All language subtitles for [1978] Peter Greenaway - A Walk Through H - The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (EN)

Tulse Luper arranged
these drawings for me

one Monday afternoon
when he heard that I was ill.

This was one of the drawings
he'd given me himself.

It's one of a pair. He told me not
to bother to look for the other one.

These two I'd received anonymously on
different occasions through the post.

This one I bought.
I remember it cost me very little.

And these two were stolen, though
not by me. I was just the receiver.

This one I copied
from a drawing at Bridzor

and this one I did steal,

from the man who looked after
the owls at the Amsterdam zoo.

These two were given to me,
probably as a birthday present.

Tulse Luper came back
at 11 in the evening

and told me this drawing was
probably the one I would need first.

I finally left on the Tuesday
morning, at about a quarter to two.

This particular map had at one time
been very familiar to me.

I had always associated it
with night.

Perhaps the map had hung on
a bedroom wall somewhere. I forget.

Astrogarth
was the first measuring place.

Once past it,
it was impossible to go back.

I had heard that one or two
had been able to turn back

just before they reached Astrogarth,
but that was rare.

The second city was Canterlupis.

This was
one of the catalogue drawings.

I bought a lot of them
and kept them in a suitcase.

The paper was poor stuff.

Hesgarden. It was in two parts,
both of them silent.

I remember this man came with a
letter accusing me of stealing eggs.

I never understood the map's
relationship to the accusation.

I still don't,
but I'm grateful for the map.

After Hesgarden came Manaphia,
34 miles from Astrogarth.

The road was very clearly marked,
very red.

This drawing I remember illustrated
a theory about blood oranges,

or perhaps it was about pomegranates.

The fifth city was Balladrome.

This was a frontispiece
to a novel by Hasper Fallbazz

called The Ringed Woman.

Fallbazz was a pioneer naturalist,

one of the first to promote ringing
birds to check on their movements.

After some 20 years of this practice,

in which time he and his wife
must have ringed some 25,000 birds,

he decided that the information
gained was not to be trusted.

He concluded that
information from a ringed bird

was not the same
as information from a bird.

Fallbazz tried to curb the enthusiasm
he had helped to pioneer.

Half in earnest, half in jest,
to draw a behavioural parallel,

he wrote his erotic novel
in which the heroine is ringed.

Fallbazz's wife
did the illustrations,

but they never appeared
in the novel.

Where this illustration fits
in the novel is not clear.

After Balladrome,
there's Dormis, a sedate place.

Dormis was 79 miles from Astogarth
and 33 from Hesgarden.

This drawing came by post, unsigned,

on a birthday
I had spent in bed with chickenpox.

Another of the catalogue drawings.

I was told to keep it
on permanent loan

by the security officer who stole it.

The scarlet brick road
was still unmistakable.

This city is unnamed.
If it had a name, I forget it.

After one unnamed city,
I came upon another.

This one had good pavements.
It surprised me a little.

It reminded me of a seaport,
though it was far from the sea.

And then Antilipe.

According to Tulse Luper,
Antilipe in Syria

was home to a unique
species of black maritime rook

that mated with seagulls.

That was obviously another Antilipe.

Contorpis, the tenth city,
117 miles from Astrogarth.

My brother found this drawing in
a desk he'd bought from a judge.

He had the drawing framed and glazed
and hung it on the wall in his house.

The drawing was stolen by a woman,
the companion of a guest

at the christening
of my brother's eldest daughter.

The woman hid the drawing under
a shawl embroidered with peacocks.

As she was leaving
in the crush of guests at the door,

the glass in the frame broke,
cutting her arm and her breast.

She fainted. When she came to,
she was very embarrassed,

said her name was Correlegiano.

She offered a cheque
to cover the damages.

According to my brother, the red
on the road is blood, type A.

Tulse Luper suggested my journey
through H needed 92 maps.

Anticipating my question,

he suggested the time
to decide what H stood for

was at the end of the journey and
by that time, it scarcely mattered.

This drawing had been found one day
in my luggage,

I returned it to the hotel clerk.

There were no claimants
and the hotel posted it on to me.

And this, I had been led to believe,

was an unrealised plan for a park
at Staines, with a bandstand.

It seemed indeed that the park had
been realised, but not in Staines.

This drawing had belonged to my aunt.

For 57 years, I thought
it was a plan of her garden.

She died of food poisoning
after eating an omelette.

The map began to fade

before I had crossed two thirds
of the territory it represented.

