Original subtitles

You will not look straight at the camera.

Except... when you are told to do so.

You will forget.

You will forget.

You will forget that this is you.

I believe it can be done.

You will also forget the camera.

But above all, you will forget that this is you.

You.

Yes, I believe it can be done,

for instance, from other points of view,

the point of view of death among others,

your death, lost somewhere

in the midst of a nameless and pervasive death.

You will look at what you see.

But you will look at it absolutely.

You will try to look at it until your sight fails,

until it makes itself blind,

and even through this blindness

you must try again to look.

Until the end.

You ask me: Look at what?

I say, well, I say

the sea,

yes,

this word, facing you,

these walls facing the sea,

these successive disappearances,

this dog,

this coast,

this bird beneath the Atlantic wind.

Listen.

I also believe that if you were not to look

at that which appears before you, it would become apparent on the screen.

And the screen would go blank.

What you would see there,

What you would see there,

the sea, the window-panes,

the wall,

the sea beyond the window-panes,

the windows in the walls,

all things you have never seen before, never looked at before.

You will think that this, which is about to take place,

is not a rehearsal,

that this is a first night,

just as your life itself is a first night

as every second unfolds.

That among the millions of men hurling themselves to their death

throughout the ages,

you are the only one to stand for himself, in my presence,

at this very moment of the film that is being made.

You will think that it is I who has chosen you.

I. You.

You who are at every moment all of you, beside me,

and this is true whatever you do,

however far or near you might be from my hopes.

You will think about your own self,

this sea which has not yet taken place,

that wind and that gull

separated for the very first time,

that lost dog.

You will think the miracle

is not in the apparent similarity

between each of the particles that make up those millions of men

in their continuous hurling,

but in the irreducible difference that separates them,

that separates men from dogs,

dogs from film,

sand from the sea,

God from the dog

or from the tenacious gull struggling against the wind,

from the liquid crystal of your eyes,

from the wounding of the sands,

from the unbreathable foul air in the hall

of that hotel

after the dazzling light of the beach,

from each word from each phrase,

from each line from each book,

from each day and each century

and each eternity past

or future

and from you and me.

During your stay,

you must believe

in your inalienable majesty.

You will proceed.

You will walk as you do when you are alone

and when you believe someone is watching you,

God or me,

or that dog along the sea,

or that tragic gull braving the wind,

so alone in the presence of the Atlantic element.

I wanted to say:

film believes it can preserve

what you are doing at this moment.

But you,

from where you are,

wherever it may be,

when you have gone away still bonded with the sand,

or the wind, or the sea,

or the wall, or the bird,

or the dog,

you will realize that film cannot do that.

Go on to something else.

Give up.

Proceed.

You will see,

everything will come from your walking along the sea,

beyond the pillars in the hall,

from the movements of your body

that you had until now,

thought natural.

You will turn right

and walk along the window-panes and the sea,

the sea behind the window-panes, the windows in the walls,

the gull, and the wind,

and the dog.

You have done it.

You are on the edge of the sea,

you are on the edge of those things trapped among themselves

by your eyes.

Now the sea is to your left.

You can hear its murmur mingled with the wind.

In huge strides it advances towards you,

towards the dunes on the coast.

You and the sea,

you are but one for me,

one single object, the object of my role in this adventure.

I too look at it.

You must look at it as I do,

as I look at it,

with all my power, from where you are.

You have left the camera's field of view.

You are absent.

With your leaving your absence has taken over,

it has been photographed just as earlier your presence was photographed.

Your life has distanced itself.

Only your absence remains now,

bodyless,

without any possibility of reaching it,

of falling prey to desire.

You are precisely nowhere.

You are no longer the chosen one.

Nothing remains of you

except this floating absence, ambulatory,

that fills the screen,

that peoples by itself, why not?

a prairie in the Far West,

or this abandoned hotel,

or these sands.

Nothing happens except this absence drowned in regret

and which, at this point leaves nothing

to weep for.

Don't let yourself be overcome by these tears,

by this sadness.

No.

Continue to forget,

to ignore the future of all this,

and also your own future.

Last night,

after your final departure,

I went into the room on the ground floor,

that opens onto the park,

there where I always go during the tragic month of June,

the month that leads into Winter.

I had swept the house, I had cleaned everything as if preparing for my funeral.

Everything had been cleared of life, exempted,

emptied of traces,

and then I said to myself:

I'll start to write, in order to cure myself of the lie of this

love affair that is ending.

I washed my things, only a few things,

and everything was clean, my body, my hair, my clothes

and also their enclosures: body and clothes,

these rooms, this house, this park.

And then I started to write.

When everything was ready for my death, I began to write

of what I know precisely,

which you've never understood,

knowing you would never understand.

That's how it happens.

I always address myself to your lack of understanding.

Without that, you see, it wouldn't be worthwhile.

But suddenly I cared little for that impossibility of yours,

I would leave it in your hands, I'd have no part of it,

I'd give it back to you,

my wish being that

you take it with you,

that you make it part of your dreams,

part of the decomposing dream of which you were told

was happiness.

I mean the decay of the mutual

happiness of lovers.

And the day returned

as usual, in tears, and ready for the performance

And once again the performance took place.

