All language subtitles for Statues also Die 1953 Les Statues Meurent Aussi d.Chris Marker, Alain Resnais_engl

This film has been made possible
thanks to the friendly assistance of

STATUES ALSO DIE

When men die,
they enter into history.

When statues die,
they enter into art.

This botany of death

is what we call
culture.

That's because the society
of statues is mortal.

One day, their faces of stone
crumble and fall to earth.

A civilization leaves behind itself
these mutilated traces

like the pebbles dropped
by Petit Poucet.

But history has devoured everything.

An object dies
when the living glance

trained upon it disappears.

And when we disappear,
our objects will be confined

to the place where we send
black things:

to the museum.

PORTRAITS OF ANCESTORS

UTILITARIAN ART /
UNKNOWN ORIGIN

UNKNOWN ORIGIN

Black art,

we look at it as if
it had its reason for being

in the pleasure it gives us.

The intentions of the black
who created it,

the emotions of the black
who looks at it,

all of that escapes us.

Because they are written on wood,
we take their thoughts

for statues
and we find the picturesque

there, where a member
of the black community

sees the face of a culture.

AFRICAN MASKS

It is its smile of Reims
that she gazes upon.

It is the sign of a lost unity

where art was the guarantee
of an agreement between man and world.

It is the sign of this gravity
which delivers her,

that ancient land of the ancestors,
Africa.

Here is the first division of Earth.

Here is the fetus of the world.

Here is Africa in the 11th century.

12th.

15th.

17th.

From age to age, as
its shape slowly unravelled,

Africa was already
the land of enigmas.

Black was already
the color of sin.

Travellers's tales
spoke of monsters, flames,

diabolical apparitions.

The whites already projected onto
the blacks their own demons

as a way to
purge themselves of them.

And yet, once
beyond deserts and forests,

which he believed to be bordering
on the kingdom of Satan,

the traveller discovered nations,

palaces.

Which song cradled
this little princess?

This little orange ripened
in the caves of Benin?

Which cult presided over
this little republic of night?

We don't know any more.

These great empires are now
dead kingdoms to history.

Contemporaries of Saint Louis,
of Joan of Arc,

they are even more unknown to us,
than those of Sumer and Babylon.

In the last century,

the flames of conquerors
turned this whole past

into an absolute enigma.

Black upon black, black battles
in the night of time,

the sinking has left us only with
this beautiful striped wreckage

which we interrogate.

But if their history is an enigma,
their shapes are not foreign to us.

After the Frisians, the monsters,
the helmeted Atrides of Benin,

all the vestments of Greece
over a people of a sect,

which strike us
with a familiar language.

And it is fair that the black
feel pride about

a civilization which is
as old as ours is.

Our ancestors can look at
each other face-to-face

without looking down
with empty eyes.

But this brotherhood in death
is not enough for us.

It is much closer to us

that we are going to find
the true black art,

that which puzzles us.

The enigma begins right now,
here, with this poor art,

this art of hard wood,
with this plate for divination,

for instance.

It is not very useful for us
to call it religious object

in a world where
everything is religion,

nor to speak of an art object
in a world where everything is art.

Art here begins in the spoon

and ends up in the statue.

And it is the same art.

The wisdom in art and the
ornament of a useful object

like the head support
and the useless beauty of the statue

belong to two different orders.

Here, this difference falls apart
when we look closer.

A chalice is not an art object,
it is a cult object.

This wooden cup
is a chalice.

Everything here is about cult.

Cult of the world.

When he makes the chair rest
upon human feet,

the black creates a nature
in his image.

Hence, every object is sacred
because every creation is sacred.

It recalls the creation of the world
and continues it.

The broadest activity cooperates
with the world as a whole

where everything is fine.

Where man affirms his reign
over things

by imprinting his mark and sometimes
his countenance upon them.

Animal shapes like the one
over this weaving bobbin,

plant shapes like the ones
over these ornamented boxes,

all of creation moves in formation
under the fingers of the black artist.

God showed him the way,
he imitates God

and this is the way in which
he invents man.

Guardians of graves,
sentinels of dead people,

watchdogs of the invisible,

these ancestors' statues
are not made for the cemetery.

We put stones
over our dead

in order to prevent them
from escaping.

The black maintains them nearby
to honor them and benefit

from their power, in a basket
overflowing with their bones.

It is the dead who own
all the wisdom

and all the security.

They are the roots of the living.

And their eternal countenance takes,
sometimes, the shape of a root.

These roots flourish.
The unvoluntary beauty

of animals and plants
shines in a girl's face.

And we can take
its light for a smile,

or else its glow
for a tear,

and feel touched,
on the condition of knowing

that these images ignore us,
that they are from another world,

that we have nothing to do
in this gathering of ancestors

who are not our
ancestors.

