1
00:00:12,435 --> 00:00:18,867
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place...

2
00:00:21,120 --> 00:00:27,143
The first image he told me about
was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.

3
00:00:33,724 --> 00:00:36,001
He said that for him it was the image of happiness

4
00:00:36,122 --> 00:00:39,254
and also that he had tried several times to link it
to other images

5
00:00:39,255 --> 00:00:40,764
but it never worked.

6
00:00:40,765 --> 00:00:41,854
He wrote me:

7
00:00:42,424 --> 00:00:45,163
One day I'll have to put it all alone
at the beginning of a film

8
00:00:45,164 --> 00:00:47,046
with a long piece of black leader;

9
00:00:47,428 --> 00:00:52,424
if they don't see happiness in the picture,
at least they'll see the black.

10
00:01:23,112 --> 00:01:27,015
He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido,
the Northern Island.

11
00:01:27,209 --> 00:01:30,792
Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane,
others take the ferry:

12
00:01:31,530 --> 00:01:34,265
waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep.

13
00:01:34,475 --> 00:01:38,448
Curiously all of that makes me think of
a past or future war:

14
00:01:38,568 --> 00:01:41,541
night trains, air raids, fallout shelters,

15
00:01:41,695 --> 00:01:45,329
small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life.

16
00:01:58,850 --> 00:02:02,012
He liked the fragility of those moments
suspended in time.

17
00:02:02,462 --> 00:02:06,580
Those memories whose only function it being
to leave behind nothing but memories.

18
00:02:06,949 --> 00:02:08,220
He wrote:

19
00:02:08,423 --> 00:02:13,513
I've been round the world several times
and now only banality still interests me.

20
00:02:13,847 --> 00:02:18,327
On this trip I've tracked it with
the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.

21
00:02:21,128 --> 00:02:23,215
At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.

22
00:02:44,235 --> 00:02:46,587
He used to write me from Africa.

23
00:02:47,266 --> 00:02:52,025
He contrasted African time to European time,
and also to Asian time.

24
00:02:52,060 --> 00:02:56,167
He said that in the 19th century
mankind had come to terms with space,

25
00:02:56,168 --> 00:03:01,249
and that the great question of the 20th was
the coexistence of different concepts of time.

26
00:03:01,250 --> 00:03:06,071
By the way, did you know that there are emus
in the Ile de France?

27
00:03:14,241 --> 00:03:18,930
He wrote me that in the Bijagos Islands
it's the young girls who choose their fiancées.

28
00:03:19,725 --> 00:03:24,326
He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo
there is a temple consecrated to cats.

29
00:03:43,668 --> 00:03:47,186
I wish I could convey to you the simplicity
—the lack of affectation—

30
00:03:47,187 --> 00:03:51,324
of this couple who had come to place
an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery

31
00:03:51,623 --> 00:03:54,527
so their cat Tora would be protected.

32
00:03:55,113 --> 00:03:58,062
No she wasn't dead, only run away.

33
00:03:58,703 --> 00:04:01,998
But on the day of her death no one
would know how to pray for her,

34
00:04:01,999 --> 00:04:05,983
how to intercede with death so that
he would call her by her right name.

35
00:04:06,783 --> 00:04:09,782
So they had to come there,
both of them, under the rain,

36
00:04:09,783 --> 00:04:14,010
to perform the rite that would repair
the web of time where it had been broken.

37
00:04:26,716 --> 00:04:27,947
He wrote me:

38
00:04:28,089 --> 00:04:31,424
I will have spent my life trying to
understand the function of remembering,

39
00:04:31,450 --> 00:04:35,760
which is not the opposite of forgetting,
but rather its lining.

40
00:04:36,797 --> 00:04:41,520
We do not remember, we rewrite memory
much as history is rewritten.

41
00:04:42,442 --> 00:04:44,501
How can one remember thirst?

42
00:04:56,288 --> 00:04:58,170
He didn't like to dwell on poverty,

43
00:04:58,264 --> 00:05:03,623
but in everything he wanted to show
there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model.

44
00:05:04,269 --> 00:05:08,865
A world full of bums, of lumpens,
of outcasts, of Koreans.

45
00:05:09,182 --> 00:05:13,392
Too broke to afford drugs,
they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk.

46
00:05:14,060 --> 00:05:18,518
This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes
from the glories of the center city,

47
00:05:18,519 --> 00:05:23,076
a character took his revenge on society
by directing traffic at the crossroads.

48
00:05:23,697 --> 00:05:26,594
Luxury for them would be one of
those large bottles of sake,

49
00:05:26,595 --> 00:05:29,458
that are poured over tombs
on the day of the dead.

50
00:05:56,931 --> 00:05:59,336
I paid for a round in a bar in Namidabashi.

51
00:05:59,859 --> 00:06:03,847
It's the kind of place that allows people
to stare at each other with equality;

52
00:06:04,318 --> 00:06:09,349
the threshold below which every man is
as good as any other—and knows it.

53
00:06:19,829 --> 00:06:23,347
He told me about the Jetty on Fogo,
in the Cape Verde islands.

54
00:06:24,104 --> 00:06:26,346
How long have they been there
waiting for the boat,

55
00:06:26,830 --> 00:06:29,629
patient as pebbles but ready to jump?

56
00:06:30,085 --> 00:06:34,657
They are a people of wanderers,
of navigators, of world travelers.

57
00:06:34,943 --> 00:06:37,613
They fashioned themselves through cross-breeding
here on these rocks,

58
00:06:37,614 --> 00:06:41,335
that the Portuguese used as
a marshaling yard for their colonies.

59
00:06:42,180 --> 00:06:47,645
A people of nothing, a people of emptiness,
a vertical people.

60
00:06:50,106 --> 00:06:52,021
Frankly, have you ever heard of
anything stupider than...

61
00:06:52,022 --> 00:06:56,408
to say to people as they teach in film schools,
not to look at the camera?

62
00:07:06,196 --> 00:07:11,289
He used to write to me: the Sahel is not only
what is shown of it when it is too late

63
00:07:11,946 --> 00:07:15,635
it's a land that drought seeps into
like water into a leaking boat.

64
00:07:16,132 --> 00:07:21,092
The animals resurrected for the time of a carnival
in Bissau will be petrified again,

65
00:07:21,158 --> 00:07:24,645
as soon as a new attack
has changed the savannah into a desert.

66
00:07:25,366 --> 00:07:28,526
This is a state of survival that
the rich countries have forgotten,

67
00:07:28,734 --> 00:07:32,442
with one exception: UN Japan.

68
00:07:32,472 --> 00:07:35,868
My constant comings and goings
are not a search for contrasts;

69
00:07:36,386 --> 00:07:39,838
they are a journey to
the two extreme poles of survival.

70
00:09:00,759 --> 00:09:02,730
He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon,

71
00:09:02,979 --> 00:09:06,405
a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning
of the 11th century,

72
00:09:06,492 --> 00:09:07,915
in the Heian period.

73
00:09:08,964 --> 00:09:11,420
Do we ever know where history is really made?

74
00:09:11,960 --> 00:09:16,186
Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies
to fight one another.

75
00:09:16,187 --> 00:09:19,719
Real power was in the hands of
a family of hereditary regents;

76
00:09:19,720 --> 00:09:21,401
the emperor's court had become
nothing more than

77
00:09:21,402 --> 00:09:23,958
a place of intrigues and intellectual games.

78
00:09:24,751 --> 00:09:27,236
By learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort

79
00:09:27,237 --> 00:09:29,971
from the contemplation of the tiniest things,

80
00:09:30,242 --> 00:09:33,621
this small group of idlers
left a mark on Japanese sensibility

81
00:09:33,622 --> 00:09:37,214
much deeper than
the mediocre thundering of the politicians,

82
00:09:38,630 --> 00:09:40,643
Shonagon had a passion for lists:

83
00:09:41,317 --> 00:09:45,507
the list of 'elegant things,'
'distressing things,'

84
00:09:46,135 --> 00:09:49,104
or even of 'things not worth doing.'

85
00:09:49,917 --> 00:09:52,478
One day she got the idea
of drawing up a list of...

86
00:09:52,724 --> 00:09:54,690
'things that quicken the heart.'

87
00:09:55,505 --> 00:09:58,516
Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming;

88
00:09:59,031 --> 00:10:01,038
I bow to the economic miracle,

89
00:10:01,041 --> 00:10:04,594
but what I want to show you
are the neighborhood celebrations.

90
00:13:32,527 --> 00:13:33,638
He wrote me:

91
00:13:33,941 --> 00:13:37,337
coming back through the Chiba coast
I thought of Shonagon's list,

92
00:13:37,616 --> 00:13:43,269
of all those signs one has only to name
to quicken the heart, just name.

93
00:13:43,649 --> 00:13:47,317
To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant,

94
00:13:47,318 --> 00:13:50,600
and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid.

95
00:13:50,751 --> 00:13:54,857
Here to place adjectives would be so rude
as leaving price tags on purchases.

96
00:13:55,249 --> 00:13:57,735
Japanese poetry never modifies.

97
00:13:58,331 --> 00:13:59,595
There is a way of saying

98
00:13:59,656 --> 00:14:05,029
boat, rock, mist, frog, crow,
hail, heron, chrysanthemum,

99
00:14:05,150 --> 00:14:06,982
that includes them all.

100
00:14:07,290 --> 00:14:11,064
Newspapers have been filled recently
with the story of a man from Nagoya.

101
00:14:11,597 --> 00:14:15,030
The woman he loved died last year
and he drowned himself in work

102
00:14:15,076 --> 00:14:16,913
—Japanese style—like a madman.

103
00:14:16,914 --> 00:14:19,776
It seems he even made
an important discovery in electronics.

104
00:14:19,920 --> 00:14:22,894
And then in the month of May he killed himself.

105
00:14:23,010 --> 00:14:26,618
They say he could not stand
hearing the word 'Spring.'

106
00:15:00,827 --> 00:15:03,017
He described me his reunion with Tokyo:

107
00:15:03,343 --> 00:15:05,444
like a cat who has come home
from vacation in his basket

108
00:15:05,445 --> 00:15:08,584
immediately starts to inspect familiar places.

109
00:15:08,903 --> 00:15:11,328
He ran off to see if everything
was where it should be:

110
00:15:11,395 --> 00:15:14,177
the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive,

111
00:15:14,178 --> 00:15:17,879
the temple of the fox
at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store,

112
00:15:17,919 --> 00:15:20,922
which he found invaded
by little girls and rock singers.

113
00:15:20,968 --> 00:15:24,006
He was told that it was now little girls
who made and unmade stars;

114
00:15:24,094 --> 00:15:26,456
the producers shuddered before them.

115
00:15:26,692 --> 00:15:30,321
He was told that a disfigured woman
took off her mask in front of passers-by

116
00:15:30,322 --> 00:15:32,866
and scratched them
if they did not find her beautiful.

