Original subtitles

On page five, the agreement says:

The producers must examine

any object or subject,

ordinary or extraordinary,

in any field,

according to their actions or ideas,

making sure to identify

any existing trace

of what we have agreed to call art...

...to finally discover if art is a legend

or a reality.

"One day," Van Gogh said,

"we will seize death in order to go to another star."

I think we were right in taking the boat to return from New York.

In a plane, you never see the whole sky.

When they spoke to him about victims,

Boltanski said... Listen to this:

In church, its true, you get a certain feeling,

but its the church that creates it.

Afterwards you just pile up clothes,

at best, theyre from agn�s b. Or Galeries Lafayette.

To call that the "Childrens Museum Reserve"

is not only an abuse of language, its also a kind of atrocity,

an artistic crime committed by a public figure

who believes its better to be in agreement with all the world

than in disagreement with himself.

What should it be called, then?

Dont call it anything, perhaps,

since she doesnt have the strength to call for help anymore.

So it remains a document,

and receives the Pulitzer Prize.

In any case, we paid the Sygma Agency 2,856 francs,

plus 5.50 in taxes, for the right to show this photo.

No, for the duty. - Yes.

But at the morgue in Blida, after the Sidi Sehrane massacres,

no one dared speak of art.

Even so, one speaks of "the art of war."

Thats different.

There was that exhibition, you remember,

with photos of the war in Yugoslavia.

The newspapers accused the photographer of making art,

as they say, with images of horror.

One must tread carefully there.

A man named William Haglund dug up countless bodies, for months on end,

for the court in The Hague.

Those photos testify to the reality of crimes against humanity.

Now, if theres a misunderstanding,

its because the photographer shouldnt have enlarged those photos,

nor shown them on big canvases as if they were paintings.

What then is the difference

between the horrors of French policy in Africa

and the Goya of the "Horrors of War"?

From Botticelli to Barnett, its the same view, the same silence,

"for I always speak the language of the other."

"When I talk to myself,

I talk to myself,

using the words of the other."

Nows the time to know where were at.

But thats hard, a bit like flying blind.

Its true: Legend, reality, art, the year 2000...

The MoMA people havent really asked for anything specific.

Theyd like to make up their minds, without knowing what about.

Theres something lve often wondered about,

but never asked.

May I ask the question now?

Of course!

Why have you never been to the stars?

I tell myself lve stayed here because I couldnt get away,

but I dont really think that.

But being able to get away is part of our nature.

So why didnt you do it?

The idea that man was free in the universe,

that he could go anywhere he wanted,

was a completely unfathomable miracle.

And the fact that he has reached this point alone,

with his body and mind,

and an inner power others dont have,

is absolutely unbelievable.

So in that case the legend is us.

Maybe were the ghosts of people taken away

when everybody vanished.

You know, I have this impression again

of hearing the noises and murmuring of ghosts

nestled in the midst of their works,

in the last hiding place left to them on earth.

Yes.

Our old world has collapsed, and theres not a lot of it left.

First we thought wed lost everything, but with time

weve realized that this loss wasnt all bad.

Maybe not bad at all. And finally, instead of losing,

weve gained the chance to make a new start.

Theater, novel, painting, films...

It seems that the question is not knowing if man will continue,

but knowing if he has the right to.

Lets get on with the exercises, then.

Theres a moment when the light begins to strike things,

making them stammer out their shapes and then their successive names,

starting out with the very "thing" that is the beginning.

First theres "something," and then "some things."

Exactly like in the Book of Books.

Theres an infancy of the features of the world, of a day,

of any given place.

They are more alone than ever. In fact, theyve disappeared.

Theyve left the landscape,

or at least our idea of a familiar landscape.

In some places,

they still organize a small demonstration, but only for love.

And the next year, they fall into a ditch,

or cling to an embankment on the edge of the road, the highway,

or the freeway. Always on the fringes.

As if they were refugees.

So much fine blood this earth has drunk,

workers' and farmers' blood,

because the crooks who start the wars

never die. Only the innocents get killed.

"Red Hill," it's called,

baptized with blood one morning.

All those who went up there ended up down in the ravine.

Now there are vines and grapes are growing there.

Whoever drinks that wine,

drinks the blood of his friends.

You could call them the last artists.

Can time be recounted?

Time as it is, as such and in itself?

No, that would really be a hare-brained undertaking.

Art wasnt protected from time.

It was what protected time.

Someone forgotten who, but someone once said that he who sings

is not always happy.

We work in the dark,

we do what we can,

we give what we have.

Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.

