"Eleven years separate these lines from the first part

of my Poetics of Cinema. Meanwhile the world has

changed and cinema with it. Poetics of Cinema1 had

much of a call to arms about it. What I write today is

rather more of a consolatio philosophica. However,

let no one be mistaken about this, a healthy

pessimism may be better than a suicidal optimism.

"Light, more light", were Goethe's dying words.

"Less light, less light", cried Orson Welles repeatedly

on a set-the one and only time I saw him. In today's

cinema (and in today's world) there is too much light.

It is time to return to the shadows. So, about turn!

And back to the caverns!"

Following his research in Poetics of Cinema1 on new

narrative models as tools for apprehending a rapidly

shifting world, Raul Ruiz with Poetics of Cinema2

makes an appeal for an entirely new way of filming,

writing, and of conceiving the image.