All language subtitles for Is Dead (Portrait Incomplet De Gertrude Stein)

Incomplete portrait of Gertrude Stein

As is said to be the case for the dying,
she was able to see clearly and freely

the things like they really are and not
like one would like them to be.

I have always been bothered by the fact that people
take a bigger interest in my person than in my work

If my work wasn't there, nobody would take any interest
in me, so why aren't they more interested in my work?

But all in all I don't know how well you know my
work, so maybe I'd better tell you everything.

For a long time I didn't know what
childhood was, but I remember a miracle

But possessing something and rememb-
ering are two very different things

There's a moment from childhood or any
time like a country school.

And I ask myself if I should talk about
what I remember as I do about what I don't

If I remember what I remember, then
why do I remember?

I remember it so well that it seems
that I don't remember after all

And if it doesn't resemble then I don't
really remember. ls it any use?

I was a little girl from California and I discovered
like everybody the difference between life and death.

I discovered that stars are moving worlds,
I discovered comets, the wind and the rain

Grass, flowers, butterflies didn't interest me like before, but
there was books and food, food and books: two great things

During childhood there is almost
everything, if not in fact everything

One suspects that life and death are quite
alike. One isn't sure but one wonders

It's when the desire to become
legendary sets in.

All that they say, all that they know,
all that they repeat is legend

lt must be legencl to be taught, feet & legs to be part of it,
hands & fingers also, but less legendary than legs & feet

To play in a garden by nightfall during
childhood is legend

You can feel it.
It's like this every time at dusk.

I remember having become legend many
times during my childhood

Me and my brother became legendary
when we mounted dusty mountain roads

When we camped, pulled a little earl,
lay close to each other

and all other boys and girls could have
done like we did, we were legendary

And later on, one likes to read, because
books always talk about legendary persons

My mother had been ill for a long time
and was unable to move

So when she died we had gotten used
to get by without her

I have said everything about her in
The Making of Americans

But it's only fiction and what use
is fiction

That it's fiction is true in itself, and after
all The Making of Americans isn't really fiction

It's a description on how everybody who
ever lived eats, drinks, loves, sleeps

talks, walks, activate, forgets, disputes,
loves, despises, works, sits down

Some descriptions are longer than others.
There's a lengthy one on my mom and dad

It's not really a description, after all,
what's the use of remembering things?

And in our time, one doesn't really
occupy oneself much with memories

My dad couldn't be woken up. My brother entered the room
from the window, cried that he was dead and that was true.

Our life without dad was the start
of a very agreeable life

I reflected on every sort of dads.
Dads come and go

When people haven't had a dad
they all want to have one

And when they have one, everybody
starts to regret they have one

Sometimes dukes and barons become
dads and kings and priests too

In the agreeable 18th Century everybody
get fed up with always having a dad

And little by little the capitalists and the synclicalists
too become dads and then the communists get into it

Maybe the 21st Century will be likable like
the 18th where people forgot to be a dad

That's how my childhood was. The 19th Century didn't end
easily, like centuries never do. It's hard to kill a century

It's like the old jokes about mothers-in-law
and centuries become as annoying as them

The 19th Century had no logic. It had
hopes, aspirations, discoveries, but no logic

I really love logic

That's why I have made my contribution
to killing the 19th Century

Like a gangster armed with
a machine gun

Gertrude Stein enters Radcliffe College
where she leaves youth and solitude

There she takes pleasure in seeing all kinds of people ancl
a profound impression is left-t on her by William James

Keep your freedom of spirit,
he often said

When a student said "What I tell you is
true", he replied, "Yes, it's mostly true"

Gertrude Stein had been to the opera
every night for a week

It was the exams for James' course. She
couldn't write anything on the paper

"Dear Professor James, I feel incapable of
an exam in philosophy today", she wrote

The next clay she got a card saying: "Dear Miss Stein, I
understand your state of mind, which I often share myself"

And on the top he had put the note, the
highest any student had gotten on the course

Gertrude Stein followed medical lectures
in Baltimore

The last years she started to get
really bored

A professor told her that he wouldn't give
her the note needed for her diploma

He told her, "Miss, all you have to do is
follow the lectures this summer"

