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"The remoteness of countries somehow
balances their proximity in time."
Racine - Second Preface from Bajazet.
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00:00:20,769 --> 00:00:26,008
The first image he told me about
was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.
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00:00:33,687 --> 00:00:35,069
He said that for him it was the image of happiness
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00:00:35,076 --> 00:00:40,268
and also that he had tried several times to link it
to other images, but it never worked.
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00:00:40,310 --> 00:00:45,840
He wrote me: one day I'll have to put
it all alone at the beginning of a film
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00:00:45,860 --> 00:00:47,435
with a long piece of black leader;
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00:00:47,450 --> 00:00:51,430
if they don't see happiness in the picture,
at least they'll see the black.
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00:01:24,407 --> 00:01:27,343
He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido,
the Northern Island.
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00:01:28,440 --> 00:01:30,909
Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane,
others take the ferry:
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00:01:31,459 --> 00:01:34,968
waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep.
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00:01:34,969 --> 00:01:37,765
Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war:
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00:01:37,766 --> 00:01:43,597
night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments
of war enshrined in everyday life.
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00:02:04,080 --> 00:02:05,684
He liked the fragility of those moments
suspended in time.
14
00:02:06,175 --> 00:02:09,416
Those memories whose only function it being
to leave behind nothing but memories.
15
00:02:09,837 --> 00:02:14,607
He wrote: I've been round the world several times
and now only banality still interests me.
16
00:02:14,608 --> 00:02:18,444
On this trip I've tracked it with
the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.
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00:02:21,504 --> 00:02:23,015
At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.
18
00:02:47,410 --> 00:02:48,498
He used to write me from Africa.
19
00:02:49,430 --> 00:02:53,001
He contrasted African time to European time,
and also to Asian time.
20
00:02:53,002 --> 00:02:57,123
He said that in the 19th century mankind
had come to terms with space,
21
00:02:57,124 --> 00:02:59,769
and that the great question of the 20th was
the coexistence of different concepts of time.
22
00:02:59,770 --> 00:03:04,043
By the way, did you know that there are emus
in the �le de France?
23
00:03:14,771 --> 00:03:18,374
He wrote me that in the Bijag�s Islands
it's the young girls who choose their fianc�es.
24
00:03:20,247 --> 00:03:23,199
He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo
there is a temple consecrated to cats.
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00:03:44,119 --> 00:03:47,114
I wish I could convey to you the simplicity
the lack of affectation
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00:03:47,410 --> 00:03:52,559
of this couple who had come to place
an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery
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so their cat Tora would be protected.
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00:03:55,787 --> 00:03:58,729
No she wasn't dead, only run away.
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00:03:58,740 --> 00:04:02,171
But on the day of her death no one
would know how to pray for her,
30
00:04:02,210 --> 00:04:05,332
how to intercede with death so that
he would call her by her right name.
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00:04:05,360 --> 00:04:10,176
So they had to come there,
both of them, under the rain,
32
00:04:10,360 --> 00:04:14,653
to perform the rite that would repair
the web of time where it had been broken.
33
00:04:27,512 --> 00:04:31,695
He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to
understand the function of remembering,
34
00:04:31,696 --> 00:04:34,964
which is not the opposite of forgetting,
but rather its lining.
35
00:04:34,965 --> 00:04:39,275
We do not remember, we rewrite memory
much as history is rewritten.
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00:04:40,410 --> 00:04:43,002
How can one remember thirst?
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00:04:59,092 --> 00:05:01,172
He didn't like to dwell on poverty,
38
00:05:01,173 --> 00:05:05,813
but in everything he wanted to show
there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model.
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00:05:05,814 --> 00:05:10,630
A world full of bums, of lumpens,
of outcasts, of Koreans.
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00:05:10,631 --> 00:05:15,663
Too broke to afford drugs,
they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk.
41
00:05:15,664 --> 00:05:21,232
This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes
from the glories of the center city,
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00:05:21,233 --> 00:05:24,233
a character took his revenge on society
by directing traffic at the crossroads.
43
00:05:24,233 --> 00:05:29,759
Luxury for them would be one of those large bottles of sake
that are poured over tombs on the day of the dead.
44
00:05:58,918 --> 00:06:00,955
I paid for a round in a bar in Namidabashi.
45
00:06:00,956 --> 00:06:04,292
It's the kind of place that allows people
to stare at each other with equality;
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00:06:04,371 --> 00:06:08,577
the threshold below which every man is
as good as any otherand knows it.
