1
00:00:41,374 --> 00:00:43,569
<i>The first image he told me about</i>

2
00:00:43,777 --> 00:00:47,508
<i>was of three children</i>
<i>on a road in Iceland in 1965.</i>

3
00:00:54,988 --> 00:00:57,218
<i>He said for him</i>
<i>it was the image of happiness,</i>

4
00:00:57,424 --> 00:01:00,416
<i>and that he'd often tried</i>
<i>to link it to other images,</i>

5
00:01:00,627 --> 00:01:03,152
<i>but it had never worked.</i>

6
00:01:03,363 --> 00:01:07,265
<i>He wrote me, "I'll have to put it</i>
<i>all alone at the beginning of a film,</i>

7
00:01:07,467 --> 00:01:09,662
<i>with a long piece of black leader.</i>

8
00:01:09,869 --> 00:01:13,669
<i>If they don't see happiness in the</i>
<i>picture, at least they'll see the black. "

9
00:01:47,774 --> 00:01:51,175
<i>He wrote, "I'm just back</i>
<i>from Hokkaido, the northern island.</i>

10
00:01:51,744 --> 00:01:56,408
<i>Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane.</i>
<i>Others take the ferry.</i>

11
00:01:56,616 --> 00:01:59,278
<i>Waiting, immobility,</i>
<i>snatches of sleep -

12
00:01:59,486 --> 00:02:01,977
<i>curiously it all makes me think</i>
<i>of some past or future war.</i>

13
00:02:02,188 --> 00:02:04,713
<i>Night trains, air raids,</i>
<i>fall-out shelters.</i>

14
00:02:04,924 --> 00:02:08,724
<i>Small fragments of war</i>
<i>enshrined in everyday life. "

15
00:02:29,015 --> 00:02:32,075
<i>He liked the fragility</i>
<i>of those moments suspended in time,</i>

16
00:02:32,285 --> 00:02:36,381
<i>memories whose only function</i>
<i>was to leave behind memories.</i>

17
00:02:36,589 --> 00:02:40,685
<i>He wrote, "After circling the globe,</i>
<i>only banality still interests me.</i>

18
00:02:40,894 --> 00:02:45,058
<i>On this trip I've tracked it relentlessly,</i>
<i>like a bounty hunter.</i>

19
00:02:46,900 --> 00:02:48,868
<i>At dawn, we'll be in Tokyo. "

20
00:03:14,360 --> 00:03:16,385
<i>He used to write me from Africa.</i>

21
00:03:16,596 --> 00:03:20,692
<i>He contrasted African time</i>
<i>with European and Asian time.</i>

22
00:03:20,900 --> 00:03:24,495
<i>He said that in the 19th century,</i>
<i>mankind had come to terms with space,</i>

23
00:03:24,704 --> 00:03:28,071
<i>and that the great question of the 20th</i>
<i>would be different concepts of time.</i>

24
00:03:28,274 --> 00:03:29,639
<i>"By the way,</i>

25
00:03:29,842 --> 00:03:33,278
<i>did you know that</i>
<i>there are emus in the Ile de France?"</i>

26
00:03:42,555 --> 00:03:44,523
<i>He wrote</i>
<i>that in the Bijago Islands,</i>

27
00:03:44,724 --> 00:03:47,818
<i>it's the young girls</i>
<i>who choose their fiancés.</i>

28
00:03:48,294 --> 00:03:52,924
<i>He wrote that in the suburbs of Tokyo,</i>
<i>there's a temple consecrated to cats.</i>

29
00:04:13,286 --> 00:04:16,813
<i>"I wish I could convey the simplicity,</i>
<i>the lack of affectation of this couple</i>

30
00:04:17,023 --> 00:04:23,087
<i>who'd come to place an inscribed</i>
<i>wooden slat in the cat cemetery</i>

31
00:04:23,296 --> 00:04:26,322
<i>so that their cat Tora</i>
<i>would be protected.</i>

32
00:04:26,532 --> 00:04:29,467
<i>No, she wasn't dead.</i>
<i>She'd just run away.</i>

33
00:04:29,669 --> 00:04:33,070
<i>But on the day of her death,</i>
<i>no one would know how to pray for her,</i>

34
00:04:33,273 --> 00:04:37,369
<i>how to intercede with death so that</i>
<i>he would call her by her right name.</i>

35
00:04:38,011 --> 00:04:40,844
<i>So they had to come in the rain</i>

36
00:04:41,047 --> 00:04:46,644
<i>to perform the rite that would repair</i>
<i>the web of time where it had been broken. "

37
00:04:58,498 --> 00:05:00,489
<i>He wrote,</i>

38
00:05:00,700 --> 00:05:03,999
<i>"I'll have spent my life trying to</i>
<i>understand the function of remembering,</i>

39
00:05:04,203 --> 00:05:07,400
<i>which is not the opposite of forgetting,</i>
<i>but rather its inner lining.</i>

40
00:05:07,607 --> 00:05:11,634
<i>We don't remember. We rewrite memory</i>
<i>much as history is rewritten.</i>

41
00:05:12,979 --> 00:05:15,812
<i>How can one remember thirst?"</i>

42
00:05:31,397 --> 00:05:34,389
<i>He didn't like</i>
<i>to dwell on poverty,</i>

43
00:05:34,600 --> 00:05:36,431
<i>but in everything</i>
<i>that he wanted to show,</i>

44
00:05:36,636 --> 00:05:39,571
<i>there were also</i>
<i>the failures of the Japanese model.</i>

45
00:05:39,772 --> 00:05:44,300
<i>"A world full of bums, of lumpens,</i>
<i>of outcasts, of Koreans.</i>

46
00:05:45,411 --> 00:05:49,939
<i>Too broke to afford drugs,</i>
<i>they get drunk on beer or fermented milk.</i>

47
00:05:50,650 --> 00:05:54,086
<i>This morning in Namidabashi,</i>
<i>20 minutes from the glories of downtown,</i>

48
00:05:54,287 --> 00:05:58,951
<i>a character took his revenge on society</i>
<i>by directing traffic at this intersection.</i>

49
00:05:59,225 --> 00:06:01,785
<i>Luxury for them would be</i>
<i>a large bottle of sake</i>

50
00:06:01,994 --> 00:06:05,623
<i>of the type poured over tombs</i>
<i>on the day of the dead.</i>

51
00:06:34,127 --> 00:06:37,255
<i>I bought a round</i>
<i>in a bar in Namidabashi,</i>

52
00:06:37,463 --> 00:06:40,091
<i>a place where people stare</i>
<i>at each other with equality.</i>

53
00:06:40,299 --> 00:06:45,259
<i>The threshold below which every man</i>
<i>is as good as any other, and knows it. "

54
00:06:58,918 --> 00:07:02,854
<i>He told me about the jetty on Fogo</i>
<i>in the Cape Verde Islands.</i>

55
00:07:03,856 --> 00:07:07,553
<i>"How long have they been there</i>
<i>waiting for the boat?</i>

56
00:07:07,760 --> 00:07:10,126
<i>Patient as pebbles,</i>
<i>but ready to pounce.</i>

57
00:07:10,797 --> 00:07:14,062
<i>They're a people of wanderers,</i>
<i>of navigators, of world travelers.</i>

58
00:07:15,468 --> 00:07:18,869
<i>They arose from crossbreeding</i>
<i>on these rocks that the Portuguese used</i>

59
00:07:19,071 --> 00:07:21,198
<i>as a marshaling yard</i>
<i>for their colonies.</i>

60
00:07:21,407 --> 00:07:24,672
<i>A people of nothing, a people</i>
<i>of emptiness, a vertical people.</i>

61
00:07:25,645 --> 00:07:27,306
<i>Frankly,</i>

62
00:07:27,513 --> 00:07:29,208
<i>isn't it stupid to tell people,</i>

63
00:07:29,415 --> 00:07:33,146
<i>like they teach in film school,</i>
<i>not to look at the camera?"</i>

64
00:07:46,165 --> 00:07:47,632
<i>He wrote...</i>

65
00:07:49,168 --> 00:07:52,296
<i>"The Sahel is not only</i>
<i>what is shown of it when it is too late.</i>

66
00:07:52,505 --> 00:07:56,771
<i>Drought seeps into this land</i>
<i>like water into a leaking boat.</i>

67
00:07:56,976 --> 00:07:59,501
<i>The animals resurrected</i>
<i>for carnival in Bissau</i>

68
00:07:59,712 --> 00:08:01,543
<i>will be petrified again</i>

69
00:08:01,747 --> 00:08:04,944
<i>as soon as a new attack</i>
<i>has changed the savannah into a desert.</i>

70
00:08:05,151 --> 00:08:09,281
<i>It's a state of survival that rich countries</i>
<i>have forgotten, with one exception.</i>

71
00:08:09,489 --> 00:08:11,719
<i>You guessed it. Japan.</i>

72
00:08:13,793 --> 00:08:16,694
<i>My constant comings and goings</i>
<i>are not a search for contrasts.</i>

73
00:08:16,896 --> 00:08:19,296
<i>They're a journey</i>
<i>to the extreme poles of survival. "

74
00:09:48,654 --> 00:09:50,713
<i>He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon,</i>

75
00:09:50,923 --> 00:09:54,188
<i>a lady-in-waiting to Princess Sadako</i>
<i>in the 11th century,</i>

76
00:09:54,393 --> 00:09:56,691
<i>during the Heian period.</i>

77
00:09:58,931 --> 00:10:01,126
<i>"Do we ever know</i>
<i>where history is really made?</i>

78
00:10:01,334 --> 00:10:04,997
<i>Rulers used complicated</i>
<i>strategies to fight one another,</i>

79
00:10:05,204 --> 00:10:08,435
<i>while real power lay</i>
<i>with a family of hereditary regents.</i>

80
00:10:08,641 --> 00:10:12,634
<i>The emperor's court was but a place</i>
<i>of intrigues and intellectual games.</i>

81
00:10:12,845 --> 00:10:17,145
<i>But by learning to draw</i>
<i>a sort of melancholy comfort</i>

82
00:10:17,350 --> 00:10:20,945
<i>from the contemplation</i>
<i>of the tiniest things,</i>

83
00:10:21,153 --> 00:10:24,680
<i>this small group of idlers</i>
<i>left a mark on Japanese sensibility</i>

84
00:10:24,890 --> 00:10:28,519
<i>much deeper than the mediocre</i>
<i>thundering of the politicians.</i>

85
00:10:28,728 --> 00:10:31,219
<i>Shonagon had a passion for lists.</i>

86
00:10:31,430 --> 00:10:33,625
<i>A list of 'elegant things, '

87
00:10:33,833 --> 00:10:35,892
<i>of 'distressing things, '

88
00:10:36,102 --> 00:10:39,299
<i>or even of</i>
<i>'things not worth doing. '

89
00:10:39,505 --> 00:10:42,963
<i>One day she drew up a list</i>
<i>of 'things that quicken the heart. '

90
00:10:43,175 --> 00:10:45,666
<i>Not a bad criterion,</i>
<i>I realize when I'm filming.</i>

91
00:10:45,878 --> 00:10:47,345
<i>I bow to the economic miracle,</i>

92
00:10:47,546 --> 00:10:50,174
<i>but I really want to show</i>
<i>the neighborhood celebrations. "

93
00:14:26,765 --> 00:14:28,357
<i>He wrote...</i>

94
00:14:29,268 --> 00:14:31,031
<i>"Coming back</i>
<i>along the Chiba coast,</i>

95
00:14:31,237 --> 00:14:35,970
<i>I thought of Shonagon's list of signs</i>
<i>one need only name to quicken the heart.</i>

96
00:14:36,175 --> 00:14:37,802
<i>Only name.</i>

97
00:14:38,010 --> 00:14:41,002
<i>To us, a sun is not quite a sun</i>
<i>unless it is 'radiant, '

98
00:14:41,213 --> 00:14:43,078
<i>a spring not quite a spring</i>
<i>unless it's 'crystal-clear. '

99
00:14:43,282 --> 00:14:45,216
<i>Here, interjecting adjectives</i>

100
00:14:45,417 --> 00:14:48,477
<i>would be as rude</i>
<i>as leaving price tags on purchases.</i>

101
00:14:49,722 --> 00:14:52,247
<i>Japanese poetry never modifies.</i>

102
00:14:52,458 --> 00:14:54,619
<i>There is a way</i>
<i>of saying boat, rock, mist,</i>

103
00:14:54,827 --> 00:14:56,886
<i>frog, crow, hail,</i>

104
00:14:57,096 --> 00:15:00,554
<i>heron, chrysanthemum</i>
<i>that includes them all.</i>

105
00:15:00,866 --> 00:15:03,858
<i>Newspapers recently chronicled</i>
<i>the story of a man from Nagoya.</i>

106
00:15:04,470 --> 00:15:06,461
<i>The woman he loved</i>
<i>died last year,</i>

107
00:15:06,672 --> 00:15:09,800
<i>and he'd drowned himself in work,</i>
<i>Japanese-style, like a madman.</i>

108
00:15:10,009 --> 00:15:14,002
<i>It seems he even made</i>
<i>an important discovery in electronics.</i>

109
00:15:14,213 --> 00:15:17,774
<i>And then, in the month of May,</i>
<i>he killed himself.</i>

110
00:15:17,983 --> 00:15:22,044
<i>They say he couldn't bear</i>
<i>to hear the word 'spring. "'</i>

111
00:15:58,757 --> 00:16:01,658
<i>He described</i>
<i>his reunion with Tokyo.</i>

112
00:16:02,761 --> 00:16:04,991
<i>"Like a cat home from vacation</i>

113
00:16:05,197 --> 00:16:07,597
<i>who immediately starts</i>
<i>to inspect familiar places. "

114
00:16:08,167 --> 00:16:10,431
<i>He ran to see</i>
<i>if all was where it should be.</i>

115
00:16:10,636 --> 00:16:13,730
<i>The Ginza owl,</i>
<i>the Shimbashi locomotive,</i>

116
00:16:13,939 --> 00:16:16,601
<i>the Temple of the Fox</i>
<i>above the Mitsukoshi department store,</i>

117
00:16:16,809 --> 00:16:19,607
<i>which he found invaded</i>
<i>by little girls and rock singers.</i>

118
00:16:19,812 --> 00:16:23,009
<i>He learned it was now</i>
<i>little girls who made and unmade stars,</i>

119
00:16:23,215 --> 00:16:26,013
<i>and that producers</i>
<i>trembled before them.</i>

120
00:16:26,218 --> 00:16:29,585
<i>He was told that a disfigured woman</i>
<i>took off her mask in front of passers-by</i>

121
00:16:29,788 --> 00:16:32,848
<i>and scratched them</i>
<i>if they didn't find her beautiful.</i>

122
00:16:33,058 --> 00:16:34,548
<i>Everything interested him.</i>

123
00:16:34,760 --> 00:16:38,787
<i>He who didn't give a damn</i>
<i>about soccer stars or racetrack winners</i>

124
00:16:38,998 --> 00:16:43,594
<i>asked feverishly about Chiyonofuji's</i>
<i>ranking in the last sumo tournament.</i>

125
00:16:43,802 --> 00:16:47,169
<i>He asked for news</i>
<i>of the imperial family, the crown prince,</i>