117
00:15:33,271 --> 00:15:34,816
Everything interested him.

118
00:15:35,668 --> 00:15:38,177
He who didn't give a damn
if the Dodgers won the pennant

119
00:15:38,183 --> 00:15:40,127
or about the results of the Daily Double

120
00:15:40,135 --> 00:15:44,055
asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done
in the last sumo tournament.

121
00:15:44,372 --> 00:15:47,930
He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, ...

122
00:15:47,931 --> 00:15:49,953
of the oldest mobster in Tokyo

123
00:15:49,954 --> 00:15:53,546
who appears regularly on television
to teach goodness to children.

124
00:15:54,065 --> 00:15:56,197
These simple joys he had never felt:

125
00:15:56,297 --> 00:15:59,663
of returning to
a country, a house, a family home.

126
00:15:59,894 --> 00:16:03,700
But twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.

127
00:17:07,386 --> 00:17:08,498
He wrote:

128
00:17:08,499 --> 00:17:12,799
Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains,
tied together with electric wire,

129
00:17:12,810 --> 00:17:14,574
she shows her veins.

130
00:17:15,416 --> 00:17:18,094
They say that television
makes her people illiterate;

131
00:17:18,135 --> 00:17:21,641
as for me, I've never seen
so many people reading in the streets.

132
00:17:22,307 --> 00:17:23,948
Perhaps they read only in the street,

133
00:17:23,949 --> 00:17:26,983
or perhaps they just
pretend to read—these yellow men.

134
00:17:27,189 --> 00:17:31,526
I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku.

135
00:17:32,025 --> 00:17:35,049
The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese
to invent CinemaScope

136
00:17:35,050 --> 00:17:36,848
ten centuries before the movies...

137
00:17:36,849 --> 00:17:40,345
compensates a little
for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines,

138
00:17:40,564 --> 00:17:45,574
victims of heartless story writers and
of castrating censorship.

139
00:17:46,716 --> 00:17:50,208
Sometimes they escape,
and you find them again on the walls.

140
00:17:50,577 --> 00:17:53,018
The entire city is a comic strip.

141
00:17:53,167 --> 00:17:54,879
It's Planet Manga.

142
00:17:55,628 --> 00:17:57,525
How can one fail to recognize the statuary

143
00:17:57,526 --> 00:18:00,652
that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central?

144
00:18:00,715 --> 00:18:04,370
And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down
on the comic book readers,

145
00:18:04,371 --> 00:18:08,602
pictures bigger than people,
voyeurizing the voyeurs.

146
00:18:18,088 --> 00:18:21,651
At nightfall, the megalopolis
breaks down into villages,

147
00:18:21,885 --> 00:18:24,614
with its country cemeteries
in the shadow of banks,

148
00:18:24,696 --> 00:18:26,797
with its stations and temples.

149
00:18:26,865 --> 00:18:30,837
Each district of Tokyo once again becomes
a tidy ingenuous little town,

150
00:18:30,838 --> 00:18:32,932
nestling amongst the skyscrapers.

151
00:18:42,818 --> 00:18:46,101
The small bar in Shinjuku
reminded him of that Indian flute

152
00:18:46,102 --> 00:18:49,197
whose sound can only be heard
by whomever is playing it.

153
00:18:50,341 --> 00:18:54,309
He might have cried out if it was
in a Godard film or a Shakespeare play,

154
00:18:54,319 --> 00:18:56,125
"Where should this music be?"

155
00:19:00,740 --> 00:19:03,495
Later he told me he had eaten
at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori

156
00:19:03,496 --> 00:19:07,785
where Mr. Yamada practices
the difficult art of 'action cooking.'

157
00:19:11,320 --> 00:19:14,013
He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada's gestures

158
00:19:14,014 --> 00:19:16,110
and his way of mixing the ingredients

159
00:19:16,236 --> 00:19:19,232
one could meditate usefully
on certain fundamental concepts

160
00:19:19,233 --> 00:19:22,448
common to painting, philosophy, and karate.

161
00:19:22,969 --> 00:19:27,175
He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed
in his humble way the essence of style,

162
00:19:27,349 --> 00:19:29,290
and consequently that it was up to him

163
00:19:29,291 --> 00:19:33,639
to use his invisible brush
to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words

164
00:19:33,640 --> 00:19:37,889
'the end.'

165
00:19:41,700 --> 00:19:45,435
I've spent the day in front of my TV set
—that memory box.

166
00:19:46,028 --> 00:19:48,619
I was in Nara with the sacred deers.

167
00:19:49,796 --> 00:19:53,748
I was taking a picture without knowing
that in the 15th century Basho had written:

168
00:19:54,098 --> 00:19:58,121
"The willow sees the heron's image... upside down."

169
00:20:06,144 --> 00:20:08,972
The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye,

170
00:20:08,973 --> 00:20:11,450
used to Western atrocities in this field;

171
00:20:12,083 --> 00:20:14,934
not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure.

172
00:20:15,473 --> 00:20:19,464
For one slightly hallucinatory moment
I had the impression that I spoke Japanese,

173
00:20:19,811 --> 00:20:23,711
but it was a cultural program on NHK
about Gérard de Nerval.

174
00:20:46,942 --> 00:20:48,928
8:40, Cambodia.

175
00:20:50,726 --> 00:20:52,888
From Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge:

176
00:20:53,136 --> 00:20:56,081
coincidence, or the sense of history?

177
00:20:58,177 --> 00:21:03,326
In Apocalypse Now, Brando said a few definitive
and incommunicable sentences:

178
00:21:04,160 --> 00:21:06,810
"Horror has a face and a name...

179
00:21:10,139 --> 00:21:12,110
you must make a friend of horror."

180
00:21:14,123 --> 00:21:16,638
To cast out the horror that has a name and a face

181
00:21:16,639 --> 00:21:19,079
you must give it another name and another face.

182
00:21:20,527 --> 00:21:24,154
Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty
of certain corpses.

183
00:21:24,612 --> 00:21:27,339
Sometimes one is stunned by so much cruelty.

184
00:21:27,340 --> 00:21:31,150
One seeks its sources in the Asian peoples
long familiarity with suffering,

185
00:21:31,151 --> 00:21:33,998
that requires that even pain be ornate.

186
00:21:34,299 --> 00:21:35,775
And then comes the reward:

187
00:21:35,976 --> 00:21:40,024
the monsters are laid out, Natsume Masako arises;

188
00:21:40,692 --> 00:21:44,178
absolute beauty also has a name and a face.

189
00:21:53,360 --> 00:21:57,921
But the more you watch Japanese television,
the more you feel it's watching you.

190
00:22:44,635 --> 00:22:47,337
Even television newscast bears witness to the fact

191
00:22:47,338 --> 00:22:50,532
that the magical function of the eye is at the center of all things.

192
00:22:51,138 --> 00:22:52,468
It's election time:

193
00:22:52,469 --> 00:22:55,290
the winning candidates black out
the empty eye of Daruma

194
00:22:55,492 --> 00:22:58,187
the spirit of luck—while losing candidates

195
00:22:58,188 --> 00:23:01,735
—sad but dignified—carry off their one-eyed Daruma.

196
00:23:02,422 --> 00:23:05,326
The images most difficult to figure out
are those of Europe.

197
00:23:05,382 --> 00:23:09,317
I watched the pictures of a film
whose soundtrack will be added later.

198
00:23:09,318 --> 00:23:11,415
It took me six months for Poland.

199
00:23:18,085 --> 00:23:21,300
Meanwhile, I have no difficulty with local earthquakes.

200
00:23:21,516 --> 00:23:25,333
But I must say that last night's quake
helped me greatly to grasp a problem.

201
00:23:25,820 --> 00:23:30,900
Poetry is born of insecurity:
wandering Jews, quaking Japanese;

202
00:23:31,495 --> 00:23:35,344
by living on a rug that jesting nature
is ever ready to pull out from under them

203
00:23:35,345 --> 00:23:38,581
they've got into the habit of moving
about in a world of appearances:

204
00:23:38,800 --> 00:23:41,004
fragile, fleeting, revocable,

205
00:23:41,005 --> 00:23:47,317
of trains that fly from planet to planet,
of samurai fighting in an immutable past.

206
00:23:47,318 --> 00:23:50,081
That's called 'the impermanence of things.'

207
00:24:15,883 --> 00:24:16,970
I did it all.

208
00:24:16,971 --> 00:24:20,409
All the way to the evening shows
for adults—so called.

209
00:24:20,909 --> 00:24:25,102
The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips,
but it's a coded hypocrisy.

210
00:24:25,378 --> 00:24:29,909
Censorship is not the mutilation of the show,
it is the show.

211
00:24:29,910 --> 00:24:31,499
The code is the message.

212
00:24:31,500 --> 00:24:34,143
It points to the absolute by hiding it.

213
00:24:34,584 --> 00:24:36,992
That's what religions have always done.

214
00:24:49,363 --> 00:24:50,187
That year,

215
00:24:50,188 --> 00:24:55,439
a new face appeared among the great ones
that blazon the streets of Tokyo: the Pope's.

216
00:24:55,797 --> 00:24:57,620
Treasures that had never left the Vatican

217
00:24:57,621 --> 00:25:00,781
were shown
on the seventh floor of the Sogo department store.

218
00:25:01,119 --> 00:25:02,428
He wrote me:

219
00:25:03,385 --> 00:25:07,979
curiosity of course, and the glimmer
of industrial espionage in the eye

220
00:25:08,625 --> 00:25:10,775
—I imagine them bringing out within two years time,

221
00:25:10,776 --> 00:25:14,557
a more efficient
and less expensive version of Catholicism—

222
00:25:15,130 --> 00:25:18,117
but there's also the fascination
associated with the sacred,

223
00:25:18,269 --> 00:25:20,690
even when it's someone else's.

224
00:25:57,124 --> 00:26:01,739
So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor
an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs

225
00:26:01,740 --> 00:26:05,571
such as can be seen at Josen-kai
on the island of Hokkaido?

226
00:26:06,703 --> 00:26:10,270
At first one smiles at this place
which combines a museum,

227
00:26:10,271 --> 00:26:12,341
a chapel, and a sex shop.

228
00:26:12,342 --> 00:26:17,064
As always in Japan, one admires the fact that
the walls between the realms are so thin

229
00:26:17,065 --> 00:26:21,634
that one can in the same breath contemplate a statue,
buy an inflatable doll,

230
00:26:21,635 --> 00:26:24,417
and give the goddess of fertility the small offering

231
00:26:24,418 --> 00:26:26,661
that always accompanies her displays.

232
00:26:28,267 --> 00:26:32,441
Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems
of the television incomprehensible,

233
00:26:32,463 --> 00:26:35,586
if it did not at the same time
say that a sex is visible

234
00:26:35,587 --> 00:26:38,591
only on condition of being severed from a body.

