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"The remoteness of countries somehow
balances their proximity in time."
Racine - Second Preface from Bajazet.
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00:00:19,359 --> 00:00:24,598
The first image he told me about
was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.
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00:00:32,277 --> 00:00:33,659
He said that for him it was the image of happiness
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and also that he had tried several times to link it
to other images, but it never worked.
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00:00:38,900 --> 00:00:44,430
He wrote me: one day I'll have to put
it all alone at the beginning of a film
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with a long piece of black leader;
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if they don't see happiness in the picture,
at least they'll see the black.
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00:01:22,997 --> 00:01:25,933
He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido,
the Northern Island.
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00:01:27,030 --> 00:01:29,499
Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane,
others take the ferry:
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00:01:30,049 --> 00:01:33,558
waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep.
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Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war:
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00:01:36,356 --> 00:01:42,187
night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments
of war enshrined in everyday life.
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00:02:02,670 --> 00:02:04,274
He liked the fragility of those moments
suspended in time.
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Those memories whose only function it being
to leave behind nothing but memories.
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00:02:08,427 --> 00:02:13,197
He wrote: I've been round the world several times
and now only banality still interests me.
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On this trip I've tracked it with
the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.
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At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.
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00:02:46,000 --> 00:02:47,088
He used to write me from Africa.
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He contrasted African time to European time,
and also to Asian time.
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00:02:51,592 --> 00:02:55,713
He said that in the 19th century mankind
had come to terms with space,
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and that the great question of the 20th was
the coexistence of different concepts of time.
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00:02:58,360 --> 00:03:02,633
By the way, did you know that there are emus
in the �le de France?
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00:03:13,361 --> 00:03:16,964
He wrote me that in the Bijag�s Islands
it's the young girls who choose their fianc�es.
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00:03:18,837 --> 00:03:21,789
He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo
there is a temple consecrated to cats.
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I wish I could convey to you the simplicity
the lack of affectation
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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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00:03:54,377 --> 00:03:57,319
No she wasn't dead, only run away.
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00:03:57,330 --> 00:04:00,761
But on the day of her death no one
would know how to pray for her,
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how to intercede with death so that
he would call her by her right name.
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00:04:03,950 --> 00:04:08,766
So they had to come there,
both of them, under the rain,
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to perform the rite that would repair
the web of time where it had been broken.
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00:04:26,102 --> 00:04:30,285
He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to
understand the function of remembering,
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00:04:30,286 --> 00:04:33,554
which is not the opposite of forgetting,
but rather its lining.
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00:04:33,555 --> 00:04:37,865
We do not remember, we rewrite memory
much as history is rewritten.
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How can one remember thirst?
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He didn't like to dwell on poverty,
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but in everything he wanted to show
there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model.
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A world full of bums, of lumpens,
of outcasts, of Koreans.
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00:05:09,221 --> 00:05:14,253
Too broke to afford drugs,
they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk.
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00:05:14,254 --> 00:05:19,822
This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes
from the glories of the center city,
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a character took his revenge on society
by directing traffic at the crossroads.
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00:05:22,823 --> 00:05:28,349
Luxury for them would be one of those large bottles of sake
that are poured over tombs on the day of the dead.
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00:05:57,508 --> 00:05:59,545
I paid for a round in a bar in Namidabashi.
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It's the kind of place that allows people
to stare at each other with equality;
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the threshold below which every man is
as good as any otherand knows it.
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00:06:21,466 --> 00:06:24,584
He told me about the Jetty on Fogo,
in the Cape Verde islands.
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How long have they been there waiting for the boat,
patient as pebbles but ready to jump?
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They are a people of wanderers,
of navigators, of world travelers.
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They fashioned themselves through cross-breeding here on these rocks
that the Portuguese used as a marshaling yard for their colonies.
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A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people.
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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?
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00:07:06,942 --> 00:07:12,191
He used to write to me: the Sahel is not only
what is shown of it when it is too late
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it's a land that drought seeps into like water into a leaking boat.
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00:07:16,220 --> 00:07:21,578
The animals resurrected for the time of a carnival
in Bissau will be petrified again,
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00:07:21,579 --> 00:07:23,579
as soon as a new attack
has changed the savannah into a desert.
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00:07:23,579 --> 00:07:30,375
This is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten,
with one exception: UN Japan.
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00:07:32,500 --> 00:07:38,388
My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts;
they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.
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00:09:04,280 --> 00:09:05,523
He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon,
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a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning
of the 11th century, in the Heian period.
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00:09:14,530 --> 00:09:15,618
Do we ever know where history is really made?
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Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies
to fight one another.
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Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents;
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the emperor's court had become nothing more
than a place of intrigues and intellectual games.
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00:09:27,393 --> 00:09:32,962
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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by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort
from the contemplation of the tiniest things.
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00:09:42,870 --> 00:09:52,069
Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,'
'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.'
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00:09:52,070 --> 00:09:55,896
One day she got the idea of drawing up a list
of 'things that quicken the heart.'
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Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming;
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00:09:58,698 --> 00:10:03,013
I bow to the economic miracle,
but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.
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He wrote me: coming back through the Chiba coast
I thought of Shonagon's list,
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of all those signs one has only to name
to quicken the heart, just name.
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00:13:40,485 --> 00:13:46,284
To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant,
and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid.
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Here to place adjectives would be so rude
as leaving price tags on purchases.
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00:13:51,525 --> 00:13:54,453
Japanese poetry never modifies.
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00:13:54,454 --> 00:14:02,340
There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow,
hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all.
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00:14:02,341 --> 00:14:06,498
Newspapers have been filled recently
with the story of a man from Nagoya.
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00:14:06,499 --> 00:14:11,876
The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work
Japanese stylelike a madman.
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00:14:11,877 --> 00:14:15,404
It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics.
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00:14:15,500 --> 00:14:19,171
And then in the month of May he killed himself.
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00:14:19,172 --> 00:14:22,702
They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'
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00:14:59,240 --> 00:15:01,004
He described me his reunion with Tokyo:
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like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket
immediately starts to inspect familiar places.
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00:15:06,889 --> 00:15:10,557
He ran off to see if everything was where it should be:
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00:15:10,558 --> 00:15:16,482
the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox
at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store,
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00:15:16,483 --> 00:15:18,483
which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers.
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00:15:18,483 --> 00:15:24,521
He was told that it was now little girls who made and unmade stars;
the producers shuddered before them.
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00:15:24,522 --> 00:15:28,617
He was told that a disfigured woman
took off her mask in front of passers-by
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00:15:28,618 --> 00:15:31,618
and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful.
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00:15:31,618 --> 00:15:32,860
Everything interested him.
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00:15:32,861 --> 00:15:38,437
He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant
or about the results of the Daily Double
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00:15:38,438 --> 00:15:41,438
asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done
in the last sumo tournament.
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00:15:41,438 --> 00:15:45,302
He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, ...
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00:15:45,303 --> 00:15:50,303
of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears regularly
on television to teach goodness to children.
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00:15:50,303 --> 00:15:55,742
These simple joys he had never felt: of returning to
a country, a house, a family home.
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00:15:55,743 --> 00:15:58,398
But twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.
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00:17:06,401 --> 00:17:12,068
He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains,
tied together with electric wire she shows her veins.
99
00:17:12,069 --> 00:17:17,967
They say that television makes her people illiterate;
as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets.
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00:17:17,968 --> 00:17:23,284
Perhaps they read only in the street,
or perhaps they just pretend to readthese yellow men.
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00:17:23,285 --> 00:17:27,223
I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku.
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00:17:27,224 --> 00:17:30,792
The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope
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ten centuries before the movies compensates a little
for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines,
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00:17:35,056 --> 00:17:38,056
victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship.
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00:17:38,056 --> 00:17:41,357
Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls.
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00:17:41,358 --> 00:17:44,648
The entire city is a comic strip.
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00:17:52,649 --> 00:17:55,649
It's Planet Manga.
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00:17:56,495 --> 00:18:00,335
How can one fail to recognize the statuary
that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central?
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00:18:00,336 --> 00:18:07,242
And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down
on the comic book readers,
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00:18:07,243 --> 00:18:09,243
pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.
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00:18:17,224 --> 00:18:19,543
At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages,
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00:18:19,544 --> 00:18:24,526
with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks,
with its stations and temples.
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00:18:24,527 --> 00:18:30,852
Each district of Tokyo once again becomes
a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.
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00:18:43,950 --> 00:18:48,869
The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that Indian flute
whose sound can only be heard by whomever is playing it.
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00:18:48,870 --> 00:18:53,423
He might have cried out if it was in a Godard film or a Shakespeare play,
"Where should this music be?"
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00:18:56,624 --> 00:19:02,937
Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori
where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of 'action cooking.'
