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.The impurity of the image of the car creates a new purity here, which is basically that of contemporary speech.What can we say to one another within this absurd world of the car? There are similar operations in Manoel de Oliveira’s films, where the car also becomes a place for self-exploration, a sort of movement back toward origins.The banality of the car isn’t eliminated; it is, as it were, purified.My third example is sexual activity.The image of sex is a staple in the cinema: naked bodies, embraces, even sexual organs have become a commonplace of the screen, as uninteresting as cars.This is what the audience has always hoped to see, but it has never, even today, seen anything … except disappointing things.This disappointment can actually be called “pornography.” And the pornographic image is a staple, like noise, like cars, like gunshots.What can be done with such material? Does a great filmmaker have to be prudish? Does he or she have to eliminate bodies? Eliminate sexuality? Clearly, that’s not the real way.Rather, it is a matter of accepting pornographic imagery but transforming it from within.I think there are three ways of transforming the pornographic image.The first is to change it into an image of love, where the light of love is internal to the sexual figure.The second way is to stylize it, to make it almost abstract, to transform the bodies into a sort of ideal beauty without, however, giving up the sexual representation.Some remarkable scenes in this vein could be mentioned, in Antonioni’s films, for example.The third way amounts to being even more pornographic than pornography: this could be called “super-pornography,” a kind of meta-pornography.It can be found in some of Godard’s scenes: for example, in the big daisy chain scene in Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man For Himself).Once again, the artist starts with the impurity of the image, its banal and obscene nature, and reworks it from within, gearing it toward a new simplicity.Now for my fourth and last example: shoot-outs, gunshots, gunfights.In this case, too, it is hard to find anything more conventional and clichéd.The number of gunshots fired in the cinema is truly extraordinary.A Martian watching our films would think that human activity boiled down to using guns.Will the great artist give up guns? Of course not.There are shoot-outs in some very great films.But, once again, the artist reworks things differently.In The Lady from Shanghai the gunshots are also images that explode, and in John Woo’s and Takeshi Kitano’s films the gun battles turn into a kind of dance, a very visual choreography.They, too, accepted the rule of the gangster film and took the material with all its triviality but transformed it through a unique stylization.The most important feature of cinema, in my opinion, is precisely this acceptance of the material of the images – contemporary imagery – and its reworking.Cars, pornography, gangsters, shoot-outs, the urban legend, different kinds of music, noises, explosions, fires, corruption, everything that basically makes up the modern social imaginary.Cinema accepts this infinite complexity, assimilates it, and produces purity with it.And so it is true that cinema treats contemporary waste products: it is an absolutely impure art and that is also why it is an art of money.The artistic endeavor involves transforming this material from within in order to produce movement-images or time-images through this traversal of impurity.That, in a nutshell, is the issue of the status of violence in cinema.Cinema can very easily be violent and obscene; that is one of its obvious features.Even in the works of great artists there is sometimes unbearable violence, manifest obscenity.But these artists – David Lynch, for example – are interesting precisely because they have the ambition to take what is worst in the contemporary world as their material and to show how, even with such material, an artistic synthesis of great purity can be created.These artists constantly show the struggle with their own material.In Kitano’s gangster films, we are often confronted with images that are unbearable owing to the violence of the relationships, to the dark, sinister nature of the stories.And yet, something luminous occurs, something that is not the negation of the material but, quite mysteriously, its transmutation, in the sense of alchemy, as though something terrible and terrifying were changing into pure, undreamt-of simplicity.I think that if you accept this hypothesis you’ll understand why cinema is a mass art.We come back to our original synthesis here, namely that cinema is a mass art because it shares the social imaginary with the masses.Cinema’s starting point isn’t its history but the impurity of its material.This is why cinema is a shared art form: everyone recognizes contemporary imagery in a film.The material is common to all films, so everyone can go see it, everyone will recognize themselves in it.Cinema can reproduce the world’s noise; it can also invent a new silence.It can reproduce our restlessness; it can invent new forms of stillness.It can accept the powerlessness of our speech; it can invent a new conversation.But, at the beginning, the materials are the same, and that is why millions of people can consider a great film as being contemporary with their own lives, whereas they can only do the same for the other arts if they have been educated for a long time.We may know why cinema is a mass art, but we must nonetheless ask ourselves what the price to be paid for it is, because there is indeed a price to be paid.The impurity is so extensive, the materials so infinite, the question of money so important, that it is impossible for cinema to attain the same degree of purity as the other arts.There is always a remnant of impurity that remains.In any film, there are whole bits of it that are banal, images that are pointless, lines that could disappear, over-done colors, bad actors, rampant pornography, and so on.At bottom, when we see a film we are seeing a fight: the struggle against the material’s impurity.We don’t see only the result, only the time-images or the movement-images; we see the battle, that artistic battle against impurity.And the battle is won at times and lost at others, even in the same film.A great film is one in which there are a lot of victories, only a few defeats for a lot of victories.That is why a great film always has something heroic about it
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