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truths, or rather the right positions in relation to barely elaborated, very dogmatic, and trivial material. When I arrived at Liberation, I remember that Michel Cressole and Guy Hocquenghem had this terrific attitude which consisted of watching everything, without any kind of system, with only one criterion: either we like it or we don't, we take it or leave it, we detest such and such announcer and we take pot shots at him. It wasn't about any deep truth, the only truth being that television calls for target practice. That had the advantage of putting television back in its place as an object, worthy of interest, by avoiding contempt and adoration, two complicit attitudes that oflFer nothing. Following them Skorecki tried to apply to television series what he had already done with cinema at Cahiers. Paradoxically writing just and true things about a TV series, while even those who watched and loved them, without, however, valorizing them, were not expecting anyone to write about them, and heinously making use of them as a war machine against the noble bourgeois culture: it's something I'm able to understand, although this project comes late, and transforms whoever practices it into an irritating misanthrope. No matter what, I would have stopped writing about television. What's strange is that on the one hand I'm stronger than it, and on the other it's much stronger than I am, and these two forces are heterogeneous. It's enough to watch any television program to be in a position to bring back the Western metaphysic, establishing that television never worked. But its strength resides in the fact that those who make it have impunity and can tolerate some impoverished critic's protests. They have the impunity of the mafia, to such an extent that you decide it's impossible to win this war, the war Godard was fighting when he said that television had to be taken as our collective destiny, or as the only public space that remains, even if it's trashed, and all we can do is begin to work with that public space. Today we should leave this approach to the sociologists and statisticians, to the "Mr. Homais" of the world. I was forced to take on the fact that I could no longer look anywhere else but the cinema for the rest of this political history of impurity, that which makes us citizens. I thought that cinema addressed itself to subjects, or it helped in constituting subjects, by a sort of very slow collective psychoanalysis, and that in the best case scenario, television would contribute to the reinforcement of the
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citizen, which is a completely different problem, calling upon different aesthetic questions. To sum up, I didn't wait for what followed from cinema in cinema, except at the periphery: I didn't pay much attention to the underground or video, conscious that great things could happen there but without any dialectical link with the cinema, or else via a few individual experiences. As for new images, about which we have heard so much for the last ten years, I have again become a Marxist: there is something called the market, and it has to be ready to welcome true and great new contributions, in terms of images and sounds, which can't be reduced to the state of appliances and the rivalry between Sony and Phillips. That takes place at a purely economic level; there is a corporate battle with the possibilities of new images of which no one sees the ludic after-effects, precisely in the interior of this public space, and which would again be able to amaze the public like it did almost a hundred years ago with the arrival of the train at La Ciotat. We don't see the desire for a new Train en gare de La Ciotat anywhere. Some say arrogantly that cinema is very beautiful with its old moons, and its extravagances, but in five years people will have giant interactive screens. It's possible, except that the timing of the event, which in my opinion is very slow, has to be respected. Like Bazin I think that the desire or need for the cinema must have been overwhelming, like a forest fire, and that was unique in the history of art. I struggled against this idea a lot, because I wanted cinema to inscribe itself in the linear unfolding of the world, after photography and before television or video. It was a comfortable thought that allowed for a continuation. Well, mistaken once again, as always when one thinks in linear terms. In faa there is a spiral, and the question is not asked on the side of technique, but on the side of a mass desire to again be amazed by the visual and the aural. The only time I ever had that feeling was watching Zbigniew Rybczinski's Quatrième dimension on Canal+ , and I thought that this videaste had the technical means to realize an absolutely profound and basic human fantasy, and that left me completelyflabbergasted.I went to the geode1 to be amazed; I came back disappointed. It's possible that we are in a sort of interminable turning, which hinders existing technology from being able to adapt itself to the market, and that there is a blockage due to the fact of
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or involution: everything is possible. What I don't believe at all is that when something seems to disappear it is immediately replaced by something else.