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00:19:09,271 --> 00:19:13,439
He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada's gestures
and his way of mixing the ingredients
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00:19:13,440 --> 00:19:19,198
one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts
common to painting, philosophy, and karate.
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00:19:19,199 --> 00:19:26,191
He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed
in his humble way the essence of style,
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00:19:26,192 --> 00:19:33,260
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.'
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00:19:40,787 --> 00:19:43,020
I've spent the day in front of my TV set
that memory box.
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00:19:43,021 --> 00:19:45,985
I was in Nara with the sacred deers.
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00:19:45,986 --> 00:19:49,675
I was taking a picture without knowing
that in the 15th century Basho had written:
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00:19:49,676 --> 00:19:54,268
"The willow sees the heron's image... upside down."
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00:20:05,102 --> 00:20:07,057
The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye,
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00:20:07,058 --> 00:20:12,409
used to Western atrocities in this field;
not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure.
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00:20:12,410 --> 00:20:16,764
For one slightly hallucinatory moment
I had the impression that I spoke Japanese,
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but it was a cultural program on NHK
about G�rard de Nerval.
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00:20:50,358 --> 00:20:51,716
8:40, Cambodia.
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00:20:51,717 --> 00:20:55,620
From Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge:
coincidence, or the sense of history?
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00:20:56,725 --> 00:21:01,521
In Apocalypse Now, Brando said a few definitive
and incommunicable sentences:
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"Horror has a face and a name...
you must make a friend of horror."
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00:21:14,640 --> 00:21:18,710
To cast out the horror that has a name and a face
you must give it another name and another face.
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00:21:18,711 --> 00:21:22,230
Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty
of certain corpses.
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00:21:22,231 --> 00:21:25,556
Sometimes one is stunned by so much cruelty.
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00:21:25,557 --> 00:21:31,748
One seeks its sources in the Asian peoples long familiarity with suffering,
that requires that even pain be ornate.
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00:21:31,749 --> 00:21:37,492
And then comes the reward:
the monsters are laid out, Natsume Masako arises;
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00:21:37,493 --> 00:21:40,727
absolute beauty also has a name and a face.
139
00:21:52,169 --> 00:21:56,818
But the more you watch Japanese television...
the more you feel it's watching you.
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00:22:43,880 --> 00:22:48,060
Even television newscast bears witness to the fact
that the magical function of the eye is at the center of all things.
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00:22:48,061 --> 00:22:54,392
It's election time:
the winning candidates black out the empty eye of Daruma
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the spirit of luckwhile losing candidates
sad but dignifiedcarry off their one-eyed Daruma.
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00:23:03,549 --> 00:23:05,481
The images most difficult to figure out are those of Europe.
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00:23:05,482 --> 00:23:09,163
I watched the pictures of a film
whose soundtrack will be added later.
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00:23:09,164 --> 00:23:11,818
It took me six months for Poland.
146
00:23:16,096 --> 00:23:18,292
Meanwhile, I have no difficulty with local earthquakes.
147
00:23:18,701 --> 00:23:22,427
But I must say that last night's quake
helped me greatly to grasp a problem.
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00:23:24,526 --> 00:23:29,438
Poetry is born of insecurity:
wandering Jews, quaking Japanese;
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00:23:32,331 --> 00:23:35,622
by living on a rug that jesting nature
is ever ready to pull out from under them
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00:23:35,623 --> 00:23:39,768
they've got into the habit of moving
about in a world of appearances: fragile, fleeting, revocable,
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00:23:39,769 --> 00:23:45,289
of trains that fly from planet to planet,
of samurai fighting in an immutable past.
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00:23:45,290 --> 00:23:48,098
That's called 'the impermanence of things.'
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00:24:16,914 --> 00:24:17,912
I did it all.
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00:24:17,913 --> 00:24:20,395
All the way to the evening shows for adultsso called.
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00:24:20,396 --> 00:24:23,925
The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips,
but it's a coded hypocrisy.
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00:24:23,926 --> 00:24:27,953
Censorship is not the mutilation of the show,
it is the show.
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00:24:27,954 --> 00:24:29,873
The code is the message.
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00:24:29,874 --> 00:24:32,168
It points to the absolute by hiding it.
159
00:24:32,169 --> 00:24:33,867
That's what religions have always done.
160
00:24:48,441 --> 00:24:53,278
That year, a new face appeared among the great ones
that blazon the streets of Tokyo: the Pope's.
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00:24:53,279 --> 00:24:58,206
Treasures that had never left the Vatican were shown
on the seventh floor of the Sogo department store.
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00:24:59,615 --> 00:25:00,676
He wrote me:
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00:25:00,677 --> 00:25:04,778
curiosity of course, and the glimmer
of industrial espionage in the eye
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00:25:04,779 --> 00:25:10,645
I imagine them bringing out within two years time a more efficient
and less expensive version of Catholicism
165
00:25:11,646 --> 00:25:15,954
but there's also the fascination associated with the sacred,
even when it's someone else's.
166
00:25:56,569 --> 00:25:59,591
So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs
167
00:25:59,592 --> 00:26:03,488
such as can be seen at Josen-kai on the island of Hokkaido?
168
00:26:05,299 --> 00:26:08,223
At first one smiles at this place which combines a museum,
a chapel, and a sex shop.
169
00:26:08,359 --> 00:26:13,092
As always in Japan, one admires the fact that
the walls between the realms are so thin
170
00:26:13,093 --> 00:26:16,826
that one can in the same breath contemplate a statue,
buy an inflatable doll,
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00:26:16,827 --> 00:26:21,604
and give the goddess of fertility the small offering
that always accompanies her displays.
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00:26:21,605 --> 00:26:25,770
Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems
of the television incomprehensible,
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00:26:25,771 --> 00:26:30,306
if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible
only on condition of being severed from a body.
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00:26:43,380 --> 00:26:45,108
One would like to believe in a world before the fall:
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00:26:45,109 --> 00:26:49,625
inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism
whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation.
176
00:26:49,626 --> 00:26:53,212
Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain,
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00:26:53,213 --> 00:26:58,440
the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture,
share in the same cosmic innocence.
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00:26:59,649 --> 00:27:04,479
The second part of the museumwith its couples of stuffed animals
would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it.
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00:27:04,480 --> 00:27:05,999
Not so sure...
180
00:27:06,000 --> 00:27:09,755
animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship,
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00:27:09,756 --> 00:27:12,756
but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation.
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00:27:12,756 --> 00:27:17,315
And even without original sin
this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost.
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00:27:20,156 --> 00:27:25,767
In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai
I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society,
184
00:27:25,768 --> 00:27:27,840
the rift that separates men from women.
185
00:27:27,841 --> 00:27:31,343
In life it seems to show itself in two ways only:
186
00:27:31,344 --> 00:27:35,343
violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy
resembling Sei Shonagon's
187
00:27:35,344 --> 00:27:39,808
which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word.
188
00:27:39,809 --> 00:27:44,129
So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts
against which the fathers of the church invade
189
00:27:44,130 --> 00:27:46,988
becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things,
190
00:27:46,989 --> 00:27:52,177
to a melancholy whose color I can give you
by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi:
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00:27:54,178 --> 00:27:57,488
"Who said that time heals all wounds?
192
00:27:57,489 --> 00:28:02,452
It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds.
193
00:28:02,453 --> 00:28:05,895
With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits.
194
00:28:05,896 --> 00:28:09,666
With time, the desired body will soon disappear,
195
00:28:09,667 --> 00:28:13,405
and if the desiring body has already ceased
to exist for the other,
196
00:28:13,406 --> 00:28:16,405
then what remains is a wound... disembodied."
197
00:28:24,491 --> 00:28:29,442
He wrote me that the Japanese secret
what L�vi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things
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00:28:29,443 --> 00:28:34,408
implied the faculty of communion with things,
of entering into them, of being them for a moment.
199
00:28:34,409 --> 00:28:39,801
It was normal that in their turn they should be like us:
perishable and immortal.
200
00:28:47,346 --> 00:28:48,268
He wrote me:
201
00:28:48,269 --> 00:28:51,935
animism is a familiar notion in Africa,
it is less often applied in Japan.
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00:28:51,936 --> 00:28:58,300
What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to
which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart?
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00:28:58,301 --> 00:29:03,035
When they build a factory or a skyscraper,
they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land.
204
00:29:03,036 --> 00:29:08,541
There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses,
and even for rusty needles.
205
00:29:08,542 --> 00:29:12,623
There's one on the 25th of September
for the repose of the soul of broken dolls.
206
00:29:12,624 --> 00:29:22,358
The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon
the goddess of compassionand are burned in public.
207
00:29:57,762 --> 00:29:59,033
I look to the participants.