126
00:16:47,373 --> 00:16:51,002
<i>or Tokyo's oldest mobster,</i>
<i>who appears regularly on television</i>

127
00:16:51,210 --> 00:16:52,905
<i>to teach goodness to children.</i>

128
00:16:53,112 --> 00:16:55,580
<i>The simple joys he'd never known -

129
00:16:55,781 --> 00:16:58,841
<i>returning to one's native land</i>
<i>and family home -

130
00:16:59,051 --> 00:17:02,418
<i>he found among the city's</i>
<i>12 million anonymous residents.</i>

131
00:18:11,757 --> 00:18:13,452
<i>He wrote...</i>

132
00:18:13,659 --> 00:18:16,753
<i>"Tokyo is crisscrossed by trains,</i>
<i>knit together by electric wires.</i>

133
00:18:16,962 --> 00:18:19,055
<i>She shows her veins.</i>

134
00:18:19,631 --> 00:18:21,861
<i>They say that TV</i>
<i>is making her people illiterate,</i>

135
00:18:22,067 --> 00:18:24,763
<i>but I've never seen</i>
<i>so many people reading in the streets.</i>

136
00:18:24,970 --> 00:18:26,631
<i>Perhaps they only read</i>
<i>in the street,</i>

137
00:18:26,839 --> 00:18:30,172
<i>or perhaps they're just pretending</i>
<i>to read, these yellow men.</i>

138
00:18:30,409 --> 00:18:34,038
<i>I make my appointments at Kinokuniya,</i>
<i>the big bookshop in Shinjuku.</i>

139
00:18:34,480 --> 00:18:36,448
<i>The graphic genius</i>
<i>that allowed the Japanese</i>

140
00:18:36,648 --> 00:18:38,707
<i>to invent Cinemascope</i>
<i>ten centuries before the movies</i>

141
00:18:38,917 --> 00:18:41,715
<i>compensates a bit for the sad fate</i>
<i>of the comic-strip heroines,</i>

142
00:18:41,920 --> 00:18:45,378
<i>victims of heartless writers</i>
<i>and a castrating censorship.</i>

143
00:18:45,591 --> 00:18:48,560
<i>Sometimes they escape,</i>
<i>and you find them again on the walls.</i>

144
00:18:49,027 --> 00:18:51,791
<i>The entire city</i>
<i>is a comic strip.</i>

145
00:19:00,739 --> 00:19:02,764
<i>It's planet Mongo.</i>

146
00:19:04,276 --> 00:19:05,675
<i>One can't miss the statuary,</i>

147
00:19:05,878 --> 00:19:08,108
<i>from plasticized baroque</i>
<i>to Stalin-sensual,</i>

148
00:19:08,814 --> 00:19:11,806
<i>and the giant faces</i>
<i>with their imposing stares.</i>

149
00:19:12,284 --> 00:19:17,153
<i>Pictures bigger than people,</i>
<i>voyeurizing the voyeurs.</i>

150
00:19:25,564 --> 00:19:30,001
<i>At nightfall, the megalopolis</i>
<i>breaks down into villages.</i>

151
00:19:30,202 --> 00:19:34,070
<i>With its country cemeteries in the shadow</i>
<i>of banks, its stations and temples,</i>

152
00:19:34,273 --> 00:19:37,800
<i>each district of Tokyo once again</i>
<i>becomes a tidy, ingenuous little town,</i>

153
00:19:38,010 --> 00:19:40,444
<i>nestled among the skyscrapers. "

154
00:19:53,525 --> 00:19:56,119
<i>The small bar in Shinjuku</i>
<i>reminded him of that Indian flute</i>

155
00:19:56,328 --> 00:19:59,092
<i>whose sound can only be heard</i>
<i>by the person playing it.</i>

156
00:19:59,298 --> 00:20:02,233
<i>He might have cried out - as in</i>
<i>a Godard film or a Shakespeare play -

157
00:20:02,501 --> 00:20:05,026
<i>"Where is that music</i>
<i>coming from?"</i>

158
00:20:06,572 --> 00:20:10,303
<i>Later he told me he'd eaten</i>
<i>at the restaurant in Nishi Nippori</i>

159
00:20:10,509 --> 00:20:13,808
<i>where Mr. Yamada practices</i>
<i>the difficult art of "action cooking."</i>

160
00:20:19,785 --> 00:20:22,618
<i>He said that by carefully watching</i>
<i>Mr. Yamada's gestures</i>

161
00:20:22,821 --> 00:20:24,789
<i>and his way</i>
<i>of mixing the ingredients,</i>

162
00:20:24,990 --> 00:20:27,618
<i>one could meditate profitably</i>
<i>on fundamental concepts</i>

163
00:20:27,826 --> 00:20:31,057
<i>common to painting,</i>
<i>philosophy and martial arts.</i>

164
00:20:31,263 --> 00:20:36,792
<i>He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed,</i>
<i>in his impressively humble way,</i>

165
00:20:37,002 --> 00:20:38,367
<i>the essence of style,</i>

166
00:20:38,570 --> 00:20:42,301
<i>and that it therefore fell to him</i>
<i>to use his invisible brush</i>

167
00:20:42,574 --> 00:20:47,807
<i>to write upon this first day in Tokyo</i>
<i>the words "The End."</i>

168
00:20:52,217 --> 00:20:55,152
<i>"I spent the day in front of my TV,</i>
<i>that box of memories.</i>

169
00:20:55,354 --> 00:20:57,788
<i>I was in Nara</i>
<i>with the sacred deer.</i>

170
00:20:57,990 --> 00:20:59,753
<i>I was taking a picture,</i>

171
00:20:59,958 --> 00:21:01,755
<i>unaware that in the 15th century</i>
<i>Basho had written...</i>

172
00:21:02,961 --> 00:21:07,227
<i>'The willow sees</i>
<i>the heron's image upside down. '

173
00:21:17,576 --> 00:21:20,101
<i>Commercials</i>
<i>become a kind of haiku</i>

174
00:21:20,312 --> 00:21:22,610
<i>to the eye used</i>
<i>to Western atrocities in the genre.</i>

175
00:21:22,814 --> 00:21:25,942
<i>Not understanding obviously</i>
<i>adds to the pleasure.</i>

176
00:21:26,151 --> 00:21:28,085
<i>For one slightly</i>
<i>hallucinatory moment,</i>

177
00:21:28,287 --> 00:21:31,256
<i>I had the impression</i>
<i>that I understood Japanese,</i>

178
00:21:31,890 --> 00:21:35,451
<i>but it was a cultural program</i>
<i>about Gérard de Nerval. "

179
00:21:35,661 --> 00:21:38,960
<i>Memories of a visit to the tomb</i>
<i>of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,</i>

180
00:21:39,164 --> 00:21:41,530
<i>a simple and moving</i>
<i>monument in stone</i>

181
00:21:41,733 --> 00:21:44,497
<i>guarded by tall trees.</i>

182
00:22:04,589 --> 00:22:06,853
<i>"8.40. Cambodia.</i>

183
00:22:07,059 --> 00:22:08,458
<i>From Rousseau</i>
<i>to the Khmer Rouge -

184
00:22:08,660 --> 00:22:10,958
<i>coincidence,</i>
<i>or a sense of history?</i>

185
00:22:11,363 --> 00:22:13,092
<i>In</i> Apocalypse Now,

186
00:22:13,298 --> 00:22:15,630
<i>Brando uttered a few definitive -
<i>and incommunicable -

187
00:22:15,834 --> 00:22:18,200
<i>sentences on the subject.</i>

188
00:22:18,403 --> 00:22:20,633
<i>'Horror has a face and a name.</i>

189
00:22:20,839 --> 00:22:22,898
<i>You must make a friend of horror. '

190
00:22:29,981 --> 00:22:32,176
<i>To cast out the horror</i>
<i>that has a name and a face,</i>

191
00:22:32,384 --> 00:22:34,978
<i>you must give it another name</i>
<i>and another face.</i>

192
00:22:35,187 --> 00:22:39,123
<i>Japanese horror movies have</i>
<i>the sly beauty of certain corpses.</i>

193
00:22:39,324 --> 00:22:41,724
<i>One is sometimes stunned</i>
<i>by so much cruelty.</i>

194
00:22:41,927 --> 00:22:46,193
<i>One seeks its source in Asian people's</i>
<i>long familiarity with suffering</i>

195
00:22:46,398 --> 00:22:48,593
<i>that requires</i>
<i>that even pain be ornate.</i>

196
00:22:48,800 --> 00:22:50,791
<i>And then comes the reward.</i>

197
00:22:51,002 --> 00:22:54,438
<i>The monsters are vanquished</i>
<i>and Natsume Masako arises.</i>

198
00:22:54,639 --> 00:22:57,665
<i>Absolute beauty too</i>
<i>has a name and a face.</i>

199
00:23:09,654 --> 00:23:12,054
<i>But the more you watch</i>
<i>Japanese television,</i>

200
00:23:12,257 --> 00:23:14,817
<i>the more you feel</i>
<i>it's watching you.</i>

201
00:24:02,941 --> 00:24:05,671
<i>Even television newscasts</i>
<i>bear witness to the fact</i>

202
00:24:05,877 --> 00:24:08,368
<i>that the eye's magical function</i>
<i>is at the center of all things.</i>

203
00:24:08,580 --> 00:24:10,343
<i>It's election time.</i>

204
00:24:10,549 --> 00:24:12,608
<i>Winning candidates black out</i>

205
00:24:12,818 --> 00:24:16,310
<i>the empty eye of Daruma,</i>
<i>the spirit of luck,</i>

206
00:24:16,555 --> 00:24:20,321
<i>while losing candidates, sad but dignified,</i>
<i>carry off their one-eyed Daruma.</i>

207
00:24:23,428 --> 00:24:26,056
<i>The most indecipherable images</i>
<i>are those of Europe.</i>

208
00:24:26,264 --> 00:24:30,633
<i>I watch the images of a film</i>
<i>whose soundtrack will be added later.</i>

209
00:24:30,836 --> 00:24:33,464
<i>It took me six months</i>
<i>for Poland.</i>

210
00:24:37,375 --> 00:24:40,344
<i>But I have no difficulty</i>
<i>with the local earthquakes,</i>

211
00:24:40,545 --> 00:24:44,845
<i>though I must admit last night's quake</i>
<i>helped me greatly to grasp the problem.</i>

212
00:24:45,417 --> 00:24:47,578
<i>Poetry is born of insecurity.</i>

213
00:24:48,453 --> 00:24:51,889
<i>Wandering Jews,</i>
<i>quaking Japanese.</i>

214
00:24:54,192 --> 00:24:57,559
<i>Living on a rug that jesting nature is</i>
<i>ever ready to pull out from under them,</i>

215
00:24:57,762 --> 00:25:00,162
<i>they've learned to inhabit</i>
<i>a world of appearances,</i>

216
00:25:00,365 --> 00:25:02,560
<i>fragile, fleeting, revocable,</i>

217
00:25:02,767 --> 00:25:04,667
<i>of trains that fly</i>
<i>from planet to planet,</i>

218
00:25:04,870 --> 00:25:07,862
<i>of samurai fighting</i>
<i>in an immutable past.</i>

219
00:25:08,073 --> 00:25:11,042
<i>It's called</i>
<i>the impermanence of things.</i>

220
00:25:39,971 --> 00:25:43,031
<i>I watched it all,</i>
<i>even the evening shows,</i>

221
00:25:43,241 --> 00:25:44,606
<i>the so-called adult shows.</i>

222
00:25:44,809 --> 00:25:48,438
<i>The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips,</i>
<i>but this is a coded hypocrisy.</i>

223
00:25:48,647 --> 00:25:52,413
<i>Censorship is not the mutilation</i>
<i>of the show. It is the show.</i>

224
00:25:52,617 --> 00:25:54,107
<i>The code is the message.</i>

225
00:25:54,319 --> 00:25:59,086
<i>It points to the absolute by hiding it,</i>
<i>like religions have always done. "

226
00:26:12,804 --> 00:26:14,772
<i>That year, a new face appeared</i>

227
00:26:14,973 --> 00:26:18,636
<i>among the great faces adorning</i>
<i>the streets of Tokyo. The face of the pope.</i>

228
00:26:18,843 --> 00:26:20,811
<i>Treasures that had never</i>
<i>left the Vatican</i>

229
00:26:21,012 --> 00:26:24,106
<i>were displayed on the seventh floor</i>
<i>of the Sogo department store.</i>

230
00:26:24,749 --> 00:26:26,478
<i>He wrote...</i>

231
00:26:26,851 --> 00:26:30,719
<i>"It's curiosity, of course, but also</i>
<i>a hint of industrial espionage.</i>

232
00:26:31,623 --> 00:26:33,591
<i>I imagine them bringing out</i>
<i>in two years</i>

233
00:26:33,792 --> 00:26:36,818
<i>a more efficient and less expensive</i>
<i>version of Catholicism.</i>

234
00:26:38,029 --> 00:26:40,293
<i>But there's also the fascination</i>
<i>associated with the sacred,</i>

235
00:26:40,498 --> 00:26:42,659
<i>even when it's someone else's.</i>

236
00:27:23,975 --> 00:27:29,208
<i>So when will French department stores</i>
<i>exhibit relics sacred to the Japanese</i>

237
00:27:29,414 --> 00:27:32,542
<i>such as can be seen at Jozankei,</i>
<i>on the island of Hokkaido?</i>

238
00:27:32,817 --> 00:27:37,186
<i>At first, one smiles at this combination</i>
<i>museum, chapel and sex shop.</i>

239
00:27:37,389 --> 00:27:41,086
<i>As always in Japan, one admires how</i>
<i>the walls between realms are so thin</i>

240
00:27:41,292 --> 00:27:43,817
<i>that one can in the same breath</i>
<i>contemplate a statue,</i>

241
00:27:44,029 --> 00:27:45,758
<i>buy an inflatable doll</i>

242
00:27:45,964 --> 00:27:48,432
<i>and give the goddess of fertility</i>
<i>the small offering</i>

243
00:27:48,633 --> 00:27:50,897
<i>that always accompanies</i>
<i>her displays,</i>

244
00:27:51,102 --> 00:27:54,629
<i>displays whose frankness would render</i>
<i>television's stratagems incomprehensible</i>

245
00:27:54,906 --> 00:28:00,401
<i>but for the fact that sex organs may</i>
<i>only be shown severed from the body.</i>

246
00:28:12,791 --> 00:28:14,952
<i>One would like to</i>
<i>believe in a world before the fall,</i>

247
00:28:15,160 --> 00:28:17,219
<i>inaccessible to the complications</i>
<i>of a puritanism</i>

248
00:28:17,429 --> 00:28:20,421
<i>whose phony shadow was imposed</i>
<i>on it by American occupation,</i>

249
00:28:20,732 --> 00:28:23,701
<i>where people who gather laughing</i>
<i>around the votive fountain,</i>

250
00:28:23,902 --> 00:28:26,132
<i>the woman who touches it</i>
<i>with a friendly gesture,</i>

251
00:28:26,337 --> 00:28:29,272
<i>share in the same</i>
<i>cosmic innocence.</i>

252
00:28:29,841 --> 00:28:32,571
<i>The second part of the museum,</i>
<i>with its pairs of coupling animals,</i>

