All language subtitles for Sans soleil (Chris Marker, 1983) ENG

The first image he told me about

was of three children
on a road in Iceland in 1965.

He said for him
it was the image of happiness,

and that he'd often tried
to link it to other images,

but it had never worked.

He wrote me, "I'll have to put it
all alone at the beginning of a film,

with a long piece of black leader.

If they don't see happiness in the
picture, at least they'll see the black. "

He wrote, "I'm just back
from Hokkaido, the northern island.

Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane.
Others take the ferry.

Waiting, immobility,
snatches of sleep -

curiously it all makes me think
of some past or future war.

Night trains, air raids,
fall-out shelters.

Small fragments of war
enshrined in everyday life. "

He liked the fragility
of those moments suspended in time,

memories whose only function
was to leave behind memories.

He wrote, "After circling the globe,
only banality still interests me.

On this trip I've tracked it relentlessly,
like a bounty hunter.

At dawn, we'll be in Tokyo. "

He used to write me from Africa.

He contrasted African time
with European and Asian time.

He said that in the 19th century,
mankind had come to terms with space,

and that the great question of the 20th
would be different concepts of time.

"By the way,

did you know that
there are emus in the Ile de France?"

He wrote
that in the Bijago Islands,

it's the young girls
who choose their fianc�s.

He wrote that in the suburbs of Tokyo,
there's a temple consecrated to cats.

"I wish I could convey the simplicity,
the lack of affectation of this couple

who'd come to place an inscribed
wooden slat in the cat cemetery

so that their cat Tora
would be protected.

No, she wasn't dead.
She'd just run away.

But on the day of her death,
no one would know how to pray for her,

how to intercede with death so that
he would call her by her right name.

So they had to come in the rain

to perform the rite that would repair
the web of time where it had been broken. "

He wrote,

"I'll have spent my life trying to
understand the function of remembering,

which is not the opposite of forgetting,
but rather its inner lining.

We don't remember. We rewrite memory
much as history is rewritten.

How can one remember thirst?"

He didn't like
to dwell on poverty,

but in everything
that he wanted to show,

there were also
the failures of the Japanese model.

"A world full of bums, of lumpens,
of outcasts, of Koreans.

Too broke to afford drugs,
they get drunk on beer or fermented milk.

This morning in Namidabashi,
20 minutes from the glories of downtown,

a character took his revenge on society
by directing traffic at this intersection.

Luxury for them would be
a large bottle of sake

of the type poured over tombs
on the day of the dead.

I bought a round
in a bar in Namidabashi,

a place where people stare
at each other with equality.

The threshold below which every man
is as good as any other, and knows it. "

He told me about the jetty on Fogo
in the Cape Verde Islands.

"How long have they been there
waiting for the boat?

Patient as pebbles,
but ready to pounce.

They're a people of wanderers,
of navigators, of world travelers.

They arose from crossbreeding
on these rocks that the Portuguese used

as a marshaling yard
for their colonies.

A people of nothing, a people
of emptiness, a vertical people.

Frankly,

isn't it stupid to tell people,

like they teach in film school,
not to look at the camera?"

He wrote...

"The Sahel is not only
what is shown of it when it is too late.

Drought seeps into this land
like water into a leaking boat.

The animals resurrected
for carnival in Bissau

will be petrified again

as soon as a new attack
has changed the savannah into a desert.

It's a state of survival that rich countries
have forgotten, with one exception.

You guessed it. Japan.

My constant comings and goings
are not a search for contrasts.

They're a journey
to the extreme poles of survival. "

He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon,

a lady-in-waiting to Princess Sadako
in the 11th century,

during the Heian period.

"Do we ever know
where history is really made?

Rulers used complicated
strategies to fight one another,

while real power lay
with a family of hereditary regents.

The emperor's court was but a place
of intrigues and intellectual games.

But by learning to draw
a sort of melancholy comfort

from the contemplation
of the tiniest things,

this small group of idlers
left a mark on Japanese sensibility

much deeper than the mediocre
thundering of the politicians.

Shonagon had a passion for lists.

A list of 'elegant things, '

of 'distressing things, '

or even of
'things not worth doing. '

One day she drew up a list
of 'things that quicken the heart. '

Not a bad criterion,
I realize when I'm filming.

I bow to the economic miracle,

but I really want to show
the neighborhood celebrations. "

He wrote...

"Coming back
along the Chiba coast,

I thought of Shonagon's list of signs
one need only name to quicken the heart.

Only name.

To us, a sun is not quite a sun
unless it is 'radiant, '

a spring not quite a spring
unless it's 'crystal-clear. '

Here, interjecting adjectives

would be as rude
as leaving price tags on purchases.

Japanese poetry never modifies.

There is a way
of saying boat, rock, mist,

frog, crow, hail,

heron, chrysanthemum
that includes them all.

Newspapers recently chronicled
the story of a man from Nagoya.

The woman he loved
died last year,

and he'd drowned himself in work,
Japanese-style, like a madman.

It seems he even made
an important discovery in electronics.

And then, in the month of May,
he killed himself.

They say he couldn't bear
to hear the word 'spring. "'

He described
his reunion with Tokyo.

"Like a cat home from vacation

who immediately starts
to inspect familiar places. "

He ran to see
if all was where it should be.

The Ginza owl,
the Shimbashi locomotive,

the Temple of the Fox
above the Mitsukoshi department store,

which he found invaded
by little girls and rock singers.

He learned it was now
little girls who made and unmade stars,

and that producers
trembled before them.

He was told that a disfigured woman
took off her mask in front of passers-by

and scratched them
if they didn't find her beautiful.