208
00:29:59,034 --> 00:30:03,522
I think the people who saw off the kamikaze pilots
had the same look on their faces.
209
00:30:35,897 --> 00:30:40,080
He wrote me that the pictures of Guinea-Bissau
ought to be accompanied by music from the Cape Verde islands.
210
00:30:40,081 --> 00:30:43,807
That would be our contribution to the unity
dreamed of by Amilcar Cabral.
211
00:30:48,285 --> 00:30:51,871
Why should so small a countryand one so poor
interest the world?
212
00:30:51,872 --> 00:30:56,062
They did what they could, they freed themselves,
they chased out the Portuguese.
213
00:30:56,063 --> 00:31:00,126
They traumatized the Portuguese army to such an extent
that it gave rise to a movement that overthrew the dictatorship,
214
00:31:00,127 --> 00:31:02,590
and led one for a moment to believe in a new revolution in Europe.
215
00:31:02,591 --> 00:31:03,923
Who remembers all that?
216
00:31:03,924 --> 00:31:06,689
History throws its empty bottles out the window.
217
00:31:11,653 --> 00:31:13,704
This morning I was on the dock at Pidjiguity,
218
00:31:13,705 --> 00:31:17,470
where everything began in 1959,
when the first victims of the struggle were killed.
219
00:31:17,471 --> 00:31:22,120
It may be as difficult to recognize Africa in this leaden fog
220
00:31:22,121 --> 00:31:26,524
as it is to recognize struggle in the rather dull activity
of tropical longshoremen.
221
00:31:26,525 --> 00:31:30,277
Rumor has it that every third world leader
coined the same phrase the morning after independence:
222
00:31:30,278 --> 00:31:32,319
"Now the real problems start."
223
00:31:32,646 --> 00:31:36,033
Cabral never got a chance to say it:
he was assassinated first.
224
00:31:36,034 --> 00:31:39,213
But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on.
225
00:31:39,214 --> 00:31:42,707
Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism:
226
00:31:42,708 --> 00:31:49,579
to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion,
temptations of power and privilege.
227
00:31:49,580 --> 00:31:53,410
Ah well... after all, history only tastes bitter
to those who expected it to be sugar coated.
228
00:32:11,612 --> 00:32:15,769
My personal problem is more specific:
how to film the ladies of Bissau?
229
00:32:15,770 --> 00:32:19,560
Apparently, the magical function of the eye
was working against me there.
230
00:32:20,447 --> 00:32:24,741
It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde
that I could stare at them again with equality.
231
00:32:24,742 --> 00:32:27,742
Les "No s� qu�" des figures
c�est proche du ritual de la seduction.
232
00:32:27,828 --> 00:32:29,992
I see her,
233
00:32:30,164 --> 00:32:32,300
she saw me,
234
00:32:32,674 --> 00:32:34,902
she knows that I see her,
235
00:32:36,035 --> 00:32:43,114
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,
236
00:32:43,172 --> 00:32:44,756
and at the end the real glance,
237
00:32:44,757 --> 00:32:46,111
straightforward,
238
00:32:46,112 --> 00:32:50,296
that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second,
the length of a film frame.
239
00:32:56,353 --> 00:32:59,173
All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility.
240
00:32:59,174 --> 00:33:03,453
And men's task has always been to make them
realize it as late as possible.
241
00:33:03,454 --> 00:33:07,532
African men are just as good at this task as others.
242
00:33:07,533 --> 00:33:12,811
But after a close look at African women,
I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men.
243
00:35:00,717 --> 00:35:02,512
He told me the story of the dog Hachiko.
244
00:35:02,513 --> 00:35:05,420
A dog waited every day for his master at the station.
245
00:35:05,421 --> 00:35:10,894
The master died, and the dog didn't know it,
and he continued to wait all his life.
246
00:35:10,895 --> 00:35:13,261
People were moved and brought him food.
247
00:35:13,262 --> 00:35:18,535
After his death a statue was erected in his honor,
in front of which sushi and rice cakes are still placed
248
00:35:18,536 --> 00:35:20,599
so that the faithful soul of Hachiko will never go hungry.
249
00:35:27,283 --> 00:35:30,176
Tokyo is full of these tiny legends, and of mediating animals.
250
00:35:30,177 --> 00:35:36,769
The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard on the frontiers of what was once
the empire of Mr. Okadaa great collector of French paintings,
251
00:35:36,770 --> 00:35:40,779
the man who hired the Ch�teau of Versailles to celebrate
the hundredth anniversary of his department stores.
252
00:35:42,439 --> 00:35:47,789
In the computer section I've seen young Japanese
exercising their brain muscles like the young Athenians at the Palaistra.
253
00:35:50,238 --> 00:35:51,539
They have a war to win.
254
00:35:51,540 --> 00:35:57,562
The history books of the future will perhaps place the battle of integrated circuits
at the same level as Salamis and Agincourt,
255
00:36:01,272 --> 00:36:04,252
but willing to honor the unfortunate adversary by leaving other fields to him:
256
00:36:04,536 --> 00:36:08,207
men's fashions this season are placed under the sign of John Kennedy.
257
00:36:46,208 --> 00:36:50,129
Like an old votive turtle stationed in the corner of a field,
every day he saw Mr. Akao
258
00:36:50,130 --> 00:36:52,603
the president of the Japanese Patriotic Party
259
00:36:52,604 --> 00:36:56,342
trumpeting from the heights of his rolling balcony
against the international communist plot.
260
00:36:58,617 --> 00:36:59,583
He wrote me:
261
00:36:59,584 --> 00:37:05,435
the automobiles of the extreme right with their flags and megaphones
are part of Tokyo's landscape
262
00:37:05,436 --> 00:37:07,707
Mr. Akao is their focal point.
263
00:37:07,708 --> 00:37:10,564
I think he'll have his statue like the dog Hachiko,
264
00:37:10,565 --> 00:37:14,565
at this crossroads from which he departs
only to go and prophesy on the battlefields.
265
00:37:21,208 --> 00:37:22,909
He was at Narita in the sixties.
266
00:37:22,910 --> 00:37:27,705
Peasants fighting against the building of an airport on their land,
267
00:37:27,706 --> 00:37:31,062
and Mr. Akao denouncing the hand of Moscow
behind everything that moved.
268
00:37:33,591 --> 00:37:35,571
Yurakucho is the political space of Tokyo.
269
00:37:35,572 --> 00:37:39,112
Once upon a time I saw bonzes pray for peace in Vietnam there.
270
00:37:39,113 --> 00:37:45,253
Today young right-wing activists protest against the annexation
of the Northern Islands by the Russians.
271
00:37:45,254 --> 00:37:50,635
Sometimes they are answered that the commercial relations of Japan
with the abominable occupier of the North
272
00:37:50,636 --> 00:37:55,252
are a thousand times better than with the American ally
who is always whining about economic aggression.
273
00:37:55,253 --> 00:37:57,105
Ah, nothing is simple.
274
00:38:03,459 --> 00:38:05,493
On the other sidewalk the Left has the floor.
275
00:38:05,494 --> 00:38:12,045
The Korean Catholic opposition leader Kim Dae Jung
kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean gestapo
276
00:38:12,046 --> 00:38:14,340
is threatened with the death sentence.
277
00:38:14,341 --> 00:38:16,909
A group has begun a hunger strike.
278
00:38:16,910 --> 00:38:20,286
Some very young militants are trying
to gather signatures in his support.
279
00:39:01,992 --> 00:39:04,745
I went back to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the struggle.
280
00:39:04,746 --> 00:39:07,965
The demo was unreal.
281
00:39:07,966 --> 00:39:09,982
I had the impression of acting in Brigadoon,
282
00:39:09,983 --> 00:39:15,768
of waking up ten years later in the midst of the same players,
with the same blue lobsters of police,
283
00:39:15,769 --> 00:39:20,342
the same helmeted adolescents, the same banners
and the same slogan:
284
00:39:20,343 --> 00:39:23,096
"Down with the airport."
285
00:39:23,097 --> 00:39:27,157
Only one thing has been added:
the airport precisely.
286
00:39:27,158 --> 00:39:31,863
But with its single runway and the barbed wire that chokes it,
it looks more besieged than victorious.
287
00:39:49,186 --> 00:39:52,358
My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution:
288
00:39:52,359 --> 00:39:56,141
if the images of the present don't change,
then change the images of the past.
289
00:39:56,142 --> 00:40:00,131
He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer:
290
00:40:00,132 --> 00:40:06,033
pictures that are less deceptive he sayswith the conviction of a fanatic
than those you see on television.
291
00:40:06,034 --> 00:40:09,786
At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are:
images,
292
00:40:09,787 --> 00:40:13,749
not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.
293
00:40:16,704 --> 00:40:21,038
Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.