47
00:06:22,876 --> 00:06:25,994
He told me about the Jetty on Fogo,
in the Cape Verde islands.
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00:06:25,995 --> 00:06:33,084
How long have they been there waiting for the boat,
patient as pebbles but ready to jump?
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00:06:33,085 --> 00:06:36,988
They are a people of wanderers,
of navigators, of world travelers.
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00:06:36,989 --> 00:06:43,067
They fashioned themselves through cross-breeding here on these rocks
that the Portuguese used as a marshaling yard for their colonies.
51
00:06:43,068 --> 00:06:47,182
A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people.
52
00:06:47,183 --> 00:06:55,569
Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people
as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?
53
00:07:08,352 --> 00:07:13,601
He used to write to me: the Sahel is not only
what is shown of it when it is too late
54
00:07:13,602 --> 00:07:17,629
it's a land that drought seeps into like water into a leaking boat.
55
00:07:17,630 --> 00:07:22,988
The animals resurrected for the time of a carnival
in Bissau will be petrified again,
56
00:07:22,989 --> 00:07:24,989
as soon as a new attack
has changed the savannah into a desert.
57
00:07:24,989 --> 00:07:31,785
This is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten,
with one exception: UN Japan.
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00:07:33,910 --> 00:07:39,798
My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts;
they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.
59
00:09:05,690 --> 00:09:06,933
He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon,
60
00:09:06,934 --> 00:09:12,098
a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning
of the 11th century, in the Heian period.
61
00:09:15,940 --> 00:09:17,028
Do we ever know where history is really made?
62
00:09:17,463 --> 00:09:20,856
Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies
to fight one another.
63
00:09:20,857 --> 00:09:24,375
Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents;
64
00:09:24,376 --> 00:09:27,944
the emperor's court had become nothing more
than a place of intrigues and intellectual games.
65
00:09:28,803 --> 00:09:34,372
But this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility
much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians,
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00:09:36,102 --> 00:09:42,337
by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort
from the contemplation of the tiniest things.
67
00:09:44,280 --> 00:09:53,479
Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,'
'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.'
68
00:09:53,480 --> 00:09:57,306
One day she got the idea of drawing up a list
of 'things that quicken the heart.'
69
00:09:57,307 --> 00:10:00,107
Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming;
70
00:10:00,108 --> 00:10:04,423
I bow to the economic miracle,
but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.
71
00:13:32,419 --> 00:13:37,894
He wrote me: coming back through the Chiba coast
I thought of Shonagon's list,
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00:13:37,895 --> 00:13:41,895
of all those signs one has only to name
to quicken the heart, just name.
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00:13:41,895 --> 00:13:47,694
To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant,
and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid.
74
00:13:47,695 --> 00:13:52,934
Here to place adjectives would be so rude
as leaving price tags on purchases.
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00:13:52,935 --> 00:13:55,863
Japanese poetry never modifies.
76
00:13:55,864 --> 00:14:03,750
There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow,
hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all.
77
00:14:03,751 --> 00:14:07,908
Newspapers have been filled recently
with the story of a man from Nagoya.
78
00:14:07,909 --> 00:14:13,286
The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work
Japanese stylelike a madman.
79
00:14:13,287 --> 00:14:16,814
It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics.
80
00:14:16,910 --> 00:14:20,581
And then in the month of May he killed himself.
81
00:14:20,582 --> 00:14:24,112
They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'
82
00:15:00,650 --> 00:15:02,414
He described me his reunion with Tokyo:
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00:15:04,527 --> 00:15:08,298
like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket
immediately starts to inspect familiar places.
84
00:15:08,299 --> 00:15:11,967
He ran off to see if everything was where it should be:
85
00:15:11,968 --> 00:15:17,892
the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox
at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store,
86
00:15:17,893 --> 00:15:19,893
which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers.
87
00:15:19,893 --> 00:15:25,931
He was told that it was now little girls who made and unmade stars;
the producers shuddered before them.
88
00:15:25,932 --> 00:15:30,027
He was told that a disfigured woman
took off her mask in front of passers-by
89
00:15:30,028 --> 00:15:33,028
and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful.
90
00:15:33,028 --> 00:15:34,270
Everything interested him.
91
00:15:34,271 --> 00:15:39,847
He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant
or about the results of the Daily Double
92
00:15:39,848 --> 00:15:42,848
asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done
in the last sumo tournament.
93
00:15:42,848 --> 00:15:46,712
He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, ...
94
00:15:46,713 --> 00:15:51,713
of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears regularly
on television to teach goodness to children.
