Garrel has succeeded in filming something we have never seen before: the faces of actors in silent films during those moments when the black intertitles, with their paltry, illuminated words, filled the screen.

According to U.S. strategy, if you never see the other, his destruction will be more acceptableso that when Iraqi soldiers surrendered, sooner than expected, it was as if they emerged from a dream, a flash-back, a lost epoch--an epoch when the enemy still had a body and was still "like us.

In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed.

The media no longer ask those who know something to share that knowledge with the public. Instead they ask those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimate it.

A cinephile is someone who expects too much of cinema.

Inasmuch as it's a culture, cinema is the only thing at our disposal with which we can recognize ourselves in today's images. As an instrument it's inevitably inadequate, but it's the only one.

If you can't believe a little in what you see on the screen, it's not worth wasting your time on cinema.