IX

		and time itself is at your mercy: this morning, snow will fall in North Dakota, this afternoon, it will be a balmy 1930s California night. The studio contains all these images. Their echoes resonate in its hall. The studio then is like the inside of a large pyramid, a dark place out of time with its tomblike silence, where the dead are buried surrounded by the icons that made them famous. For the directors, actors, and technicians who once made the place so alive are still around. Their ghosts still haunt the place. In the old days, a light was even kept burning through the night in their honor. Listen! Pay attention! They are here! And it is here also that the living assemble once more to perform the rituals initiated by the pioneers. Like them we conjure up the spirits with the magic words: "Camera!' "Action!" "Cut!" Like them, we form a procession, walking grimly and silently alongside a dolly as if it were a hearse carrying a loved one. Like them, we solemnly go over and over the same action until finally "It's a take!,'' which means that something quite numinous has finally been captured on film.

		As a tomb, a cenotaph, the studio is the great repository of our film culture. It is the formidable graveyard of all film practices. It is the place where the past dominates, where symbolic structures overwhelm the visiting filmmaker. In front of the dead, the tone is grave, heads are bowed, bodies stand still. We give respect. We censor ourselves. To shoot films then, our films, we must go elsewhere, find places where we can be free to move as we want, do what we like, create in an environment that does not conjure up the past. To make films today we must go on location.

		III

		This is what Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, Giuseppe de Santis did in Italy just after World War II. This is where Fran ois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Agn s Varda chose to go to during the early days of the French New Wave. To be sure, historical circumstances forced them to go on location, but there are other reasons as well. In a studio, a set may look like the real thing but, quickly, the eye realizes the artificiality of it all. Alfred Hitchcock referred to this when he suggested that a set dresser needed to think more like a screenwriter. By this he meant that a set dresser should make a special effort to avoid generic furnishings, imagining instead how the actual human beings living in this room would furnish it, make it theirs. Unfortunately, he concluded,