294
00:41:09,171 --> 00:41:12,709
What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram,
295
00:41:12,710 --> 00:41:15,152
was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties.
296
00:41:17,601 --> 00:41:20,027
If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it.
297
00:41:20,028 --> 00:41:22,927
It was a generation that often exasperated me,
298
00:41:22,928 --> 00:41:29,095
for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle
those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth.
299
00:41:29,096 --> 00:41:33,923
But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices
no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.
300
00:41:42,248 --> 00:41:44,185
I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the struggle.
301
00:41:44,563 --> 00:41:46,537
Concretely it had failed.
302
00:41:46,766 --> 00:41:54,020
At the same time, all they had won in their understanding of the world
could have been won only through the struggle.
303
00:41:54,021 --> 00:42:00,410
As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains
in the name of revolutionary purity,
304
00:42:00,411 --> 00:42:06,382
while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly
to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives.
305
00:42:06,383 --> 00:42:12,599
Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists,
including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom.
306
00:42:12,600 --> 00:42:19,355
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".
307
00:42:19,356 --> 00:42:26,298
They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity,
and their generosity has outlasted their politics.
308
00:42:26,299 --> 00:42:31,637
That's why I will never allow it to be said
that youth is wasted on the young.
309
00:42:49,386 --> 00:42:54,538
The youth who get together every weekend at Shinjuku
obviously know that they are not on a launching pad toward real life;
310
00:42:54,539 --> 00:42:57,872
but they are life, to be eaten on the spot like fresh doughnuts.
311
00:42:57,873 --> 00:43:00,298
It's a very simple secret.
312
00:43:00,299 --> 00:43:03,517
The old try to hide it, and not all the young know it.
313
00:43:03,518 --> 00:43:08,689
The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend from the thirteenth floor of a building
after having tied her hands,
314
00:43:08,690 --> 00:43:11,859
because she'd spoken badly of their class team,
hadn't discovered it yet.
315
00:43:11,860 --> 00:43:16,490
Parents who demand an increase in the number of special telephone lines
devoted to the prevention of children's suicides
316
00:43:16,491 --> 00:43:19,465
find out a little late that they have kept it all too well.
317
00:43:20,466 --> 00:43:24,971
Rock is an international language for spreading the secret.
318
00:43:24,972 --> 00:43:27,814
Another is peculiar to Tokyo.
319
00:43:36,560 --> 00:43:39,444
For the takenoko, twenty is the age of retirement.
320
00:43:39,445 --> 00:43:41,380
They are baby Martians.
321
00:43:41,381 --> 00:43:43,938
I go to see them dance every Sunday in the park at Yoyogi.
322
00:43:43,939 --> 00:43:48,506
They want people to look at them,
but they don't seem to notice that people do.
323
00:43:48,507 --> 00:43:50,636
They live in a parallel time sphere:
324
00:43:50,721 --> 00:43:53,649
a kind of invisible aquarium wall separates them
from the crowd they attract,
325
00:43:53,650 --> 00:43:57,165
and I can spend a whole afternoon contemplating the little takenoko girl who is learning
326
00:43:57,166 --> 00:44:00,433
no doubt for the first timethe customs of her planet.
327
00:44:14,283 --> 00:44:18,599
Beyond that, they wear dog tags,
they obey a whistle, the Mafia rackets them,
328
00:44:18,600 --> 00:44:22,708
and with the exception of a single group made up of girls,
it's always a boy who commands.
329
00:45:19,923 --> 00:45:22,908
One day he writes to me: description of a dream.
330
00:45:22,909 --> 00:45:26,952
More and more my dreams find their settings
in the department stores of Tokyo,
331
00:45:26,953 --> 00:45:30,416
the subterranean tunnels that extend them and run parallel to the city.
332
00:45:30,417 --> 00:45:34,982
A face appears, disappears... a trace is found, is lost.
333
00:45:34,983 --> 00:45:38,636
All the folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day when I am awake
334
00:45:38,637 --> 00:45:44,076
I realize that I continue to seek in the basement labyrinth
the presence concealed the night before.
335
00:45:44,077 --> 00:45:49,152
I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine,
or if they are part of a totality,
336
00:45:49,153 --> 00:45:53,718
of a gigantic collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection.
337
00:45:53,719 --> 00:46:02,949
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,
338
00:46:02,950 --> 00:46:05,653
Sei Shonagon's for example.
339
00:46:07,132 --> 00:46:08,634
All the galleries lead to stations;
340
00:46:08,635 --> 00:46:11,981
the same companies own the stores
and the railroads that bear their name.
341
00:46:11,982 --> 00:46:14,699
Keio, Odakyuall those names of ports.
342
00:46:14,700 --> 00:46:18,320
The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams,
343
00:46:18,321 --> 00:46:21,162
makes a single film of themthe ultimate film.
344
00:46:21,163 --> 00:46:24,627
The tickets from the automatic dispenser
grant admission to the show.
345
00:51:18,688 --> 00:51:20,859
He told me about the January light on the station stairways.
346
00:51:20,860 --> 00:51:24,898
He told me that this city ought to be deciphered
like a musical score;
347
00:51:27,174 --> 00:51:30,681
one could get lost in the great orchestral masses
and the accumulation of details.
348
00:51:30,771 --> 00:51:35,166
And that created the cheapest image of Tokyo:
overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman.
349
00:51:35,239 --> 00:51:41,245
He thought he saw more subtle cycles there:
rhythms, clusters of faces caught sight of in passing
350
00:51:41,246 --> 00:51:44,497
as different and precise as groups of instruments.
351
00:51:44,498 --> 00:51:48,392
Sometimes the musical comparison coincided with plain reality;
352
00:51:48,393 --> 00:51:53,307
the Sony stairway in the Ginza was itself an instrument,
each step a note.
353
00:51:53,776 --> 00:51:57,331
All of it fit together like the voices
of a somewhat complicated fugue,
354
00:51:57,332 --> 00:52:00,223
but it was enough to take hold of one of them
and hang on to it.
355
00:52:00,224 --> 00:52:01,871
The television screens for example;
356
00:52:01,872 --> 00:52:07,263
all by themselves they created an itinerary
that sometimes wound up in unexpected curves.
357
00:52:07,264 --> 00:52:12,893
It was sumo season, and the fans who came to watch the fights
in the very chic showrooms on the Ginza
358
00:52:12,894 --> 00:52:15,151
were "justement" the poorest of the Tokyo poors.
359
00:52:15,152 --> 00:52:17,199
So poor that they didn't even have a TV set.
360
00:52:17,200 --> 00:52:24,061
He saw them come, the dead souls of Namida-bashi
he had drunk sak� with one sunny dawn
361
00:52:24,062 --> 00:52:26,422
how many seasons ago was that now?
362
00:53:54,427 --> 00:53:55,473
He wrote me:
363
00:53:55,474 --> 00:54:01,454
even in the stalls where they sell electronic spare parts
that some hipsters use for jewelry
364
00:54:01,455 --> 00:54:08,103
there is in the score that is Tokyo a particular staff,
whose rarity in Europe condemns me to a real acoustic exile.
365
00:54:08,104 --> 00:54:10,882
I mean the music of video games.
366
00:54:10,883 --> 00:54:16,043
They are fitted into tables.
You can drink, you can lunch, and go on playing.
367
00:54:16,333 --> 00:54:18,530
They open onto the street.
368
00:54:18,531 --> 00:54:20,687
By listening to them you can play from memory.
369
00:54:49,714 --> 00:54:51,222
I saw these games born in Japan
370
00:54:51,223 --> 00:54:54,850
I later met up with them again all over the world,
but one detail was different.
371
00:54:54,851 --> 00:54:57,016
At the beginning the game was familiar:
372
00:54:57,017 --> 00:55:00,757
a kind of anti-ecological beating where the idea was to kill off
as soon as they showed the white of their eyes
373
00:55:00,758 --> 00:55:05,250
creatures that were either prairie dogs or baby seals,
I can't be sure which.
374
00:55:06,251 --> 00:55:08,494
Now here's the Japanese variation.
375
00:55:08,732 --> 00:55:13,511
Instead of the critters, there's some vaguely human heads
identified by a label:
376
00:55:14,019 --> 00:55:16,105
at the top the chairman of the board,
377
00:55:16,106 --> 00:55:19,140
in front of him the vice president and the directors,
378
00:55:19,141 --> 00:55:23,036
in the front row the section heads
and the personnel manager.
379
00:55:23,037 --> 00:55:28,208
The guy I filmedwho was smashing up
the hierarchy with an enviable energy
380
00:55:28,209 --> 00:55:33,658
confided in me that for him the game was not at all allegorical,
that he was thinking very precisely of his superiors.
381
00:55:33,659 --> 00:55:40,207
No doubt that's why the puppet representing the personnel manager
has been clubbed so often and so hard that it's out of commission,
382
00:55:40,208 --> 00:55:42,985
and why it had to be replaced again by a baby seal.
