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.
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He wrote me:
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even in the stalls where they sell electronic spare parts
that some hipsters use for jewelry
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there is in the score that is Tokyo a particular staff,
whose rarity in Europe condemns me to a real acoustic exile.
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I mean the music of video games.
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They are fitted into tables.
You can drink, you can lunch, and go on playing.
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They open onto the street.
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By listening to them you can play from memory.
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I saw these games born in Japan
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I later met up with them again all over the world,
but one detail was different.
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At the beginning the game was familiar:
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a kind of anti-ecological beating where the idea was to kill off
as soon as they showed the white of their eyes
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creatures that were either prairie dogs or baby seals,
I can't be sure which.
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Now here's the Japanese variation.
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Instead of the critters, there's some vaguely human heads
identified by a label:
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at the top the chairman of the board,
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in front of him the vice president and the directors,
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in the front row the section heads
and the personnel manager.
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The guy I filmedwho was smashing up
the hierarchy with an enviable energy
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confided in me that for him the game was not at all allegorical,
that he was thinking very precisely of his superiors.
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No doubt that's why the puppet representing the personnel manager
has been clubbed so often and so hard that it's out of commission,
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and why it had to be replaced again by a baby seal.
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Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine.
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To please me he puts in my best beloved animals:
the cat and the owl.
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He claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal
with sentiment, memory, and imagination.
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Mizoguchi's Ars�ne Lupin for example,
or the no less imaginary burakumin.
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How one claim to show a category of Japanese who do not exist?
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Yes they're there; I saw them in Osaka hiring themselves
out by the day, sleeping on the ground.
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Ever since the middle ages they've been doomed
to grubby and back-breaking jobs.
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But since the Meiji era, officially nothing sets them apart,
and their real nameetais a taboo word, not to be pronounced.
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They are non-persons.
How can they be shown, except as non-images?
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Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race,
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the only plan that offers a future for intelligence.
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00:03:20,088 --> 00:03:24,764
For the moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time
is contained in the Pac-Man.
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I didn't know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him
that he was going to conquer the world.
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Perhaps because he is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate.
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He puts into true perspective the balance of power
between the individual and the environment.
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00:03:39,563 --> 00:03:44,332
And he tells us soberly that though
there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks,
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it always comes a cropper.
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00:04:28,280 --> 00:04:31,956
He was pleased that the same chrysanthemums appeared
in funerals for men and for animals.
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00:04:31,957 --> 00:04:38,876
He described to me the ceremony held at the zoo in Ueno
in memory of animals that had died during the year.
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00:04:38,877 --> 00:04:43,643
For two years in a row this day of mourning
has had a pall cast over it by the death of a panda,
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more irreparableaccording to the newspapers
than the death of the prime minister that took place at the same time.
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Last year people really cried.
Now they seem to be getting used to it,
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accepting that each year death takes a panda
as dragons do young girls in fairy tales.
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I've heard this sentence:
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"The partition that separates life from death
does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner."
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00:05:10,536 --> 00:05:14,127
What I have read most often in the eyes of people about to die
is surprise.
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00:05:14,128 --> 00:05:18,374
What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity,
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as if they were tryingin order to understand the death of an animal
to stare through the partition.
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I have returned from a country where death
is not a partition to cross through but a road to follow.
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The great ancestor of the Bijag�s archipelago has described for us the itinerary of the dead
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00:06:54,899 --> 00:07:00,737
and how they move from island to island
according to a rigorous protocol until they come to the last beach
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00:07:00,738 --> 00:07:03,620
where they wait for the ship that will take them to the other world.
55
00:07:03,621 --> 00:07:08,639
If by accident one should meet them,
it is above all imperative not to recognize them.
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00:07:13,100 --> 00:07:15,074
The Bijag�s is a part of Guinea Bissau.
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00:07:15,075 --> 00:07:18,970
In an old film clip Amilcar Cabral waves
a gesture of good-bye to the shore;
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00:07:18,971 --> 00:07:22,040
he's right, he'll never see it again.
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00:07:22,041 --> 00:07:26,941
Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later
on the canoe that was bringing us back.
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00:07:26,942 --> 00:07:32,184
Guinea has by that time become a nation and Luis is its president.
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00:07:32,185 --> 00:07:35,248
All those who remember the war remember him.
