Maurice Pialat es uno de los mejores directores de la historia del cine.
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You say that realism was important to you. Doesn’t this aesthetic forcibly cast an eye upon society?
What I mean by realism goes beyond reality. A little before going into production on
L’enfance-nue, I watched some of Louis Lumière’s films. They were a revelation. This cinema that existed for a brief moment before quickly dying, suppressed by the commercial constraints of show-business, should once again have its day.
It’s not being modest to say that
L’enfance-nue was directed under the influence of Lumière. But that’s exactly how it was. While shooting
L’enfance-nue, I was thinking of
Repas de Bébé [
Baby’s Meal, Louis Lumière, 1895]. Did Lumière film reality? I don’t think so. In his films, men and women, captured by a machine they know nothing about, gave up a moment in their lives, and, ever since, every actor has been doing the same thing. In the “fantastic” shot, Lumière outstrips Méliès. Those people, without knowing it, are watching their lives take place. All of cinema is there, in this seizing of existence, in this exorcism of death. This is dream-like cinema. The exiting from the Lumière factories hurls back into the distance the coarse stupidities of someone like Fellini. This aesthetic provides the definition of cinema: an alchemy, a transformation of the sordid into the marvelous, of the common into the exceptional, of the filmed subject into the very moment of its extinction. This is what realism is for me. Put simply, I’d say: “Cheap oneirism: I know nothing about it. The simple event of pushing a button on the camera is oneiric.”
But oneirism, fantasy, etc., are pretty precise genres practiced with talent by directors like Fellini.
Fellini is afraid of reality because he hasn’t got the strength to confront it, which, artistically, is a sort of impotency and vulgarity. Fellini betrayed Rossellini, his master. Dishonest direction in films is that which stages what’s technically unrealizable. In the scene in the metro in
Roma [Federico Fellini, 1972], the camera is placed such that you think it incapable of having recorded what it is the spectator is seeing. In the cinema, one has every right, except that of being an impostor."
Cinemasparagus: L'enfance-nue (Pialat) - Essay by Kent Jones + Interview with Maurice Pialat 