383
00:55:48,924 --> 00:55:51,226
Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine.
384
00:55:51,227 --> 00:55:57,673
To please me he puts in my best beloved animals:
the cat and the owl.
385
00:56:04,161 --> 00:56:09,617
He claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal
with sentiment, memory, and imagination.
386
00:56:10,618 --> 00:56:16,150
Mizoguchi's Ars�ne Lupin for example,
or the no less imaginary burakumin.
387
00:56:16,151 --> 00:56:21,100
How one claim to show a category of Japanese who do not exist?
388
00:56:21,101 --> 00:56:26,082
Yes they're there; I saw them in Osaka hiring themselves
out by the day, sleeping on the ground.
389
00:56:26,083 --> 00:56:29,946
Ever since the middle ages they've been doomed
to grubby and back-breaking jobs.
390
00:56:29,947 --> 00:56:37,473
But since the Meiji era, officially nothing sets them apart,
and their real nameetais a taboo word, not to be pronounced.
391
00:56:37,474 --> 00:56:42,602
They are non-persons.
How can they be shown, except as non-images?
392
00:56:52,159 --> 00:56:55,807
Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race,
393
00:56:55,808 --> 00:56:58,273
the only plan that offers a future for intelligence.
394
00:56:59,478 --> 00:57:04,154
For the moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time
is contained in the Pac-Man.
395
00:57:05,155 --> 00:57:10,148
I didn't know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him
that he was going to conquer the world.
396
00:57:10,149 --> 00:57:14,273
Perhaps because he is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate.
397
00:57:14,274 --> 00:57:18,952
He puts into true perspective the balance of power
between the individual and the environment.
398
00:57:18,953 --> 00:57:23,722
And he tells us soberly that though
there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks,
399
00:57:23,723 --> 00:57:25,723
it always comes a cropper.
400
00:58:07,670 --> 00:58:11,346
He was pleased that the same chrysanthemums appeared
in funerals for men and for animals.
401
00:58:11,347 --> 00:58:18,266
He described to me the ceremony held at the zoo in Ueno
in memory of animals that had died during the year.
402
00:58:18,267 --> 00:58:23,033
For two years in a row this day of mourning
has had a pall cast over it by the death of a panda,
403
00:58:23,034 --> 00:58:27,124
more irreparableaccording to the newspapers
than the death of the prime minister that took place at the same time.
404
00:58:27,125 --> 00:58:30,411
Last year people really cried.
Now they seem to be getting used to it,
405
00:58:30,808 --> 00:58:35,357
accepting that each year death takes a panda
as dragons do young girls in fairy tales.
406
00:58:38,590 --> 00:58:39,782
I've heard this sentence:
407
00:58:39,783 --> 00:58:46,831
"The partition that separates life from death
does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner."
408
00:58:49,926 --> 00:58:53,517
What I have read most often in the eyes of people about to die
is surprise.
409
00:58:53,518 --> 00:58:57,764
What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity,
410
00:58:57,765 --> 00:59:03,955
as if they were tryingin order to understand the death of an animal
to stare through the partition.
411
01:00:24,134 --> 01:00:28,732
I have returned from a country where death
is not a partition to cross through but a road to follow.
412
01:00:28,733 --> 01:00:34,288
The great ancestor of the Bijag�s archipelago has described for us the itinerary of the dead
413
01:00:34,289 --> 01:00:40,127
and how they move from island to island
according to a rigorous protocol until they come to the last beach
414
01:00:40,128 --> 01:00:43,010
where they wait for the ship that will take them to the other world.
415
01:00:43,011 --> 01:00:48,029
If by accident one should meet them,
it is above all imperative not to recognize them.
416
01:00:52,490 --> 01:00:54,464
The Bijag�s is a part of Guinea Bissau.
417
01:00:54,465 --> 01:00:58,360
In an old film clip Amilcar Cabral waves
a gesture of good-bye to the shore;
418
01:00:58,361 --> 01:01:01,430
he's right, he'll never see it again.
419
01:01:01,431 --> 01:01:06,331
Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later
on the canoe that was bringing us back.
420
01:01:06,332 --> 01:01:11,574
Guinea has by that time become a nation and Luis is its president.
421
01:01:11,575 --> 01:01:14,638
All those who remember the war remember him.
422
01:01:14,639 --> 01:01:19,408
the half-brother of Amilcar, born as he was
of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdean blood,
423
01:01:19,409 --> 01:01:23,695
and like him a founding member of an unusual party, the PAIGC,
424
01:01:23,696 --> 01:01:29,226
which by uniting the two colonized countries in a single movement of struggle
wishes to be the forerunner of a federation of the two states.
425
01:01:29,227 --> 01:01:35,980
I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters,
who had fought in conditions so inhuman
426
01:01:35,981 --> 01:01:39,606
that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers
for having to bear what they themselves suffered.
427
01:01:39,607 --> 01:01:41,069
That I heard.
428
01:01:41,070 --> 01:01:44,563
And many more things that make one ashamed for having used lightly
429
01:01:44,564 --> 01:01:49,628
even if inadvertentlythe word guerrilla
to describe a certain breed of film-making.
430
01:01:49,629 --> 01:01:54,554
A word that at the time was linked to many theoretical debates
and also to bloody defeats on the ground.
431
01:01:54,555 --> 01:01:57,934
Amilcar Cabral was the only one to lead a victorious guerrilla war,
432
01:01:57,935 --> 01:02:00,360
and not only in terms of military conquests.
433
01:02:00,361 --> 01:02:02,883
He knew his people,
he had studied them for a long time,
434
01:02:02,884 --> 01:02:05,800
and he wanted every liberated region
to be also the precursor of a different kind of society.
435
01:02:05,801 --> 01:02:08,805
The socialist countries send weapons to arm the fighters.
436
01:02:08,806 --> 01:02:11,672
The social democracies fill the People's Stores.
437
01:02:11,673 --> 01:02:16,606
May the extreme left forgive history
but if the guerrillas are like fish in water
438
01:02:16,607 --> 01:02:18,607
it's a bit thanks to Sweden.
439
01:02:20,087 --> 01:02:22,474
Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguitieshe knew the traps.
440
01:02:22,475 --> 01:02:28,764
He wrote: "It's as though we were at the edge of a great river full of waves and storms,
441
01:02:28,765 --> 01:02:33,100
with people who are trying to cross it and drown,
but they have no other way out, they must get to the other side."
442
01:02:52,177 --> 01:02:55,566
And now, the scene moves to Cassaque:
the seventeenth of February, 1980.
443
01:02:55,567 --> 01:02:58,294
But to understand it properly one must move forward in time.
444
01:02:58,295 --> 01:03:01,725
In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison,
445
01:03:01,726 --> 01:03:06,659
and the weeping man he has just decorated,
major Nino, will have taken power.
446
01:03:06,660 --> 01:03:12,621
The party will have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other
will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy.
447
01:03:12,622 --> 01:03:18,412
We will learn that behind this ceremony of promotions
which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the brotherhood of the struggle,
448
01:03:18,413 --> 01:03:25,011
there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness,
and that Nino's tears did not express an ex-warrior's emotion,
449
01:03:25,012 --> 01:03:28,817
but the wounded pride of a hero who felt
he had not been raised high enough above the others.
450
01:03:32,444 --> 01:03:34,612
And beneath each of these faces a memory.
451
01:03:34,613 --> 01:03:37,813
And in place of what we were told had been forged
into a collective memory,
452
01:03:37,814 --> 01:03:43,849
a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration
in the great wound of history.
453
01:03:45,432 --> 01:03:48,377
In Portugalraised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau
454
01:03:48,378 --> 01:03:52,372
Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life
against the dictatorship wrote:
455
01:03:52,373 --> 01:03:55,891
"Every protagonist represents only himself;
456
01:03:55,892 --> 01:04:03,495
in place of a change in the social setting
he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation of his own image."
457
01:04:06,684 --> 01:04:09,028
That's the way the breakers recede.
458
01:04:09,029 --> 01:04:14,514
And so predictably that one has to believe
in a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes
459
01:04:14,515 --> 01:04:17,866
through mercy
or calculation to those whom it recruits:
460
01:04:17,867 --> 01:04:21,976
Amilcar murdered by members of his own party,
461
01:04:21,977 --> 01:04:26,207
the liberated areas fallen under the yoke of bloody petty tyrants
462
01:04:26,208 --> 01:04:31,214
liquidated in their turn by a central power
to whose stability everyone paid homage until the military coup.
463
01:04:31,215 --> 01:04:36,624
That's how history advances,
plugging its memory as one plugs one's ears.
