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1
00:00:40,833 --> 00:00:42,959
The first image he told me about
2
00:00:43,085 --> 00:00:46,879
was of three children
on a road in Iceland in 1965.
3
00:00:54,304 --> 00:00:56,514
He said for him
it was the image of happiness,
4
00:00:56,682 --> 00:00:59,767
and that he'd often tried
to link it to other images,
5
00:00:59,893 --> 00:01:02,478
but it had never worked.
6
00:01:02,646 --> 00:01:06,566
He wrote me, "I'll have to put it
all alone at the beginning of a film,
7
00:01:06,734 --> 00:01:08,985
with a long piece of black leader.
8
00:01:09,153 --> 00:01:13,030
If they don't see happiness in the
picture, at least they'll see the black."
9
00:01:47,065 --> 00:01:50,610
He wrote, "I'm just back
from Ηokkaido, the northern island.
10
00:01:51,028 --> 00:01:55,198
Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane.
Others take the ferry.
11
00:01:55,908 --> 00:01:58,618
Waiting, immobility,
snatches of sleep -
12
00:01:58,786 --> 00:02:01,329
curiously it all makes me think
of some past or future war:
13
00:02:01,455 --> 00:02:04,040
night trains, air raids,
fall-out shelters.
14
00:02:04,208 --> 00:02:08,044
Small fragments of war
enshrined in everyday life."
15
00:02:28,398 --> 00:02:31,442
He liked the fragility
of those moments suspended in time,
16
00:02:31,568 --> 00:02:35,696
memories whose only function
was to leave behind memories.
17
00:02:35,864 --> 00:02:40,076
He wrote, "After circling the globe,
only banality still interests me.
18
00:02:40,202 --> 00:02:43,329
On this trip I've tracked it relentlessly,
like a bounty hunter.
19
00:02:46,166 --> 00:02:48,167
At dawn, we'll be in Tokyo."
20
00:03:13,694 --> 00:03:15,695
He used to write me from Africa.
21
00:03:15,863 --> 00:03:20,032
He contrasted African time
with European and Asian time.
22
00:03:20,200 --> 00:03:23,828
He said that in the 1 9th century,
mankind had come to terms with space,
23
00:03:23,996 --> 00:03:27,373
and that the great question of the 20th
would be different concepts of time.
24
00:03:27,541 --> 00:03:29,000
"By the way,
25
00:03:29,126 --> 00:03:32,587
did you know that
there are emus in the lle de France?"
26
00:03:41,847 --> 00:03:43,848
Ηe wrote that in the Bijago Islands,
27
00:03:44,016 --> 00:03:47,184
it's the young girls
who choose their fiancés.
28
00:03:47,561 --> 00:03:52,231
He wrote that in the suburbs of Tokyo,
there's a temple consecrated to cats.
29
00:04:12,586 --> 00:04:16,172
"I wish I could convey the simplicity,
the lack of affectation of this couple
30
00:04:16,298 --> 00:04:22,011
who'd come to place an inscribed
wooden slat in the cat cemetery
31
00:04:22,638 --> 00:04:25,640
so that their cat Tora
would be protected.
32
00:04:25,807 --> 00:04:28,768
No, she wasn't dead.
She'd just run away.
33
00:04:28,936 --> 00:04:32,396
But on the day of her death,
no one would know how to pray for her,
34
00:04:32,564 --> 00:04:36,692
how to intercede with death so that
he would call her by her right name.
35
00:04:37,486 --> 00:04:40,321
So they had to come in the rain
36
00:04:40,447 --> 00:04:45,952
to perform the rite that would repair
the web of time where it had been broken."
37
00:04:57,798 --> 00:04:59,799
He wrote...
38
00:04:59,967 --> 00:05:03,302
"I'll have spent my life trying to
understand the function of remembering,
39
00:05:03,470 --> 00:05:06,889
which is not the opposite of forgetting,
but rather its inner lining.
40
00:05:07,015 --> 00:05:10,977
We don't remember. We rewrite memory
much as history is rewritten.
41
00:05:12,270 --> 00:05:15,147
How can one remember thirst?"
42
00:05:30,831 --> 00:05:33,708
He didn't like
to dwell on poverty,
43
00:05:33,875 --> 00:05:35,960
but in everything
that he wanted to show,
44
00:05:36,086 --> 00:05:39,005
there were also
the failures of the Japanese model.
45
00:05:39,172 --> 00:05:43,634
"A world full of bums, of lumpens,
of outcasts, of Koreans.
46
00:05:44,678 --> 00:05:49,306
Too broke to afford drugs,
they get drunk on beer or fermented milk.
47
00:05:49,933 --> 00:05:53,477
This morning in Namidabashi,
20 minutes from the glories of downtown,
48
00:05:53,603 --> 00:05:58,274
a character took his revenge on society
by directing traffic at this intersection.
49
00:05:58,525 --> 00:06:01,110
Luxury for them would be
a large bottle of sake
50
00:06:01,278 --> 00:06:04,947
of the type poured over tombs
on the day of the dead.
51
00:06:33,518 --> 00:06:36,562
I bought a round
in a bar in Namidabashi,
52
00:06:36,730 --> 00:06:39,440
a place where people stare
at each other with equality.
53
00:06:39,858 --> 00:06:44,570
The threshold below which every man
is as good as any other, and knows it."
54
00:06:58,293 --> 00:07:02,171
Ηe told me about the jetty on Fogo
in the Cape Verde Islands.
55
00:07:03,340 --> 00:07:06,884
"How long have they been there
waiting for the boat?
56
00:07:07,052 --> 00:07:09,428
Patient as pebbles,
but ready to pounce.
57
00:07:10,138 --> 00:07:13,432
They're a people of wanderers,
of navigators, of world travelers.
58
00:07:14,726 --> 00:07:18,229
They arose from crossbreeding
on these rocks that the Portuguese used
59
00:07:18,355 --> 00:07:20,564
as a marshaling yard
for their colonies.
60
00:07:20,690 --> 00:07:24,026
A people of nothing, a people
of emptiness, a vertical people.
61
00:07:24,945 --> 00:07:26,654
Frankly,
62
00:07:26,780 --> 00:07:28,572
isn't it stupid to tell people,
63
00:07:28,698 --> 00:07:32,451
like they teach in film school,
not to look at the camera?"
64
00:07:45,549 --> 00:07:47,424
He wrote...
65
00:07:48,468 --> 00:07:51,637
"The Sahel is not only
what is shown of it when it is too late.
66
00:07:51,805 --> 00:07:56,100
Drought seeps into this land
like water into a leaking boat.
67
00:07:56,434 --> 00:07:59,061
The animals resurrected
for carnival in Bissau
68
00:07:59,187 --> 00:08:01,021
will be petrified again
69
00:08:01,148 --> 00:08:04,275
as soon as a new attack has
changed the savannah into a desert.
70
00:08:04,442 --> 00:08:08,612
It's a state of survival that rich countries
have forgotten, with one exception.
71
00:08:08,780 --> 00:08:11,031
You guessed it: Japan.
72
00:08:13,076 --> 00:08:15,995
My constant comings and goings
are not a search for contrasts.
73
00:08:16,163 --> 00:08:18,664
They're a journey
to the extreme poles of survival."
74
00:09:47,921 --> 00:09:50,047
He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon,
75
00:09:50,215 --> 00:09:53,717
a lady-in-waiting to Princess Sadako
in the 11th century,
76
00:09:53,843 --> 00:09:56,011
during the Ηeian period.
77
00:09:58,390 --> 00:10:00,599
"Do we ever know
where history is really made?
78
00:10:00,725 --> 00:10:04,436
Rulers used complicated
strategies to fight one another,
79
00:10:04,562 --> 00:10:07,940
while real power lay
with a family of hereditary regents.
80
00:10:08,066 --> 00:10:12,111
The emperor's court was but a place
of intrigues and intellectual games.
81
00:10:12,237 --> 00:10:16,490
But by learning to draw
a sort of melancholy comfort
82
00:10:16,616 --> 00:10:20,286
from the contemplation
of the tiniest things,
83
00:10:20,453 --> 00:10:24,206
this small group of idlers
left a mark on Japanese sensibility
84
00:10:24,332 --> 00:10:27,876
much deeper than the mediocre
thundering of the politicians.
85
00:10:28,003 --> 00:10:30,546
Shonagon had a passion for lists:
86
00:10:30,714 --> 00:10:33,090
a list of 'elegant things,'
87
00:10:33,216 --> 00:10:35,217
of 'distressing things,'
88
00:10:35,385 --> 00:10:38,637
or even of
'things not worth doing.'
89
00:10:38,805 --> 00:10:42,391
One day she drew up a list
of 'things that quicken the heart.'
90
00:10:42,517 --> 00:10:45,019
Not a bad criterion,
I realize when I'm filming.
91
00:10:45,145 --> 00:10:46,812
I bow to the economic miracle,
92
00:10:46,980 --> 00:10:49,481
but I really want to show
the neighborhood celebrations."
93
00:14:26,157 --> 00:14:28,408
He wrote...
94
00:14:28,535 --> 00:14:30,369
"Coming back
along the Chiba coast,
95
00:14:30,495 --> 00:14:35,290
I thought of Shonagon's list of signs
one need only name to quicken the heart.
96
00:14:35,458 --> 00:14:37,125
Only name.
97
00:14:37,293 --> 00:14:40,337
To us, a sun is not quite a sun
unless it is 'radiant,'
98
00:14:40,505 --> 00:14:42,422
a spring not quite a spring
unless it's 'crystal-clear.'
99
00:14:42,549 --> 00:14:44,550
Ηere, interjecting adjectives
100
00:14:44,717 --> 00:14:47,844
would be as rude
as leaving price tags on purchases.
101
00:14:49,055 --> 00:14:51,598
Japanese poetry never modifies.
102
00:14:51,724 --> 00:14:53,934
There is a way
of saying boat, rock, mist,
103
00:14:54,102 --> 00:14:56,228
frog, crow, hail,
104
00:14:56,354 --> 00:15:00,065
heron, chrysanthemum
that includes them all.
105
00:15:00,233 --> 00:15:03,235
Newspapers recently chronicled
the story of a man from Nagoya.
106
00:15:03,861 --> 00:15:05,904
The woman he loved died last year,
107
00:15:06,072 --> 00:15:09,241
and he'd drowned himself in work,
Japanese-style, like a madman.
108
00:15:09,367 --> 00:15:13,328
It seems he even made
an important discovery in electronics.
109
00:15:13,496 --> 00:15:17,165
And then, in the month of May,
he killed himself.
110
00:15:17,292 --> 00:15:20,961
They say he couldn't bear
to hear the word 'spring."'
111
00:15:58,124 --> 00:16:00,959
He described his reunion with Tokyo.
112
00:16:02,045 --> 00:16:04,338
"Like a cat home from vacation
113
00:16:04,464 --> 00:16:06,965
who immediately starts
to inspect familiar places."
114
00:16:07,467 --> 00:16:09,760
He ran to see
if all was where it should be:
115
00:16:09,927 --> 00:16:13,096
the Ginza owl,
the Shimbashi locomotive,
116
00:16:13,222 --> 00:16:15,932
the Temple of the Fox
above the Mitsukoshi department store,
117
00:16:16,100 --> 00:16:18,935
which he found invaded
by little girls and rock singers.
118
00:16:19,103 --> 00:16:22,648
He learned it was now
little girls who made and unmade stars,
119
00:16:22,774 --> 00:16:25,359
and that producers
trembled before them.
120
00:16:25,485 --> 00:16:29,112
He was told that a disfigured woman
took off her mask in front of passers-by
121
00:16:29,238 --> 00:16:32,282
and scratched them
if they didn't find her beautiful.
122
00:16:32,408 --> 00:16:34,034
Everything interested him.
123
00:16:34,160 --> 00:16:38,246
He who didn't give a damn
about soccer stars or racetrack winners
124
00:16:38,373 --> 00:16:43,043
asked feverishly about Chiyonofuji's
ranking in the last sumo tournament.
