Original subtitles

World's masters should be...

...wary of Bécassine: she is silent

Fairy's five fingers

together they make up the hand

Man's true condition:

to think with hands

Archives and Moral

Go fetch the books... we'll have a look

Image and Words

No bullshit

SIGNS AMONGST US PICTURE

It's like a bad dream

written in a stormy night

Moral fault was merged with state crimes

One would carry out the savior act

if we could drive to death

our way of thinking and talking

that want only to keep up appearances

Tell lies

I'm not sad that you are leaving

I'm not in love with you

I don't kiss you tenderly

Americans are trying to question a fighting girl

Insults, communist songs

more simply: cries of pain

Climb up on the chair!

You live with your parents?

To be or not being

Spring 1944, the war was over

Please, please

To be immortal has no interest for you?

What will become of me if I don't die?

It's our first quarrel

We have signed

With communists I'll go to death

but I'll not do one more step

He started it,... that's the truth

Shut up, Cassandra!

St. Petersburg's Evenings

War is here

Nothing is as handy as a text

To put into book

what would it be, into book

one puts reality?

And put reality into reality?

Holidays come to an end

I need one whole day

to tell the story of one second

I need a life time

for the story of one hour

I need eternity

for the story of one day

So horrible

It's in St. Petersburg

that de Maistre wrote the evenings

a day before the Battle of Moscova

Tortures are punishment

of man's wickedness

The executioner carries out divine fate

Heaven can only be soothed with blood

The innocent may pay for the guilty

During the evening, Count de Maistre went on

with his most foolish words

This is the law of destruction of the living

Every being must be sacrificed

Once more, we understood

that we didn't imagine

that war would end

without our victory

War is therefore divine

Who could believe that the victims

had shed their blood in vain?

By the end of the evening,

those words of French diplomacy

I wish you good luck

And Malraux said simply:

To transform our apocalypse into an army

or die, that's all.

Leave me alone!

All alone!

Those flowers between the rails, in the confused wind of travels

The Warsaw train

was approaching Petersburg at full steam

When a century

slowly dissolves into the next century,

some people

transform means of survival

into new means

It's the latter that we call art

No activity shall become an art

before its time is over

then, this art will disappear

Clearly, you're asleep

At least madam, will you explain to me?

Nothing, if you dream, accept your dreams

It's the sleeper's role

The words of Goethe had become dreadful

when heard in the nights of small Russian railways

We want to travel

Without steam

Or sails

To cheer up our jails

Spread through our minds

Stretched out like a screen

Our memories with their framed horizon

UNDER WESTERN EYES

Tell me why you were a spy?

Even among communists,

money is the most important

shall do exactly the same thing

All of them

The lush green

Of summer

Regal

blaze

of autumn

And the ruin of winter

Before spring

would bloom

again

Darkened by time

Not like sentinels,

No.

As if they were defending

the living against the dead

All of them

Before spring would bloom again

Spirit of Laws

The flag

The flag goes with the foul landscape

Arthur Rimbaud: Democracy

If I could make those who are in command

increase their knowledge

about what they have to prescribe

and that those who obey

would find a pleasure in obeying

I would be the most happy man

I'm calling prejudice

what one ignores oneself

It's no more permissible for a government

or for an individual

to be an assassin

Everything done in Europe is done by Europe

Here one massacres, one burns, one loots

One slits the throats of fathers and mothers

One sells little girls

So that to the living who sent them the carnage

the dead are sending the plague

We inform Europe's government this

France's destiny

followed that of America's

like in the romantic German fairy tales

The cat

that makes his master's ambitions derisory

It's when looking for how to teach men

that one may take part in this general virtue

that consists of love for all

Man

is able to know his own nature when shown

and to lose it when stolen from him

Secret and Law

It doesn't matter, all is grace

A man that justice has cut off from the living

belongs to the Bench

The prison belongs to the Bench,

which controls it absolutely

There is something wrong with the law

Society is based on a shared murder

Remember

Not by principle

but Europe does not have the necessary virtues

To slit the throat of the infidels

I prefer poor people

because they are the defeated

I knew neither rules nor exceptions

thirst for words, then the image

What does that mean, politics?

Virtue Terror

What is she saying?

I can't hear anything

She says that the poor will save the world

They will ask for nothing in exchange

They will do this huge deal

Central Area

It's a brief story

that of the mass extinction of species

Two groups

The richest billion and the poorest billion

the richest ravage the global environment

by producing waste

while the poorest destroy their resources

by lack of choice

However

to love those capable of doing this

What more can be expected of love?

If we were alive

but we are alive

You search inside of me something not living

That's pain

It's expecting too much

when time is out of time

and the waiting that takes place over time

opens time to the absence of time

where there is nothing to wait for

There are the five fingers...

...the hand

And, after a long time

because the stories that are told

are going more slowly than actions

Joyful Arabia

In a novel,

the concern

in a worst case

in any given situation,

behavior comes close to the worst

The Lost Paradises

I may die quietly

Do you still remember

how long ago we trained our thoughts?

Most often, we went from a dream

I have always felt like a king's son

Everyone in Egypt feels the same

The East is more philosophical than the West

and everyone is a philosopher,

because he has time to reflect

to look at the world

Clear off!