95
00:15:51,713 --> 00:15:57,152
These simple joys he had never felt: of returning to
a country, a house, a family home.
96
00:15:57,153 --> 00:15:59,808
But twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.
97
00:17:07,811 --> 00:17:13,478
He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains,
tied together with electric wire she shows her veins.
98
00:17:13,479 --> 00:17:19,377
They say that television makes her people illiterate;
as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets.
99
00:17:19,378 --> 00:17:24,694
Perhaps they read only in the street,
or perhaps they just pretend to readthese yellow men.
100
00:17:24,695 --> 00:17:28,633
I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku.
101
00:17:28,634 --> 00:17:32,202
The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope
102
00:17:32,203 --> 00:17:36,465
ten centuries before the movies compensates a little
for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines,
103
00:17:36,466 --> 00:17:39,466
victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship.
104
00:17:39,466 --> 00:17:42,767
Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls.
105
00:17:42,768 --> 00:17:46,058
The entire city is a comic strip.
106
00:17:54,059 --> 00:17:57,059
It's Planet Manga.
107
00:17:57,905 --> 00:18:01,745
How can one fail to recognize the statuary
that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central?
108
00:18:01,746 --> 00:18:08,652
And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down
on the comic book readers,
109
00:18:08,653 --> 00:18:10,653
pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.
110
00:18:18,634 --> 00:18:20,953
At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages,
111
00:18:20,954 --> 00:18:25,936
with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks,
with its stations and temples.
112
00:18:25,937 --> 00:18:32,262
Each district of Tokyo once again becomes
a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.
113
00:18:45,360 --> 00:18:50,279
The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that Indian flute
whose sound can only be heard by whomever is playing it.
114
00:18:50,280 --> 00:18:54,833
He might have cried out if it was in a Godard film or a Shakespeare play,
"Where should this music be?"
115
00:18:58,034 --> 00:19:04,347
Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori
where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of 'action cooking.'
116
00:19:10,681 --> 00:19:14,849
He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada's gestures
and his way of mixing the ingredients
117
00:19:14,850 --> 00:19:20,608
one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts
common to painting, philosophy, and karate.
118
00:19:20,609 --> 00:19:27,601
He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed
in his humble way the essence of style,
119
00:19:27,602 --> 00:19:34,670
and consequently that it was up to him to use his invisible brush
to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words 'the end.'
120
00:19:42,197 --> 00:19:44,430
I've spent the day in front of my TV set
that memory box.
121
00:19:44,431 --> 00:19:47,395
I was in Nara with the sacred deers.
122
00:19:47,396 --> 00:19:51,085
I was taking a picture without knowing
that in the 15th century Basho had written:
123
00:19:51,086 --> 00:19:55,678
"The willow sees the heron's image... upside down."
124
00:20:06,512 --> 00:20:08,467
The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye,
125
00:20:08,468 --> 00:20:13,819
used to Western atrocities in this field;
not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure.
126
00:20:13,820 --> 00:20:18,174
For one slightly hallucinatory moment
I had the impression that I spoke Japanese,
127
00:20:18,175 --> 00:20:23,152
but it was a cultural program on NHK
about G�rard de Nerval.
128
00:20:51,768 --> 00:20:53,126
8:40, Cambodia.
129
00:20:53,127 --> 00:20:57,030
From Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge:
coincidence, or the sense of history?
130
00:20:58,135 --> 00:21:02,931
In Apocalypse Now, Brando said a few definitive
and incommunicable sentences:
131
00:21:02,932 --> 00:21:08,672
"Horror has a face and a name...
you must make a friend of horror."
132
00:21:16,050 --> 00:21:20,120
To cast out the horror that has a name and a face
you must give it another name and another face.
133
00:21:20,121 --> 00:21:23,640
Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty
of certain corpses.
134
00:21:23,641 --> 00:21:26,966
Sometimes one is stunned by so much cruelty.
135
00:21:26,967 --> 00:21:33,158
One seeks its sources in the Asian peoples long familiarity with suffering,
that requires that even pain be ornate.
136
00:21:33,159 --> 00:21:38,902
And then comes the reward:
the monsters are laid out, Natsume Masako arises;
137
00:21:38,903 --> 00:21:42,137
absolute beauty also has a name and a face.
138
00:21:53,579 --> 00:21:58,228
But the more you watch Japanese television...
the more you feel it's watching you.
139
00:22:45,290 --> 00:22:49,470
Even television newscast bears witness to the fact
that the magical function of the eye is at the center of all things.
