There’s something in the act of “making” cinema that I don’t have: the desire to impose oneself. Not out of virtue but out of the inability to bet on oneself, to believe in oneself. I believed in my destiny, a kind of pale star, but I didn’t believe in me. As a passeur I stayed in the middle of the fjord, waiting for one of the banks to call me, or to take me by the hand, and since that never happened I began to send little messages, both written and oral, giving news from one bank to the other without myself belonging to either of them. I wasn’t on the side of the normal people who laughingly consume movies, nor was I on the side of the specialists, of the doers, the artists, whose experience will end up proving that they too are very normal, which is to say that there isn’t much point in idealizing them.

I stayed in the middle of the fjord so long that I ended up–it’s happening to me today–scheming, making up part of the landscape, like a rather dignified scarecrow or a modern art statue. I waited patiently for someone to see me, and since I was incapable of making myself seen, I waited for a few to venture over to my side, the side of cinema, which is the only one in which I can exist favorably, and as soon as they showed up I over whelmed them with all that I had never been able to tell anyone. I never had to produce evidence of my existence or of my value because the key to my existence was under the watch of the cinematic house of mirrors, with a prisoner for a father, and my value was what my mother gave me at my birth. What value? Zero value, simply that I exist.

Serge Daney, obrigado, muito obrigado.