlets any physical action whatever ... I think the way people t alk about the cinema, about politics, is a critical vice, perhaps of the filmmak ers ... And that is of putting themselves in a slightly superior position. Of sa ying, we make films so we have a powerful tool ...

Straub: Right. Strumentalizzare il cinema (Make an instrument of the cinema), as s ome Italians say, is false too. It happens sometimes that an entirely ... let s sa y poetic ... film plays a more political role than a film whose subject is obvio usly political. Which is not to say that a poetic film would have the impact of, say, Das Kapital by Marx. But a film like this can, to take up your expression again, play a much more important political role than some little leftist social -democratic ... Hartog: Do you feel the cinema can change anything? Straub: Yes! The cinema can change things the way anything else can, the way a p olitical pamphlet can, only more so. It s not a question of turning the cinema int o a myth it s just that the cinema is nearest to, is most closely tied to, life, a nd so to politics, nothing more. But it s no use dreaming, or wanting to believe . .. Glauber has put that strongly ... Clmenti: But the cinema is capable of changing people, and if this is so, it can change life, that is it can be a ... Straub: Renoir said, I did La Grande Illusion (1937) and it didn t stop war breaki ng out. And yet people who have seen La Grande Illusion ... Clmenti: It s not a myth in that a whole American generation brought up on televisi on, that is on old movies by a preceding generation, has changed the whole way o f life, of thinking about things, of that generation. It s in this sense that I th ink the cinema has a truly positive action, in the way it can alter, or awake, c onsciousness. Rocha: This discussion tends to be ridiculous at times, because you could have h ad exactly the same sort of discussion at any point in history, around the novel , or poetry, opera, music ... Now it s the cinema, a technological fact. Straub me ntioned Marx and Das Kapital. It wasn t a question of the book, or the writing, bu t rather of a man named Marx who wrote a book called Das Kapital. It had nothing to do with the book. The cinema is a technological means of communication. When it is used as expression, it becomes particularised in the hands of a few peopl e who can make of it something poetic, didactic, or agitational. I don t think it s possible to define the cinema in general terms without mystifying it, because ba sically, filmmakers read books. For example the ones fighting culture today, the ones who say: it s all gotta come down they learnt these things in books. Of cour se you ve got to keep yourself informed, it s very important ... Clmenti: But people are going to read less and less, and if that s so, they re going to see more and more films. Because basically a film has more to give than a boo k. We are still library-ridden, we re a book-ridden generation. We ve got Marx, we ve got Lenin, but think of fifty years away. The filmmakers will go much further th an Lenin, than Karl Marx. This is normal. It s evolution, natural evolution ... Straub: Because their only means of expression will be the cinema. This discussion was transcribed by Patrick Letessier, translated by John Mathews and published originally in Cinematics no. 4.