translated by Ted Fendt
What one writes – or what one films – retains, whether one accepts it or not, an indestructible element whose weight and significance in the path of one’s life varies for everyone: the age – to which the text or the film is definitively linked once it has been exposed to the broad daylight of a secular year.
It is not so much that the age in which it was produced allows one to appreciate a work’s degree of maturity or clarify an expressed thought, but rather that as long as we consider it just one point on the great map where sooner or later a whole life takes shapes in a succession of phantom points, each of which, when the time comes, contributes to awakening the fragment of a time period, it marks a virtual place: the grain of the present retained in a work, apparently so unimportant during its contemporary evaluation, will one day take on, for whoever comes later and considers the greater whole formed by a lifetime’s work, a past shade of youth, maturity, and, soon, old age, which lends it a bit of its tonality.
If at the moment one discovers a work at some fortuitous age in one’s life, as old or new as it may be, and the reality effect it produces suffices to erase any external, temporal distance between us and it, even if this is in an anticipatory dimension, and leads us suddenly and unambiguously to the vanished present of when it was written, then there is reason to believe that the work also held within it, before its author gave it away, the truth of the feeling that brought it to life, of indecidable autobiographemes, the major anonymous wounds of the life of an era.
Nothing creates an obligation in us toward a work more than obligating ourselves to write about it precisely that which we cannot reach in the brisk time of speech, time which more willingly latches onto the first ideas that come to mind than it addresses their resistance to coming to light, and affirms a taste – an agreement, a disagreement – before thinking of submitting it to the judgement of silence. This other time, the dead time of writing, is rarely granted to ephemeral criticism, which is tempted to practice the written transcription of that which is dictated by the lived time of speech, however well argued and complete the latter may be.
Taste as well as the light its relevance can shed plays an essential role in film evaluation. Therefore, it is hard to be satisfied with arguments in a verbal exchange: they often say nothing about one’s personal inventory, a group of more unique references with fragile coherence and fertile contradictions. For anyone putting forward an argument, the work of taste is accompanied by time and history, contemporaneity and discrepancy, and a confused mixture of heritage and discovery which each repeated viewing of the same film – to stick to cinema – modifies, sets apart, brings closer, or complicates, inevitably at the discretion of the affects of each passing day. This even applies to those who write in the dead time of writing.
If we believe his films, Stanley Kubrick’s strong point was never knowledge of human passions, or of himself put to the test by others. When the subject of a film seemed to require the story’s trajectory dwell on sequences whose dramaturgy called, firstly, for acting or energy exchanged between actors and the mere authority of fleeting suggestion no longer sufficed for the story’s creeping progress, Kubrick often had to confront the complex question of actors’ expressivity, once human affects demanding autonomy had been almost resolutely excluded from his system. In films so stubbornly constructed on the implementation of an expressive secret formula, weaving an indissoluble link between multiple journeys through imaginary spaces and a temporality internal to the story, all the more insidious for leading without any noticeable effect to the ultimate disappearance of its energy in the relatively brief, euphoric time of the end credits, Kubrick had no reason to pay particular attention to the contradictory or ambiguous forms suggested to him by his even remotely free actors. Primarily and organically foreign or rebellious to the rules imposed by a director’s mastery, these forms can sometimes – rarely, in truth – be snared from the inner force with which actors defend themselves: Jouvet in Les Bas-fonds or Jean-Louis Barrault in Le Testament du docteur Cordelier are, in spite of their mastery, reoriented along Renoir’s dialectical line.