Not at all, she replied. You have no idea
how thankful I am

You are making it impossible for me to
practice medicine, which bored me stiff

That was the end of Gertrude Stein's
medical studies

Her brother had settled in Paris. She joined
him and started to write

She wrote a novel

Her apartment in 27 rue Fleurus had two
floors, four rooms, a kitchen and a big studio

That's where I met her. I moved into rue
Fleurus and our Paris adventure started

Gertrude Stein bought a painting from
a young Spaniard called Picasso one day

How that happened, none of them
could remember

The first time Picasso came to dinner and
the first time Stein posed for a painting

they could remember. The rest had
been forgotten

She wrote a negro story, Melanctha
Herbert, second of the Three Lives stories

Gertrude Stein went to Montmartre to pose
for Picasso and went back each day

by foot, meditating and forming phrases.
Three Lives had been finished

Gertrude Stein asked her sister-in-law to
read it. She did and was very moved

This delighted Gertrude Stein, who didn't
think that anybody could take an interest

At the time, she didn't ask people what
they thought, only if they wanted to read

Now she thought: If they agree to read,
they'll end up liking it

She needed am editor. After some research
she ended up printing it herself

Somebody told her about a publisher in
New York who published historical works

Three Lives was printed in USA and copies
were sent to France for correction

One day a young American presented him-
self and said he wanted to see Miss Stein

The director of Grafton Press wants to
know if your knowledge of English is

He asked a bit embarrassed.
I'm American, Stein said with indignation.

You don't think I have gotten a proper
education, she asked, laughing

I will write to your director and tell him
that every word was written consciously

Every word was meant to be like this
and all I ask from him is to print it

I will take the full responsabilty

When the book had gotten much attention
from critics, the editor wrote a frank letter

saying that he had been surprised by the favorable
reviews, but that he has proud of having printed the book

The reception was overwhelming, because
the author was completely unknown

The autumn exhibition was a step in official
recognition of the outlaws of the independent salon

There were many beautiful pictures, ancl a very good one
by someone called Matisse, which wasn't really beautiful

It was a portrait of a woman with a fan. It
was very strange in its colour and its anatomy

It pleased Gertrude Stein, who
bought it

She was upset to see so many people
making fun of it

She couldn't grasp why she found it so natural,
while other found it so natural to find it absurd

like she later couldn't understand why her writings,
who seemed so clear, caused anger and mockery

She often said: My writing is clear as mud, but mud
settles and clear streams run on and disappear

Now I want to talk about the pictures that
were in Gertrude Stein's house

There were plenty of Renoir, Cezanne, two
Gauguins, a Monticelli, some Manguins

two Vallottons, a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Daumier,
a small Delacroix and a moderate sized Greco

enormous Picassos, two rows of Matisses, a big portrait
of a woman by Cezanne and some very little Cezannes

People were coming to see the paintings
all the time and it started to get intolerable

That was the reason why Gertrude Stein
started to write at night time

She had started The Making of Americans
and was fighting words and phrases

Especially the phrases. It began with an old daily
theme that she had written when at Radcliffe

"Once an angry man dragged his father
along the ground to his own orchard

'Stop' cried the old man at last. 'Stop'
I did not drag my father beyond this tree"

It was to be the story of a family but it was getting to be a history
of all living beings, all who ever were or are or could be living

lt was at this time that she got the habit that lasted to the
war, which breaks a lot of habits, to work from 11 pm to daybreak

She tried to finish before the sun rose and the birds started to
sing, because from then on it wasn't comfortable to go to sleep

At that time there were a lot of birds in
the trees, but there are less now

But at that time, the morning and the birds
often caught her in the middle of her work

So she went out. And she tried to get
accustomed to the sun and the birds

before she went to bed. Sunrises are very good, she said,
if you approach them softly through the end of the night

But if you have to face them suddenly in
the middle of the morning, they are awful

Her style slowly started to change. Before she was interested
in the interior of persons, their character ancl inner life

Now she wanted to express the rhythm
of the visible world

It was a slow and painful transformation, and she went
through many different experiences in order to get there

She looked, she listened and
she described

I have always been haunted by the problem of the
relation of the exterior being with the interior being

