I'm just a flipbook crazy collector; I want all of them, like a DOM JUAN wants all the women, with the risk of loving one.

But not only...

I could go on a big gold horse and declaim:

“That Art is the check-point between an emotional shock and a truth that opens on the future”;

“That playing adolf hitler is not Nazi propaganda”;

“That Andy Warhol, in depicting Mao Tse Tung, is not responsible for the massacres of the Cultural Revolution”;

But not only...

I too can remember 11.09. This day, actor, I was in rehearsal for “The Road of the Orange Tree Grove” which speaks of a man who doesn’t understand his son and goes to die alone... We were having a pause, the television was on in the Green Room, and the first images mixed themselves up in my head with the text I was studying. Where was the fiction? Where was the truth?

Then the nightmare confirmed itself as being Life. I was so moved, so shocked, I couldn’t react. I just said: “World War III has just begun today”. My anger was stronger than my despair, I didn’t cry, I howled.

I could remember the days after, huge memories and shameful memories: the pictures of New-York firemen, heroic in their sacrifice... the pictures of young Muslims in certain French suburbs, proudly wearing tee-shirts at my enemy’s effigy, Bin Laden; cynic provocation from lost kids, killers for tomorrow.

I asked Jean-Pierre, "How would you feel if I started selling September 11th Flipbooks for money and profit in stores like HEEZA? Or how about the in The Pompidou Center?"

I could smile about your question (“can we sell this flipbook in today’s world, in Paris, in the Georges Pompidou Centre?”), but I don’t smile... This artistic modesty that refuses to enrich itself on dung, that refuses to be the dealer of a purulent temple, touches me because I discover that this feeling exists in the USA too. But I do not think it is right: a photograph is to an action it depicts what grass is to Attila. If the MGM and fellow members could not show on screens “sensitive” subjects we’d eternally see “The Little House on the Prairie”, or “Heidi”! We would then be the bemused spectators of a collective cultural suicide, and at the best, for the most resistant among us, of suffocating boredom.

I could also think that a little book is an act of resistance, a little flower hanging on the guns of Intolerance, the minimal answer to the world’s maximum cruelty, a kid’s smile to the face of a nightmare; for this, “Thank you”.

And so, and again, and mostly, a flipbook, this particular flipbook can be manipulated in two directions. Hold it firmly from the back; turn the pages backwards, fanning it from the end to the beginning: you will see a building on fire being built again, anew, a plane receding in the sky, disappearing far away, out of New-York. Do the exercise several times.

Again.

Again.

And again.

Jean-Pierre Becker