All that remained was a mark
that could have been a signpost

or the skeleton of a windmill.

All those 13 maps whose territory
I had passed through had faded

and in their place on each sheet was
the same mark, or one much like it.

I hurried till I was sure
that I had reached the territory

of the next map, the 14th.

It was a small drawing
that I'd admired

by a man who was
an inspector of mazes.

I had expected it to be
an invaluable asset,

but it faded before I had walked less
than a third of its territory.

The maps not only faded with use,

they faded after the allotted time
for their use had become exhausted.

I ran to keep pace with the 15th map.

It faded as I reached
its furthest edge.

I hurried on.
I was 161 miles from Astrogarth,

I was using the 16th map
and I was running.

More like A Run Through H.

I was encouraged
by the sight of a bird.

If it could rest, so perhaps could I.

I slowed up, apprehensively.

This is a map
made by an exiled pianist

as a directive
to the members of his band.

He could not foresee

that his musical and topographical
instruction should be used backwards.

As a cartographer, he was not
appreciated in his own country.

I had sent away
for a plan of Anascaul,

and had received this map in return.

It was accompanied with a note
saying Anascaul didn't exist,

but would this do?

It was too late to argue at the time,
so I kept it.

I was never able
to trace its identity until now.

The maps had stopped fading.

Unless there was some other reason,

it looked as though I had discovered
the correct walking pace.

This drawing was bought on my behalf

from a traveller who said
she had made the journey before.

I'd paid a lot for it.

I thought at the time any journey
she might take would be worth taking.

The road was clearly marked.
Perhaps too clearly.

As a map, the drawing was worthless.

The image faded, but when
it had gone, the paper was empty.

There was no mark, no cross,
no skeleton of a windmill.

I had strayed to a dead end.

Tulse Luper said, if in need,

I should play this map like a blank
in a card game.

It might get me out of trouble.

For encouragement, I had some reason
to think that I had a guide.

The 21 st map. The map
of a conscientious cartographer.

This map had been a legal orthodox
buy from an antiquarian's bookshop.

It had been kept in a map cabinet,

and exchanged in daylight
for an authorised cheque.

There was a receipt.

Yet, for all that,
I never felt the map was mine.

I had kept it hidden.

Perhaps that had helped preserve
the pencil marks from fading.

Now indeed I was among fields,

small fields
surrounded by damp cobbled lanes.

There were
enough possible routes to follow.

My daughter, as a child, on numerous
occasions stood before this map

and made imaginary journeys on it.
It was glazed.

One day, she scratched a route on
the glass with a hard engraving tool.

I was angry, but I noted the journey
and didn't replace the glass.

The journey she took is not the one
that I was persuaded to take.

There had been more than one occasion
when I'd nearly thrown this map away.

When he couldn't find it,
Tulse Luper asked where it was.

He suggested my judgement was
too much governed by other people.

This gullibility might have governed

the number of maps
I had to take with me.

By the same token,
others might take less time than I

deciding what the initial H
was to stand for.

It didn't stand for heron.

I didn't like this drawing, either.
I'd found it in a hide.

It was frozen
to the observation window.

I had reason to suppose that my guide
had been scared off.

This drawing was supposed to have
been by Erhaus Bewler

but if so, then it's a fake.

It was obviously
more valuable to me as a fake.

It saw me successfully into the
territory of the next map, the 28th,

though I was less and less inclined
to walk there.

Map 28 was no fake.

A playing field
marked out for an abandoned game

and scattered with obstacles
that made the game unplayable.

This was the map Tulse Luper gave me
himself as a present

on some anniversary of his own.

He told me
I should need to use it twice

to accustom myself to what
was to come immediately after.

And the landscape did repeat itself.

There was probably
another drawing to match this one.

I think Tulse Luper
gave it to my brother.

In the other drawing, I was sure
there were no obstacles on the pitch.

(wind)

At the end of the field
came the gate.

Tulse Luper called it the owl gate.

It was to introduce perhaps the most
significant map, the Amsterdam map.

I had known in advance
that this map would be significant.

Up until my possession of it,

any accumulation of maps I might
have made was unplanned, fortuitous.

It was only after I had been
persuaded to steal this map,

did I look for a map
in everything I possessed

and in most things
I didn't possess as well.

I had no idea how to use it.

As far as I could see, no road was
more clearly marked than any other.

Cautiously, I followed what
I considered to be an amenable route,

and soon had to retrace my path.

