We Are Not Innocent Anymore
- Jacques Rivette, December 2011 To see a film by Mauritz Stiller, F. W. Murnau, or D. W. Griffith today is striking, and revealing also of the exceptional importance that every human gesture—indeed, the functioning of the entire sensible universe—assumes in their films: an act as simple as drinking, walking or dying possesses a density—the plenitude of meaning and the confused evidence of the sign—that always transcends interpretations and limitations, and that we would be fain to find in films today. Jean Vigo and Jean Renoir are perhaps the only ones who still suggest an incessant improvisation of the universe, a perennial, calm, and sure creation of the world. Silence explains nothing. The problems begin with the followers of the ‘pioneers’, with the reflections on the miracle. Every reflection implies analysis, and analysis evidently must begin with the basics: we make synthetic films, still clumsy and naïve, from which all life and vigour has fled. The awkward systematization...