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the half-brother of Amilcar, born as he was
of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdean blood,
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and like him a founding member of an unusual party, the PAIGC,
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which by uniting the two colonized countries in a single movement of struggle
wishes to be the forerunner of a federation of the two states.
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I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters,
who had fought in conditions so inhuman
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00:07:56,591 --> 00:08:00,216
that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers
for having to bear what they themselves suffered.
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That I heard.
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00:08:01,680 --> 00:08:05,173
And many more things that make one ashamed for having used lightly
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00:08:05,174 --> 00:08:10,238
even if inadvertentlythe word guerrilla
to describe a certain breed of film-making.
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00:08:10,239 --> 00:08:15,164
A word that at the time was linked to many theoretical debates
and also to bloody defeats on the ground.
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00:08:15,165 --> 00:08:18,544
Amilcar Cabral was the only one to lead a victorious guerrilla war,
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and not only in terms of military conquests.
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00:08:20,971 --> 00:08:23,493
He knew his people,
he had studied them for a long time,
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00:08:23,494 --> 00:08:26,410
and he wanted every liberated region
to be also the precursor of a different kind of society.
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00:08:26,411 --> 00:08:29,415
The socialist countries send weapons to arm the fighters.
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00:08:29,416 --> 00:08:32,282
The social democracies fill the People's Stores.
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00:08:32,283 --> 00:08:37,216
May the extreme left forgive history
but if the guerrillas are like fish in water
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00:08:37,217 --> 00:08:39,217
it's a bit thanks to Sweden.
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00:08:40,697 --> 00:08:43,084
Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguitieshe knew the traps.
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00:08:43,085 --> 00:08:49,374
He wrote: "It's as though we were at the edge of a great river full of waves and storms,
81
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with people who are trying to cross it and drown,
but they have no other way out, they must get to the other side."
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00:09:12,787 --> 00:09:16,176
And now, the scene moves to Cassaque:
the seventeenth of February, 1980.
83
00:09:16,177 --> 00:09:18,904
But to understand it properly one must move forward in time.
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00:09:18,905 --> 00:09:22,335
In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison,
85
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and the weeping man he has just decorated,
major Nino, will have taken power.
86
00:09:27,270 --> 00:09:33,231
The party will have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other
will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy.
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00:09:33,232 --> 00:09:39,022
We will learn that behind this ceremony of promotions
which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the brotherhood of the struggle,
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00:09:39,023 --> 00:09:45,621
there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness,
and that Nino's tears did not express an ex-warrior's emotion,
89
00:09:45,622 --> 00:09:49,427
but the wounded pride of a hero who felt
he had not been raised high enough above the others.
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00:09:53,054 --> 00:09:55,222
And beneath each of these faces a memory.
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00:09:55,223 --> 00:09:58,423
And in place of what we were told had been forged
into a collective memory,
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a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration
in the great wound of history.
93
00:10:06,042 --> 00:10:08,987
In Portugalraised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau
94
00:10:08,988 --> 00:10:12,982
Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life
against the dictatorship wrote:
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00:10:12,983 --> 00:10:16,501
"Every protagonist represents only himself;
96
00:10:16,502 --> 00:10:24,105
in place of a change in the social setting
he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation of his own image."
97
00:10:27,294 --> 00:10:29,638
That's the way the breakers recede.
98
00:10:29,639 --> 00:10:35,124
And so predictably that one has to believe
in a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes
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through mercy
or calculation to those whom it recruits:
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00:10:38,477 --> 00:10:42,586
Amilcar murdered by members of his own party,
101
00:10:42,587 --> 00:10:46,817
the liberated areas fallen under the yoke of bloody petty tyrants
102
00:10:46,818 --> 00:10:51,824
liquidated in their turn by a central power
to whose stability everyone paid homage until the military coup.
103
00:10:51,825 --> 00:10:57,234
That's how history advances,
plugging its memory as one plugs one's ears.
104
00:10:57,235 --> 00:11:02,390
Luis exiled to Cuba,
Nino discovering in his turn plots woven against him,
105
00:11:02,391 --> 00:11:05,689
can be cited reciprocally to appear before the bar of history.
106
00:11:05,690 --> 00:11:08,972
She doesn't care, she understands nothing,
107
00:11:08,973 --> 00:11:12,918
she has only one friend,
the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse: horror.
108
00:11:12,919 --> 00:11:15,253
That has a name and a face.