However, Kubrick’s responses lie elsewhere than in his unifying mastery of his actors, through which he focuses on making them all act through identifiable, sign-posting, ephemeral expressions, staying within their skill range, and it is almost never through them or the characters that the slightest bit of heterogeneity appears – which we may or may not regret – but instead through discrete appearances of the commonplace which nevertheless remind us that life exists even in an engine room tasked with producing a categorical distance from human experiences. Maybe we need to be sensitive to the magnetization which emanates from all power, if only for the time needed to dive into a film, if we want to accept the sacrifice of human recognition and fully love Kubrick the filmmaker. With their secret author, do his films form such a clear unit that they illegitimatize a disorganized selection of examples in order to observe what the situation is and how they function in detail? For instance, the sequence in Lolita in which, thinking her daughter stayed at the party, Shelley Winters (in Kubrick, we can refer indifferently to the actor or the character since no air is allowed to pass between them) goes home with James Mason for a private dinner: together, two lengthy shots separated by a short transitional caesura inscribe in our eyes the mother’s close dance and the professor’s embarrassment. Despite the constant brilliance of their performances, the actors are corseted by the simultaneous role of getting closer and avoidance assigned to the characters by a story that authorizes local developments – it even needs them to affirm itself – but forbids the subjects it controls any signs of independence. Surprises and coups de force are solely regulated by the story’s dynamic. The incorruptible log of events asks for, obtains, and records the exact quantity of actions necessary for its marching orders: this is the internal temporality, at the risk of also enriching itself on other modules, which is punctuated in Lolita by these great gaps – Time’s expressive silence which reasserts itself after a long sequence. Lolita’s sudden arrival, which marks a slight shift in the story (she returns as her mother’s rival for the first time), does not seem to have asked the actors for anything more than to continue a bland game of semaphores so that – it was still too early to fear the European disconnection (Renoir again beating everyone to it) that would provoke in audiences still unaccustomed to the rules of modern cinema unsettling doubts about the characters’ unity – the elementary identification with their emotions which all Hollywood cinema sought never appears.
In 1962, Kubrick, a modern filmmaker, had already inscribed his cinematic Magna Charta in an implicitly dreamed 21st century, an orb from which his eye considered everything that fed a film from the viewpoint of a law anticipating death. It took a long time before, late in his life, he accepted doing the back and forth that Dreyer, Lang, Murnau, and Straub carried out from their earliest films. He was sure that, once he had invented an adequate promontory for each of his films, he could then trace perspectives not only in space, but also in time according to a specific system that would maintain all direct human truth within the cold zones of retention, suspected of threatening the narrative’s construction if it ventured to express in any manner the possible charms of life’s here and now. In this respect, the film of his whose expressive result fortunately exceeds the scale of the labor which realized the dream of the film is 2001: A Space Odyssey, a solemn ode to cinema rather than the human species, viewed in the film from afar: for once, all subjectivity, typically engaging one or more actors, is, however you look at it, legitimately absent, sacrificed for the benefit of the computer Hal 9000: it was necessary to give improbable life to this faceless watcher from the future whose heart is struck by his separation.
Today, the film’s MacGuffin, the monolith that threads through the film with all its old, modern monolithism, is disappointing, whereas that which resists upon each viewing over the passing years owes much to the film’s composition in major independent blocks whose differences illuminate each other, one story shedding light on the other. Cut up by major gaps, they induce the vertigo of the first stages of sleep, with fake floors giving way to black skies. Each transition from one block of screen time to the next which is linked to it ensures us that Time advances by the sudden opening of trapdoors – like the one through which the nearly familiar hero vanishes (we even see his family teleported into his cockpit) from the second block as soon as we pass into the third one. This is merely Space’s false bottom, ensnared even more as the film’s light extols the (deliberately monochromatic) immensity and variety of its landscapes without hiding their specific dangers (gravity, weightlessness, all physical laws without pathos).
How to leave Lolita behind completely, a film piercing for its very defects, close relatives of the drab mystery its impasse butts against: the compromise, in fact, between a subject urgently calling for the whole truth and representational models which, at the time, only allowed for sparkling, inoffensive packages. After six or seven viewings, most of them in the past ten years, the plotting of the story, which owes a good deal of what it accomplishes to the intimidating pressure placed on Kubrick by Nabakov’s book, maintains, unaltered, its fortunate capacity to induce anxiety. Without talking about the secondary characters whose role in the shots remains sign-posting and utilitarian, Shelley Winters’ character (Lolita’s mother) is cruelly deprived of harmonics: thus her death terminates, like a mess, the rut in the social sketch on which the story and it alone has fed until then. As for James Mason’s character, rhetorically enveloped in his bathrobe, he is like a bit of irrefutable proof of what is unambiguous in the film’s first half. The story, which is the only true protagonist, momentarily obeys a clearly privative concern for economy, beyond the juxtaposition of long sequences tempered by short ones, wherein the same characters are relaunched based on positions in the shot space which visually double certain interior scenes and make their modifications more intense without the performance becoming moving. The Summer Dance where all the characters meet is certainly the heart of the city: but if some join in the parade while others stand aside to scheme or judge, they are not so much observed as held at the appropriate voyeur’s distance. Here again, we must reduce the location with its figures to the size of its discretely temporal dimension which, escaping from sight (the sense destined for trompe‑l’oeil), deeply alters the value ratios and allows one to calmly consider the discouragingly mechanistic acting in most of Kubrick’s films.