253
00:28:32,777 --> 00:28:35,541
<i>would then be the earthly paradise</i>
<i>as we've always dreamed of it.</i>

254
00:28:35,747 --> 00:28:37,044
<i>Not so sure.</i>

255
00:28:37,248 --> 00:28:40,615
<i>Animal innocence may be a trick</i>
<i>for getting around censorship,</i>

256
00:28:41,119 --> 00:28:44,145
<i>but perhaps also the mirror</i>
<i>of an impossible reconciliation,</i>

257
00:28:44,355 --> 00:28:49,292
<i>and even without original sin, this</i>
<i>earthly paradise may be a paradise lost.</i>

258
00:28:51,629 --> 00:28:54,257
<i>In the glossy splendor</i>
<i>of the gentle animals of Jozankei,</i>

259
00:28:54,466 --> 00:28:57,435
<i>I read the fundamental rift</i>
<i>of Japanese society,</i>

260
00:28:57,635 --> 00:29:00,297
<i>the rift that separates</i>
<i>men from women.</i>

261
00:29:00,505 --> 00:29:03,235
<i>In life it seems to manifest</i>
<i>in just two ways.</i>

262
00:29:03,441 --> 00:29:08,037
<i>Violent slaughter, or a discreet</i>
<i>melancholy resembling the Shonagon's,</i>

263
00:29:08,246 --> 00:29:12,512
<i>which the Japanese express</i>
<i>in a single - and untranslatable - word.</i>

264
00:29:12,717 --> 00:29:14,582
<i>Bringing man down</i>
<i>to the level of the beasts</i>

265
00:29:14,786 --> 00:29:16,811
<i>against which</i>
<i>the church fathers inveighed</i>

266
00:29:17,021 --> 00:29:20,388
<i>becomes here the challenge of the beasts</i>
<i>to the 'poignancy of things, '

267
00:29:20,592 --> 00:29:22,890
<i>to a melancholy whose tone</i>
<i>I can convey</i>

268
00:29:23,094 --> 00:29:26,063
<i>by copying a few lines</i>
<i>from Samura Koichi.</i>

269
00:29:27,832 --> 00:29:30,767
<i>'Who said that time</i>
<i>heals all wounds?</i>

270
00:29:31,970 --> 00:29:35,963
<i>Better to say that time heals</i>
<i>everything except wounds.</i>

271
00:29:36,241 --> 00:29:39,904
<i>With time, the hurt of separation</i>
<i>loses its real limits.</i>

272
00:29:40,111 --> 00:29:43,444
<i>With time, the desired body</i>
<i>will soon disappear,</i>

273
00:29:43,648 --> 00:29:46,617
<i>and if the desiring body has already</i>
<i>ceased to exist for the other,</i>

274
00:29:46,818 --> 00:29:50,652
<i>then what remains</i>
<i>is a disembodied wound. "'</i>

275
00:29:58,396 --> 00:30:00,455
<i>He wrote</i>
<i>that the Japanese secret -

276
00:30:00,665 --> 00:30:03,759
<i>what Levi-Strauss called</i>
<i>the poignancy of things -

277
00:30:03,968 --> 00:30:06,493
<i>implied the faculty</i>
<i>of communing with things,</i>

278
00:30:06,704 --> 00:30:09,969
<i>of entering into them,</i>
<i>of being them for a moment.</i>

279
00:30:10,375 --> 00:30:12,969
<i>It's only natural that, in their turn,</i>
<i>they should be like us -

280
00:30:13,178 --> 00:30:14,907
<i>perishable and immortal.</i>

281
00:30:22,220 --> 00:30:25,451
<i>He wrote, "Animism is</i>
<i>a familiar notion in Africa.</i>

282
00:30:25,657 --> 00:30:27,682
<i>It's less often applied to Japan.</i>

283
00:30:27,892 --> 00:30:29,792
<i>What then shall we call</i>
<i>this diffuse belief</i>

284
00:30:29,994 --> 00:30:33,953
<i>according to which every fragment</i>
<i>of creation has its invisible counterpart?</i>

285
00:30:34,499 --> 00:30:36,990
<i>Building a factory or skyscraper</i>

286
00:30:37,202 --> 00:30:40,365
<i>begins with a ceremony</i>
<i>to appease the god who owns the land.</i>

287
00:30:40,572 --> 00:30:44,508
<i>There's a ceremony for brushes,</i>
<i>abacuses, even rusty needles.</i>

288
00:30:44,709 --> 00:30:49,408
<i>There's one on September 25th for</i>
<i>the repose of the soul of broken dolls.</i>

289
00:30:49,614 --> 00:30:52,515
<i>The dolls are piled up</i>
<i>in the Temple of Kiyomizu -

290
00:30:52,717 --> 00:30:57,245
<i>which is consecrated to Kannon,</i>
<i>the goddess of compassion -

291
00:30:57,455 --> 00:30:59,719
<i>and then burned in public.</i>

292
00:31:35,460 --> 00:31:37,325
<i>I watched the participants.</i>

293
00:31:37,762 --> 00:31:39,889
<i>I think the people who saw off</i>
<i>the kamikaze pilots</i>

294
00:31:40,098 --> 00:31:42,760
<i>had the same look on their faces. "

295
00:32:15,500 --> 00:32:17,627
<i>He wrote that the pictures</i>
<i>of Guinea-Bissau</i>

296
00:32:17,835 --> 00:32:20,235
<i>ought to be accompanied</i>
<i>by music from the Cape Verde Islands.</i>

297
00:32:20,438 --> 00:32:23,407
<i>That would be our contribution</i>
<i>to the unity dreamed of by Amilcar Cabral.</i>

298
00:32:28,246 --> 00:32:32,376
<i>"Why should a country so small</i>
<i>and so poor interest the world?</i>

299
00:32:32,583 --> 00:32:34,676
<i>They did what they could.</i>

300
00:32:34,886 --> 00:32:38,287
<i>They chased Portugal out,</i>
<i>so traumatizing its army</i>

301
00:32:38,489 --> 00:32:40,923
<i>that it moved to overthrow</i>
<i>its own dictatorship</i>

302
00:32:41,125 --> 00:32:43,685
<i>and led one briefly to believe</i>
<i>in a new revolution in Europe.</i>

303
00:32:43,895 --> 00:32:45,556
<i>Who remembers all that?</i>

304
00:32:45,763 --> 00:32:48,630
<i>History throws its empty bottles</i>
<i>out the window.</i>

305
00:32:52,637 --> 00:32:55,037
<i>This morning I was</i>
<i>on the dock at Pidjiguiti,</i>

306
00:32:55,239 --> 00:32:59,699
<i>where everything began in 1959, when the</i>
<i>first victims of the struggle were killed.</i>

307
00:32:59,944 --> 00:33:03,072
<i>It may be as difficult</i>
<i>to recognize Africa in this leaden fog</i>

308
00:33:03,281 --> 00:33:05,272
<i>as it is to recognize the struggle</i>

309
00:33:05,483 --> 00:33:07,747
<i>in the rather dull activity</i>
<i>of tropical longshoremen.</i>

310
00:33:08,019 --> 00:33:09,953
<i>Rumor has it</i>
<i>that every third-world leader</i>

311
00:33:10,154 --> 00:33:12,486
<i>coined the same phrase</i>
<i>the morning after independence.</i>

312
00:33:12,690 --> 00:33:15,181
<i>'Now the real problems begin. '

313
00:33:15,526 --> 00:33:18,723
<i>Cabral never got a chance to say it.</i>
<i>He was assassinated first.</i>

314
00:33:18,930 --> 00:33:22,297
<i>But the problems began,</i>
<i>and went on, and are still going on.</i>

315
00:33:22,500 --> 00:33:25,230
<i>Rather unexciting problems</i>
<i>for revolutionary romanticism.</i>

316
00:33:25,436 --> 00:33:27,904
<i>To work, to produce,</i>
<i>to distribute,</i>

317
00:33:28,106 --> 00:33:30,370
<i>to overcome postwar exhaustion</i>

318
00:33:30,575 --> 00:33:33,169
<i>and the temptations</i>
<i>of power and privilege.</i>

319
00:33:33,378 --> 00:33:37,508
<i>But after all, history's only bitter</i>
<i>to those who expect a sugar coating.</i>

320
00:33:54,999 --> 00:33:58,457
<i>My personal problem</i>
<i>was more specific.</i>

321
00:33:58,669 --> 00:34:00,603
<i>How to film</i>
<i>the ladies of Bissau?</i>

322
00:34:00,805 --> 00:34:03,831
<i>Apparently, the eye's magical function</i>
<i>was working against me there.</i>

323
00:34:04,442 --> 00:34:06,603
<i>In the marketplaces</i>
<i>of Bissau and Cape Verde,</i>

324
00:34:06,811 --> 00:34:08,938
<i>I again encountered</i>
<i>those egalitarian stares</i>

325
00:34:09,147 --> 00:34:12,810
<i>and this sequence of glances</i>
<i>that bordered on seduction.</i>

326
00:34:13,684 --> 00:34:15,447
<i>I see her.</i>

327
00:34:16,320 --> 00:34:18,117
<i>She sees me.</i>

328
00:34:18,356 --> 00:34:20,586
<i>She knows that I see her.</i>

329
00:34:23,294 --> 00:34:24,727
<i>She glances my way,</i>

330
00:34:24,929 --> 00:34:28,456
<i>but furtively, as if I'm not</i>
<i>really the object of her gaze.</i>

331
00:34:28,666 --> 00:34:31,100
<i>Finally, the direct gaze</i>

332
00:34:32,403 --> 00:34:35,930
<i>lasting 1/24th of a second,</i>
<i>the length of a film frame.</i>

333
00:34:41,746 --> 00:34:45,512
<i>All women have a built-in kernel</i>
<i>of indestructibility,</i>

334
00:34:45,750 --> 00:34:48,810
<i>and men's task has always been</i>
<i>to keep them from realizing it</i>

335
00:34:49,020 --> 00:34:50,578
<i>for as long as possible.</i>

336
00:34:50,788 --> 00:34:55,157
<i>African men are just as good</i>
<i>at this task as others,</i>

337
00:34:55,359 --> 00:34:59,853
<i>but after a close look at African women,</i>
<i>I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men. "

338
00:36:51,475 --> 00:36:54,069
<i>He told me the story</i>
<i>of Hachiko the dog.</i>

339
00:36:54,278 --> 00:36:56,872
<i>"A dog waited for his master</i>
<i>every day at the station.</i>

340
00:36:57,081 --> 00:36:59,879
<i>The master died,</i>
<i>but the dog didn't know it,</i>

341
00:37:00,084 --> 00:37:02,746
<i>and he continued to wait,</i>
<i>all his life.</i>

342
00:37:02,954 --> 00:37:05,616
<i>People were moved</i>
<i>and brought him food.</i>

343
00:37:05,823 --> 00:37:10,260
<i>They still place sushi and rice cakes</i>
<i>before the statue erected in his honor</i>

344
00:37:10,461 --> 00:37:13,259
<i>so that the faithful soul of Hachiko</i>
<i>will never go hungry.</i>

345
00:37:19,270 --> 00:37:23,206
<i>Tokyo is full of these small legends</i>
<i>and animal intercessors.</i>

346
00:37:23,674 --> 00:37:27,576
<i>The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard over</i>
<i>what was once the empire of Mr. Okada,</i>

347
00:37:27,778 --> 00:37:29,803
<i>a great collector</i>
<i>of French paintings,</i>

348
00:37:30,014 --> 00:37:31,879
<i>the man who rented</i>
<i>the Château of Versailles</i>

349
00:37:32,083 --> 00:37:34,517
<i>to celebrate the 100th anniversary</i>
<i>of his department stores.</i>

350
00:37:34,719 --> 00:37:36,949
<i>In the computer section</i>
<i>of one such store,</i>

351
00:37:37,154 --> 00:37:39,179
<i>I've seen young Japanese</i>
<i>exercising their brain muscles</i>

352
00:37:39,390 --> 00:37:41,881
<i>like young Athenians</i>
<i>at the palestra.</i>

353
00:37:43,127 --> 00:37:45,095
<i>They have a war to win.</i>

354
00:37:45,296 --> 00:37:48,493
<i>History books of the future will perhaps</i>
<i>rank the battle of the integrated circuit</i>

355
00:37:48,699 --> 00:37:50,826
<i>with the battles of Salamis</i>
<i>or Agincourt.</i>

356
00:37:54,839 --> 00:37:58,741
<i>But they honor the unfortunate</i>
<i>adversary by leaving other fields to him.</i>

357
00:37:58,943 --> 00:38:02,379
<i>Men's fashions this season are placed</i>
<i>under the sign of John Kennedy. "

358
00:38:41,619 --> 00:38:44,213
<i>Like an old votive turtle</i>
<i>stationed in the corner of a field,</i>

359
00:38:44,422 --> 00:38:48,620
<i>Mr. Akao, president</i>
<i>of the Japanese Patriotic Party,</i>

360
00:38:48,826 --> 00:38:53,456
<i>rails from his rolling balcony</i>
<i>against the international communist plot.</i>

361
00:38:54,265 --> 00:38:55,789
<i>He wrote...</i>

362
00:38:57,435 --> 00:39:00,063
<i>"The extreme right's vans,</i>
<i>with their flags and megaphones,</i>

363
00:39:00,271 --> 00:39:02,000
<i>are part of the Tokyo landscape.</i>

364
00:39:02,206 --> 00:39:04,868
<i>Mr. Akao is their focal point.</i>

365
00:39:05,076 --> 00:39:07,670
<i>I think he'll have his own statue,</i>
<i>like Hachiko the dog,</i>

366
00:39:07,878 --> 00:39:12,577
<i>at this intersection that he leaves</i>
<i>only to go prophesy on the battlefields.</i>

367
00:39:18,322 --> 00:39:21,883
<i>He was at Narita in the '60s.</i>

368
00:39:22,093 --> 00:39:25,085
<i>Peasants fought an airport</i>
<i>to be built on their land,</i>

369
00:39:25,296 --> 00:39:29,289
<i>with Mr. Akao denouncing Moscow's</i>
<i>hand in everything that moved.</i>

370
00:39:30,801 --> 00:39:33,702
<i>Yurakucho is</i>
<i>Tokyo's political arena.</i>

371
00:39:33,904 --> 00:39:36,668
<i>I once saw a monk there</i>
<i>pray for peace in Vietnam.</i>

372
00:39:38,242 --> 00:39:40,176
<i>Today, young right-wing activists</i>

373
00:39:40,378 --> 00:39:43,870
<i>protest the annexation</i>
<i>of the northern islands by the Russians.</i>

374
00:39:44,515 --> 00:39:47,006
<i>Sometimes they're told that</i>
<i>Japan's commercial relations</i>

375
00:39:47,218 --> 00:39:49,152
<i>with the abominable occupier</i>
<i>to the north</i>

376
00:39:49,353 --> 00:39:51,480
<i>are a thousand times better</i>
<i>than with the American ally,</i>

377
00:39:51,689 --> 00:39:54,419
<i>who's always whining</i>
<i>about economic aggression.</i>

378
00:39:54,625 --> 00:39:56,616
<i>Nothing is simple.</i>

379
00:40:01,999 --> 00:40:04,934
<i>On the other sidewalk,</i>
<i>the left has the floor.</i>