We want to see
suffering, serenity, humor,

when we know nothing.

Colonizers of the world, we want
everything to speak to us:

the beast, the dead,
the statues.

And these statues are mute.

They have mouths and
don't speak.

They have eyes

and don't see us.

And they are not so much idols
as toys, serious toys

which have no value
except for what they represent.

There is less idolatry here
than in our saints' statues.

Nobody worships
these severe dolls.

The black statue is not the God,

it is the prayer.

Prayer for motherhood,
for the fertility of women,

for the children's beauty,

it can be covered
with ornaments

which have the value
of illuminations.

It can also be rough,
like this earthen ball

protecting the harvest,

or, still, connected to the earth,
to death,

by means of shape
and by means of matter.

This is the world of rigour,

each thing has its place
within it.

These heads don't have
to be frightening,

they have to be fair.

Look carefully at their scars,

this magnetic field
where every shape

from sky and earth
comes into being.

There's no need for the object
to exist and to serve.

This overflow of creation,
which deposits its signs

like shells upon
the smooth wall of the statue,

is an overflow of imagination,

it is freedom, turning of the sun,
flower knot, water curve,

fork of the trees,
one after the other,

the techniques are mixed,

the wood subtly
imitates the fabric,

the fabric takes its motives
from earth.

One realizes that
this creation has no limits,

that everything communicates,

and that from
its planets to its atoms

this world of rigour
comprises by its turning

the world of beauty.

A god made these gestures.

The god who wove this flesh

taught them by its turn
to weave the cloth

and its gesture sends back every
second to the weaving of the world.

And the world is the cloth of the gods,
where they received man.

Try to distinguish here which one is
the Earth and which one is the cloth,

which one is the black skin
and which one is the Earth

seen from an airplane,

which one is the bark of the tree
and that of the statue.

Here, man is never
separated from the world,

the same strength
nourishes every fiber.

Those fibers, among which,
the foremost sacrilege,

lifting the Earth's skirt,
has discovered...

...death.

Beast's mask.

Man's mask.

Mask which participates
of both beast and man.

House-mask.

Face-mask.

Pierrot of the rivers.

Harlequin of the forest.

These masks fight
against death.

They unveil that which
it wants to hide.

Because the familiarity of the dead
leads to the domestication of death,

to the government of death
by means of spells,

to the transmission of death,

to the charming of death by means
of the magic of shells.

And the sorcerer captures
in his mirror

the images of this country of death,

where one goes
by losing one's memory.

But, winner of the body,

death cannot do anything
against the vital strength

spread through every being
and which composes its double.

Through life, this double takes
sometimes the form of the shadow

or of the reflection
in the water

and more than one man gets angry
for being hit right there.

But death is not only
something one bears,

it is something one gives.

Here is the death of an animal.

Where has the strength
which inhabited this hand gone?

It is free now.

It wanders.

It will torment the living until
it has taken on its former appearance.

It is to this appearance that
the blood of sacrifice is addressed.

And it is this appearance

which is fixed in these
legendary metamorphoses

in order to appease it

until these winning
faces are done

repairing
the fabric of the world.

And then they die,
in their turn.

Classified, labelled,

conserved in the ice
of showcases and collections,

they enter into
the history of art,

paradise of the forms

where the most mysterious
relationships are established.

We recognize Greece

in an old African head
of 2000 years;

and still India;

Sumerian idols;

our Roman Christ;

or our modern art.

But at the same time it
receives this title of glory,

black art becomes
a dead language

and that which is born over
its death is the jargon of decadence.

Its religious requirements are followed
by commercial requirements.

And given that the white is the buyer,
given that demand outstrips supply,

given that it is necessary to go fast,

black art becomes
indigenous handicraft.

Each time even more degraded
replicas of the beautiful pictures

invented by African culture
are fabricated.

Here, the village is vulgarized,
the technique is impoverished.

In the country where every form
had its signification,

where the gracefulness of a curve was
a declaration of love to the world,

one becomes accustomed to
an art of bazaar.

These fake jewels,

which the explorers offer to the
savages in order to please them,

end up being sent back to us
by the blacks.

The particular beauty of black art

is substituted by a general ugliness.

An art where the objects
become bibelots,

a cosmopolitan art.

An art of the flower-pot,
the paperweight

and the souvenir pen-rack,

where one sees, transparently,
the Tower of Babel.

Also an art of portraits.

Henceforth incapable
of expressing the essential,

the sculptor seeks after
resemblance.

We taught him not to carve
farther than the tip of his nose.

But that which we make
disappear from Africa

doesn't count for much among us
compared to what we have in store.

That's because we are
the Martians of Africa.

