Original subtitles

YOU IMAGINE ROBINSON

A film by Jean-Daniel Pollet

First, we should have explained these images.

Explain now this scene,

the woman, the scarf,

the bird, the wall,

the face.

In a kind of sleep,

with also this real landscape where you are,

where you would be alive.

With the other side of the landscape as in sleep,

where you approach what scares you.

That,

the same scene that still presents itself,

another of these parts.

The same images that insist,

which come back in another way.

In an impossible wakening situation,

where open eyes would not see what should be there.

A bedroom...

Where the sleeper would dream of himself,

sleeping in a dream.

Hero of the Western World,

drifting.

Taken away thus...sleeping.

Still alive.

You imagine torture or a forbidden intimacy.

And then, after suffering,

further than you've ever gone.

You already have the gestures that will let you survive.

Now a destiny for you,

open,

of which you would be the master outside the world.

From a few images

like seeds that you would have taken away.

Here...

because of your fear, inventing.

I was in the boat. I'd been drinking.

A bomb fell.

Three quarters of the world destroyed.

Only a few portions remain of earth and water.

I was on one of these fringes by chance.

Imagining the end of this society

where you traveled,

that only you can escape.

Paris...destroyed.

New York, London, Rome.

Not even the dead... Nothing.

One survivor.

Why not?

You.

In the fable that saves you from your nightmare.

In your nightmare.

And you start by looking in the ground.

Digging.

Wanting an answer.

In your madness.

You imagine Robinson.

You imagine the story in color of a man who represents you,

thrown up on an island.

Alone

and he would have everything to do, everything to rediscover,

starting from nothing for his own benefit.

He is in reality on borrowed time.

At the same time

the allegorical ensemble from the beginning reappears.

The allegory is still there, around.

Like ghosts who would come to haunt and call to them, the one who is alive.

Fingers, hand, arm.

And after?

The face.

Mouth.

Nose.

The eyes.

An eye, two eyes.

The heart.

Or, like the meaning.

The scrambled meaning of what worries the fable,

where you recognize yourself.

Allegory, always present,

deep down,

and heavier than what could be taken for reality.

That is to say this asylum,

the place where you took refuge.

What could be taken for reality

is what we called, 200 years ago, a philosophical tale.

You would come back to nature.

You would find what would be essential.

But, if you speak you keep yourself wise,

like in an engraving from an old book

I am in the East, in the West.

In the North, in the South.

South of what?

South of the sun.

But already the sun is no more a benchmark for me.

It would take an isle or another town.

Which town? Which isle?

I don't know anything about cities anymore.

This is not a return to the origin of language.

I know nothing of cities anymore.

This is not innocence.

Rumors.

Sounds of war.

Then suddenly wars break out,

like clouds.

Elsewhere surely is fighting.

Someone is defending his right.

Who? Who is in his right?

Which is the city, right now?

Faces, friends,

shredded,

dead, defending their street.

Or a bomb.

Waking, they are all dead.

All.

Those who were right and the others.

To wake up alone.

The great silence.

Sleeper. Outside.

Outside where she walks,

she comes.

She alone who looks at you,

who is waiting, who is there,

who's looking at you.

I can't stand it anymore. I don't even want to die.

I'm going to drag myself on this square of earth

and no one, but no one.

They say the head bursts.

Let's assume these ropes at some point...

at some point

to be torn...

to break...

What would be a dream

is now installed in that which poses for reality...

And everything happens in reality, in colors and light, in the noises.

With the way for example, of moving from one day to another.

You live in the reduced space of the fable in which you dream.

In the proximity of colors.

Not moving from here.

And they are all ready to be there,

never quite absent, gone back now.

Docile, watching what happens.

Mute.

All ready to fade away.

And they look at you.

We must not let our tongue ossify.

Speak.

If need be, say anything,

but speak.

Hygienic measure.

Speak, speak, speak.

Hello, how are you?

Thank you for coming.

It is not strictly speaking a party or a meeting.

It's not...

Talk about anything.

Of this island.

The color of the sky.