It is the Summer Dance which the mother and the professor leave for their private dinner, spoiled by Lolita’s unexpected return. “Spoiled” is saying too much, because the filmmaker only makes us judges of the mother’s harsh disappointment. He wanted – I put this forth in all modesty – to maintain the purity of his story. Yet the film begins with a sequence that is solely dramatic: James Mason tensely enters a large house that looks like a ruin, looking for a certain Quilty, who suddenly emerges from a sheet covering a chair. Awoken and still drunk, the man grows afraid when he sees Mason threaten him with a gun – they clearly know each other – and attempts to calm him down with jokes: he asks him to play a game of Roman ping pong, makes brilliant puns, even brings up Spartacus (our filmmaker’s recent hero). In vain: after Quilty’s fake improvisation on the piano, Mason fires a first shot. A slow chase broken down into stations slows down more from a wound, and ends with the man’s death behind a woman’s portrait, an ineffective loop. After this long scene, the story can begin: “Four years earlier,” but it has just claimed two meanings: that assigned to it by Kubrick – the role of a well-sounding opening to the story in this Wellesian or Mankiewiczian set – but also another – an infinite series of others – that which any viewer (since Kubrick cares so much about them, here’s one) can grasp, first, by initiating their perception of the film in discomfort and, second, when they inevitably return to it at the end and carry it away in their memory. In this respect, every viewing of the beginning acts as if it were an unchanging first time. Peter Sellers, Quilty, is engraved in this first sequence in which he is led to his death. Vain and cynical, he could be a ghost from The Blue Angel (the character). He is an insolent virtuoso of his transformations (the actor). And Kubrick lets himself be so fascinated that, later in the film, since the story is told in reverse, Claire Quilty – TV writer, mysterious pleasure seeker omnipresent in society – is gratified with an impressive double, a brilliant blackmailer: professor Zempf. Each of Sellers’ appearances presents one of the many masks of the drama which threatens the story and its obligatory bearer, James Mason. We know the actor/creator of these masks would later invade Dr. Strangelove, but here in Lolita, the story, which, as a good obsessive creature submitted to time, cannot be measured against what is ultimately nothing more than another form of adventure – more human than any story, drama is the adventure that struggles against time – is reduced to planning and carrying out the death of the character, instigator of these threatening masks. Is Lolita Kubrick’s Persona?
So it is not surprising that the sequences with Sellers are opportunities for nice, enclosed performances (here again the idolatry of cinema flourishes) which do not, however, affect the story’s nice tipsy advancement. It is in the second part, focused on Lolita and the professor’s romantic madness, that the film is released from its descriptive acidity and best responds to that conspiracy of time which is dedicated to deciding everything: the awakening of jealousy, the impossibility of opening a folding bed (filmed like an instrument of moral torture), denunciations, blackmail, and finally Lolita’s unimaginable marriage. The inaugural scene, intended to close the four years the story encompasses, is seen again from the start, itself destined to disappear immediately into a trapdoor of time as a known fragment of a story that now comes to its logical conclusion: the trial and imprisonment of the murderous professor. The onscreen inscription, evoking a real but absent social punishment, plays more than just its role of final, plausible punctuation: because the film is tangibly shaped not to struggle against the time of which it is nevertheless the organizer, the inscription gives back to the film a freedom – as unbelievable as it may be – which it would otherwise lack in order to represent an exceptional signal (of a dramatic nature) to the idolatrous law that, by presenting mastery over everything, has too often distorted Kubrickian acting.
According to his films, knowledge of actors as well as self-awareness of his resistance to actors, was never Stanley Kubrick’s strong point. It would have been nice to see, the French for once rendering the English well, “Les yeux grands fermés” on the poster of his final film. However, we’ll have to start saying “Eyes Wide Shut” to talk about one of the best films in this vexing auteur’s entire oeuvre.
