Original subtitles

Man...

Man has...

in his poor heart

places that do not yet exist

and into which pain enters

in order for them to exist.

I understand better

why, earlier, I had such a hard time beginning.

Now I know

what voice I wish had come before me,

had carried me, had invited me to speak

and had lodged itself in my own discourse.

I know what was so intimidating about beginning to speak,

because it is here where I heard him,

and he is no longer here to hear me.

While divining nature's loneliest moment,

let my whole and unique melody

rise

in the evening, and increase,

and do all it can,

and say the thing that the thing is,

and fall

and rise again

and cause pain.

Oh, solo of sobs,

and rise

and fall according to its required task.

I sometimes hear men speak

of the pleasure they took

with this woman or that.

Not necessarily vulgar,

though sometimes very precise.

But I feel like telling them:

"Come now. It was something else."

Something else. No words for it.

No sentence can embody it.

Or rather, if I start a sentence

thinking I have on the tip of my tongue

the picture, the moment, the color, the fallen dress,

that glow on the woman's body,

her shoulder strap sliding down,

that feeling of fear

mixed with haste, her arms,

her wandering mind...

my memory becomes disordered.

I don't forget, but things slip away.

If I force my memory,

I suddenly understand what happens to me.

I imagine.

Yes. I no longer remember. I imagine.

It is morning now, I think.

You're deaf.

Rachel.

Cruel.

But I have what I wanted.

You have nothing at all.

To love, you need a body.

That is not exact.

This is exact:

In 1932, the Dutchman

Jan Ort was studying

the stars moving away from the Milky Way.

Soon, as predicted,

gravity pulls them back.

Measuring the positions

and speed of these repatriated stars,

Ort was able to calculate

the mass of our galaxy.

Imagine his surprise on discovering

that visible matter represented only fifty percent

of the mass necessary to exert such gravitational force.

Where did the other half of the universe go?

Phantom matter was born.

Omnipresent,

but invisible.

The time when, in the countryside,

we were alert to dogs barking in the deep night.

When many-colored parachutes bearing weapons and cigarettes

fell from the sky to clearings amid the glow of firelight.

A time of basements

and the desperate cries

of torture victims with children's voices.

The struggle of the shadows had begun.

Enter, here, Jean Moulin,

with his terrible cortege

of those who died in basements

without having talked, like you,

and perhaps even worse,

after having talked.

In a way, fear is the daughter of God

redeemed on Good Friday night.

She is no pretty sight,

sometimes mocked, sometimes cursed, repudiated by all.

But don't be mistaken. She's at every deathbed,

She intervenes on man's behalf.

That night

getting up at night

every night

faint light in the room

from where

mystery

nil from the window

no

almost nil

that doesn't exist

nil

Blank like a negative named Ilford, Kodak or Fuji.

All of a piece, needing to be blown upon

so it will stretch, depending on who blows:

Hitchcock, Langlois, Vigo. Dissolve.

Editing ideas together, no points of suspension.

This is no crime novel or C�line.

Leave him to literature. He deserved to suffer and re-enlist

book after book in the regiments of language.

With cinema, it is something else.

It is life.

Nothing new, but hard to talk about.

Tough enough to live and die it,

but to talk about it... There are books.

But cinema isn't books.

Just music and painting,

which can be lived but not really talked about.

So cinema, you see now,

what to say about it. Life is the subject.

Cinemascope and color its attributes, if we are broad-minded.

Life,

a beginning of life, like Euclid's parallel lines,

is a beginning of geometry.

There have been other lives, will be others,

a broken blossom, hunted lions,

the silence of a hotel in Sweden.

Others' lives are unsettling.

The life itself I'd like to blow out of proportion

to make it admired or reduced to its basic elements

for students and Earth dwellers in general

and spectators in particular -

The life itself I'd like to hold prisoner

by means of pans of nature,

fixed shots of death,

long and short takes, loud and soft sounds,

free and enslaved actors and actresses -

but life thrashes about worse than Nanouk's fish,

slips away like Monica's memories in the red desert around Milan.

All is eclipsed, and it so happens that

the only big problem in cinema

is where and why to start a shot

and where and why to end it.

When we know how many deaths,

not symbolic or simulated,

but real ones, one life costs,

we no longer care about meaning.

Only a life filled

to the bursting point gives meaning to life,

irreducible to any meaning.

By living the combination of all the body's forces,

life stops questioning itself

and accepts itself as pure answer.

Event

that no longer needs to proclaim its assent to itself

to become the greatest of assents.

Nothing can comprehend this relation of the body to the world.

The degree zero of the other is posited

when we utter the word "man".

There must be a Russian people in swaddling clothes.

These political slaves must have moral freedom.

These beasts in the hell of drunkenness

and massacres

must be doted with a recklessness unequalled in Europe.

These people, capable of anything

like cruel children and asleep in terrible impotence,

must be the only people in Europe

who still have a god.

Shut up, Cassandra!

So long as we're asleep!

For which curtain-rise do we rid ourselves of our dreams?

How do we dare, on waking,

bring them to light?

Oh, in the light,

each of us carries about us invisible dreams.