The rest is the madness of art.

That reminds me of my old philosophy teacher,

Mr. Brunschwig:

"One is in the other, and the other is in the one,

and those are the three persons."

The spirit borrows from matter the perceptions

it draws its nourishment from, and gives them back as movement

stamped with its freedom.

The spirit borrows from matter...

and gives them back as movement stamped with its freedom.

With the red hair of a little street girl

Id torch all of modern civilization.

Since a girl has to have long hair, she has to have clean hair.

Since she has to have clean hair, she mustnt have a messy house.

Since she mustnt have a messy house, her mother must be carefree.

Since her mother must be carefree,

the landlord cant be a profiteer.

Since the landlord cant be a profiteer,

there has to be a redistribution of property.

Since there has to be a redistribution of property,

there has to be a revolution.

The girl with the red-gold hair is the sacred image of humanity.

The KEO project,

the archeological bird of the future.

A microsatellite shaped like a bird. Launched in 2001,

it will return to Earth in 50,000 years

to tell our distant descendents

what Earth and its inhabitants were like today.

In addition to standard subjects like geography, biology, history, etc.,

the bird will also deliver messages

sent by the inhabitants of the earth into their future.

What kind of messages?

I dont know..."Love one another."?

Id be surprised.

Perhaps: "Stop discrimination against women."

That would surprise me too.

Or: "Show a Griffith film once a year."

I have my doubts.

Its the future that decides if the past is alive or not.

A man with plans for progress defines his old self

as the self that no longer exists, and loses interest in it.

On the other hand, some peoples plan involves the rejection of time

and an identification with the past.

This is the case for most people.

They reject time because they dont want to come down in the world.

So many things you havent even seen, like on this street

you walk down six times a day,

or in your room,

where you spend so many hours a day.

Look at the angle, the edge of that furniture

makes with the windowpane.

You have to reclaim it from banality, from the unseen visible.

You have to save it,

give it what you can, through imitation and the shortfalls of your sensibility,

to any sublime landscape, sunset,

storm at sea,

or any artwork in a museum.

Those are readymade views.

But give to this poor person, to this place,

to this insipid moment and thing,

and youll be rewarded a hundredfold.

So who are you?

I'm the person who speaks,

the one named I,

and who, from body to body, from face to face,

indeed, in all of life itself, in all form, has the moment to act,

and can't do anything but be.

We havent done much yet.

Weve visited a few stars.

This image that you are, that I am, which Walter Benjamin speaks of,

that point where the past resonates with the present for a split second

to form a constellation.

"The work of art," he says,

"is the sole apparition of something distant, however close it may be."

But lm not sure I understand: Close and distant at the same time.

People often say: "In the beginning was..."

The origin is both what is discovered as absolutely new,

and what recognizes itself as having existed forever.

The sum of all ideas, according to Benjamin,

makes up a primal, ever-present landscape.

Even when people have forgotten it,

and its a question of returning.

There are the stars,

which are to the constellations what things are to ideas.

Instead of "exercises," we couldve said "an object lesson."

"Exercises in artistic thinking," was what we said.

The concept is that of approach.

Just as stars simultaneously approach and move away from each other,

driven by the laws of physics

as they form a constellation,

so too do certain things and thoughts approach each other

to form one or more images.

So to understand

what goes on between stars and between images,

you must start by looking at the simple links.

So everythings far away,

and close at the same time.

Between the infinitely small

and the infinitely large,

well eventually find an average.

And the average will be the average person, no doubt.

What already has been will be, and what will be has already been.

19 people attended the Crucifixion,

1400 the first performance of "Hamlet."

And two and a half billion attended the World Cup final.

An image isnt only an atom.

It is, has been, will be its own image,

the image of the image, the image of all these possibilities.

Working as an artist isnt just a matter of observing,

of collecting experimental data,

then coming up with a theory, a picture, a novel, a film, etc.

Artistic thinking begins with the invention of a possible world,

or a fragment of a possible world,

then using experience and work,

painting, writing, filming, to confront it with the outside world.

This endless dialogue between imagination and work

allows for the formation of an ever-clearer representation

of what we agree to call reality.

Were all lost in the immensity of the universe.

Weve lost our native country,

we have no place to go, or worse yet,

too many places that we could go.

Were lost, not only in the depths of the universe,

but also in the depths of our own minds.

When people only lived on one planet, they knew where they were.

They had a yardstick,

they had their index finger to check the direction of the wind.

But now were lost, even when we think that we know where we are.

Either theres no path leading back home,

or we dont have a homeland worth going back to.

