Apart from the documentary
À propos de Nice that you can watch below, we provide the short text version of the introductory speech presented at the second screening of this film by the very influential, albeit tragically short-lived french film author Jean Vigo.
/ Presentation of
À propos de Nice /
Lecture by Jean Vigo at the Vieux-Colombier Theater in Paris
on June 14, 1930, on the occasion of the second screening of the film
You’re right if you don’t think that we’re going to discover America together. I say this to indicate right away the precise import of the words on the scrap of paper you have been given as a promise of more to come.
I’m not concerned today with revealing what social cinema is, no more than I am in strangling it with a formula. Rather,
I’m trying to arouse your latent need to more often see good films – filmmakers, please excuse me for the pleonasm – dealing with society and its relationships with individuals and things.
Because, you see, the cinema suffers more from flawed thinking than from a total absence of thought.
At the cinema we treat our minds with a refinement that the Chinese usually reserve for their feet.
On the pretext that the cinema was born yesterday, we speak babytalk, like a daddy who babbles to his darling so that his little babe-in-arms can better understand him.
A camera, after all, is not a pump for creating vacuums.
To aim toward a social cinema would be to consent to work a mine of subjects that reality ceaselessly renews.
It would be to liberate oneself from the two pairs of lips that take 3,000 meters to come together and almost as long to come unstuck.
It would be to avoid the overly artistic subtlety of a pure cinema which contemplates its super-navel from one angle, then from yet another angle, always another angle, a super-angle; that’s technique for technique’s sake.
It would be to dispense with knowing whether the cinema should be silent a priori, or as sonorous as an empty jug, or as 100 percent talking as our war veterans, or in three dimensional relief, in color, with smells, etc.
For, to take another field, why don’t we demand that an author tell us if he used a goose quill or a fountain pen to write his latest novel?
These devices are really no more than fairground trinkets.
Besides, the cinema is governed by the laws of the fairground.
To aim at a social cinema would simply be to agree to say something and to stimulate echoes other than those created by the belches of ladies and gentlemen who come to the cinema to aid their digestion.
...
To aim at a social cinema is therefore simply to underwrite a cinema that deals with provocative subjects, subjects that cut into flesh.
But I want to talk with you more precisely about a social cinema, one that I am closer to: a social documentary or, more precisely, a documented point of view.
In the realm to be explored, the camera is king or, at least, President of the Republic.
I don’t know if the result will be a work of art, but I am sure that it will be cinematic – cinematic in the sense that no other art form, no other science could take its place.
Anyone making social documentaries must be slim enough to slip through the keyhole of a Romanian lock and be able to catch Prince Carol jumping out of bed in his shirt tails, assuming, that is, that one thinks such a spectacle worthy of interest. The person who makes social documentaries must be a fellow small enough to fit under the chair of a croupier, that great god of the Monte Carlo casino – and believe me, that’s not easy!
A social documentary is distinguished from an ordinary documentary and weekly newsreels by the viewpoint that the author clearly supports in it.
This kind of social documentary demands that one take a position because it dots the i’s.
If it doesn’t interest an artist, at least a man will find it compelling. And that’s worth at least as much.
The camera is aimed at what must be considered a document, which will be treated as a document during the editing.
Obviously, self-conscious acting cannot be tolerated. The subject must be taken unawares by the camera, or else one must surrender all claims to any “documentary” value such a cinema possesses.
And the goal will be attained if one succeeds in revealing the hidden reason behind a gesture, in extracting from a banal person chosen at random his interior beauty or caricature, if one succeeds in revealing the spirit of a collectivity through one of its purely physical manifestations.
...