Everything interested him.

He who didn't give a damn
about soccer stars or racetrack winners

asked feverishly about Chiyonofuji's
ranking in the last sumo tournament.

He asked for news
of the imperial family, the crown prince,

or Tokyo's oldest mobster,
who appears regularly on television

to teach goodness to children.

The simple joys he'd never known -

returning to one's native land
and family home -

he found among the city's
12 million anonymous residents.

He wrote...

"Tokyo is crisscrossed by trains,
knit together by electric wires.

She shows her veins.

They say that TV
is making her people illiterate,

but I've never seen
so many people reading in the streets.

Perhaps they only read
in the street,

or perhaps they're just pretending
to read, these yellow men.

I make my appointments at Kinokuniya,
the big bookshop in Shinjuku.

The graphic genius
that allowed the Japanese

to invent Cinemascope
ten centuries before the movies

compensates a bit for the sad fate
of the comic-strip heroines,

victims of heartless writers
and a castrating censorship.

Sometimes they escape,
and you find them again on the walls.

The entire city
is a comic strip.

It's planet Mongo.

One can't miss the statuary,

from plasticized baroque
to Stalin-sensual,

and the giant faces
with their imposing stares.

Pictures bigger than people,
voyeurizing the voyeurs.

At nightfall, the megalopolis
breaks down into villages.

With its country cemeteries in the shadow
of banks, its stations and temples,

each district of Tokyo once again
becomes a tidy, ingenuous little town,

nestled among the skyscrapers. "

The small bar in Shinjuku
reminded him of that Indian flute

whose sound can only be heard
by the person playing it.

He might have cried out - as in
a Godard film or a Shakespeare play -

"Where is that music
coming from?"

Later he told me he'd eaten
at the restaurant in Nishi Nippori

where Mr. Yamada practices
the difficult art of "action cooking."

He said that by carefully watching
Mr. Yamada's gestures

and his way
of mixing the ingredients,

one could meditate profitably
on fundamental concepts

common to painting,
philosophy and martial arts.

He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed,
in his impressively humble way,

the essence of style,

and that it therefore fell to him
to use his invisible brush

to write upon this first day in Tokyo
the words "The End."

"I spent the day in front of my TV,
that box of memories.

I was in Nara
with the sacred deer.

I was taking a picture,

unaware that in the 15th century
Basho had written...

'The willow sees
the heron's image upside down. '

Commercials
become a kind of haiku

to the eye used
to Western atrocities in the genre.

Not understanding obviously
adds to the pleasure.

For one slightly
hallucinatory moment,

I had the impression
that I understood Japanese,

but it was a cultural program
about G�rard de Nerval. "

Memories of a visit to the tomb
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

a simple and moving
monument in stone

guarded by tall trees.

"8.40. Cambodia.

From Rousseau
to the Khmer Rouge -

coincidence,
or a sense of history?

In Apocalypse Now,

Brando uttered a few definitive -
and incommunicable -

sentences on the subject.

'Horror has a face and a name.

You must make a friend of horror. '

To cast out the horror
that has a name and a face,

you must give it another name
and another face.

Japanese horror movies have
the sly beauty of certain corpses.

One is sometimes stunned
by so much cruelty.

One seeks its source in Asian people's
long familiarity with suffering

that requires
that even pain be ornate.

And then comes the reward.

The monsters are vanquished
and Natsume Masako arises.

Absolute beauty too
has a name and a face.

But the more you watch
Japanese television,

the more you feel
it's watching you.

Even television newscasts
bear witness to the fact

that the eye's magical function
is at the center of all things.

It's election time.

Winning candidates black out

the empty eye of Daruma,
the spirit of luck,

while losing candidates, sad but dignified,
carry off their one-eyed Daruma.

The most indecipherable images
are those of Europe.

I watch the images of a film
whose soundtrack will be added later.

It took me six months
for Poland.

But I have no difficulty
with the local earthquakes,

though I must admit last night's quake
helped me greatly to grasp the problem.

Poetry is born of insecurity.

Wandering Jews,
quaking Japanese.

Living on a rug that jesting nature is
ever ready to pull out from under them,

they've learned to inhabit
a world of appearances,

fragile, fleeting, revocable,

of trains that fly
from planet to planet,

of samurai fighting
in an immutable past.

It's called
the impermanence of things.

I watched it all,
even the evening shows,

the so-called adult shows.

The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips,
but this is a coded hypocrisy.

Censorship is not the mutilation
of the show. It is the show.

The code is the message.

It points to the absolute by hiding it,
like religions have always done. "

That year, a new face appeared

among the great faces adorning
the streets of Tokyo. The face of the pope.

Treasures that had never
left the Vatican

were displayed on the seventh floor
of the Sogo department store.

He wrote...

"It's curiosity, of course, but also
a hint of industrial espionage.

I imagine them bringing out
in two years

a more efficient and less expensive
version of Catholicism.

But there's also the fascination
associated with the sacred,

even when it's someone else's.

So when will French department stores
exhibit relics sacred to the Japanese

such as can be seen at Jozankei,
on the island of Hokkaido?

At first, one smiles at this combination
museum, chapel and sex shop.

As always in Japan, one admires how
the walls between realms are so thin

that one can in the same breath
contemplate a statue,

buy an inflatable doll

and give the goddess of fertility
the small offering

that always accompanies
her displays,

displays whose frankness would render
television's stratagems incomprehensible

but for the fact that sex organs may
only be shown severed from the body.

One would like to
believe in a world before the fall,

inaccessible to the complications
of a puritanism

whose phony shadow was imposed
on it by American occupation,

where people who gather laughing
around the votive fountain,

the woman who touches it
with a friendly gesture,

share in the same
cosmic innocence.

