There is a law that governs everything, but we do not know it. Again, the question of coercive conditions, of a power exterior to man. The law of probabilities?
The epic theater of Brecht.
How little I know.
1963 February
One cannot say, with the Surrealists: The world is going to pieces! The question of content is not out of bounds to the artist. We can’t keep saying, “There’s no longer anything to write about.” The conditions in our country do not allow it. A hundred topics await. A hundred horizons open every day.
[.] a negative and dangerous aspect. We will pass through a Stalinist experience. The new generation can’t take up politics as a battle of ideas. It’s on the verge of becoming a generation of cowards. They’ve rung down the curtain on the history of revolutionary struggle before the revolution of 1952. [.] The men of the regime are sincere, but they have been schooled in fear. How did revolutionary workers come to hate their country and rejoice at its difficulties?. How have the consciences of so many been destroyed by acts of terror? The humiliation of man. Three months of terror, January — March, 1959.*
Impressions of Mustafa Sweif’s book.**
— Thought Under Pressure (or, the negative aspect of extremist engagement). Speaking about what he calls the renunciation of censorship over thought, Freud says some people suffer an inability to set free their spontaneous thoughts. They cannot renounce their critical capacity. This is because desirable thoughts (the artist’s thoughts are of this type, since they are essentially libidinal) create a violent resistance, which tries to bar their entry into consciousness. The condition for poetic creation, according to Schiller, is very like what Freud says. In one of his letters to Korner, in which he replies to a friend’s complaint about the weakness of his creative powers, Schiller writes, “The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination. Apparently it is not good if the intellect examines too closely the ideas already pouring in at the gates. Regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, but it may acquire importance from an idea that follows it; perhaps, in a certain collocation with other ideas, which may seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link. The intellect cannot judge all these ideas unless it can consider them in connection with these other ideas. In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in like waves, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.” From Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.
Al-Ahram, February 13, 1963, New Tendencies, “Real Cinema, No Actors, No Scripts, No Studios.” Since 1919, some cinéastes have dreamt of a cinema not shot in the studio and requiring no actors. Their idea was basically that the camera should be a tool in the director’s hand just as the pen is for the writer. If the writer can rush with his pen to record his reactions to events, why can’t the director do the same? Why not take the camera into the street, into the places where people live? If he happens to come across something he’d like to “comment” on, he grabs his camera and records his impression. This is what the Soviet Vertov did, followed by the American Flaherty, and then the two Frenchmen, Epstein and Vigo. Why did they fail to establish a school? Contemporary French cinéaste Jean Rouch says, “The failure stems from a confusion of reportage and drama. They recorded the appearances of life as it is, while the real cinéaste relies on selection. When we carry a camera around and run into something, we put ourselves physically in front of that something. We ‘focus’ our lens on a particular facet of it, rather than filming the whole. We shut out some elements and concentrate on others. This is obvious from the composition of the shot. After shooting any number of things, we have a film that might take twenty hours to show, from which we select or edit ninety minutes’ worth. We ‘focus’ our idea about the subject, just as a writer prepares his draft for publication.” Rouch applies this principle to African societies in Abidjan (Ivory Coast). He was an ethnographer sent to Africa by the French Anthropological Society and based on his experience filming the social life of blacks, he developed a method that made the director the sole author of the film and the reality he recorded its primary subject matter. By selecting from among the elements of struggle in each instance, and by foregrounding that choice by means of montage and cadrage, he transformed the camera into a human eye, one that selects from reality whatever tallies with the director’s point of view. In this way, he revealed a new consciousness of reality, one we wouldn’t have experienced by looking at things while they were mixed in with the events of ordinary life. Rouch’s films — Chronicle of a Summer; Me, a Black Man; and The Human Pyramid — forge a new path for cinema, which critics call “cinema verité,” or real cinema. (Zavattini’s experience. Cameras in the square, facing the police station.)
May
The Plague, Albert Camus. (Last lines of the novel) “As he listened to the cries of joy that rose above the town, Rieux remembered that this joy was still threatened. He knew from reading his books what the happy crowd did not, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes for good, that it can sleep for decades in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs, and old papers, and that the day might come when the plague would rouse its rats and send them out among the people, for their immiseration or their instruction, when death would rip them from life’s happy embrace.”***
Yevtushenko, “Confessions of a Young Soviet,” L’Express: “The autobiography of a poet is his poetry, everything else is merely a footnote. The poet must offer the reader his feelings, his thoughts, his writings. To deserve the right to speak for others, he must pay the price and submit himself mercilessly to the truth.”
— After the Revolution, Soviet poets established the Association of Proletarian Culture and made the decision never to write except in the plural form, to always say “we.” At the same time, our literary critics very cleverly devised a theory of “the lyric hero.” According to them, the poet was required to extol the loftiest virtues so that he would not appear as himself in his poems, but rather as a model of the perfect man.
— Many old Bolsheviks who were arrested and tortured persisted in believing that they had been abused without Stalin’s knowledge. They never accepted that he had personally ordered their treatment. Some of them, after being tortured, traced the words ‘Long Live Stalin’ in their own blood on the walls of their prison.****
Stravinsky’s thoughts on reaching eighty: “Were Eliot and myself merely trying to refit old ships while the other side (Webern, Schoenberg, Joyce, Klee) sought new forms of travel? I believe this interpretation or distinction, much discussed a generation ago, is no longer viable. Our era is but a great unity in which we all share a part. It may indeed seem that Eliot and I made things that lacked living continuity, that we made art out of disjecta membra: quotations from other poets and artists, references to earlier styles (‘hints of earlier and other creation’). But we used these things along with anything else that came to hand, treating everything ironically in order to rebuild. We did not pretend to have invented new conveyors or new means of travel, for the true job of the artist is to refit old ships. He can say again, in his way, only what others have already said before him.”