140
00:22:49,471 --> 00:22:55,802
It's election time:
the winning candidates black out the empty eye of Daruma
141
00:22:55,803 --> 00:23:01,765
the spirit of luckwhile losing candidates
sad but dignifiedcarry off their one-eyed Daruma.
142
00:23:04,959 --> 00:23:06,891
The images most difficult to figure out are those of Europe.
143
00:23:06,892 --> 00:23:10,573
I watched the pictures of a film
whose soundtrack will be added later.
144
00:23:10,574 --> 00:23:13,228
It took me six months for Poland.
145
00:23:17,506 --> 00:23:19,702
Meanwhile, I have no difficulty with local earthquakes.
146
00:23:20,111 --> 00:23:23,837
But I must say that last night's quake
helped me greatly to grasp a problem.
147
00:23:25,936 --> 00:23:30,848
Poetry is born of insecurity:
wandering Jews, quaking Japanese;
148
00:23:33,741 --> 00:23:37,032
by living on a rug that jesting nature
is ever ready to pull out from under them
149
00:23:37,033 --> 00:23:41,178
they've got into the habit of moving
about in a world of appearances: fragile, fleeting, revocable,
150
00:23:41,179 --> 00:23:46,699
of trains that fly from planet to planet,
of samurai fighting in an immutable past.
151
00:23:46,700 --> 00:23:49,508
That's called 'the impermanence of things.'
152
00:24:18,324 --> 00:24:19,322
I did it all.
153
00:24:19,323 --> 00:24:21,805
All the way to the evening shows for adultsso called.
154
00:24:21,806 --> 00:24:25,335
The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips,
but it's a coded hypocrisy.
155
00:24:25,336 --> 00:24:29,363
Censorship is not the mutilation of the show,
it is the show.
156
00:24:29,364 --> 00:24:31,283
The code is the message.
157
00:24:31,284 --> 00:24:33,578
It points to the absolute by hiding it.
158
00:24:33,579 --> 00:24:35,277
That's what religions have always done.
159
00:24:49,851 --> 00:24:54,688
That year, a new face appeared among the great ones
that blazon the streets of Tokyo: the Pope's.
160
00:24:54,689 --> 00:24:59,616
Treasures that had never left the Vatican were shown
on the seventh floor of the Sogo department store.
161
00:25:01,025 --> 00:25:02,086
He wrote me:
162
00:25:02,087 --> 00:25:06,188
curiosity of course, and the glimmer
of industrial espionage in the eye
163
00:25:06,189 --> 00:25:12,055
I imagine them bringing out within two years time a more efficient
and less expensive version of Catholicism
164
00:25:13,056 --> 00:25:17,364
but there's also the fascination associated with the sacred,
even when it's someone else's.
165
00:25:57,979 --> 00:26:01,001
So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs
166
00:26:01,002 --> 00:26:04,898
such as can be seen at Josen-kai on the island of Hokkaido?
167
00:26:06,709 --> 00:26:09,633
At first one smiles at this place which combines a museum,
a chapel, and a sex shop.
168
00:26:09,769 --> 00:26:14,502
As always in Japan, one admires the fact that
the walls between the realms are so thin
169
00:26:14,503 --> 00:26:18,236
that one can in the same breath contemplate a statue,
buy an inflatable doll,
170
00:26:18,237 --> 00:26:23,014
and give the goddess of fertility the small offering
that always accompanies her displays.
171
00:26:23,015 --> 00:26:27,180
Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems
of the television incomprehensible,
172
00:26:27,181 --> 00:26:31,716
if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible
only on condition of being severed from a body.
173
00:26:44,790 --> 00:26:46,518
One would like to believe in a world before the fall:
174
00:26:46,519 --> 00:26:51,035
inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism
whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation.
175
00:26:51,036 --> 00:26:54,622
Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain,
176
00:26:54,623 --> 00:26:59,850
the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture,
share in the same cosmic innocence.
177
00:27:01,059 --> 00:27:05,889
The second part of the museumwith its couples of stuffed animals
would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it.
178
00:27:05,890 --> 00:27:07,409
Not so sure...
179
00:27:07,410 --> 00:27:11,165
animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship,
180
00:27:11,166 --> 00:27:14,166
but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation.
181
00:27:14,166 --> 00:27:18,725
And even without original sin
this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost.
182
00:27:21,566 --> 00:27:27,177
In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai
I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society,
183
00:27:27,178 --> 00:27:29,250
the rift that separates men from women.