125
00:16:43,169 --> 00:16:46,505
He asked for news
of the imperial family, the crown prince,
126
00:16:46,673 --> 00:16:50,342
or Tokyo's oldest mobster,
who appears regularly on television
127
00:16:50,468 --> 00:16:52,511
to teach goodness to children.
128
00:16:52,637 --> 00:16:54,888
The simple joys he'd never known -
129
00:16:55,056 --> 00:16:58,183
returning to one's native land
and family home -
130
00:16:58,309 --> 00:17:01,728
he found among the city's
12 million anonymous residents.
131
00:18:10,757 --> 00:18:12,674
He wrote...
132
00:18:12,800 --> 00:18:16,094
"Tokyo is crisscrossed by trains,
knit together by electric wires.
133
00:18:16,262 --> 00:18:18,430
She shows her veins.
134
00:18:18,556 --> 00:18:21,099
They say TV is making
her people illiterate,
135
00:18:21,225 --> 00:18:24,060
but I've never seen
so many people reading in the streets.
136
00:18:24,187 --> 00:18:25,979
Perhaps they only read
in the street,
137
00:18:26,105 --> 00:18:29,316
or perhaps they're just pretending
to read, these yellow men.
138
00:18:29,442 --> 00:18:33,320
I make my appointments at Kinokuniya,
the big bookshop in Shinjuku.
139
00:18:33,446 --> 00:18:35,781
The graphic genius
that allowed the Japanese
140
00:18:35,948 --> 00:18:38,074
to invent CinemaScope
ten centuries before the movies
141
00:18:38,201 --> 00:18:41,036
compensates a bit for the sad fate
of the comic-strip heroines,
142
00:18:41,204 --> 00:18:44,706
victims of heartless writers
and a castrating censorship.
143
00:18:44,874 --> 00:18:47,918
Sometimes they escape,
and you find them again on the walls.
144
00:18:48,044 --> 00:18:50,670
The entire city is a comic strip.
145
00:18:59,806 --> 00:19:02,140
It's planet Mongo.
146
00:19:02,809 --> 00:19:05,018
One can't miss the statuary,
147
00:19:05,144 --> 00:19:07,437
from plasticized baroque
to Stalin-sensual,
148
00:19:07,563 --> 00:19:11,149
and the giant faces
with their imposing stares.
149
00:19:11,275 --> 00:19:15,779
Pictures bigger than people,
voyeurizing the voyeurs.
150
00:19:24,455 --> 00:19:28,500
At nightfall, the megalopolis
breaks down into villages.
151
00:19:28,626 --> 00:19:32,796
With its country cemeteries in the shadow
of banks, its stations and temples,
152
00:19:32,922 --> 00:19:36,716
each district of Tokyo once again
becomes a tidy, ingenuous little town,
153
00:19:36,843 --> 00:19:39,803
nestled among the skyscrapers."
154
00:19:52,358 --> 00:19:55,193
The small bar in Shinjuku
reminded him of that lndian flute
155
00:19:55,319 --> 00:19:58,113
whose sound can only be heard
by the person playing it.
156
00:19:58,239 --> 00:20:01,533
Ηe might have cried out - as in
a Godard film or a Shakespeare play -
157
00:20:01,659 --> 00:20:04,369
"Where is that music coming from?"
158
00:20:05,538 --> 00:20:09,416
Later he told me he'd eaten
at the restaurant in Nishi Nippori
159
00:20:09,542 --> 00:20:13,169
where Mr. Yamada practices
the difficult art of "action cooking."
160
00:20:19,051 --> 00:20:21,720
He said that by carefully watching
Mr. Yamada's gestures
161
00:20:21,888 --> 00:20:24,097
and his way
of mixing the ingredients,
162
00:20:24,265 --> 00:20:26,933
one could meditate profitably
on fundamental concepts
163
00:20:27,101 --> 00:20:29,477
common to painting,
philosophy and martial arts.
164
00:20:30,104 --> 00:20:32,230
He claimed
that Mr. Yamada possessed,
165
00:20:32,398 --> 00:20:36,192
in his impressively humble way,
the essence of style...
166
00:20:37,361 --> 00:20:39,613
and that it therefore fell to him
167
00:20:39,739 --> 00:20:41,740
to use his invisible brush
168
00:20:41,866 --> 00:20:45,410
to write upon this first day in Tokyo
the words "The End."
169
00:20:51,500 --> 00:20:54,502
"I spent the day in front of my TV,
that box of memories.
170
00:20:54,629 --> 00:20:57,130
I was in Nara
with the sacred deer.
171
00:20:57,548 --> 00:20:59,090
I was taking a picture,
172
00:20:59,258 --> 00:21:01,092
unaware that in the 1 5th century
Basho had written...
173
00:21:02,428 --> 00:21:06,556
'The willow sees
the heron's image upside down.'
174
00:21:16,859 --> 00:21:19,444
Commercials
become a kind of haiku
175
00:21:19,570 --> 00:21:21,947
to the eye used
to Western atrocities in the genre.
176
00:21:22,448 --> 00:21:25,283
Not understanding obviously
adds to the pleasure.
177
00:21:25,451 --> 00:21:27,619
For one slightly
hallucinatory moment,
178
00:21:27,745 --> 00:21:30,622
I had the impression
that I understood Japanese...
179
00:21:31,374 --> 00:21:34,793
but it was a cultural program
about Gérard de Nerval."
180
00:21:34,919 --> 00:21:38,380
Memories of a visit to the tomb
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
181
00:21:38,506 --> 00:21:40,882
a simple and moving
monument in stone
182
00:21:41,008 --> 00:21:43,635
guarded by tall trees.
183
00:22:03,990 --> 00:22:06,157
"8:40. Cambodia.
184
00:22:06,325 --> 00:22:07,784
From Rousseau
to the Khmer Rouge -
185
00:22:07,952 --> 00:22:10,286
coincidence, or a sense of history?
186
00:22:10,663 --> 00:22:12,414
In Apocalypse Now,
187
00:22:12,581 --> 00:22:14,958
Brando uttered a few definitive -
and incommunicable -
188
00:22:15,126 --> 00:22:17,544
sentences on the subject:
189
00:22:17,670 --> 00:22:19,963
'Horror has a face and a name.
190
00:22:20,089 --> 00:22:22,215
You must make a friend of horror.'
191
00:22:29,265 --> 00:22:31,516
To cast out the horror
that has a name and a face,
192
00:22:31,684 --> 00:22:34,310
you must give it another name
and another face.
193
00:22:34,478 --> 00:22:38,398
Japanese horror movies have
the sly beauty of certain corpses.
194
00:22:38,524 --> 00:22:41,234
One is sometimes stunned
by so much cruelty.
195
00:22:41,360 --> 00:22:45,530
One seeks its source in Asian people's
long familiarity with suffering
196
00:22:45,656 --> 00:22:47,949
that requires
that even pain be ornate.
197
00:22:48,075 --> 00:22:50,118
And then comes the reward:
198
00:22:50,286 --> 00:22:53,997
The monsters are vanquished
and Natsume Masako arises.
199
00:22:54,123 --> 00:22:57,000
Absolute beauty too
has a name and a face.
200
00:23:08,971 --> 00:23:11,389
But the more you watch
Japanese television,
201
00:23:11,515 --> 00:23:14,142
the more you feel it's watching you.
202
00:24:02,233 --> 00:24:05,151
Even television newscasts
bear witness to the fact
203
00:24:05,277 --> 00:24:07,779
that the eye's magical function
is at the center of all things.
204
00:24:07,947 --> 00:24:09,656
It's election time.
205
00:24:09,824 --> 00:24:11,950
Winning candidates black out
206
00:24:12,076 --> 00:24:15,745
the empty eye of Daruma,
the spirit of luck,
207
00:24:15,871 --> 00:24:19,624
while losing candidates, sad but dignified,
carry off their one-eyed Daruma.
208
00:24:22,711 --> 00:24:25,421
The most indecipherable images
are those of Europe.
209
00:24:25,548 --> 00:24:29,968
I watch the images of a film
whose soundtrack will be added later.
210
00:24:30,136 --> 00:24:32,804
It took me six months for Poland.
211
00:24:36,809 --> 00:24:39,644
But I have no difficulty
with the local earthquakes,
212
00:24:39,812 --> 00:24:43,857
though I must admit last night's quake
helped me greatly to grasp the problem.
213
00:24:44,733 --> 00:24:46,985
Poetry is born of insecurity:
214
00:24:47,736 --> 00:24:49,154
wandering Jews,
215
00:24:49,280 --> 00:24:51,197
quaking Japanese.
216
00:24:52,950 --> 00:24:56,953
Living on a rug that jesting nature is
ever ready to pull out from under them,
217
00:24:57,079 --> 00:24:59,497
they've learned to inhabit
a world of appearances,
218
00:24:59,623 --> 00:25:01,958
fragile, fleeting, revocable,
219
00:25:02,084 --> 00:25:04,002
of trains that fly
from planet to planet,
220
00:25:04,128 --> 00:25:07,463
of samurai fighting
in an ever-shifting past.
221
00:25:07,590 --> 00:25:10,341
It's called
the impermanence of things.
222
00:25:39,496 --> 00:25:42,373
I watched it all,
even the evening shows,
223
00:25:42,499 --> 00:25:43,917
the so-called adult shows.
224
00:25:44,084 --> 00:25:47,754
The same hypocrisy as in the comic
strips, but this is a coded hypocrisy.
225
00:25:47,880 --> 00:25:51,758
Censorship is not the mutilation
of the show. It is the show.
226
00:25:51,884 --> 00:25:53,468
The code is the message.
227
00:25:53,594 --> 00:25:58,389
It points to the absolute by hiding it,
like religions have always done."
228
00:26:12,071 --> 00:26:14,113
That year, a new face appeared
229
00:26:14,240 --> 00:26:17,951
among the great faces adorning
the streets of Tokyo: the face of the pope.
230
00:26:18,118 --> 00:26:20,119
Treasures that had never
left the Vatican
231
00:26:20,287 --> 00:26:23,414
were displayed on the seventh floor
of the Sogo department store.
232
00:26:24,124 --> 00:26:25,833
He wrote...
233
00:26:26,126 --> 00:26:30,088
"It's curiosity, of course, but also
a hint of industrial espionage.
234
00:26:30,923 --> 00:26:32,924
I imagine them bringing out
in two years
235
00:26:33,092 --> 00:26:36,177
a more efficient and less expensive
version of Catholicism.
236
00:26:37,304 --> 00:26:39,889
But there's also the fascination
associated with the sacred,
237
00:26:40,015 --> 00:26:41,975
even when it's someone else's.
238
00:27:23,475 --> 00:27:28,521
So when will French department stores
exhibit relics sacred to the Japanese
239
00:27:28,689 --> 00:27:31,858
such as can be seen at Jozankei,
on the island of Hokkaido?
240
00:27:32,359 --> 00:27:36,321
At first, one smiles at this combination
museum, chapel and sex shop.
241
00:27:36,822 --> 00:27:40,450
As always in Japan, one admires
how the walls between realms are so thin
242
00:27:40,576 --> 00:27:43,161
that one can in the same breath
contemplate a statue,
243
00:27:43,329 --> 00:27:45,079
buy an inflatable doll
244
00:27:45,247 --> 00:27:47,749
and give the goddess of fertility
the small offering
245
00:27:47,875 --> 00:27:50,251
that always accompanies
her displays,
246
00:27:50,377 --> 00:27:54,047
displays whose frankness would render
television's stratagems incomprehensible
247
00:27:54,465 --> 00:27:59,719
but for the fact that sex organs may
only be shown severed from the body.
248
00:28:12,191 --> 00:28:14,275
One would like to
believe in a world before the fall,
249
00:28:14,443 --> 00:28:16,527
inaccessible to the complications
of a puritanism
250
00:28:16,695 --> 00:28:20,365
whose phony shadow was imposed
on it by American occupation,
251
00:28:20,657 --> 00:28:23,326
where people who gather laughing
around the votive fountain,
252
00:28:23,452 --> 00:28:25,453
the woman who touches it
with a friendly gesture,
253
00:28:25,621 --> 00:28:28,581
share in the same cosmic innocence.
