Original subtitles

"The remoteness of countries somehow balances their proximity in time." Racine - Second Preface from Bajazet.

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.

He said that for him it was the image of happiness

and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked.

He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film

with a long piece of black leader;

if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island.

Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry:

waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep.

Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war:

night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life.

He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time.

Those memories whose only function it being to leave behind nothing but memories.

He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me.

On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.

At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.

He used to write me from Africa.

He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time.

He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space,

and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time.

By the way, did you know that there are emus in the �le de France?

He wrote me that in the Bijag�s Islands it's the young girls who choose their fianc�es.

He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats.

I wish I could convey to you the simplicity the lack of affectation

of this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery

so their cat Tora would be protected.

No she wasn't dead, only run away.

But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her,

how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name.

So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain,

to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering,

which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.

We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.

How can one remember thirst?

He didn't like to dwell on poverty,

but in everything he wanted to show there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model.

A world full of bums, of lumpens, of outcasts, of Koreans.

Too broke to afford drugs, they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk.

This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes from the glories of the center city,

a character took his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads.

Luxury for them would be one of those large bottles of sake that are poured over tombs on the day of the dead.

I paid for a round in a bar in Namidabashi.

It's the kind of place that allows people to stare at each other with equality;

the threshold below which every man is as good as any otherand knows it.

He told me about the Jetty on Fogo, in the Cape Verde islands.

How long have they been there waiting for the boat, patient as pebbles but ready to jump?

They are a people of wanderers, of navigators, of world travelers.

They fashioned themselves through cross-breeding here on these rocks that the Portuguese used as a marshaling yard for their colonies.

A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people.

Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?

He used to write to me: the Sahel is not only what is shown of it when it is too late

it's a land that drought seeps into like water into a leaking boat.

The animals resurrected for the time of a carnival in Bissau will be petrified again,

as soon as a new attack has changed the savannah into a desert.

This is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten, with one exception: UN Japan.

My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts; they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.

He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon,

a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning of the 11th century, in the Heian period.

Do we ever know where history is really made?

Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another.

Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents;

the emperor's court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games.

But this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians,

by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things.

Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,' 'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.'

One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart.'

Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming;

I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.

He wrote me: coming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon's list,

of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name.

To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant, and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid.

Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases.

Japanese poetry never modifies.

There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all.

Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from Nagoya.

The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work Japanese stylelike a madman.

It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics.

And then in the month of May he killed himself.

They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'

He described me his reunion with Tokyo:

like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket immediately starts to inspect familiar places.

He ran off to see if everything was where it should be:

the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store,

which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers.

He was told that it was now little girls who made and unmade stars; the producers shuddered before them.

He was told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of passers-by

and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful.

Everything interested him.

He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant or about the results of the Daily Double

asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done in the last sumo tournament.

He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, ...

of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears regularly on television to teach goodness to children.

These simple joys he had never felt: of returning to a country, a house, a family home.

But twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.

He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains, tied together with electric wire she shows her veins.

They say that television makes her people illiterate; as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets.

Perhaps they read only in the street, or perhaps they just pretend to readthese yellow men.

I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku.

The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope

ten centuries before the movies compensates a little for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines,

victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship.

Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls.

The entire city is a comic strip.

It's Planet Manga.

How can one fail to recognize the statuary that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central?

And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book readers,

pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.

At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages,

with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples.

Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.

The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that Indian flute whose sound can only be heard by whomever is playing it.

He might have cried out if it was in a Godard film or a Shakespeare play, "Where should this music be?"

Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of 'action cooking.'

He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada's gestures and his way of mixing the ingredients

one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts common to painting, philosophy, and karate.

He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed in his humble way the essence of style,

and consequently that it was up to him to use his invisible brush to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words 'the end.'

I've spent the day in front of my TV set that memory box.

I was in Nara with the sacred deers.

I was taking a picture without knowing that in the 15th century Basho had written:

"The willow sees the heron's image... upside down."

The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye,

used to Western atrocities in this field; not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure.

For one slightly hallucinatory moment I had the impression that I spoke Japanese,

but it was a cultural program on NHK about G�rard de Nerval.

8:40, Cambodia.

From Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge: coincidence, or the sense of history?

In Apocalypse Now, Brando said a few definitive and incommunicable sentences:

"Horror has a face and a name... you must make a friend of horror."

To cast out the horror that has a name and a face you must give it another name and another face.

Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty of certain corpses.

Sometimes one is stunned by so much cruelty.

One seeks its sources in the Asian peoples long familiarity with suffering, that requires that even pain be ornate.

And then comes the reward: the monsters are laid out, Natsume Masako arises;

absolute beauty also has a name and a face.

But the more you watch Japanese television... the more you feel it's watching you.

Even television newscast bears witness to the fact that the magical function of the eye is at the center of all things.

It's election time: the winning candidates black out the empty eye of Daruma

the spirit of luckwhile losing candidates sad but dignifiedcarry off their one-eyed Daruma.

The images most difficult to figure out are those of Europe.