184
00:27:29,251 --> 00:27:32,753
In life it seems to show itself in two ways only:
185
00:27:32,754 --> 00:27:36,753
violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy
resembling Sei Shonagon's
186
00:27:36,754 --> 00:27:41,218
which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word.
187
00:27:41,219 --> 00:27:45,539
So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts
against which the fathers of the church invade
188
00:27:45,540 --> 00:27:48,398
becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things,
189
00:27:48,399 --> 00:27:53,587
to a melancholy whose color I can give you
by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi:
190
00:27:55,588 --> 00:27:58,898
"Who said that time heals all wounds?
191
00:27:58,899 --> 00:28:03,862
It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds.
192
00:28:03,863 --> 00:28:07,305
With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits.
193
00:28:07,306 --> 00:28:11,076
With time, the desired body will soon disappear,
194
00:28:11,077 --> 00:28:14,815
and if the desiring body has already ceased
to exist for the other,
195
00:28:14,816 --> 00:28:17,815
then what remains is a wound... disembodied."
196
00:28:25,901 --> 00:28:30,852
He wrote me that the Japanese secret
what L�vi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things
197
00:28:30,853 --> 00:28:35,818
implied the faculty of communion with things,
of entering into them, of being them for a moment.
198
00:28:35,819 --> 00:28:41,211
It was normal that in their turn they should be like us:
perishable and immortal.
199
00:28:48,756 --> 00:28:49,678
He wrote me:
200
00:28:49,679 --> 00:28:53,345
animism is a familiar notion in Africa,
it is less often applied in Japan.
201
00:28:53,346 --> 00:28:59,710
What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to
which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart?
202
00:28:59,711 --> 00:29:04,445
When they build a factory or a skyscraper,
they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land.
203
00:29:04,446 --> 00:29:09,951
There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses,
and even for rusty needles.
204
00:29:09,952 --> 00:29:14,033
There's one on the 25th of September
for the repose of the soul of broken dolls.
205
00:29:14,034 --> 00:29:23,768
The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon
the goddess of compassionand are burned in public.
206
00:29:59,172 --> 00:30:00,443
I look to the participants.
207
00:30:00,444 --> 00:30:04,932
I think the people who saw off the kamikaze pilots
had the same look on their faces.
208
00:30:37,307 --> 00:30:41,490
He wrote me that the pictures of Guinea-Bissau
ought to be accompanied by music from the Cape Verde islands.
209
00:30:41,491 --> 00:30:45,217
That would be our contribution to the unity
dreamed of by Amilcar Cabral.
210
00:30:49,695 --> 00:30:53,281
Why should so small a countryand one so poor
interest the world?
211
00:30:53,282 --> 00:30:57,472
They did what they could, they freed themselves,
they chased out the Portuguese.
212
00:30:57,473 --> 00:31:01,536
They traumatized the Portuguese army to such an extent
that it gave rise to a movement that overthrew the dictatorship,
213
00:31:01,537 --> 00:31:04,000
and led one for a moment to believe in a new revolution in Europe.
214
00:31:04,001 --> 00:31:05,333
Who remembers all that?
215
00:31:05,334 --> 00:31:08,099
History throws its empty bottles out the window.
216
00:31:13,063 --> 00:31:15,114
This morning I was on the dock at Pidjiguity,
217
00:31:15,115 --> 00:31:18,880
where everything began in 1959,
when the first victims of the struggle were killed.
218
00:31:18,881 --> 00:31:23,530
It may be as difficult to recognize Africa in this leaden fog
219
00:31:23,531 --> 00:31:27,934
as it is to recognize struggle in the rather dull activity
of tropical longshoremen.
220
00:31:27,935 --> 00:31:31,687
Rumor has it that every third world leader
coined the same phrase the morning after independence:
221
00:31:31,688 --> 00:31:33,729
"Now the real problems start."
222
00:31:34,056 --> 00:31:37,443
Cabral never got a chance to say it:
he was assassinated first.
223
00:31:37,444 --> 00:31:40,623
But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on.
224
00:31:40,624 --> 00:31:44,117
Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism:
225
00:31:44,118 --> 00:31:50,989
to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion,
temptations of power and privilege.
226
00:31:50,990 --> 00:31:54,820
Ah well... after all, history only tastes bitter
to those who expected it to be sugar coated.
227
00:32:13,022 --> 00:32:17,179
My personal problem is more specific:
how to film the ladies of Bissau?
228
00:32:17,180 --> 00:32:20,970
Apparently, the magical function of the eye
was working against me there.