And instead of dying

I went out onto the terrace in the park

and without emotion I called out loud the date of that day

Monday June 15th, 1981,

that day you left in that terrible heat

forever

and I believed, this time, yes, that it was forever.

I think I didn't suffer from your leaving.

Everything was as usual,

the trees, the roses,

the turning shadow of the house on the terrace,

the time and the date,

and yet you, you were absent.

I didn't think that you had to come back.

Around the park, the doves on the rooftops

called out to their mates to join them.

And then it was seven in the evening.

I told myself that I would have loved you.

I thought all that was left to me of you was nothing more

than a hesitant memory,

but no,

I was wrong,

my eyes remembered those beaches,

a place to embrace

with tenderness on the warm sand,

and that look of yours so focused on death.

That was when I said to myself, why not make a film.

From now on writing would be too difficult.

Why not a film.

And then the sun rose.

A bird crossed the terrace along the wall of the house.

Thinking the house empty,

it flew so close

it grazed one of the roses,

one of the roses I call "of Versailles".

The movement was violent, the only movement

in that park under the even light

in the sky.

I heard the rose's brushing

by the bird

in its velvet flight.

And I looked at the rose.

The rose stirred as if imbued with life,

and then little by little became again an ordinary rose.

You have remained in the state of having left.

And I have made a film out of your absence.

You will pass once again in front of the camera.

This time you will look at it.

Look at the camera.

The camera will now capture your reappearance

in the mirror parallel to that in which it sees itself.

Don't move. Wait.

Don't be surprised. I'll tell you this:

you will reappear in the image.

No,

I didn't warn you.

Yes, It will happen again.

Now

you already have, behind you, a past,

a plan.

Now you already have grown old.

Now you already are in danger.

The greatest danger that you now encounter

is resembling yourself,

resembling the man in that first shot

taken an hour ago.

Forget more.

Forget even more.

You will look at all the people in the audience,

one by one and each on in particular.

Remember this, very clearly:

the movie-theatre is in itself, like yourself, the entire world,

you are the entire world, you, you alone.

Never forget that. Don't be afraid.

No one, no other person in the world

can do what you will now do:

pass by this place a second time today,

under my orders alone, before God.

Don't try to understand the photographic phenomenon,

life.

This time, you will die as you look on.

You will look at the camera as you looked at the sea,

as you looked at the sea

and the window-panes and the dog

and the tragic bird in the wind

and the still sands braving the waves.

At the end of the journey,

the camera will have decided what you will have looked at.

Look.

The camera won't lie.

But look at it as if it were an object of choice

determined by yourself, something for which you have always waited,

as if you had decided to face it at last,

to engage with it in a struggle of life and death.

Act as if you had understood,

just now,

as you held it in your eyes,

that it was this, the camera,

that at first had wanted to kill you.

Look around you.

As far as the eye can see

you will recognize these barren stretches of sand,

these valleys cemented by war

and by happiness,

these valleys of film,

they look at one another, face one another.

Turn away. Walk on.

Forget.

walk away from that detail, the cinema.

The film will remain like this.

Finished.

You are at once present and hidden.

Present only through the film,

beyond this film,

hidden from yourself,

from all knowledge anyone could have of you.

While I no longer love you

I no longer love anything,

nothing, except you, still.

Tonight it's raining.

It's raining around the house and on the sea.

The film will remain like this, as it is.

I have no more images for it.

I no longer know where we are,

in what months we are,

at what end of what love,

at what beginning of what other love,

in what story we have lost ourselves.

It is only for this film that I know.

For the film alone I know,

I know that no image, no single image more,

could make it last any longer.

Light hasn't broken all day long

and there isn't the slightest breeze

in the treetops of the forests, or in the fields,

the valleys.

No one knows if it's still summer or the end of summer

or some other deceitful, undecided season,

ugly, nameless.

I no longer love you

Like I did on the first day. I no longer love you.

Nevertheless around your eyes,

always there,

those expanses surrounding the gaze,

and the life that stirs you in sleep.

There always remains that exaltation that comes

over me from not knowing what to do with all this,

with the knowledge I have of your eyes,

of the immensities your eyes explore,

to the point of not knowing what to write,

what to say,

and what to show of their pristine insignificance.

Of those things I know only this:

that I have nothing to do now

except suffer the exaltation

about someone who was once here,

someone who was not aware of being alive

and whose I knew was alive,

of someone who didn't know how to live, as I was saying,

and of myself who knew it

and who didn't know what to do with it,

with that knowledge of the life he lived,

who did not know what to write, what to show;

who didn't know what to do with me either.

They say that midsummer is on its way, it's possible.

I don't know.

The roses are already out, at the bottom of the park.

That sometimes they are not seen by anyone

during their entire life

and that they hold themselves like that in their perfume,

open,

for several days and then fall to pieces.

Never seen by this woman alone, who forgets.

Never seen by me, they die.

I am in a state of love between living and dying.

It is through your lack of feeling

that I rediscover your quality,

that of pleasing me.

I desire only

that life should not leave you,

otherwise,

I care nothing for its progress,

for it can teach me nothing about you,

it can only draw death closer to me, render it

more tolerable, yes, desirable.

This is how

you stand: facing me,

softly,

in constant provocation,

innocent, impenetrable.

You are the Atlantic Man:

You do not know this.