109
00:11:17,407 --> 00:11:20,569
I'm writing you all this from another world,
a world of appearances.
110
00:11:20,570 --> 00:11:23,990
In a way the two worlds communicate with each other.
111
00:11:23,991 --> 00:11:29,119
Memory is to one what history is to the other:
an impossibility.
112
00:11:29,120 --> 00:11:32,868
Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable.
113
00:11:32,869 --> 00:11:36,103
Memories must make do with their delirium,
with their drift.
114
00:11:38,766 --> 00:11:42,849
A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film
blocked before the furnace of the projector.
115
00:11:43,850 --> 00:11:46,142
Madness protects, as fever does.
116
00:11:48,143 --> 00:11:53,088
I envy Hayao in his 'zone,'
he plays with the signs of his memory.
117
00:11:53,089 --> 00:11:57,408
He pins them down and decorates them like insects
that would have flown beyond time,
118
00:11:57,409 --> 00:12:03,086
and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time:
the only eternity we have left.
119
00:12:04,087 --> 00:12:06,082
I look at his machines.
120
00:12:06,083 --> 00:12:09,865
I think of a world where each memory
could create its own legend.
121
00:13:12,504 --> 00:13:18,629
He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory
insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
122
00:13:21,634 --> 00:13:26,210
In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering
a field ever wider as it moved away,
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00:13:26,211 --> 00:13:30,828
a cyclone whose present moment contains,
motionless, the eye.
124
00:13:32,899 --> 00:13:35,784
In San Francisco he had made his pilgrimage
to all the film's locations:
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00:13:35,785 --> 00:13:41,756
the florist Podesta Baldocchi,
where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak;
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00:13:41,757 --> 00:13:43,757
he the hunter, she the prey.
127
00:13:43,757 --> 00:13:48,485
Or was it the other way around?
The tiles hadn't changed.
128
00:13:47,486 --> 00:13:55,370
He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco
where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline.
129
00:13:59,508 --> 00:14:01,805
It seems to be a question of trailing,
of enigma, of murder,
130
00:14:01,806 --> 00:14:06,256
but in truth it's a question of power and freedom,
of melancholy and dazzlement,
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00:14:06,257 --> 00:14:10,797
so carefully coded within the spiral
that you could miss it,
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00:14:10,798 --> 00:14:16,147
and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space
in reality stands for the vertigo of time.
133
00:14:18,598 --> 00:14:21,519
He had followed all the trails,
even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores,
134
00:14:21,520 --> 00:14:27,171
where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead,
whom she should not have known.
135
00:14:27,172 --> 00:14:35,428
He followed Madelineas Scotty had doneto the Museum at the Legion of Honor,
before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known.
136
00:14:35,429 --> 00:14:40,941
And on the portrait, as in Madeline's hair,
the spiral of time.
137
00:14:48,826 --> 00:14:52,200
The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared
had disappeared itself;
138
00:14:52,201 --> 00:14:55,427
concrete had replaced it,
at the corner of Eddy and Gough.
139
00:14:55,428 --> 00:15:00,222
On the other hand, the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods.
140
00:15:00,223 --> 00:15:06,322
On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines
that measured the age of the tree and said,
141
00:15:06,323 --> 00:15:09,892
"Here I was born... and here I died."
142
00:15:09,893 --> 00:15:13,803
He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted.
143
00:15:13,804 --> 00:15:17,242
The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris,
144
00:15:17,243 --> 00:15:21,825
and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree,
outside of time.
145
00:15:25,924 --> 00:15:29,507
The painted horse at San Juan Bautista,
his eye that looked like Madeline's:
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00:15:29,508 --> 00:15:32,807
Hitchcock had invented nothing,
it was all there.
147
00:15:32,808 --> 00:15:37,994
He had run under the arches of the promenade in the mission
as Madeline had run towards her death.
148
00:15:37,995 --> 00:15:39,854
Or was it hers?
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00:15:43,455 --> 00:15:45,847
From this fake tower
the only thing that Hitchcock had added
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00:15:45,848 --> 00:15:52,701
he imagined Scotty as time's fool of love,
finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it.
151
00:15:52,702 --> 00:15:58,761
Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time,
a zone that would belong only to him
152
00:15:58,762 --> 00:16:02,885
and from which he could decipher
the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate
153
00:16:02,886 --> 00:16:06,071
when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay,
154
00:16:06,072 --> 00:16:08,292
when he had saved her from death
before casting her back to death.