235
00:26:39,697 --> 00:26:42,667
One would like to believe in a world before the fall:

236
00:26:43,109 --> 00:26:45,454
inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism

237
00:26:45,455 --> 00:26:49,079
whose phony shadow has been imposed on it
by American occupation.

238
00:26:49,637 --> 00:26:52,599
Where people who gather
laughing around the votive fountain,

239
00:26:52,600 --> 00:26:55,311
the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture,

240
00:26:55,326 --> 00:26:58,577
share in the same cosmic innocence.

241
00:26:58,578 --> 00:27:00,140
The second part of the museum

242
00:27:00,141 --> 00:27:02,158
—with its couples of stuffed animals—

243
00:27:02,159 --> 00:27:05,660
would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it.

244
00:27:05,925 --> 00:27:07,013
Not so sure...

245
00:27:07,132 --> 00:27:10,322
animal innocence may be a trick for
getting around censorship,

246
00:27:10,338 --> 00:27:14,069
but perhaps also the mirror of
an impossible reconciliation.

247
00:27:14,227 --> 00:27:19,462
And even without original sin
this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost.

248
00:27:19,828 --> 00:27:23,119
In the glossy splendour of
the gentle animals of Josen-kai

249
00:27:23,511 --> 00:27:26,257
I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society,

250
00:27:26,446 --> 00:27:29,144
the rift that separates men from women.

251
00:27:29,943 --> 00:27:33,019
In life it seems to show itself in two ways only:

252
00:27:33,020 --> 00:27:38,118
violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy
—resembling Sei Shonagon's—

253
00:27:38,119 --> 00:27:42,880
which the Japanese express in a single
untranslatable word.

254
00:27:43,104 --> 00:27:45,991
So this bringing down of man
to the level of the beasts

255
00:27:45,992 --> 00:27:48,616
—against which the fathers of the church invade—

256
00:27:48,841 --> 00:27:52,892
becomes here the challenge of the beasts
to the poignancy of things,

257
00:27:53,005 --> 00:27:57,755
to a melancholy whose color I can give you
by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi:

258
00:27:57,970 --> 00:28:00,648
"Who said that time heals all wounds?

259
00:28:00,649 --> 00:28:04,982
It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds.

260
00:28:05,266 --> 00:28:09,354
With time, the hurt of separation
loses its real limits.

261
00:28:09,678 --> 00:28:13,138
With time, the desired body will soon disappear,

262
00:28:13,139 --> 00:28:17,169
and if the desiring body has already ceased
to exist for the other,

263
00:28:17,793 --> 00:28:21,977
then what remains is a wound... disembodied."

264
00:28:29,135 --> 00:28:31,007
He wrote me that the Japanese secret

265
00:28:31,008 --> 00:28:33,943
—what Lévi-Strauss had called
the poignancy of things—

266
00:28:34,068 --> 00:28:36,414
implied the faculty of communion with things,

267
00:28:36,415 --> 00:28:39,469
of entering into them,
of being them for a moment.

268
00:28:39,836 --> 00:28:42,611
It was normal that in their turn
they should be like us:

269
00:28:42,612 --> 00:28:44,920
perishable and immortal.

270
00:28:47,463 --> 00:28:48,567
He wrote me:

271
00:28:49,254 --> 00:28:54,243
animism is a familiar notion in Africa,
it is less often applied in Japan.

272
00:28:54,244 --> 00:28:57,111
What then shall we call this diffuse belief,

273
00:28:57,112 --> 00:29:01,397
according to which every fragment of creation
has its invisible counterpart?

274
00:29:01,940 --> 00:29:04,227
When they build a factory or a skyscraper,

275
00:29:04,228 --> 00:29:07,751
they begin with a ceremony
to appease the god who owns the land.

276
00:29:07,752 --> 00:29:13,457
There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses,
and even for rusty needles.

277
00:29:13,855 --> 00:29:18,909
There's one on the 25th of September
for the repose of the soul of broken dolls.

278
00:29:18,910 --> 00:29:24,303
The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon
—the goddess of compassion—

279
00:29:24,338 --> 00:29:26,152
and are burned in public.

280
00:29:58,974 --> 00:30:00,456
I look to the participants.

281
00:30:00,457 --> 00:30:03,713
I think the people who saw off the kamikaze pilots
had the same...

282
00:30:03,714 --> 00:30:05,741
look on their faces.

283
00:30:37,089 --> 00:30:38,985
He wrote me that the pictures of Guinea-Bissau

284
00:30:38,986 --> 00:30:42,266
ought to be accompanied by
music from the Cape Verde islands.

285
00:30:42,765 --> 00:30:47,414
That would be our contribution to the unity
dreamed of by Amilcar Cabral.

286
00:30:47,857 --> 00:30:52,741
Why should so small a country—and one so poor—
interest the world?

287
00:30:53,036 --> 00:30:55,600
They did what they could, they freed themselves,

288
00:30:55,601 --> 00:30:57,156
they chased out the Portuguese.

289
00:30:57,217 --> 00:30:59,784
They traumatized the Portuguese army
to such an extent

290
00:30:59,785 --> 00:31:02,537
that it gave rise to a movement that
overthrew the dictatorship,

291
00:31:02,538 --> 00:31:06,411
and led one for a moment to believe
in a new revolution in Europe.

292
00:31:07,147 --> 00:31:08,927
Who remembers all that?

293
00:31:09,169 --> 00:31:11,828
History throws its empty bottles out the window.

294
00:31:13,759 --> 00:31:16,188
This morning I was on the dock at Pidjiguity,

295
00:31:16,279 --> 00:31:18,669
where everything began in 1959,

296
00:31:18,670 --> 00:31:21,593
when the first victims of the struggle were killed.

297
00:31:22,062 --> 00:31:25,415
It may be as difficult to recognize Africa
in this leaden fog

298
00:31:25,416 --> 00:31:30,583
as it is to recognize struggle in the rather dull activity
of tropical longshoremen.

299
00:31:31,951 --> 00:31:34,226
Rumor has it that every third world leader

300
00:31:34,227 --> 00:31:36,837
coined the same phrase
the morning after independence:

301
00:31:37,104 --> 00:31:39,702
"Now the real problems start."

302
00:31:40,172 --> 00:31:44,078
Cabral never got a chance to say it:
he was assassinated first.

303
00:31:44,890 --> 00:31:48,668
But the problems started, and went on,
and are still going on.

304
00:31:48,865 --> 00:31:52,465
Rather unexciting problems
for revolutionary romanticism:

305
00:31:52,603 --> 00:31:55,345
to work, to produce, to distribute,

306
00:31:55,371 --> 00:31:59,616
to overcome postwar exhaustion,
temptations of power and privilege.

307
00:32:00,702 --> 00:32:01,431
Ah well...

308
00:32:01,432 --> 00:32:06,470
after all, history only tastes bitter
to those who expected it to be sugar coated.

309
00:32:12,225 --> 00:32:17,289
My personal problem is more specific:
how to film the ladies of Bissau?

310
00:32:17,541 --> 00:32:21,202
Apparently, the magical function of the eye
was working against me there.

311
00:32:21,966 --> 00:32:24,634
It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde

312
00:32:24,635 --> 00:32:27,781
that I could stare at them again with equality.

313
00:32:28,431 --> 00:32:29,915
I see her,

314
00:32:31,452 --> 00:32:33,068
she saw me,

315
00:32:34,413 --> 00:32:36,334
she knows that I see her,

316
00:32:39,175 --> 00:32:40,585
she drops me her glance,

317
00:32:40,586 --> 00:32:44,831
but just at an angle where it is still possible to act
as though it was not addressed to me,

318
00:32:44,985 --> 00:32:47,775
and at the end the real glance,
straightforward,

319
00:32:47,872 --> 00:32:51,966
that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second,
the length of a film frame.

320
00:32:59,808 --> 00:33:02,804
All women have a built-in
grain of indestructibility.

321
00:33:02,805 --> 00:33:07,074
And men's task has always been to make them
realize it as late as possible.

322
00:33:07,188 --> 00:33:10,239
African men are just as good at this task as others.

323
00:33:10,240 --> 00:33:14,795
But after a close look at African women,
I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men.

324
00:34:59,856 --> 00:35:02,367
He told me the story of the dog Hachiko.

325
00:35:02,704 --> 00:35:05,643
A dog waited every day
for his master at the station.

326
00:35:05,963 --> 00:35:08,779
The master died, and the dog didn't know it,

327
00:35:08,780 --> 00:35:11,175
and he continued to wait all his life.

328
00:35:11,486 --> 00:35:13,919
People were moved and brought him food.

329
00:35:14,487 --> 00:35:17,327
After his death a statue
was erected in his honor,

330
00:35:17,328 --> 00:35:20,156
in front of which sushi and rice cakes
are still placed

331
00:35:20,157 --> 00:35:23,534
so that the faithful soul of Hachiko
will never go hungry.

332
00:35:27,971 --> 00:35:32,017
Tokyo is full of these tiny legends,
and of mediating animals.

333
00:35:32,284 --> 00:35:34,886
The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard on the frontiers

334
00:35:34,887 --> 00:35:37,344
of what was once
the empire of Mr. Okada

335
00:35:37,345 --> 00:35:39,477
—a great collector of French paintings,

336
00:35:39,944 --> 00:35:41,905
the man who hired the Château of Versailles

337
00:35:41,906 --> 00:35:45,578
to celebrate the hundredth anniversary
of his department stores.

338
00:35:46,700 --> 00:35:50,811
In the computer section I've seen young Japanese
exercising their brain muscles like...

339
00:35:50,812 --> 00:35:53,185
the young Athenians at the Palaistra.

340
00:35:53,186 --> 00:35:54,859
They have a war to win.

341
00:35:54,908 --> 00:35:58,554
The history books of the future will perhaps
place the battle of integrated circuits

342
00:35:58,555 --> 00:36:01,130
at the same level as Salamis and Agincourt,

343
00:36:01,269 --> 00:36:06,358
but willing to honor the unfortunate adversary by leaving other fields to him:

344
00:36:06,558 --> 00:36:11,138
men's fashions this season are placed under the sign of John Kennedy.

345
00:36:45,483 --> 00:36:48,774
Like an old votive turtle
stationed in the corner of a field,

346
00:36:48,814 --> 00:36:50,676
every day he saw Mr. Akao—

347
00:36:50,677 --> 00:36:53,356
—the president of the Japanese Patriotic Party—

348
00:36:53,472 --> 00:36:55,861
trumpeting from the heights of his rolling balcony

349
00:36:55,862 --> 00:36:58,681
against the international communist plot.