380
00:40:05,469 --> 00:40:08,199
<i>Korean Catholic opposition</i>
<i>leader Kim Dae Jung,</i>

381
00:40:08,406 --> 00:40:11,307
<i>kidnapped in Tokyo in '73</i>
<i>by the South Korean Gestapo,</i>

382
00:40:11,842 --> 00:40:14,367
<i>is threatened</i>
<i>with a death sentence.</i>

383
00:40:14,578 --> 00:40:16,546
<i>A group has begun</i>
<i>a hunger strike.</i>

384
00:40:16,747 --> 00:40:19,944
<i>Some very young activists</i>
<i>gather signatures in his support.</i>

385
00:41:03,227 --> 00:41:07,687
<i>I returned to Narita for the birthday</i>
<i>of one of the victims of the struggle.</i>

386
00:41:08,365 --> 00:41:10,196
<i>The demonstration was unreal.</i>

387
00:41:10,401 --> 00:41:12,562
<i>I felt like I was in</i> Brigadoon,

388
00:41:12,770 --> 00:41:15,671
<i>like I'd woken up ten years later</i>
<i>amid the same actors,</i>

389
00:41:15,873 --> 00:41:19,673
<i>the same blue-suited police</i>
<i>and helmeted adolescents,</i>

390
00:41:19,877 --> 00:41:22,175
<i>the same slogan,</i>
<i>the same banners,</i>

391
00:41:23,280 --> 00:41:26,306
<i>and the same goal.</i>
<i>To fight the airport.</i>

392
00:41:26,517 --> 00:41:30,317
<i>Just one thing has been added.</i>
<i>The airport itself.</i>

393
00:41:30,521 --> 00:41:32,785
<i>But its single runway</i>
<i>hemmed in by barbed wire</i>

394
00:41:32,990 --> 00:41:35,481
<i>looks more besieged</i>
<i>than victorious.</i>

395
00:41:52,309 --> 00:41:56,837
<i>My pal Hayao Yamaneko</i>
<i>has found a solution.</i>

396
00:41:57,047 --> 00:42:00,608
<i>If the images of the present don't change,</i>
<i>change the images of the past.</i>

397
00:42:01,218 --> 00:42:04,813
<i>He showed me clashes of the '60s</i>
<i>run through his synthesizer.</i>

398
00:42:05,556 --> 00:42:08,582
<i>'Less deceptive pictures, 'he says,</i>
<i>with the conviction of a fanatic,</i>

399
00:42:08,792 --> 00:42:10,885
<i>than those you see on television. '

400
00:42:11,095 --> 00:42:14,087
<i>At least they proclaim themselves</i>
<i>to be what they are. Images -

401
00:42:14,298 --> 00:42:18,826
<i>not the portable and compact form</i>
<i>of an already inaccessible reality.</i>

402
00:42:21,171 --> 00:42:26,404
<i>Hayao calls his machine's world</i>
<i>'the Zone, 'in an homage to Tarkovsky.</i>

403
00:43:15,859 --> 00:43:19,818
<i>What Narita brought back to me</i>
<i>like a shattered hologram</i>

404
00:43:20,030 --> 00:43:22,191
<i>was a fragment</i>
<i>of the '60s generation.</i>

405
00:43:24,568 --> 00:43:28,004
<i>If to love without illusions is still</i>
<i>to love, I can say that I loved it.</i>

406
00:43:28,505 --> 00:43:30,302
<i>It was a generation</i>
<i>that often exasperated me,</i>

407
00:43:30,507 --> 00:43:33,271
<i>for I didn't share its utopian goal</i>
<i>of uniting in a common struggle</i>

408
00:43:33,477 --> 00:43:37,345
<i>those who revolt against poverty</i>
<i>and those who revolt against wealth,</i>

409
00:43:37,548 --> 00:43:42,485
<i>but it let out a primordial scream that</i>
<i>better-adjusted voices no longer could.</i>

410
00:43:50,160 --> 00:43:53,186
<i>I met peasants there who'd come</i>
<i>to know themselves through the struggle.</i>

411
00:43:53,397 --> 00:43:55,365
<i>In concrete terms, it had failed.</i>

412
00:43:55,566 --> 00:43:58,034
<i>Yet all they had won</i>
<i>in their understanding of the world</i>

413
00:43:58,235 --> 00:44:00,100
<i>and of themselves</i>

414
00:44:00,304 --> 00:44:03,432
<i>could only have been won</i>
<i>through the struggle.</i>

415
00:44:04,108 --> 00:44:07,839
<i>As for the students, some massacred</i>
<i>each other in the mountains</i>

416
00:44:08,045 --> 00:44:09,945
<i>in the name</i>
<i>of revolutionary purity,</i>

417
00:44:10,147 --> 00:44:12,809
<i>while others had studied capitalism</i>
<i>so thoroughly to fight it</i>

418
00:44:13,117 --> 00:44:15,915
<i>that they now provide it</i>
<i>with its best executives.</i>

419
00:44:16,120 --> 00:44:19,214
<i>Like everywhere else, the movement</i>
<i>had its posturers and its careerists -

420
00:44:19,423 --> 00:44:22,688
<i>including those who made</i>
<i>a career of martyrdom -

421
00:44:22,893 --> 00:44:25,521
<i>but it carried with it all those</i>
<i>who said, like Che Guevara,</i>

422
00:44:25,729 --> 00:44:29,688
<i>that they 'trembled with indignation</i>
<i>at every injustice committed in the world. '

423
00:44:30,567 --> 00:44:33,297
<i>They wanted to give</i>
<i>a political meaning to their generosity,</i>

424
00:44:33,504 --> 00:44:36,769
<i>and their generosity</i>
<i>has outlasted their politics.</i>

425
00:44:36,974 --> 00:44:42,412
<i>That's why I will never allow it to be</i>
<i>said that youth is wasted on the young. "

426
00:45:00,030 --> 00:45:02,555
<i>"The youth who gather</i>
<i>every weekend at Shinjuku</i>

427
00:45:02,766 --> 00:45:05,860
<i>obviously know they're not</i>
<i>on a launching pad toward real life,</i>

428
00:45:06,070 --> 00:45:08,732
<i>that they are life, to be eaten</i>
<i>on the spot, like fresh donuts.</i>

429
00:45:10,774 --> 00:45:12,241
<i>It's a very simple secret.</i>

430
00:45:12,443 --> 00:45:15,810
<i>The old try to hide it,</i>
<i>and not all the young know it.</i>

431
00:45:16,013 --> 00:45:18,345
<i>The 10-year-old girl</i>
<i>who tied her friend's hands</i>

432
00:45:18,549 --> 00:45:20,744
<i>and threw her</i>
<i>from the 13th floor</i>

433
00:45:20,951 --> 00:45:24,148
<i>for speaking badly of their class team</i>
<i>hadn't discovered it yet.</i>

434
00:45:24,354 --> 00:45:27,289
<i>Parents who demand</i>
<i>more special telephone lines</i>

435
00:45:27,491 --> 00:45:29,220
<i>to prevent children's suicides</i>

436
00:45:29,426 --> 00:45:33,157
<i>find out a little late</i>
<i>that they kept the secret too well.</i>

437
00:45:34,398 --> 00:45:37,959
<i>Rock is an international language</i>
<i>for spreading the secret.</i>

438
00:45:38,635 --> 00:45:41,365
<i>Another is peculiar to Tokyo.</i>

439
00:45:49,480 --> 00:45:52,813
<i>For the Takenoko,</i>
<i>20 is retiring age.</i>

440
00:45:53,016 --> 00:45:54,643
<i>They are baby Martians.</i>

441
00:45:54,852 --> 00:45:58,219
<i>I go see them dance</i>
<i>every Sunday in Yoyogi Park.</i>

442
00:45:58,689 --> 00:46:02,819
<i>They want people to look at them</i>
<i>but seem not to notice when they do.</i>

443
00:46:03,026 --> 00:46:04,618
<i>They live</i>
<i>in a parallel time stream.</i>

444
00:46:04,828 --> 00:46:07,922
<i>An invisible aquarium wall</i>
<i>separates them from their audience,</i>

445
00:46:08,132 --> 00:46:10,100
<i>and I can spend a whole afternoon</i>

446
00:46:10,300 --> 00:46:14,964
<i>watching a little Takenoko girl</i>
<i>learn the customs of her planet.</i>

447
00:46:28,752 --> 00:46:30,879
<i>Beyond that,</i>
<i>they wear dog tags,</i>

448
00:46:31,088 --> 00:46:33,852
<i>they obey a whistle,</i>
<i>the Mafia extorts money from them,</i>

449
00:46:34,057 --> 00:46:36,355
<i>and with the exception</i>
<i>of a single all-girl group,</i>

450
00:46:36,560 --> 00:46:38,960
<i>a boy is always in charge. "

451
00:47:37,221 --> 00:47:39,189
<i>One day he writes to me,</i>

452
00:47:39,389 --> 00:47:41,118
<i>"Description of a dream.</i>

453
00:47:41,325 --> 00:47:43,350
<i>More and more,</i>
<i>my dreams are set</i>

454
00:47:43,560 --> 00:47:45,323
<i>in the department stores of Tokyo,</i>

455
00:47:45,529 --> 00:47:47,929
<i>the subterranean passages</i>
<i>that parallel the city above.</i>

456
00:47:49,833 --> 00:47:53,530
<i>A face appears, then disappears.</i>
<i>A trace is found, then lost.</i>

457
00:47:53,737 --> 00:47:56,865
<i>The folklore of dreams is so much intact</i>
<i>that the next day, when I'm awake,</i>

458
00:47:57,074 --> 00:47:59,941
<i>I realize that I continue to seek</i>
<i>in this basement labyrinth</i>

459
00:48:00,143 --> 00:48:03,374
<i>the presence concealed</i>
<i>the night before.</i>

460
00:48:03,881 --> 00:48:06,281
<i>I begin to wonder</i>
<i>if those dreams are really mine,</i>

461
00:48:06,483 --> 00:48:10,442
<i>or if they're part of a totality,</i>
<i>a gigantic collective dream,</i>

462
00:48:10,654 --> 00:48:13,782
<i>of which the entire city</i>
<i>may be the projection.</i>

463
00:48:14,124 --> 00:48:17,059
<i>It might suffice to pick up</i>
<i>any of the telephones lying around</i>

464
00:48:17,261 --> 00:48:18,956
<i>to hear a familiar voice</i>

465
00:48:19,696 --> 00:48:22,631
<i>or the beating of a heart -

466
00:48:23,100 --> 00:48:25,762
<i>Sei Shonagon's, for example.</i>

467
00:48:26,336 --> 00:48:28,304
<i>All the underground passages</i>
<i>lead to train stations.</i>

468
00:48:28,505 --> 00:48:31,633
<i>The same companies own the stores</i>
<i>and the railroads that bear their name -

469
00:48:31,842 --> 00:48:34,936
<i>Keio, Odakyu,</i>
<i>all those names of ports.</i>

470
00:48:35,145 --> 00:48:38,273
<i>The train inhabited by sleeping people</i>
<i>assembles all the fragments of dreams</i>

471
00:48:38,482 --> 00:48:41,815
<i>and makes a single film of them,</i>
<i>the ultimate film.</i>

472
00:48:42,052 --> 00:48:45,180
<i>The tickets from the automatic dispenser</i>
<i>grant admission to the show. "

473
00:53:50,994 --> 00:53:54,521
<i>He told me of the January light</i>
<i>on the stations' stairways.</i>

474
00:53:55,098 --> 00:53:58,329
<i>He said the city ought to be</i>
<i>deciphered like a musical score.</i>

475
00:53:59,803 --> 00:54:04,263
<i>One could get lost in the great orchestral</i>
<i>masses and the accumulation of details,</i>

476
00:54:04,474 --> 00:54:06,635
<i>but that yielded</i>
<i>the cheapest image of Tokyo.</i>

477
00:54:06,843 --> 00:54:09,505
<i>Overcrowded,</i>
<i>megalomaniac, inhuman.</i>

478
00:54:09,713 --> 00:54:12,147
<i>He thought he saw</i>
<i>more subtle cycles there.</i>

479
00:54:12,349 --> 00:54:15,011
<i>Rhythms, clusters of faces</i>
<i>glimpsed in passing,</i>

480
00:54:15,218 --> 00:54:18,881
<i>as different and precise</i>
<i>as groups of instruments.</i>

481
00:54:19,322 --> 00:54:22,291
<i>Sometimes the musical comparison</i>
<i>coincided with plain reality.</i>

482
00:54:22,492 --> 00:54:26,326
<i>The Sony stairway in the Ginza</i>
<i>was itself a musical instrument,</i>

483
00:54:26,529 --> 00:54:28,759
<i>each step a note.</i>

484
00:54:28,965 --> 00:54:31,763
<i>It all fit together like voices</i>
<i>in a complicated fugue,</i>

485
00:54:31,968 --> 00:54:34,937
<i>but it was enough to seize</i>
<i>one of them and hang on to it.</i>

486
00:54:35,138 --> 00:54:37,629
<i>The television screens,</i>
<i>for example.</i>

487
00:54:37,841 --> 00:54:39,638
<i>All by themselves</i>
<i>they created an itinerary</i>

488
00:54:39,843 --> 00:54:42,778
<i>that sometimes</i>
<i>took unexpected turns.</i>

489
00:54:42,979 --> 00:54:44,446
<i>It was sumo season,</i>

490
00:54:44,648 --> 00:54:47,981
<i>and the fans watching the fights</i>
<i>in the very chic Ginza showrooms</i>

491
00:54:48,184 --> 00:54:50,846
<i>were the poorest</i>
<i>of the Tokyo poor,</i>

492
00:54:51,054 --> 00:54:53,545
<i>so poor that they didn't have</i>
<i>even a TVset.</i>

493
00:54:53,757 --> 00:54:56,658
<i>He saw them come,</i>
<i>these lost souls of Namidabashi</i>

494
00:54:56,860 --> 00:54:59,954
<i>with whom he'd drunk sake</i>
<i>one sunny dawn.</i>

495
00:55:00,330 --> 00:55:03,163
<i>How many seasons ago</i>
<i>was that now?</i>

496
00:56:33,656 --> 00:56:35,590
<i>He wrote me...</i>

497
00:56:36,826 --> 00:56:39,124
<i>"Even in the stalls</i>
<i>selling spare electronic parts</i>

498
00:56:39,329 --> 00:56:42,025
<i>that some hipsters</i>
<i>use for jewelry,</i>

499
00:56:42,232 --> 00:56:45,360
<i>there is, in Tokyo's musical score,</i>
<i>a particular staff</i>

500
00:56:45,568 --> 00:56:49,026
<i>whose rarity in Europe condemns me</i>
<i>to a real acoustic exile.</i>

501
00:56:49,239 --> 00:56:51,833
<i>The music of video games.</i>

502
00:56:52,342 --> 00:56:54,401
<i>They're built into tables.</i>

503
00:56:54,611 --> 00:56:57,512
<i>You can drink and have lunch</i>
<i>and go on playing.</i>

504
00:56:57,781 --> 00:56:59,681
<i>The arcades open onto the street,</i>

505
00:56:59,883 --> 00:57:02,477
<i>where you can listen</i>
<i>and play from memory.</i>