Up until I stole this map,
I had made no mistakes

collecting the right information
for this journey.

Afterwards, my mistakes were legion.
I collected rubbish, worthless junk.

Tulse Luper, on the evening
of my last illness,

waded through that ephemera, frowning
and tossing the papers like confetti.

Yet it was Tulse Luper who had
cajoled me into possessing this map.

He said it was imperative
that it should be mine.

This map had belonged, technically,

to the keeper of the owls
at the Amsterdam zoo.

(birdsong)

The zookeeper's name
was Van Hoyten, another H.

Before his job at the Amsterdam zoo,
he'd lived at Assidium

on the Bosphorus,
favoured by metal smiths

who hammered copper artefacts
with a tool shaped like a wishbone.

Van Hoyten was a bird counter.

He counted the birds as they flew
from Europe to Africa each autumn

along their migration route across
the Bosphorus.

(wind)

The possibilities of following any
route on this map were so numerous,

I wondered by what criterion
I should make a choice.

There were no compass directions.

I could not depend
on the top of the map being north.

(wind)

A telescope was used
to count the birds

as they flew
across the disc of the full moon.

Against the disc of the full moon,
even white birds are black.

The birds
were often two or three miles away

and in some cases,
were as small as a Scops owl.

Van Hoyten let owls go by uncounted.
They were immune from his count.

There was no point in counting what
you already knew was your own.

Areas of this map
were now becoming familiar.

So was the territory
they represented.

Had they become familiar
to other travellers?

Were other travellers obliged to
travel through the same country?

There was no indication
that they should.

They left me no signposts.

Perhaps other travellers had
different maps of this territory,

simpler
and more straightforward maps.

Perhaps the country only existed
in its maps, in which case,

a traveller created the territory
as he walked through it.

If he should stand still,
so would the landscape.

I kept moving.

Anxiety about the map fading
through wasting time

could still prevent me from halting
to satisfy such a prospect.

At Assidium, there were only four
or five bird-counting nights a month.

On several of these,
the moon would be obscured by cloud.

It might be possible to guarantee
only 30 bird-counting nights a year.

The odds were still too high
in Van Hoyten's favour.

For Tulse Luper reckoned
a count was as good as a capture.

I hid the telescope.
I locked the observatory.

Three times, I lit fires
in the observatory garden

and heaped them with damp wood
to hide the moon with smoke.

(high wind)

On the map I continued to follow what
I thought might be a sensible route.

If there had been cardinal points,

I was walking north, south, east
and west indiscriminately,

and I kept coming across the same
places and the same events.

I slowed my pace,
knowing that I was lost.

Van Hoyten had a lot of free time.
He collected feathers.

His room was full of them.
He hung them up like trophies.

When he was not collecting feathers

or counting souls as they flew
across the face of the full moon,

he was compiling a catalogue,

a catalogue of the migrating birds
of the Northern Hemisphere.

Tulse Luper said it was
important that Van Hoyten

should never finish his catalogue of
birds of the Northern Hemisphere.

He should be discouraged or he should
be lured away from the Bosphorus.

The catalogue should be completed
by some disinterested person.

An ornithologist
with no ulterior motive.

Tulse Luper wrote

suggesting I might find a suitable
map for his wife as a present.

He knew that she was dying.

At the 92nd booth of
the metalworkers' street in Assidium,

I saw this map.

I put down a deposit
to the equivalent of half its price.

I wrote to Tulse Luper describing it
and the street where I found it.

He curtly replied
that it was of no use to his wife,

but it was imperative
that I should buy it for myself.

When I went back to do just that,
the map had gone.

Three days later, it was pinned up
in Van Hoyten's room.

(birdsong)

I fell ill for six weeks
with food poisoning.

At the end of autumn,
I was offered a job

as keeper of the owls
at Amsterdam zoo.

Tulse Luper had recommended me.

I arrived in Amsterdam to find
that the job had been taken,

by Van Hoyten.

He also suggested to the
zoo authority that I was a saboteur.

That I had three times tried to
burn down the Bosphorus observatory.

I searched for his office
to confront him with this.

He wasn't there, but the map was.

I left money to make up
to the metal smith's price

and I took the map.

By the time I had passed one point
on this map nine times,

it occurred to me I might in
fact be marking time by arrangement,

awaiting the convenience
of future maps.

Maybe the time allowance for each map
stretched forwards as well as back.

Perhaps I had now been walking
through H too fast.