350
00:37:01,757 --> 00:37:02,722
He wrote me:

351
00:37:02,723 --> 00:37:05,924
the automobiles of the extreme right
with their flags and megaphones

352
00:37:05,925 --> 00:37:07,862
are part of Tokyo's landscape

353
00:37:08,080 --> 00:37:10,164
—Mr. Akao is their focal point.

354
00:37:11,061 --> 00:37:14,207
I think he'll have his statue like the dog Hachiko,

355
00:37:14,208 --> 00:37:18,496
at this crossroads from which he departs
only to go and prophesy on the battlefields.

356
00:37:21,344 --> 00:37:23,275
He was at Narita in the sixties.

357
00:37:24,153 --> 00:37:27,171
Peasants fighting against the building
of an airport on their land,

358
00:37:27,351 --> 00:37:31,253
and Mr. Akao denouncing the hand of Moscow
behind everything that moved.

359
00:37:33,645 --> 00:37:36,543
Yurakucho is the political space of Tokyo.

360
00:37:36,888 --> 00:37:40,442
Once upon a time I saw bonzes
pray for peace in Vietnam there.

361
00:37:40,513 --> 00:37:42,529
Today young right-wing activists

362
00:37:42,530 --> 00:37:45,732
protest against the annexation
of the Northern Islands by the Russians.

363
00:37:46,180 --> 00:37:48,744
Sometimes they are answered that
the commercial relations of Japan

364
00:37:48,745 --> 00:37:50,729
with the abominable occupier of the North

365
00:37:50,730 --> 00:37:52,373
are a thousand times better

366
00:37:52,374 --> 00:37:56,634
than with the American ally
who is always whining about economic aggression.

367
00:37:57,136 --> 00:37:59,362
Ah, nothing is simple.

368
00:38:06,756 --> 00:38:09,458
On the other sidewalk the Left has the floor.

369
00:38:09,813 --> 00:38:13,352
The Korean Catholic opposition leader Kim Dae Jung

370
00:38:13,423 --> 00:38:16,670
—kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean gestapo—

371
00:38:16,801 --> 00:38:18,916
is threatened with the death sentence.

372
00:38:19,657 --> 00:38:21,569
A group has begun a hunger strike.

373
00:38:21,784 --> 00:38:25,297
Some very young militants are trying
to gather signatures in his support.

374
00:39:05,272 --> 00:39:08,617
I went back to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the struggle.

375
00:39:08,814 --> 00:39:10,563
The demo was unreal.

376
00:39:10,839 --> 00:39:12,955
I had the impression of acting in Brigadoon,

377
00:39:12,985 --> 00:39:16,024
of waking up ten years later
in the midst of the same players,

378
00:39:16,025 --> 00:39:17,909
with the same blue lobsters of police,

379
00:39:17,910 --> 00:39:22,263
the same helmeted adolescents, the same banners
and the same slogan:

380
00:39:22,264 --> 00:39:23,960
"Down with the airport."

381
00:39:24,259 --> 00:39:28,406
Only one thing has been added:
the airport precisely.

382
00:39:28,641 --> 00:39:31,407
But with its single runway
and the barbed wire that chokes it,

383
00:39:31,408 --> 00:39:33,515
it looks more besieged than victorious.

384
00:39:48,157 --> 00:39:51,094
My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution:

385
00:39:51,772 --> 00:39:56,397
if the images of the present don't change,
then change the images of the past.

386
00:39:58,186 --> 00:40:01,702
He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer:

387
00:40:01,979 --> 00:40:05,339
pictures that are less deceptive he says
—with the conviction of a fanatic—

388
00:40:05,340 --> 00:40:07,306
than those you see on television.

389
00:40:07,307 --> 00:40:09,817
At least they proclaim themselves
to be what they are:

390
00:40:09,818 --> 00:40:10,892
images,

391
00:40:10,893 --> 00:40:15,329
not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.

392
00:40:17,826 --> 00:40:23,530
Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.

393
00:41:09,760 --> 00:41:12,699
What Narita brought back to me,
like a shattered hologram,

394
00:41:12,700 --> 00:41:15,678
was an intact fragment of
the generation of the sixties.

395
00:41:16,073 --> 00:41:20,304
If to love without illusions is still to love,
I can say that I loved it.

396
00:41:20,662 --> 00:41:23,198
It was a generation
that often exasperated me,

397
00:41:23,199 --> 00:41:25,991
for I didn't share its utopia
of uniting in a common struggle

398
00:41:25,992 --> 00:41:30,327
those who revolt against poverty
and those who revolt against wealth.

399
00:41:30,365 --> 00:41:34,682
But it screamed out that gut reaction
that better adjusted voices no longer knew how,

400
00:41:34,683 --> 00:41:36,936
or no longer dared to utter.

401
00:41:41,048 --> 00:41:44,370
I met peasants there who had come
to know themselves through the struggle.

402
00:41:44,733 --> 00:41:46,859
Concretely it had failed.

403
00:41:46,860 --> 00:41:50,416
At the same time, all they had won
in their understanding of the world

404
00:41:50,417 --> 00:41:52,713
could have been won only through the struggle.

405
00:41:55,030 --> 00:41:56,221
As for the students,

406
00:41:56,222 --> 00:41:59,962
some massacred each other in the mountains
in the name of revolutionary purity,

407
00:42:00,088 --> 00:42:03,357
while others had studied capitalism
so thoroughly to fight it

408
00:42:03,358 --> 00:42:06,402
that they now provide it with its best executives.

409
00:42:06,563 --> 00:42:09,921
Like everywhere else the movement
had its postures and its careerists,

410
00:42:09,922 --> 00:42:13,950
including, and there are some,
those who made a career of martyrdom.

411
00:42:14,127 --> 00:42:17,617
But it carried with it all those who said,
like Ché Guevara, that...

412
00:42:17,618 --> 00:42:22,159
they trembled with indignation
every time an injustice is committed in the world".

413
00:42:22,750 --> 00:42:25,843
They wanted to give a political meaning
to their generosity,

414
00:42:25,947 --> 00:42:28,643
and their generosity has outlasted their politics.

415
00:42:29,017 --> 00:42:33,015
That's why I will never allow it to be said
that youth is wasted on the young.

416
00:42:48,687 --> 00:42:51,270
The youth who get together
every weekend at Shinjuku

417
00:42:51,271 --> 00:42:54,622
obviously know that they are not
on a launching pad toward real life;

418
00:42:54,640 --> 00:42:58,732
but they are life, to be eaten
on the spot like fresh doughnuts.

419
00:42:58,833 --> 00:43:00,745
It's a very simple secret.

420
00:43:00,771 --> 00:43:04,153
The old try to hide it,
and not all the young know it.

421
00:43:04,402 --> 00:43:06,309
The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend

422
00:43:06,310 --> 00:43:09,316
from the thirteenth floor of a building
after having tied her hands,

423
00:43:09,473 --> 00:43:13,308
because she'd spoken badly of their class team,
hadn't discovered it yet.

424
00:43:13,703 --> 00:43:16,696
Parents who demand an increase
in the number of special telephone lines

425
00:43:16,697 --> 00:43:18,956
devoted to the prevention of children's suicides

426
00:43:18,957 --> 00:43:22,326
find out a little late
that they have kept it all too well.

427
00:43:22,442 --> 00:43:25,893
Rock is an international language
for spreading the secret.

428
00:43:26,358 --> 00:43:29,583
Another is peculiar to Tokyo.

429
00:43:34,207 --> 00:43:37,338
For the takenoko,
twenty is the age of retirement.

430
00:43:38,012 --> 00:43:39,823
They are baby Martians.

431
00:43:39,843 --> 00:43:43,020
I go to see them dance
every Sunday in the park at Yoyogi.

432
00:43:43,268 --> 00:43:47,260
They want people to look at them,
but they don't seem to notice that people do.

433
00:43:47,462 --> 00:43:49,743
They live in a parallel time sphere:

434
00:43:49,744 --> 00:43:53,866
a kind of invisible aquarium wall separates them
from the crowd they attract,

435
00:43:53,867 --> 00:43:58,446
and I can spend a whole afternoon
contemplating the little takenoko girl who is learning

436
00:43:58,447 --> 00:44:01,798
—no doubt for the first time—
the customs of her planet.

437
00:44:14,987 --> 00:44:19,546
Beyond that, they wear dog tags,
they obey a whistle, the Mafia rackets them,

438
00:44:19,547 --> 00:44:22,244
and with the exception of
a single group made up of girls,

439
00:44:22,245 --> 00:44:24,485
it's always a boy who commands.

440
00:45:18,121 --> 00:45:21,871
One day he writes to me:
description of a dream.

441
00:45:23,177 --> 00:45:27,064
More and more my dreams find their settings
in the department stores of Tokyo,

442
00:45:27,498 --> 00:45:31,665
the subterranean tunnels that
extend them and run parallel to the city.

443
00:45:31,855 --> 00:45:35,022
A face appears, disappears.
A trace is found, is lost.

444
00:45:35,478 --> 00:45:37,599
All the folklore of dreams
is so much in its place

445
00:45:37,600 --> 00:45:39,106
that the next day when I am awake

446
00:45:39,481 --> 00:45:42,454
I realize that I continue
to seek in the basement labyrinth

447
00:45:42,454 --> 00:45:44,533
the presence concealed the night before.

448
00:45:46,449 --> 00:45:48,904
I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine,

449
00:45:48,905 --> 00:45:51,030
or if they are part of a totality,

450
00:45:51,135 --> 00:45:55,299
of a gigantic collective dream of which
the entire city may be the projection.

451
00:45:55,890 --> 00:45:58,617
It might suffice to pick up
any one of the telephones

452
00:45:58,617 --> 00:46:02,679
that are lying around to hear a familiar voice,
or the beating of a heart,

453
00:46:02,680 --> 00:46:04,688
Sei Shonagon's for example.

454
00:46:05,038 --> 00:46:07,009
All the galleries lead to stations;

455
00:46:07,098 --> 00:46:10,920
the same companies own the stores
and the railroads that bear their name.

456
00:46:10,921 --> 00:46:14,568
Keio, Odakyu—all those names of ports.

457
00:46:14,700 --> 00:46:18,987
The train inhabited by sleeping people
puts together all the fragments of dreams,

458
00:46:18,988 --> 00:46:22,138
makes a single film of them—the ultimate film.

459
00:46:22,746 --> 00:46:26,467
The tickets from the automatic dispenser
grant admission to the show.

460
00:51:18,627 --> 00:51:21,899
He told me about the January light
on the station stairways.

461
00:51:22,101 --> 00:51:25,522
He told me that this city ought to be deciphered
like a musical score;

462
00:51:25,871 --> 00:51:30,046
one could get lost in the great orchestral masses
and the accumulation of details.

463
00:51:30,771 --> 00:51:36,081
And that created the cheapest image of Tokyo:
overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman.