In this final film, wherein Kubrick feels obliged to settle his personal accounts with an old novella by Schnitzler which seems to have pursued him with its haunting power, something is released which the film alone communicates to us from the first shots. As with any keen oral interest, oral indignation carries little weight if it is not the prelude to a pause in writing in the face of the silence of the blank page, writing which takes its time to find the proper distance to consider its keen interest or its indignation with the respect it deserves. In the presence of any old film, we cannot be satisfied with merely thinking about our dreams or regrets about what the film is or is not, or expecting it to be there, first and foremost, to provide us with explanations, without at least making sure – beyond the pleasure we may or may not have taken in it – we know at what point we ourselves are in our own lives, in our intimate knowledge of an art that – through the works, errors, insignificant productions, and marvels making up its history, between greatness and misery – nevertheless exists fully independent from us. Is it not always the case that we discover a film at such and such an age, that we see it again at another age, and that we forget it a lot or a little between this and that age, until the day when we passionately rediscover it as different and similar? Everyone – every film viewer – lives their lives, but the memory of the films which colors everyone’s tastes and judgements makes a selection as if life in its entirety and every personal life were self-evident, and as if, the question having been resolved since we no longer raise it once history is dissolved, there were nothing left to consider and represent than globalized social space. History, far from having vanished, has merely gone unnoticed, momentarily undeciphered: it has merely changed speeds, or rather it is moving ahead at several speeds.
That which is perhaps evidence for today’s tastes is often only the gentle slope at the end of a long, rocky road. The universal consecration, for example, of Hitchcock as a major filmmaker is the result of harsh years during which the critical writings of Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette, Truffaut, Godard, and Douchet were mocked in France and sometimes around the world at a time when the filmmaker, who had nothing to add to his success, hid the passion animating his films behind an acrobat’s humor. The Truffaut/Hitchcock interviews changed, so to speak, Cleopatra’s nose. If the young critics of the yellow Cahiers, to mention only them, had stuck to speaking to each other or countered Bazin orally, if they had not written, things would not be as they are. Hawks may have had to wait for Scorsese or Carpenter to be discovered, Lang would be a sub-Siodmak and Renoir a filmmaker who betrayed realism. Not that other critics in other countries did not defend the same cinema, the same idea of mise-en-scène, but the methodical excess of the young French critics of yore, relayed by the longevity of one or two magazines which provided a framework to this stubbornness, favored the progressive transmission of a base of tastes. It is not the oeuvre or even the work of the audience, but just a few viewers who have insisted over the years.
Anyone, starting the moment in life when they feel the desire, can begin – or begin again – to discover for themself one film and then another as if nothing had been said or written about it, to see it as an expressive object that addresses one in the present if it is old – does it remain present? – or that starts to speak to our memory if it is new – is it already forgotten? We always perceive a film in the present, in the movie theater or through the channel of a VCR (even if the present is not of the same nature in the latter case), and it is in the present, too, that we bring our memories to it. All perception, whether of a film being seen or only memorized, is in any case fragmentary. The most sustained attention rarely provides us with more than a limited group of elements we are capable of grasping and linking among each other – in interdependence, in contradiction, in a more complex articulation of a small number of terms – to vaster things we have in our memories from having noticed them in other films and kept them within us, and, better still, to things that we were already capable, starting from elements in our memory, to link to our individual life experience. We should therefore not expect or hope for perfect contiguity in taste with those with whom we are sure we have tastes in common, even when our overall admiration for a filmmaker maintains such an illusion. This is based on a similar widespread misunderstanding that a majority, not only of critics but of those who talk about the films around them, act as if everyone expected the same thing from a film. When I read his texts, a friend with whom I do not often agree orally about films, turns out to be the most unsettling critic because of how he reduces to a bare minimum the inevitable schizophrenic gap between collective memory and his personal experience of life. Here, it is no longer a matter of creating a conviction but reactivating perception and finding criteria which displace films’ overly established value. New arrangement, new finds.
In putting things in the best possible light, there is always a moment when, smack in the middle of a group of collective admirations or shared dislikes, a film slips in that causes dissension. It is precisely here, in this unexpected division, that we are sent back to our solitude as viewers and driven to a kind of necessity to understand why such a film suddenly displeases or pleases us so much. It is perhaps with the films on which we disagree that we can notice – beyond definitive agreements on major oeuvres – the irreducible points that call for writing. Orality, with its superficial excesses, certainly maintains a passion which is fatigued or unsure of itself, but the slow formation of a fragile and free tradition not only consists of frequent dialogues – poorly identified, unknown, sometimes confessed or proclaimed – between one film and another, but also by a few written texts which quietly ripen and provoke, transformed by reading, fresh meditations which will someday take hold for a long time. Desire is all about silence.