While the difficulty is speaking in the image,

because these images, obviously, do not speak.

When it comes to chatting

we would say at the heart of the image, in the fable...

It's a relative meaning, a coincidence of speech.

I have nothing.

David has nothing.

David is alone,

all alone.

David is a man.

The man,

the woman, the child,

the dog.

The personal pronoun, the grammar.

Conjugate two hundred times, the verb a hundred times!

Numbers

One...

two, three, four...

I have to speak.

I have to speak.

Say the words, all the words.

Take care not to forget any.

Window...

Cloth...

Dream.

This island is populated by 625 million crabs

Crabs are red, the fish are white.

The rainbow has seven colors.

Rainbow.

Brittany, house. a wall, bricks.

Telluric, archaic, cynical.

What actually happens is what we see.

And then, what the fable has built and burnt by the fable.

What's there in front of you is burning, your shelter.

So...

the bird first detached from the allegory

and which made the link

between what would be the real world and its beyond

was sacrificed

so that everything comes together.

At this point of the story,

everything is brought back to this little corpse

and you no longer know who you are.

Then you start again according to an identical scenario:

to build, to live in,

to get something to eat, to talk about, to play,

to sleep.

There where you set yourself, where you are seen.

You are caught up in your game.

Walking through the same small space,

you don't want to go away, explore, change.

It would be disappearing.

Having decided to oneself, as in a childish bet,

that it is here one will find you.

David multiplies.

The one who lights the fire,

the one who gathers, the one who cuts.

The one who digs.

David watching birds, David watching fish

and David who...

And what passes for the dream, a unique dream,

a coherent obsession.

It returns when you summon it...

but slowly.

And this time it's you who invoke this apparition.

It's you who hold it in front of you.

She who would be no one

in your real biography,

or only a very brief moment,

if at all.

The Isle of David!

A surprising spectacle!

The wind everywhere and his nest,

because the famous David lives in a nest.

A dog!

The paw! The paw! Paw-paw!

Yesterday Ladies and Gentlemen, yesterday, David was afraid of a rat.

Not really a rat, but really scared.

Who hasn't seen David feeding on grass

has seen nothing!

But no one ever sees David.

Nobody except me.

Come on!

Come on just the same, you never know.

David's rock.

The stone that David polished with his hands,

three days and three nights of patience.

And David who could do nothing with his ten fingers, nothing!

David loved Joyce, Borges, Rimbaud,

David knew the "Vowel sonnet" by heart.

David reciting the sonnet to a girl... no, it's the girl.

Rimbaud crossing the desert to sell weapons.

and it was an air-conditioned desert, full of Arabs and camels.

David's desert is a real desert, an empty desert!

Empty! David's void!

Empty!

Ladies and gentlemen, the void!

David was good-looking.

He knew English and a little Spanish.

One day in Barcelona he got lost.

David loved Spain and bullfights!

David loved music!

He loved Bach! Monteverdi!

Bartok! Varèse!

David had his own brand of whiskey, his cigarettes!

David exhibited large canvases.

David

knew how to play with stains.

knew how to draw

eyes... feet... hands.

David no longer draws,

he polishes pebbles!

David's pebbles.

David's stones.

David's branches.

His crab.

David's crabs.

Ugly crabs, carcasses.

Inside...

there is no more crab, the crab is dead.

David's crab! His crab!

David's crab! His crab!

Despite everything you stay there.

Your fiction is completely inside the circle that it has drawn,

where you dig your grave.

And you would like to speak now.

Sick.

Return

to another landscape, so different.

See, see again, questioning you.

Don't come back...

and the water floods.

Red water

and breaking trees.

The barrier

returns to the starting point

What is blood?

Suddenly

it freezes, thickens.

I'm thirsty!

I'm thirsty!

And that stinking water! It will rot.

It will rot.

So this is the theater where you play, where you gesticulate

You always move,

in the fragments of the world that are prepared for you.

Somnambulist.

And you imagine the moment where she would dance

with the assurance of memory.

And you are afraid...

In your sleep that never stops.