229
00:32:21,857 --> 00:32:26,151
It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde
that I could stare at them again with equality.
230
00:32:26,152 --> 00:32:29,152
Les "No s� qu�" des figures
c�est proche du ritual de la seduction.
231
00:32:29,238 --> 00:32:31,402
I see her,
232
00:32:31,574 --> 00:32:33,710
she saw me,
233
00:32:34,084 --> 00:32:36,312
she knows that I see her,
234
00:32:37,445 --> 00:32:44,524
she drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is still possible to act
as though it was not addressed to me,
235
00:32:44,582 --> 00:32:46,166
and at the end the real glance,
236
00:32:46,167 --> 00:32:47,521
straightforward,
237
00:32:47,522 --> 00:32:51,706
that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second,
the length of a film frame.
238
00:32:57,763 --> 00:33:00,583
All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility.
239
00:33:00,584 --> 00:33:04,863
And men's task has always been to make them
realize it as late as possible.
240
00:33:04,864 --> 00:33:08,942
African men are just as good at this task as others.
241
00:33:08,943 --> 00:33:14,221
But after a close look at African women,
I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men.
242
00:35:02,127 --> 00:35:03,922
He told me the story of the dog Hachiko.
243
00:35:03,923 --> 00:35:06,830
A dog waited every day for his master at the station.
244
00:35:06,831 --> 00:35:12,304
The master died, and the dog didn't know it,
and he continued to wait all his life.
245
00:35:12,305 --> 00:35:14,671
People were moved and brought him food.
246
00:35:14,672 --> 00:35:19,945
After his death a statue was erected in his honor,
in front of which sushi and rice cakes are still placed
247
00:35:19,946 --> 00:35:22,009
so that the faithful soul of Hachiko will never go hungry.
248
00:35:28,693 --> 00:35:31,586
Tokyo is full of these tiny legends, and of mediating animals.
249
00:35:31,587 --> 00:35:38,179
The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard on the frontiers of what was once
the empire of Mr. Okadaa great collector of French paintings,
250
00:35:38,180 --> 00:35:42,189
the man who hired the Ch�teau of Versailles to celebrate
the hundredth anniversary of his department stores.
251
00:35:43,849 --> 00:35:49,199
In the computer section I've seen young Japanese
exercising their brain muscles like the young Athenians at the Palaistra.
252
00:35:51,648 --> 00:35:52,949
They have a war to win.
253
00:35:52,950 --> 00:35:58,972
The history books of the future will perhaps place the battle of integrated circuits
at the same level as Salamis and Agincourt,
254
00:36:02,682 --> 00:36:05,662
but willing to honor the unfortunate adversary by leaving other fields to him:
255
00:36:05,946 --> 00:36:09,617
men's fashions this season are placed under the sign of John Kennedy.
256
00:36:47,618 --> 00:36:51,539
Like an old votive turtle stationed in the corner of a field,
every day he saw Mr. Akao
257
00:36:51,540 --> 00:36:54,013
the president of the Japanese Patriotic Party
258
00:36:54,014 --> 00:36:57,752
trumpeting from the heights of his rolling balcony
against the international communist plot.
259
00:37:00,027 --> 00:37:00,993
He wrote me:
260
00:37:00,994 --> 00:37:06,845
the automobiles of the extreme right with their flags and megaphones
are part of Tokyo's landscape
261
00:37:06,846 --> 00:37:09,117
Mr. Akao is their focal point.
262
00:37:09,118 --> 00:37:11,974
I think he'll have his statue like the dog Hachiko,
263
00:37:11,975 --> 00:37:15,975
at this crossroads from which he departs
only to go and prophesy on the battlefields.
264
00:37:22,618 --> 00:37:24,319
He was at Narita in the sixties.
265
00:37:24,320 --> 00:37:29,115
Peasants fighting against the building of an airport on their land,
266
00:37:29,116 --> 00:37:32,472
and Mr. Akao denouncing the hand of Moscow
behind everything that moved.
267
00:37:35,001 --> 00:37:36,981
Yurakucho is the political space of Tokyo.
268
00:37:36,982 --> 00:37:40,522
Once upon a time I saw bonzes pray for peace in Vietnam there.
269
00:37:40,523 --> 00:37:46,663
Today young right-wing activists protest against the annexation
of the Northern Islands by the Russians.
270
00:37:46,664 --> 00:37:52,045
Sometimes they are answered that the commercial relations of Japan
with the abominable occupier of the North
271
00:37:52,046 --> 00:37:56,662
are a thousand times better than with the American ally
who is always whining about economic aggression.