464
01:04:36,625 --> 01:04:41,780
Luis exiled to Cuba,
Nino discovering in his turn plots woven against him,
465
01:04:41,781 --> 01:04:45,079
can be cited reciprocally to appear before the bar of history.
466
01:04:45,080 --> 01:04:48,362
She doesn't care, she understands nothing,
467
01:04:48,363 --> 01:04:52,308
she has only one friend,
the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse: horror.
468
01:04:52,309 --> 01:04:54,643
That has a name and a face.
469
01:04:56,797 --> 01:04:59,959
I'm writing you all this from another world,
a world of appearances.
470
01:04:59,960 --> 01:05:03,380
In a way the two worlds communicate with each other.
471
01:05:03,381 --> 01:05:08,509
Memory is to one what history is to the other:
an impossibility.
472
01:05:08,510 --> 01:05:12,258
Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable.
473
01:05:12,259 --> 01:05:15,493
Memories must make do with their delirium,
with their drift.
474
01:05:18,156 --> 01:05:22,239
A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film
blocked before the furnace of the projector.
475
01:05:23,240 --> 01:05:25,532
Madness protects, as fever does.
476
01:05:27,533 --> 01:05:32,478
I envy Hayao in his 'zone,'
he plays with the signs of his memory.
477
01:05:32,479 --> 01:05:36,798
He pins them down and decorates them like insects
that would have flown beyond time,
478
01:05:36,799 --> 01:05:42,476
and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time:
the only eternity we have left.
479
01:05:43,477 --> 01:05:45,472
I look at his machines.
480
01:05:45,473 --> 01:05:49,255
I think of a world where each memory
could create its own legend.
481
01:06:51,894 --> 01:06:58,019
He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory
insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
482
01:07:01,024 --> 01:07:05,600
In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering
a field ever wider as it moved away,
483
01:07:05,601 --> 01:07:10,218
a cyclone whose present moment contains,
motionless, the eye.
484
01:07:12,289 --> 01:07:15,174
In San Francisco he had made his pilgrimage
to all the film's locations:
485
01:07:15,175 --> 01:07:21,146
the florist Podesta Baldocchi,
where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak;
486
01:07:21,147 --> 01:07:23,147
he the hunter, she the prey.
487
01:07:23,147 --> 01:07:27,875
Or was it the other way around?
The tiles hadn't changed.
488
01:07:26,876 --> 01:07:34,760
He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco
where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline.
489
01:07:38,898 --> 01:07:41,195
It seems to be a question of trailing,
of enigma, of murder,
490
01:07:41,196 --> 01:07:45,646
but in truth it's a question of power and freedom,
of melancholy and dazzlement,
491
01:07:45,647 --> 01:07:50,187
so carefully coded within the spiral
that you could miss it,
492
01:07:50,188 --> 01:07:55,537
and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space
in reality stands for the vertigo of time.
493
01:07:57,988 --> 01:08:00,909
He had followed all the trails,
even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores,
494
01:08:00,910 --> 01:08:06,561
where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead,
whom she should not have known.
495
01:08:06,562 --> 01:08:14,818
He followed Madelineas Scotty had doneto the Museum at the Legion of Honor,
before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known.
496
01:08:14,819 --> 01:08:20,331
And on the portrait, as in Madeline's hair,
the spiral of time.
497
01:08:28,216 --> 01:08:31,590
The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared
had disappeared itself;
498
01:08:31,591 --> 01:08:34,817
concrete had replaced it,
at the corner of Eddy and Gough.
499
01:08:34,818 --> 01:08:39,612
On the other hand, the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods.
500
01:08:39,613 --> 01:08:45,712
On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines
that measured the age of the tree and said,
501
01:08:45,713 --> 01:08:49,282
"Here I was born... and here I died."
502
01:08:49,283 --> 01:08:53,193
He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted.
503
01:08:53,194 --> 01:08:56,632
The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris,
504
01:08:56,633 --> 01:09:01,215
and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree,
outside of time.
505
01:09:05,314 --> 01:09:08,897
The painted horse at San Juan Bautista,
his eye that looked like Madeline's:
506
01:09:08,898 --> 01:09:12,197
Hitchcock had invented nothing,
it was all there.
507
01:09:12,198 --> 01:09:17,384
He had run under the arches of the promenade in the mission
as Madeline had run towards her death.
508
01:09:17,385 --> 01:09:19,244
Or was it hers?
509
01:09:22,845 --> 01:09:25,237
From this fake tower
the only thing that Hitchcock had added
510
01:09:25,238 --> 01:09:32,091
he imagined Scotty as time's fool of love,
finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it.
511
01:09:32,092 --> 01:09:38,151
Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time,
a zone that would belong only to him
512
01:09:38,152 --> 01:09:42,275
and from which he could decipher
the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate
513
01:09:42,276 --> 01:09:45,461
when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay,
514
01:09:45,462 --> 01:09:47,682
when he had saved her from death
before casting her back to death.
515
01:09:47,683 --> 01:09:49,882
Or was it the other way around?
516
01:10:06,691 --> 01:10:09,764
In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film
I had seen nineteen times.
517
01:10:09,765 --> 01:10:13,709
In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film.
518
01:10:13,710 --> 01:10:18,684
That summer I had met three children on a road
and a volcano had come out of the sea.
519
01:10:18,685 --> 01:10:20,894
Encore un blablabla de s�enveiller.
520
01:10:23,625 --> 01:10:26,904
The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon,
in this corner of Earth that resembles it.
521
01:10:27,177 --> 01:10:30,883
I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction:
the landscape of another planet.
522
01:10:30,884 --> 01:10:35,160
Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet
for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away.
523
01:10:37,261 --> 01:10:41,915
I imagine him moving slowly, heavily,
about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles.
524
01:10:41,962 --> 01:10:45,880
All of a sudden he stumbles,
and the next step it's a year later.
525
01:10:45,955 --> 01:10:50,957
He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border
along a sea bird sanctuary.
526
01:10:53,564 --> 01:10:55,093
That's for a start.
527
01:10:55,094 --> 01:11:00,271
Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories?
That's just it, he can't understand.
528
01:11:00,272 --> 01:11:03,247
He hasn't come from another planet,
he comes from our future,
529
01:11:04,630 --> 01:11:05,617
Four thousand and one:
530
01:11:06,098 --> 01:11:08,909
the time when the human brain has reached
the era of full employment.
531
01:11:08,910 --> 01:11:13,424
Everything works to perfection,
all that we allow to slumber, including memory.
532
01:11:13,449 --> 01:11:18,449
Logical consequence:
total recall is memory anesthetized.
533
01:11:18,629 --> 01:11:21,477
After so many stories of men who had lost their memory,
534
01:11:21,478 --> 01:11:27,970
here is the story of one who has lost forgetting,
and whothrough some peculiarity of his nature
535
01:11:27,971 --> 01:11:32,046
instead of drawing pride from the fact and
scorning mankind of the past and its shadows,
536
01:11:32,153 --> 01:11:35,666
turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion.
537
01:11:36,001 --> 01:11:40,486
In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision,
to be moved by a portrait,
538
01:11:40,509 --> 01:11:44,840
to tremble at the sound of music,
can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history.
539
01:11:44,841 --> 01:11:47,176
He wants to understand.
540
01:11:47,202 --> 01:11:50,608
He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice,
541
01:11:50,609 --> 01:11:55,765
and he reacts to that injustice like Ch� Guevara,
like the youth of the sixties, with indignation.
542
01:11:55,766 --> 01:11:59,180
He is a Third Worlder of time.
543
01:11:59,181 --> 01:12:04,165
The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past
is as unbearable to him
544
01:12:04,489 --> 01:12:06,620
as to them the existence of poverty in their present.
545
01:12:10,819 --> 01:12:12,110
Naturally he'll fail.
546
01:12:12,111 --> 01:12:18,421
The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him
as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children of a rich one.
547
01:12:18,593 --> 01:12:24,465
He has chosen to give up his privileges,
but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose.
548
01:12:25,466 --> 01:12:32,362
His only recourse is precisely that which threw him into this absurd quest:
a song cycle by Mussorgsky.
549
01:12:32,363 --> 01:12:35,531
They are still sung in the fortieth century.
550
01:12:35,532 --> 01:12:38,803
Their meaning has been lost,
but it was then that for the first time,
551
01:12:38,804 --> 01:12:43,695
he perceived the presence of that thing he didn't understand
which had something to do with unhappiness and memory,
552
01:12:43,696 --> 01:12:50,222
and towards which slowly, heavily,
he began to walk.
553
01:12:53,725 --> 01:12:55,449
Of course I'll never make that film.
554
01:12:58,799 --> 01:13:03,475
Nonetheless I'm collecting the sets, inventing the twists,
putting in my favorite creatures.
