Original subtitles

In a hushed voice

in a gentle, soft voice,

saying great things

important, surprising, profound,

just things,

in a gentle, soft voice

the threat of thunder,

the presence of absolutes in a robin's voice,

in the fine detail of a flute

and the delicacy of pure sound.

The whole sun evoked in a half smile.

O hushed voice

and a sort of murmur

in infinitely pure French.

He who heard not the words would have thought they were nothing.

They were nothing for the reassured ear.

But this contrast and this music,

this voice barely rippling the air,

this whispering strength,

these perspectives,

these discoveries,

these abysses,

and these maneuvers, hinted at,

this smile

dismissing the universe.

Also, the sound of silk, lonely and discreet,

of a fire which burns

creating the room around it

and which speaks to itself,

or to me,

almost for itself.

Spirit is true only when it manifests itself.

The root of "manifest" is the word "hand".

Love is the epitome of spirit.

Loving others is an act.

A hand reaching out, not a draped sentiment,

an ideal on the way to Jericho passing by a bandits' victim.

Police.

Propaganda. State.

This is the hand,

the name of the tyrant God created by man's proud reason.

When speech breaks down,

when it is no longer a gift which commits something of itself,

human friendship breaks down.

This is the worry of the people.

It is not material at first.

It is a worry of heart and spirit,

born of the death of friendship.

I do not believe in mysterious voices

but in the call of facts.

Let us consider the time, the places we live,

our precise situations and their resulting call.

After that, let us judge.

The Europe of today.

In this Europe, two kinds of nations.

Those considered old

and those considered rejuvenated.

Those with possibilities

but not knowing what to do with their freedom,

and those which have undergone revolution

and have freedom of opinion,

that is, the right to complain, but without deep-felt passion,

where misery is at the door and all one can do is wait.

Misery.

Last argument. Last basis of modern community.

The backdrop of all our dramas, thoughts and action,

and even our utopias.

The essential is not what a dictator thinks.

It is not material necessity.

It is a higher truth.

At the level of man

and, I might add, within man's reach.

It is time that thought becomes what it truly is:

Dangerous for the thinker

and able to transform reality.

"Where I create is where I am true": Rilke.

Some think, others act.

But man's true condition

is to think with his hands.

I will not denigrate our tools

but I'd like them usable.

If it is true that the danger is not in our tools

but in the weakness of our hands.

A thought which abandons itself to the rhythm of its own mechanisms

proletarianizes itself.

Such a thought no longer lives of its own creation.

Man is formed by others.

I recite this.

Who are these others?

We know now.

They are the laws born of the abandonment of thought.

Who is responsible?

Not the parties. Not the classes. Not the governments.

It is men, one by one.

In anger I am torn by insurmountable irony.

Otherwise I would not shout.

But silence is not given to man through effort.

Silence and pitiful intelligence are the work of forgiveness.

"It is your business, not mine, to rule over absence,"

said a poet.

True violence is the work of the spirit.

Every creative act contains a real threat

for the person who dares it.

This is how art moves the viewer or reader.

If thought refuses to do violence,

it exposes itself in vain

to all the brutalities which its absence released.

We sometimes hope that thinking in France

becomes punishable by prison.

Free thinkers would be taken seriously again.

The place of all creative thinking

is the person.

The world's agitation is no more than a question

which is put to me and which takes form

only when it forces me to act.

Partisans of "we" have mistaken the person.

The world's contradictions figure in the equation of all existence.

X is a person, a creative element,

an incalculable liberty.

Man,

as man, is a creator,

but a created creator.

It is in hope that we are saved.

But this hope is true

because time destroys the act,

but the act is the judge of time.

When the acrobat falls prey

to his own precarious balance,

we make a wish.

This wish is two-fold

and empty.

We hope he falls

and we hope he holds on.

This wish is necessary. We can't help forming it

in all its contradiction, in all sincerity.

It naively paints our soul

at that moment.

It feels that the man will fall,

must fall,

is going to fall.

It confirms his fall and refrains

from any emotion, desiring what it foresees.

For it, he has already fallen.

It doesn't believe its eyes. It wouldn't watch him on the rope,

wouldn't push him down at every moment

if he hadn't already fallen.