272
00:37:56,663 --> 00:37:58,515
Ah, nothing is simple.
273
00:38:04,869 --> 00:38:06,903
On the other sidewalk the Left has the floor.
274
00:38:06,904 --> 00:38:13,455
The Korean Catholic opposition leader Kim Dae Jung
kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean gestapo
275
00:38:13,456 --> 00:38:15,750
is threatened with the death sentence.
276
00:38:15,751 --> 00:38:18,319
A group has begun a hunger strike.
277
00:38:18,320 --> 00:38:21,696
Some very young militants are trying
to gather signatures in his support.
278
00:39:03,402 --> 00:39:06,155
I went back to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the struggle.
279
00:39:06,156 --> 00:39:09,375
The demo was unreal.
280
00:39:09,376 --> 00:39:11,392
I had the impression of acting in Brigadoon,
281
00:39:11,393 --> 00:39:17,178
of waking up ten years later in the midst of the same players,
with the same blue lobsters of police,
282
00:39:17,179 --> 00:39:21,752
the same helmeted adolescents, the same banners
and the same slogan:
283
00:39:21,753 --> 00:39:24,506
"Down with the airport."
284
00:39:24,507 --> 00:39:28,567
Only one thing has been added:
the airport precisely.
285
00:39:28,568 --> 00:39:33,273
But with its single runway and the barbed wire that chokes it,
it looks more besieged than victorious.
286
00:39:50,596 --> 00:39:53,768
My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution:
287
00:39:53,769 --> 00:39:57,551
if the images of the present don't change,
then change the images of the past.
288
00:39:57,552 --> 00:40:01,541
He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer:
289
00:40:01,542 --> 00:40:07,443
pictures that are less deceptive he sayswith the conviction of a fanatic
than those you see on television.
290
00:40:07,444 --> 00:40:11,196
At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are:
images,
291
00:40:11,197 --> 00:40:15,159
not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.
292
00:40:18,114 --> 00:40:22,448
Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.
293
00:41:10,581 --> 00:41:14,119
What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram,
294
00:41:14,120 --> 00:41:16,562
was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties.
295
00:41:19,011 --> 00:41:21,437
If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it.
296
00:41:21,438 --> 00:41:24,337
It was a generation that often exasperated me,
297
00:41:24,338 --> 00:41:30,505
for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle
those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth.
298
00:41:30,506 --> 00:41:35,333
But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices
no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.
299
00:41:43,658 --> 00:41:45,595
I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the struggle.
300
00:41:45,973 --> 00:41:47,947
Concretely it had failed.
301
00:41:48,176 --> 00:41:55,430
At the same time, all they had won in their understanding of the world
could have been won only through the struggle.
302
00:41:55,431 --> 00:42:01,820
As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains
in the name of revolutionary purity,
303
00:42:01,821 --> 00:42:07,792
while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly
to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives.
304
00:42:07,793 --> 00:42:14,009
Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists,
including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom.
305
00:42:14,010 --> 00:42:20,765
But it carried with it all those who said, like Ch� Guevara,
that they "trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world".
306
00:42:20,766 --> 00:42:27,708
They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity,
and their generosity has outlasted their politics.
307
00:42:27,709 --> 00:42:33,047
That's why I will never allow it to be said
that youth is wasted on the young.
308
00:42:50,796 --> 00:42:55,948
The youth who get together every weekend at Shinjuku
obviously know that they are not on a launching pad toward real life;
309
00:42:55,949 --> 00:42:59,282
but they are life, to be eaten on the spot like fresh doughnuts.
310
00:42:59,283 --> 00:43:01,708
It's a very simple secret.
311
00:43:01,709 --> 00:43:04,927
The old try to hide it, and not all the young know it.
312
00:43:04,928 --> 00:43:10,099
The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend from the thirteenth floor of a building
after having tied her hands,
313
00:43:10,100 --> 00:43:13,269
because she'd spoken badly of their class team,
hadn't discovered it yet.
314
00:43:13,270 --> 00:43:17,900
Parents who demand an increase in the number of special telephone lines
devoted to the prevention of children's suicides
315
00:43:17,901 --> 00:43:20,875
find out a little late that they have kept it all too well.
316
00:43:21,876 --> 00:43:26,381
Rock is an international language for spreading the secret.
317
00:43:26,382 --> 00:43:29,224
Another is peculiar to Tokyo.
318
00:43:37,970 --> 00:43:40,854
For the takenoko, twenty is the age of retirement.