506
00:57:31,247 --> 00:57:33,715
<i>I witnessed the birth</i>
<i>of these games in Japan.</i>

507
00:57:33,917 --> 00:57:37,717
<i>I met them again later all over the world,</i>
<i>but one detail was different.</i>

508
00:57:37,921 --> 00:57:39,684
<i>At first it was the familiar game,</i>

509
00:57:39,889 --> 00:57:43,381
<i>a politically incorrect battering</i>
<i>aimed at killing off creatures</i>

510
00:57:43,593 --> 00:57:48,292
<i>that were either prairie dogs</i>
<i>or baby seals - I can't be sure which.</i>

511
00:57:49,365 --> 00:57:52,129
<i>Here's the new Japanese variation.</i>

512
00:57:52,335 --> 00:57:56,396
<i>Instead of the critters, there are</i>
<i>vaguely human heads identified by labels.</i>

513
00:57:56,606 --> 00:57:59,234
<i>At the top,</i>
<i>the chairman of the board.</i>

514
00:57:59,609 --> 00:58:02,703
<i>In front of him,</i>
<i>the vice president and directors.</i>

515
00:58:03,413 --> 00:58:06,576
<i>In the front row, department heads</i>
<i>and personnel manager.</i>

516
00:58:07,116 --> 00:58:09,084
<i>The guy I filmed,</i>

517
00:58:09,285 --> 00:58:11,913
<i>who was smashing up</i>
<i>the hierarchy with enviable energy,</i>

518
00:58:12,121 --> 00:58:14,612
<i>confided that it was</i>
<i>not at all allegorical for him,</i>

519
00:58:14,824 --> 00:58:17,384
<i>that he was thinking</i>
<i>very specifically of his superiors.</i>

520
00:58:17,594 --> 00:58:19,824
<i>That's no doubt why</i>
<i>the 'personnel manager'</i>

521
00:58:20,029 --> 00:58:24,227
<i>has been clubbed so often and so hard</i>
<i>that it was taken out of commission</i>

522
00:58:24,434 --> 00:58:28,063
<i>and a baby seal</i>
<i>reinserted in its place.</i>

523
00:58:32,942 --> 00:58:35,308
<i>Hayao Yamaneko invents</i>
<i>video games with his machine.</i>

524
00:58:36,813 --> 00:58:40,078
<i>To please me, he puts in</i>
<i>my most beloved animals,</i>

525
00:58:40,283 --> 00:58:42,376
<i>the cat and the owl.</i>

526
00:58:48,958 --> 00:58:51,017
<i>He claims</i>
<i>that only electronics</i>

527
00:58:51,227 --> 00:58:55,687
<i>can deal with feeling,</i>
<i>memory and imagination.</i>

528
00:58:57,066 --> 00:58:59,330
<i>Mizoguchi's Arsène Lupin,</i>
<i>for example,</i>

529
00:58:59,536 --> 00:59:02,437
<i>or the no-less-imaginary</i>
<i>Burakumin.</i>

530
00:59:03,139 --> 00:59:07,599
<i>How to show a category</i>
<i>of Japanese that doesn't exist?</i>

531
00:59:07,944 --> 00:59:12,313
<i>Yes, I saw them in Osaka, for hire</i>
<i>by the day, sleeping on the ground.</i>

532
00:59:12,515 --> 00:59:15,575
<i>Since the Middle Ages they've been</i>
<i>doomed to grubby and thankless jobs,</i>

533
00:59:15,785 --> 00:59:19,084
<i>but since the Meiji era,</i>
<i>officially nothing sets them apart,</i>

534
00:59:19,289 --> 00:59:23,658
<i>and their real name - the</i> eta -
<i>is a taboo word, not to be pronounced.</i>

535
00:59:24,994 --> 00:59:26,621
<i>They are non-persons.</i>

536
00:59:26,829 --> 00:59:29,662
<i>How can they be shown,</i>
<i>except as non-images?</i>

537
00:59:38,908 --> 00:59:43,277
<i>Video games are the first stage in a plan</i>
<i>for machines to help the human race,</i>

538
00:59:43,479 --> 00:59:46,039
<i>the only plan that offers</i>
<i>a future for intelligence.</i>

539
00:59:47,350 --> 00:59:50,513
<i>For the moment, the unsurpassable</i>
<i>philosophy of our time</i>

540
00:59:50,720 --> 00:59:52,688
<i>is found in Pac-Man.</i>

541
00:59:53,623 --> 00:59:56,251
<i>I didn't know, while sacrificing</i>
<i>my 100-yen coins to him,</i>

542
00:59:56,459 --> 00:59:58,654
<i>that he was</i>
<i>to conquer the world.</i>

543
00:59:58,861 --> 01:00:02,558
<i>Perhaps because he's the most perfect</i>
<i>graphic metaphor of the human condition.</i>

544
01:00:02,765 --> 01:00:04,665
<i>He puts into true perspective</i>

545
01:00:04,867 --> 01:00:07,131
<i>the balance of power between</i>
<i>the individual and the environment,</i>

546
01:00:07,337 --> 01:00:09,464
<i>and he tells us soberly</i>
<i>that though there's honor</i>

547
01:00:09,672 --> 01:00:11,936
<i>in carrying out the greatest number</i>
<i>of victorious attacks,</i>

548
01:00:12,141 --> 01:00:15,110
<i>it never amounts</i>
<i>to anything in the end. "

549
01:00:58,054 --> 01:01:00,284
<i>He was pleased to see</i>
<i>the same chrysanthemums</i>

550
01:01:00,490 --> 01:01:03,186
<i>at funerals</i>
<i>for both men and animals.</i>

551
01:01:03,393 --> 01:01:06,385
<i>He described the ceremony</i>
<i>held at the zoo in Ueno,</i>

552
01:01:06,596 --> 01:01:08,791
<i>in memory of animals</i>
<i>that had died during the year.</i>

553
01:01:09,465 --> 01:01:10,932
<i>"For two years now,</i>

554
01:01:11,134 --> 01:01:14,365
<i>a certain panda's death has rendered</i>
<i>this day even more sorrowful,</i>

555
01:01:14,570 --> 01:01:16,470
<i>a loss more irreparable,</i>
<i>say the newspapers,</i>

556
01:01:16,673 --> 01:01:18,436
<i>than the recent death</i>
<i>of the prime minister.</i>

557
01:01:18,641 --> 01:01:20,438
<i>Last year people really cried.</i>

558
01:01:20,643 --> 01:01:22,406
<i>Now they seem to be</i>
<i>getting used to it,</i>

559
01:01:22,612 --> 01:01:24,580
<i>accepting that each year</i>
<i>death takes a panda</i>

560
01:01:24,781 --> 01:01:27,682
<i>as dragons carry off young girls</i>
<i>in fairy tales.</i>

561
01:01:30,019 --> 01:01:32,146
<i>I've heard this sentence.</i>

562
01:01:33,756 --> 01:01:35,587
<i>'The partition separating</i>
<i>life from death</i>

563
01:01:35,792 --> 01:01:39,421
<i>doesn't seem as thick to us</i>
<i>as it does to a Westerner. '

564
01:01:41,731 --> 01:01:45,633
<i>What I've read most often in the eyes</i>
<i>of people about to die is surprise.</i>

565
01:01:46,369 --> 01:01:50,328
<i>What I read right now in the eyes</i>
<i>of Japanese children is curiosity,</i>

566
01:01:50,540 --> 01:01:54,499
<i>as if they were trying</i>
<i>to see through the partition</i>

567
01:01:54,711 --> 01:01:56,679
<i>to understand an animal's death. "

568
01:03:19,996 --> 01:03:21,827
<i>"I've returned from a country</i>

569
01:03:22,031 --> 01:03:25,797
<i>where death is not a partition to cross</i>
<i>but a road to follow.</i>

570
01:03:26,435 --> 01:03:28,926
<i>The Great Ancestor</i>
<i>of the Bijago archipelago</i>

571
01:03:29,138 --> 01:03:31,072
<i>has described for us</i>
<i>the itinerary of the dead,</i>

572
01:03:31,274 --> 01:03:35,404
<i>and how they move from island to island</i>
<i>according to a rigorous protocol,</i>

573
01:03:35,611 --> 01:03:40,514
<i>until they come to the last beach, where</i>
<i>they wait for the ship to the other world.</i>

574
01:03:42,585 --> 01:03:46,077
<i>If by accident one should meet them,</i>
<i>it is imperative not to recognize them.</i>

575
01:03:49,559 --> 01:03:52,357
<i>The Bijagos</i>
<i>are part of Guinea-Bissau.</i>

576
01:03:52,562 --> 01:03:56,464
<i>In an old film clip, Amilcar Cabral</i>
<i>waves good-bye to the shore.</i>

577
01:03:56,666 --> 01:03:59,794
<i>He's right.</i>
<i>He'll never see it again.</i>

578
01:04:00,169 --> 01:04:02,603
<i>Luis Cabral made</i>
<i>the same gesture 15 years later,</i>

579
01:04:02,805 --> 01:04:05,330
<i>on the canoe</i>
<i>that was bringing us back.</i>

580
01:04:05,541 --> 01:04:09,978
<i>Guinea had by that time become a nation,</i>
<i>and Luis was its president.</i>

581
01:04:10,580 --> 01:04:13,481
<i>All those who remember the war</i>
<i>remember him.</i>

582
01:04:13,716 --> 01:04:18,346
<i>Like his half brother Amilcar, he was of</i>
<i>mixed Guinean and Cape Verdian blood,</i>

583
01:04:18,554 --> 01:04:22,923
<i>and, like Amilcar, a founding member</i>
<i>of an unusual party, the PAIGC,</i>

584
01:04:23,125 --> 01:04:25,821
<i>which, by uniting the two colonized</i>
<i>countries in a single struggle,</i>

585
01:04:26,028 --> 01:04:29,486
<i>sought to herald</i>
<i>a federation of the two states.</i>

586
01:04:30,466 --> 01:04:32,798
<i>I've heard the stories</i>
<i>of former guerrilla fighters,</i>

587
01:04:33,002 --> 01:04:36,870
<i>who'd fought in conditions so inhuman</i>
<i>that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers</i>

588
01:04:37,073 --> 01:04:39,268
<i>for having to bear what</i>
<i>they themselves suffered.</i>

589
01:04:39,475 --> 01:04:41,966
<i>I heard that</i>
<i>and many more things</i>

590
01:04:42,178 --> 01:04:45,978
<i>that make one ashamed for having used</i>
<i>lightly, even if inadvertently,</i>

591
01:04:46,182 --> 01:04:49,618
<i>the word "guerrilla" to describe</i>
<i>a certain kind of filmmaking,</i>

592
01:04:49,819 --> 01:04:52,185
<i>a word linked at the time</i>
<i>to many theoretical debates</i>

593
01:04:52,388 --> 01:04:54,948
<i>as well as bloody defeats</i>
<i>on the ground.</i>

594
01:04:55,157 --> 01:04:58,092
<i>Amilcar Cabral was the only one</i>
<i>to lead a victorious guerrilla war,</i>

595
01:04:58,294 --> 01:05:00,660
<i>and not only in terms</i>
<i>of military conquests.</i>

596
01:05:00,863 --> 01:05:03,263
<i>He knew his people.</i>
<i>He'd studied them at length.</i>

597
01:05:03,466 --> 01:05:06,993
<i>He wanted every liberated region</i>
<i>to herald a different kind of society.</i>

598
01:05:07,203 --> 01:05:09,797
<i>The socialist countries send</i>
<i>weapons to arm the fighters.</i>

599
01:05:10,006 --> 01:05:13,134
<i>The social democracies</i>
<i>fill the people's stores.</i>

600
01:05:13,342 --> 01:05:15,776
<i>May the extreme Left</i>
<i>forgive history,</i>

601
01:05:15,978 --> 01:05:20,779
<i>but if the guerrillas are like fish</i>
<i>in water, it's a bit thanks to Sweden.</i>

602
01:05:20,983 --> 01:05:24,475
<i>Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguities.</i>
<i>He knew the traps.</i>

603
01:05:24,687 --> 01:05:30,125
<i>He wrote, "It's as though</i>
<i>we're facing a raging river,</i>

604
01:05:30,326 --> 01:05:32,317
<i>and those trying</i>
<i>to cross are drowning.</i>

605
01:05:32,528 --> 01:05:35,224
<i>But there's no choice.</i>
<i>They must get to the other side. "

606
01:05:54,550 --> 01:05:58,213
<i>Now the scene moves to Cassaca,</i>
<i>February 17th, 1980,</i>

607
01:05:58,421 --> 01:06:01,652
<i>but to grasp it properly,</i>
<i>one must move forward in time.</i>

608
01:06:01,857 --> 01:06:05,020
<i>In a year, Luis Cabral,</i>
<i>the president, will be in prison,</i>

609
01:06:05,227 --> 01:06:08,594
<i>and the weeping man</i>
<i>he has just decorated, Major Nino,</i>

610
01:06:08,798 --> 01:06:10,595
<i>will have taken power.</i>

611
01:06:10,967 --> 01:06:12,696
<i>The party will have split.</i>

612
01:06:12,902 --> 01:06:16,497
<i>Guineans and Capeverdians</i>
<i>will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy.</i>

613
01:06:16,706 --> 01:06:19,334
<i>We'll see that beneath</i>
<i>this ceremony of promotions,</i>

614
01:06:19,542 --> 01:06:22,534
<i>seemingly perpetuating</i>
<i>the brotherhood of the struggle,</i>

615
01:06:22,745 --> 01:06:25,612
<i>there lay a pit</i>
<i>of post-victory bitterness,</i>

616
01:06:25,815 --> 01:06:28,943
<i>and that Nino's tears expressed</i>
<i>not an ex-warrior's emotion</i>

617
01:06:29,151 --> 01:06:31,016
<i>but the wounded pride of a hero</i>

618
01:06:31,220 --> 01:06:34,121
<i>slighted at not being raised</i>
<i>high enough above the rest.</i>

619
01:06:36,359 --> 01:06:39,294
<i>Beneath each of these faces</i>
<i>lies a memory,</i>

620
01:06:39,495 --> 01:06:42,623
<i>and where there was to be</i>
<i>one collective memory,</i>

621
01:06:42,932 --> 01:06:46,527
<i>there are a thousand memories of men</i>
<i>who parade their personal wounds</i>

622
01:06:46,736 --> 01:06:48,533
<i>in the great wound of history.</i>

623
01:06:49,839 --> 01:06:53,900
<i>In Portugal, swept up in turn</i>
<i>by the breaking wave of Bissau,</i>

624
01:06:54,110 --> 01:06:57,910
<i>Miguel Torga, who'd struggled all his</i>
<i>life against the dictatorship, wrote,</i>

625
01:06:58,114 --> 01:07:01,572
<i>'Every bit player</i>
<i>represents only himself.</i>

626
01:07:01,984 --> 01:07:04,179
<i>Instead of seeking social change,</i>

627
01:07:04,387 --> 01:07:09,825
<i>he seeks simply, in the revolutionary act,</i>
<i>to boost his own image. '

628
01:07:12,194 --> 01:07:14,924
<i>That's the way</i>
<i>the breakers recede,</i>