Christianity is the refusal to know oneself

the death of language

Suddenly,

beyond Tunis, she saw

a big curtain of gray powder

camel heads, spears,

shields,

it was the army of barbarians advancing towards Carthage

Those flowers lost in the wind

There is no doubt

that the act of representation

almost always

involves violence

towards the subject of the representation

There is a real contrast

between the violence of the act of representing

and the calm within the representation itself

They are caught between salamecs and gibberish

The world is not interested in Arabs

Muslims neither

While Islam holds the attention politically

the Arab world is primarily scenery and landscapes

Even if the Arab world exists as a world

it is never seen as such

it is always considered as a whole

relating to a country of the Middle East

They would have loved to die for the homeland

and they were going to kill her

Can the Arabs speak?

In a soft low voice,

Saying great things

Surprising, deep and accurate matters

Thunder

Absolutes in the voice of a robin

Delicacy of essential sound

The sun adumbrated between the lips of a smile

And they were nothings for the ear

But this contrast and this music

This whispered power

These discoveries, these gulfs

This smile, dismissing the universe

What hasn't been written

We were talking about what we saw in a dream

We wondered how, in total darkness

colors of such intensity could emerge within us

They are the product of our knowledge of light

Knowledge sees

The counterpoint is a discipline of superposition

Melodies don't need to be identical

In harmony, the arrangements produce melodies

In the counterpoint, it's the melodies

which, to the contrary, become arrangements

Far below,

The hundred million waves of the ocean

Crept toward the invisible shores of Dofa

From up in the sky

They seemed hardly to be moving at all

they stole over the sea

with a lazy damascened precision

Archeology and Pirates

In that transparency,

the shape of a fish stirred,

and vanished

A giant ray

or a shark on his way to cooler waters

To the north,

lay a group of islands

like a row of crocodiles

To the south gardens

fishing boats

poised on the glass like mosquitoes

The religions of the book have forged our societies

and we have made its texts sacred

Tables of the Law,

Ten Commandments

Koran, etc...

Here, in Dofa,

setting up a subversive movement was unthinkable

by rumors, except with explosions

In fact, the great imperialist power

that ruled the Gulf States

was no longer interested in Dofa

whose underground had no oil

A government powerful enough

to give people everything they wanted

is powerful enough to take all they have away

The rebels

of established order

had long since renounced

to any brutal action

in this miserable oasis

where a sovereign peace reigned

for where there is nothing

even villains resign themselves to indigence

However, we could not forget their ability

to excel in abjection

when encouraged by more powerful criminals

from the outside

Samantar was convinced

that the poverty of a country

was its only protection against raptors

looking for only a promise of prosperity

to conquer it,

to destroy it

and to spoil it

Samantar thanked heaven

for being born on this land

thankless enough to discourage business

The most astonishing about this

was that the attacks were claimed

by a so-called

"Gulf Liberation Force"

in poorly printed leaflets

boasting a revolutionary vocabulary

long outdated

The size of Dofa's territory

didn't lend itself to such stupidity

and could become hell

Sheik Ben Kadem was tormented

by a political fantasy

because he dreamt of submitting

all the Gulf countries to his domination

It was true

that on this arid strip of land

he was the undisputed master

since the old emir,

crouching in his harem

no longer gave him any orders

and Ben Kadem had felt passion

for power since childhood

But the world

wasn't as simple as his dream

petrol everywhere

except in Dofa

had destroyed his hope

The only man who Ben Kadem

could talk to

was the one who found

this ambition derisory

Samantar, his younger cousin

The beginning of a revolutionary era in Dofa

was a total negation of the possibility

of armed action in the peninsula

Are you alone?

Yes I am alone

You are still not ready for this sacrifice

Every political ambition uses the excuse

to pretend to sacrifice itself for the people's happiness

but the people have not asked you for anything

they just want to live in peace

While in peace,

the world is changing

What do we care about this changing world?

They are scoundrels

accomplices to the universal deceit

The revolution has begun in the Kingdom

I would believe it

if it was a real revolution

but I doubt it is

Here, in Dofa,

people throwing bombs

seems normal to me

It's the only way

they can express their revolt

against the harsh methods

used by the governments

As far as I am concerned

I'll always be with the bombs

In this region,

revolution doesn't seem vital

It's true, nowadays

everything is possible

Do you think men...

Do you think men in power today,

in the world,

are anything other than bloody morons?

Why dream of being king,

when one could dream of being Faust?

But nobody

dreams of being Faust anymore

and everyone dreams of being king

In Dofa, Shiek Ben Kadem's dream was destroyed

the death of his young lover

dispelled his ambition

of submitting all the Gulf countries

to his rule

Ben Kadem confessed

his political errors to Samantar

and then he fled and took refuge

Samantar came out of his miserable housing

A few months later,

Samantar met Tarek

What I'm doing with the children, said the madman

is a kind of counter-revolution

A madman can go anywhere

with complete freedom of movement and speech

With the help of the children, I blew up the bank

and the import-export agency

The two signs of capitalist ignominy

The explosives were found by the children

in an old abandoned derrick

Chatting with a madman is an invaluable privilege

Believe me

we are never sad enough

for the world to be better

Earth,

abandoned,

overloaded with letters of the alphabet,

stifled under the knowledge

And hardly any ears listening anymore

But the words will never be language

Brecht said, in reality,

Only a fragment carries the mark of authenticity

Marx and Engels, in their eyes

Eugene Sue was a blind man

...to produce is to breathe...

to exist

Where civil rights were not respected

But unlike Balzac,

who dazzles our eyes with

a transformation of reality

There has to be a revolution

When I talk to myself

I speak the words of another

that I speak to myself

And even if nothing would be

as we had hoped

it would change nothing of our hopes

they would remain a necessary utopia

and the field of expectations

would be larger than that of our time

just as the past was immutable

expectations will remain immutable

and the ones who, when we were young

fed...

...ardent hope