Octavio Paz said once that, “A chained man needs only shut his eyes to make the world explode.” Paraphrasing him, I would say that the white eye of the screen need only reflect the light that is properly its own to blow up the universe. But, for the time being, we can sleep easily, for the cinemagraphic light that reaches us is carefully filtered and metered. In none of the traditional arts is there so great a disproportion between potential and achievement as in the cinema. A film acts directly upon the spectator, presenting him with concrete people and things; in the silence and darkness of the theater, it isolates him from what we might call his normal psychic habitat. For these reasons, it can stimulate him more effectively than any other form of human expression. It can also more effectively stultify him.

The essential element in any work of art is mystery, and generally this is lacking in films. Authors, directors and producers take great pains not to disturb our peace of mind, and they keep the marvelous window of the screen closed to the liberating world of poetry. They would rather have that screen reflect subjects that could perfectly well be sequels to our everyday life; they rather that it repeat over and over the same hackneyed drama to make us forget the tedium of our daily work. Their approach is, of course, sanctioned by conventional morality, official censorship, and religion; it is ruled by good taste, and seasoned with an innocuous humor together with all the other prosaic imperatives of reality.

Anyone who is eager to see good films will rarely be satisfied by the big expensive productions or by those that have won critical praise or wide open popular acceptance. The personal story, the private individual drama, cannot, in my opinion, interest anyone who is truly alive to the contemporary world. If the spectator shares in the joys, sorrows and anguish of society as a whole and, by extension, his own. Unemployment, the instability of society, the fear of war, and so on- these are the things that affect all men today and, accordingly, they affect the spectator. But that some fellow is not happy at home and casts about for a girlfriend to provide him some fun, and that he then abandons her to return to his self-sacrificing spouse- all this is unquestionably moral and edifying but it leaves us completely indifferent.

Sometimes that which is the essence of cinema springs unexpectedly from an otherwise insipid movie– a slapstick comedy, or a banal romantic film. Man Ray once said something very significant: “The worst movies I’ve ever seen in my life, the kind that put me sound asleep, always have five minutes that are marvelous. But the best, the most highly praised films, have barely five minutes that are even worthwhile.” What this means is that in all films, good or bad- and beyond and despite the intentions of directors- cinematic poetry struggles to come to the surface and even reveal itself.

In the hands of a free spirit the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon. It is the superlative medium through which to express the world of thought, feeling and instinct. The creative handling of film image is such that, among all means of human expression, its way of functioning is most reminiscent of the work of the mind during sleep. A film is an involuntary imitation of a dream.

The cinema seems to have been invented to express the life of the subconscious, the roots of which penetrate poetry so deeply. Yet it is almost never used to accomplish this.

“The most admirable thing about the fantastic,” Andre Breton has said, “is that the fantastic does not exist; everything is real”

Each person pours a certain dose of subjective feeling into what he is looking at, because no one sees things as they are but as he desires and his state of mind make him see them. I am fighting for the kind of film that will make me see this for it is this kind of cinema that will give a total vision of reality, enlarge my knowledge of things and of people, and open to me the marvelous world of the unknown, of everything that I do not find in any newspaper or on any street.

Do not think from what I have just said that I am for a cinema exclusively dedicated to the expression of the fantastic and mysterious, for a cinema that flees from or despises daily reality and aspires only to plunge us into the unconscious world of dreams.