“I love cinema because its images are traces of something forgotten, a lost part of you. Suddenly, in a flash, you are reacquainted with your past…” This, from Pierre Clémenti in his A Few Personal Messages, a collection of essayistic journal entries written over the course of the 18 months he spent in a pair of Italian prisons, articulates the Bazinian party line in its sentimental dimension. We are moved by films because, briefly, deeply, they convince us that the past isn’t irretrievable, that life isn’t forever slipping away. But in his usual manner, Clémenti immediately complicates this, narrowing the perspective to an actor’s: “And at the very moment you’re playing the part, you become the person who will one day look back at yourself.” To be an actor, to be in front of the camera, is to occupy a space, weird and uncanny, in which past, present, and future braid into an inextricable whole. To state the obvious, 50 years on from when Clémenti wrote these words, the role of actor, understood as such, now seems all but unavoidable. It’s nothing more or less than the texture of modern self-consciousness.
Perhaps we enjoy this, perhaps we don’t. In either case, taking up the camera oneself offers a kind of control—deepening the pleasure, or providing relief. And so this is what Clémenti did.