629
01:07:15,131 --> 01:07:19,261
<i>and so predictably that one must believe</i>
<i>in an 'amnesia of the future'</i>

630
01:07:19,468 --> 01:07:22,631
<i>that history bestows,</i>
<i>out of mercy or self-interest,</i>

631
01:07:22,838 --> 01:07:24,965
<i>on those whom it recruits.</i>

632
01:07:25,307 --> 01:07:28,799
<i>Amilcar murdered</i>
<i>by members of his own party,</i>

633
01:07:29,011 --> 01:07:32,174
<i>the liberated areas</i>
<i>fallen to bloody petty tyrants,</i>

634
01:07:32,381 --> 01:07:34,645
<i>liquidated in their turn</i>
<i>by a central power</i>

635
01:07:34,850 --> 01:07:38,411
<i>to whose stability everyone</i>
<i>paid homage until the military coup -

636
01:07:38,621 --> 01:07:40,953
<i>that's how history advances,</i>

637
01:07:41,157 --> 01:07:44,217
<i>plugging its memory</i>
<i>like one plugs one's ears.</i>

638
01:07:44,427 --> 01:07:46,190
<i>Luis, exiled to Cuba,</i>

639
01:07:46,395 --> 01:07:49,057
<i>and Nino,</i>
<i>himself a target of later plots,</i>

640
01:07:49,265 --> 01:07:53,065
<i>can summon each other endlessly</i>
<i>before history's court -

641
01:07:53,269 --> 01:07:55,294
<i>but history doesn't care.</i>

642
01:07:55,504 --> 01:07:58,735
<i>It has only one friend,</i>
<i>the one Brando spoke of in</i> Apocalypse:

643
01:07:59,241 --> 01:08:02,039
<i>The horror that has a name</i>
<i>and a face.</i>

644
01:08:04,513 --> 01:08:08,711
<i>I'm writing you all this from another world,</i>
<i>a world of appearances.</i>

645
01:08:09,185 --> 01:08:12,279
<i>In a way, the two worlds</i>
<i>communicate with each other.</i>

646
01:08:12,488 --> 01:08:15,218
<i>Memory is to one</i>
<i>what history is to the other.</i>

647
01:08:15,424 --> 01:08:17,392
<i>An impossibility.</i>

648
01:08:17,860 --> 01:08:20,954
<i>Legends are born of the need</i>
<i>to decipher the indecipherable.</i>

649
01:08:21,163 --> 01:08:23,859
<i>Memories must make do</i>
<i>with their delirium, with their drift.</i>

650
01:08:26,735 --> 01:08:28,635
<i>A moment stopped would burn</i>

651
01:08:28,838 --> 01:08:32,035
<i>like a frame of film caught</i>
<i>in the furnace of the projector.</i>

652
01:08:32,241 --> 01:08:35,108
<i>Madness protects,</i>
<i>as fever does.</i>

653
01:08:37,012 --> 01:08:39,412
<i>I envy Hayao and his Zone.</i>

654
01:08:39,615 --> 01:08:41,981
<i>He plays</i>
<i>with the signs of his memory.</i>

655
01:08:42,184 --> 01:08:44,345
<i>He pins them down</i>
<i>and decorates them like insects</i>

656
01:08:44,553 --> 01:08:46,316
<i>that have flown beyond time</i>

657
01:08:46,522 --> 01:08:50,083
<i>and that he can contemplate</i>
<i>from a point outside of time -

658
01:08:50,326 --> 01:08:52,920
<i>the only eternity we have left.</i>

659
01:08:53,929 --> 01:08:55,897
<i>I look at his machines.</i>

660
01:08:56,098 --> 01:09:00,262
<i>I think of a world where each memory</i>
<i>could create its own legend. "

661
01:10:04,333 --> 01:10:06,494
<i>He wrote that only one film</i>
<i>had been capable</i>

662
01:10:06,702 --> 01:10:08,966
<i>of portraying impossible memory,</i>
<i>insane memory.</i>

663
01:10:09,171 --> 01:10:12,038
<i>Alfred Hitchcock's</i> Vertigo.

664
01:10:13,976 --> 01:10:15,637
<i>In the spiral</i>
<i>of the opening titles,</i>

665
01:10:15,844 --> 01:10:19,610
<i>he saw time covering a field</i>
<i>growing ever wider as it moved away,</i>

666
01:10:19,815 --> 01:10:24,275
<i>a cyclone whose present moment</i>
<i>contains the motionless eye.</i>

667
01:10:25,588 --> 01:10:29,615
<i>In San Francisco he'd gone</i>
<i>on a pilgrimage to all the film's locations.</i>

668
01:10:30,192 --> 01:10:35,459
<i>The florist Podesta Baldocchi,</i>
<i>where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak,</i>

669
01:10:35,664 --> 01:10:37,632
<i>he the hunter</i>
<i>and she the prey -

670
01:10:37,833 --> 01:10:40,131
<i>or was it the other way around?</i>

671
01:10:40,536 --> 01:10:43,403
<i>The tile floor hadn't changed.</i>

672
01:10:43,772 --> 01:10:46,434
<i>He'd driven up and down the hills</i>
<i>of San Francisco,</i>

673
01:10:46,642 --> 01:10:50,305
<i>where Jimmy Stewart - Scottie -
<i>follows Kim Novak- Madeleine.</i>

674
01:10:53,349 --> 01:10:56,443
<i>It seems to be about pursuit,</i>
<i>mystery and murder,</i>

675
01:10:56,652 --> 01:10:58,984
<i>but in truth</i>
<i>it's about power and freedom,</i>

676
01:10:59,188 --> 01:11:01,486
<i>melancholy and dazzlement,</i>

677
01:11:01,690 --> 01:11:05,786
<i>so carefully coded within the spiral</i>
<i>that you could miss it</i>

678
01:11:05,995 --> 01:11:08,361
<i>and not immediately notice</i>
<i>that this vertigo of space</i>

679
01:11:08,564 --> 01:11:11,533
<i>in reality stands</i>
<i>for the vertigo of time.</i>

680
01:11:13,269 --> 01:11:15,169
<i>He'd followed every trail,</i>

681
01:11:15,371 --> 01:11:17,339
<i>even to the cemetery</i>
<i>at Mission Dolores,</i>

682
01:11:17,539 --> 01:11:20,940
<i>where Madeleine prayed at the grave</i>
<i>of a woman long dead</i>

683
01:11:21,143 --> 01:11:23,611
<i>whom she should not</i>
<i>have known.</i>

684
01:11:23,979 --> 01:11:26,447
<i>He'd followed Madeleine -
<i>as Scottie had done -

685
01:11:26,649 --> 01:11:28,480
<i>to the Museum</i>
<i>of the Legion of Honor,</i>

686
01:11:28,684 --> 01:11:31,744
<i>before the portrait of a dead woman</i>
<i>she shouldn't have known.</i>

687
01:11:31,954 --> 01:11:34,514
<i>And on the portrait,</i>
<i>as in Madeleine's hair,</i>

688
01:11:34,723 --> 01:11:36,691
<i>the spiral of time.</i>

689
01:11:44,733 --> 01:11:48,999
<i>The Victorian hotel where Madeleine</i>
<i>disappeared had itself disappeared.</i>

690
01:11:49,204 --> 01:11:52,731
<i>Concrete had replaced it</i>
<i>at the corner of Eddie and Gough.</i>

691
01:11:52,941 --> 01:11:57,640
<i>But the cross-section of redwood trunk</i>
<i>was still in Muir Woods.</i>

692
01:11:57,913 --> 01:11:59,881
<i>On it, Madeleine traced</i>
<i>the short distance</i>

693
01:12:00,082 --> 01:12:04,314
<i>between two of those concentric lines</i>
<i>that measure the age of the tree and said,</i>

694
01:12:04,520 --> 01:12:07,216
<i>"Here I was born,</i>
<i>and there I died. "

695
01:12:08,424 --> 01:12:11,359
<i>He remembered another film</i>
<i>in which this passage was quoted.</i>

696
01:12:11,860 --> 01:12:14,761
<i>The redwood was</i>
<i>in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris,</i>

697
01:12:14,963 --> 01:12:20,424
<i>and the hand pointed to a place</i>
<i>beyond the tree - outside of time.</i>

698
01:12:23,238 --> 01:12:25,570
<i>This painted horse</i>
<i>at San Juan Bautista,</i>

699
01:12:25,774 --> 01:12:28,334
<i>with an eye</i>
<i>that looked like Madeleine's -

700
01:12:28,544 --> 01:12:31,775
<i>Hitchcock had invented nothing.</i>
<i>It was all there.</i>

701
01:12:32,448 --> 01:12:34,382
<i>He'd run under the arches</i>
<i>in the mission</i>

702
01:12:34,583 --> 01:12:36,608
<i>as Madeleine had run</i>
<i>towards her death -

703
01:12:36,819 --> 01:12:39,379
<i>but was it really hers?</i>

704
01:12:41,724 --> 01:12:44,693
<i>From this fake tower-</i>
<i>the only thing Hitchcock added-</i>

705
01:12:44,893 --> 01:12:47,726
<i>he imagined Scottie</i>
<i>as "Time's Fool of Love,"</i>

706
01:12:48,097 --> 01:12:52,591
<i>unable to live with memory</i>
<i>without falsifying it,</i>

707
01:12:52,801 --> 01:12:55,827
<i>inventing a double for Madeleine</i>
<i>in another dimension of time,</i>

708
01:12:56,038 --> 01:12:58,871
<i>a Zone that would belong</i>
<i>only to him,</i>

709
01:12:59,074 --> 01:13:01,702
<i>from which he could decipher</i>
<i>the undecipherable story</i>

710
01:13:01,910 --> 01:13:05,471
<i>begun under the Golden Gate when he</i>
<i>pulled Madeleine out of San Francisco Bay,</i>

711
01:13:05,681 --> 01:13:08,616
<i>when he'd saved her from death</i>
<i>before casting her back to death -

712
01:13:08,817 --> 01:13:11,547
<i>or was it the other way around?</i>

713
01:13:27,636 --> 01:13:31,629
<i>"In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage</i>
<i>of a film I'd seen 19 times.</i>

714
01:13:32,174 --> 01:13:35,803
<i>In Iceland, I laid the first stone</i>
<i>of an imaginary film.</i>

715
01:13:36,011 --> 01:13:38,673
<i>That summer,</i>
<i>I'd met three children on a road,</i>

716
01:13:38,881 --> 01:13:41,042
<i>and a volcano had risen up</i>
<i>out of the sea -

717
01:13:41,250 --> 01:13:43,684
<i>the Set Designer</i>
<i>at work once again.</i>

718
01:13:45,053 --> 01:13:49,456
<i>American astronauts trained in this lunar</i>
<i>landscape before flying to the moon.</i>

719
01:13:49,658 --> 01:13:51,626
<i>I immediately saw it as a setting</i>
<i>for science fiction,</i>

720
01:13:51,827 --> 01:13:53,488
<i>the landscape of another planet -

721
01:13:53,695 --> 01:13:58,325
<i>No, let it be our own for someone</i>
<i>who comes from very far away.</i>

722
01:13:59,368 --> 01:14:02,303
<i>I imagine him lumbering about</i>
<i>like a deep-sea diver</i>

723
01:14:02,504 --> 01:14:04,768
<i>in this volcanic soil</i>
<i>that sticks to the soles.</i>

724
01:14:04,973 --> 01:14:08,875
<i>All of a sudden he stumbles,</i>
<i>and with the next step it's a year later.</i>

725
01:14:09,077 --> 01:14:12,046
<i>He's walking on a small path</i>
<i>near the Dutch border,</i>

726
01:14:12,247 --> 01:14:14,977
<i>along a seabird sanctuary.</i>

727
01:14:16,318 --> 01:14:18,445
<i>That's for a start.</i>

728
01:14:18,654 --> 01:14:21,589
<i>Why this cut in time,</i>
<i>this connection of memories?</i>

729
01:14:21,790 --> 01:14:24,315
<i>That's just it.</i>
<i>He can't understand.</i>

730
01:14:24,526 --> 01:14:28,121
<i>He comes not from another planet</i>
<i>but from our future.</i>

731
01:14:28,330 --> 01:14:32,699
<i>4001, when the human brain</i>
<i>has reached the era of full employment.</i>

732
01:14:32,901 --> 01:14:34,869
<i>Everything works to perfection -

733
01:14:35,070 --> 01:14:37,630
<i>all that we now allow to slumber,</i>
<i>including memory.</i>

734
01:14:38,507 --> 01:14:43,137
<i>The logical result.</i>
<i>Total recall is memory anesthetized.</i>

735
01:14:43,345 --> 01:14:46,212
<i>After so many stories of men</i>
<i>who forgot how to remember,</i>

736
01:14:46,415 --> 01:14:49,179
<i>here's the story of one</i>
<i>who forgot how to forget...</i>

737
01:14:50,519 --> 01:14:52,749
<i>and who, through some peculiarity</i>
<i>of his nature,</i>

738
01:14:52,955 --> 01:14:56,914
<i>instead of being proud and scorning</i>
<i>mankind of the past and its shadows,</i>

739
01:14:57,125 --> 01:15:01,391
<i>turned to it first with curiosity</i>
<i>and then with compassion.</i>

740
01:15:01,730 --> 01:15:03,960
<i>In the world he comes from,</i>
<i>to call forth a vision,</i>

741
01:15:04,166 --> 01:15:07,101
<i>to be moved by a portrait,</i>
<i>to tremble at the sound of music</i>

742
01:15:07,302 --> 01:15:11,033
<i>can only be signs</i>
<i>of a long and painful prehistory.</i>

743
01:15:11,573 --> 01:15:13,473
<i>He wants to understand.</i>

744
01:15:13,675 --> 01:15:17,441
<i>He feels these infirmities of time</i>
<i>like an injustice,</i>

745
01:15:17,646 --> 01:15:21,707
<i>and he reacts to it like Che Guevara</i>
<i>or youth of the '60s - with indignation.</i>

746
01:15:23,285 --> 01:15:25,378
<i>He's a third worlder of time.</i>

747
01:15:25,587 --> 01:15:28,556
<i>The idea that unhappiness</i>
<i>had existed in his planet's past</i>

748
01:15:28,757 --> 01:15:32,921
<i>is as unbearable to him as the existence</i>
<i>of poverty in their present moment.</i>

749
01:15:36,832 --> 01:15:38,925
<i>Naturally, he will fail.</i>

750
01:15:39,134 --> 01:15:41,364
<i>The unhappiness he discovers</i>
<i>is as inaccessible to him</i>

751
01:15:41,570 --> 01:15:46,132
<i>as the poverty of a poor country</i>
<i>is to the children of a rich one.</i>

752
01:15:46,341 --> 01:15:49,139
<i>He's chosen</i>
<i>to give up his privileges,</i>

753
01:15:49,344 --> 01:15:53,246
<i>but he can do nothing about the privilege</i>
<i>that has allowed him to choose.</i>

754
01:15:54,516 --> 01:15:57,610
<i>His only comfort is precisely</i>
<i>what threw him into this absurd quest.</i>

755
01:15:57,819 --> 01:16:00,583
<i>A song cycle by Moussorgski.</i>

756
01:16:00,889 --> 01:16:03,653
<i>It's still sung</i>
<i>in the 40th century.</i>

757
01:16:03,859 --> 01:16:07,056
<i>Its meaning has been lost,</i>
<i>but for the first time, he glimpsed</i>

758
01:16:07,262 --> 01:16:09,492
<i>the presence of that thing</i>
<i>he didn't understand,</i>

759
01:16:09,698 --> 01:16:11,996
<i>which had to do</i>
<i>with unhappiness and memory,</i>

760
01:16:12,200 --> 01:16:14,361
<i>which he must grasp at all cost,</i>

761
01:16:14,570 --> 01:16:18,802
<i>and toward which, slowly,</i>
<i>heavily, he began to walk.</i>

762
01:16:21,843 --> 01:16:24,607
<i>Of course,</i>
<i>I'll never make that film.</i>

763
01:16:26,715 --> 01:16:30,173
<i>Nonetheless, I'm collecting sets,</i>
<i>devising plot twists,</i>

764
01:16:30,385 --> 01:16:32,683
<i>putting in my favorite creatures.</i>

765
01:16:32,888 --> 01:16:35,186
<i>I've even given it a title,</i>

766
01:16:35,791 --> 01:16:38,282
<i>indeed, the title</i>
<i>of those Moussorgski songs.</i>

767
01:16:38,493 --> 01:16:40,620
Sunless."