Thus, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s final film.
In the very first minutes, as they are coming and going, finishing to get dressed to go to a big party, during the rushed to-and-fro that reveals to us the size of the couple’s apartment, an imperceptible gap between Alice and her husband Bill is produced in their dialogue: Alice has barely spoken the name “Roz” when Bill asks her the babysitter’s name; Alice repeats “Roz” without thinking to point out to him that she just told him it. Maybe she is not even aware of it: we will never know. From this tiny detail – none in the film is innocent – the dialogue continues and complexifies this initial momentum on another register: most of the lines are repeated with frequent shifts from the interrogative to the affirmative, or the other way around, a kind of reciprocal habit for making oneself heard, as if unconsciously to test the statement on the other person. Consequently, each line seems like an example drawn from an imaginary grammar book of everyday life which structures beforehand the language all the characters speak bit by bit. This is first and foremost where the direction of the actors occurs, as if the clear vacuity accompanying this story of a couple – it then contaminates all the other relationships – whose constantly cheated spectators we are led to be from the outset is primarily located in the way Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman converse in sentences that are so simplified, purged as they are of all particularities, any allusions to a describable, external life, that there is no room left or raison d’être, for any kind of search for intonations of the truth (and the introductory scene is the only one constructed, under the official pretext of dramatic necessity, with a certain speed in the movement and delivery, in order to make us feel what will be a contrario the general régime of slowness), because what counts, the film tells us, is the time preceding and the time following each line before the other character responds with a new line just as spaced out as the previous one. More so than the immediate meaning of the spoken lines, this stretched-out time partakes in creating the implicit meaning of each scene. The emptiness between the words, a complimentary and hidden truth of the primary meaning of what plays out in the words, extends and suggests what the glances and gestures struggle to say in their constant frankness. Hence the strong impression at the start, if not of a secret parody of educational TV movies for teaching English to foreigners, at least of a kind of structural quotation from those films. As if Kubrick, having to construct for the first time in a long time a major concentric, dramatic form, playing with the constant presence of actors in a familiar mode – he who only rarely trusted them enough to leave it up to them to give more than the semblance of life to imaginary characters, but who knew, with his finicky mastery of a particular type of scansion underlying the story as well as a dramaturgy prioritizing shots, how to lead them beyond the humanity of language – had suddenly – upon close inspection, he’s a filmmaker of time (there are fewer than we think): time co-produced by exhaustive spatial exploration – found this particular technique for rhythmically regulating spoken language in order to create some distance to material (from Schnitzler’s novella to the couple of Cruise/Kidman) with a threatening load of direct humanity.
Beyond their obvious narrative function, two sequences at the beginning spell out the film’s agenda: at the first big party, Alice, who drinks non-stop (her glass leads her by the hand), naturally leaves more time between her lines when she responds to the Hungarian seducer and then dances with him, while Bill, upstairs, called to the side of a naked young woman coming to after passing out from sex and drugs, asks her, as the doctor he is, questions spaced out (and repeated) which await answers. The other sequence, in which Alice and Bill smoke a joint in their bedroom, is constructed around the inevitable slowness, once again, of their pronunciation so that it is the sudden change of rhythm, with the incredible position of Nicole Kidman’s body when she bursts into laughter, that changes the direction of the drama. A tension quickly appears on another level between the nearly erotic relationship Kubrick develops with regard to his pair of actors (nothing is more eloquent than the short sequence before their mirror which served as the trailer) and the methodical distancing of the characters by how they pronounce their words.
In this asymmetrical story in which the man projects an image and travels while the woman waits and dreams, the film sets up temporal spaces that the man symmetrically crosses and re-crosses on either side of the orgiastic Bayreuth, and subjects this oneiric repetition of the same locations to changes in lighting and to unique shots arranged to serve just once, wherein each background, re-used as in an older, idealized cinema, activates and reinforces our memory of gestures and faces in the foreground: every viewer is led to imagine what is at stake between this man and this woman, linked by marriage and a child, but separated spatially (as in – distant cousin – Von heute auf morgen), as he gradually traverses the different chapters of temptations which attract Ulysses far from the family home. Reconstructed in the studio due to his well-known penchant for voluntary isolation (today, a fake New York set is almost as amazing as when, in the studio era, one suddenly saw a story shot on real locations), with its few trivial points and hints of brutality (when Bill is verbally abused on the street) thanks to which Kubrick identifies and recognizes in himself his share of hatred for society, the world is nevertheless represented here in a new light of calm seriousness.