464
00:51:36,816 --> 00:51:39,235
He thought he saw more subtle cycles there:

465
00:51:39,236 --> 00:51:42,167
rhythms, clusters of faces caught sight of in passing

466
00:51:42,222 --> 00:51:44,980
—as different and precise as groups of instruments.

467
00:51:45,915 --> 00:51:49,412
Sometimes the musical comparison
coincided with plain reality;

468
00:51:50,247 --> 00:51:55,407
the Sony stairway in the Ginza
was itself an instrument, each step a note.

469
00:51:56,417 --> 00:52:00,242
All of it fit together like the voices
of a somewhat complicated fugue,

470
00:52:00,277 --> 00:52:03,735
but it was enough to take hold of one of them
and hang on to it.

471
00:52:04,238 --> 00:52:06,196
The television screens for example;

472
00:52:06,427 --> 00:52:11,206
all by themselves they created an itinerary
that sometimes wound up in unexpected curves.

473
00:52:11,811 --> 00:52:16,431
It was sumo season, and the fans
who came to watch the fights
in the very chic showrooms on the Ginza

474
00:52:16,432 --> 00:52:18,720
were the poorest of the Tokyo poors.

475
00:52:18,815 --> 00:52:21,258
So poor that they didn't even have a TV set.

476
00:52:21,950 --> 00:52:27,054
He saw them come, the dead souls of Namida-bashi
he had drunk saké with one sunny dawn

477
00:52:27,312 --> 00:52:29,354
—how many seasons ago was that now?

478
00:53:57,021 --> 00:53:58,347
He wrote me:

479
00:53:58,382 --> 00:54:01,237
even in the stalls where
they sell electronic spare parts

480
00:54:01,237 --> 00:54:03,359
—that some hipsters use for jewelry—

481
00:54:03,361 --> 00:54:06,789
there is in the score that is Tokyo
a particular staff,

482
00:54:06,789 --> 00:54:10,164
whose rarity in Europe condemns me
to a real acoustic exile.

483
00:54:10,717 --> 00:54:12,636
I mean the music of video games.

484
00:54:13,045 --> 00:54:17,282
They are fitted into tables.
You can drink, you can lunch, and go on playing.

485
00:54:17,623 --> 00:54:19,150
They open onto the street.

486
00:54:19,326 --> 00:54:21,587
By listening to them you can play from memory.

487
00:54:48,590 --> 00:54:51,033
I saw these games born in Japan

488
00:54:51,223 --> 00:54:55,900
I later met up with them again all over the world,
but one detail was different.

489
00:54:55,935 --> 00:54:57,879
At the beginning the game was familiar:

490
00:54:57,914 --> 00:55:00,929
a kind of anti-ecological beating
where the idea was to kill off

491
00:55:00,929 --> 00:55:02,769
—as soon as they showed
the white of their eyes—

492
00:55:03,133 --> 00:55:07,162
creatures that were either prairie dogs
or baby seals, I can't be sure which.

493
00:55:07,197 --> 00:55:09,412
Now here's the Japanese variation.

494
00:55:09,447 --> 00:55:14,452
Instead of the critters, there's some vaguely human heads
identified by a label:

495
00:55:15,350 --> 00:55:17,431
at the top the chairman of the board,

496
00:55:17,466 --> 00:55:20,312
in front of him the vice president and the directors,

497
00:55:20,347 --> 00:55:23,853
in the front row the section heads
and the personnel manager.

498
00:55:24,228 --> 00:55:28,231
The guy I filmed—who was smashing up
the hierarchy with an enviable energy—

499
00:55:28,266 --> 00:55:34,392
confided in me that for him the game was not at all allegorical,
that he was thinking very precisely of his superiors.

500
00:55:34,689 --> 00:55:37,893
No doubt that's why the puppet
representing the personnel manager

501
00:55:37,893 --> 00:55:40,956
has been clubbed so often and so hard
that it's out of commission,

502
00:55:41,169 --> 00:55:44,209
and why it had to be replaced again by a baby seal.

503
00:55:49,826 --> 00:55:53,565
Hayao Yamaneko invents
video games with his machine.

504
00:55:53,809 --> 00:55:58,901
To please me he puts in my best beloved animals:
the cat and the owl.

505
00:56:06,959 --> 00:56:12,897
He claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal
with sentiment, memory, and imagination.

506
00:56:13,113 --> 00:56:18,118
Mizoguchi's Arsène Lupin for example,
or the no less imaginary burakumin.

507
00:56:18,153 --> 00:56:22,278
How can one claim to show a category
of Japanese who do not exist?

508
00:56:22,370 --> 00:56:23,678
Yes they're there;

509
00:56:23,811 --> 00:56:28,510
I saw them in Osaka hiring themselves
out by the day, sleeping on the ground.

510
00:56:28,679 --> 00:56:32,777
Ever since the middle ages they've been doomed
to grubby and back-breaking jobs.

511
00:56:32,812 --> 00:56:36,597
But since the Meiji era,
officially nothing sets them apart,

512
00:56:36,597 --> 00:56:41,414
and their real name—eta—is a taboo word,
not to be pronounced.

513
00:56:41,898 --> 00:56:43,436
They are non-persons.

514
00:56:43,436 --> 00:56:47,782
How can they be shown,
except as non-images?

515
00:56:51,898 --> 00:56:56,327
Video games are the first stage
in a plan for machines to help the human race,

516
00:56:56,689 --> 00:56:59,591
the only plan that offers a future for intelligence.

517
00:57:00,120 --> 00:57:04,984
For the moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time
is contained in the Pac-Man.

518
00:57:05,181 --> 00:57:10,346
I didn't know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him
that he was going to conquer the world.

519
00:57:10,405 --> 00:57:14,309
Perhaps because he is the most perfect graphic metaphor
of man's fate.

520
00:57:14,606 --> 00:57:19,413
He puts into true perspective the balance of power
between the individual and the environment.

521
00:57:19,462 --> 00:57:24,694
And he tells us soberly that though
there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks,

522
00:57:24,729 --> 00:57:26,682
it always comes a cropper.

523
00:58:10,164 --> 00:58:14,565
He was pleased that the same chrysanthemums appeared
in funerals for men and for animals.

524
00:58:15,138 --> 00:58:20,401
He described to me the ceremony held at the zoo in Ueno
in memory of animals that had died during the year.

525
00:58:20,436 --> 00:58:25,395
For two years in a row this day of mourning
has had a pall cast over it by the death of a panda,

526
00:58:25,395 --> 00:58:30,698
more irreparable—according to the newspapers—
than the death of the prime minister that took place at the same time.

527
00:58:30,745 --> 00:58:34,571
Last year people really cried.
Now they seem to be getting used to it,

528
00:58:34,606 --> 00:58:39,514
accepting that each year death takes a panda
as dragons do young girls in fairy tales.

529
00:58:40,561 --> 00:58:41,982
I've heard this sentence:

530
00:58:42,218 --> 00:58:47,820
"The partition that separates life from death
does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner."

531
00:58:49,694 --> 00:58:54,020
What I have read most often in the eyes
of people about to die is surprise.

532
00:58:54,370 --> 00:58:58,263
What I read right now
in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity,

533
00:58:58,778 --> 00:59:04,747
as if they were trying
—in order to understand the death of an animal—
to stare through the partition.

534
01:00:25,535 --> 01:00:30,574
I have returned from a country where death
is not a partition to cross through but a road to follow.

535
01:00:30,891 --> 01:00:35,701
The great ancestor of the Bijagos archipelago
has described for us the itinerary of the dead

536
01:00:35,736 --> 01:00:39,530
and how they move from island to island
according to a rigorous protocol

537
01:00:39,530 --> 01:00:41,523
until they come to the last beach

538
01:00:41,583 --> 01:00:44,538
where they wait for the ship
that will take them to the other world.

539
01:00:44,938 --> 01:00:50,182
If by accident one should meet them,
it is above all imperative not to recognize them.

540
01:00:52,852 --> 01:00:55,416
The Bijagos is a part of Guinea Bissau.

541
01:00:55,904 --> 01:01:00,553
In an old film clip, Amilcar Cabral waves
a gesture of good-bye to the shore;

542
01:01:00,714 --> 01:01:02,708
he's right, he'll never see it again.

543
01:01:03,115 --> 01:01:08,528
Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later
on the canoe that was bringing us back.

544
01:01:09,255 --> 01:01:13,076
Guinea has by that time
become a nation and Luis is its president.

545
01:01:13,324 --> 01:01:15,977
All those who remember the war remember him.

546
01:01:16,208 --> 01:01:21,418
He is the half-brother of Amilcar, born as he was
of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdean blood,

547
01:01:21,453 --> 01:01:25,518
and like him a founding member
of an unusual party, the PAIGC,

548
01:01:25,553 --> 01:01:29,447
which by uniting the two colonized countries
in a single movement of struggle

549
01:01:29,447 --> 01:01:32,934
wishes to be the forerunner
of a federation of the two states.

550
01:01:33,170 --> 01:01:38,275
I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters,
who had fought in conditions so inhuman

551
01:01:38,310 --> 01:01:42,528
that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers
for having to bear what they themselves suffered.

552
01:01:42,624 --> 01:01:44,064
That I heard.

553
01:01:44,099 --> 01:01:47,260
And many more things that make one ashamed
for having used lightly

554
01:01:47,295 --> 01:01:52,639
—even if inadvertently—the word guerrilla
to describe a certain breed of film-making.

555
01:01:52,674 --> 01:01:58,456
A word that at the time was linked to many theoretical debates
and also to bloody defeats on the ground.

556
01:01:58,491 --> 01:02:02,544
Amilcar Cabral was the only one
to lead a victorious guerrilla war,

557
01:02:02,579 --> 01:02:05,332
and not only in terms of military conquests.

558
01:02:05,367 --> 01:02:08,620
He knew his people,
he had studied them for a long time,

559
01:02:08,655 --> 01:02:14,064
and he wanted every liberated region
to be also the precursor of a different kind of society.

560
01:02:14,099 --> 01:02:17,623
The socialist countries send weapons to arm the fighters.

561
01:02:17,658 --> 01:02:20,819
The social democracies fill the People's Stores.

562
01:02:20,854 --> 01:02:25,379
May the extreme left forgive history
but if the guerrillas are like fish in water

563
01:02:25,414 --> 01:02:27,677
it's a bit thanks to Sweden.

564
01:02:28,137 --> 01:02:32,180
Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguities,
he knew the traps.

565
01:02:32,257 --> 01:02:38,926
He wrote: "It's as though we were at the edge of
a great river full of waves and storms,

566
01:02:38,961 --> 01:02:41,742
with people who are trying to cross it and drown,

567
01:02:41,742 --> 01:02:46,598
but they have no other way out,
they must get to the other side."