768
01:17:00,983 --> 01:17:03,952
<i>"On May 15th, 1945,</i>
<i>at 7.00 a.m.,</i>

769
01:17:04,152 --> 01:17:06,814
<i>the 382nd US Infantry Regiment</i>

770
01:17:07,022 --> 01:17:10,958
<i>attacked a hill in Okinawa</i>
<i>they had renamed Dick Hill.</i>

771
01:17:11,159 --> 01:17:14,651
<i>I suppose they believed</i>
<i>they were conquering Japanese soil</i>

772
01:17:14,863 --> 01:17:17,559
<i>and knew nothing</i>
<i>about Ryukyu civilization.</i>

773
01:17:17,766 --> 01:17:19,393
<i>Neither did I,</i>

774
01:17:19,601 --> 01:17:21,728
<i>except that the faces</i>
<i>of the market ladies at Itoman</i>

775
01:17:21,937 --> 01:17:25,498
<i>spoke to me more of Gauguin</i>
<i>than of Utamaro.</i>

776
01:17:25,707 --> 01:17:29,803
<i>Through centuries of dreamy vassalage,</i>
<i>time had not stirred in the archipelago.</i>

777
01:17:30,012 --> 01:17:31,946
<i>Then came the rupture.</i>

778
01:17:32,514 --> 01:17:36,917
<i>Is it a property of islands to make women</i>
<i>the guardians of their memory?</i>

779
01:17:37,119 --> 01:17:41,317
<i>I learned that, as in the Bijagos, magic</i>
<i>knowledge is passed on through women.</i>

780
01:17:41,523 --> 01:17:44,253
<i>Each community</i>
<i>has its priestess, the</i> noro,

781
01:17:44,459 --> 01:17:47,826
<i>who presides over all ceremonies,</i>
<i>with the exception of funerals.</i>

782
01:17:48,497 --> 01:17:50,590
<i>The Japanese defended</i>
<i>their position inch by inch.</i>

783
01:17:50,799 --> 01:17:54,326
<i>At the end of the day,</i>
<i>the remnants of L Company</i>

784
01:17:54,536 --> 01:17:57,061
<i>had gotten only</i>
<i>halfway up the hill-</i>

785
01:17:57,339 --> 01:17:59,739
<i>a hill like the one</i>
<i>where I followed some villagers</i>

786
01:17:59,941 --> 01:18:03,274
<i>on their way</i>
<i>to a purification ceremony.</i>

787
01:18:03,478 --> 01:18:05,878
<i>The</i> noro <i>communicates</i>
<i>with the gods of the sea,</i>

788
01:18:06,081 --> 01:18:07,981
<i>of rain, of earth, of fire.</i>

789
01:18:08,183 --> 01:18:12,313
<i>She speaks of them</i>
<i>as of family members who've made good.</i>

790
01:18:12,521 --> 01:18:16,514
<i>All bow down before the Sister Deity,</i>
<i>a reflection, in the absolute,</i>

791
01:18:16,725 --> 01:18:19,626
<i>of a privileged relationship</i>
<i>between brother and sister.</i>

792
01:18:19,828 --> 01:18:23,559
<i>Even after her death, the sister</i>
<i>maintains her spiritual predominance.</i>

793
01:18:23,765 --> 01:18:25,733
<i>At dawn</i>
<i>the Americans withdrew.</i>

794
01:18:25,934 --> 01:18:28,732
<i>Fighting went on for a month</i>
<i>before the island surrendered-</i>

795
01:18:28,937 --> 01:18:31,371
<i>and toppled</i>
<i>into the modern world.</i>

796
01:18:31,573 --> 01:18:33,302
<i>Twenty-seven years</i>
<i>of American occupation,</i>

797
01:18:33,508 --> 01:18:35,703
<i>Japan's disputed</i>
<i>sovereignty restored.</i>

798
01:18:35,911 --> 01:18:38,072
<i>Two miles from bowling alleys</i>
<i>and gas stations,</i>

799
01:18:38,280 --> 01:18:41,511
<i>the</i> noro <i>continues her dialogue</i>
<i>with the gods.</i>

800
01:18:41,717 --> 01:18:44,777
<i>When she's gone,</i>
<i>the dialogue will end.</i>

801
01:18:44,986 --> 01:18:48,945
<i>Brothers will no longer know that</i>
<i>their dead sister is watching over them.</i>

802
01:19:58,226 --> 01:20:02,253
<i>When filming this ceremony, I knew</i>
<i>I was present at the end of something.</i>

803
01:20:02,931 --> 01:20:06,367
<i>Magical cultures that disappear</i>
<i>leave traces for those who follow.</i>

804
01:20:06,568 --> 01:20:08,832
<i>This one will leave none.</i>

805
01:20:09,037 --> 01:20:11,301
<i>The rupture in history</i>
<i>has been too violent.</i>

806
01:20:11,506 --> 01:20:14,066
<i>I touched that rupture</i>
<i>at the top of the hill,</i>

807
01:20:14,276 --> 01:20:16,244
<i>as I had at the edge of the ditch</i>

808
01:20:16,444 --> 01:20:19,413
<i>where 200 girls used grenades</i>
<i>in 1945 to commit suicide</i>

809
01:20:19,614 --> 01:20:23,243
<i>rather than fall</i>
<i>into American hands.</i>

810
01:20:23,451 --> 01:20:25,510
<i>People have</i>
<i>their pictures taken here.</i>

811
01:20:25,720 --> 01:20:29,918
<i>Grenade-shaped cigarette lighters</i>
<i>are sold nearby as souvenirs.</i>

812
01:20:34,930 --> 01:20:36,397
<i>On Hayao's machine,</i>

813
01:20:36,598 --> 01:20:41,934
<i>war resembles letters being burned,</i>
<i>shredded in a fiery frame.</i>

814
01:20:42,204 --> 01:20:45,867
<i>The code name for Pearl Harbor</i>
<i>was "Tora, tora, tora,"</i>

815
01:20:46,074 --> 01:20:49,771
<i>the name of the cat the couple</i>
<i>in Gotokuji was praying for.</i>

816
01:20:49,978 --> 01:20:54,847
<i>So all of this will have begun with</i>
<i>the name of a cat pronounced three times.</i>

817
01:21:02,490 --> 01:21:07,052
<i>Off Okinawa,</i>
<i>kamikazes dived on the American fleet.</i>

818
01:21:07,262 --> 01:21:11,062
<i>They would become a legend, and were</i>
<i>likelier material for it, obviously,</i>

819
01:21:11,266 --> 01:21:14,258
<i>than the special units who exposed their</i>
<i>prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria</i>

820
01:21:14,469 --> 01:21:19,406
<i>and then to hot water to see</i>
<i>how fast flesh separates from bone.</i>

821
01:21:20,275 --> 01:21:24,439
<i>Only their last letters would reveal</i>
<i>that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers,</i>

822
01:21:24,646 --> 01:21:27,444
<i>nor were they all</i>
<i>swashbuckling samurai.</i>

823
01:21:27,649 --> 01:21:32,313
<i>Before drinking his last cup of sake,</i>
<i>Ryoji Uebara had written,</i>

824
01:21:32,520 --> 01:21:37,116
<i>'I've always thought that Japan</i>
<i>must live free to live eternally.</i>

825
01:21:37,325 --> 01:21:41,489
<i>It may seem idiotic to say that today,</i>
<i>under a totalitarian regime.</i>

826
01:21:42,063 --> 01:21:47,160
<i>We kamikaze pilots are machines.</i>
<i>We have nothing to say</i>

827
01:21:47,369 --> 01:21:51,169
<i>except to beg our compatriots to make</i>
<i>Japan the great country of our dreams.</i>

828
01:21:51,373 --> 01:21:53,170
<i>In the plane</i>
<i>I'm a machine,</i>

829
01:21:53,375 --> 01:21:56,276
<i>a bit of magnetized metal that will</i>
<i>plaster itself to an aircraft carrier,</i>

830
01:21:56,478 --> 01:22:01,415
<i>but on the ground, I'm a human being,</i>
<i>with feelings and passions.</i>

831
01:22:01,616 --> 01:22:03,811
<i>Please excuse</i>
<i>these disorganized thoughts.</i>

832
01:22:04,019 --> 01:22:05,919
<i>I'm leaving you</i>
<i>with a rather melancholy picture,</i>

833
01:22:06,121 --> 01:22:08,589
<i>but in the depths of my heart,</i>
<i>I'm happy.</i>

834
01:22:08,790 --> 01:22:12,385
<i>I've spoken frankly.</i>
<i>Forgive me. "'</i>

835
01:23:36,945 --> 01:23:40,108
<i>Every time he came back from Africa,</i>
<i>he stopped at the Island of Sal,</i>

836
01:23:40,315 --> 01:23:43,443
<i>a salt rock</i>
<i>in the middle of the Atlantic.</i>

837
01:23:43,651 --> 01:23:45,516
<i>At the end of the island,</i>

838
01:23:45,720 --> 01:23:48,553
<i>beyond the village of Santa Maria</i>
<i>and its cemetery of painted tombs,</i>

839
01:23:48,757 --> 01:23:52,659
<i>one need only walk straight ahead</i>
<i>to meet the desert.</i>

840
01:24:06,441 --> 01:24:08,432
<i>He wrote...</i>

841
01:24:08,643 --> 01:24:10,406
<i>"I've understood the visions.</i>

842
01:24:10,612 --> 01:24:13,080
<i>Suddenly you're in the desert</i>
<i>the way you are in the night.</i>

843
01:24:13,281 --> 01:24:15,340
<i>Whatever is not desert</i>
<i>no longer exists.</i>

844
01:24:15,550 --> 01:24:18,883
<i>You don't want to believe</i>
<i>the images that crop up.</i>

845
01:25:14,542 --> 01:25:17,909
<i>Did I write that there are emus</i>
<i>in the Ile de France?</i>

846
01:25:19,614 --> 01:25:23,414
<i>'Island of France' sounds strange</i>
<i>on the Island of Sal.</i>

847
01:25:23,651 --> 01:25:25,778
<i>My memory superimposes</i>
<i>two towers,</i>

848
01:25:25,987 --> 01:25:29,286
<i>the one in the castle ruins of Montepilloy</i>
<i>that Joan of Arc used as a camp,</i>

849
01:25:30,091 --> 01:25:32,355
<i>and the lighthouse tower</i>
<i>at the southern tip of Sal,</i>

850
01:25:32,560 --> 01:25:35,757
<i>probably one</i>
<i>of the last lighthouses to use oil.</i>

851
01:26:00,388 --> 01:26:03,118
<i>A lighthouse in the Sahel</i>
<i>looks pasted on</i>

852
01:26:03,324 --> 01:26:07,226
<i>until you see the ocean</i>
<i>at the edge of the sand and salt.</i>

853
01:26:07,962 --> 01:26:11,295
<i>Crews of transcontinental planes</i>
<i>are rotated on Sal.</i>

854
01:26:11,499 --> 01:26:13,558
<i>Their club brings</i>
<i>to this empty frontier</i>

855
01:26:13,768 --> 01:26:17,431
<i>a small touch of the seaside resort</i>
<i>that makes the rest even more unreal.</i>

856
01:26:17,639 --> 01:26:20,802
<i>They feed the stray dogs</i>
<i>that live on the beach.</i>

857
01:26:34,522 --> 01:26:37,184
<i>My dogs seemed</i>
<i>pretty nervous that evening.</i>

858
01:26:37,392 --> 01:26:41,158
<i>They played with the sea</i>
<i>as I'd never seen them before.</i>

859
01:26:41,396 --> 01:26:44,126
<i>Listening to Radio Hong Kong</i>
<i>later on, I understood.</i>

860
01:26:44,332 --> 01:26:47,529
<i>That was the first day</i>
<i>of the lunar new year,</i>

861
01:26:47,735 --> 01:26:52,399
<i>and for the first time in 60 years, the</i>
<i>sign of the Dog met the sign of Water. "

862
01:27:35,583 --> 01:27:37,915
<i>"Out there,</i>
<i>11,000 miles away,</i>

863
01:27:38,119 --> 01:27:41,020
<i>a single shadow remains immobile</i>
<i>among the long moving shadows</i>

864
01:27:41,222 --> 01:27:43,782
<i>that the January light</i>
<i>casts on the ground in Tokyo.</i>

865
01:27:43,992 --> 01:27:46,426
<i>The shadow of the Asakusa monk.</i>

866
01:28:36,110 --> 01:28:39,136
<i>For in Japan too</i>
<i>the Year of the Dog is beginning.</i>

867
01:28:39,347 --> 01:28:42,248
<i>Temples are filled with visitors</i>
<i>who toss their coins</i>

868
01:28:42,450 --> 01:28:44,418
<i>and pray, Japanese-style -

869
01:28:44,619 --> 01:28:48,111
<i>a prayer slipped quietly into life</i>
<i>without interrupting it.</i>

870
01:29:19,987 --> 01:29:22,512
<i>Stranded at the end of the world,</i>
<i>on my Island of Sal,</i>

871
01:29:22,724 --> 01:29:25,056
<i>in the company</i>
<i>of my prancing dogs,</i>

872
01:29:25,259 --> 01:29:26,920
<i>I remember that January in Tokyo,</i>

873
01:29:27,128 --> 01:29:31,155
<i>or rather I remember the images</i>
<i>I filmed that January in Tokyo.</i>

874
01:29:31,366 --> 01:29:33,459
<i>They've replaced my memory.</i>

875
01:29:33,668 --> 01:29:35,431
<i>They are my memory.</i>

876
01:29:36,003 --> 01:29:41,168
<i>I wonder how people remember things</i>
<i>who don't film or photograph or tape.</i>

877
01:29:41,376 --> 01:29:44,072
<i>How has mankind</i>
<i>managed to remember?</i>

878
01:29:44,278 --> 01:29:47,076
<i>I know.</i>
<i>It wrote the Bible.</i>

879
01:29:47,615 --> 01:29:50,550
<i>The new bible will be</i>
<i>an eternal magnetic tape</i>