254
00:28:29,291 --> 00:28:31,876
The second part of the museum,
with its pairs of coupling animals,
255
00:28:32,044 --> 00:28:34,879
would then be the earthly paradise
as we've always dreamed of it.
256
00:28:35,047 --> 00:28:36,381
Not so sure.
257
00:28:36,548 --> 00:28:39,926
Animal innocence may be a trick
for getting around censorship,
258
00:28:40,386 --> 00:28:43,596
but perhaps also the mirror
of an impossible reconciliation,
259
00:28:43,722 --> 00:28:48,601
and even without original sin, this
earthly paradise may be a paradise lost.
260
00:28:51,188 --> 00:28:53,689
In the glossy splendor
of the gentle animals of Jozankei,
261
00:28:53,816 --> 00:28:56,859
I read the fundamental rift
of Japanese society,
262
00:28:56,985 --> 00:28:59,612
the rift that separates
men from women.
263
00:28:59,780 --> 00:29:02,573
In life it seems to manifest
in just two ways:
264
00:29:02,741 --> 00:29:04,450
violent slaughter,
265
00:29:04,576 --> 00:29:07,495
or a discreet melancholy
resembling Shonagon's,
266
00:29:07,621 --> 00:29:11,833
which the Japanese express
in a single - and untranslatable - word.
267
00:29:12,000 --> 00:29:13,918
Bringing man down
to the level of the beasts
268
00:29:14,086 --> 00:29:16,129
against which
the church fathers inveighed
269
00:29:16,296 --> 00:29:19,715
becomes here the challenge of the beasts
to the 'poignancy of things,'
270
00:29:19,883 --> 00:29:22,218
to a melancholy whose tone
I can convey
271
00:29:22,386 --> 00:29:25,388
by copying a few lines
from Samura Koichi:
272
00:29:27,224 --> 00:29:30,268
'Who said that time
heals all wounds?
273
00:29:31,270 --> 00:29:35,273
Better to say that time heals
everything except wounds.
274
00:29:35,524 --> 00:29:39,235
With time, the hurt of separation
loses its real limits.
275
00:29:39,361 --> 00:29:42,780
With time, the desired body
will soon disappear,
276
00:29:42,948 --> 00:29:45,992
and if the desiring body has already
ceased to exist for the other,
277
00:29:46,118 --> 00:29:49,954
then what remains
is a disembodied wound."'
278
00:29:57,671 --> 00:29:59,797
He wrote
that the Japanese secret -
279
00:29:59,965 --> 00:30:03,092
what Levi-Strauss called
the poignancy of things -
280
00:30:03,260 --> 00:30:05,803
implied the faculty
of communing with things,
281
00:30:05,971 --> 00:30:09,557
of entering into them,
of being them for a moment.
282
00:30:09,683 --> 00:30:12,310
It's only natural that, in their turn,
they should be like us -
283
00:30:12,436 --> 00:30:14,312
perishable and immortal.
284
00:30:21,570 --> 00:30:24,780
He wrote, "Animism is
a familiar notion in Africa.
285
00:30:24,948 --> 00:30:26,991
It's less often applied to Japan.
286
00:30:27,159 --> 00:30:29,118
What then shall we call
this diffuse belief
287
00:30:29,286 --> 00:30:33,331
according to which every fragment
of creation has its invisible counterpart?
288
00:30:33,790 --> 00:30:36,334
Building a factory or skyscraper
289
00:30:36,460 --> 00:30:39,670
begins with a ceremony to appease
the god who owns the land.
290
00:30:39,838 --> 00:30:43,841
There's a ceremony for brushes,
abacuses, even rusty needles.
291
00:30:44,009 --> 00:30:48,721
There's one on September 25th for
the repose of the soul of broken dolls.
292
00:30:48,847 --> 00:30:51,849
The dolls are piled up
in the Temple of Kiyomizu -
293
00:30:51,975 --> 00:30:56,771
which is consecrated to Kannon,
the goddess of compassion -
294
00:30:56,897 --> 00:30:59,023
and then burned in public.
295
00:31:34,851 --> 00:31:36,727
I watched the participants.
296
00:31:37,062 --> 00:31:39,230
I think the people who saw off
the kamikaze pilots
297
00:31:39,648 --> 00:31:42,066
had the same look on their faces."
298
00:32:14,850 --> 00:32:16,934
He wrote that the pictures
of Guinea-Bissau
299
00:32:17,102 --> 00:32:19,562
ought to be accompanied
by music from the Cape Verde Islands.
300
00:32:19,730 --> 00:32:22,773
That would be our contribution
to the unity dreamed of by Amílcar Cabral.
301
00:32:27,779 --> 00:32:31,949
"Why should a country so small
and so poor interest the world?
302
00:32:32,075 --> 00:32:34,076
They did what they could.
303
00:32:34,202 --> 00:32:37,622
They chased Portugal out,
so traumatizing its army
304
00:32:37,789 --> 00:32:40,249
that it moved to overthrow
its own dictatorship
305
00:32:40,417 --> 00:32:43,002
and led one briefly to believe
in a new revolution in Europe.
306
00:32:43,170 --> 00:32:44,879
Who remembers all that?
307
00:32:45,047 --> 00:32:47,965
History throws its empty bottles
out the window.
308
00:32:52,012 --> 00:32:54,388
This morning I was
on the dock at Pidjiguiti,
309
00:32:54,514 --> 00:32:56,515
where everything began in 1959,
310
00:32:56,642 --> 00:32:59,143
when the first victims
of the struggle were killed.
311
00:32:59,269 --> 00:33:02,438
It may be as difficult
to recognize Africa in this leaden fog
312
00:33:02,564 --> 00:33:04,607
as it is to recognize the struggle
313
00:33:04,775 --> 00:33:07,068
in the rather dull activity
of tropical longshoremen.
314
00:33:07,319 --> 00:33:09,278
Rumor has it
that every third-world leader
315
00:33:09,446 --> 00:33:11,822
coined the same phrase
the morning after independence:
316
00:33:11,948 --> 00:33:14,659
'Now the real problems begin.'
317
00:33:14,826 --> 00:33:18,037
Cabral never got a chance to say it.
He was assassinated first.
318
00:33:18,163 --> 00:33:21,666
But the problems began,
and went on, and are still going on.
319
00:33:21,833 --> 00:33:24,543
Rather unexciting problems
for revolutionary romanticism:
320
00:33:24,711 --> 00:33:27,213
to work, to produce, to distribute,
321
00:33:27,381 --> 00:33:29,674
to overcome postwar exhaustion
322
00:33:29,841 --> 00:33:32,510
and the temptations
of power and privilege.
323
00:33:32,678 --> 00:33:36,847
But after all, history's only bitter
to those who expect a sugar coating.
324
00:33:54,366 --> 00:33:57,827
My personal problem
was more specific:
325
00:33:57,953 --> 00:34:00,037
How to film the ladies of Bissau?
326
00:34:00,205 --> 00:34:03,207
Apparently, the eye's magical function
was working against me there.
327
00:34:03,834 --> 00:34:05,960
In the marketplaces
of Bissau and Cape Verde,
328
00:34:06,086 --> 00:34:08,087
I again encountered
those egalitarian stares
329
00:34:08,213 --> 00:34:12,133
and this sequence of glances
that bordered on seduction.
330
00:34:12,968 --> 00:34:14,760
I see her.
331
00:34:15,595 --> 00:34:17,430
She sees me.
332
00:34:17,889 --> 00:34:19,890
She knows I see her.
333
00:34:22,561 --> 00:34:24,270
She glances my way,
334
00:34:24,396 --> 00:34:27,857
but furtively, as if I'm not
really the object of her gaze.
335
00:34:27,983 --> 00:34:30,401
Finally, the direct gaze
336
00:34:31,570 --> 00:34:35,239
lasting 1 /24th of a second,
the length of a film frame.
337
00:34:41,079 --> 00:34:44,832
All women have a built-in
kernel of indestructibility,
338
00:34:45,041 --> 00:34:48,127
and men's task has always been
to keep them from realizing it
339
00:34:48,295 --> 00:34:50,087
for as long as possible.
340
00:34:50,213 --> 00:34:54,550
African men are just as good
at this task as others,
341
00:34:54,676 --> 00:34:59,180
but after a close look at African women,
I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men."
342
00:36:50,750 --> 00:36:53,419
He told me the story
of Hachiko the dog.
343
00:36:53,545 --> 00:36:56,213
"A dog waited for his master
every day at the station.
344
00:36:56,339 --> 00:36:59,216
The master died,
but the dog didn't know it,
345
00:36:59,384 --> 00:37:02,052
and he continued to wait,
all his life.
346
00:37:02,220 --> 00:37:04,930
People were moved
and brought him food.
347
00:37:05,098 --> 00:37:09,560
They still place sushi and rice cakes
before the statue erected in his honor
348
00:37:09,728 --> 00:37:13,147
so that the faithful soul of Hachiko
will never go hungry.
349
00:37:18,612 --> 00:37:22,531
Tokyo is full of these small legends
and animal intercessors.
350
00:37:22,949 --> 00:37:26,911
The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard over
what was once the empire of Mr. Okada,
351
00:37:27,078 --> 00:37:29,121
a great collector of French paintings,
352
00:37:29,289 --> 00:37:31,206
the man who rented
the Château of Versailles
353
00:37:31,374 --> 00:37:33,876
to celebrate the 1 00th anniversary
of his department stores.
354
00:37:34,002 --> 00:37:36,253
In the computer section
of one such store,
355
00:37:36,421 --> 00:37:38,505
I've seen young Japanese
exercising their brain muscles
356
00:37:38,673 --> 00:37:41,216
like young Athenians at the palestra.
357
00:37:42,427 --> 00:37:44,428
They have a war to win.
358
00:37:44,596 --> 00:37:47,806
History books of the future will perhaps
rank the battle of the integrated circuit
359
00:37:47,974 --> 00:37:50,184
with the battles
of Salamis or Agincourt.
360
00:37:54,105 --> 00:37:58,025
But they honor the unfortunate
adversary by leaving other fields to him:
361
00:37:58,151 --> 00:38:01,779
men's fashions this season are placed
under the sign of John Kennedy."
362
00:38:40,902 --> 00:38:43,529
Like an old votive turtle
stationed in the corner of a field,
363
00:38:43,697 --> 00:38:47,950
Mr. Akao, president
of the Japanese Patriotic Party,
364
00:38:48,118 --> 00:38:52,413
rails from his rolling balcony
against the international communist plot.
365
00:38:53,665 --> 00:38:55,165
He wrote...
366
00:38:56,710 --> 00:38:59,378
"The extreme right's vans,
with their flags and megaphones,
367
00:38:59,546 --> 00:39:01,338
are part of the Tokyo landscape.
368
00:39:01,840 --> 00:39:04,216
Mr. Akao is their focal point.
369
00:39:04,342 --> 00:39:07,011
I think he'll have his own statue,
like Ηachiko the dog,
370
00:39:07,178 --> 00:39:11,890
at this intersection that he leaves
only to go prophesy on the battlefields.
371
00:39:17,605 --> 00:39:21,316
He was at Narita in the '60s:
372
00:39:21,443 --> 00:39:24,528
Peasants fought an airport
to be built on their land,
373
00:39:24,654 --> 00:39:28,615
with Mr. Akao denouncing Moscow's
hand in everything that moved.
374
00:39:30,201 --> 00:39:33,078
Yurakucho is
Tokyo's political arena.
375
00:39:33,204 --> 00:39:36,040
I once saw a monk there
pray for peace in Vietnam.
376
00:39:37,542 --> 00:39:39,626
Today, young right-wing activists
377
00:39:39,753 --> 00:39:43,672
protest the annexation
of the northern islands by the Russians.
378
00:39:43,798 --> 00:39:46,341
Sometimes they're told that
Japan's commercial relations
379
00:39:46,509 --> 00:39:48,469
with the abominable occupier
to the north
380
00:39:48,636 --> 00:39:50,804
are a thousand times better
than with the American ally,
381
00:39:50,972 --> 00:39:53,724
who's always whining
about economic aggression.
382
00:39:53,892 --> 00:39:55,934
Nothing is simple.
383
00:40:01,357 --> 00:40:04,234
On the other sidewalk,
the left has the floor.