568
01:02:52,558 --> 01:02:57,734
And now, the scene moves to Cassaque:
the seventeenth of February, 1980.

569
01:02:58,102 --> 01:03:01,636
But to understand it properly
one must move forward in time.

570
01:03:02,335 --> 01:03:05,295
In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison,

571
01:03:05,330 --> 01:03:10,164
and the weeping man he has just decorated,
major Nino, will have taken power.

572
01:03:10,199 --> 01:03:14,071
The party will have split, Guineans
and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other

573
01:03:14,071 --> 01:03:16,650
will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy.

574
01:03:16,664 --> 01:03:23,041
We will learn that behind this ceremony of promotions
which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the brotherhood of the struggle,

575
01:03:23,076 --> 01:03:25,439
there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness,

576
01:03:25,474 --> 01:03:28,594
and that Nino's tears did not express
an ex-warrior's emotion,

577
01:03:28,704 --> 01:03:33,540
but the wounded pride of a hero who felt
he had not been raised high enough above the others.

578
01:03:34,141 --> 01:03:36,705
And beneath each of these faces
a memory.

579
01:03:36,740 --> 01:03:40,889
And in place of what we were told had been forged
into a collective memory,

580
01:03:40,924 --> 01:03:46,237
a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration
in the great wound of history.

581
01:03:46,435 --> 01:03:50,606
In Portugal—raised up
in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau—

582
01:03:50,641 --> 01:03:54,732
Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life
against the dictatorship wrote:

583
01:03:54,767 --> 01:03:57,774
"Every protagonist represents only himself;

584
01:03:57,809 --> 01:04:04,221
in place of a change in the social setting
he seeks simply in the revolutionary act
the sublimation of his own image."

585
01:04:05,738 --> 01:04:07,839
That's the way the breakers recede.

586
01:04:08,239 --> 01:04:12,146
And so predictably that one has to believe
in a kind of amnesia of the future

587
01:04:12,181 --> 01:04:16,287
that history distributes through mercy
or calculation to those whom it recruits:

588
01:04:17,025 --> 01:04:19,816
Amilcar murdered by members of his own party,

589
01:04:20,033 --> 01:04:23,340
the liberated areas fallen
under the yoke of bloody petty tyrants

590
01:04:23,440 --> 01:04:29,350
liquidated in their turn by a central power
to whose stability everyone paid homage until the military coup.

591
01:04:29,863 --> 01:04:31,339
That's how history advances,

592
01:04:31,439 --> 01:04:34,895
plugging its memory as one plugs one's ears.

593
01:04:34,930 --> 01:04:39,607
Luis exiled to Cuba,
Nino discovering in his turn plots woven against him,

594
01:04:39,628 --> 01:04:43,148
can be cited reciprocally
to appear before the bar of history.

595
01:04:43,295 --> 01:04:46,047
She doesn't care, she understands nothing,

596
01:04:46,051 --> 01:04:47,852
she has only one friend,

597
01:04:48,218 --> 01:04:51,264
the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse: horror.

598
01:04:51,375 --> 01:04:53,210
That has a name and a face.

599
01:04:57,879 --> 01:05:02,165
I'm writing you all this from another world,
a world of appearances.

600
01:05:02,716 --> 01:05:05,429
In a way the two worlds
communicate with each other.

601
01:05:05,464 --> 01:05:09,414
Memory is to one what history is to the other:
an impossibility.

602
01:05:09,763 --> 01:05:13,363
Legends are born out of the need
to decipher the indecipherable.

603
01:05:13,906 --> 01:05:17,071
Memories must make do with their delirium,
with their drift.

604
01:05:17,470 --> 01:05:22,281
A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film
blocked before the furnace of the projector.

605
01:05:22,801 --> 01:05:25,559
Madness protects, as fever does.

606
01:05:25,997 --> 01:05:29,539
I envy Hayao in his 'zone,'
he plays with the signs of his memory.

607
01:05:29,539 --> 01:05:33,775
He pins them down and decorates them like insects
that would have flown beyond time,

608
01:05:33,775 --> 01:05:39,189
and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time:
the only eternity we have left.

609
01:05:42,230 --> 01:05:43,447
I look at his machines.

610
01:05:43,933 --> 01:05:47,318
I think of a world where each memory
could create its own legend.

611
01:06:52,458 --> 01:06:58,104
He wrote me that only one film had been
capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory:

612
01:06:58,124 --> 01:07:00,106
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

613
01:07:00,410 --> 01:07:06,067
In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering
a field ever wider as it moved away,

614
01:07:06,480 --> 01:07:11,426
a cyclone whose present moment contains,
motionless, the eye.

615
01:07:12,749 --> 01:07:16,500
In San Francisco he had made his pilgrimage
to all the film's locations:

616
01:07:16,826 --> 01:07:21,295
the florist Podesta Baldocchi,
where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak;

617
01:07:21,296 --> 01:07:23,658
he the hunter, she the prey.

618
01:07:23,852 --> 01:07:25,814
Or was it the other way around?

619
01:07:26,931 --> 01:07:28,788
The tiles hadn't changed.

620
01:07:30,997 --> 01:07:33,206
He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco

621
01:07:33,241 --> 01:07:36,913
where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty,
follows Kim Novak, Madeline.

622
01:07:36,915 --> 01:07:40,837
It seems to be a question of trailing,
of enigma, of murder,

623
01:07:40,837 --> 01:07:45,854
but in truth it's a question of power and freedom,
of melancholy and dazzlement,

624
01:07:45,889 --> 01:07:48,907
so carefully coded within the spiral
that you could miss it,

625
01:07:48,940 --> 01:07:54,610
and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space
in reality stands for the vertigo of time.

626
01:07:59,167 --> 01:08:02,757
He had followed all the trails,
even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores,

627
01:08:02,792 --> 01:08:06,492
where Madeline came to pray at
the grave of a woman long since dead,

628
01:08:06,492 --> 01:08:08,270
whom she should not have known.

629
01:08:09,876 --> 01:08:14,190
He followed Madeline—as Scotty had done—
to the Museum at the Legion of Honor,

630
01:08:14,190 --> 01:08:16,852
before the portrait of a dead woman
she should not have known.

631
01:08:16,887 --> 01:08:20,982
And on the portrait, as in Madeline's hair,
the spiral of time.

632
01:08:28,844 --> 01:08:32,576
The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared
had disappeared itself;

633
01:08:32,862 --> 01:08:36,532
concrete had replaced it,
at the corner of Eddy and Gough.

634
01:08:37,583 --> 01:08:40,479
On the other hand,
the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods.

635
01:08:41,105 --> 01:08:47,505
On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines
that measured the age of the tree and said,

636
01:08:47,723 --> 01:08:50,746
"Here I was born... and here I died."

637
01:08:51,422 --> 01:08:54,254
He remembered another film
in which this passage was quoted.

638
01:08:54,489 --> 01:08:57,444
The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris,

639
01:08:57,479 --> 01:09:01,905
and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree,
outside of time.

640
01:09:04,458 --> 01:09:09,292
The painted horse at San Juan Bautista,
his eye that looked like Madeline's:

641
01:09:09,461 --> 01:09:12,608
Hitchcock had invented nothing,
it was all there.

642
01:09:13,644 --> 01:09:18,450
He had run under the arches of the promenade in the mission
as Madeline had run towards her death.

643
01:09:18,893 --> 01:09:20,335
Or was it hers?

644
01:09:21,927 --> 01:09:25,283
From this fake tower
—the only thing that Hitchcock had added—

645
01:09:25,318 --> 01:09:28,284
he imagined Scotty as time's fool of love,

646
01:09:28,402 --> 01:09:32,404
finding it impossible to live
with memory without falsifying it.

647
01:09:32,614 --> 01:09:35,872
Inventing a double for Madeline
in another dimension of time,

648
01:09:35,872 --> 01:09:38,457
a zone that would belong only to him

649
01:09:38,492 --> 01:09:42,688
and from which he could decipher
the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate

650
01:09:42,723 --> 01:09:45,199
when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay,

651
01:09:45,462 --> 01:09:49,092
when he had saved her from death
before casting her back to death.

652
01:09:49,336 --> 01:09:51,454
Or was it the other way around?

653
01:10:03,559 --> 01:10:07,700
In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film
I had seen nineteen times.

654
01:10:07,765 --> 01:10:11,119
In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film.

655
01:10:11,299 --> 01:10:16,131
That summer I had met three children on a road
and a volcano had come out of the sea.

656
01:10:16,519 --> 01:10:20,177
The American astronauts came to train
before flying off to the moon,

657
01:10:20,177 --> 01:10:22,523
in this corner of Earth that resembles it.

658
01:10:23,177 --> 01:10:25,825
I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction:

659
01:10:25,990 --> 01:10:28,036
the landscape of another planet.

660
01:10:28,055 --> 01:10:33,454
Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet
for someone who comes from elsewhere,

661
01:10:33,648 --> 01:10:35,731
from very far away.

662
01:10:35,817 --> 01:10:42,495
I imagine him moving slowly, heavily,
about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles.

663
01:10:42,530 --> 01:10:46,903
All of a sudden he stumbles,
and the next step it's a year later.

664
01:10:46,938 --> 01:10:51,595
He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border
along a sea bird sanctuary.

665
01:10:52,742 --> 01:10:54,725
That's for a start.

666
01:10:54,760 --> 01:10:58,192
Now why this cut in time,
this connection of memories?

667
01:10:58,354 --> 01:11:01,077
That's just it, he can't understand.

668
01:11:01,290 --> 01:11:04,649
He hasn't come from another planet,
he comes from our future,

669
01:11:04,684 --> 01:11:06,233
Four thousand and one:

670
01:11:06,268 --> 01:11:09,751
the time when the human brain has reached
the era of full employment.

671
01:11:09,786 --> 01:11:15,386
Everything works to perfection,
all that we allow to slumber, including memory.

672
01:11:15,421 --> 01:11:19,904
Logical consequence:
total recall is memory anesthetized.

673
01:11:19,939 --> 01:11:23,331
After so many stories of men
who had lost their memory,

674
01:11:23,366 --> 01:11:26,013
here is the story of one who has lost forgetting,

675
01:11:26,013 --> 01:11:29,413
and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—

676
01:11:29,448 --> 01:11:34,441
instead of drawing pride from the fact and
scorning mankind of the past and its shadows,

677
01:11:34,476 --> 01:11:38,252
turned to it first with curiosity
and then with compassion.

678
01:11:38,722 --> 01:11:41,638
In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision,

679
01:11:41,673 --> 01:11:43,305
to be moved by a portrait,

680
01:11:43,407 --> 01:11:48,264
to tremble at the sound of music,
can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history.

681
01:11:48,299 --> 01:11:50,210
He wants to understand.

