At markets I watch people describe films they have not seen. Eight or nine conversations decide a film's international life and most of them happen before anyone has watched a single frame of it.

My four-year-old asked me where babies come from in a museum in Marseille, and I did not answer him. On Bonnes Mères at the Mucem, a film from 1896 about cabbages, and the woman who made it and then went missing from it.