384
00:40:04,861 --> 00:40:07,529
Korean Catholic opposition
leader Kim Dae Jung,
385
00:40:07,697 --> 00:40:10,699
kidnapped in Tokyo in '73
by the South Korean Gestapo,
386
00:40:11,034 --> 00:40:13,535
is threatened
with a death sentence.
387
00:40:13,870 --> 00:40:15,871
A group has begun a hunger strike.
388
00:40:16,039 --> 00:40:19,249
Some very young activists
gather signatures in his support.
389
00:41:02,544 --> 00:41:05,629
I returned to Narita for the birthday
of one of the victims of the struggle.
390
00:41:07,632 --> 00:41:09,508
The demonstration was unreal.
391
00:41:09,676 --> 00:41:11,885
I felt like I was in Brigadoon,
392
00:41:12,053 --> 00:41:14,972
like I'd woken up ten years later
amid the same actors,
393
00:41:15,140 --> 00:41:18,976
the same blue-suited police
and helmeted adolescents,
394
00:41:19,144 --> 00:41:21,478
the same slogan,
the same banners...
395
00:41:22,480 --> 00:41:25,649
and the same goal:
to fight the airport.
396
00:41:25,942 --> 00:41:29,653
Just one thing has been added:
the airport itself.
397
00:41:29,821 --> 00:41:32,114
But its single runway
hemmed in by barbed wire
398
00:41:32,282 --> 00:41:34,825
looks more besieged than victorious.
399
00:41:51,593 --> 00:41:56,180
My pal Hayao Yamaneko
has found a solution:
400
00:41:56,306 --> 00:42:00,017
If the images of the present don't change,
change the images of the past.
401
00:42:00,518 --> 00:42:04,104
He showed me clashes of the '60s
run through his synthesizer.
402
00:42:04,856 --> 00:42:07,900
'Less deceptive pictures,' he says,
with the conviction of a fanatic,
403
00:42:08,067 --> 00:42:10,194
than those you see on television.'
404
00:42:10,361 --> 00:42:13,572
At least they proclaim themselves
to be what they are: images -
405
00:42:13,698 --> 00:42:18,202
not the portable and compact form
of an already inaccessible reality.
406
00:42:20,455 --> 00:42:23,457
Hayao calls
his machine's world 'the Zone,'
407
00:42:23,583 --> 00:42:25,709
in an homage to Tarkovsky.
408
00:43:15,134 --> 00:43:19,137
What Narita brought back to me
like a shattered hologram
409
00:43:19,305 --> 00:43:21,556
was a fragment
of the '60s generation.
410
00:43:23,851 --> 00:43:27,312
If to love without illusions is still
to love, I can say that I loved it.
411
00:43:27,772 --> 00:43:29,606
It was a generation
that often exasperated me,
412
00:43:29,774 --> 00:43:32,609
for I didn't share its utopian goal
of uniting in a common struggle
413
00:43:32,777 --> 00:43:36,655
those who revolt against poverty
and those who revolt against wealth,
414
00:43:36,823 --> 00:43:41,785
but it let out a primordial scream that
better-adjusted voices no longer could.
415
00:43:49,460 --> 00:43:52,504
I met peasants there who'd come
to know themselves through the struggle.
416
00:43:52,672 --> 00:43:54,673
In concrete terms, it had failed.
417
00:43:54,841 --> 00:43:57,592
Yet all they had won
in their understanding of the world
418
00:43:57,719 --> 00:43:59,511
and of themselves
419
00:43:59,637 --> 00:44:02,764
could only have been won
through the struggle.
420
00:44:03,474 --> 00:44:07,185
As for the students, some massacred
each other in the mountains
421
00:44:07,312 --> 00:44:09,271
in the name
of revolutionary purity,
422
00:44:09,439 --> 00:44:12,316
while others had studied capitalism
so thoroughly to fight it
423
00:44:12,483 --> 00:44:15,235
that they now provide it
with its best executives.
424
00:44:15,403 --> 00:44:18,530
Like everywhere else, the movement
had its posturers and its careerists -
425
00:44:18,698 --> 00:44:21,992
including those who made
a career of martyrdom -
426
00:44:22,160 --> 00:44:24,828
but it carried with it all those
who said, like Che Guevara,
427
00:44:24,996 --> 00:44:28,999
that they 'trembled with indignation
at every injustice committed in the world.'
428
00:44:29,834 --> 00:44:32,627
They wanted to give
a political meaning to their generosity,
429
00:44:32,795 --> 00:44:36,131
and their generosity
has outlasted their politics.
430
00:44:36,257 --> 00:44:41,762
That's why I will never allow it to be
said that youth is wasted on the young."
431
00:44:59,322 --> 00:45:01,907
"The youth who gather
every weekend at Shinjuku
432
00:45:02,033 --> 00:45:05,202
obviously know they're not
on a launching pad toward real life,
433
00:45:05,328 --> 00:45:08,038
that they are life, to be eaten
on the spot, like fresh donuts.
434
00:45:10,041 --> 00:45:11,583
It's a very simple secret.
435
00:45:11,709 --> 00:45:15,170
The old try to hide it,
and not all the young know it.
436
00:45:15,296 --> 00:45:17,672
The 10-year-old girl
who tied her friend's hands
437
00:45:17,840 --> 00:45:20,050
and threw her from the 13th floor
438
00:45:20,218 --> 00:45:23,678
for speaking badly of their class team
hadn't discovered it yet.
439
00:45:23,805 --> 00:45:26,598
Parents who demand
more special telephone lines
440
00:45:26,766 --> 00:45:28,558
to prevent children's suicides
441
00:45:28,726 --> 00:45:32,562
find out a little late
that they kept the secret too well.
442
00:45:33,856 --> 00:45:37,317
Rock is an international language
for spreading the secret.
443
00:45:37,902 --> 00:45:40,695
Another is peculiar to Tokyo.
444
00:45:48,871 --> 00:45:52,124
For the Takenoko,
20 is retiring age.
445
00:45:52,250 --> 00:45:54,084
They are baby Martians.
446
00:45:54,210 --> 00:45:57,546
I go see them dance
every Sunday in Yoyogi Park.
447
00:45:57,964 --> 00:46:02,134
They want people to look at them
but seem not to notice when they do.
448
00:46:02,301 --> 00:46:03,927
They live
in a parallel time stream.
449
00:46:04,095 --> 00:46:07,389
An invisible aquarium wall
separates them from their audience,
450
00:46:07,515 --> 00:46:09,766
and I can spend a whole afternoon
451
00:46:09,934 --> 00:46:14,104
watching a little Takenoko girl
learn the customs of her planet.
452
00:46:28,035 --> 00:46:30,287
Beyond that, they wear dog tags,
453
00:46:30,413 --> 00:46:33,165
they obey a whistle,
the Mafia extorts money from them,
454
00:46:33,332 --> 00:46:35,709
and with the exception
of a single all-girl group,
455
00:46:35,835 --> 00:46:38,295
a boy is always in charge."
456
00:47:36,604 --> 00:47:38,522
One day he writes to me,
457
00:47:38,689 --> 00:47:40,440
"Description of a dream:
458
00:47:40,608 --> 00:47:42,692
More and more,
my dreams are set
459
00:47:42,860 --> 00:47:44,653
in the department stores of Tokyo,
460
00:47:44,820 --> 00:47:47,280
the subterranean passages
that parallel the city above.
461
00:47:49,242 --> 00:47:52,869
A face appears, then disappears.
A trace is found, then lost.
462
00:47:53,037 --> 00:47:56,206
The folklore of dreams is so much intact
that the next day, when I'm awake,
463
00:47:56,332 --> 00:47:59,543
I realize that I continue to seek
in this basement labyrinth
464
00:47:59,669 --> 00:48:02,712
the presence concealed
the night before.
465
00:48:03,172 --> 00:48:05,715
I begin to wonder
if those dreams are really mine,
466
00:48:05,841 --> 00:48:09,761
or if they're part of a totality,
a gigantic collective dream,
467
00:48:09,929 --> 00:48:13,098
of which the entire city
may be the projection.
468
00:48:13,558 --> 00:48:16,393
It might suffice to pick up
any of the telephones lying around
469
00:48:16,561 --> 00:48:18,311
to hear a familiar voice
470
00:48:19,063 --> 00:48:21,940
or the beating of a heart -
471
00:48:22,400 --> 00:48:25,068
Sei Shonagon's, for example.
472
00:48:25,945 --> 00:48:27,612
All the underground passages
lead to train stations.
473
00:48:27,780 --> 00:48:30,949
The same companies own the stores
and the railroads that bear their name -
474
00:48:31,117 --> 00:48:34,411
Keio, Odakyu,
all those names of ports.
475
00:48:34,537 --> 00:48:37,789
The train inhabited by sleeping people
assembles all the fragments of dreams
476
00:48:37,915 --> 00:48:41,167
and makes a single film of them,
the ultimate film.
477
00:48:41,294 --> 00:48:44,546
The tickets from the automatic dispenser
grant admission to the show."
478
00:53:50,269 --> 00:53:53,855
He told me of the January light
on the stations' stairways.
479
00:53:54,398 --> 00:53:57,734
Ηe said the city ought to be
deciphered like a musical score.
480
00:53:59,820 --> 00:54:03,573
One could get lost in the great orchestral
masses and the accumulation of details,
481
00:54:03,741 --> 00:54:05,950
but that yielded
the cheapest image of Tokyo:
482
00:54:06,118 --> 00:54:08,828
overcrowded,
megalomaniac, inhuman.
483
00:54:08,996 --> 00:54:11,456
Ηe thought he saw
more subtle cycles there:
484
00:54:11,624 --> 00:54:14,375
rhythms, clusters of faces
glimpsed in passing,
485
00:54:14,501 --> 00:54:18,212
as different and precise
as groups of instruments.
486
00:54:18,589 --> 00:54:21,633
Sometimes the musical comparison
coincided with plain reality:
487
00:54:22,217 --> 00:54:25,845
The Sony stairway in the Ginza
was itself a musical instrument,
488
00:54:25,971 --> 00:54:28,097
each step a note.
489
00:54:28,265 --> 00:54:31,267
It all fit together like voices
in a complicated fugue,
490
00:54:31,393 --> 00:54:34,395
but it was enough to seize one
and hang on to it:
491
00:54:34,521 --> 00:54:36,940
the television screens,
for example.
492
00:54:37,107 --> 00:54:39,192
All by themselves
they created an itinerary
493
00:54:39,318 --> 00:54:42,111
that sometimes
took unexpected turns.
494
00:54:42,237 --> 00:54:43,863
It was sumo season,
495
00:54:43,989 --> 00:54:47,283
and the fans watching the fights
in the very chic Ginza showrooms
496
00:54:47,451 --> 00:54:50,203
were the poorest of the Tokyo poor,
497
00:54:50,329 --> 00:54:52,872
so poor they didn't have even a TV set.
498
00:54:53,040 --> 00:54:56,125
Ηe saw them come,
these lost souls of Namidabashi
499
00:54:56,293 --> 00:54:59,671
with whom he'd drunk sake
one sunny dawn.
500
00:54:59,797 --> 00:55:02,465
How many seasons ago was that now?
501
00:56:33,015 --> 00:56:34,891
He wrote me...
502
00:56:36,101 --> 00:56:38,436
"Even in the stalls
selling spare electronic parts
503
00:56:38,604 --> 00:56:41,355
that some hipsters use for jewelry,
504
00:56:41,523 --> 00:56:44,692
there is, in Tokyo's musical score,
a particular staff
505
00:56:44,860 --> 00:56:48,362
whose rarity in Europe condemns me
to a real acoustic exile:
506
00:56:48,530 --> 00:56:51,157
the music of video games.
507
00:56:51,742 --> 00:56:53,743
They're built into tables.
508
00:56:53,911 --> 00:56:56,829
You can drink and have lunch
and go on playing.
509
00:56:57,081 --> 00:56:58,998
The arcades open onto the street,
510
00:56:59,166 --> 00:57:01,793
where you can listen
and play from memory.
511
00:57:30,697 --> 00:57:33,032
I witnessed the birth
of these games in Japan.