I watched the pictures of a film whose soundtrack will be added later.

It took me six months for Poland.

Meanwhile, I have no difficulty with local earthquakes.

But I must say that last night's quake helped me greatly to grasp a problem.

Poetry is born of insecurity: wandering Jews, quaking Japanese;

by living on a rug that jesting nature is ever ready to pull out from under them

they've got into the habit of moving about in a world of appearances: fragile, fleeting, revocable,

of trains that fly from planet to planet, of samurai fighting in an immutable past.

That's called 'the impermanence of things.'

I did it all.

All the way to the evening shows for adultsso called.

The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips, but it's a coded hypocrisy.

Censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show.

The code is the message.

It points to the absolute by hiding it.

That's what religions have always done.

That year, a new face appeared among the great ones that blazon the streets of Tokyo: the Pope's.

Treasures that had never left the Vatican were shown on the seventh floor of the Sogo department store.

He wrote me:

curiosity of course, and the glimmer of industrial espionage in the eye

I imagine them bringing out within two years time a more efficient and less expensive version of Catholicism

but there's also the fascination associated with the sacred, even when it's someone else's.

So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs

such as can be seen at Josen-kai on the island of Hokkaido?

At first one smiles at this place which combines a museum, a chapel, and a sex shop.

As always in Japan, one admires the fact that the walls between the realms are so thin

that one can in the same breath contemplate a statue, buy an inflatable doll,

and give the goddess of fertility the small offering that always accompanies her displays.

Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems of the television incomprehensible,

if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible only on condition of being severed from a body.

One would like to believe in a world before the fall:

inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation.

Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain,

the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture, share in the same cosmic innocence.

The second part of the museumwith its couples of stuffed animals would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it.

Not so sure...

animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship,

but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation.

And even without original sin this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost.

In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society,

the rift that separates men from women.

In life it seems to show itself in two ways only:

violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy resembling Sei Shonagon's

which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word.

So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts against which the fathers of the church invade

becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things,

to a melancholy whose color I can give you by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi:

"Who said that time heals all wounds?

It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds.

With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits.

With time, the desired body will soon disappear,

and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other,

then what remains is a wound... disembodied."

He wrote me that the Japanese secret what L�vi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things

implied the faculty of communion with things, of entering into them, of being them for a moment.

It was normal that in their turn they should be like us: perishable and immortal.

He wrote me:

animism is a familiar notion in Africa, it is less often applied in Japan.

What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart?

When they build a factory or a skyscraper, they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land.

There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses, and even for rusty needles.

There's one on the 25th of September for the repose of the soul of broken dolls.

The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon the goddess of compassionand are burned in public.

I look to the participants.

I think the people who saw off the kamikaze pilots had the same look on their faces.

He wrote me that the pictures of Guinea-Bissau ought to be accompanied by music from the Cape Verde islands.

That would be our contribution to the unity dreamed of by Amilcar Cabral.

Why should so small a countryand one so poor interest the world?

They did what they could, they freed themselves, they chased out the Portuguese.

They traumatized the Portuguese army to such an extent that it gave rise to a movement that overthrew the dictatorship,

and led one for a moment to believe in a new revolution in Europe.

Who remembers all that?

History throws its empty bottles out the window.

This morning I was on the dock at Pidjiguity,

where everything began in 1959, when the first victims of the struggle were killed.

It may be as difficult to recognize Africa in this leaden fog

as it is to recognize struggle in the rather dull activity of tropical longshoremen.

Rumor has it that every third world leader coined the same phrase the morning after independence:

"Now the real problems start."

Cabral never got a chance to say it: he was assassinated first.

But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on.

Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism:

to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion, temptations of power and privilege.

Ah well... after all, history only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated.

My personal problem is more specific: how to film the ladies of Bissau?

Apparently, the magical function of the eye was working against me there.

It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde that I could stare at them again with equality.

Les "No s� qu�" des figures c�est proche du ritual de la seduction.

I see her,

she saw me,

she knows that I see her,

she drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is still possible to act as though it was not addressed to me,

and at the end the real glance,

straightforward,

that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second, the length of a film frame.

All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility.

And men's task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible.

African men are just as good at this task as others.

But after a close look at African women, I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men.

He told me the story of the dog Hachiko.

A dog waited every day for his master at the station.

The master died, and the dog didn't know it, and he continued to wait all his life.

People were moved and brought him food.

After his death a statue was erected in his honor, in front of which sushi and rice cakes are still placed

so that the faithful soul of Hachiko will never go hungry.

Tokyo is full of these tiny legends, and of mediating animals.

The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard on the frontiers of what was once the empire of Mr. Okadaa great collector of French paintings,

the man who hired the Ch�teau of Versailles to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his department stores.

In the computer section I've seen young Japanese exercising their brain muscles like the young Athenians at the Palaistra.

They have a war to win.

The history books of the future will perhaps place the battle of integrated circuits at the same level as Salamis and Agincourt,

but willing to honor the unfortunate adversary by leaving other fields to him:

men's fashions this season are placed under the sign of John Kennedy.