155
00:16:08,293 --> 00:16:10,492
Or was it the other way around?
156
00:16:27,301 --> 00:16:30,374
In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film
I had seen nineteen times.
157
00:16:30,375 --> 00:16:34,319
In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film.
158
00:16:34,320 --> 00:16:39,294
That summer I had met three children on a road
and a volcano had come out of the sea.
159
00:16:39,295 --> 00:16:41,504
Encore un blablabla de s�enveiller.
160
00:16:44,235 --> 00:16:47,514
The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon,
in this corner of Earth that resembles it.
161
00:16:47,787 --> 00:16:51,493
I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction:
the landscape of another planet.
162
00:16:51,494 --> 00:16:55,770
Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet
for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away.
163
00:16:57,871 --> 00:17:02,525
I imagine him moving slowly, heavily,
about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles.
164
00:17:02,572 --> 00:17:06,490
All of a sudden he stumbles,
and the next step it's a year later.
165
00:17:06,565 --> 00:17:11,567
He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border
along a sea bird sanctuary.
166
00:17:14,174 --> 00:17:15,703
That's for a start.
167
00:17:15,704 --> 00:17:20,881
Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories?
That's just it, he can't understand.
168
00:17:20,882 --> 00:17:23,857
He hasn't come from another planet,
he comes from our future,
169
00:17:25,240 --> 00:17:26,227
Four thousand and one:
170
00:17:26,708 --> 00:17:29,519
the time when the human brain has reached
the era of full employment.
171
00:17:29,520 --> 00:17:34,034
Everything works to perfection,
all that we allow to slumber, including memory.
172
00:17:34,059 --> 00:17:39,059
Logical consequence:
total recall is memory anesthetized.
173
00:17:39,239 --> 00:17:42,087
After so many stories of men who had lost their memory,
174
00:17:42,088 --> 00:17:48,580
here is the story of one who has lost forgetting,
and whothrough some peculiarity of his nature
175
00:17:48,581 --> 00:17:52,656
instead of drawing pride from the fact and
scorning mankind of the past and its shadows,
176
00:17:52,763 --> 00:17:56,276
turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion.
177
00:17:56,611 --> 00:18:01,096
In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision,
to be moved by a portrait,
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00:18:01,119 --> 00:18:05,450
to tremble at the sound of music,
can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history.
179
00:18:05,451 --> 00:18:07,786
He wants to understand.
180
00:18:07,812 --> 00:18:11,218
He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice,
181
00:18:11,219 --> 00:18:16,375
and he reacts to that injustice like Ch� Guevara,
like the youth of the sixties, with indignation.
182
00:18:16,376 --> 00:18:19,790
He is a Third Worlder of time.
183
00:18:19,791 --> 00:18:24,775
The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past
is as unbearable to him
184
00:18:25,099 --> 00:18:27,230
as to them the existence of poverty in their present.
185
00:18:31,429 --> 00:18:32,720
Naturally he'll fail.
186
00:18:32,721 --> 00:18:39,031
The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him
as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children of a rich one.
187
00:18:39,203 --> 00:18:45,075
He has chosen to give up his privileges,
but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose.
188
00:18:46,076 --> 00:18:52,972
His only recourse is precisely that which threw him into this absurd quest:
a song cycle by Mussorgsky.
189
00:18:52,973 --> 00:18:56,141
They are still sung in the fortieth century.
190
00:18:56,142 --> 00:18:59,413
Their meaning has been lost,
but it was then that for the first time,
191
00:18:59,414 --> 00:19:04,305
he perceived the presence of that thing he didn't understand
which had something to do with unhappiness and memory,
192
00:19:04,306 --> 00:19:10,832
and towards which slowly, heavily,
he began to walk.
193
00:19:14,335 --> 00:19:16,059
Of course I'll never make that film.
194
00:19:19,409 --> 00:19:24,085
Nonetheless I'm collecting the sets, inventing the twists,
putting in my favorite creatures.
195
00:19:24,086 --> 00:19:31,240
I've even given it a title,
indeed the title of those Mussorgsky songs: Sunless.
196
00:19:52,225 --> 00:19:54,496
On May 15, 1945, at seven o'clock in the morning,
197
00:19:54,497 --> 00:20:00,320
the three hundred and eighty second US infantry regiment
attacked a hill in Okinawa they had renamed 'Dick Hill.'
