"Pourquoi le metteur en scène est le seul à ne pas baiser dans La nuit américaine?" - this was the question our friend asked. Of course, I immediately wanted to recoil from him. To cross myself. Cross to the other side of the street. To spit. That's what he wants: for you to get scared, turn away and jog away. It's not a question, it's a challenge! A real provocation. It's a test of a potential accomplice's willingness to make losses, to cross the line, to break the rules; it's a hint: "Hey, kid in the chequered jacket, maybe you should give up those boring lessons? Let's go to the cinema!" 

No need for endless chatter, volumes of personal files, psychological tests, decades of cohabitation, horoscope coincidences or crude questionnaires - the conspiracy was ripe for the taking at a glance.  

"Why is the director the only one who doesn't fuck in La nuit américaine?" - try asking this question in a school class. The result is obvious. This is, in general, one of the symptoms of modern schools and universities: instead of answering questions, they impose punishment.   

So hurry up! Dive into the Rue Jean Vigo while the warden is distracted! And now that there are no wardens or educators, police officers or priests left, listen, look, smell, and turn the question in your hands. Just be careful - you can cut yourself with it. It smells like sulphur and gunpowder, tastes like the first sickly sweet puff in an old school toilet. It sounds like a bell going off in the middle of a lesson. It looks like the beetroot-coloured face of the head teacher, to whom the head girl timidly reports the words you just used to tease her and the rest of the school.  

I saw that it touched you. And you responded. Twenty pages of insults and excuses. Isn't that what he wanted from you? For it to penetrate you to the nails, for it to climb into the open wound with a fiery blade and dig in. For you to react. For you to act like a child. And that's exactly what happened.  

Enough time has passed, and the resting emotions will not interfere with this conversation. Thanks to death, which cuts away all unnecessary things, we can focus on the essentials.

Before you set off, you need to map out the path. This is where the best of guides, the leader of our ragtag bande à part, comes in. He often leads us along these paths, along which questions abound, obscuring the problem. In order to reveal it, we need to open the question. When it is revealed, it exposes the junction, which is the correlation of opposites that construct contradictions. Therefore, we need to find this joint, the seam - the contradiction; and then try to resolve it, that is, to find a ratio that would remove it; to redraw it in such a way as to smooth the joint.

Rebel Without a Cause

the question as a rebellion

The question is: "Why is the director the only one who doesn't fuck in La nuit américaine?". It's a sharp, radical and very decisive question. Which is not surprising, because the question is asked by a young rebel, so first of all it is a manifestation of rebellion, and only then is it a question. And this is its difficulty. This is where the first junction appears: between the question and the rebellion.  

One can immediately notice a certain commonality between them: both relate to the status quo, but in different ways: questioning questions, while rebellion denies it. The former requires clarification, clarification of the unclear, i.e. it is addressed to (at) a boundary that needs to be defined as precisely as possible, while the latter requires the very existence of a boundary. Rebellion does not ask; the possibility of clarification is indifferent to the rebel, he or she rests on the boundaries, and the stronger the better. Rebellion is resistance, but not to something definite, but as a principle. Hence, it is clear that a rebel needs not so much a cause as a reaction, i.e. a limit to the manifestation of resistance. Moreover, the cause of the rebellion will be the limit itself! After all, resistance is conditioned by limitation. If there is no limit, there will be nothing to resist. And while the one who questions the limit tries to overcome (remove) it, the rebel has no such goal, since the limit as such is only an obstacle for him.

Can we say that the question includes (contains) rebellion? Probably yes, because by asking we indicate a certain limitation, we highlight the boundaries. This would not be possible without resting on them. After all, to question something means to deny its previous boundaries in order to define new ones, which would be quite problematic without such an element as rebellion. By asking we demand an answer, by rebelling we deny it. So questioning contains rebellion, but it is not limited to it. We can say that rebellion is a necessary stage of questioning. While in itself a fruitless resistance, it is a necessary component of the removal of contradiction, the union of contradictions in a new birth. 

It seems all the more incredible that I managed to capture the confusion frozen in Antoine's eyes - a reflection of a fruitless sticking to the boundless indifference of the elements. 

The ineffectiveness of rebellion is best manifested at the junction with unlimited indifference (indifference). After all, what is the best way to neutralize a school bully? Ignore them. Remove from the classroom. Isolate. The lack of reaction makes further damage meaningless. The absence of restrictions makes a rebellion impossible. After all, every time the rebel finds no resistance, he will pierce the void, falling into it. 

This is what they did to our friend. And in an extremely ruthless way - they simply stopped opposing him. He was no longer criticized, and his films became indifferent (indifferent) - they were no longer paid attention to (no longer "distinguished"). He was given a whole spacious corner to himself, a label "rebel" was put around his neck, a record was made in the file, and anyone could come to watch, and even feed him for a fee. 

Perhaps this is the reason for his question? It's an attempt to somehow hang on to the possibility of continuing the rebellion. And you acted like a true friend, giving him a bright flash in the end. 

Amour et é(il)lusion 

question as a question 

What does it mean to fuck? There are two ways of approaching (sneaking up on or fitting in) this question: one is about possessing someone, the other is about giving yourself to someone. It is true to say that this is an act of mastery, as well as an act of devotion. In both cases, it is an act of penetration, and it would not be wrong to call it an act of interpenetration. Obviously, we are looking at a manifestation of the subject-object relationship. Just as the subjective and the objective are combined in a product that contains features of both, and yet is different from each of them, born out of contradiction, new, so the act of interpenetration of the masculine and feminine must result in the birth of a new life.    

