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The fascination of these contemporary interviews, for me, is that each brings vividly before us, as a person seemingly different, gifted with a more instinctive sense of freedom, a writer who can never be sure that his emotions, his habits, his childhood, his loves and enmities, are not crucial to …

It is great not required of the writer in these interviews that he be and wise. We all know, we readers of contemporary literature, that our novelists and poets do not live better than we do. What is required is that the writer be gifted, which ever since the Romantic period has meant vividness, a …

In contrast to all the films that we defend in Les Cahiers du Cinema, Assassins et Voleurs is innocent of any esthetic ambitions. It possesses not the slightest indication of professional conscience: a boat scene supposed to be taking place in the open sea has obviously been shot on the sand; a hot…

Jean Renoir does not film situations but rather -- I ask you to remember the circus attraction of the Hall of Mirrors -- characters who are trying to find their way out of the Hall, bumping into the mirrors of reality. Renoir does not film ideas, but men and women who have ideas, and he does not in…

Like all artists, filmmakers search for realism in the sense that they search for their own reality, and they are generally tormented by the chasm between their aspirations and what they have actually produced, between life as they feel it and what they have managed to reproduce of it.