The second part of the museum,
with its pairs of coupling animals,

would then be the earthly paradise
as we've always dreamed of it.

Not so sure.

Animal innocence may be a trick
for getting around censorship,

but perhaps also the mirror
of an impossible reconciliation,

and even without original sin, this
earthly paradise may be a paradise lost.

In the glossy splendor
of the gentle animals of Jozankei,

I read the fundamental rift
of Japanese society,

the rift that separates
men from women.

In life it seems to manifest
in just two ways.

Violent slaughter, or a discreet
melancholy resembling the Shonagon's,

which the Japanese express
in a single - and untranslatable - word.

Bringing man down
to the level of the beasts

against which
the church fathers inveighed

becomes here the challenge of the beasts
to the 'poignancy of things, '

to a melancholy whose tone
I can convey

by copying a few lines
from Samura Koichi.

'Who said that time
heals all wounds?

Better to say that time heals
everything except wounds.

With time, the hurt of separation
loses its real limits.

With time, the desired body
will soon disappear,

and if the desiring body has already
ceased to exist for the other,

then what remains
is a disembodied wound. "'

He wrote
that the Japanese secret -

what Levi-Strauss called
the poignancy of things -

implied the faculty
of communing with things,

of entering into them,
of being them for a moment.

It's only natural that, in their turn,
they should be like us -

perishable and immortal.

He wrote, "Animism is
a familiar notion in Africa.

It's less often applied to Japan.

What then shall we call
this diffuse belief

according to which every fragment
of creation has its invisible counterpart?

Building a factory or skyscraper

begins with a ceremony
to appease the god who owns the land.

There's a ceremony for brushes,
abacuses, even rusty needles.

There's one on September 25th for
the repose of the soul of broken dolls.

The dolls are piled up
in the Temple of Kiyomizu -

which is consecrated to Kannon,
the goddess of compassion -

and then burned in public.

I watched the participants.

I think the people who saw off
the kamikaze pilots

had the same look on their faces. "

He wrote that the pictures
of Guinea-Bissau

ought to be accompanied
by music from the Cape Verde Islands.

That would be our contribution
to the unity dreamed of by Amilcar Cabral.

"Why should a country so small
and so poor interest the world?

They did what they could.

They chased Portugal out,
so traumatizing its army

that it moved to overthrow
its own dictatorship

and led one briefly to believe
in a new revolution in Europe.

Who remembers all that?

History throws its empty bottles
out the window.

This morning I was
on the dock at Pidjiguiti,

where everything began in 1959, when the
first victims of the struggle were killed.

It may be as difficult
to recognize Africa in this leaden fog

as it is to recognize the struggle

in the rather dull activity
of tropical longshoremen.

Rumor has it
that every third-world leader

coined the same phrase
the morning after independence.

'Now the real problems begin. '

Cabral never got a chance to say it.
He was assassinated first.

But the problems began,
and went on, and are still going on.

Rather unexciting problems
for revolutionary romanticism.

To work, to produce,
to distribute,

to overcome postwar exhaustion

and the temptations
of power and privilege.

But after all, history's only bitter
to those who expect a sugar coating.

My personal problem
was more specific.

How to film
the ladies of Bissau?

Apparently, the eye's magical function
was working against me there.

In the marketplaces
of Bissau and Cape Verde,

I again encountered
those egalitarian stares

and this sequence of glances
that bordered on seduction.

I see her.

She sees me.

She knows that I see her.

She glances my way,

but furtively, as if I'm not
really the object of her gaze.

Finally, the direct gaze

lasting 1/24th of a second,
the length of a film frame.

All women have a built-in kernel
of indestructibility,

and men's task has always been
to keep them from realizing it

for as long as possible.

African men are just as good
at this task as others,

but after a close look at African women,
I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men. "

He told me the story
of Hachiko the dog.

"A dog waited for his master
every day at the station.

The master died,
but the dog didn't know it,

and he continued to wait,
all his life.

People were moved
and brought him food.

They still place sushi and rice cakes
before the statue erected in his honor

so that the faithful soul of Hachiko
will never go hungry.

Tokyo is full of these small legends
and animal intercessors.

The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard over
what was once the empire of Mr. Okada,

a great collector
of French paintings,

the man who rented
the Ch�teau of Versailles

to celebrate the 100th anniversary
of his department stores.

In the computer section
of one such store,

I've seen young Japanese
exercising their brain muscles

like young Athenians
at the palestra.

They have a war to win.

History books of the future will perhaps
rank the battle of the integrated circuit

with the battles of Salamis
or Agincourt.

But they honor the unfortunate
adversary by leaving other fields to him.

Men's fashions this season are placed
under the sign of John Kennedy. "

Like an old votive turtle
stationed in the corner of a field,

Mr. Akao, president
of the Japanese Patriotic Party,

rails from his rolling balcony
against the international communist plot.

He wrote...

"The extreme right's vans,
with their flags and megaphones,

are part of the Tokyo landscape.

Mr. Akao is their focal point.

I think he'll have his own statue,
like Hachiko the dog,

at this intersection that he leaves
only to go prophesy on the battlefields.

He was at Narita in the '60s.

Peasants fought an airport
to be built on their land,

with Mr. Akao denouncing Moscow's
hand in everything that moved.

Yurakucho is
Tokyo's political arena.

I once saw a monk there
pray for peace in Vietnam.

Today, young right-wing activists

protest the annexation
of the northern islands by the Russians.