A question that occupies her in painting is the difficulty of
representing the human that leads the artist to paint still-lifes

Because, after all, the human life can't
be rendered in painting

She tried in various ways to describe, to
invent words, but she soon gave up

She was working in English and would have
to solve her problems inside the language

The idea of making up words
shocked her

She hated the abnormal. To her, the simplicity
of the normal was more interesting and complex

She stood by her task, describing objects
and rooms filled with objects

and with this she made the book
Tender Buttons

However she said that it is the whole of
that which concerns men and women

which is interesting, and that's why she
never stopped to do her series of portraits

This is how she started to write
these portraits

I started to read and first I thought that
she was kidding me

and protested. Then I read the rest of
the page and was completely seduced

In 1914, war broke out. For years already
Picasso's paintings had been showing

the structure of Spanish villages with
houses fusing with the landscape

For him this was always the principle of
the camouflage of war

In the first year of war, Picasso, Stein and
I were walking down boulevard Raspail

a cold winter evening. There is nothing
colder than bd Raspail a cold winter evening

All of a sudden down the street came
some big cannon

the first one any of us had seen
painted, that is camouflaged

Pablo stopped. He was spellbound.
We did this, he said. He was right

The order of this war wasn't at all
like the preceding ones

There wasn't a figure in center surrounded by other
figures, but a composition that had nor start nor finish

A composition where one corner was
as important as the other

In a word: Cubism

We had seen villages and houses
destroyed, but this was different

I remember hearing a nurse once say and the only thing she
did say of the front was: It's an absorbing landscape

It was humid and dark with some living
creatures scattered here and there

Gertrude Stein once said: A war is never
fatal, but it is always lost

Before the war, Picasso, Apollinaire,Matisse
Derain and Braque spent their clay together

Picasso looked like an Apollon followed
by four enormous grendiers

Derain & Braque were huge, Matisse wasn't
small. Apollinaire was big and robust

Poor Guillaume. He had been injured during
the war. A bit of his cranium was blown off

Picasso told me Guillaume died the day
of Armistice, and that he watched over him

It was hot, the windows were open ancl the crowd outside
was yelling "Death to Guillaume" (the German emperor)

And since one had always called him Apollinaire,
Guillaume was deeply hurt even while in agony

The death of Guillaume changed the
life if all his friends

It was just after the war, blood was every-
where and everybody went their own way

Guillaume had the gift of grouping people.
Now friendships were dissolving

Everybody was sad and shaken. The
whole universe seemed shaken up.

The whole universe seemed sad.
Guillaume Apollinaire was dead.

The old life had ended

An old woman in the village said to Stein: The people
who laughed before the war don't laugh any more

She didn't know if it was because they didn't know
how to laugh anymore or because they wouldn't laugh

Maybe people will laugh again if a
whole generation won't hear of the war

But maybe not, she said. Maybe we'll
never laugh like that again

The first years after the war Gertrude Stein worked a lot, but not
like before the war. Not every night, but at any time of clay

At this time she worked with great care
slowly and very concentrated

We observed that she was very
preoccupied

Gertrude Stein has a deep love of what
the French call "le metier"

Everybody should have only one metier like
everybody should have only one language

Her job was to write and her language
was English

Gertrude Stein has always been dominated
by the spirit of exactitude

She knows that the beauty resulting from emotion
must never be taken to be the cause of emotion

Prose and poetry should always be the exact
reproduction of an interior or exterior reality

She says poetry is essentially a vocabulary
just as prose is essentially not

And what is this vocabulary on which
poetry is completely based?