555
01:13:03,476 --> 01:13:10,630
I've even given it a title,
indeed the title of those Mussorgsky songs: Sunless.
556
01:13:31,615 --> 01:13:33,886
On May 15, 1945, at seven o'clock in the morning,
557
01:13:33,887 --> 01:13:39,710
the three hundred and eighty second US infantry regiment
attacked a hill in Okinawa they had renamed 'Dick Hill.'
558
01:13:39,711 --> 01:13:43,885
I suppose the Americans themselves believed
that they were conquering Japanese soil,
559
01:13:43,886 --> 01:13:47,061
and that they knew nothing about the Ryukyu civilization.
560
01:13:47,062 --> 01:13:53,318
Neither did I, apart from the fact that the faces of the market ladies at Itoman
spoke to me more of Gauguin than of Utamaro.
561
01:13:53,319 --> 01:13:58,626
For centuries of dreamy vassalage,
time had not moved in the archipelago.
562
01:13:58,627 --> 01:14:00,423
Then came the break.
563
01:14:00,424 --> 01:14:04,927
Is it a property of islands to make their women
into the guardians of their memory?
564
01:14:04,928 --> 01:14:09,573
I learned thatas in the Bijag�s
it is through the women that magic knowledge is transmitted.
565
01:14:09,574 --> 01:14:15,454
Each community has its priestessthe noro
who presides over all ceremonies with the exception of funerals.
566
01:14:15,455 --> 01:14:18,835
The Japanese defended their position inch by inch.
567
01:14:18,836 --> 01:14:24,014
At the end of the day, the two half platoons formed from the remnants
of L Company had got only halfway up the hill,
568
01:14:24,015 --> 01:14:30,393
a hill like the one where I followed a group of villagers
on their way to the purification ceremony.
569
01:14:30,394 --> 01:14:35,328
The noro communicates with the gods of the sea,
of rain, of the earth, of fire.
570
01:14:35,329 --> 01:14:38,901
Everyone bows down before the sister deity
571
01:14:38,902 --> 01:14:45,798
who is the reflection, in the absolute,
of a privileged relationship between brother and sister.
572
01:14:45,799 --> 01:14:49,425
Even after her death,
the sister retains her spiritual predominance.
573
01:14:49,426 --> 01:14:51,948
At dawn the Americans withdrew.
574
01:14:51,949 --> 01:14:56,857
Fighting went on for over a month before the island surrendered,
and toppled into the modern world.
575
01:14:56,858 --> 01:15:01,815
Twenty-seven years of American occupation,
the re-establishment of a controversial Japanese sovereignty:
576
01:15:01,816 --> 01:15:06,813
two miles from the bowling alleys and the gas stations
the noro continues her dialogue with the gods.
577
01:15:06,814 --> 01:15:10,377
When she is gone the dialogue will end.
578
01:15:10,378 --> 01:15:13,863
Brothers will no longer know that their dead sister
is watching over them.
579
01:16:21,506 --> 01:16:24,248
When filming this ceremony I knew I was present
at the end of something.
580
01:16:24,249 --> 01:16:29,097
Magical cultures that disappear leave traces
to those who succeed them.
581
01:16:29,098 --> 01:16:32,643
This one will leave none;
the break in history has been too violent.
582
01:16:32,644 --> 01:16:39,962
I touched that break at the summit of the hill,
as I had touched it at the edge of the ditch
583
01:16:39,963 --> 01:16:44,765
where two hundred girls had used grenades to commit suicide in 1945
rather than fall alive into the hands of the Americans.
584
01:16:44,766 --> 01:16:46,839
People have their pictures taken in front of the ditch.
585
01:16:46,840 --> 01:16:50,910
Across from it souvenir lighters are sold shaped like grenades.
586
01:16:57,222 --> 01:17:01,926
On Hayao's machine war resembles letters being burned,
shredded in a frame of fire.
587
01:17:01,927 --> 01:17:09,966
The code name for Pearl Harbor was Tora, Tora, Tora,
the name of the cat the couple in Gokokuji was praying for.
588
01:17:09,967 --> 01:17:14,106
So all of this will have begun with the name of a cat pronounced three times.
589
01:17:23,122 --> 01:17:28,606
Off Okinawa kamikaze dived on the American fleet;
they would become a legend.
590
01:17:28,607 --> 01:17:35,067
They were likelier material for it obviously than the special units
who exposed their prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria
591
01:17:35,068 --> 01:17:38,653
and then to hot water so as to see
how fast flesh separates from the bone.
592
01:17:38,654 --> 01:17:43,349
One would have to read their last letters to learn
that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers,
593
01:17:43,350 --> 01:17:45,998
nor were they all swashbuckling samurai.
594
01:17:45,999 --> 01:17:51,395
Before drinking his last cup of sak� Ryoji Uebara had written:
595
01:17:51,396 --> 01:17:54,957
"I have always thought that Japan must live free in order to live eternally.
596
01:17:54,958 --> 01:17:59,342
It may seem idiotic to say that today, under a totalitarian regime.
597
01:17:59,343 --> 01:18:08,809
We kamikaze pilots are machines, we have nothing to say,
except to beg our compatriots to make Japan the great country of our dreams.
598
01:18:08,810 --> 01:18:14,168
In the plane I am a machine, a bit of magnetized metal
that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier.
599
01:18:14,169 --> 01:18:18,153
But once on the ground I am a human being
with feelings and passions.
600
01:18:18,154 --> 01:18:21,020
Please excuse these disorganized thoughts.
601
01:18:21,021 --> 01:18:24,867
I'm leaving you a rather melancholy picture,
but in the depths of my heart I am happy.
602
01:18:24,868 --> 01:18:28,902
I have spoken frankly, forgive me."
603
01:19:51,226 --> 01:19:56,163
Every time he came from Africa he stopped at the island of Sal,
which is in fact a salt rock in the middle of the Atlantic.
604
01:19:56,164 --> 01:20:01,508
At the end of the island, beyond the village of Santa Maria
and its cemetery with the painted tombs,
605
01:20:01,509 --> 01:20:04,660
it suffices to walk straight ahead to meet the desert.
606
01:20:19,655 --> 01:20:22,368
He wrote me:
I've understood the visions.
607
01:20:22,369 --> 01:20:27,342
Suddenly you're in the desert the way you are in the night;
whatever is not desert no longer exists.
608
01:20:27,343 --> 01:20:30,152
You don't want to believe the images that crop up.
609
01:21:24,894 --> 01:21:26,895
Did I write you that there are emus in the Ile de France?
610
01:21:26,896 --> 01:21:32,466
This nameIsland of France
sounds strangely on the island of Sal.
611
01:21:32,467 --> 01:21:34,895
My memory superimposes two towers:
612
01:21:34,896 --> 01:21:38,718
the one at the ruined castle of Montpilloy
that served as an encampment for Joan of Arc,
613
01:21:38,719 --> 01:21:44,500
and the lighthouse tower at the southern tip of Sal,
probably one of the last lighthouses to use oil.
614
01:22:08,848 --> 01:22:14,668
A lighthouse in the Sahel looks like a collage
until you see the ocean at the edge of the sand and salt.
615
01:22:14,669 --> 01:22:18,587
Crews of transcontinental planes are rotated on Sal.
616
01:22:18,588 --> 01:22:23,954
Their club brings to this frontier of nothingness a small touch
of the seaside resort which makes the rest still more unreal.
617
01:22:23,955 --> 01:22:27,052
They feed the stray dogs that live on the beach.
618
01:22:41,509 --> 01:22:47,041
I found my dogs pretty nervous tonight;
they were playing with the sea as I had never seen them before.
619
01:22:47,042 --> 01:22:53,323
Listening to Radio Hong Kong later on I understood:
today was the first day of the lunar new year,
620
01:22:53,324 --> 01:22:58,657
and for the first time in sixty years
the sign of the dog met the sign of water.
621
01:23:40,075 --> 01:23:43,823
Out there, eleven thousand miles away,
a single shadow remains immobile
622
01:23:43,824 --> 01:23:47,303
in the midst of the long moving shadows
that the January light throws over the ground of Tokyo:
623
01:23:47,304 --> 01:23:49,663
the shadow of the Asakusa bonze.
624
01:24:38,113 --> 01:24:40,401
For also in Japan the year of the dog is beginning.
625
01:24:40,402 --> 01:24:44,779
Temples are filled with visitors who come
to toss down their coins and to prayJapanese style
626
01:24:44,780 --> 01:24:48,561
a prayer
which slips into life without interrupting it.
627
01:25:19,839 --> 01:25:24,112
Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal
in the company of my prancing dogs
628
01:25:24,113 --> 01:25:29,896
I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather
I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo.
629
01:25:29,897 --> 01:25:32,820
They have substituted themselves for my memory.
630
01:25:32,821 --> 01:25:34,583
They are my memory.