198
00:20:00,321 --> 00:20:04,495
I suppose the Americans themselves believed
that they were conquering Japanese soil,
199
00:20:04,496 --> 00:20:07,671
and that they knew nothing about the Ryukyu civilization.
200
00:20:07,672 --> 00:20:13,928
Neither did I, apart from the fact that the faces of the market ladies at Itoman
spoke to me more of Gauguin than of Utamaro.
201
00:20:13,929 --> 00:20:19,236
For centuries of dreamy vassalage,
time had not moved in the archipelago.
202
00:20:19,237 --> 00:20:21,033
Then came the break.
203
00:20:21,034 --> 00:20:25,537
Is it a property of islands to make their women
into the guardians of their memory?
204
00:20:25,538 --> 00:20:30,183
I learned thatas in the Bijag�s
it is through the women that magic knowledge is transmitted.
205
00:20:30,184 --> 00:20:36,064
Each community has its priestessthe noro
who presides over all ceremonies with the exception of funerals.
206
00:20:36,065 --> 00:20:39,445
The Japanese defended their position inch by inch.
207
00:20:39,446 --> 00:20:44,624
At the end of the day, the two half platoons formed from the remnants
of L Company had got only halfway up the hill,
208
00:20:44,625 --> 00:20:51,003
a hill like the one where I followed a group of villagers
on their way to the purification ceremony.
209
00:20:51,004 --> 00:20:55,938
The noro communicates with the gods of the sea,
of rain, of the earth, of fire.
210
00:20:55,939 --> 00:20:59,511
Everyone bows down before the sister deity
211
00:20:59,512 --> 00:21:06,408
who is the reflection, in the absolute,
of a privileged relationship between brother and sister.
212
00:21:06,409 --> 00:21:10,035
Even after her death,
the sister retains her spiritual predominance.
213
00:21:10,036 --> 00:21:12,558
At dawn the Americans withdrew.
214
00:21:12,559 --> 00:21:17,467
Fighting went on for over a month before the island surrendered,
and toppled into the modern world.
215
00:21:17,468 --> 00:21:22,425
Twenty-seven years of American occupation,
the re-establishment of a controversial Japanese sovereignty:
216
00:21:22,426 --> 00:21:27,423
two miles from the bowling alleys and the gas stations
the noro continues her dialogue with the gods.
217
00:21:27,424 --> 00:21:30,987
When she is gone the dialogue will end.
218
00:21:30,988 --> 00:21:34,473
Brothers will no longer know that their dead sister
is watching over them.
219
00:22:42,116 --> 00:22:44,858
When filming this ceremony I knew I was present
at the end of something.
220
00:22:44,859 --> 00:22:49,707
Magical cultures that disappear leave traces
to those who succeed them.
221
00:22:49,708 --> 00:22:53,253
This one will leave none;
the break in history has been too violent.
222
00:22:53,254 --> 00:23:00,572
I touched that break at the summit of the hill,
as I had touched it at the edge of the ditch
223
00:23:00,573 --> 00:23:05,375
where two hundred girls had used grenades to commit suicide in 1945
rather than fall alive into the hands of the Americans.
224
00:23:05,376 --> 00:23:07,449
People have their pictures taken in front of the ditch.
225
00:23:07,450 --> 00:23:11,520
Across from it souvenir lighters are sold shaped like grenades.
226
00:23:17,832 --> 00:23:22,536
On Hayao's machine war resembles letters being burned,
shredded in a frame of fire.
227
00:23:22,537 --> 00:23:30,576
The code name for Pearl Harbor was Tora, Tora, Tora,
the name of the cat the couple in Gokokuji was praying for.
228
00:23:30,577 --> 00:23:34,716
So all of this will have begun with the name of a cat pronounced three times.
229
00:23:43,732 --> 00:23:49,216
Off Okinawa kamikaze dived on the American fleet;
they would become a legend.
230
00:23:49,217 --> 00:23:55,677
They were likelier material for it obviously than the special units
who exposed their prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria
231
00:23:55,678 --> 00:23:59,263
and then to hot water so as to see
how fast flesh separates from the bone.
232
00:23:59,264 --> 00:24:03,959
One would have to read their last letters to learn
that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers,
233
00:24:03,960 --> 00:24:06,608
nor were they all swashbuckling samurai.
