Jacques Rivette - Cahiers du Cinema - May 1957

from the roundtable "Six Characters in Search of an Auteur" published in the May 1957 special issue of Cahiers du Cinema "Situation of French Cinema"


"The ideal for French cinema would be that, on one hand, you have the super-productions made by directors like Delannoy or Le Chanois (people who are qualified to do that and do it well such that a film costing 500 million francs brings back 800 million francs or even more, which is what, after all, everyone wants) and, on the other, directors, of talent who refuse to be involved in these combinations, who possess the kind of moral integrity to and who are contented with films (let’s put it at 100 million francs) that have no need of foreign markets to amortize themselves and where they can make true works of auteurs. It is necessary that these two domains co-exist and that they be clearly distinct from each other. This is the exact case of Italian cinema, which has its crises as well, but which remains in the best of health inasmuch as it never confuses “Ulysses”, or any other super-production, and the school Rossellini, Zavattini, de Sica, Antonioni who, while they disagree on a number of points, have themselves never been compromised."