We dont have a home anymore.

Humankind has broken up, scattered,

and is still scattering out among the stars.

Our species, as a whole, cannot bear the past.

Many of us also hate the present,

and we only have one direction: The future,

which takes us further away from the concept of a homeland of our own.

As a whole, our species is made up of incurable wanderers.

We reject all ties, everything we could cling to.

And that will certainly continue until the ineluctable day,

when we each begin to understand that were not free, as we thought,

but lost.

Only when we try to remember, with our ancestral memory,

where we went, and why,

will we fully understand how lost we are.

Havent we forgotten to talk about the decisive turn in painting?

Later. Now were dealing with the technology of the future.

But when we left the earth, rejecting and scorning our native planet

to go off to distant, brighter stars,

we expanded our space enormously.

We dont have those few million years.

In our haste, we dont have time anymore...

When Jean-Fran�ois Millet paints two peasants praying in a field,

and calls it "The Angelus,"

the title matches the reality.

When Francis Picabia draws a bolt

and calls it "Portrait of an American Girl in the Nude,"

the title no longer matches the reality.

"All the same to me," says Picabia, after Duchamp and before Warhol,

just like the owner of the station caf� as he hands you the menu.

That was the decisive turn in painting. The second one.

The first was when painters decided to paint eternal woman.

That happened almost from the start, but it did no harm to the Virgin Mary.

So from sacred legends

we moved to natural history.

I get the feeling the titles have taken their revenge.

Today you dont see the image,

you see what the title says about it.

Its modern advertising.

"Sad tropics," writes L�vi-Strauss.

Thats what those bears were thinking just now,

and the walking man, and Paul Gauguin.

I read somewhere

that Chardin once said of art that he didnt know what it was.

Or that it was an island whose shores he had glimpsed from far off.

And Andy Warhol says that art is a market for buying and selling.

And then the real battle begins, the battle of money and blood.

From an art history point of view,

if Malevich can put a black square on a white canvas,

I dont think World War I is such a disaster.

Poisoned by photography, painting itself committed suicide,

and Soulages laid it in its grave after World War II.

From an art history point of view,

the 20th century is the Hundred Years War.

It took a while for one man to own the La Redoute and Christies catalogues.

And then advertising space takes over the spaces of Hope

and of Prousts madeleine.

And the latest Citro�n is called "Picasso".

Even so, I have the feeling that something is resisting,

something original,

that the origin will always be there, and that it resists.

If you want to look out over the worlds loveliest landscape,

you must climb to the top of the Tower of Victory in Chitor.

There, standing on a circular terrace,

one has a sweep of the whole horizon.

A winding stairway leads up to the terrace,

but only those people dare to go up

who dont believe the tale:

In the stairway of the Tower of Victory has lived since the beginning of time

a being so sensitive to the shades of the human soul: The A Bao A Qu.

It lives in a lethargic state on the first step,

and only becomes consciously alive

when someone climbs the stairs.

The vibrations of the approaching person breathe life into it,

and it is filled with an inner glow.

At the same time, its body and almost translucent skin

begin to stir.

When someone climbs the spiral stairs,

the A Bao A Qu follows closely upon the visitors heels

and climbs along the outside of the steps,

which are worn down by the feet of generations of pilgrims.

With each step, its color becomes more intense,

its shape more perfect,

and the light it gives off

more brilliant.

The proof of its sensitivity

lies in the fact that it only achieves its ultimate form

at the top step,

and only when the person climbing is a spiritually evolved being.

Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu remains, as if paralyzed,

short of its goal,

its body incomplete,

its color undefined,

and its glow faltering.

The A Bao A Qu suffers

when it cannot come to completion,

and its moan is a barely audible sound,

something like the rustling of silk.

But when the man or woman bringing it back to life

is totally pure,

the A Bao A Qu can make it to the top step.

Having achieved full form,

it glows with a vivid blue light.

But its return to life is very brief, for when the pilgrim descends,

the A Bao A Qu rolls and tumbles back down to the first steps,

where, already faded

and looking like an engraving with vague contours,

it awaits the next visitor.

It cant be seen clearly

until its halfway up the stairs,

when the little tentacles that extend from its body,

which it uses to climb, take on a clear definition.

It is also said that it can see with its entire body,

and that at sunset it looks like the skin of a peach.

In the course of the centuries,

the A Bao A Qu has only once achieved perfection.

Sir Richard Burton recounts

the legend of the A Bao A Qu

in a note to his version

of "A Thousand and One Nights."

Weve decided

to close with this text, because

it illustrates the film perfectly.