Sometimes they're told that
Japan's commercial relations

with the abominable occupier
to the north

are a thousand times better
than with the American ally,

who's always whining
about economic aggression.

Nothing is simple.

On the other sidewalk,
the left has the floor.

Korean Catholic opposition
leader Kim Dae Jung,

kidnapped in Tokyo in '73
by the South Korean Gestapo,

is threatened
with a death sentence.

A group has begun
a hunger strike.

Some very young activists
gather signatures in his support.

I returned to Narita for the birthday
of one of the victims of the struggle.

The demonstration was unreal.

I felt like I was in Brigadoon,

like I'd woken up ten years later
amid the same actors,

the same blue-suited police
and helmeted adolescents,

the same slogan,
the same banners,

and the same goal.
To fight the airport.

Just one thing has been added.
The airport itself.

But its single runway
hemmed in by barbed wire

looks more besieged
than victorious.

My pal Hayao Yamaneko
has found a solution.

If the images of the present don't change,
change the images of the past.

He showed me clashes of the '60s
run through his synthesizer.

'Less deceptive pictures, 'he says,
with the conviction of a fanatic,

than those you see on television. '

At least they proclaim themselves
to be what they are. Images -

not the portable and compact form
of an already inaccessible reality.

Hayao calls his machine's world
'the Zone, 'in an homage to Tarkovsky.

What Narita brought back to me
like a shattered hologram

was a fragment
of the '60s generation.

If to love without illusions is still
to love, I can say that I loved it.

It was a generation
that often exasperated me,

for I didn't share its utopian goal
of uniting in a common struggle

those who revolt against poverty
and those who revolt against wealth,

but it let out a primordial scream that
better-adjusted voices no longer could.

I met peasants there who'd come
to know themselves through the struggle.

In concrete terms, it had failed.

Yet all they had won
in their understanding of the world

and of themselves

could only have been won
through the struggle.

As for the students, some massacred
each other in the mountains

in the name
of revolutionary purity,

while others had studied capitalism
so thoroughly to fight it

that they now provide it
with its best executives.

Like everywhere else, the movement
had its posturers and its careerists -

including those who made
a career of martyrdom -

but it carried with it all those
who said, like Che Guevara,

that they 'trembled with indignation
at every injustice committed in the world. '

They wanted to give
a political meaning to their generosity,

and their generosity
has outlasted their politics.

That's why I will never allow it to be
said that youth is wasted on the young. "

"The youth who gather
every weekend at Shinjuku

obviously know they're not
on a launching pad toward real life,

that they are life, to be eaten
on the spot, like fresh donuts.

It's a very simple secret.

The old try to hide it,
and not all the young know it.

The 10-year-old girl
who tied her friend's hands

and threw her
from the 13th floor

for speaking badly of their class team
hadn't discovered it yet.

Parents who demand
more special telephone lines

to prevent children's suicides

find out a little late
that they kept the secret too well.

Rock is an international language
for spreading the secret.

Another is peculiar to Tokyo.

For the Takenoko,
20 is retiring age.

They are baby Martians.

I go see them dance
every Sunday in Yoyogi Park.

They want people to look at them
but seem not to notice when they do.

They live
in a parallel time stream.

An invisible aquarium wall
separates them from their audience,

and I can spend a whole afternoon

watching a little Takenoko girl
learn the customs of her planet.

Beyond that,
they wear dog tags,

they obey a whistle,
the Mafia extorts money from them,

and with the exception
of a single all-girl group,

a boy is always in charge. "

One day he writes to me,

"Description of a dream.

More and more,
my dreams are set

in the department stores of Tokyo,

the subterranean passages
that parallel the city above.

A face appears, then disappears.
A trace is found, then lost.

The folklore of dreams is so much intact
that the next day, when I'm awake,

I realize that I continue to seek
in this basement labyrinth

the presence concealed
the night before.

I begin to wonder
if those dreams are really mine,

or if they're part of a totality,
a gigantic collective dream,

of which the entire city
may be the projection.

It might suffice to pick up
any of the telephones lying around

to hear a familiar voice

or the beating of a heart -

Sei Shonagon's, for example.

All the underground passages
lead to train stations.

The same companies own the stores
and the railroads that bear their name -

Keio, Odakyu,
all those names of ports.

The train inhabited by sleeping people
assembles all the fragments of dreams

and makes a single film of them,
the ultimate film.

The tickets from the automatic dispenser
grant admission to the show. "

He told me of the January light
on the stations' stairways.

He said the city ought to be
deciphered like a musical score.

One could get lost in the great orchestral
masses and the accumulation of details,

but that yielded
the cheapest image of Tokyo.

Overcrowded,
megalomaniac, inhuman.

He thought he saw
more subtle cycles there.

Rhythms, clusters of faces
glimpsed in passing,

as different and precise
as groups of instruments.

Sometimes the musical comparison
coincided with plain reality.

The Sony stairway in the Ginza
was itself a musical instrument,

each step a note.

It all fit together like voices
in a complicated fugue,

but it was enough to seize
one of them and hang on to it.

The television screens,
for example.

All by themselves
they created an itinerary

that sometimes
took unexpected turns.

It was sumo season,

and the fans watching the fights
in the very chic Ginza showrooms

were the poorest
of the Tokyo poor,

so poor that they didn't have
even a TVset.

He saw them come,
these lost souls of Namidabashi

with whom he'd drunk sake
one sunny dawn.

How many seasons ago
was that now?

He wrote me...

"Even in the stalls
selling spare electronic parts

that some hipsters
use for jewelry,

there is, in Tokyo's musical score,
a particular staff

whose rarity in Europe condemns me
to a real acoustic exile.

The music of video games.

They're built into tables.