Van Hoyten stayed on
as owl keeper of the Amsterdam zoo.

He'd been lured away from Assidium
and I had been the lure.

When I returned to London,
Tulse Luper said

that no one
would follow up the theft.

They would leave their pursuit

until such time as I should need
to use the map, like now.

Perhaps the owl keeper succeeded
no more than to keep me waiting,

for at the end
of the ninth profitless journey,

I knew that the tenth
would show an exit.

(wind)

But even out of the maze
its influence still persisted

in a shadow story.

The yellow paper of this map is the
protective wrapping of an X-ray film.

The map was made by a radiologist

who said he was suffering from
exposure to the X-ray machine.

He was a thief
as well as a hallucinist.

He stole a jacket of mine.

In the pocket was my passport
and the draft of a story,

The Lammergeyer
and the Capercaillie.

The radiologist denied stealing
and he had nothing I could steal back

except his drawings,
so I stole those.

He reported me.

I was dismissed, not for the drawings
but for stealing the yellow paper

which was hospital property.

This is a map that Tulse Luper found
somewhere in the house.

I heard him in the cellar
and the attic.

He returned covered in dust.

Sitting on the end of the bed, he
spread out all the items he'd found.

He sorted and discarded,
arranged and rearranged

until he had the maps together
in five sections.

Then he began to sort out an order
for the maps in each section.

I asked him
how he was to organise the material.

He said he had a thousand schemes

and they would all come out
in the same order.

This map in a sense was a commission.

I'd asked a friend to show me from
the railway station to his house.

Not content with a few directions,
he spent some time on a map

filling it out with details
not necessary for so short a walk.

As it happened
the map proved worthless,

because I arrived
at the wrong station.

Since I first owned this map,
the colours have darkened.

It was an estate agent's plan.
RED stood for "redevelopment".

My wife took a drawing I had bought
to be framed.

It was one I didn't know too well,
but well enough to know

that when it came back,
it had been exchanged for another.

This is that replacement.
I said nothing to my wife,

but I went to find the frame maker.
I couldn't find him.

I told my wife I'd passed the shop
where she'd had the drawing framed.

She only looked surprised
for a moment.

Six months later, it would have been
impossible to verify either story

because that part of Dresden
was laid waste from the air.

This drawing is simpler than
the one it was exchanged for

and one word in the caption
has been changed.

This is a detail of a portrait
of a man with a hawk on his wrist.

My father paid L70 for it.
It was of his brother.

Painted in the landscape
behind the figure was this road.

Tulse Luper calmly ripped the detail
from the portrait

and included it as map 46.

I don't remember this drawing,

but I remember one like it
that was destroyed in a fire.

My son dealt with the insurance.
Perhaps he arranged the replacement.

This was a lonely road.

I have no memory of owning the map
though my wife's name is on the back

and so is the date
of my stay in the Bosphorus.

Intrigued by the map detail
in my uncle's portrait,

I wrote to his widow to find if she
knew anything else about the painter.

She sent me this drawing with a note

saying when her husband had left her,
it was the one map he left behind.

I don't remember this one.

It has a strong similarity to map 48.
The crosses are a later addition.

There's a note on the back
about grazing geese.

And I don't remember this one.

Again, there is some writing
on the back,

some personal details
that only I could have put there.

This map was drawn
by a patient named Vogel

who was hospitalised
with M�ni�re's disease.

An orderly supplied Vogel with paper,

took this drawing and others like it
in exchange for favours

and entered them for competitions
in a popular ornithological magazine.

I was one of the competition judges

and this was one of the few entries
that I kept.

In six months with Vogel's drawings
the orderly won a car,

a weekend holiday at a bird sanctuary
in the Camargue, L400 and a parrot.

The next three maps had been
the property of Canton Remadol,

an ornithologist
and a pioneer aviator.

He designed kites based on
his observations of seagulls.

The kites were often made
of wastepaper from his workroom,

paper which sometimes bore
his designs and drawings.

This is such a strip.

I'm told it is a reworking

of a flight plan
of a much earlier conceptual aviator.

I took the route
of the third alternative.

When asked about the likelihood
of making an aircraft,

Remadol reputedly said it would be
easier to breed giant seagulls

and then ride the offspring.

Tulse Luper said the maps Remadol
had collected for his final flight

were taken from the most brilliant
aeronautical drawings of the time.

Remadol crashed his last plane
into a cliff at Hastings

knocking my great-grandfather
into the sea.