631
01:25:34,584 --> 01:25:39,909
I wonder how people remember things
who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape.
632
01:25:39,910 --> 01:25:42,361
How has mankind managed to remember?
633
01:25:42,362 --> 01:25:44,826
I know: it wrote the Bible.
634
01:25:44,827 --> 01:25:52,735
The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time
that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.
635
01:25:52,736 --> 01:25:56,818
As we await the year four thousand and one and its total recall,
636
01:25:56,819 --> 01:26:02,096
that's what the oracles we take out of their long hexagonal boxes
at new year may offer us:
637
01:26:02,097 --> 01:26:07,307
a little more power over that memory
that runs from camp to camplike Joan of Arc.
638
01:26:07,308 --> 01:26:12,682
That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong radio
picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo,
639
01:26:12,683 --> 01:26:20,851
and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces
back on another country, another distance, another music, endlessly.
640
01:26:30,075 --> 01:26:31,727
At the end of memory's path,
641
01:26:31,728 --> 01:26:38,423
the ideograms of the Island of France are no less enigmatic
than the kanji of Tokyo in the miraculous light of the new year.
642
01:26:38,424 --> 01:26:45,301
It's Indian winter, as if the air were the first element
to emerge purified from the countless ceremonies
643
01:26:45,302 --> 01:26:48,741
by which the Japanese wash off
one year to enter the next one.
644
01:26:48,742 --> 01:26:54,124
A full month is just enough for them to fulfill
all the duties that courtesy owes to time,
645
01:26:54,125 --> 01:27:00,167
the most interesting unquestionably being the acquisition
at the temple of Tenjin of the uso bird,
646
01:27:00,168 --> 01:27:06,107
who according to one tradition eats all your lies of the year to come,
and according to another turns them into truths.
647
01:27:07,377 --> 01:27:14,130
But what gives the street its color in January,
what makes it suddenly different is the appearance of kimono.
648
01:27:14,131 --> 01:27:22,672
In the street, in stores, in offices, even at the stock exchange
on opening day, the girls take out their fur collared winter kimono.
649
01:27:22,673 --> 01:27:27,800
At that moment of the year other Japanese
may well invent extra flat TV sets,
650
01:27:27,801 --> 01:27:30,563
commit suicide with a chain saw,
or capture two thirds of the world market for semiconductors.
651
01:27:30,564 --> 01:27:32,399
Good for them;
all you see are the girls.
652
01:27:44,850 --> 01:27:49,131
The fifteenth of January is coming of age day:
an obligatory celebration in the life of a young Japanese woman.
653
01:27:49,132 --> 01:27:54,280
The city governments distribute small bags
filled with gifts, datebooks, advice:
654
01:27:54,281 --> 01:27:57,555
how to be a good citizen, a good mother, a good wife.
655
01:27:57,556 --> 01:28:03,992
On that day every twenty-year-old girl
can phone her family for free, no matter where in Japan.
656
01:28:04,993 --> 01:28:09,269
Flag, home, and country:
this is the anteroom of adulthood.
657
01:28:09,270 --> 01:28:13,622
The world of the takenoko and of rock singers
speeds away like a rocket.
658
01:28:13,623 --> 01:28:17,354
Speakers explain what society expects of them.
659
01:28:17,355 --> 01:28:21,422
How long will it take to forget the secret?
660
01:29:18,854 --> 01:29:22,337
And when all the celebrations are over it
remains only to pick up all the ornaments
661
01:29:22,338 --> 01:29:26,370
all the accessories of the celebration
and by burning them, make a celebration.
662
01:30:10,456 --> 01:30:16,598
This is dondo-yaki, a Shinto blessing of the debris
that have a right to immortalitylike the dolls at Ueno.
663
01:30:16,599 --> 01:30:21,139
The last statebefore their disappearance
of the poignancy of things.
664
01:30:21,140 --> 01:30:26,368
Darumathe one eyed spirit
reigns supreme at the summit of the bonfire.
665
01:30:26,369 --> 01:30:29,765
Abandonment must be a feast;
laceration must be a feast.
666
01:30:29,766 --> 01:30:33,621
And the farewell to all that one has lost, broken,
used, must be ennobled by a ceremony.
667
01:30:33,622 --> 01:30:38,506
It's Japan that could fulfill the wish of that French writer
who wanted divorce to be made a sacrament.
668
01:30:38,507 --> 01:30:44,711
The only baffling part of this ritual was the circle of children
striking the ground with their long poles.
669
01:30:44,712 --> 01:30:50,571
I only got one explanation, a singular one
although for me it might take the form of a small intimate service
670
01:30:50,572 --> 01:30:52,485
it was to chase away the moles.
671
01:31:34,465 --> 01:31:38,090
And that's where my three children of Iceland
came and grafted themselves in.
672
01:31:40,173 --> 01:31:43,629
I picked up the whole shot again,
adding the somewhat hazy end,
673
01:31:43,630 --> 01:31:47,224
the frame trembling under the force of the wind
beating us down on the cliff:
674
01:31:47,225 --> 01:31:52,501
everything I had cut in order to tidy up, and that said
better than all the rest what I saw in that moment,
675
01:31:52,502 --> 01:31:57,604
why I held it at arms length, at zooms length,
until its last twenty-fourth of a second.
676
01:32:00,433 --> 01:32:02,065
The city of Heimaey spread out below us.
677
01:32:02,066 --> 01:32:06,304
And when five years later my friend Haroun Tazieff sent me the film
he had just shot in the same place
678
01:32:06,305 --> 01:32:11,172
I lacked only the name to learn that
nature performs its own dondo-yaki;
679
01:32:12,173 --> 01:32:14,792
the island's volcano had awakened.
680
01:32:14,793 --> 01:32:20,910
I looked at those pictures, and it was as
if the entire year '65 had just been covered with ashes.
681
01:32:38,329 --> 01:32:42,577
So, it sufficed to wait and the planet itself
staged the working of time.
682
01:32:43,710 --> 01:32:46,077
I saw what had been my window again.
683
01:32:46,078 --> 01:32:49,689
I saw emerge familiar roofs and balconies,
684
01:32:49,690 --> 01:32:55,685
the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day,
down to the cliff where I had met the children.
685
01:32:55,689 --> 01:33:02,956
The cat with white socks that Haroun had been considerate
enough to film for me naturally found its place.
686
01:33:02,957 --> 01:33:09,637
And I thought, of all the prayers to time that had studded this trip
the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of Gotokuji,
687
01:33:09,638 --> 01:33:16,932
who said simply to her cat Tora,
"Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you."
688
01:33:38,492 --> 01:33:45,237
And then in its turn the journey entered the 'zone,'
and Hayao showed me my images already affected by the moss of time,
689
01:33:45,238 --> 01:33:49,982
freed of the lie that had prolonged the existence
of those moments swallowed by the spiral.
690
01:34:06,653 --> 01:34:11,432
When spring came, when every crow announced
its arrival by raising his cry half a tone,
691
01:34:11,433 --> 01:34:19,437
I took the green train of the Yamanote line and
got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office.
692
01:34:19,438 --> 01:34:25,105
Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light
Japanese style
693
01:34:25,106 --> 01:34:27,973
so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars.
694
01:34:27,974 --> 01:34:32,489
Even if I was expecting no letter
I stopped at the general delivery window,
695
01:34:32,490 --> 01:34:40,361
for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters,
and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters.
696
01:34:40,362 --> 01:34:44,399
I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West,
697
01:34:44,400 --> 01:34:47,440
that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being,
what is spoken to what is left unsaid.
698
01:34:47,441 --> 01:34:50,919
I walked alongside the little stalls of clothing dealers.
699
01:34:50,920 --> 01:34:57,004
I heard in the distance Mr. Akao's voice reverberating
from the loudspeakers... a half tone higher.
700
01:34:57,005 --> 01:35:02,297
Then I went down into the basement where my friend
the maniacbusies himself with his electronic graffiti.
701
01:35:02,298 --> 01:35:09,210
Finally his language touches me, because he talks to that part of us
which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls.
702
01:35:09,211 --> 01:35:14,470
A piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not,
or is no longer, or is not yet;
703
01:35:14,471 --> 01:35:20,645
the handwriting each one of us will use to compose his own list of 'things
that quicken the heart,' to offer, or to erase.
704
01:35:20,646 --> 01:35:29,096
In that moment poetry will be made by everyone,
and there will be emus in the 'zone.'
705
01:35:48,831 --> 01:35:51,786
He writes me from Japan.
He writes me from Africa.
706
01:35:51,787 --> 01:35:58,576
He writes that he can now summon up the look on the face
of the market lady of Praia that had lasted only the length of a film frame.
707
01:35:58,577 --> 01:36:02,532
Will there be a last letter?
707
01:36:03,000 --> 01:36:06,147
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