Selected excerpts from the diary entries in ON THE BACK OF OUR IMAGES, VOL. I

December 2, 1991

Resist, with every ounce of energy, the fate of the work of art, the leaden force that stiffens, blocks, walls up, suffocates, embalms. The battle with this fate betokens the true work of art.

December 3, 1991

Make images with broad brushstrokes, not tiny ones. The thing to show is coarse, replete with roughness. The same indelicacy for the sound . . .

December 9, 1991

I suffocate in the images and music of this cinema that can only imagine by freezing the movements of reality’s breathing. Fantasies but not metaphors. Transportation stopped, constricted, passage forbidden. Help! Against these stopper-images, these images/music full to bursting yet unable to burst, against these overfull and shut-off images, the irresistible need for images and sounds that resonate, cry out, stamp their feet and pound their fists until the bubble is burst. A hole. A frame.

December 19, 1991

Is it still necessary to shock, to destroy codes? What matters in a film is to succeed in reconstructing human experience. A shock, given the absence of this experience in our present.

December 26, 1991

“‘I cannot see any basic difference,’ Paul Celan wrote to Hans Bender, ‘between a handshake and a poem.’” In citing this line, Levinas opens a text dedicated to Paul Celan.

I would like us to succeed in making a film that would be a handshake.

December 29, 1991

What to do? Is it necessary to keep on wanting to film? Make films? What’s the point! The bad film we’ve just shot should have disabused us of this illusion, this ambition. Can our country, its history, produce filmmakers like us, a cinema like the one we want to make? In any case, everything has already been done, and done better than anything we could ever do. They were right, these old and new filmmakers who heralded the death of film, who commented on its funeral. They were right. And for good reason! It’s because they’re right that we’ve been driven to prove them wrong, to believe that we, my brother and I, can still film, invent, make something new. The camera obscura isn’t a death chamber for watching over the deceased’s corpse. An object lost forever! An object we’ll never regain! We don’t care! We won’t be overpowered by their sadness! We’ll spit out black bile! May the dead bury the dead! Live! Long live the cinema to come! We have to be equal to it.

Live in a little land like ours. Never be seen in film circles. A necessary isolation.

January 3, 1992

Must not worry about pleasing or displeasing audiences. Glancing over this hellish speculation is enough to swallow you whole forever. Flee all the mirrors held up to us, make darkness, make a void to get closer to the essential movement, the sense’s movement that attempts to express itself, the form’s movement that attempts to frame. When we feel that this movement has caught us, when it is felt like something that controls us, that constrains us even as it frees, as it opens, that’s the mark of the other’s presence, of the other met at the center of our solitude. The work of art that emerges in this movement is an address to the other. Will the audience be there to receive this address and respond to it? This cannot be our question.

January 19, 1992

Escape. Simply escape. Meet something, someone, a material, a surface, a strange, unknown body, I don’t know what but to escape myself, to be affected, touched. I can’t bear to be inside anymore.

Johan Van Der Keuken is right to say that cinema is not a language but a state. To succeed in transposing, within our films (if we keep on doing so) the coarse, raw, unforeseeable, taut state (the just-in-time economy) of actual reality.

The argument, that a work of art reveals terribleness because reality is terrible, is just a dialectical pirouette.

January 21, 1992

We have to start from the beginning even though we know that’s impossible. The need to start, not to repeat. The feeling of an obligation forcing us to say something even when this something has been chosen as a function of what has already been seen or what has never been seen. To descend into our solitude and stay there as long as is needed. Needed to escape all the temptations to use methods, effects, and to feel anew what we have or do not have to say.

January 23, 1992

We’ll do what we know how to do. Nothing more. Nothing less.

January 26, 1992

When you no longer know where you are, when you’re wholly lost, you remember the one who first showed you the way. In art, in film, this was Gatti. He pulled us out of our torpor, projected us into the poem, in search of man’s signs, of his indestructible hopes. He taught us how to invent out of our truth, no matter how paltry our means, he taught us rigor, demystified technique. We remembered, today, this story he told us about the filming of Enclosure. It was the first day of shooting. He didn’t know that to look at the frame through the camera he had to position his eye at the eyepiece while pressing firmly so that the shutter would open. Each time the chief cameraman asked him to look at the frame, he set his eye in the eyepiece but did not see anything. After some time he would look back up and say, “We can shoot.”

February 10, 1992

May our images not be a fate. May they yank open the shutters of the death chamber where we suffocate. May they never fall into the caricature that seals people into a semblance of themselves which hampers all contact with them. May they never broadcast aesthetic force. May they be mangled, ruined, rent apart by what is never revealed. May they never look at themselves. Those eyes raised to the screen utter a violent prayer:

“Deliver us from evil.”