If the drama – mainly Alice and Bill’s relationship (the tension between her confession – a story – of desiring but not having consummated an extramarital affair, and his projected fantasy of its consummation – an image – a tension borne out of one challenge which calls forth another; we are in turn led to project this tension on the remaining film) kept on an abstract line thanks to the harmonious expression of the unity, realized in both actors, between imposed rhythmic construction and private truth accessing the open air – f this drama therefore occupies the whole visible space, it is the story’s progress which guards the film’s secrets. The drama plays with doubles, rhymes, inversions of locations and characters (the two prostitutes in a row), and, above all, confessions and false acknowledgements between the guests at the first party with uncovered faces and the masked ones at the second, all things which are visible up to a certain point, but – directed at the inattentive perception of viewers who come for images (and for the barrier of music that all filmmakers of images place between them and the sounds) occurring in time – are mostly stored away for a later viewing of the film. Thus at the same time and in a distinct manner, the temporal control of the line delivery works on the drama and the story. Spoken at the first party with a strange de-dramatized rhythm without hurting or weakening the performances, certain lines seem banal, pure small talk, and go unnoticed, while they are often prophetic signs, calls for complicity, allusions to the masked party. We should also trace all the occurrences of the hero’s first name, Bill, which acts like an initial password, the daytime side of “fidelio,” the nocturnal side, whose borrower is guilty of not knowing he only needed to say it a second time to pass through the second entry at the manor. It is not surprising that the hero’s first name ends up being changed at least once into a common noun with its other meaning of payment.
The gestures are also subject to this temporal law: all approaches are signs of eroticism and find their formal expression in space, but also in time (the actor dancing with Nicole Kidman reduces, through a temporally extended progression, the space between their faces). And in the big nocturnal party, the steps of the tall, masked nude women and the mechanical sexual figures as well as the immobility of the circular ceremony and Bill’s path through the vast rooms –everything obeys the time which progresses and controls the pacing of the shots. In this final film, the editing is entirely unostentatious: in the studio lighting, it conserves its power of illusion which keeps us in the unity of the story, but works to direct us imperceptibly toward its shadowy center. We might say Kubrick films the air circulating between the words, that we find one last time a viewpoint anticipating death applied to the world of desire, that his defeated paranoia is invaded by a Dreyerian anxiety, that he looks at us like ghosts called to enter the image.
But instead we must return to Time. For almost his entire life, Kubrick invented and directed films from which he excluded himself, at the same time that others in Hollywood were already including themselves (Hitchcock, Ray, Fuller, not to mention Chaplin). Obstinacy, daring, pride, isolation – gradually, he traded in his humanity for demiurgic power. From the heights from which Welles – his model – never ceased to descend, paralyzed as he was by theater (that is, humanity), Kubrick ceaselessly ascended and created oversized sealed worlds crossed in every direction by dazed or frowning gods. Gods but not men, rather gloomy samples of the human species.
These traversed spaces always contain time, and time is even what constitutes them, but it is a time which has left behind history, even when the subjects are historical, a pure time given to the viewer who venerates the same idol as the filmmaker –Cinema. It is not his biographical time – his age of man – or even of the era, the present of one film or another, it is a duration of consumption, the imaginary time that traverses an entire film to join something outside time which dispenses with human time. The post-mortem distance was his golden ratio. For the first time, with Eyes Wide Shut, the frowns and stupors fall from the gods and return to the masks they should never have left. These play their role as masks: they mask. The world or society? Once this basic law of humanity was found, through the grace with which the actors perform with, without, and in the presence of masks worn or placed next to them, Stanley Kubrick was able to inhabit his final film. He is there himself, with his final age, diligent viewer of ancient passions which he revives in the present, but the filmmaker in him – necessary schizophrenia – has lost none of his mastery and knows how to translate into a still secret language what the man he shelters really experienced while making the film and during his entire life.