All language subtitles for 8. Les signes parmi nous (1998)

Man...

Man has...

in his poor heart

places that do not yet exist

and into which pain enters

in order for them to exist.

I understand better

why, earlier,
I had such a hard time beginning.

Now I know

what voice I wish
had come before me,

had carried me,
had invited me to speak

and had lodged itself
in my own discourse.

I know what was so intimidating
about beginning to speak,

because it is here where I heard him,

and he is no longer here to hear me.

While divining
nature's loneliest moment,

let my whole and unique melody

rise

in the evening, and increase,

and do all it can,

and say the thing
that the thing is,

and fall

and rise again

and cause pain.

Oh, solo of sobs,

and rise

and fall
according to its required task.

I sometimes hear men speak

of the pleasure they took

with this woman or that.

Not necessarily vulgar,

though sometimes very precise.

But I feel like telling them:

"Come now. It was something else."

Something else.
No words for it.

No sentence can embody it.

Or rather,
if I start a sentence

thinking I have
on the tip of my tongue

the picture, the moment, the color,
the fallen dress,

that glow on the woman's body,

her shoulder strap sliding down,

that feeling of fear

mixed with haste, her arms,

her wandering mind...

my memory becomes disordered.

I don't forget, but things slip away.

If I force my memory,

I suddenly understand
what happens to me.

I imagine.

Yes. I no longer remember.
I imagine.

It is morning now, I think.

You're deaf.

Rachel.

Cruel.

But I have what I wanted.

You have nothing at all.

To love, you need a body.

That is not exact.

This is exact:

In 1932, the Dutchman

Jan Ort was studying

the stars moving away
from the Milky Way.

Soon, as predicted,

gravity pulls them back.

Measuring the positions

and speed of these repatriated stars,

Ort was able to calculate

the mass of our galaxy.

Imagine his surprise
on discovering

that visible matter
represented only fifty percent

of the mass necessary
to exert such gravitational force.

Where did the other half
of the universe go?

Phantom matter was born.

Omnipresent,

but invisible.

The time when,
in the countryside,

we were alert to dogs barking
in the deep night.

When many-colored parachutes
bearing weapons and cigarettes

fell from the sky to clearings
amid the glow of firelight.

A time of basements

and the desperate cries

of torture victims
with children's voices.

The struggle of the shadows
had begun.

Enter, here, Jean Moulin,

with his terrible cortege

of those who died in basements

without having talked, like you,

and perhaps even worse,

after having talked.

In a way,
fear is the daughter of God

redeemed on Good Friday night.

She is no pretty sight,

sometimes mocked, sometimes cursed,
repudiated by all.

But don't be mistaken.
She's at every deathbed,

She intervenes on man's behalf.

That night

getting up at night

every night

faint light in the room

from where

mystery

nil from the window

no

almost nil

that doesn't exist

nil

Blank like a negative
named Ilford, Kodak or Fuji.

All of a piece,
needing to be blown upon

so it will stretch,
depending on who blows:

Hitchcock, Langlois, Vigo.
Dissolve.

Editing ideas together,
no points of suspension.

This is no crime novel or C�line.

Leave him to literature.
He deserved to suffer and re-enlist

book after book
in the regiments of language.

With cinema, it is something else.

It is life.

Nothing new, but hard to talk about.

Tough enough to live and die it,

but to talk about it...
There are books.

But cinema isn't books.

Just music and painting,

which can be lived
but not really talked about.

So cinema, you see now,

what to say about it.
Life is the subject.

Cinemascope and color its attributes,
if we are broad-minded.

Life,

a beginning of life,
like Euclid's parallel lines,

is a beginning of geometry.

There have been other lives,
will be others,

a broken blossom, hunted lions,

the silence of a hotel in Sweden.

Others' lives are unsettling.

The life itself I'd like
to blow out of proportion

to make it admired
or reduced to its basic elements

for students
and Earth dwellers in general

and spectators in particular -

The life itself
I'd like to hold prisoner

by means of pans of nature,

fixed shots of death,

long and short takes,
loud and soft sounds,

free and enslaved
actors and actresses -

but life thrashes about
worse than Nanouk's fish,

slips away like Monica's memories
in the red desert around Milan.

All is eclipsed, and it so happens that

the only big problem in cinema

is where and why to start a shot

and where and why to end it.

When we know how many deaths,

not symbolic or simulated,

but real ones,
one life costs,

we no longer care about meaning.

Only a life filled

to the bursting point
gives meaning to life,

irreducible to any meaning.

By living the combination
of all the body's forces,

life stops questioning itself

and accepts itself as pure answer.

Event

that no longer needs to proclaim
its assent to itself

to become the greatest of assents.

Nothing can comprehend this relation
of the body to the world.

The degree zero of the other is posited

when we utter the word "man".

There must be a Russian people
in swaddling clothes.

These political slaves
must have moral freedom.

These beasts in the hell
of drunkenness

and massacres

must be doted with a recklessness
unequalled in Europe.

These people, capable of anything

like cruel children
and asleep in terrible impotence,

must be the only people in Europe

who still have a god.

Shut up, Cassandra!

So long as we're asleep!

For which curtain-rise
do we rid ourselves of our dreams?

How do we dare, on waking,

bring them to light?

Oh, in the light,

each of us carries about us
invisible dreams.

