“In Regular Lovers, for instance, toward the end of the shoot, I had a dream, but instead of writing it down I did something like what Godard would do when he was . . . let’s call it ‘improvising the mise-en-scene’ on the set, where he would make something up and shoot it with without writing it down. So, I had this dream. I called my assistant early in the morning and said, ‘Go to the store, buy some barbed wire, and come to the set. I’ll tell you why.’ We were shooting in the forest, and what I was able to do is I noted the dream directly through the camera. I didn’t write it down. It would be hard for you to remember, but it was the scene where the character takes opium and then he dreams. That was a dream noted on camera. You see a young woman wearing old clothes in a small camp with barbed wire. She’s woken by Louis Garrel, who’s dressed as a young prince. There’s a small flame. He takes her out of the camp. And that’s how you get to be avant-garde. You try to be the first to make a certain gesture. So, in this case, two or three hours after I’d woken up, I was shooting the dream, noting the dream directly through the camera, while I was still inhabited by it.”

“Vanel also sets his camera on various fairground rides, and in this, as well as much of his visual style, he seems influenced by the impressionist school: Jean Epstein features a long, ecstatic funfair scene in his Cœur fidèle (1923). Like Epstein, Vanel exults in hallucinatory moments of disorientation, transient effects of light, and contrasting overheated emotion with gritty locations and a naturalistic depiction of working life.”