Citizen Camera_The Memoirs of René Vautier
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In cinema, as in any other craft, there are those who swallow and those who spit, those who climb and those who stand their ground. Usually, the former win —and are also the first to be defeated in that peculiar thing called dignity. A corrupt system only benefits the corrupt. It’s elementary logic.
René Vautier entered cinema with a verse by Paul Éluard in mind («I say what I see, what I know, what is true»). He devoted his professional life to fighting censorship —not because he sought to specialize in it, but because what we call censorship is nothing other than the dense web of traps, laws, ambushes, silences, amputations, distortions, blackmail, betrayals, and changes of side that every filmmaker must face when attempting something as simple as telling what they see. The bitter, comic, devastating, hilarious, brutal, and delicate account of that struggle —which forced him to invent a thousand and one ways to outwit the iron hand of power— makes for a brilliant and necessary book. A book that every documentary student should keep on their bedside table.