You can drink and have lunch
and go on playing.

The arcades open onto the street,

where you can listen
and play from memory.

I witnessed the birth
of these games in Japan.

I met them again later all over the world,
but one detail was different.

At first it was the familiar game,

a politically incorrect battering
aimed at killing off creatures

that were either prairie dogs
or baby seals - I can't be sure which.

Here's the new Japanese variation.

Instead of the critters, there are
vaguely human heads identified by labels.

At the top,
the chairman of the board.

In front of him,
the vice president and directors.

In the front row, department heads
and personnel manager.

The guy I filmed,

who was smashing up
the hierarchy with enviable energy,

confided that it was
not at all allegorical for him,

that he was thinking
very specifically of his superiors.

That's no doubt why
the 'personnel manager'

has been clubbed so often and so hard
that it was taken out of commission

and a baby seal
reinserted in its place.

Hayao Yamaneko invents
video games with his machine.

To please me, he puts in
my most beloved animals,

the cat and the owl.

He claims
that only electronics

can deal with feeling,
memory and imagination.

Mizoguchi's Ars�ne Lupin,
for example,

or the no-less-imaginary
Burakumin.

How to show a category
of Japanese that doesn't exist?

Yes, I saw them in Osaka, for hire
by the day, sleeping on the ground.

Since the Middle Ages they've been
doomed to grubby and thankless jobs,

but since the Meiji era,
officially nothing sets them apart,

and their real name - the eta -
is a taboo word, not to be pronounced.

They are non-persons.

How can they be shown,
except as non-images?

Video games are the first stage in a plan
for machines to help the human race,

the only plan that offers
a future for intelligence.

For the moment, the unsurpassable
philosophy of our time

is found in Pac-Man.

I didn't know, while sacrificing
my 100-yen coins to him,

that he was
to conquer the world.

Perhaps because he's the most perfect
graphic metaphor of the human condition.

He puts into true perspective

the balance of power between
the individual and the environment,

and he tells us soberly
that though there's honor

in carrying out the greatest number
of victorious attacks,

it never amounts
to anything in the end. "

He was pleased to see
the same chrysanthemums

at funerals
for both men and animals.

He described the ceremony
held at the zoo in Ueno,

in memory of animals
that had died during the year.

"For two years now,

a certain panda's death has rendered
this day even more sorrowful,

a loss more irreparable,
say the newspapers,

than the recent death
of the prime minister.

Last year people really cried.

Now they seem to be
getting used to it,

accepting that each year
death takes a panda

as dragons carry off young girls
in fairy tales.

I've heard this sentence.

'The partition separating
life from death

doesn't seem as thick to us
as it does to a Westerner. '

What I've read most often in the eyes
of people about to die is surprise.

What I read right now in the eyes
of Japanese children is curiosity,

as if they were trying
to see through the partition

to understand an animal's death. "

"I've returned from a country

where death is not a partition to cross
but a road to follow.

The Great Ancestor
of the Bijago archipelago

has described for us
the itinerary of the dead,

and how they move from island to island
according to a rigorous protocol,

until they come to the last beach, where
they wait for the ship to the other world.

If by accident one should meet them,
it is imperative not to recognize them.

The Bijagos
are part of Guinea-Bissau.

In an old film clip, Amilcar Cabral
waves good-bye to the shore.

He's right.
He'll never see it again.

Luis Cabral made
the same gesture 15 years later,

on the canoe
that was bringing us back.

Guinea had by that time become a nation,
and Luis was its president.

All those who remember the war
remember him.

Like his half brother Amilcar, he was of
mixed Guinean and Cape Verdian blood,

and, like Amilcar, a founding member
of an unusual party, the PAIGC,

which, by uniting the two colonized
countries in a single struggle,

sought to herald
a federation of the two states.

I've heard the stories
of former guerrilla fighters,

who'd fought in conditions so inhuman
that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers

for having to bear what
they themselves suffered.

I heard that
and many more things

that make one ashamed for having used
lightly, even if inadvertently,

the word "guerrilla" to describe
a certain kind of filmmaking,

a word linked at the time
to many theoretical debates

as well as bloody defeats
on the ground.

Amilcar Cabral was the only one
to lead a victorious guerrilla war,

and not only in terms
of military conquests.

He knew his people.
He'd studied them at length.

He wanted every liberated region
to herald a different kind of society.

The socialist countries send
weapons to arm the fighters.

The social democracies
fill the people's stores.

May the extreme Left
forgive history,

but if the guerrillas are like fish
in water, it's a bit thanks to Sweden.

Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguities.
He knew the traps.

He wrote, "It's as though
we're facing a raging river,

and those trying
to cross are drowning.

But there's no choice.
They must get to the other side. "

Now the scene moves to Cassaca,
February 17th, 1980,

but to grasp it properly,
one must move forward in time.

In a year, Luis Cabral,
the president, will be in prison,

and the weeping man
he has just decorated, Major Nino,

will have taken power.

The party will have split.

Guineans and Capeverdians
will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy.

We'll see that beneath
this ceremony of promotions,

seemingly perpetuating
the brotherhood of the struggle,

there lay a pit
of post-victory bitterness,

and that Nino's tears expressed
not an ex-warrior's emotion

but the wounded pride of a hero

slighted at not being raised
high enough above the rest.

Beneath each of these faces
lies a memory,

and where there was to be
one collective memory,

there are a thousand memories of men
who parade their personal wounds

in the great wound of history.

In Portugal, swept up in turn
by the breaking wave of Bissau,

Miguel Torga, who'd struggled all his
life against the dictatorship, wrote,

'Every bit player
represents only himself.

