Clair Conversing With Himself

In René Clair's 1953 book Reflections on the Cinema, Clair imagines a conversation with his former self from 1923 and endeavours to explain his own desire to educate the spectator anew:

R.C. 1923: If I could teach you to forget I would turn you into fine, simple savages. In front of the screen, at first entirely blank, you would marvel at elementary visions: a leaf, a hand, water, an ear; then a tree, a human body, a river, a face; after that, wind in the leaves, a man walking, a river flowing, simple facial expressions. In the second year, you would solve visual puzzles. You would be taught the rudiments of a provisional syntax. You would learn to guess the meaning of various successions of images, as a child or a foreigner, little by little, finds out the meanings of the sounds he hears. And after several years, or, perhaps, several generations (I'm not a prophet), you would have learned to accept the rules of a visual convention as practical as the verbal one, and no more exacting.