234
00:24:06,609 --> 00:24:12,005
Before drinking his last cup of sak� Ryoji Uebara had written:
235
00:24:12,006 --> 00:24:15,567
"I have always thought that Japan must live free in order to live eternally.
236
00:24:15,568 --> 00:24:19,952
It may seem idiotic to say that today, under a totalitarian regime.
237
00:24:19,953 --> 00:24:29,419
We kamikaze pilots are machines, we have nothing to say,
except to beg our compatriots to make Japan the great country of our dreams.
238
00:24:29,420 --> 00:24:34,778
In the plane I am a machine, a bit of magnetized metal
that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier.
239
00:24:34,779 --> 00:24:38,763
But once on the ground I am a human being
with feelings and passions.
240
00:24:38,764 --> 00:24:41,630
Please excuse these disorganized thoughts.
241
00:24:41,631 --> 00:24:45,477
I'm leaving you a rather melancholy picture,
but in the depths of my heart I am happy.
242
00:24:45,478 --> 00:24:49,512
I have spoken frankly, forgive me."
243
00:26:11,836 --> 00:26:16,773
Every time he came from Africa he stopped at the island of Sal,
which is in fact a salt rock in the middle of the Atlantic.
244
00:26:16,774 --> 00:26:22,118
At the end of the island, beyond the village of Santa Maria
and its cemetery with the painted tombs,
245
00:26:22,119 --> 00:26:25,270
it suffices to walk straight ahead to meet the desert.
246
00:26:40,265 --> 00:26:42,978
He wrote me:
I've understood the visions.
247
00:26:42,979 --> 00:26:47,952
Suddenly you're in the desert the way you are in the night;
whatever is not desert no longer exists.
248
00:26:47,953 --> 00:26:50,762
You don't want to believe the images that crop up.
249
00:27:45,504 --> 00:27:47,505
Did I write you that there are emus in the Ile de France?
250
00:27:47,506 --> 00:27:53,076
This nameIsland of France
sounds strangely on the island of Sal.
251
00:27:53,077 --> 00:27:55,505
My memory superimposes two towers:
252
00:27:55,506 --> 00:27:59,328
the one at the ruined castle of Montpilloy
that served as an encampment for Joan of Arc,
253
00:27:59,329 --> 00:28:05,110
and the lighthouse tower at the southern tip of Sal,
probably one of the last lighthouses to use oil.
254
00:28:29,458 --> 00:28:35,278
A lighthouse in the Sahel looks like a collage
until you see the ocean at the edge of the sand and salt.
255
00:28:35,279 --> 00:28:39,197
Crews of transcontinental planes are rotated on Sal.
256
00:28:39,198 --> 00:28:44,564
Their club brings to this frontier of nothingness a small touch
of the seaside resort which makes the rest still more unreal.
257
00:28:44,565 --> 00:28:47,662
They feed the stray dogs that live on the beach.
258
00:29:02,119 --> 00:29:07,651
I found my dogs pretty nervous tonight;
they were playing with the sea as I had never seen them before.
259
00:29:07,652 --> 00:29:13,933
Listening to Radio Hong Kong later on I understood:
today was the first day of the lunar new year,
260
00:29:13,934 --> 00:29:19,267
and for the first time in sixty years
the sign of the dog met the sign of water.
261
00:30:00,685 --> 00:30:04,433
Out there, eleven thousand miles away,
a single shadow remains immobile
262
00:30:04,434 --> 00:30:07,913
in the midst of the long moving shadows
that the January light throws over the ground of Tokyo:
263
00:30:07,914 --> 00:30:10,273
the shadow of the Asakusa bonze.
264
00:30:58,723 --> 00:31:01,011
For also in Japan the year of the dog is beginning.
265
00:31:01,012 --> 00:31:05,389
Temples are filled with visitors who come
to toss down their coins and to prayJapanese style
266
00:31:05,390 --> 00:31:09,171
a prayer
which slips into life without interrupting it.
267
00:31:40,449 --> 00:31:44,722
Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal
in the company of my prancing dogs
268
00:31:44,723 --> 00:31:50,506
I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather
I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo.
269
00:31:50,507 --> 00:31:53,430
They have substituted themselves for my memory.
270
00:31:53,431 --> 00:31:55,193
They are my memory.
271
00:31:55,194 --> 00:32:00,519
I wonder how people remember things
who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape.
272
00:32:00,520 --> 00:32:02,971
How has mankind managed to remember?