Music carries us all
to that line of light

gleaming under the curtain

when the orchestra tunes its violins.

The dance begins.

Our hands slide and separate.

We lose ourselves
in one another's gaze.

Bodies brushing
delicately against one another,

trying not to tear one another
from its dream,

to send him back into the dark,

to rid the night of the night
which is not day.

As we loved each other.

It's what I like in cinema.

A saturation of magnificent signs

bathing in the light
of their absence of explanation.

It cannot be spoken.

It can be written.
Flaubert, no Pushkin.

Flaubert, Dostoevski.
It can be written.

It can be composed.
Gershwin. Mozart.

It can be painted.
C�zanne. Vermeer.

It can be filmed.
Antonioni. Vigo.

Miss!

What is it?

I took the shortcut.

- I have a secret.
- Another one? What?

Turn off the headlights.

Yes, but history. What is it?

Deep down.

Malraux.

We all felt that the stakes
were more obscure than political.

Braudel.

Measure the mass of people
who deny their misery,

who want to be themselves,

to live their lives.

As if our lives were our own.

At our disposal.

That bastard Cioran.

Nothing we know
remains without atonement.

We pay dearly, sooner or later,

the courage of our thoughts,

the indiscretions of our mind.

And young P�guy.

Ah, history...

Somber loyalty to fallen things.

I told you.

Witness means

martyr.

What's she doing here?

You see, P�guy,

she says,

today they appeal
to the judgement of history.

The modern appeal.

The modern judgement.

Poor friends,

they think I'm the judge.

I'm just the registration clerk.

An apparatus has been erected,
she says.

We live in a system
in which everything can be done

except the history of what is done.

Everything can be completed

except the history
of this completion.

You see, P�guy, she says,

night is always falling.

An image is not strong
because it is brutal or fantastic,

but because the association of ideas

is distant.

Distant and just.

I was given a last name:

History.

And a first name: Clio.

What if it didn't concern a text,

but a movement? An idea,

reality, life.

Or simply,
if it still concerned a text,

but wasn't about determining texts
on a word,

but on an idea,
or an intention,

or a movement,

or a usage

or a relationship.

When philosophy paints
its grayness in grisaille,

a manifestation of life
finishes growing old.

We cannot rejuvenate it
with gray on gray,

only understand it.

Marguerite.

Germaine.

Happy unbirthday, Margarete.

Milena.

Right?

I didn't think about death.

There is no death.

Nothing is as handy

as a text.

Nothing as handy as a word in a text.

We had nothing but book

to put into book.

What would it be, when,
into a book, into book,

one must put reality?

And with a turn of the screw,

put reality into reality.

What is always happening, my friend?

Night falls.

Vacations come to an end.

I need a day to tell the history
of a second.

I need a year to tell the history

of a minute.

I need a life

to tell the history of an hour.

I need an eternity

to tell the history of a day.

We can do everything

except the history

of what we are doing.

It is my privilege to film

and live in France

as an artist.

Nothing like a country
that every day walks further down

the path of its own
inexorable decline.

Nothing better than

an ever more provincial country

run by a rotating crew
of the same incompetents,

dishonest, corrupted by their support

of a permanently
and totally corrupt regime.

What is better than living in a land

where justice is a bazaar?

What artist wouldn't dream
of a such nation,

the world's fourth economic power,
they say.

The refutation sleeps
on our doorstep,

waiting for a coin
to stifle the pangs

of the hungry.

I am the fugitive enemy
of our times.

The totalitarianism of the present
as applied mechanically

every day more oppressive
on a planetary scale.

This faceless tyranny
that effaces all faces

for the systematic organization
of the unified time of the moment.

This global, abstract tyranny

which I try to oppose
from my fleeting point of view.

Because I try,

because I try in my compositions

to show an ear that listens to time.

And try to make it heard

and to surge into the future.

Death already included in my time,

I cannot be the enemy
of our times

because its task is to abolish time.

I do not see in this state

that a life is worth living.

As one century slowly dissolves
into the next,

some individuals metabolize

the former means of survival
into new ones.

These latter we call art.

The only thing that survives

from one epoch

is the art from it created.

No activity can become an art

until its proper epoch has ended.

Then,

this art will disappear.

Thus, the art of the 19th century

- cinema -

made the 20th century exist,
which barely existed.

Men and women believed

in prophets.
Now we believe in statesmen.

Nothing is further

from the image of the beloved
than that of state.

Reason of state
opposes sovereign value of love.

The state has no power,
or has lost it,

to embrace before us
the totality of the world.

This totality of the universe

given at the same time

outside, in the loved one as object

inside, in the lover as subject.

Cinema feared nothing of others
or of itself.

It wasn't sheltered from time.
It was the shelter of time.

Yes, image is happiness.

But beside it dwells nothingness.

The power of the image is expressed
only by invoking nothingness.

It is perhaps worth adding:

The image,
able to negate nothingness,

is also the gaze of nothingness on us.

The image is light.

Nothingness, immensely heavy.

The image gleams.

Nothingness is that thickness
where all is veiled.

The most fleeting moments

possess an illustrious past.

If a man

passed through paradise
in his dreams

and received a flower
as proof of passage,

and on waking,

found this flower in his hand...

What is there to say?

I was that man.

Subtitles: Andrew Litvack

Subtitling: Vdm