The first day of the Festival des Films du Monde was an endurance test. I enjoy movies but I’ve never been an immoderate consumer, just following what comes out of France, at least the ones that make it here—and less so, what’s done in the States, because I find most American movies have too much noise and not enough sensitivity—and then, out of solidarity if I dare to use the word, what’s been done here for the past twenty years or so.

I don’t think I was even twenty when Valérie came out. My memory of it’s confused, like a feeling of embarrassment because I’d thought the film was idiotic, though at the same time I was relieved to see our grotesque censorship being held up to ridicule, the same censorship that in 1960 had devastated and violated Hiroshima mon amour under the pretext of preserving public morality. So there I was, on the first day of the festival standing in line at a quarter to nine a.m.—outside the Parisien with Mathieu, who was so keyed up he couldn’t stand still.

“This year I’m aiming at an average of four films a day . . . It’s easy at first, but towards the middle of the Festival, you’ll see, you reach a kind of plateau . . . you can’t take in any more, it’s like a kind of indigestion . . . but it gets sorted out and the final sprint’s always exhilarating.”

Since I was afraid I wouldn’t even make it through the first day, I didn’t reply.

It was Mathieu, of course, who’d drawn up our schedule. At breakfast he’d held out a leaflet covered with yellow and black splotches, totally unintelligible to me, and tried, in vain, to explain them. All that got through to me was that on day one, we were going to see a film from Poland, one from Britain, one from Japan and, if there was still time, one from Australia. So in just one day I was going to see what I usually take in over a month and I didn’t even feel like going to the movies.