512
00:57:33,200 --> 00:57:37,120
I met them again later all over the world,
but one detail was different.
513
00:57:37,246 --> 00:57:38,996
At first it was the familiar game,
514
00:57:39,164 --> 00:57:42,708
a politically incorrect battering
aimed at killing off creatures
515
00:57:42,876 --> 00:57:47,630
that were either prairie dogs
or baby seals - I can't be sure which.
516
00:57:48,632 --> 00:57:51,467
Here's the new Japanese variation:
517
00:57:51,635 --> 00:57:55,763
lnstead of the critters, there are
vaguely human heads identified by labels.
518
00:57:55,889 --> 00:57:58,641
At the top, the chairman of the board.
519
00:57:58,892 --> 00:58:02,603
In front of him,
the vice president and directors.
520
00:58:02,729 --> 00:58:05,982
In the front row, department heads
and personnel manager.
521
00:58:06,400 --> 00:58:08,442
The guy I filmed,
522
00:58:08,569 --> 00:58:11,279
who was smashing up
the hierarchy with enviable energy,
523
00:58:11,405 --> 00:58:13,948
confided that it was
not at all allegorical for him,
524
00:58:14,116 --> 00:58:16,701
that he was thinking
very specifically of his superiors.
525
00:58:16,869 --> 00:58:19,162
That's no doubt why
the 'personnel manager'
526
00:58:19,288 --> 00:58:23,541
has been clubbed so often and so hard
that it was taken out of commission
527
00:58:23,709 --> 00:58:27,378
and a baby seal
reinserted in its place.
528
00:58:32,217 --> 00:58:34,677
Hayao Yamaneko invents
video games with his machine.
529
00:58:36,096 --> 00:58:39,515
To please me, he puts in
my most beloved animals,
530
00:58:39,683 --> 00:58:41,684
the cat and the owl.
531
00:58:48,233 --> 00:58:50,359
He claims that only electronics
532
00:58:50,485 --> 00:58:55,031
can deal with feeling,
memory and imagination.
533
00:58:56,325 --> 00:58:58,659
Mizoguchi's Arsène Lupin,
for example,
534
00:58:58,827 --> 00:59:01,746
or the no-less-imaginary
Burakumin.
535
00:59:02,414 --> 00:59:06,959
Ηow to show a category
of Japanese that doesn't exist?
536
00:59:07,377 --> 00:59:11,672
Yes, I saw them in Osaka, for hire
by the day, sleeping on the ground.
537
00:59:11,798 --> 00:59:14,926
Since the Middle Ages they've been
doomed to grubby and thankless jobs,
538
00:59:15,052 --> 00:59:18,429
but since the Meiji era,
officially nothing sets them apart,
539
00:59:18,555 --> 00:59:23,059
and their real name - the eta -
is a taboo word, not to be pronounced.
540
00:59:24,269 --> 00:59:26,020
They are non-persons.
541
00:59:26,146 --> 00:59:28,981
How can they be shown,
except as non-images?
542
00:59:38,200 --> 00:59:42,578
Video games are the first stage in a plan
for machines to help the human race,
543
00:59:42,746 --> 00:59:45,373
the only plan that offers
a future for intelligence.
544
00:59:46,792 --> 00:59:49,877
For the moment, the unsurpassable
philosophy of our time
545
00:59:50,003 --> 00:59:52,004
is found in Pac-Man.
546
00:59:52,923 --> 00:59:55,591
I didn't know, while sacrificing
my 100-yen coins to him,
547
00:59:55,759 --> 00:59:57,969
that he was to conquer the world.
548
00:59:58,136 --> 01:00:01,889
Perhaps because he's the most perfect
graphic metaphor of the human condition.
549
01:00:02,057 --> 01:00:03,975
He puts into true perspective
550
01:00:04,142 --> 01:00:06,435
the balance of power between
the individual and the environment,
551
01:00:06,603 --> 01:00:08,813
and he tells us soberly
that though there's honor
552
01:00:08,939 --> 01:00:11,274
in carrying out the greatest number
of victorious attacks,
553
01:00:11,400 --> 01:00:14,443
it never amounts
to anything in the end."
554
01:00:57,321 --> 01:00:59,613
He was pleased to see
the same chrysanthemums
555
01:00:59,781 --> 01:01:02,658
at funerals
for both men and animals.
556
01:01:02,784 --> 01:01:05,786
He described the ceremony
held at the zoo in Ueno,
557
01:01:05,912 --> 01:01:08,122
in memory of animals
that had died during the year.
558
01:01:08,749 --> 01:01:10,249
"For two years now,
559
01:01:10,417 --> 01:01:13,711
a certain panda's death has rendered
this day even more sorrowful,
560
01:01:13,837 --> 01:01:15,796
a loss more irreparable,
say the newspapers,
561
01:01:15,964 --> 01:01:17,757
than the recent death
of the prime minister.
562
01:01:17,924 --> 01:01:19,800
Last year people really cried.
563
01:01:19,926 --> 01:01:21,719
Now they seem to be
getting used to it,
564
01:01:21,887 --> 01:01:24,013
accepting that each year
death takes a panda
565
01:01:24,181 --> 01:01:27,016
as dragons carry off
young girls in fairy tales.
566
01:01:29,311 --> 01:01:31,479
I've heard this sentence:
567
01:01:33,023 --> 01:01:35,024
'The partition separating
life from death
568
01:01:35,192 --> 01:01:38,736
doesn't seem as thick to us
as it does to a Westerner.'
569
01:01:41,114 --> 01:01:44,950
What I've read most often in the eyes
of people about to die is surprise.
570
01:01:45,660 --> 01:01:49,955
What I read right now in the eyes
of Japanese children is curiosity,
571
01:01:50,082 --> 01:01:53,834
as if they were trying
to see through the partition
572
01:01:54,002 --> 01:01:56,045
to understand an animal's death."
573
01:03:19,296 --> 01:03:21,130
"I've returned from a country
574
01:03:21,298 --> 01:03:25,134
where death is not a partition
to cross but a road to follow.
575
01:03:25,844 --> 01:03:28,262
The Great Ancestor
of the Bijago archipelago
576
01:03:28,430 --> 01:03:30,556
has described for us
the itinerary of the dead,
577
01:03:30,682 --> 01:03:34,727
and how they move from island to island
according to a rigorous protocol,
578
01:03:34,895 --> 01:03:36,896
until they come to the last beach,
579
01:03:37,022 --> 01:03:39,815
where they wait
for the ship to the other world.
580
01:03:41,860 --> 01:03:45,446
If by accident one should meet them,
it is imperative not to recognize them.
581
01:03:48,950 --> 01:03:51,660
The Bijagos
are part of Guinea-Bissau.
582
01:03:51,828 --> 01:03:55,789
In an old film clip, Amílcar Cabral
waves good-bye to the shore.
583
01:03:55,957 --> 01:03:59,126
He's right.
Ηe'll never see it again.
584
01:03:59,461 --> 01:04:01,921
Luís Cabral made
the same gesture 1 5 years later,
585
01:04:02,088 --> 01:04:04,673
on the canoe
that was bringing us back.
586
01:04:04,841 --> 01:04:09,345
Guinea had by that time become a nation,
and Luís was its president.
587
01:04:09,846 --> 01:04:12,806
All those who remember the war
remember him.
588
01:04:13,183 --> 01:04:17,686
Like his half brother Amílcar, he was of mixed
Guinean and Cape Verdian blood,
589
01:04:17,854 --> 01:04:22,233
and, like Amílcar, a founding member
of an unusual party, the PAIGC,
590
01:04:22,400 --> 01:04:25,361
which, by uniting the two colonized
countries in a single struggle,
591
01:04:25,529 --> 01:04:28,822
sought to herald
a federation of the two states.
592
01:04:29,741 --> 01:04:32,117
I've heard the stories
of former guerrilla fighters,
593
01:04:32,285 --> 01:04:36,205
who'd fought in conditions so inhuman
that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers
594
01:04:36,373 --> 01:04:38,582
for having to bear what
they themselves suffered.
595
01:04:38,750 --> 01:04:41,293
I heard that
and many more things
596
01:04:41,461 --> 01:04:45,297
that make one ashamed for having used
lightly, even if inadvertently,
597
01:04:45,465 --> 01:04:48,926
the word "guerrilla" to describe
a certain kind of filmmaking,
598
01:04:49,094 --> 01:04:51,512
a word linked at the time
to many theoretical debates
599
01:04:51,680 --> 01:04:54,265
as well as bloody defeats
on the ground.
600
01:04:54,432 --> 01:04:57,393
Amílcar Cabral was the only one
to lead a victorious guerrilla war,
601
01:04:57,561 --> 01:04:59,979
and not only in terms
of military conquests.
602
01:05:00,146 --> 01:05:02,565
He knew his people.
Ηe'd studied them at length.
603
01:05:02,732 --> 01:05:06,318
Ηe wanted every liberated region
to herald a different kind of society.
604
01:05:06,486 --> 01:05:09,113
The socialist countries send
weapons to arm the fighters.
605
01:05:09,281 --> 01:05:12,449
The social democracies
fill the people's stores.
606
01:05:12,617 --> 01:05:15,077
May the extreme Left
forgive history,
607
01:05:15,245 --> 01:05:20,082
but if the guerrillas are like fish
in water, it's a bit thanks to Sweden.
608
01:05:20,250 --> 01:05:23,794
Amílcar was not afraid of ambiguities.
He knew the traps.
609
01:05:23,962 --> 01:05:25,879
He wrote...
610
01:05:26,006 --> 01:05:29,592
"It's as though
we're facing a raging river,
611
01:05:29,759 --> 01:05:31,635
and those trying
to cross are drowning.
612
01:05:31,803 --> 01:05:34,555
But there's no choice.
They must get to the other side."
613
01:05:53,742 --> 01:05:57,536
Now the scene moves to Cassaca,
February 17th, 1980,
614
01:05:57,704 --> 01:06:00,956
but to grasp it properly,
one must move forward in time:
615
01:06:01,124 --> 01:06:04,501
In a year, Luís Cabral,
the president, will be in prison,
616
01:06:04,628 --> 01:06:07,921
and the weeping man
he has just decorated, Major Nino,
617
01:06:08,089 --> 01:06:10,007
will have taken power.
618
01:06:10,133 --> 01:06:12,092
The party will have split.
619
01:06:12,218 --> 01:06:15,804
Guineans and Capeverdians
will be fighting over Amílcar's legacy.
620
01:06:15,972 --> 01:06:18,682
We'll see that beneath
this ceremony of promotions,
621
01:06:18,808 --> 01:06:21,852
seemingly perpetuating
the brotherhood of the struggle,
622
01:06:22,020 --> 01:06:24,938
there lay a pit
of post-victory bitterness,
623
01:06:25,106 --> 01:06:28,275
and that Nino's tears expressed
not an ex-warrior's emotion
624
01:06:28,443 --> 01:06:30,319
but the wounded pride of a hero
625
01:06:30,487 --> 01:06:33,447
slighted at not being raised
high enough above the rest.
626
01:06:35,659 --> 01:06:38,619
Beneath each of these faces
lies a memory,
627
01:06:38,787 --> 01:06:41,955
and where there was to be
one collective memory,
628
01:06:42,207 --> 01:06:45,834
there are a thousand memories of men
who parade their personal wounds
629
01:06:46,002 --> 01:06:47,836
in the great wound of history.
630
01:06:49,130 --> 01:06:53,342
In Portugal, swept up in turn
by the breaking wave of Bissau,
631
01:06:53,468 --> 01:06:57,304
Miguel Torga, who'd struggled all his
life against the dictatorship, wrote,
632
01:06:57,430 --> 01:07:00,891
'Every bit player
represents only himself.
633
01:07:01,267 --> 01:07:03,519
lnstead of seeking social change,
634
01:07:03,687 --> 01:07:06,522
he seeks simply,
in the revolutionary act,
635
01:07:06,690 --> 01:07:09,525
to boost his own image.'