682
01:11:50,245 --> 01:11:53,534
He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice,

683
01:11:53,569 --> 01:11:59,452
and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara,
like the youth of the sixties, with indignation.

684
01:11:59,487 --> 01:12:01,737
He is a Third Worlder of time.

685
01:12:01,772 --> 01:12:06,489
The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past
is as unbearable to him

686
01:12:06,524 --> 01:12:09,456
as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

687
01:12:10,808 --> 01:12:12,234
Naturally he'll fail.

688
01:12:12,269 --> 01:12:15,395
The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him

689
01:12:15,430 --> 01:12:19,393
as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable
to the children of a rich one.

690
01:12:19,529 --> 01:12:21,628
He has chosen to give up his privileges,

691
01:12:21,663 --> 01:12:25,180
but he can do nothing about the privilege
that has allowed him to choose.

692
01:12:25,402 --> 01:12:29,667
His only recourse is precisely that which
threw him into this absurd quest:

693
01:12:29,667 --> 01:12:32,211
a song cycle by Mussorgsky.

694
01:12:32,246 --> 01:12:34,935
They are still sung in the fortieth century.

695
01:12:34,970 --> 01:12:36,703
Their meaning has been lost,

696
01:12:36,703 --> 01:12:38,591
but it was then that for the first time,

697
01:12:38,626 --> 01:12:41,396
he perceived the presence
of that thing he didn't understand

698
01:12:41,396 --> 01:12:45,758
which had something to do
with unhappiness and memory,

699
01:12:46,875 --> 01:12:50,794
and towards which slowly, heavily,
he began to walk.

700
01:12:55,820 --> 01:12:58,022
Of course I'll never make that film.

701
01:12:58,213 --> 01:13:01,900
Nonetheless I'm collecting the sets,
inventing the twists,

702
01:13:02,400 --> 01:13:04,659
putting in my favorite creatures.

703
01:13:05,791 --> 01:13:10,548
I've even given it a title,
indeed the title of those Mussorgsky songs:

704
01:13:10,720 --> 01:13:12,250
Sunless.

705
01:13:32,326 --> 01:13:35,892
On May 15, 1945, at seven o'clock in the morning,

706
01:13:35,927 --> 01:13:39,167
the three hundred and
eighty second US infantry regiment

707
01:13:39,267 --> 01:13:42,896
attacked a hill in Okinawa
they had renamed 'Dick Hill.'

708
01:13:42,931 --> 01:13:46,997
I suppose the Americans themselves believed
that they were conquering Japanese soil,

709
01:13:47,032 --> 01:13:50,242
and that they knew nothing
about the Ryukyu civilization.

710
01:13:50,277 --> 01:13:54,635
Neither did I, apart from the fact
that the faces of the market ladies at Itoman

711
01:13:54,670 --> 01:13:57,216
spoke to me more of Gauguin than of Utamaro.

712
01:13:57,251 --> 01:14:01,703
For centuries of dreamy vassalage,
time had not moved in the archipelago.

713
01:14:01,738 --> 01:14:03,329
Then came the break.

714
01:14:04,072 --> 01:14:08,454
Is it a property of islands to make their women
into the guardians of their memory?

715
01:14:09,146 --> 01:14:14,093
I learned that—as in the Bijagos—
it is through the women that magic knowledge is transmitted.

716
01:14:14,459 --> 01:14:20,963
Each community has its priestess—the noro—
who presides over all ceremonies with the exception of funerals.

717
01:14:20,998 --> 01:14:23,934
The Japanese defended their position inch by inch.

718
01:14:23,969 --> 01:14:30,278
At the end of the day, the two half platoons formed from the remnants
of L Company had got only halfway up the hill,

719
01:14:30,833 --> 01:14:35,626
a hill like the one where I followed a group of villagers
on their way to the purification ceremony.

720
01:14:35,944 --> 01:14:40,986
The noro communicates with the gods of the sea,
of rain, of the earth, of fire.

721
01:14:41,021 --> 01:14:43,564
Everyone bows down before the sister deity

722
01:14:43,599 --> 01:14:49,074
who is the reflection, in the absolute,
of a privileged relationship between brother and sister.

723
01:14:49,109 --> 01:14:53,602
Even after her death,
the sister retains her spiritual predominance.

724
01:14:54,096 --> 01:14:55,808
At dawn the Americans withdrew.

725
01:14:55,843 --> 01:15:01,866
Fighting went on for over a month before the island surrendered,
and toppled into the modern world.

726
01:15:01,901 --> 01:15:04,480
Twenty-seven years of American occupation,

727
01:15:04,515 --> 01:15:08,436
the re-establishment of
a controversial Japanese sovereignty:

728
01:15:08,756 --> 01:15:14,314
two miles from the bowling alleys and the gas stations
the noro continues her dialogue with the gods.

729
01:15:14,544 --> 01:15:17,330
When she is gone the dialogue will end.

730
01:15:17,441 --> 01:15:20,923
Brothers will no longer know that their dead sister
is watching over them.

731
01:16:19,140 --> 01:16:22,972
When filming this ceremony I knew I was present
at the end of something.

732
01:16:23,579 --> 01:16:27,663
Magical cultures that disappear leave traces
to those who succeed them.

733
01:16:28,022 --> 01:16:30,027
This one will leave none;

734
01:16:30,185 --> 01:16:32,688
the break in history has been too violent.

735
01:16:33,094 --> 01:16:37,715
I touched that break at the summit of the hill,
as I had touched it at the edge of the ditch

736
01:16:37,750 --> 01:16:41,710
where two hundred girls had used grenades
to commit suicide in 1945

737
01:16:41,766 --> 01:16:45,161
rather than fall alive into the hands of the Americans.

738
01:16:45,196 --> 01:16:47,951
People have their pictures taken in front of the ditch.

739
01:16:48,505 --> 01:16:53,080
Across from it souvenir lighters
are sold shaped like grenades.

740
01:16:56,391 --> 01:17:01,666
On Hayao's machine war resembles letters being burned,
shredded in a frame of fire.

741
01:17:02,157 --> 01:17:05,315
The code name for Pearl Harbor was Tora, Tora, Tora,

742
01:17:05,350 --> 01:17:09,073
the name of the cat
the couple in Gokokuji was praying for.

743
01:17:09,367 --> 01:17:13,768
So all of this will have begun with the name of a cat pronounced three times.

744
01:17:18,467 --> 01:17:24,321
Off Okinawa kamikaze dived on the American fleet;
they would become a legend.

745
01:17:24,356 --> 01:17:27,263
They were likelier material for
it obviously than the special units

746
01:17:27,298 --> 01:17:30,411
who exposed their prisoners
to the bitter frost of Manchuria

747
01:17:30,424 --> 01:17:35,179
and then to hot water so as to see
how fast flesh separates from the bone.

748
01:17:35,713 --> 01:17:40,414
One would have to read their last letters to learn
that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers,

749
01:17:40,449 --> 01:17:43,481
nor were they all swashbuckling samurai.

750
01:17:43,653 --> 01:17:48,564
Before drinking his last cup
of saké Ryoji Uebara had written:

751
01:17:49,259 --> 01:17:53,244
"I have always thought that Japan
must live free in order to live eternally.

752
01:17:53,572 --> 01:17:58,496
It may seem idiotic to say that today,
under a totalitarian regime.

753
01:17:58,727 --> 01:18:01,783
We kamikaze pilots are machines,
we have nothing to say,

754
01:18:01,818 --> 01:18:06,260
except to beg our compatriots to make Japan
the great country of our dreams.

755
01:18:06,618 --> 01:18:12,610
In the plane I am a machine, a bit of magnetized metal
that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier.

756
01:18:12,856 --> 01:18:17,528
But once on the ground I am a human being
with feelings and passions.

757
01:18:17,786 --> 01:18:20,488
Please excuse these disorganized thoughts.

758
01:18:20,574 --> 01:18:26,018
I'm leaving you a rather melancholy picture,
but in the depths of my heart I am happy.

759
01:18:26,216 --> 01:18:29,031
I have spoken frankly, forgive me."

760
01:19:52,101 --> 01:19:55,823
Every time he came from Africa
he stopped at the island of Sal,

761
01:19:55,858 --> 01:19:58,858
which is in fact a salt rock
in the middle of the Atlantic.

762
01:19:59,165 --> 01:20:04,179
At the end of the island, beyond the village of Santa Maria
and its cemetery with the painted tombs,

763
01:20:04,214 --> 01:20:07,409
it suffices to walk straight ahead to meet the desert.

764
01:20:20,122 --> 01:20:22,581
He wrote me:
I've understood the visions.

765
01:20:22,616 --> 01:20:28,510
Suddenly you're in the desert the way you are in the night;
whatever is not desert no longer exists.

766
01:20:28,731 --> 01:20:31,528
You don't want to believe the images that crop up.

767
01:21:25,902 --> 01:21:28,791
Did I write you that
there are emus in the Ile de France?

768
01:21:29,230 --> 01:21:34,055
This name—Island of France—
sounds strangely on the island of Sal.

769
01:21:34,263 --> 01:21:37,257
My memory superimposes two towers:

770
01:21:37,292 --> 01:21:41,794
the one at the ruined castle of Montpilloy
that served as an encampment for Joan of Arc,

771
01:21:41,829 --> 01:21:44,791
and the lighthouse tower at the southern tip of Sal,

772
01:21:44,826 --> 01:21:48,704
probably one of the last lighthouses to use oil.

773
01:22:08,348 --> 01:22:14,048
A lighthouse in the Sahel looks like a collage
until you see the ocean at the edge of the sand and salt.

774
01:22:14,488 --> 01:22:17,936
Crews of transcontinental planes are rotated on Sal.

775
01:22:18,435 --> 01:22:23,142
Their club brings to this frontier of nothingness a small touch
of the seaside resort...

776
01:22:23,177 --> 01:22:26,496
which makes the rest still more unreal.

777
01:22:26,531 --> 01:22:29,276
They feed the stray dogs that live on the beach.

778
01:22:41,509 --> 01:22:44,323
I found my dogs pretty nervous tonight;

779
01:22:44,358 --> 01:22:48,042
they were playing with the sea
as I had never seen them before.

780
01:22:48,558 --> 01:22:51,864
Listening to Radio Hong Kong later on I understood:

781
01:22:51,899 --> 01:22:54,394
today was the first day of the lunar new year,

782
01:22:54,429 --> 01:22:59,340
and for the first time in sixty years
the sign of the dog met the sign of water.

783
01:23:39,340 --> 01:23:43,379
Out there, eleven thousand miles away,
a single shadow remains immobile

784
01:23:43,380 --> 01:23:48,500
in the midst of the long moving shadows
that the January light throws over the ground of Tokyo:

785
01:23:48,818 --> 01:23:52,258
the shadow of the Asakusa bonze.

786
01:24:38,494 --> 01:24:41,246
For also in Japan the year of the dog is beginning.