Instead of seeking social change,

he seeks simply, in the revolutionary act,
to boost his own image. '

That's the way
the breakers recede,

and so predictably that one must believe
in an 'amnesia of the future'

that history bestows,
out of mercy or self-interest,

on those whom it recruits.

Amilcar murdered
by members of his own party,

the liberated areas
fallen to bloody petty tyrants,

liquidated in their turn
by a central power

to whose stability everyone
paid homage until the military coup -

that's how history advances,

plugging its memory
like one plugs one's ears.

Luis, exiled to Cuba,

and Nino,
himself a target of later plots,

can summon each other endlessly
before history's court -

but history doesn't care.

It has only one friend,
the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse:

The horror that has a name
and a face.

I'm writing you all this from another world,
a world of appearances.

In a way, the two worlds
communicate with each other.

Memory is to one
what history is to the other.

An impossibility.

Legends are born of the need
to decipher the indecipherable.

Memories must make do
with their delirium, with their drift.

A moment stopped would burn

like a frame of film caught
in the furnace of the projector.

Madness protects,
as fever does.

I envy Hayao and his Zone.

He plays
with the signs of his memory.

He pins them down
and decorates them like insects

that have flown beyond time

and that he can contemplate
from a point outside of time -

the only eternity we have left.

I look at his machines.

I think of a world where each memory
could create its own legend. "

He wrote that only one film
had been capable

of portraying impossible memory,
insane memory.

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

In the spiral
of the opening titles,

he saw time covering a field
growing ever wider as it moved away,

a cyclone whose present moment
contains the motionless eye.

In San Francisco he'd gone
on a pilgrimage to all the film's locations.

The florist Podesta Baldocchi,
where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak,

he the hunter
and she the prey -

or was it the other way around?

The tile floor hadn't changed.

He'd driven up and down the hills
of San Francisco,

where Jimmy Stewart - Scottie -
follows Kim Novak- Madeleine.

It seems to be about pursuit,
mystery and murder,

but in truth
it's about power and freedom,

melancholy and dazzlement,

so carefully coded within the spiral
that you could miss it

and not immediately notice
that this vertigo of space

in reality stands
for the vertigo of time.

He'd followed every trail,

even to the cemetery
at Mission Dolores,

where Madeleine prayed at the grave
of a woman long dead

whom she should not
have known.

He'd followed Madeleine -
as Scottie had done -

to the Museum
of the Legion of Honor,

before the portrait of a dead woman
she shouldn't have known.

And on the portrait,
as in Madeleine's hair,

the spiral of time.

The Victorian hotel where Madeleine
disappeared had itself disappeared.

Concrete had replaced it
at the corner of Eddie and Gough.

But the cross-section of redwood trunk
was still in Muir Woods.

On it, Madeleine traced
the short distance

between two of those concentric lines
that measure the age of the tree and said,

"Here I was born,
and there I died. "

He remembered another film
in which this passage was quoted.

The redwood was
in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris,

and the hand pointed to a place
beyond the tree - outside of time.

This painted horse
at San Juan Bautista,

with an eye
that looked like Madeleine's -

Hitchcock had invented nothing.
It was all there.

He'd run under the arches
in the mission

as Madeleine had run
towards her death -

but was it really hers?

From this fake tower-
the only thing Hitchcock added-

he imagined Scottie
as "Time's Fool of Love,"

unable to live with memory
without falsifying it,

inventing a double for Madeleine
in another dimension of time,

a Zone that would belong
only to him,

from which he could decipher
the undecipherable story

begun under the Golden Gate when he
pulled Madeleine out of San Francisco Bay,

when he'd saved her from death
before casting her back to death -

or was it the other way around?

"In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage
of a film I'd seen 19 times.

In Iceland, I laid the first stone
of an imaginary film.

That summer,
I'd met three children on a road,

and a volcano had risen up
out of the sea -

the Set Designer
at work once again.

American astronauts trained in this lunar
landscape before flying to the moon.

I immediately saw it as a setting
for science fiction,

the landscape of another planet -

No, let it be our own for someone
who comes from very far away.

I imagine him lumbering about
like a deep-sea diver

in this volcanic soil
that sticks to the soles.

All of a sudden he stumbles,
and with the next step it's a year later.

He's walking on a small path
near the Dutch border,

along a seabird sanctuary.

That's for a start.

Why this cut in time,
this connection of memories?

That's just it.
He can't understand.

He comes not from another planet
but from our future.

4001, when the human brain
has reached the era of full employment.

Everything works to perfection -

all that we now allow to slumber,
including memory.

The logical result.
Total recall is memory anesthetized.

After so many stories of men
who forgot how to remember,

here's the story of one
who forgot how to forget...

and who, through some peculiarity
of his nature,

instead of being proud and scorning
mankind of the past and its shadows,

turned to it first with curiosity
and then with compassion.

In the world he comes from,
to call forth a vision,

to be moved by a portrait,
to tremble at the sound of music

can only be signs
of a long and painful prehistory.

He wants to understand.

He feels these infirmities of time
like an injustice,

and he reacts to it like Che Guevara
or youth of the '60s - with indignation.

He's a third worlder of time.

The idea that unhappiness
had existed in his planet's past

is as unbearable to him as the existence
of poverty in their present moment.

Naturally, he will fail.

The unhappiness he discovers
is as inaccessible to him

as the poverty of a poor country
is to the children of a rich one.

He's chosen
to give up his privileges,

but he can do nothing about the privilege
that has allowed him to choose.

His only comfort is precisely
what threw him into this absurd quest.

A song cycle by Moussorgski.