It's a vocabulary entirely based on
the noun

as prose is essentially and determinately
and vigorously not based on the noun

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting
with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun

It is doing that always doing that,
doing that doing nothing but that

When she said "A rose is a rose is
a rose is a rose"

She made poetry

What did she do? She really caressed
a noun and she spoke to it

Some day somebody asked her why she
wrote "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"

She answered that in that verse, for the first time in
a century in English poetry, the rose was really recl

She understands very well the
mechanisms of creation

That's why her opinions are so
valuable to her friends

I often hear Picasso say, after she has
made a remark about one of his paintings

and illustrating it in talking about what
she herself wants to do

"Tell me". They sit clown knee to knee and
talk about clogs, death, misfortune

Since Picasso is Spanish, he finds life
painful. Gertrude Stein often tells me:

Pablo just convinced me that I am
as unhappy as he is

"Are you unhappy?" I ask. "N0" she laughs,
"no, I don't think that I'm unhappy"

Ezra Pound dined at our place. Stein
liked him but didn't find him very amusing

She said that he was a good town orator.
Very good if you were local, otherwise not

Ezra talked a lot about T. S. Eliot.
Gertrude wasn't too keen on meeting him

but everybody said that she should, and
she finished by vaguely consenting

One day the door bell rang
and Eliot entered

He and Gertrude Stein had a formal
conversation, mostly on infinitives

Finally Eliot rose and said that if he printed anything of Stein's
in the Criterion it would have to be her very latest thing

He left and Gertrude Stein said that
we were no longer obliged to visit him

She started writing a portrait of T. S. Eliot
and called it the fifteenth of November,

that being this day and so there could be
no doubt but that it was her latest thing

It was all about wool is wool and
silk is silk

or wool is woolen and
silk is silken

She sent it to T. S. Eliot who naturally
didn't publish it

We were supposed to go to Hollywood
to see Charlie Chaplin. And we went there

Gertrude Stein liked Charlie Chaplin
a lot

They talked about cinema.
He told her something

He said that in silent film you could do
things that you couldn't do on stage

You could change the rhythm, but with an
accompanying voice you couldn't anymore

You were bound to the rhythm that
was given by the voice

Gertrude Stein talked about her opera, Four Saints
In Three acts, and what she had wanted to do

She had wanted to do a piece where
nothing happened

She had done it and it was interesting.
He said yes, he understood that

She said that films would be like news-
papers, pure habit with nothing interesting

One only asks of an artist to be interesting
and he's only that if nothing happens

If something happens it's just like
everything else

And the sure thing was that what's
interesting is when nothing happens

Chaplin wanted the sense of movement to
be his invention, Stein claimed the non-event

Both loved to talk, and had to stop them- selves
in order to let the other person have the word

After dinner, people gathered around Stein,
asking how she had gotten such publicity

Because of my small audience, she said.
With a big audience you get no way

Great publicity comes from real poetry, and
real poetry only has a small audience

Not a big audience, but it is really interes-
ting and causes thus a great publicity

This seemed to preoccupy them, as they
wanted both an audience and big publicity

Thet asked themselves how an author
like Gertrude Stein could become popular

It's easy! People are writing comprehen-
sible things all the time and one is bored

Bored because one feels one understands.
One starts to like the incomprehensible

Stein said: "The great reception I get is
not caused by my comprehensible books

but the incomprehensible ones

Many people came to Gertrude Stein
to ask her to write her autobiography

but she always said:
"Impossible"

She started to talk me into writing
MY autobiography. "Think of it" she said

"think of the money". And she started to
make up titles like "My Life With The Great"

"My Twenty-five Years With Gertrude Stein"

Then she started to get serious and say:
"Really, you must write the autobiography"

I am a pretty good housekeeper & a pretty
good gardener & a pretty good secretary

& a pretty good editor & a pretty good vet for dogs & I
found it difficult to add being a pretty good author

Stein said, it does not look to me as if you
were ever going to write that autobiography

You know what I'm going to do. I am going
to write it as simply as Defoe did

the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe.
And she has and this is it

In the summer I live on the French country-
side in a village with about 2O families

I know them all. And I know their oxen,
their cows, their clogs, who know me back

Me, my cars and my dogs

We were there in september 1939 when
France declared war on Germany

I was very afraid

I was so sure that there would
be no war

And here it came

I started to make a book for children, and only allowed myself
to think about the stories that would be included there

I walked during daytime composing stories.
I walked in the evening composing stories

I went to sleep composing stories

And I was quite successful at distracting
my mind from the realities of war

But when Alice Toklas said of a house
by the road: "What a lovely house"

I said "I won't look at it. All that will
be destroyed"

I had predicted that when I had cut to the
end of the garden, the war would be over

Today all the boxwood is cut
and war isn't over

How can a strong nation like Germany be
afraid of a handful of Jews?