636
01:07:11,486 --> 01:07:14,238
That's the way
the breakers recede,
637
01:07:14,406 --> 01:07:18,575
and so predictably that one must believe
in an 'amnesia of the future'
638
01:07:18,743 --> 01:07:21,954
that history bestows,
out of mercy or self-interest,
639
01:07:22,122 --> 01:07:24,456
on those it recruits.
640
01:07:24,582 --> 01:07:28,127
Amílcar murdered
by members of his own party,
641
01:07:28,294 --> 01:07:31,714
the liberated areas
fallen to bloody petty tyrants,
642
01:07:31,881 --> 01:07:33,966
liquidated in their turn
by a central power
643
01:07:34,134 --> 01:07:37,720
to whose stability everyone
paid homage until the military coup -
644
01:07:37,887 --> 01:07:40,305
that's how history advances,
645
01:07:40,432 --> 01:07:43,559
plugging its memory
like one plugs one's ears.
646
01:07:43,727 --> 01:07:45,519
Luís, exiled to Cuba,
647
01:07:45,687 --> 01:07:48,397
and Nino,
himself a target of later plots,
648
01:07:48,565 --> 01:07:52,401
can summon each other endlessly
before history's court -
649
01:07:52,569 --> 01:07:54,653
but history doesn't care.
650
01:07:54,779 --> 01:07:58,073
It has only one friend,
the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse:
651
01:07:58,533 --> 01:08:01,410
the horror that has
a name and a face.
652
01:08:03,788 --> 01:08:06,039
I'm writing you all this
from another world,
653
01:08:06,166 --> 01:08:08,333
a world of appearances.
654
01:08:08,460 --> 01:08:11,670
In a way, the two worlds
communicate with each other.
655
01:08:11,796 --> 01:08:14,548
Memory is to one
what history is to the other:
656
01:08:14,716 --> 01:08:16,717
an impossibility.
657
01:08:17,260 --> 01:08:20,429
Legends are born of the need
to decipher the indecipherable.
658
01:08:20,555 --> 01:08:23,265
Memories must make do
with their delirium, with their drift.
659
01:08:26,019 --> 01:08:27,936
A moment stopped would burn
660
01:08:28,104 --> 01:08:31,482
like a frame of film caught
in the furnace of the projector.
661
01:08:31,608 --> 01:08:34,443
Madness protects, as fever does.
662
01:08:36,279 --> 01:08:38,739
I envy Hayao and his Zone.
663
01:08:38,907 --> 01:08:41,283
He plays
with the signs of his memory.
664
01:08:41,451 --> 01:08:43,660
He pins them down
and decorates them like insects
665
01:08:43,828 --> 01:08:45,621
that have flown beyond time
666
01:08:45,789 --> 01:08:49,666
and that he can contemplate
from a point outside of time -
667
01:08:49,793 --> 01:08:52,252
the only eternity we have left.
668
01:08:53,213 --> 01:08:55,214
I look at his machines.
669
01:08:55,381 --> 01:08:59,593
I think of a world where each memory
could create its own legend."
670
01:10:03,700 --> 01:10:06,034
He wrote that only one film
had been capable
671
01:10:06,160 --> 01:10:08,287
of portraying impossible memory,
insane memory:
672
01:10:08,454 --> 01:10:11,373
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
673
01:10:13,251 --> 01:10:15,127
In the spiral of the opening titles,
674
01:10:15,253 --> 01:10:19,006
he saw time covering a field
growing ever wider as it moved away,
675
01:10:19,132 --> 01:10:23,594
a cyclone whose present moment
contains the motionless eye.
676
01:10:24,888 --> 01:10:28,932
In San Francisco he'd gone
on a pilgrimage to all the film's locations.
677
01:10:29,475 --> 01:10:31,560
The florist Podesta Baldocchi,
678
01:10:31,728 --> 01:10:34,813
where James Stewart
spies on Kim Novak,
679
01:10:34,939 --> 01:10:36,940
he the hunter and she the prey -
680
01:10:37,108 --> 01:10:39,443
or was it the other way around?
681
01:10:39,819 --> 01:10:42,738
The tile floor hadn't changed.
682
01:10:43,072 --> 01:10:45,782
He'd driven up and down
the hills of San Francisco,
683
01:10:45,909 --> 01:10:49,620
where Jimmy Stewart - Scottie -
follows Kim Novak - Madeleine.
684
01:10:52,790 --> 01:10:55,751
It seems to be about pursuit,
mystery and murder,
685
01:10:55,919 --> 01:10:58,295
but in truth
it's about power and freedom,
686
01:10:58,463 --> 01:11:00,797
melancholy and dazzlement,
687
01:11:00,965 --> 01:11:05,093
so carefully coded within the spiral
that you could miss it
688
01:11:05,261 --> 01:11:07,679
and not immediately notice
that this vertigo of space
689
01:11:07,847 --> 01:11:10,849
in reality stands
for the vertigo of time.
690
01:11:12,560 --> 01:11:14,519
He'd followed every trail,
691
01:11:14,646 --> 01:11:16,730
even to the cemetery
at Mission Dolores,
692
01:11:16,856 --> 01:11:20,275
where Madeleine prayed
at the grave of a woman long dead
693
01:11:20,443 --> 01:11:22,945
whom she should not have known.
694
01:11:23,279 --> 01:11:25,781
He'd followed Madeleine -
as Scottie had done -
695
01:11:25,949 --> 01:11:27,824
to the Museum
of the Legion of Honor,
696
01:11:27,951 --> 01:11:31,078
before the portrait of a dead woman
she shouldn't have known.
697
01:11:31,245 --> 01:11:33,872
And on the portrait,
as in Madeleine's hair,
698
01:11:33,998 --> 01:11:36,041
the spiral of time.
699
01:11:44,008 --> 01:11:48,303
The Victorian hotel where Madeleine
disappeared had itself disappeared.
700
01:11:48,471 --> 01:11:52,265
Concrete had replaced it
at the corner of Eddie and Gough.
701
01:11:52,392 --> 01:11:56,979
But the cross-section of redwood trunk
was still in Muir Woods.
702
01:11:57,188 --> 01:11:59,231
On it, Madeleine traced
the short distance
703
01:11:59,357 --> 01:12:03,652
between two of those concentric lines
that measure the age of the tree and said,
704
01:12:03,820 --> 01:12:06,571
"Ηere I was born,
and there I died."
705
01:12:07,699 --> 01:12:10,659
He remembered another film
in which this passage was quoted:
706
01:12:11,160 --> 01:12:14,079
the redwood was
in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris,
707
01:12:14,247 --> 01:12:17,457
and the hand pointed
to a place beyond the tree -
708
01:12:17,583 --> 01:12:19,835
outside of time.
709
01:12:22,505 --> 01:12:25,048
This painted horse
at San Juan Bautista,
710
01:12:25,174 --> 01:12:27,759
with an eye
that looked like Madeleine's -
711
01:12:27,885 --> 01:12:30,721
Ηitchcock had invented nothing.
It was all there.
712
01:12:31,723 --> 01:12:33,724
He'd run under the arches
in the mission
713
01:12:33,850 --> 01:12:35,976
as Madeleine had run
towards her death -
714
01:12:36,102 --> 01:12:38,687
but was it really hers?
715
01:12:41,024 --> 01:12:44,026
From this fake tower -
the only thing Ηitchcock added -
716
01:12:44,152 --> 01:12:47,029
he imagined Scottie
as "Time's Fool of Love,"
717
01:12:47,655 --> 01:12:51,950
unable to live with memory
without falsifying it,
718
01:12:52,076 --> 01:12:55,162
inventing a double for Madeleine
in another dimension of time,
719
01:12:55,329 --> 01:12:58,206
a Zone that would belong
only to him,
720
01:12:58,332 --> 01:13:01,043
from which he could decipher
the undecipherable story
721
01:13:01,169 --> 01:13:04,796
begun under the Golden Gate when he
pulled Madeleine out of San Francisco Bay,
722
01:13:04,964 --> 01:13:08,091
when he'd saved her from death
before casting her back to death -
723
01:13:08,217 --> 01:13:10,886
or was it the other way around?
724
01:13:26,903 --> 01:13:30,947
"In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage
of a film I'd seen 19 times.
725
01:13:31,616 --> 01:13:35,202
In Iceland, I laid the first stone
of an imaginary film.
726
01:13:35,328 --> 01:13:37,996
That summer,
I'd met three children on a road,
727
01:13:38,164 --> 01:13:40,499
and a volcano had risen up
out of the sea -
728
01:13:40,625 --> 01:13:43,043
the Set Designer at work once again.
729
01:13:44,337 --> 01:13:48,757
American astronauts trained in this lunar
landscape before flying to the moon.
730
01:13:48,925 --> 01:13:50,926
I immediately saw it as a setting
for science fiction,
731
01:13:51,094 --> 01:13:52,803
the landscape of another planet -
732
01:13:52,970 --> 01:13:57,641
No, let it be our own for someone
who comes from very far away.
733
01:13:58,643 --> 01:14:01,812
I imagine him lumbering about
like a deep-sea diver
734
01:14:01,938 --> 01:14:04,314
in this volcanic soil
that sticks to the soles.
735
01:14:04,440 --> 01:14:08,193
All of a sudden he stumbles,
and with the next step it's a year later.
736
01:14:08,361 --> 01:14:11,363
Ηe's walking on a small path
near the Dutch border,
737
01:14:11,531 --> 01:14:14,282
along a seabird sanctuary.
738
01:14:15,618 --> 01:14:17,786
That's for a start.
739
01:14:17,954 --> 01:14:20,914
Why this cut in time,
this connection of memories?
740
01:14:21,082 --> 01:14:23,667
That's just it.
He can't understand.
741
01:14:23,793 --> 01:14:27,462
He comes not from another planet
but from our future.
742
01:14:27,630 --> 01:14:32,008
4001, when the human brain
has reached the era of full employment.
743
01:14:32,176 --> 01:14:34,177
Everything works to perfection -
744
01:14:34,345 --> 01:14:36,972
all that we now allow to slumber,
including memory.
745
01:14:37,807 --> 01:14:42,477
The logical result:
Total recall is memory anesthetized.
746
01:14:42,603 --> 01:14:45,522
After so many stories of men
who forgot how to remember,
747
01:14:45,690 --> 01:14:48,483
here's the story of one
who forgot how to forget...
748
01:14:49,819 --> 01:14:52,070
and who, through some
peculiarity of his nature,
749
01:14:52,238 --> 01:14:56,241
instead of being proud and scorning
mankind of the past and its shadows,
750
01:14:56,409 --> 01:15:00,996
turned to it first with curiosity
and then with compassion.
751
01:15:01,164 --> 01:15:03,456
In the world he comes from,
to call forth a vision,
752
01:15:03,583 --> 01:15:06,418
to be moved by a portrait,
to tremble at the sound of music
753
01:15:06,586 --> 01:15:10,338
can only be signs
of a long and painful prehistory.
754
01:15:10,840 --> 01:15:12,799
He wants to understand.
755
01:15:12,967 --> 01:15:16,803
He feels these infirmities of time
like an injustice,
756
01:15:16,929 --> 01:15:21,016
and he reacts to it like Che Guevara
or youth of the '60s - with indignation.
757
01:15:22,560 --> 01:15:24,686
He's a third worlder of time.
758
01:15:24,854 --> 01:15:27,856
The idea that unhappiness
had existed in his planet's past
759
01:15:28,024 --> 01:15:32,277
is as unbearable to him as the existence
of poverty in their present moment.
760
01:15:36,199 --> 01:15:38,241
Naturally, he will fail.
761
01:15:38,409 --> 01:15:40,702
The unhappiness he discovers
is as inaccessible to him
762
01:15:40,870 --> 01:15:45,457
as the poverty of a poor country
is to the children of a rich one.
763
01:15:45,625 --> 01:15:48,501
He's chosen
to give up his privileges,
764
01:15:48,628 --> 01:15:52,547
but he can do nothing about the privilege
that has allowed him to choose.
765
01:15:53,799 --> 01:15:56,927
His only comfort is precisely
what threw him into this absurd quest:
766
01:15:57,094 --> 01:16:00,180
a song cycle by Mussorgsky.
767
01:16:00,306 --> 01:16:02,724
It's still sung in the 40th century.