787
01:24:41,539 --> 01:24:46,795
Temples are filled with visitors who come
to toss down their coins and to pray—Japanese style—

788
01:24:46,830 --> 01:24:50,067
a prayer
which slips into life without interrupting it.

789
01:25:18,839 --> 01:25:23,857
Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal
in the company of my prancing dogs

790
01:25:23,892 --> 01:25:26,006
I remember that month of January in Tokyo,

791
01:25:26,041 --> 01:25:30,319
or rather I remember the images
I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo.

792
01:25:30,354 --> 01:25:32,722
They have substituted themselves for my memory.

793
01:25:32,757 --> 01:25:34,607
They are my memory.

794
01:25:35,346 --> 01:25:40,182
I wonder how people remember things
who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape.

795
01:25:40,217 --> 01:25:42,755
How has mankind managed to remember?

796
01:25:42,790 --> 01:25:44,457
I know: it wrote the Bible.

797
01:25:44,781 --> 01:25:47,935
The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time

798
01:25:47,970 --> 01:25:50,171
that will have to reread itself constantly

799
01:25:50,206 --> 01:25:52,419
just to know it existed.

800
01:25:52,752 --> 01:25:56,424
As we await the year four thousand and one
and its total recall,

801
01:25:56,656 --> 01:25:59,867
that's what the oracles we take out
of their long hexagonal boxes

802
01:25:59,868 --> 01:26:01,776
at new year may offer us:

803
01:26:01,861 --> 01:26:06,859
a little more power over that memory
that runs from camp to camp—like Joan of Arc.

804
01:26:07,264 --> 01:26:13,175
That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong radio
picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo,

805
01:26:13,210 --> 01:26:17,659
and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces
back on another country,

806
01:26:17,694 --> 01:26:22,054
another distance, another music, endlessly.

807
01:26:30,738 --> 01:26:32,534
At the end of memory's path,

808
01:26:32,569 --> 01:26:39,341
the ideograms of the Island of France are no less enigmatic
than the kanji of Tokyo in the miraculous light of the new year.

809
01:26:39,376 --> 01:26:40,869
It's Indian winter,

810
01:26:41,346 --> 01:26:45,495
as if the air were the first element
to emerge purified from the countless ceremonies

811
01:26:45,530 --> 01:26:49,330
by which the Japanese wash off
one year to enter the next one.

812
01:26:49,925 --> 01:26:54,496
A full month is just enough for them to fulfill
all the duties that courtesy owes to time,

813
01:26:54,531 --> 01:27:00,253
the most interesting unquestionably being the acquisition
at the temple of Tenjin of the uso bird,

814
01:27:00,288 --> 01:27:07,038
who according to one tradition eats all your lies of the year to come,
and according to another turns them into truths.

815
01:27:07,469 --> 01:27:11,308
But what gives the street its color in January,
what makes it suddenly different...

816
01:27:11,343 --> 01:27:13,213
is the appearance of kimono.

817
01:27:13,379 --> 01:27:17,843
In the street, in stores, in offices,
even at the stock exchange on opening day,

818
01:27:17,878 --> 01:27:20,747
the girls take out their fur collared winter kimono.

819
01:27:20,795 --> 01:27:25,029
At that moment of the year, other Japanese
may well invent extra flat TV sets,

820
01:27:25,064 --> 01:27:30,356
commit suicide with a chain saw,
or capture two thirds of the world market for semiconductors.

821
01:27:30,391 --> 01:27:33,751
Good for them;
all you see are the girls.

822
01:27:44,147 --> 01:27:47,128
The fifteenth of January is coming of age day:

823
01:27:47,163 --> 01:27:50,851
an obligatory celebration
in the life of a young Japanese woman.

824
01:27:51,107 --> 01:27:56,034
The city governments distribute small bags
filled with gifts, datebooks, advice:

825
01:27:56,045 --> 01:27:59,992
how to be a good citizen,
a good mother, a good wife.

826
01:28:00,199 --> 01:28:03,498
On that day every twenty-year-old girl
can phone her family for free,

827
01:28:03,533 --> 01:28:05,624
no matter where in Japan.

828
01:28:05,659 --> 01:28:09,437
Flag, home, and country:
this is the anteroom of adulthood.

829
01:28:09,558 --> 01:28:13,363
The world of the takenoko and of rock singers
speeds away like a rocket.

830
01:28:13,398 --> 01:28:16,755
Speakers explain what society expects of them.

831
01:28:16,790 --> 01:28:19,820
How long will it take to forget the secret?

832
01:29:18,879 --> 01:29:23,686
And when all the celebrations are over it
remains only to pick up all the ornaments

833
01:29:23,721 --> 01:29:29,962
—all the accessories of the celebration—
and by burning them, make a celebration.

834
01:30:11,683 --> 01:30:16,634
This is dondo-yaki, a Shinto blessing of the debris
that have a right to immortality

835
01:30:16,669 --> 01:30:18,128
—like the dolls at Ueno.—

836
01:30:18,163 --> 01:30:22,287
The last state—before their disappearance—
of the poignancy of things.

837
01:30:22,924 --> 01:30:27,106
Daruma—the one eyed spirit—
reigns supreme at the summit of the bonfire.

838
01:30:27,577 --> 01:30:31,840
Abandonment must be a feast;
laceration must be a feast.

839
01:30:31,875 --> 01:30:37,832
And the farewell to all that one has lost, broken,
used, must be ennobled by a ceremony.

840
01:30:38,235 --> 01:30:44,564
It's Japan that could fulfill the wish of that French writer
who wanted divorce to be made a sacrament.

841
01:30:44,741 --> 01:30:50,427
The only baffling part of this ritual was the circle of children
striking the ground with their long poles.

842
01:30:50,462 --> 01:30:53,658
I only got one explanation, a singular one

843
01:30:53,693 --> 01:30:57,202
—although for me it might take the form
of a small intimate service—

844
01:30:57,237 --> 01:30:59,536
it was to chase away the moles.

845
01:31:37,725 --> 01:31:41,494
And that's where my three children of Iceland
came and grafted themselves in.

846
01:31:41,693 --> 01:31:45,446
I picked up the whole shot again,
adding the somewhat hazy end,

847
01:31:45,481 --> 01:31:49,314
the frame trembling under the force of the wind
beating us down on the cliff:

848
01:31:49,349 --> 01:31:54,970
everything I had cut in order to tidy up, and that said
better than all the rest what I saw in that moment,

849
01:31:55,005 --> 01:32:00,884
why I held it at arms length, at zooms length,
until its last twenty-fourth of a second.

850
01:32:00,919 --> 01:32:03,657
The city of Heimaey spread out below us.

851
01:32:03,692 --> 01:32:09,161
And when five years later my friend Haroun Tazieff sent me the film
he had just shot in the same place

852
01:32:09,196 --> 01:32:14,288
I lacked only the name to learn that
nature performs its own dondo-yaki;

853
01:32:15,060 --> 01:32:17,250
the island's volcano had awakened.

854
01:32:18,043 --> 01:32:24,066
I looked at those pictures, and it was as
if the entire year '65 had just been covered with ashes.

855
01:32:41,591 --> 01:32:46,737
So, it sufficed to wait and the planet itself
staged the working of time.

856
01:32:47,341 --> 01:32:49,506
I saw what had been my window again.

857
01:32:49,541 --> 01:32:52,236
I saw emerge familiar roofs and balconies,

858
01:32:52,271 --> 01:32:55,301
the landmarks of the walks
I took through town every day,

859
01:32:55,336 --> 01:32:58,430
down to the cliff where I had met the children.

860
01:32:58,465 --> 01:33:03,772
The cat with white socks that Haroun had been considerate
enough to film for me naturally found its place.

861
01:33:04,065 --> 01:33:07,891
And I thought, of all the prayers
to time that had studded this trip

862
01:33:07,926 --> 01:33:11,004
the kindest was the one spoken
by the woman of Gotokuji,

863
01:33:11,039 --> 01:33:13,545
who said simply to her cat Tora,

864
01:33:13,580 --> 01:33:18,074
"Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you."

865
01:33:39,384 --> 01:33:42,929
And then in its turn the journey entered the 'zone,'

866
01:33:42,964 --> 01:33:46,973
and Hayao showed me my images
already affected by the moss of time,

867
01:33:47,008 --> 01:33:52,964
freed of the lie that had prolonged the existence
of those moments swallowed by the spiral.

868
01:34:03,951 --> 01:34:05,412
When spring came,

869
01:34:05,447 --> 01:34:10,051
when every crow announced
its arrival by raising his cry half a tone,

870
01:34:10,086 --> 01:34:16,026
I took the green train of the Yamanote line and
got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office.

871
01:34:16,977 --> 01:34:21,133
Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light
—Japanese style—

872
01:34:21,168 --> 01:34:24,665
so as to leave space
for the spirits of the broken cars.

873
01:34:24,700 --> 01:34:28,599
Even if I was expecting no letter
I stopped at the general delivery window,

874
01:34:28,634 --> 01:34:31,500
for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters,

875
01:34:31,535 --> 01:34:35,567
and at the airmail counter
to salute the spirits of unmailed letters.

876
01:34:35,761 --> 01:34:38,609
I took the measure
of the unbearable vanity of the West,

877
01:34:38,644 --> 01:34:42,140
that has never ceased to privilege
being over non-being,

878
01:34:42,175 --> 01:34:44,776
what is spoken to what is left unsaid.

879
01:34:45,434 --> 01:34:48,682
I walked alongside the little stalls
of clothing dealers.

880
01:34:48,993 --> 01:34:55,082
I heard in the distance Mr. Akao's voice reverberating
from the loudspeakers... a half tone higher.

881
01:34:55,569 --> 01:35:01,629
Then I went down into the basement where my friend
—the maniac—busies himself with his electronic graffiti.

882
01:35:02,595 --> 01:35:04,800
Finally his language touches me,

883
01:35:04,835 --> 01:35:09,679
because he talks to that part of us
which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls.

884
01:35:10,029 --> 01:35:15,733
A piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not,
or is no longer, or is not yet;

885
01:35:16,068 --> 01:35:21,509
the handwriting each one of us will use
to compose his own list of
'things that quicken the heart,'

886
01:35:21,544 --> 01:35:23,881
to offer, or to erase.

887
01:35:25,128 --> 01:35:30,947
In that moment poetry will be made by everyone,
and there will be emus in the 'zone.'

888
01:35:47,661 --> 01:35:51,450
He writes me from Japan.
He writes me from Africa.

889
01:35:52,225 --> 01:35:56,347
He writes that he can now summon up the look on the face
of the market lady of Praia.

890
01:35:56,382 --> 01:35:59,461
that had lasted only the length of a film frame

891
01:36:00,932 --> 01:36:03,410
Will there be a last letter?