No doubt they're scared because
hatred is fear

And after all, what can they do?
What can they do to them?

Since this time all is so alike that it's
different. And everything is just different

The 21st Century will no doubt be a
difficult and troubled time

Faith in progress and peace
will cease to exist

Everybody knows, but
nobody says it

Because nobody has confidence
in anybody else anymore

And since nobody has faith in the
possibility of being peaceful and happy

Maybe people will realize what
the French know so well

The it's better to be vanquished and then
win than to win and be vanquished

But everybody will also be absorbed by
the daily occupations

So, I'm an American who's lived
half her life in France. Not the half

that made me, but the half
where I have done what I have done

I have done things, written real poems,
real plays, real phrases

and real paragraphs, but I have
never said things in a simple manner

But I have wanted, I should
have had just that

When I have written a story, I have
written it as story

And I have found that there is comfort in novels,
because they present things as they could have happened

In other word by remembering something.
Everybody can remember

And if one can do it,
then why do it?

So I wanted to tell what I knew
the way I knew it

and not the way I
remembered it

I have considered the words to a point
where I knew their weight and volume

I placed them among other words and
I started to make portraits of people

At the start I did the same thing
that film does

I did a succession of affirmations
about the person

till I had a created a whole

I didn't think in terms of film. I had
never been to the cinema at the time

But one belongs to one's time, and our
time is no doubt the time of cinema

And one must express what the world
one lives in is doing

In the cinema two images are
never alike

Each one is a little different from the
one preceeding

Each time I said that the person I was
portraying was such and such

The thing I was referring to was a little
different from the preceding one

And this way I elaborated little by
little a portrait. And I said

a great number of times a person
was such a thing

and each time there was a difference that allowed
the portrait to progress and exist in the present

I had discovered what was fundamentally
interesting in the interior of a person

and I should find it not from what
they said or did

but from the intensity of movement
inside him or her

What bothers me is telling: saying
something without saying more

than the thing being told.
That's what telling something is

After all, human beings take an
interest in two things

Reality and how to tell it

I have always wanted what I write
to be banal and simple

And I ask myself if I have succeeded
in doing that

If something isn't sufficiently banal
and simple, it's nothing at all

That's what's pleased me about being surrounded
by people not speaking English all these years

Most of them are unable to read
a word of my writings

I like to live here, with plenty of people and
alone with the English language and myself

A chapter of Americans starts like this:
I have written for myself and for strangers

In New York they filmed me for the news
and invited me to come watch the movie

I didn't like seeing myself
moving and talking like that

I got a strange feeling, and I didn't
like that feeling

It's strange to be yourself, because
you're never yourself in your own eyes

Except in the memories that you have, but
of course you don't believe in those

That's the problem with autobiography:
You don't believe in it yourself

Why should you believe in it?
You know very well that's not you

It couldn't be you because you couldn't
have exact memories

and if you had exact memories, that sounds
false, false because it's not exact

Obviously, you are never yourself

I have thought a lot about how one
is one self for one self

About the fact that you are present to
yourself on the inside all the time

But a minute earlier you could only have a memory
of yourself and not the sense of what you were

And I started to think that to the degree
that you are what you think you are

you don't have the sense of time

You only have the sensation of time when
you remember what you were

And that's when I said: What good
is it to be a little girl

when you are going to be a woman?
What good is it for?

People are grown ups in their own eyes,
they never consider themselves a little child

or a very old adult

In Gulliver's Travels is described
people who never die

And this seems to prove that
death is necessary

Because those who don't die
don't live either

And I thought that in order not to die
there was no need to be old

Why not stay young and immortal? Why
not go on forever if you feel like it?

The time of early childhood certainly
go very slow

And if it went infinitely slow, why not
live indefinitely?

Later I told myself that if
nobody died

Earth would be completely
filled up

And I wouldn't have existed. I couldn't
have tried to be something else

So why not die?

When I was eight, I was shocked to learn that there was nothing
about the afterlife or eternity in the ancient testament

I checked the text and there
was nothing there

There was a God and he spoke, but
there was nothing about eternity