Like an old votive turtle stationed in the corner of a field, every day he saw Mr. Akao

the president of the Japanese Patriotic Party

trumpeting from the heights of his rolling balcony against the international communist plot.

He wrote me:

the automobiles of the extreme right with their flags and megaphones are part of Tokyo's landscape

Mr. Akao is their focal point.

I think he'll have his statue like the dog Hachiko,

at this crossroads from which he departs only to go and prophesy on the battlefields.

He was at Narita in the sixties.

Peasants fighting against the building of an airport on their land,

and Mr. Akao denouncing the hand of Moscow behind everything that moved.

Yurakucho is the political space of Tokyo.

Once upon a time I saw bonzes pray for peace in Vietnam there.

Today young right-wing activists protest against the annexation of the Northern Islands by the Russians.

Sometimes they are answered that the commercial relations of Japan with the abominable occupier of the North

are a thousand times better than with the American ally who is always whining about economic aggression.

Ah, nothing is simple.

On the other sidewalk the Left has the floor.

The Korean Catholic opposition leader Kim Dae Jung kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean gestapo

is threatened with the death sentence.

A group has begun a hunger strike.

Some very young militants are trying to gather signatures in his support.

I went back to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the struggle.

The demo was unreal.

I had the impression of acting in Brigadoon,

of waking up ten years later in the midst of the same players, with the same blue lobsters of police,

the same helmeted adolescents, the same banners and the same slogan:

"Down with the airport."

Only one thing has been added: the airport precisely.

But with its single runway and the barbed wire that chokes it, it looks more besieged than victorious.

My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution:

if the images of the present don't change, then change the images of the past.

He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer:

pictures that are less deceptive he sayswith the conviction of a fanatic than those you see on television.

At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images,

not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.

Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.

What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram,

was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties.

If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it.

It was a generation that often exasperated me,

for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth.

But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.

I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the struggle.

Concretely it had failed.

At the same time, all they had won in their understanding of the world could have been won only through the struggle.

As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains in the name of revolutionary purity,

while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives.

Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists, including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom.

But it carried with it all those who said, like Ch� Guevara, that they "trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world".

They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity, and their generosity has outlasted their politics.

That's why I will never allow it to be said that youth is wasted on the young.

The youth who get together every weekend at Shinjuku obviously know that they are not on a launching pad toward real life;

but they are life, to be eaten on the spot like fresh doughnuts.

It's a very simple secret.

The old try to hide it, and not all the young know it.

The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend from the thirteenth floor of a building after having tied her hands,

because she'd spoken badly of their class team, hadn't discovered it yet.

Parents who demand an increase in the number of special telephone lines devoted to the prevention of children's suicides

find out a little late that they have kept it all too well.

Rock is an international language for spreading the secret.

Another is peculiar to Tokyo.

For the takenoko, twenty is the age of retirement.

They are baby Martians.

I go to see them dance every Sunday in the park at Yoyogi.

They want people to look at them, but they don't seem to notice that people do.

They live in a parallel time sphere:

a kind of invisible aquarium wall separates them from the crowd they attract,

and I can spend a whole afternoon contemplating the little takenoko girl who is learning

no doubt for the first timethe customs of her planet.

Beyond that, they wear dog tags, they obey a whistle, the Mafia rackets them,

and with the exception of a single group made up of girls, it's always a boy who commands.

One day he writes to me: description of a dream.

More and more my dreams find their settings in the department stores of Tokyo,

the subterranean tunnels that extend them and run parallel to the city.

A face appears, disappears... a trace is found, is lost.

All the folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day when I am awake

I realize that I continue to seek in the basement labyrinth the presence concealed the night before.

I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine, or if they are part of a totality,

of a gigantic collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection.

It might suffice to pick up any one of the telephones that are lying around to hear a familiar voice, or the beating of a heart,

Sei Shonagon's for example.

All the galleries lead to stations;

the same companies own the stores and the railroads that bear their name.

Keio, Odakyuall those names of ports.

The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams,

makes a single film of themthe ultimate film.

The tickets from the automatic dispenser grant admission to the show.

He told me about the January light on the station stairways.

He told me that this city ought to be deciphered like a musical score;

one could get lost in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of details.

And that created the cheapest image of Tokyo: overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman.

He thought he saw more subtle cycles there: rhythms, clusters of faces caught sight of in passing

as different and precise as groups of instruments.

Sometimes the musical comparison coincided with plain reality;

the Sony stairway in the Ginza was itself an instrument, each step a note.

All of it fit together like the voices of a somewhat complicated fugue,

but it was enough to take hold of one of them and hang on to it.

The television screens for example;

all by themselves they created an itinerary that sometimes wound up in unexpected curves.

It was sumo season, and the fans who came to watch the fights in the very chic showrooms on the Ginza

were "justement" the poorest of the Tokyo poors.

So poor that they didn't even have a TV set.

He saw them come, the dead souls of Namida-bashi he had drunk sak� with one sunny dawn

how many seasons ago was that now?

.