I must admit I feel some nostalgia for the wonderful twenties when cinema truly became a universal language thanks to the magic of images, the music of images as Abel Gance put it.

Silent cinema had established perfect narrative forms and remarkable filming techniques. At the time of the silent movies, you could say that a deaf person heard what a mute person had to say to him. And the height of the art was to make films without any title cards. (...)

I was part of that generation of young filmmakers at the end of the twenties who lived through the painful passage from silent to talking films. One had to adapt very quickly. My film Images d'Ostende, shot during the winter 1929 – 1930 is purely visual (people have said it was something akin to music). In any case, it is a film for which there exists no solution in terms of sound, it tolerates no music, no music goes with the images and anything that could be added in terms of noise or speech would only destroy a sort of visual poetry that emanates from it.

As for Idlylle à la plage, filmed in 1931, it is still basically a silent film, which includes only a few noises that serve as sound gags, but no ambient sounds. It is accompanied by a fresh and intelligent music composed by Manuel Rosenthal, and a few brief words that act as sub-titles to help understand the anecdote and which were spoken during the recording of the music. Indeed, mixing didn't exist at that time.

Borinage, filmed by Ivens and myself in 1933, was a purely silent film, interspersed with title cards. The effect was powerful. The titles created a rhythm; they provided information about and gave meaning to the images, which were intended to produce emotion.

At the beginning of the sixties, in order to facilitate the distribution of the film, the title cards were replaced by a spoken commentary. It was very difficult to find the right tone and create an atmosphere as effective as the title cards, even though the commentary used exactly the same text.

Yet, at the time of creating the film, Ivens and I had wanted to ask Bertolt Brecht to write a prologue and Hans Eisler to compose some music. Eisler had just composed the music for New Earth, Ivens' film on Zuyderzee. But circumstances (that year Brecht's books were burned in Berlin and he fled to Denmark) and the lack of funding prevented us from doing so. Recently, the German film historian, Lothar Prox, invited André Asriel, a former pupil of Eisler, to write some music for Borinage.

Naturally, after so many years, this film has lost some of its accusing sting and has become a historical document about a revolting situation. Asriel's music, which is of great quality and precisely in the style of Eisler, adds a feeling of revolutionary exaltation to the film and it does not do it disservice, but it does perhaps take away some of the implacability and irrefutability of the document.

It is a good example of how to shift a rigorous document towards something resembling a lyrical pamphlet. Does it remove some of its credibility or on the contrary, does it exalt the spectator's feelings?

Whatever the case may be, I know Ivens is not in favour of it.

On this subject, I would like to add that in the thirties, the weak point of the documentary was precisely its soundtrack. Today when one sees a documentary from that period, often only the image remains and triumphs, preserves its charm, its seduction, its eloquence and truth, its sense of depth. In the early days of sound, we fell into the opposite trap. All of a sudden we thought that images needed support and that their impact needed to be reinforced by a certain literary and musical commentary. But we could never manage to find a natural tone, a language that didn't damage the images. Silence seemed incongruous to us and sound vulgar, ordinary and lacking in expressivity, strength and colour.

We did not want a theatrical voice, known as the voice of God and used to hypnotic effect by newsreaders. Reacting against this, we would sometimes use a completely artificial voice, falsely poetic, tinted with bad literature. It took us a long time to come to grips with sound, to understand the eloquence of a silence, the colour of a sound...

By chasing away silent cinema, by turning away from it, we forgot that the spectators had acquired a certain ability to read images. While on this subject, it must be said in passing that over the past few years, this ability has been developed to an extraordinary degree and that the most brutal of ellipses in time and space, narrative procedures that remained taboo for a long time, have become familiar to the younger generations. But they have also rediscovered the magic of silent cinema.

Lately, Jean Rouch projected a beautiful copy of Nanouk, at 16 images/second and silent. The audience of students filling the big hall of Chaillot lapped up the film in religious silence. It was an unforgettable experience.