319
00:43:40,855 --> 00:43:42,790
They are baby Martians.
320
00:43:42,791 --> 00:43:45,348
I go to see them dance every Sunday in the park at Yoyogi.
321
00:43:45,349 --> 00:43:49,916
They want people to look at them,
but they don't seem to notice that people do.
322
00:43:49,917 --> 00:43:52,046
They live in a parallel time sphere:
323
00:43:52,131 --> 00:43:55,059
a kind of invisible aquarium wall separates them
from the crowd they attract,
324
00:43:55,060 --> 00:43:58,575
and I can spend a whole afternoon contemplating the little takenoko girl who is learning
325
00:43:58,576 --> 00:44:01,843
no doubt for the first timethe customs of her planet.
326
00:44:15,693 --> 00:44:20,009
Beyond that, they wear dog tags,
they obey a whistle, the Mafia rackets them,
327
00:44:20,010 --> 00:44:24,118
and with the exception of a single group made up of girls,
it's always a boy who commands.
328
00:45:21,333 --> 00:45:24,318
One day he writes to me: description of a dream.
329
00:45:24,319 --> 00:45:28,362
More and more my dreams find their settings
in the department stores of Tokyo,
330
00:45:28,363 --> 00:45:31,826
the subterranean tunnels that extend them and run parallel to the city.
331
00:45:31,827 --> 00:45:36,392
A face appears, disappears... a trace is found, is lost.
332
00:45:36,393 --> 00:45:40,046
All the folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day when I am awake
333
00:45:40,047 --> 00:45:45,486
I realize that I continue to seek in the basement labyrinth
the presence concealed the night before.
334
00:45:45,487 --> 00:45:50,562
I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine,
or if they are part of a totality,
335
00:45:50,563 --> 00:45:55,128
of a gigantic collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection.
336
00:45:55,129 --> 00:46:04,359
It might suffice to pick up any one of the telephones
that are lying around to hear a familiar voice, or the beating of a heart,
337
00:46:04,360 --> 00:46:07,063
Sei Shonagon's for example.
338
00:46:08,542 --> 00:46:10,044
All the galleries lead to stations;
339
00:46:10,045 --> 00:46:13,391
the same companies own the stores
and the railroads that bear their name.
340
00:46:13,392 --> 00:46:16,109
Keio, Odakyuall those names of ports.
341
00:46:16,110 --> 00:46:19,730
The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams,
342
00:46:19,731 --> 00:46:22,572
makes a single film of themthe ultimate film.
343
00:46:22,573 --> 00:46:26,037
The tickets from the automatic dispenser
grant admission to the show.
344
00:51:20,098 --> 00:51:22,269
He told me about the January light on the station stairways.
345
00:51:22,270 --> 00:51:26,308
He told me that this city ought to be deciphered
like a musical score;
346
00:51:28,584 --> 00:51:32,091
one could get lost in the great orchestral masses
and the accumulation of details.
347
00:51:32,181 --> 00:51:36,576
And that created the cheapest image of Tokyo:
overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman.
348
00:51:36,649 --> 00:51:42,655
He thought he saw more subtle cycles there:
rhythms, clusters of faces caught sight of in passing
349
00:51:42,656 --> 00:51:45,907
as different and precise as groups of instruments.
350
00:51:45,908 --> 00:51:49,802
Sometimes the musical comparison coincided with plain reality;
351
00:51:49,803 --> 00:51:54,717
the Sony stairway in the Ginza was itself an instrument,
each step a note.
352
00:51:55,186 --> 00:51:58,741
All of it fit together like the voices
of a somewhat complicated fugue,
353
00:51:58,742 --> 00:52:01,633
but it was enough to take hold of one of them
and hang on to it.
354
00:52:01,634 --> 00:52:03,281
The television screens for example;
355
00:52:03,282 --> 00:52:08,673
all by themselves they created an itinerary
that sometimes wound up in unexpected curves.
356
00:52:08,674 --> 00:52:14,303
It was sumo season, and the fans who came to watch the fights
in the very chic showrooms on the Ginza
357
00:52:14,304 --> 00:52:16,561
were "justement" the poorest of the Tokyo poors.
358
00:52:16,562 --> 00:52:18,609
So poor that they didn't even have a TV set.
359
00:52:18,610 --> 00:52:25,471
He saw them come, the dead souls of Namida-bashi
he had drunk sak� with one sunny dawn
360
00:52:25,472 --> 00:52:27,832
how many seasons ago was that now?
361
00:53:40,700 --> 00:53:40,800
.
40372
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