My great-grandfather
had been collecting seagull eggs.

This is a plan from
a bogus ecological textbook

called
Robinson Crusoe on Concrete Island.

It shows the water drainage system
for an inclined concrete platform.

My landscape was not concrete,
but the map was invaluable.

I know nothing about this one,

I don't remember receiving
the postcard, nor did I send it.

The address on the back
is unknown to me,

as are most of the details of French
history referred to on the front.

This ostensibly
is the floor plan of a gallery

where I had once arranged
an exhibition on flight.

The red line was an instruction
for a tracking film camera.

It now served me
as a track to the 60th map.

This map had been given to me
by a charter-flight steward

in appeasement
for a cancelled flight.

It had been given to him
by an anatomist

who had signed the passenger book
in mirror writing.

Tulse Luper put in the arrows.

Along with my elder brother,
I was offered as a prize

the choice of one of several items
laid out on a table at a fete.

My brother, showing off some newly
acquired erudition, chose a drawing.

I regretfully felt obliged
to follow suit and took this one.

Much later, Tulse Luper made
some small changes and signed it.

Originally the two drawings were very
alike, which at the time surprised me

because, whilst my brother's choice
was admired, mine was not.

It seems my brother,
even at that age,

he must have been eight, was making
a decision that would be relevant.

My imitative choice
had to be corrected.

This too had belonged to my brother.

He became an archaeologist.

I made the alterations this time.

Tulse Luper raised his eyebrows,
but didn't interfere.

I followed the route
with some difficulty.

It needed some interpretation

and I left the territory
it represented without regret.

It smelt of guano.

This map of the section
of Southeastern Australia

was reproduced in possibly
80,000 school textbooks.

I'd never supposed my version
was different from any other.

Tulse Luper
used this embellished photocopy

to fix the chronology
of the map that followed it,

a journey on the plumage
of a red-legged partridge.

Only after reaching the eye
of this upside-down bird

did Tulse Luper suggest
I return to the Australian photocopy,

align the eye of the bird
with the letter I in its name

and then proceed to point A.

For my present walk,
the map was not especially clear.

I distrusted its usefulness
and its place in the chronology.

Most of all, I was uneasy
at Tulse Luper's lightness of manner,

but the alphabetical path

led me eventually
to the territory of map 65.

A map sketched in laundry ink
onto a ripped shirt collar

sent from Ceylon to a cousin who was
a milliner in the feather trade.

The information suggesting
the drawing was authentic

was also advice for me
to quicken my pace.

I walked quickly, carrying
the used maps in my left hand

and the unused in my right.

(wind, geese call)

Map 66.

There could have been books like this
one in my grandfather's front room.

I spent a lot of time in that room,

kept at a reasonable distance from
adult conversation in the kitchen.

Maybe it was my grandfather

who turned the title page
into an instruction.

It was not that easy to follow.

This drawing, I do remember.

It was on the back of a old treasury
envelope carrying an instruction

about the prevention of pigeons
roosting on government property.

This map seemed based as much on a
speculative appreciation of landscape

as on anything permanent.

And an inevitable recourse
to a darkened copy of the past map

was not that reassuring.

This map could only suggest
the approximate position

of riverbeds that had dried
and flooded several times

between the making of the map
and the journey I was taking.

But the lack of a clear route was not
causing me especial disappointment.

I was not remembering these maps
at all.

As the stack diminished,
I recognised less and less.

The maps offered alternative routes.
Their magnanimity was not helpful.

A map that tried to pin down
a sheep trail was just credible,

but it was an optimistic map that
tried to fix a path made by the wind

or a path made across the grass
by the shadow of flying birds.

The usual intentions of cartography
were now collapsing

or the route itself
was becoming so insecure

that mapping it
was a foolhardy occupation.

I was nearing the end of the journey

and the maps represented less
and less distance on the ground.

Three miles.

Two miles.

The final mile.

The last instruction.
It was drawn on the torn envelope

that had been wrapped around the maps
of the last section, a bonus.

I walked the last half-mile across
a nearly featureless landscape,

guided by a few stains
and some hesitant pencil lines.

The finish to that line
was marked by the ubiquitous signpost

or maybe
it was the skeleton of a windmill.

(birds screech)

I had arrived.

It was Tuesday morning, early,
at about quarter to two.

I had used 92 maps
and had travelled 1,418 miles.

(birds screech)

Subtitles: IMS