Music carries us all to that line of light

gleaming under the curtain

when the orchestra tunes its violins.

The dance begins.

Our hands slide and separate.

We lose ourselves in one another's gaze.

Bodies brushing delicately against one another,

trying not to tear one another from its dream,

to send him back into the dark,

to rid the night of the night which is not day.

As we loved each other.

It's what I like in cinema.

A saturation of magnificent signs

bathing in the light of their absence of explanation.

It cannot be spoken.

It can be written. Flaubert, no Pushkin.

Flaubert, Dostoevski. It can be written.

It can be composed. Gershwin. Mozart.

It can be painted. C�zanne. Vermeer.

It can be filmed. Antonioni. Vigo.

Miss!

What is it?

I took the shortcut.

- I have a secret. - Another one? What?

Turn off the headlights.

Yes, but history. What is it?

Deep down.

Malraux.

We all felt that the stakes were more obscure than political.

Braudel.

Measure the mass of people who deny their misery,

who want to be themselves,

to live their lives.

As if our lives were our own.

At our disposal.

That bastard Cioran.

Nothing we know remains without atonement.

We pay dearly, sooner or later,

the courage of our thoughts,

the indiscretions of our mind.

And young P�guy.

Ah, history...

Somber loyalty to fallen things.

I told you.

Witness means

martyr.

What's she doing here?

You see, P�guy,

she says,

today they appeal to the judgement of history.

The modern appeal.

The modern judgement.

Poor friends,

they think I'm the judge.

I'm just the registration clerk.

An apparatus has been erected, she says.

We live in a system in which everything can be done

except the history of what is done.

Everything can be completed

except the history of this completion.

You see, P�guy, she says,

night is always falling.

An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic,

but because the association of ideas

is distant.

Distant and just.

I was given a last name:

History.

And a first name: Clio.

What if it didn't concern a text,

but a movement? An idea,

reality, life.

Or simply, if it still concerned a text,

but wasn't about determining texts on a word,

but on an idea, or an intention,

or a movement,

or a usage

or a relationship.

When philosophy paints its grayness in grisaille,

a manifestation of life finishes growing old.

We cannot rejuvenate it with gray on gray,

only understand it.

Marguerite.

Germaine.

Happy unbirthday, Margarete.

Milena.

Right?

I didn't think about death.

There is no death.

Nothing is as handy

as a text.

Nothing as handy as a word in a text.

We had nothing but book

to put into book.

What would it be, when, into a book, into book,

one must put reality?

And with a turn of the screw,

put reality into reality.

What is always happening, my friend?

Night falls.

Vacations come to an end.

I need a day to tell the history of a second.

I need a year to tell the history

of a minute.

I need a life

to tell the history of an hour.

I need an eternity

to tell the history of a day.

We can do everything

except the history

of what we are doing.

It is my privilege to film

and live in France

as an artist.

Nothing like a country that every day walks further down

the path of its own inexorable decline.

Nothing better than

an ever more provincial country

run by a rotating crew of the same incompetents,

dishonest, corrupted by their support

of a permanently and totally corrupt regime.

What is better than living in a land

where justice is a bazaar?

What artist wouldn't dream of a such nation,

the world's fourth economic power, they say.

The refutation sleeps on our doorstep,

waiting for a coin to stifle the pangs

of the hungry.

I am the fugitive enemy of our times.

The totalitarianism of the present as applied mechanically

every day more oppressive on a planetary scale.

This faceless tyranny that effaces all faces

for the systematic organization of the unified time of the moment.

This global, abstract tyranny

which I try to oppose from my fleeting point of view.

Because I try,

because I try in my compositions

to show an ear that listens to time.

And try to make it heard

and to surge into the future.

Death already included in my time,

I cannot be the enemy of our times

because its task is to abolish time.

I do not see in this state

that a life is worth living.

As one century slowly dissolves into the next,

some individuals metabolize

the former means of survival into new ones.

These latter we call art.

The only thing that survives

from one epoch

is the art from it created.

No activity can become an art

until its proper epoch has ended.

Then,

this art will disappear.

Thus, the art of the 19th century

- cinema -

made the 20th century exist, which barely existed.

Men and women believed

in prophets. Now we believe in statesmen.

Nothing is further

from the image of the beloved than that of state.

Reason of state opposes sovereign value of love.

The state has no power, or has lost it,

to embrace before us the totality of the world.

This totality of the universe

given at the same time

outside, in the loved one as object

inside, in the lover as subject.

Cinema feared nothing of others or of itself.

It wasn't sheltered from time. It was the shelter of time.

Yes, image is happiness.

But beside it dwells nothingness.

The power of the image is expressed only by invoking nothingness.

It is perhaps worth adding:

The image, able to negate nothingness,

is also the gaze of nothingness on us.

The image is light.

Nothingness, immensely heavy.

The image gleams.

Nothingness is that thickness where all is veiled.

The most fleeting moments

possess an illustrious past.

If a man

passed through paradise in his dreams

and received a flower as proof of passage,

and on waking,

found this flower in his hand...

What is there to say?

I was that man.

Subtitles: Andrew Litvack

Subtitling: Vdm