 Thank you, Dr. Casse and thank you, Mares and Jordy, for arranging this honor. It's a great privilege for me to be named, given an honor, Dr. University. I take it as a recognition for the film work that I've done over the last 50 years. The problem that I haven't speaking now is that Mares so well covered my life, my career, my thoughts, that I don't know what to say because she has said it all for me. So I don't know whether to contradict her or to make something up or just to keep quiet. But I'll try to find something different to say that I'll improvise at the moment. I think the model for my life, the pretentious way of putting it, would be the metaphor for my life, would be Las Vegas and Roulette. Because everything, so much of my experience in life has depended on chance. I had the misfortune after I went to law school to avoid the Korean War because you could get deferred if you were doing graduate studies. There's a way of spearing the middle class from fighting. And I hated law school and I read novels and poems for three years. I never went to class. And after law school I was in, I served my country in the peacetime army. Fortunately the war was over. And then I went to Paris to write the great American novel. And I don't think I wrote one word, but I went around Paris clutching a copy that everybody who saw me could see the title called, it was a book by Sartre called What Is Existentialism, which I read about two pages of and understood nothing. And then I ran out of money and for some reason or another I was hired to teach at a law school. I've never understood why, probably because they thought I would work for very little money. And I taught law for a number of years. And one of the things I, I was always interested in the movies. And when I went, when I was in Paris I shot a whole bunch of movies in eight millimeter in super eight. And one of the courses I taught at law school was a course on legal medicine. And I took the law students on field trips to criminal trials and prisons and metal hospitals and all board hearings. I wanted to take, I wanted to give some reality to the rather dry and poorly written appellate court decisions that they were forced to read otherwise. And I wanted them to see where their clients might end up if they didn't defend them properly. And one of the places I took them to was a prison for the currently insane. And when I finally couldn't tolerate being in a law school or the law school atmosphere anymore, I had reached the witching age of 30 and decided that I should try and make movies. And I first worked on a film that was half fiction and half documentary based on an novel called The Cool World. And it was in, I didn't direct it myself because at that point I had no experience. But in observing the people who were making the film, it completely demystified the filmmaking process for me. And I thought if they could make a film so could I. And this, so I then started to make my own movies. And this is well before there was a film school on every corner. And so when you wanted to make a movie you just sort of picked up the equipment or a transistor yourself to someone and start making movies. And so I knew the superintendent of the prison and asked his permission. And much to my surprise he gave me the permission. And then after about a year and a half negotiations, I had permission from the commission of correction in Massachusetts and made the film which became Titty Cut Follies. And in doing the Follies I had the idea for an institutional series. And it seemed to me that the appropriate next subject after a prison for the criminally insane was a high school. And I proceeded pretty much on the basis of one film a year to do what has become an institutional series with no precise definition of an institution since I blessedly am not a sociologist. I'm really a place that has physical limitations, a building or a geographical area. And whatever goes on within that narrow or limited area is fit for inclusion in the film. And what happens outside is another film or certainly not fit for inclusion. The metaphor is that the institution serves the same function that the net or the lines do on a tennis court. And the technique has remained the same over the years. Small crew with just three of us. I direct and do the sound, work with a cameraman. The third person when we shot on film carried the extra equipment and bought lunch. And I don't do any research ahead of time because I don't like to miss something if I'm there doing research and something great is going on. I feel near suicidal to have missed it. So the shooting of the film is a research and the shooting is very instinctive. It's kind of a sport. You have to run around. You have to be in shape. You have to make up your mind very quickly. And all I try to do during the shooting is accumulate material with no idea at all what the themes or the point of view of the film is going to be. And the shooting period is varied from four to 12 weeks. Really, in part, the length of the shooting is determined by how comfortable a hotel is where I'm staying and I wish to get back home. And I typically accumulate anywhere from 100 to, in the case of that, Berkeley, 250 hours of rushes. And Berkeley was 250 hours because I noticed that professors like to talk. And it was important to shoot all of the meetings. And then the film, I really try and figure out the film in the editing. As I say, I have no point of view toward the material or no particular message that I'm interested in presenting. I think my films are non-ideological. There's a famous American philosopher by the name of Samuel Goldwyn who said if you have a message send a telegram. And that's a philosophy that I've followed in the films. And the film is discovered in the editing. The procedure is to, when I get back from shooting, I look at all the rushes, set aside about 50% of the material after the six or eight weeks of looking at the rushes. Then it takes me six or eight months to edit the sequences that I think I might use in the film. And it's only when those sequences are in editing close to final form that I begin working on the structure. And I make the first assembly in maybe three or four days at that point. And that first assembly usually comes out to be within 30 or 40 minutes of the final film. And then I work on the internal rhythm within the sequence and the external rhythm, the transitions between the sequences. But most of film editing, or at least 50% of film editing, has absolutely nothing to do with the technique of movies, of cinema, as one says, pretentiously. But rather try to understand what it is that I'm looking at and hearing. So that the most important, or certainly one of the most important parts of making a film, is deluding myself into thinking that I understand what's going on in the sequence that I'm studying. Because unless I think I know what's going on within a sequence, I can't make the decision first whether to use the sequence, second how to use it, in other words, how to compress it into a usable form, and third where to place it in the film. And one of the most interesting aspects of filmmaking for me is that sort of analysis. And I think I've learned most about that kind of analysis from the reading I've done. When I was at college, it was the late 40s, and we were in English courses in poetry classes, we were taught something called the New Criticism, which was to study the essence, which is when one reads a poem, you're not interested in the life of the poet or his traumatic experiences as a child, or his relationship with his mummy and daddy, but rather what is the evidence in the poem for what the writer is trying to say. So I was taught in university how to do a close analysis of a text. And what I try to do in the