273
00:32:02,972 --> 00:32:05,436
I know: it wrote the Bible.
274
00:32:05,437 --> 00:32:13,345
The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time
that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.
275
00:32:13,346 --> 00:32:17,428
As we await the year four thousand and one and its total recall,
276
00:32:17,429 --> 00:32:22,706
that's what the oracles we take out of their long hexagonal boxes
at new year may offer us:
277
00:32:22,707 --> 00:32:27,917
a little more power over that memory
that runs from camp to camplike Joan of Arc.
278
00:32:27,918 --> 00:32:33,292
That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong radio
picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo,
279
00:32:33,293 --> 00:32:41,461
and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces
back on another country, another distance, another music, endlessly.
280
00:32:50,685 --> 00:32:52,337
At the end of memory's path,
281
00:32:52,338 --> 00:32:59,033
the ideograms of the Island of France are no less enigmatic
than the kanji of Tokyo in the miraculous light of the new year.
282
00:32:59,034 --> 00:33:05,911
It's Indian winter, as if the air were the first element
to emerge purified from the countless ceremonies
283
00:33:05,912 --> 00:33:09,351
by which the Japanese wash off
one year to enter the next one.
284
00:33:09,352 --> 00:33:14,734
A full month is just enough for them to fulfill
all the duties that courtesy owes to time,
285
00:33:14,735 --> 00:33:20,777
the most interesting unquestionably being the acquisition
at the temple of Tenjin of the uso bird,
286
00:33:20,778 --> 00:33:26,717
who according to one tradition eats all your lies of the year to come,
and according to another turns them into truths.
287
00:33:27,987 --> 00:33:34,740
But what gives the street its color in January,
what makes it suddenly different is the appearance of kimono.
288
00:33:34,741 --> 00:33:43,282
In the street, in stores, in offices, even at the stock exchange
on opening day, the girls take out their fur collared winter kimono.
289
00:33:43,283 --> 00:33:48,410
At that moment of the year other Japanese
may well invent extra flat TV sets,
290
00:33:48,411 --> 00:33:51,173
commit suicide with a chain saw,
or capture two thirds of the world market for semiconductors.
291
00:33:51,174 --> 00:33:53,009
Good for them;
all you see are the girls.
292
00:34:05,460 --> 00:34:09,741
The fifteenth of January is coming of age day:
an obligatory celebration in the life of a young Japanese woman.
293
00:34:09,742 --> 00:34:14,890
The city governments distribute small bags
filled with gifts, datebooks, advice:
294
00:34:14,891 --> 00:34:18,165
how to be a good citizen, a good mother, a good wife.
295
00:34:18,166 --> 00:34:24,602
On that day every twenty-year-old girl
can phone her family for free, no matter where in Japan.
296
00:34:25,603 --> 00:34:29,879
Flag, home, and country:
this is the anteroom of adulthood.
297
00:34:29,880 --> 00:34:34,232
The world of the takenoko and of rock singers
speeds away like a rocket.
298
00:34:34,233 --> 00:34:37,964
Speakers explain what society expects of them.
299
00:34:37,965 --> 00:34:42,032
How long will it take to forget the secret?
300
00:35:39,464 --> 00:35:42,947
And when all the celebrations are over it
remains only to pick up all the ornaments
301
00:35:42,948 --> 00:35:46,980
all the accessories of the celebration
and by burning them, make a celebration.
302
00:36:31,066 --> 00:36:37,208
This is dondo-yaki, a Shinto blessing of the debris
that have a right to immortalitylike the dolls at Ueno.
303
00:36:37,209 --> 00:36:41,749
The last statebefore their disappearance
of the poignancy of things.
304
00:36:41,750 --> 00:36:46,978
Darumathe one eyed spirit
reigns supreme at the summit of the bonfire.
305
00:36:46,979 --> 00:36:50,375
Abandonment must be a feast;
laceration must be a feast.
306
00:36:50,376 --> 00:36:54,231
And the farewell to all that one has lost, broken,
used, must be ennobled by a ceremony.
307
00:36:54,232 --> 00:36:59,116
It's Japan that could fulfill the wish of that French writer
who wanted divorce to be made a sacrament.
308
00:36:59,117 --> 00:37:05,321
The only baffling part of this ritual was the circle of children
striking the ground with their long poles.
