Drop me anywhere, into a dry, most lifeless, dead, stone place where nobody likes to live—and I’ll begin to grow and soak it, like a sponge. No abstract internationalism for me. Nor do I put my stakes on the future: I am now and here. Is this because I was uprooted from my home by force? Is that why I always feel a need for a new home because I don’t really belong anywhere but there, in that one place, which was my childhood and which is gone forever?
That year, sometime during the summer of 1958, I decided to make another run for life. My first act toward it was to cut out my tonsils … Somewhere, in the gardens of the Western civilization, in the forced labor camps, I had caught a chronic cold, and I was told to get rid of my tonsils, or else. As I was leaving the gates of the hospital, still groggy, I took my second decision toward liberation: I decided to drop my job at the Graphic Studios where I was working five days a week. Instead, I took a part-time job at Cooper Offset, two hours every day, for eighteen dollars a week, and I became practically a free man ready to explore Whatever It Is.
I felt very free. Almost as free as fifteen years earlier, in 1944, after completing college: then, too, I felt free. I thought I should be a writer and live from writing. I felt life opening in front of me like a huge flower. But two months later I found myself in the wet suburbs of Hamburg, in a forced labor camp, together with Italian, French and Russian war prisoners, slaving for the Third Reich. It took me another fifteen years and many fragments of many different languages and countries to end up on 515 East 13th Street and again declare my total independence.
As my third act, I went to see Jerry Tallmer, at The Village Voice, and I asked him why there was no regular movie column in his paper. He said, why don’t you do one? I said, O.K., I’ll have it tomorrow. My first column appeared on November 12, 1958. And that was it. What I did not realize at that time was that with this act I almost voluntarily got myself into the same situation as in 1944: I became a slave of the New Cinema, working in its forced labor camps, digging its ditches.
When I began writing my Movie Journal, it was the very beginning of the New American Cinema. Cassavetes had just completed Shadows. Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie were shooting Pull My Daisy. The film bug had already bitten us, and the air was becoming more and more charged with energy and expectations. We felt the cinema was beginning with us! So that though I had intended, with my first columns, to become a serious film critic and deal seriously with the Hollywood film, very soon I discovered that my critic’s hat was of no great use. Instead, I had to take a sword and become a self-appointed minister of defense and propaganda of the New Cinema. Nobody took the new film-maker seriously. The non-narrative cinema was not looked upon as cinema. My colleagues either ignored it or hit it right between the eyes. The best time to kill something is when it is too fragile to defend itself. Those who give birth to life or things of art are vulnerable during the birth periods. That’s why animals hide in inaccessible places when they give birth: they try to get as far as possible from the established movie critics.
Very soon after I started my Journal, I had to drop the critic’s hat and become practically a midwife. I had to pull out, to hold, to protect all the beautiful things that I saw happening in the cinema and that were either butchered or ignored by my colleague writers and by the public. So I kept running around my chickens, cackling, look look how beautiful my chickens are, more beautiful than anything else in the world, and everybody thinks they are ugly ducklings! Since I had to do plenty of cackling, I couldn’t afford wasting any of my space writing on commercial cinema.
Even art can enslave man, take away his freedom. I feel today that only that art is sacred which has no “ideas,” no “thoughts,” no “mean¬ ings,” no “content,” but is simply beautiful; serves no other purpose but its own beauty; it just is, like trees are.
