Mystery

I often think that we go about the analysis of films the wrong way around. We usually start from the end of the film, as it were, and project all the things that we have come to know about the themes, the characters, the form, the entire trajectory, back to its beginning. Once we think, speak, or write about a film, the hardest thing to recapture, as we re-view it, is the experience of starting in blissful ignorance, knowing (for the most part) nothing of what is to unfold, understanding nothing of the strange figures, places, objects and incidents that appear before us.

There is a phrase, from a panel discussion transcribed at the end of the 1970s, that I often recall: responding to some negative remarks about experimental cinema made by the theorist Jean-Louis Comolli, Peter Gidal snapped, “You must be blind”. To this, Comolli calmly, cryptically replied: “I am blind, and we are all blind”.

In Le Récit au cinéma, Alain Masson emphasises the intense aura of mystery that accompanies almost any film in its initial moments. Everything is unfamiliar, ambiguous, full of multiple potentialities.