It's still sung
in the 40th century.

Its meaning has been lost,
but for the first time, he glimpsed

the presence of that thing
he didn't understand,

which had to do
with unhappiness and memory,

which he must grasp at all cost,

and toward which, slowly,
heavily, he began to walk.

Of course,
I'll never make that film.

Nonetheless, I'm collecting sets,
devising plot twists,

putting in my favorite creatures.

I've even given it a title,

indeed, the title
of those Moussorgski songs.

Sunless."

"On May 15th, 1945,
at 7.00 a.m.,

the 382nd US Infantry Regiment

attacked a hill in Okinawa
they had renamed Dick Hill.

I suppose they believed
they were conquering Japanese soil

and knew nothing
about Ryukyu civilization.

Neither did I,

except that the faces
of the market ladies at Itoman

spoke to me more of Gauguin
than of Utamaro.

Through centuries of dreamy vassalage,
time had not stirred in the archipelago.

Then came the rupture.

Is it a property of islands to make women
the guardians of their memory?

I learned that, as in the Bijagos, magic
knowledge is passed on through women.

Each community
has its priestess, the noro,

who presides over all ceremonies,
with the exception of funerals.

The Japanese defended
their position inch by inch.

At the end of the day,
the remnants of L Company

had gotten only
halfway up the hill-

a hill like the one
where I followed some villagers

on their way
to a purification ceremony.

The noro communicates
with the gods of the sea,

of rain, of earth, of fire.

She speaks of them
as of family members who've made good.

All bow down before the Sister Deity,
a reflection, in the absolute,

of a privileged relationship
between brother and sister.

Even after her death, the sister
maintains her spiritual predominance.

At dawn
the Americans withdrew.

Fighting went on for a month
before the island surrendered-

and toppled
into the modern world.

Twenty-seven years
of American occupation,

Japan's disputed
sovereignty restored.

Two miles from bowling alleys
and gas stations,

the noro continues her dialogue
with the gods.

When she's gone,
the dialogue will end.

Brothers will no longer know that
their dead sister is watching over them.

When filming this ceremony, I knew
I was present at the end of something.

Magical cultures that disappear
leave traces for those who follow.

This one will leave none.

The rupture in history
has been too violent.

I touched that rupture
at the top of the hill,

as I had at the edge of the ditch

where 200 girls used grenades
in 1945 to commit suicide

rather than fall
into American hands.

People have
their pictures taken here.

Grenade-shaped cigarette lighters
are sold nearby as souvenirs.

On Hayao's machine,

war resembles letters being burned,
shredded in a fiery frame.

The code name for Pearl Harbor
was "Tora, tora, tora,"

the name of the cat the couple
in Gotokuji was praying for.

So all of this will have begun with
the name of a cat pronounced three times.

Off Okinawa,
kamikazes dived on the American fleet.

They would become a legend, and were
likelier material for it, obviously,

than the special units who exposed their
prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria

and then to hot water to see
how fast flesh separates from bone.

Only their last letters would reveal
that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers,

nor were they all
swashbuckling samurai.

Before drinking his last cup of sake,
Ryoji Uebara had written,

'I've always thought that Japan
must live free to live eternally.

It may seem idiotic to say that today,
under a totalitarian regime.

We kamikaze pilots are machines.
We have nothing to say

except to beg our compatriots to make
Japan the great country of our dreams.

In the plane
I'm a machine,

a bit of magnetized metal that will
plaster itself to an aircraft carrier,

but on the ground, I'm a human being,
with feelings and passions.

Please excuse
these disorganized thoughts.

I'm leaving you
with a rather melancholy picture,

but in the depths of my heart,
I'm happy.

I've spoken frankly.
Forgive me. "'

Every time he came back from Africa,
he stopped at the Island of Sal,

a salt rock
in the middle of the Atlantic.

At the end of the island,

beyond the village of Santa Maria
and its cemetery of painted tombs,

one need only walk straight ahead
to meet the desert.

He wrote...

"I've understood the visions.

Suddenly you're in the desert
the way you are in the night.

Whatever is not desert
no longer exists.

You don't want to believe
the images that crop up.

Did I write that there are emus
in the Ile de France?

'Island of France' sounds strange
on the Island of Sal.

My memory superimposes
two towers,

the one in the castle ruins of Montepilloy
that Joan of Arc used as a camp,

and the lighthouse tower
at the southern tip of Sal,

probably one
of the last lighthouses to use oil.

A lighthouse in the Sahel
looks pasted on

until you see the ocean
at the edge of the sand and salt.

Crews of transcontinental planes
are rotated on Sal.

Their club brings
to this empty frontier

a small touch of the seaside resort
that makes the rest even more unreal.

They feed the stray dogs
that live on the beach.

My dogs seemed
pretty nervous that evening.

They played with the sea
as I'd never seen them before.

Listening to Radio Hong Kong
later on, I understood.

That was the first day
of the lunar new year,

and for the first time in 60 years, the
sign of the Dog met the sign of Water. "

"Out there,
11,000 miles away,

a single shadow remains immobile
among the long moving shadows

that the January light
casts on the ground in Tokyo.

The shadow of the Asakusa monk.

For in Japan too
the Year of the Dog is beginning.

Temples are filled with visitors
who toss their coins

and pray, Japanese-style -

a prayer slipped quietly into life
without interrupting it.

Stranded at the end of the world,
on my Island of Sal,

in the company
of my prancing dogs,

I remember that January in Tokyo,

or rather I remember the images
I filmed that January in Tokyo.

They've replaced my memory.

They are my memory.

I wonder how people remember things
who don't film or photograph or tape.