Yet your memory does not belong to you.

It goes back further than you,

for example, back to the year 1719

when Robinson Crusoe appeared.

These brand new images are actually two and a half centuries old.

Since I've been counting

I've counted 67 nights.

Before.

One day I'll make you a fish or some mice.

A dog too.

An entire, still world to hear me.

The dog, I'll call him Friday

and Friday also the mice.

And every day that follows will be Friday.

I wanted to run away.

I thought I wanted to run away.

I really wanted to.

These brand new images are actually two and a half centuries old.

This is where you go, blind, today.

In a memory which is not yours.

You are in a mythology in decline.

What you do is already fully written.

The wind,

rain.

No matter.

It's for me that I write,

as I live, for me.

What you repeat, but useless.

On the sand.

And you are unable to start over what was done.

Work, animals trained to work, slaves.

You are only a refugee, anywhere.

Come out of nowhere, fell from the sky.

So that your deliverance could too, now, only come from chance.

Like what you pronounce, randomly.

I decide that today is Monday.

I might as well decide that this day has another name.

Every thing will now have the name I like.

While the five continents,

including the islands which are firmly attached to them,

are still engaged in violent history.

The weapon you made for yourself in this truly deserted island

is for playing.

Prisoner

and your deliverance cannot but fall from heaven.

I have to talk, it's the rule of the game.

Play. The intertwining lines.

A maze.

You walk, you walk, you walk.

They like money, Webster and the other one with a Z name.

All these boxes that look alike, the same.

Blacks and whites that intersect.

Queen, they eat all my pawns.

Always. I don't know.

Cards too.

The tremor when unfolding the fan.

Heart, spades, clubs. Two clubs, king to queen.

On the other side half-closed eyes.

Read in the eyes.

He doesn't smile.

His hand, huge

and the ring, moonstone.

The backs of the cards.

These marblings like birds' feet.

The imprint of a thousand birds' feet, a thousand times repeated.

A geometry.

And behind the geometry, other shapes.

Red or black.

The smell of tobacco, then the rustle of lace.

These names from the past.

Serge, Indian madapollam.

I have to decide

The lines are blurring. A geometry falls apart.

Prisoner

and your deliverance cannot but fall from heaven.

Or else

you must face the forbidden that keeps you under its spell.

Get up, get out, move on.

Nothing more!

And if it cannot fall from heaven...

Your deliverance would come from what you do now,

from violence.

A mask.

Not the dark, not the light!

Nothing!

Not even fear.

Nerves, the network of nerves.

A spider that gnaws at you.

Unfold. Why? They are there.

They are watching me like rats.

Motionless.

Not even a breath.

The foetus.

No one.

No one here to force me to unfold.

I will

go back

into the night.

Bend, bend in the water.

I asked for nothing, nothing.

I will return, bend in the water.

My head will go away.

Lapping.

The exterior, lap... lappi...

The... thousand... little

antennas.

Water, madame.

He goes

The others say:

Maria!

He goes...

This long, slow slide...

They say: Water.

Fable and allegory would through violence be erased.

These are my last words.

If my lips open again

it will be to really talk, to someone else.

I don't know if the words that I pronounce

would be understood by another.

This morning the sky is clear.

Fifty two days of getting ready.

I know perfectly well where land is.

The sun and the stars will guide me.

Fifty two days to learn the sky.

I have to go.

The worst: not knowing.

Not knowing if I've gone crazy.

Not knowing the exact number of days, of nights.

No rush to leave,

simply, I leave.

And you leave the fiction. You say goodbye to it.

You get ready,

knowing that this time again

you will stay, despite everything, inside the circle that fiction has drawn.

In the fable you will leave.

And it could be to go die in the water and the night,

in front of you.

To be only bathed, carried away.

How far you could go? Out of this world, feeding off yourself,

returning, driven.

Sleeper.

Have you ever come or come back here?

In this place that will be inhabited again by the same figures,

despite the noises, the voices.

You,

dressed as the men of this country actually are,

though you're not one.

Subtitles: Dagomir corvusalbus edit