768
01:16:03,142 --> 01:16:06,394
Its meaning has been lost,
but for the first time, he glimpsed
769
01:16:06,562 --> 01:16:08,813
the presence of that thing
he didn't understand,
770
01:16:08,981 --> 01:16:11,358
which had to do
with unhappiness and memory,
771
01:16:11,484 --> 01:16:13,693
which he must grasp at all cost,
772
01:16:13,861 --> 01:16:18,156
and toward which, slowly,
heavily, he began to walk.
773
01:16:21,118 --> 01:16:23,912
Of course,
I'll never make that film.
774
01:16:26,332 --> 01:16:29,542
Nonetheless, I'm collecting sets,
devising plot twists,
775
01:16:29,669 --> 01:16:32,003
putting in my favorite creatures.
776
01:16:32,171 --> 01:16:34,506
I've even given it a title,
777
01:16:35,091 --> 01:16:37,592
indeed, the title
of those Mussorgsky songs:
778
01:16:37,927 --> 01:16:39,928
Sunless."
779
01:17:00,408 --> 01:17:03,285
"On May 15th, 1945, at 7:00 a.m.,
780
01:17:03,452 --> 01:17:06,288
the 382nd US Infantry Regiment
781
01:17:06,455 --> 01:17:10,292
attacked a hill in Okinawa
they had renamed Dick Hill.
782
01:17:10,459 --> 01:17:13,962
I suppose they believed
they were conquering Japanese soil
783
01:17:14,130 --> 01:17:16,881
and knew nothing
about Ryukyu civilization.
784
01:17:17,049 --> 01:17:18,717
Neither did I,
785
01:17:18,884 --> 01:17:21,177
except that the faces
of the market ladies at Itoman
786
01:17:21,304 --> 01:17:24,806
spoke to me more of Gauguin
than of Utamaro.
787
01:17:24,974 --> 01:17:29,144
Through centuries of dreamy vassalage,
time had not stirred in the archipelago.
788
01:17:29,312 --> 01:17:31,271
Then came the rupture.
789
01:17:31,814 --> 01:17:36,234
Is it a property of islands to make women
the guardians of their memory?
790
01:17:36,402 --> 01:17:40,655
I learned that, as in the Bijagos, magic
knowledge is passed on through women.
791
01:17:40,823 --> 01:17:43,575
Each community
has its priestess, the noro,
792
01:17:43,743 --> 01:17:47,162
who presides over all ceremonies,
with the exception of funerals.
793
01:17:47,788 --> 01:17:49,914
The Japanese defended
their position inch by inch.
794
01:17:50,082 --> 01:17:53,668
At the end of the day,
the remnants of L Company
795
01:17:53,794 --> 01:17:56,379
had gotten only halfway up the hill -
796
01:17:56,630 --> 01:17:59,132
a hill like the one
where I followed some villagers
797
01:17:59,675 --> 01:18:02,594
on their way
to a purification ceremony.
798
01:18:02,762 --> 01:18:05,221
The noro communicates
with the gods of the sea,
799
01:18:05,348 --> 01:18:07,307
of rain, of earth, of fire.
800
01:18:07,475 --> 01:18:11,644
She speaks of them as of
family members who've made good.
801
01:18:11,812 --> 01:18:15,774
All bow down before the Sister Deity,
a reflection, in the absolute,
802
01:18:15,900 --> 01:18:18,943
of a privileged relationship
between brother and sister.
803
01:18:19,111 --> 01:18:22,906
Even after her death, the sister
maintains her spiritual predominance.
804
01:18:23,032 --> 01:18:25,033
At dawn the Americans withdrew.
805
01:18:25,201 --> 01:18:28,036
Fighting went on for a month
before the island surrendered -
806
01:18:28,204 --> 01:18:30,705
and toppled into the modern world.
807
01:18:30,873 --> 01:18:32,624
Twenty-seven years
of American occupation,
808
01:18:32,792 --> 01:18:35,043
Japan's disputed sovereignty restored.
809
01:18:35,211 --> 01:18:37,379
Two miles from bowling alleys
and gas stations,
810
01:18:37,546 --> 01:18:40,840
the noro continues
her dialogue with the gods.
811
01:18:41,008 --> 01:18:44,094
When she's gone,
the dialogue will end.
812
01:18:44,261 --> 01:18:48,264
Brothers will no longer know that
their dead sister is watching over them.
813
01:19:57,501 --> 01:20:01,588
When filming this ceremony, I knew
I was present at the end of something.
814
01:20:02,214 --> 01:20:05,675
Magical cultures that disappear
leave traces for those who follow.
815
01:20:05,843 --> 01:20:08,178
This one will leave none.
816
01:20:08,304 --> 01:20:10,638
The rupture in history
has been too violent.
817
01:20:10,806 --> 01:20:13,391
I touched that rupture
at the top of the hill,
818
01:20:13,559 --> 01:20:15,560
as I had at the edge of the ditch
819
01:20:15,728 --> 01:20:18,730
where 200 girls used grenades
in 1945 to commit suicide
820
01:20:18,898 --> 01:20:22,609
rather than fall into American hands.
821
01:20:22,735 --> 01:20:25,320
People have
their pictures taken here.
822
01:20:25,446 --> 01:20:29,324
Grenade-shaped cigarette lighters
are sold nearby as souvenirs.
823
01:20:34,205 --> 01:20:35,747
On Hayao's machine,
824
01:20:35,873 --> 01:20:41,252
war resembles letters being burned,
shredded in a fiery frame.
825
01:20:41,504 --> 01:20:45,173
The code name for Pearl Harbor
was "Tora, tora, tora,"
826
01:20:45,341 --> 01:20:49,093
the name of the cat the couple
in Gotokuji was praying for.
827
01:20:49,261 --> 01:20:54,182
So all of this will have begun with
the name of a cat pronounced three times.
828
01:21:01,774 --> 01:21:06,402
Off Okinawa, kamikazes
dived on the American fleet.
829
01:21:06,529 --> 01:21:10,365
They would become a legend, and were
likelier material for it, obviously,
830
01:21:10,533 --> 01:21:13,576
than the special units who exposed
their prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria
831
01:21:13,744 --> 01:21:18,706
and then to hot water to see
how fast flesh separates from bone.
832
01:21:19,542 --> 01:21:23,795
Only their last letters would reveal
that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers,
833
01:21:23,921 --> 01:21:26,756
nor were they all
swashbuckling samurai.
834
01:21:26,924 --> 01:21:29,842
Before drinking his last cup of sake,
835
01:21:29,969 --> 01:21:32,262
Ryoji Uebara had written,
836
01:21:32,388 --> 01:21:36,474
'I've always thought that Japan
must live free to live eternally.
837
01:21:36,600 --> 01:21:40,812
It may seem idiotic to say that today,
under a totalitarian regime.
838
01:21:41,355 --> 01:21:46,484
We kamikaze pilots are machines.
We have nothing to say
839
01:21:46,652 --> 01:21:50,488
except to beg our compatriots to make
Japan the great country of our dreams.
840
01:21:50,656 --> 01:21:52,490
In the plane I'm a machine,
841
01:21:52,658 --> 01:21:55,577
a bit of magnetized metal that will
plaster itself to an aircraft carrier,
842
01:21:55,744 --> 01:22:00,748
but on the ground, I'm a human being,
with feelings and passions.
843
01:22:00,874 --> 01:22:03,167
Please excuse
these disorganized thoughts.
844
01:22:03,294 --> 01:22:05,253
I'm leaving you
with a rather melancholy picture,
845
01:22:05,421 --> 01:22:07,922
but in the depths of my heart,
I'm happy.
846
01:22:08,090 --> 01:22:11,301
I've spoken frankly.
Forgive me."'
847
01:23:36,053 --> 01:23:39,347
Every time he came back from Africa,
he stopped at the lsland of Sal,
848
01:23:39,515 --> 01:23:41,683
a salt rock
in the middle of the Atlantic.
849
01:23:43,018 --> 01:23:44,852
At the end of the island,
850
01:23:44,978 --> 01:23:47,855
beyond the village of Santa María
and its cemetery of painted tombs,
851
01:23:48,023 --> 01:23:50,650
one need only walk
straight ahead to meet the desert.
852
01:24:05,666 --> 01:24:07,625
He wrote...
853
01:24:07,751 --> 01:24:09,627
"I've understood the visions.
854
01:24:09,753 --> 01:24:12,338
Suddenly you're in the desert
the way you are in the night.
855
01:24:12,464 --> 01:24:14,507
Whatever is not desert
no longer exists.
856
01:24:14,633 --> 01:24:16,634
You don't want to believe
the images that crop up.
857
01:25:13,650 --> 01:25:17,278
Did I write that there are emus
in the lle de France?
858
01:25:18,655 --> 01:25:22,617
'Island of France' sounds strange
on the lsland of Sal.
859
01:25:22,785 --> 01:25:25,077
My memory superimposes
two towers,
860
01:25:25,204 --> 01:25:28,623
the one in the castle ruins of Montepilloy
that Joan of Arc used as a camp,
861
01:25:29,208 --> 01:25:31,667
and the lighthouse tower
at the southern tip of Sal,
862
01:25:31,835 --> 01:25:35,129
probably one of the last
lighthouses to use oil.
863
01:25:59,446 --> 01:26:02,323
A lighthouse in the Sahel
looks pasted on
864
01:26:02,491 --> 01:26:06,536
until you see the ocean
at the edge of the sand and salt.
865
01:26:07,037 --> 01:26:10,498
Crews of transcontinental planes
are rotated on Sal.
866
01:26:10,666 --> 01:26:12,750
Their club brings
to this empty frontier
867
01:26:12,876 --> 01:26:16,671
a small touch of the seaside resort
that makes the rest even more unreal.
868
01:26:16,797 --> 01:26:20,174
They feed the stray dogs
that live on the beach.
869
01:26:33,689 --> 01:26:36,440
My dogs seemed
pretty nervous that evening.
870
01:26:36,567 --> 01:26:40,361
They played with the sea
as I'd never seen them before.
871
01:26:40,529 --> 01:26:43,322
Listening to Radio Ηong Kong
later on, I understood.
872
01:26:43,448 --> 01:26:46,701
That was the first day
of the lunar new year,
873
01:26:46,869 --> 01:26:49,036
and for the first time in 60 years,
874
01:26:49,204 --> 01:26:51,706
the sign of the Dog
met the sign of Water."
875
01:27:34,625 --> 01:27:37,043
"Out there, 11,000 miles away,
876
01:27:37,169 --> 01:27:40,338
a single shadow remains immobile
among the long moving shadows
877
01:27:40,505 --> 01:27:43,090
that the January light
casts on the ground in Tokyo:
878
01:27:43,216 --> 01:27:45,760
the shadow of the Asakusa monk.
879
01:28:35,310 --> 01:28:38,312
For in Japan too
the Year of the Dog is beginning.
880
01:28:38,480 --> 01:28:41,565
Temples are filled with visitors
who toss their coins
881
01:28:41,733 --> 01:28:43,651
and pray, Japanese-style -
882
01:28:43,777 --> 01:28:46,988
a prayer slipped quietly into life
without interrupting it.
883
01:29:18,687 --> 01:29:21,689
Stranded at the end of the world,
on my lsland of Sal,
884
01:29:21,857 --> 01:29:24,400
in the company
of my prancing dogs,
885
01:29:24,526 --> 01:29:26,235
I remember that January in Tokyo,
886
01:29:26,403 --> 01:29:30,364
or rather I remember the images
I filmed that January in Tokyo.
887
01:29:30,532 --> 01:29:32,700
They've replaced my memory.
888
01:29:32,868 --> 01:29:34,785
They are my memory.
889
01:29:35,037 --> 01:29:37,538
I wonder how people remember things
890
01:29:37,664 --> 01:29:40,374
who don't film or photograph or tape them.
891
01:29:40,542 --> 01:29:42,543
How has mankind
managed to remember?
892
01:29:43,170 --> 01:29:45,212
I know. It wrote the Bible.
893
01:29:46,673 --> 01:29:49,884
The new bible will be
an eternal magnetic tape
894
01:29:50,010 --> 01:29:54,138
of a time that will have to reread itself
constantly, just to know it existed.