309
00:37:05,322 --> 00:37:11,181
I only got one explanation, a singular one
although for me it might take the form of a small intimate service
310
00:37:11,182 --> 00:37:13,095
it was to chase away the moles.
311
00:37:55,075 --> 00:37:58,700
And that's where my three children of Iceland
came and grafted themselves in.
312
00:38:00,783 --> 00:38:04,239
I picked up the whole shot again,
adding the somewhat hazy end,
313
00:38:04,240 --> 00:38:07,834
the frame trembling under the force of the wind
beating us down on the cliff:
314
00:38:07,835 --> 00:38:13,111
everything I had cut in order to tidy up, and that said
better than all the rest what I saw in that moment,
315
00:38:13,112 --> 00:38:18,214
why I held it at arms length, at zooms length,
until its last twenty-fourth of a second.
316
00:38:21,043 --> 00:38:22,675
The city of Heimaey spread out below us.
317
00:38:22,676 --> 00:38:26,914
And when five years later my friend Haroun Tazieff sent me the film
he had just shot in the same place
318
00:38:26,915 --> 00:38:31,782
I lacked only the name to learn that
nature performs its own dondo-yaki;
319
00:38:32,783 --> 00:38:35,402
the island's volcano had awakened.
320
00:38:35,403 --> 00:38:41,520
I looked at those pictures, and it was as
if the entire year '65 had just been covered with ashes.
321
00:38:58,939 --> 00:39:03,187
So, it sufficed to wait and the planet itself
staged the working of time.
322
00:39:04,320 --> 00:39:06,687
I saw what had been my window again.
323
00:39:06,688 --> 00:39:10,299
I saw emerge familiar roofs and balconies,
324
00:39:10,300 --> 00:39:16,295
the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day,
down to the cliff where I had met the children.
325
00:39:16,299 --> 00:39:23,566
The cat with white socks that Haroun had been considerate
enough to film for me naturally found its place.
326
00:39:23,567 --> 00:39:30,247
And I thought, of all the prayers to time that had studded this trip
the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of Gotokuji,
327
00:39:30,248 --> 00:39:37,542
who said simply to her cat Tora,
"Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you."
328
00:39:59,102 --> 00:40:05,847
And then in its turn the journey entered the 'zone,'
and Hayao showed me my images already affected by the moss of time,
329
00:40:05,848 --> 00:40:10,592
freed of the lie that had prolonged the existence
of those moments swallowed by the spiral.
330
00:40:27,263 --> 00:40:32,042
When spring came, when every crow announced
its arrival by raising his cry half a tone,
331
00:40:32,043 --> 00:40:40,047
I took the green train of the Yamanote line and
got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office.
332
00:40:40,048 --> 00:40:45,715
Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light
Japanese style
333
00:40:45,716 --> 00:40:48,583
so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars.
334
00:40:48,584 --> 00:40:53,099
Even if I was expecting no letter
I stopped at the general delivery window,
335
00:40:53,100 --> 00:41:00,971
for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters,
and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters.
336
00:41:00,972 --> 00:41:05,009
I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West,
337
00:41:05,010 --> 00:41:08,050
that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being,
what is spoken to what is left unsaid.
338
00:41:08,051 --> 00:41:11,529
I walked alongside the little stalls of clothing dealers.
339
00:41:11,530 --> 00:41:17,614
I heard in the distance Mr. Akao's voice reverberating
from the loudspeakers... a half tone higher.
340
00:41:17,615 --> 00:41:22,907
Then I went down into the basement where my friend
the maniacbusies himself with his electronic graffiti.
341
00:41:22,908 --> 00:41:29,820
Finally his language touches me, because he talks to that part of us
which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls.
342
00:41:29,821 --> 00:41:35,080
A piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not,
or is no longer, or is not yet;
343
00:41:35,081 --> 00:41:41,255
the handwriting each one of us will use to compose his own list of 'things
that quicken the heart,' to offer, or to erase.
344
00:41:41,256 --> 00:41:49,706
In that moment poetry will be made by everyone,
and there will be emus in the 'zone.'
345
00:42:09,441 --> 00:42:12,396
He writes me from Japan.
He writes me from Africa.
346
00:42:12,397 --> 00:42:19,186
He writes that he can now summon up the look on the face
of the market lady of Praia that had lasted only the length of a film frame.
347
00:42:19,187 --> 00:42:23,142
Will there be a last letter?
40253
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