We disembark from our planet

with our way of seeing,
with our white magic,

and with our machines.

We cure the black
of his diseases, it is certain.

He catches ours,
it is certain as well.

Who loses and who wins
in the exchange

has been of no concern whatsoever.

The magic devised to protect them
when they die on their own account

is powerless when they die
on our account.

Against the Christian paradise
and the lay immortality,

the cult of ancestors
evaporates,

the monument to the dead
substitutes for the funeral statue.

All of this dominated by the whites,
who see things from their heights,

which rise above
the contradictions of reality.

From these heights, Africa
seems orderly, rich,

covered with people
from modern cities,

filled with its concrete igloos
like white blood cells

of civilization.

From such heights, Africa is
a wonderful laboratory

where it is possible
to partially prefabricate

the kind of good black
dreamt up by the good whites.

Then all this protective apparatus
which gave sense and form

to black art
dissolves and disappears.

It is the whites who intend to
take on the role of the ancestors.

The true statue for protection,
exorcism and fecundity

hecenforth is their silhouette.

Everything unites
against black art.

Caught in a pass between
Islam, enemy of the images,

and Christianity, which burns idols,

African culture collapses.

the black-christian art.

But each of the two influences
destroys the other one.

And this flawed wedding
makes Catholicism in Africa lose

its exuberance, its glow,

everything that blacks, indeed,
anyone had recognized in Europe.

Temporal power practices
the same austerity.

All that was pretext for
works of art is replaced

be it clothing,

symbolic gestures,

intrigues,

or talking.

One says "yes, yes, yes".

Sometimes, one says "no"!

There, that is the black artist
who says it.

And so a new form of art shows up:
the art of fighting.

Art of transition
for a period of transition.

Art of the present time,
between a lost greatness

and another to conquer.

Art of the provisional, whose ambition
is not to last, but to witness.

Here the problem of the subject
is not posed.

The subject is this
naturally ungrateful earth

this naturally troublesome
climate

and inside work,
at an unfathomable scale,

the rhythm of the factory
confronting the rhythm of nature:

Ford meets Tarzan.

The subject is this black man,
mutilated from his culture

and without contact
with our culture.

His work is able to provide neither
spiritual nor social sustenance,

he works for nothing,
his reward is nothing

but a derisory salary.

Into this country of gift and exchange,
we have introduced money.

We buy the blacks' work
and we degrade it.

We buy their art
and we degrade it.

The religious dance
becomes spectacle.

We pay the blacks to give us
the comedy of their joy and their fervour.

In this way, by the side
of the black-slave,

appears a second figure,
the black-puppet.

His strength serves us,
his prowess amuses us,

on the side, he
serves us as well.

Nations which are endowed
with racist traditions

find it all the more natural
to trust to men of color

the concern for
the nation's olympic glories.

But a moving black
is still black art.

And in sport

the black can find,
hoping for the best,

a good terrain for
mystifying the white's pride.

The white does not always
appreciate the joke.

It happens that he cries "foul"
when things are turning out bad.

If a black boxer manages
to defeat a white one

in a country marked by
Hitlerian racism

they try to break him down with blows of
menacing insults and projectiles:

he had better stay in his place.

And when it's no longer for play,

when the blacks, for instance,
join the labor struggle,

it's the blows of guns and batons
that break up the demonstrations.

This climate of premeditated menace

drives the black artist
into a new metamorphosis

and, in the ring,
or in an orchestra,

his role consists in returning
the blows that his brother has received

in the street.

And witness here, far from
the appearances of black art:

for the art of communion,
the art of invention

finds accomodations within this
world of loneliness and the machine.

The man who had impressed
his mark upon things

accomplishes now
empty gestures.

What we have is this, from
the bottom of this loneliness,

that which will create
a new community.

Black art was the instrument
of a will to grasp the world

and also of the will which undertook
to change its form.

Look well at this technique,

which frees mankind
from magic.

It presents sometimes with magic
a strange relationship of gestures.

It is always against death
which one fights.

Science, as magic,

admits the necessity of
the sacrifice of the animal.

The virtue of blood.

The harnessing of malevolent forces.

The sorcerer captures
images every day.

And death

is always a country where one goes
forth at the cost of one's memories.

No. We are not redeemed by shutting off
the blacks within their own celebrity.

There would be nothing
to prevent us from being, together,

the inheritors of two pasts

if that equality could be
recovered in the present.

Less remarked, it is prefigured by
the only equality denied to no one...

...that of repression.

Because there is no rupture
between African civilization and ours.

The faces of black art

fell off from the same human face,

like the serpent's skin.

Beyond their dead forms,

we recognize this promise,

common to all the great cultures,

of a man who is
victorious over the world.

And, white or black,

our future is made
of this promise.

THE END