It sees him holding on

and admits there are reasons for his holding on,

invoking these reasons, begging them to last.

The existence of everything

and of ourselves...

We forget why Joan Fontaine leans over the cliff.

Why was Joel McCrea in Holland?

What confession did Montgomery Clift keep secret?

Why did Janet Leigh stop at the Motel?

Why does Theresa Wright still love Uncle Charlie?

What isn't Henry Fonda entirely guilty of?

Why did the American government

hire Ingrid Bergman?

But we remember a handbag.

But we remember

a bus in the desert.

But we remember

a glass of milk, a windmill,

a hairbrush.

But we remember a row of bottles,

a pair of glasses,

a musical score,

a key chain.

Because with them and through them, Alfred Hitchcock

succeeded where Alexander, Caesar, Hitler and Napoleon failed:

In taking control of the universe.

Maybe 10,000 people

haven't forgot C�zanne's apple,

but a billion remember the lighter in Strangers on a Train.

Hitchcock, the only accursed poet

to meet with success.

Our century's greatest creator of forms.

Forms tell us what is at the bottom of things.

What is art,

if not the way forms become style?

What is style...

What is style, if not man?

So it is a bra-less blonde

tailed by a detective scared of heights

who proves that it's all cinema, that is,

child's play.

In the beginning

it felt very little

and thought it knew everything.

Later,

filled solely with doubt, pain,

dread before the mystery of life,

it all began floating.

And now that it feels everything

it believes it knows nothing.

And yet

from insouciance

to worry,

from the loving recording of beginnings

to the hesitant but essential form of the end,

the same central force governs

cinema.

We follow it from within,

from form to form

with the prowling shadow and beam,

illuminating one thing, hiding another.

Making a shoulder appear,

a face,

a raised finger,

an open window,

a forehead,

a child

in a nursery.

That which plunges into light

is the echo of what the night submerges.

What the night submerges

sustains in the invisible that which plunges into light.

The thought,

the look, the word,

the action

link this forehead, this eye

this mouth,

this hand,

their size

barely noticed in the dark,

heads and bodies

bending over a birth, an agony

or a death.

Even,

and maybe especially,

when its only tool

is black and white,

even then

it works the world

like a constant drama

that daylight and darkness sculpt,

dig,

convulse,

calm

and let live and die according to its passion,

its sadness,

its desperate desire

for eternity and absolutes

which overwhelm its heart.

A headlight,

a face asleep,

shadows coming to life,

bodies leaning

over a cradle

when all light falls,

someone executed against a wall,

a muddy path by the sea,

a street corner,

a dark sky,

a ray of light on a prairie,

the empire of wind in a flying cloud.

There are only black lines crossing a blond painting

and the tragedy of space and the tragedy of life

twist the screen in their fire.

Only the cinema saw

that if everyone does his job,

the masses organize themselves alone

according to an irreproachable balance.

Light falls where it must, neglecting what it must

because it is useful that it illuminate part of the scene,

shadows ruling elsewhere.

It is alone to have been constantly present

in everything it looked at.

Alone to have been able

to mix mud with the gleam of eyes,

to introduce fire into ashes,

to make shine, in a shroud,

a rose,

or a light blue as fresh as a rose.

Its humanity

is truly formidable.

Fatal like moaning,

devastating like love,

dramatic like exchange, indifferent

and continuous

between all that is born

and all that dies.

Following our march toward death on the trace of its blood,

cinema does not cry,

does not cry over us.

It does not comfort us

because it is with us, because it is us.

It is there when the cradle is lit.

It is there

when the girl appears to us,

leaning out the window with her unknowing eyes

and a pearl between her breasts.

There when we've undressed her,

when her hard chest trembles to our throbbing fever.

It is there

when the woman opens her knees to us

with the same maternal emotion

as when she opens her arms to the child.

It is there when the fruit falls from her.

How many times in her life!

It is there, afterwards,

when she is old,

when her face is wrinkled

when her rough hands tell us,

that she does not resent life for having hurt her.

It is there when we are old,

when we stare

at the approaching night.

And it is there

when we die

and our cadaver offers the shroud to our children's arms.

There.

I am yours.