895
01:29:54,890 --> 01:29:57,892
As we await the year 4001
and its total recall,
896
01:29:58,018 --> 01:30:00,478
that's what the New Year oracles
897
01:30:00,645 --> 01:30:03,981
that we take out of
their long hexagonal boxes offer us:
898
01:30:04,107 --> 01:30:06,442
a little more power
over that memory
899
01:30:06,610 --> 01:30:09,070
that runs from camp to camp,
like Joan of Arc,
900
01:30:09,196 --> 01:30:11,614
that a shortwave announcement
from Hong Kong Radio
901
01:30:11,782 --> 01:30:14,742
picked up on a Cape Verde lsland
projects to Tokyo,
902
01:30:14,910 --> 01:30:17,495
and that the memory of a precise color
in the street bounces back
903
01:30:17,662 --> 01:30:19,955
on another country,
another distance,
904
01:30:20,082 --> 01:30:22,249
another music, endlessly.
905
01:30:31,718 --> 01:30:33,761
At the end of memory's path,
906
01:30:34,137 --> 01:30:37,223
the ideograms of the lsland of France
are no less enigmatic
907
01:30:37,349 --> 01:30:39,141
than the kanji of Tokyo
908
01:30:39,267 --> 01:30:42,186
in the miraculous light
of the New Year.
909
01:30:42,312 --> 01:30:44,105
It's Indian winter.
910
01:30:44,231 --> 01:30:46,107
It's as if the air
were the first element
911
01:30:46,274 --> 01:30:49,819
to emerge purified from the countless
ceremonies the Japanese use
912
01:30:49,945 --> 01:30:52,446
to wash off one year
before entering the next.
913
01:30:52,572 --> 01:30:54,615
A full month is just enough
914
01:30:54,783 --> 01:30:59,120
to fulfill all the duties
that courtesy owes to time,
915
01:30:59,246 --> 01:31:01,288
the most interesting
being the acquisition,
916
01:31:01,414 --> 01:31:03,624
at the temple of Tenjin,
of the Uso bird,
917
01:31:03,792 --> 01:31:07,086
that, according to one tradition,
eats all your lies of the year to come,
918
01:31:07,254 --> 01:31:10,798
and according to another,
turns them into truths.
919
01:31:10,924 --> 01:31:14,260
But what gives the street
its color in January,
920
01:31:14,386 --> 01:31:16,595
what makes it suddenly different,
921
01:31:16,721 --> 01:31:19,306
is the appearance of the kimonos.
922
01:31:19,474 --> 01:31:21,475
In the street, in stores, in offices,
923
01:31:21,643 --> 01:31:23,853
even at the stock exchange
on opening day,
924
01:31:24,020 --> 01:31:27,773
girls bring out
their fur-collared winter kimonos.
925
01:31:27,899 --> 01:31:29,567
At that time of year,
926
01:31:29,734 --> 01:31:33,445
others may invent extra-flat TV sets,
commit suicide with chain saws,
927
01:31:33,572 --> 01:31:36,532
or capture two-thirds of the world market
for semiconductors - good for them!
928
01:31:36,700 --> 01:31:39,201
All you see are the girls.
929
01:31:49,963 --> 01:31:52,339
January 15th
is Coming-of-Age day,
930
01:31:52,507 --> 01:31:55,676
an obligatory celebration
in the life of a young Japanese woman.
931
01:31:55,844 --> 01:31:59,847
City governments distribute bags
filled with gifts, date books, advice:
932
01:32:00,515 --> 01:32:03,767
how to be a good citizen,
mother, and wife.
933
01:32:04,728 --> 01:32:08,606
On that day, every 20-year-old girl
can phone her family for free,
934
01:32:08,773 --> 01:32:11,775
no matter where in Japan.
935
01:32:12,485 --> 01:32:16,697
Work, home and country -
this is the anteroom of adulthood.
936
01:32:16,907 --> 01:32:20,910
The world of the Takenoko and of
rock singers speeds away like a rocket.
937
01:32:21,369 --> 01:32:24,955
Speakers explain
what society expects of them.
938
01:32:25,916 --> 01:32:29,251
Ηow long will they take
to forget the secret?
939
01:33:27,894 --> 01:33:30,020
And when
all the celebrations are over,
940
01:33:30,146 --> 01:33:33,857
all that remains is to collect
the ornaments and accessories
941
01:33:33,984 --> 01:33:36,777
and burn them
in one more celebration.
942
01:34:21,698 --> 01:34:23,615
This is dondoyaki,
943
01:34:23,742 --> 01:34:27,828
a Shinto blessing of the debris
that has a right to immortality,
944
01:34:27,954 --> 01:34:29,747
like the dolls at Ueno.
945
01:34:29,914 --> 01:34:33,500
The last stage in the poignancy
of things before they disappear.
946
01:34:34,294 --> 01:34:38,339
Daruma, the one-eyed spirit,
reigns supreme atop the bonfire.
947
01:34:39,257 --> 01:34:42,009
Abandonment must be a feast,
laceration must be a feast,
948
01:34:42,135 --> 01:34:44,595
and the farewell to all
that one has lost, broken, used,
949
01:34:44,763 --> 01:34:46,847
must be ennobled by a ceremony.
950
01:34:47,015 --> 01:34:49,767
It's Japan that could fulfill
the wish of that French writer
951
01:34:49,934 --> 01:34:52,353
who wanted divorce
to be made a sacrament.
952
01:34:52,520 --> 01:34:54,480
The only baffling part of this ritual
953
01:34:54,606 --> 01:34:58,400
was the children striking
the ground with long poles.
954
01:34:58,526 --> 01:35:01,403
I only got one explanation,
a rather peculiar one.
955
01:35:01,529 --> 01:35:04,448
I thought it might be
a small, intimate ritual,
956
01:35:04,574 --> 01:35:07,159
but it was to chase away moles.
957
01:35:49,327 --> 01:35:52,454
And that's where
my three children from Iceland
958
01:35:52,580 --> 01:35:54,581
came and grafted themselves in.
959
01:35:55,458 --> 01:35:57,876
I picked up the whole shot again,
960
01:35:58,002 --> 01:35:59,920
adding the somewhat
hazy ending,
961
01:36:00,088 --> 01:36:03,465
the frame trembling
under the force of the wind.
962
01:36:03,591 --> 01:36:05,676
Everything I had cut
in order to "tidy up"
963
01:36:05,844 --> 01:36:08,887
and that said better than all the rest
what I saw in that moment,
964
01:36:09,055 --> 01:36:11,557
why I held it at arm's length,
at zoom's length,
965
01:36:11,724 --> 01:36:14,768
until its last 24th of a second.
966
01:36:16,438 --> 01:36:19,022
The city of Heimaey
spread out below us,
967
01:36:19,149 --> 01:36:21,275
and when, five years later,
my friend Haroun Tazieff
968
01:36:21,443 --> 01:36:23,694
sent me the film
he'd just shot in the same place,
969
01:36:23,862 --> 01:36:28,782
I lacked only the name to know
that nature performs its own dondoyaki.
970
01:36:29,826 --> 01:36:32,453
The island's volcano had reawakened.
971
01:36:32,787 --> 01:36:34,746
I looked at those pictures,
972
01:36:34,914 --> 01:36:38,959
and it was as if all of 1965
had just been covered in ash.
973
01:36:56,060 --> 01:36:58,061
So all one had to do was wait,
974
01:36:58,229 --> 01:37:01,899
and the planet itself
would stage the working of time.
975
01:37:02,650 --> 01:37:05,694
I saw again
what had been my window.
976
01:37:05,820 --> 01:37:08,655
I saw familiar roofs
and balconies emerge,
977
01:37:08,823 --> 01:37:11,742
the landmarks of the walks
I took through town every day,
978
01:37:11,910 --> 01:37:14,828
down to the cliff
where I'd met the children.
979
01:37:16,039 --> 01:37:20,042
The cat with white socks
that Haroun had kindly filmed for me
980
01:37:20,168 --> 01:37:22,711
naturally found its place,
981
01:37:22,837 --> 01:37:26,465
and I thought that of all the prayers
to time that I'd studied this trip,
982
01:37:26,633 --> 01:37:29,343
the kindest was the one spoken
by the woman of Gotokuji,
983
01:37:29,511 --> 01:37:31,845
who said simply to her cat Tora,
984
01:37:31,971 --> 01:37:36,266
"Beloved cat, wherever you are,
may your soul rest in peace."
985
01:37:58,831 --> 01:38:01,208
And then, in its turn,
the journey entered the Zone.
986
01:38:02,627 --> 01:38:06,547
Hayao showed me my images
already touched by the moss of time,
987
01:38:06,714 --> 01:38:09,675
freed of the lie that had prolonged
the existence of those moments
988
01:38:09,801 --> 01:38:11,510
swallowed by the spiral.
989
01:38:27,944 --> 01:38:30,153
When spring came
990
01:38:30,280 --> 01:38:34,199
and every crow announced its arrival
by raising his cry half a tone...
991
01:38:34,909 --> 01:38:39,788
I took the green train of the Yamanote
line and got off at Tokyo station,
992
01:38:39,914 --> 01:38:42,791
near the central post office.
993
01:38:42,917 --> 01:38:45,168
Though the street was empty,
994
01:38:45,295 --> 01:38:48,046
I waited at the red light,
Japanese-style,
995
01:38:48,172 --> 01:38:51,341
to leave space
for the spirits of broken cars.
996
01:38:51,467 --> 01:38:53,594
Though I was expecting no letter,
997
01:38:53,720 --> 01:38:56,471
I stopped
at the general delivery window,
998
01:38:56,598 --> 01:38:59,391
for one must honor
the spirits of torn-up letters,
999
01:38:59,517 --> 01:39:04,104
and at the airmail counter,
to hail the spirits of unmailed letters.
1000
01:39:05,148 --> 01:39:07,482
I took the measure
of the unbearable vanity of the West
1001
01:39:07,609 --> 01:39:09,693
that has always favored
being over non-being,
1002
01:39:09,819 --> 01:39:11,653
what is spoken
over what's left unsaid.
1003
01:39:11,779 --> 01:39:15,741
I walked along the little stalls
of clothing dealers.
1004
01:39:15,867 --> 01:39:19,244
In the distance I heard Mr. Akao's voice
reverberating from the loudspeakers,
1005
01:39:19,370 --> 01:39:21,622
now a half tone higher.
1006
01:39:21,789 --> 01:39:24,291
Then I went down to the basement
1007
01:39:24,459 --> 01:39:27,502
where my maniac friend busies
himself with his electronic graffiti.
1008
01:39:27,629 --> 01:39:29,630
In the end
his language touches me,
1009
01:39:29,756 --> 01:39:34,301
for he talks to that part of us that insists
on drawing profiles on prison walls.
1010
01:39:34,427 --> 01:39:36,345
A piece of chalk
to follow the contours
1011
01:39:36,471 --> 01:39:40,140
of what is not,
or is no longer, or is not yet.
1012
01:39:40,391 --> 01:39:43,226
The handwriting each of us
will use to draw up
1013
01:39:43,353 --> 01:39:46,146
his own list of things
that quicken the heart -
1014
01:39:46,272 --> 01:39:49,191
to offer up or to erase.
1015
01:39:49,400 --> 01:39:51,902
In that moment,
poetry will be made by everyone,
1016
01:39:52,028 --> 01:39:54,821
and there will be emus in the Zone."
1017
01:40:14,634 --> 01:40:16,802
He writes to me from Japan.
1018
01:40:16,928 --> 01:40:18,762
He writes to me from Africa.
1019
01:40:18,888 --> 01:40:22,933
He says he can now summon up the look
on the market lady's face in Praia
1020
01:40:23,059 --> 01:40:25,352
that had lasted
only the length of a film frame.
1021
01:40:26,854 --> 01:40:29,690
Will there be
a last letter someday?
1022
01:40:33,861 --> 01:40:37,489
IN THE FRENCH AUDIO VERSION,
1023
01:40:37,657 --> 01:40:43,537
THE LETTERS OF SANDOR KRASNA
WERE READ BY FLORENCE DELAY
86597
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