The need for this act arose from the primary separation of the two principles, the vague echo of which is carried by red blood cells to every cell of our being every second. It is a thirst for identity, an unquenchable longing for absolute and final mergence. The more passionate the passion, the deeper the devastation after each desperate attempt to restore indistinguishability, which each time slips away like a beautiful mirage, giving way to despair, which with its icy breath condemns the potential of new impulses to slow fading.     

All that is left is to try not to let it die out. Resist, selflessly cultivate the divine spark and share it with others. Rebellion is not the way to go, because it is fruitless. It is an illusion of resistance; it is a constant agony that is still a resistance to death, while at the same time marking its triumph. The real act of resistance is birth. The act of creation - l'acte de création - is the true act of resistance. Creativity is an attempt to escape death, to fill the gaping hole, to stitch up the eternal tear.  

It's amazing how strong a glue cinema, which is essentially a shimmering rupture, has turned out to be. Cinema itself was supposed to be the most ruthless art, to be a half-heartedly horrifying existential experience, to inevitably throw viewers onto the shores of their own souls, to force them to be present but not to distract them. Instead, it has been turned into an industrial-scale entertainment, turned into a grandiose promise of escape. But there is nowhere to escape to - you can see that by looking into Antoine's eyes. Cinema leads to an element greater and more terrifying than reality itself; and the wave of fascination, rolling away, reveals a bottomless rift filled with a mute scream.

Le conseguenze della fedeltà

The title, La nuit américaine, already contains a question: "What is the relationship between cinema and life?". Life is conditioned by the continuity of living it. We move through life continuously and do not have the opportunity to stop life, rewind or rewind, cut out and relive bad moments. In cinema, on the contrary, it is determined by a break. The re-glued prints of reality set in motion is the mechanism of cinema. The continuity of a film is an illusion. It is a reshaped life, from which all the awkward movements have been cut out and glued back together. 

Often the line between cinema and reality is blurred, and cinema seems more real than reality itself. It substitutes for reality, fascinates, making us believe that it is reality, but being essentially an illusion, it exposes inconsistencies, throwing us outside of reality, thus pointing to its limitations and inferiority. Cinema is a cruel deception that hints at the truth.

The director, accordingly, constructs an illusion. He is the Réalisateur of deception. Therefore, when a director is called a deceiver, it is a compliment and recognition of the value of his work. Is that how our friend defines you? 

However, he is not alone in this case. He needs accomplices. He has a plan that needs to be implemented. However, this is a very delicate and risky undertaking, where everyone has a role to play: someone has to shine, and someone has to deal with elephants. Everyone has to be in their place, otherwise the miracle of birth will turn out to be a white thread miscarriage. Filming is a collective pregnancy, preparation for the birth (embodiment) of a film, and the creation of conditions for this. It requires serious effort, patience, and most importantly, dedication. 

Cinema requires devotion, unshakable loyalty, for which it is worth betraying even the closest people. In this sense, a filmmaker embraces a kind of celibacy, devoting himself to cinema, being completely absorbed by it in his dreams and waking life. By continuously listening to the cinema, and thus not being able to hear the other, the director in cinema raises a fragment of a casual conversation to a symbolic level, and from the chaos of metal, lenses, sweaty limbs, silver, mucus, soot and polyester, gives birth to a soul. 

Faithfulness is manifested through service. Service involves self-denial. Denying yourself for the sake of cinema is a necessary condition for the act of creation. It means being prepared to take the right place, for example, to "clean up the shit behind the stars", and to risk everything, because it may (and often does) turn out that the cinema does not need you. Service is the expectation of being involved in a miracle, which is the manifestation of the divine in the real. You can try to create the conditions for a miracle, but you cannot guarantee it. And this is obvious, because not every attempt gives birth to a masterpiece. 

Loyalty is at once the hardest and the most fragile material; nothing can break it at the same moment, and at the same time it can be shattered by the faintest breath. By betraying cinema, you betray yourself first and foremost, placing yourself in the deepest nightmare of the waking world, turning into a savage monster that eats rats for counterfeit banknotes to please the satiated perverts. 

However, remaining loyal has its side effects. It turns those who want to serve into applicants. And contenders are always rivals. To claim means to argue, which means the emergence of contradiction, which is necessary because it is the only thing that causes movement! 

***

And that is all. This is just a confirmation that you, friends, are ultimately the same, and reconciliation is impossible. However, I hope that this attempt, which you are already indifferent to, will not be the same for us. 

Keys.

Jean Vigo, "À propos de Nice" (1930)

Jean Vigo, "Zéro de conduite" (1933) 

François Truffaut, "Les Quatre Cents Coups" (1959)

François Truffaut, "Baisers volés" (1968)

François Truffaut, "La Nuit américaine" (1973)

François Truffaut, L'amour en fuite (1979)

Jean-Luc Godard, "À bout de souffle" (1960)

Jean-Luc Godard, "Les Carabiniers" (1963)

Jean-Luc Godard, "Bande à part" (1964) 

Nicholas Ray, "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955)

Paolo Sorrentino, "Le conseguenze dell'amore" (2004)

Damien Chazelle, "Babylon" (2022)

Lettre de Jean-Luc Godard à Truffaut, mai 1973

Letter de François Truffaut à Jean-Luc Godard, mai-juin 1973

Jean Renoir "In Memory of Jacques Becker" (Jean Renoir: Articles, interviews, memoirs, scripts / compiled by I. I. Lishchinsky. - Moscow: Art, 1972)

François Truffaut "On Jean Vigo" (Truffaut about Truffaut. - Moscow: Raduga, 1987)

Serhiy Forkosh "Philosophical Letters: Writing about (geo)politics (Part XII)"

Gilles Deleuze "What is the act of creation?" (Conference given in the cadre of the mardis of the Femis Foundation - 17/05/1987)

F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, Moscow, Mysl, 1966.