How has mankind
managed to remember?

I know.
It wrote the Bible.

The new bible will be
an eternal magnetic tape

of a time that will have to reread itself
constantly, just to know it existed.

As we await the year 4001
and its total recall,

that's what the New Year oracles

that we take out of
their long hexagonal boxes offer us.

A little more power
over that memory

that runs from camp to camp,
like Joan of Arc,

that a shortwave announcement
from Hong Kong Radio

picked up on a Cape Verde Island
projects to Tokyo,

and that the memory of a precise color
in the street bounces back

on another country,
another distance,

another music, endlessly.

At the end of memory's path,

the ideograms of the Island of France
are no less enigmatic

than the kanji of Tokyo
in the miraculous light of the New Year.

It's Indian winter.

It's as if the air
were the first element

to emerge purified
from the countless ceremonies

the Japanese use to wash off one year
before entering the next.

A full month is just enough

to fulfill all the duties
that courtesy owes to time,

the most interesting
being the acquisition,

at the temple of Tenjin,
of the Uso bird,

who, according to one tradition,
eats all your lies of the year to come,

and according to another,
turns them into truths.

But what gives the street
its color in January,

what makes it suddenly different,

is the appearance
of the kimonos.

In the street,
in stores, in offices,

even at the stock exchange
on opening day,

girls bring out
their fur-collared winter kimonos.

At that time of year,

others may invent extra-flat TVsets,
commit suicide with chain saws,

or capture two-thirds of the world market
for semiconductors - good for them!

All you see are the girls.

January 15th
is Coming-of-Age day,

an obligatory celebration
in the life of a young Japanese woman.

City governments distribute bags
filled with gifts, date books, advice.

How to be a good citizen,
mother and wife.

On that day, every 20-year-old girl
can phone her family for free,

no matter where in Japan.

Work, home and country -
this is the anteroom of adulthood.

The world of the Takenoko and of
rock singers speeds away like a rocket.

Speakers explain
what society expects of them.

How long will they take
to forget the secret?

And when
all the celebrations are over,

all that remains is to collect
the ornaments and accessories

and burn them
in one more celebration.

This is dondoyaki,

a Shinto blessing of the debris
that has a right to immortality,

like the dolls at Ueno.

The last stage in the poignancy of things
before they disappear.

Daruma, the one-eyed spirit,
reigns supreme atop the bonfire.

Abandonment must be a feast,
laceration must be a feast,

and the farewell
to all that one has lost, broken, used,

must be ennobled by a ceremony.

It's Japan that could fulfill
the wish of that French writer

who wanted divorce
to be made a sacrament.

The only baffling part
of this ritual

was the children striking
the ground with long poles.

I only got one explanation,
a rather peculiar one.

I thought it might be
a small, intimate ritual,

but it was to chase away moles.

And that's where my three children from
Iceland came and grafted themselves in.

I picked up the whole shot again,

adding the somewhat
hazy ending,

the frame trembling
under the force of the wind.

Everything I had cut
in order to "tidy up"

and that said better than all the rest
what I saw in that moment,

why I held it at arm's length,
at zoom's length,

until its last 24th of a second.

The city of Heimaey
spread out below us,

and when, five years later,
my friend Haroun Tazieff

sent me the film
he'd just shot in the same place,

I lacked only the name to know
that nature performs its own dondoyaki.

The island's volcano
had reawakened.

I looked at those pictures,

and it was as if all of 1965
had just been covered in ash.

So all one had to do was wait,

and the planet itself
would stage the working of time.

I saw again
what had been my window.

I saw familiar roofs
and balconies emerge,

the landmarks of the walks
I took through town every day,

down to the cliff
where I'd met the children.

The cat with white socks
that Haroun had kindly filmed for me

naturally found its place,

and I thought that of all the prayers
to time that I'd studied this trip,

the kindest was the one spoken
by the woman of Gotokuji,

who said simply to her cat Tora,

"Beloved cat, wherever you are,
may your soul rest in peace. "

And then, in its turn,
the journey entered the Zone.

Hayao showed me my images
already touched by the moss of time,

freed of the lie that had prolonged
the existence of those moments

swallowed by the spiral.

When spring came

and every crow announced its arrival
by raising his cry half a tone,

I took the green train of the Yamanote
line and got off at Tokyo station,

near the central post office.

Though the street was empty,

I waited at the red light,
Japanese-style,

to leave space
for the spirits of broken cars.

Though I was expecting no letter,

I stopped
at the general delivery window,

for one must honor
the spirits of torn-up letters,

and at the airmail counter,
to hail the spirits of unmailed letters.

I took the measure
of the unbearable vanity of the West

that has always favored
being over non-being,

what is spoken
over what's left unsaid.

I walked along the little stalls
of clothing dealers.

In the distance I heard Mr. Akao's voice
reverberating from the loudspeakers,

now a half tone higher.

Then I went down
to the basement

where my maniac friend busies
himself with his electronic graffiti.

In the end
his language touches me,

for he talks to that part of us that insists
on drawing profiles on prison walls.

A piece of chalk
to follow the contours

of what is not,
or is no longer, or is not yet.

The handwriting each of us
will use to draw up

his own list of things
that quicken the heart -

to offer up or to erase.

In that moment,
poetry will be made by everyone,

and there will be emus
in the Zone. "

He writes to me from Japan.

He writes to me from Africa.

He says he can now summon up the look
on the market lady's face in Praia

that had lasted
only the length of a film frame.

Will there be
a last letter someday?

IN THE FRENCH AUDIO VERSION,

THE LETTERS OF SANDOR KRASNA
WERE READ BY FLORENCE DELAY