movies is to bring that same kind of analytic technique, if that's the right way of describing it, to the study of the individual sequences. And one of the things that troubles me, I often, one of the ways I make a living is by talking at film schools, uttering my bromides about movies. And I found it very curious that often the students are much more interested in the technical aspects of filmmaking than they are in the content. And for me, the technique is at the service of the content, not the other way around. And I'm always, in the film schools I've spoken at, I'm appalled at the fact that the students don't, they seem to know a lot about the history of movies, but they don't know, they haven't read much. And I don't have no idea whether that's true in Spain or not. I know that it's true in France, in America, where I've met a lot of film students. And I think that's unfortunate. And in a sense, I don't know if it's a failure of the education system in general or a failure of film schools. And I have no idea, I'm not offering this as a critique of what happens here because I don't really know. But, you know, sometimes I'm asked what movies have influenced me the most. And I say, well, I haven't really been very much influenced by movies. I've influenced by what I read. And at the risk of sounding pretentious, the best book I've ever read on film editing is the Letters of Flo Baer and George Sand. Because when they write to each other about the technique, the problems they're having in writing, I read that as they're writing about film editing. I just substitute film editing for writing because I think the issues in all the forms are the same. The way they're resolved is different, but everyone, whether it's a painter or a poet or a novelist, playwright, we all have the same problems in the abstract. The problems of characterization, of metaphor, the passage of time, of abstraction, etc. And when I'm editing a movie, I always have to think of my choices being made with two tracks in mind. One track is literally what's going on, who says what to whom, what people are wearing, why does somebody turn left rather than right, why does somebody ask for a cigarette at a particular moment. In other words, I have to analyze the specific aspects of the behavior. But then I also have to try and think about whether successfully or not is enough for me to say what are the implications of the behavior that I'm observing and thinking about. And the implications, what more general ideas are suggested by the specific encounters in the sequences. So that the final movie proceeds on two tracks, the literal track and the abstract track. And the real movie is where the literal and the abstract, the ladders that connect the literal and the abstract. And the editing process really is a funny combination of being highly rational and highly non-rational or irrational, some might say. And I've learned to pay as much attention to the thoughts that my association is, the thoughts at the so-called periphery of my brain as to the more deductive aspects. And sometimes I've had all the cliche experiences. I've thought of a cut in the shower, walking down the street. I've dreamt a cut as well as deducing a cut from a more formal straightforward analysis. And the movie emerges from that kind of process. But I come back a little bit to the question of chance, because during the shooting, for example, no events are staged. I have no idea what I'm going to find. I take an example, I don't know if any of you have seen Jackson Heights. But there's a sequence in Jackson Heights where a group of women from Alabama have come to Queens, one of the boroughs of New York City, because they think the streets are dirty and they're there to sweep the streets. And the streets are no more or less dirty than anybody else, but they're thinking they're making a social contribution to Queens by sweeping the streets. And I thought that was rather funny, and as we were shooting them sweeping the sidewalk, a woman came up and said she recognized that they were from the south with a southern Baptist. And she asked them if they would offer a prayer for her father who was dying of cancer in the hospital and she was about to go visit him. So suddenly this group of street sweepers reconvened as a group of religious Baptists and the woman offered a prayer. One of the sweepers offered a prayer for the father of the woman who approached them. So it turned out, I mentioned that sequence because it has some of the elements that I, it has the element of luck. I just happened to be there when they were sweeping and the woman came up. But also it's a very sad sequence because of the history of the story of the father who was dying. It's also a very funny sequence in my mind because the ignorance and the provincialism and the stupidity of women coming from Alabama to sweep the sidewalk of Queens. But that chance aspect is characteristic of a lot of what I consider the best sequences in the film. There's another sequence in Jackson Heights. We were driving along and I saw a sign that said taxi school. And I hadn't ever heard of a school for taxi drivers before. So I stopped and went in and asked the person in the office whether I could come by sometime and shoot his course for taxi drivers. And he said yes, it's a class beginning in 20 minutes. And it turned out to be one of the funniest sequences I've had in any of the films. But it was just sheer chance that I saw the sign, took the risk, stopped. I had no idea what was going to happen and lucked out. And that is characteristic of all the films and I think an element of the technique really because you have to be prepared to shoot whatever is going on. You have to act very quickly. You have to make up your mind very quickly that it's worth shooting and then take the risk of shooting it. One of the reasons that a lot of film is shot now, whatever it's called, films are shot on digital cameras. I always forget what that's called. It's no longer called film. And you have to shoot a lot in order to have some choice in the editing room. Because if you don't have the shots six months later in the editing room, I tear what's left of my hair out because I don't have the shot. For my kind of filming, it's better to overshoot rather than undershoot so you have the choice in the editing. And then when the film is finished, a couple of months before the film is finished, I start thinking about the next film to avoid the postpartum depression that sits in when I finished. So I've been continuing like that, fighting off depression by making another movie for the last 50 years. That's really the technique and the experience. Making these movies is a great adventure. One of the greatest of adventures was when I made a film called Near Death in Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. I made a film about how decisions are made to stop treating dying patients. And it's really in an abstract sense, it's a film about democracy because it shows that the doctors and nurses and family members and the person that was dying all participated in the decision-making. And the person was kept alive until there was a recognition either on the patient's part or on the family's part that no more help was offered or no additional help wouldn't do any good. So in an abstract sense it's a movie about democratic decision-making. But after the last day of shooting, I went around thanking the people who had helped me and some of the sequences were shot in the morgue and I looked around for the man who was in charge of the morgue and finally found him in the cafeteria of the hospital and I thanked him and I said I appreciated his help and he shook my hand very warmly and said, see you soon. So I think thank you very much for the degree and see you soon.