If cinema itself has been freewheeling in its use and abuse of other art forms to show what influential critic Raymond Durgnat calls “the impossible,” why, when it comes to talking about films, should we be limited to literary forms of expression?
That’s the question illustrator and co-author Naiel Ibarrola and I asked ourselves before launching into a new form of film criticism using the comic format to tell our alternative history of cinema, a project that’s occupied us since last year.
The great thing about comics, as a medium, is the endless freedom you have in playing with elements of time and space, building up scenes, putting people in one place talking to each other, where in reality they had been thousands of miles away and never spoken the same language. Hence the comic, like cinema, becomes the art of the impossible. The comic imitates the cinema. So far, we have used the illustrations to show how a Raoul Walsh composition is realized; how an imaginary conversation between Yasujiro Ozu and Fritz Lang takes place in a dingy French café; and to fulfill many other cinephilic fantasies through ideas, colors and drawings. Now we want to share some of them with you.
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