880
01:29:50,752 --> 01:29:54,813
<i>of a time that will have to reread itself</i>
<i>constantly, just to know it existed.</i>

881
01:29:55,823 --> 01:29:58,621
<i>As we await the year 4001</i>
<i>and its total recall,</i>

882
01:29:58,826 --> 01:30:01,158
<i>that's what the New Year oracles</i>

883
01:30:01,362 --> 01:30:04,627
<i>that we take out of</i>
<i>their long hexagonal boxes offer us.</i>

884
01:30:04,832 --> 01:30:07,130
<i>A little more power</i>
<i>over that memory</i>

885
01:30:07,335 --> 01:30:09,803
<i>that runs from camp to camp,</i>
<i>like Joan of Arc,</i>

886
01:30:10,004 --> 01:30:12,302
<i>that a shortwave announcement</i>
<i>from Hong Kong Radio</i>

887
01:30:12,507 --> 01:30:15,442
<i>picked up on a Cape Verde Island</i>
<i>projects to Tokyo,</i>

888
01:30:15,643 --> 01:30:18,168
<i>and that the memory of a precise color</i>
<i>in the street bounces back</i>

889
01:30:18,379 --> 01:30:20,609
<i>on another country,</i>
<i>another distance,</i>

890
01:30:20,815 --> 01:30:24,410
<i>another music, endlessly.</i>

891
01:30:32,427 --> 01:30:34,395
<i>At the end of memory's path,</i>

892
01:30:34,962 --> 01:30:37,863
<i>the ideograms of the Island of France</i>
<i>are no less enigmatic</i>

893
01:30:38,065 --> 01:30:42,832
<i>than the kanji of Tokyo</i>
<i>in the miraculous light of the New Year.</i>

894
01:30:43,037 --> 01:30:44,698
<i>It's Indian winter.</i>

895
01:30:44,906 --> 01:30:46,806
<i>It's as if the air</i>
<i>were the first element</i>

896
01:30:47,008 --> 01:30:49,169
<i>to emerge purified</i>
<i>from the countless ceremonies</i>

897
01:30:49,377 --> 01:30:53,177
<i>the Japanese use to wash off one year</i>
<i>before entering the next.</i>

898
01:30:53,381 --> 01:30:55,315
<i>A full month is just enough</i>

899
01:30:55,516 --> 01:30:59,782
<i>to fulfill all the duties</i>
<i>that courtesy owes to time,</i>

900
01:30:59,987 --> 01:31:01,716
<i>the most interesting</i>
<i>being the acquisition,</i>

901
01:31:01,923 --> 01:31:04,323
<i>at the temple of Tenjin,</i>
<i>of the Uso bird,</i>

902
01:31:04,525 --> 01:31:07,756
<i>who, according to one tradition,</i>
<i>eats all your lies of the year to come,</i>

903
01:31:07,962 --> 01:31:11,489
<i>and according to another,</i>
<i>turns them into truths.</i>

904
01:31:11,799 --> 01:31:14,893
<i>But what gives the street</i>
<i>its color in January,</i>

905
01:31:15,102 --> 01:31:17,332
<i>what makes it suddenly different,</i>

906
01:31:17,538 --> 01:31:19,904
<i>is the appearance</i>
<i>of the kimonos.</i>

907
01:31:20,475 --> 01:31:22,170
<i>In the street,</i>
<i>in stores, in offices,</i>

908
01:31:22,376 --> 01:31:24,537
<i>even at the stock exchange</i>
<i>on opening day,</i>

909
01:31:24,745 --> 01:31:28,579
<i>girls bring out</i>
<i>their fur-collared winter kimonos.</i>

910
01:31:28,783 --> 01:31:30,250
<i>At that time of year,</i>

911
01:31:30,451 --> 01:31:34,080
<i>others may invent extra-flat TVsets,</i>
<i>commit suicide with chain saws,</i>

912
01:31:34,288 --> 01:31:37,223
<i>or capture two-thirds of the world market</i>
<i>for semiconductors - good for them!</i>

913
01:31:37,425 --> 01:31:39,893
<i>All you see are the girls.</i>

914
01:31:50,838 --> 01:31:53,102
<i>January 15th</i>
<i>is Coming-of-Age day,</i>

915
01:31:53,307 --> 01:31:56,538
<i>an obligatory celebration</i>
<i>in the life of a young Japanese woman.</i>

916
01:31:56,744 --> 01:32:01,306
<i>City governments distribute bags</i>
<i>filled with gifts, date books, advice.</i>

917
01:32:01,516 --> 01:32:04,417
<i>How to be a good citizen,</i>
<i>mother and wife.</i>

918
01:32:05,653 --> 01:32:09,282
<i>On that day, every 20-year-old girl</i>
<i>can phone her family for free,</i>

919
01:32:09,490 --> 01:32:11,924
<i>no matter where in Japan.</i>

920
01:32:13,294 --> 01:32:17,287
<i>Work, home and country -
<i>this is the anteroom of adulthood.</i>

921
01:32:17,865 --> 01:32:21,858
<i>The world of the Takenoko and of</i>
<i>rock singers speeds away like a rocket.</i>

922
01:32:22,270 --> 01:32:26,434
<i>Speakers explain</i>
<i>what society expects of them.</i>

923
01:32:26,641 --> 01:32:29,940
<i>How long will they take</i>
<i>to forget the secret?</i>

924
01:33:28,803 --> 01:33:30,828
<i>And when</i>
<i>all the celebrations are over,</i>

925
01:33:31,038 --> 01:33:34,769
<i>all that remains is to collect</i>
<i>the ornaments and accessories</i>

926
01:33:34,976 --> 01:33:37,444
<i>and burn them</i>
<i>in one more celebration.</i>

927
01:34:22,423 --> 01:34:24,391
<i>This is</i> dondoyaki,

928
01:34:24,592 --> 01:34:28,494
<i>a Shinto blessing of the debris</i>
<i>that has a right to immortality,</i>

929
01:34:28,696 --> 01:34:30,425
<i>like the dolls at Ueno.</i>

930
01:34:30,631 --> 01:34:34,123
<i>The last stage in the poignancy of things</i>
<i>before they disappear.</i>

931
01:34:35,202 --> 01:34:39,832
<i>Daruma, the one-eyed spirit,</i>
<i>reigns supreme atop the bonfire.</i>

932
01:34:40,041 --> 01:34:42,703
<i>Abandonment must be a feast,</i>
<i>laceration must be a feast,</i>

933
01:34:42,910 --> 01:34:45,276
<i>and the farewell</i>
<i>to all that one has lost, broken, used,</i>

934
01:34:45,479 --> 01:34:47,447
<i>must be ennobled by a ceremony.</i>

935
01:34:47,648 --> 01:34:50,446
<i>It's Japan that could fulfill</i>
<i>the wish of that French writer</i>

936
01:34:50,651 --> 01:34:53,176
<i>who wanted divorce</i>
<i>to be made a sacrament.</i>

937
01:34:53,387 --> 01:34:55,548
<i>The only baffling part</i>
<i>of this ritual</i>

938
01:34:55,756 --> 01:34:59,214
<i>was the children striking</i>
<i>the ground with long poles.</i>

939
01:34:59,427 --> 01:35:01,452
<i>I only got one explanation,</i>
<i>a rather peculiar one.</i>

940
01:35:01,662 --> 01:35:05,189
<i>I thought it might be</i>
<i>a small, intimate ritual,</i>

941
01:35:05,399 --> 01:35:07,833
<i>but it was to chase away moles.</i>

942
01:35:50,344 --> 01:35:55,247
<i>And that's where my three children from</i>
<i>Iceland came and grafted themselves in.</i>

943
01:35:56,317 --> 01:35:58,512
<i>I picked up the whole shot again,</i>

944
01:35:58,719 --> 01:36:00,619
<i>adding the somewhat</i>
<i>hazy ending,</i>

945
01:36:00,821 --> 01:36:04,222
<i>the frame trembling</i>
<i>under the force of the wind.</i>

946
01:36:04,425 --> 01:36:06,359
<i>Everything I had cut</i>
<i>in order to "tidy up"</i>

947
01:36:06,560 --> 01:36:09,552
<i>and that said better than all the rest</i>
<i>what I saw in that moment,</i>

948
01:36:09,764 --> 01:36:12,232
<i>why I held it at arm's length,</i>
<i>at zoom's length,</i>

949
01:36:12,433 --> 01:36:15,425
<i>until its last 24th of a second.</i>

950
01:36:17,338 --> 01:36:19,829
<i>The city of Heimaey</i>
<i>spread out below us,</i>

951
01:36:20,040 --> 01:36:21,974
<i>and when, five years later,</i>
<i>my friend Haroun Tazieff</i>

952
01:36:22,176 --> 01:36:24,371
<i>sent me the film</i>
<i>he'd just shot in the same place,</i>

953
01:36:24,578 --> 01:36:29,743
<i>I lacked only the name to know</i>
<i>that nature performs its own</i> dondoyaki.

954
01:36:30,785 --> 01:36:33,583
<i>The island's volcano</i>
<i>had reawakened.</i>

955
01:36:33,788 --> 01:36:35,415
<i>I looked at those pictures,</i>

956
01:36:35,623 --> 01:36:40,060
<i>and it was as if all of 1965</i>
<i>had just been covered in ash.</i>

957
01:36:56,744 --> 01:36:58,735
<i>So all one had to do was wait,</i>

958
01:36:58,946 --> 01:37:02,575
<i>and the planet itself</i>
<i>would stage the working of time.</i>

959
01:37:03,551 --> 01:37:06,349
<i>I saw again</i>
<i>what had been my window.</i>

960
01:37:06,554 --> 01:37:09,489
<i>I saw familiar roofs</i>
<i>and balconies emerge,</i>

961
01:37:09,690 --> 01:37:12,420
<i>the landmarks of the walks</i>
<i>I took through town every day,</i>

962
01:37:12,626 --> 01:37:15,459
<i>down to the cliff</i>
<i>where I'd met the children.</i>

963
01:37:16,997 --> 01:37:20,797
<i>The cat with white socks</i>
<i>that Haroun had kindly filmed for me</i>

964
01:37:21,001 --> 01:37:23,561
<i>naturally found its place,</i>

965
01:37:23,771 --> 01:37:27,138
<i>and I thought that of all the prayers</i>
<i>to time that I'd studied this trip,</i>

966
01:37:27,341 --> 01:37:30,105
<i>the kindest was the one spoken</i>
<i>by the woman of Gotokuji,</i>

967
01:37:30,311 --> 01:37:32,609
<i>who said simply to her cat Tora,</i>

968
01:37:32,813 --> 01:37:36,909
<i>"Beloved cat, wherever you are,</i>
<i>may your soul rest in peace. "

969
01:37:59,573 --> 01:38:02,667
<i>And then, in its turn,</i>
<i>the journey entered the Zone.</i>

970
01:38:03,444 --> 01:38:07,312
<i>Hayao showed me my images</i>
<i>already touched by the moss of time,</i>

971
01:38:07,514 --> 01:38:10,381
<i>freed of the lie that had prolonged</i>
<i>the existence of those moments</i>

972
01:38:10,584 --> 01:38:13,052
<i>swallowed by the spiral.</i>

973
01:38:28,769 --> 01:38:30,999
<i>When spring came</i>

974
01:38:31,205 --> 01:38:35,164
<i>and every crow announced its arrival</i>
<i>by raising his cry half a tone,</i>

975
01:38:35,809 --> 01:38:40,439
<i>I took the green train of the Yamanote</i>
<i>line and got off at Tokyo station,</i>

976
01:38:40,648 --> 01:38:43,481
<i>near the central post office.</i>

977
01:38:43,918 --> 01:38:45,977
<i>Though the street was empty,</i>

978
01:38:46,186 --> 01:38:48,677
<i>I waited at the red light,</i>
<i>Japanese-style,</i>

979
01:38:48,989 --> 01:38:52,322
<i>to leave space</i>
<i>for the spirits of broken cars.</i>

980
01:38:52,526 --> 01:38:54,357
<i>Though I was expecting no letter,</i>

981
01:38:54,561 --> 01:38:57,121
<i>I stopped</i>
<i>at the general delivery window,</i>

982
01:38:57,331 --> 01:38:59,993
<i>for one must honor</i>
<i>the spirits of torn-up letters,</i>

983
01:39:00,200 --> 01:39:04,796
<i>and at the airmail counter,</i>
<i>to hail the spirits of unmailed letters.</i>

984
01:39:06,040 --> 01:39:08,133
<i>I took the measure</i>
<i>of the unbearable vanity of the West</i>

985
01:39:08,342 --> 01:39:10,469
<i>that has always favored</i>
<i>being over non-being,</i>

986
01:39:10,678 --> 01:39:12,373
<i>what is spoken</i>
<i>over what's left unsaid.</i>

987
01:39:12,579 --> 01:39:16,379
<i>I walked along the little stalls</i>
<i>of clothing dealers.</i>

988
01:39:16,583 --> 01:39:20,041
<i>In the distance I heard Mr. Akao's voice</i>
<i>reverberating from the loudspeakers,</i>

989
01:39:20,254 --> 01:39:22,449
<i>now a half tone higher.</i>

990
01:39:22,656 --> 01:39:24,419
<i>Then I went down</i>
<i>to the basement</i>

991
01:39:24,625 --> 01:39:28,083
<i>where my maniac friend busies</i>
<i>himself with his electronic graffiti.</i>

992
01:39:28,329 --> 01:39:30,263
<i>In the end</i>
<i>his language touches me,</i>

993
01:39:30,464 --> 01:39:34,958
<i>for he talks to that part of us that insists</i>
<i>on drawing profiles on prison walls.</i>

994
01:39:35,169 --> 01:39:37,103
<i>A piece of chalk</i>
<i>to follow the contours</i>

995
01:39:37,304 --> 01:39:40,831
<i>of what is not,</i>
<i>or is no longer, or is not yet.</i>

996
01:39:41,108 --> 01:39:43,804
<i>The handwriting each of us</i>
<i>will use to draw up</i>

997
01:39:44,011 --> 01:39:46,946
<i>his own list of things</i>
<i>that quicken the heart -

998
01:39:47,147 --> 01:39:49,877
<i>to offer up or to erase.</i>

999
01:39:50,751 --> 01:39:53,049
<i>In that moment,</i>
<i>poetry will be made by everyone,</i>

1000
01:39:53,253 --> 01:39:55,983
<i>and there will be emus</i>
<i>in the Zone. "

1001
01:40:15,476 --> 01:40:17,444
<i>He writes to me from Japan.</i>

1002
01:40:17,644 --> 01:40:19,544
<i>He writes to me from Africa.</i>

1003
01:40:19,747 --> 01:40:23,581
<i>He says he can now summon up the look</i>
<i>on the market lady's face in Praia</i>

1004
01:40:23,784 --> 01:40:25,979
<i>that had lasted</i>
<i>only the length of a film frame.</i>

1005
01:40:27,688 --> 01:40:31,089
<i>Will there be</i>
<i>a last letter someday?</i>

1006
01:40:34,561 --> 01:40:38,156
IN THE FRENCH AUDIO VERSION,

1007
01:40:38,365 --> 01:40:44,235
THE LETTERS OF SANDOR KRASNA
WERE READ BY FLORENCE DELAY

