Man...
Man has...
in his poor heart
places that do not yet exist
and into which pain enters
in order for them to exist.
I understand better
why, earlier, I had such a hard time beginning.
Now I know
what voice I wish had come before me,
had carried me, had invited me to speak
and had lodged itself in my own discourse.
I know what was so intimidating about beginning to speak,
because it is here where I heard him,
and he is no longer here to hear me.
While divining nature's loneliest moment,
let my whole and unique melody
rise
in the evening, and increase,
and do all it can,
and say the thing that the thing is,
and fall
and rise again
and cause pain.
Oh, solo of sobs,
and rise
and fall according to its required task.
I sometimes hear men speak
of the pleasure they took
with this woman or that.
Not necessarily vulgar,
though sometimes very precise.
But I feel like telling them:
"Come now. It was something else."
Something else. No words for it.
No sentence can embody it.
Or rather, if I start a sentence
thinking I have on the tip of my tongue
the picture, the moment, the color, the fallen dress,
that glow on the woman's body,
her shoulder strap sliding down,
that feeling of fear
mixed with haste, her arms,
her wandering mind...
my memory becomes disordered.
I don't forget, but things slip away.
If I force my memory,
I suddenly understand what happens to me.
I imagine.
Yes. I no longer remember. I imagine.
It is morning now, I think.
You're deaf.
Rachel.
Cruel.
But I have what I wanted.
You have nothing at all.
To love, you need a body.
That is not exact.
This is exact:
In 1932, the Dutchman
Jan Ort was studying
the stars moving away from the Milky Way.
Soon, as predicted,
gravity pulls them back.
Measuring the positions
and speed of these repatriated stars,
Ort was able to calculate
the mass of our galaxy.
Imagine his surprise on discovering
that visible matter represented only fifty percent
of the mass necessary to exert such gravitational force.
Where did the other half of the universe go?
Phantom matter was born.
Omnipresent,
but invisible.
The time when, in the countryside,
we were alert to dogs barking in the deep night.
When many-colored parachutes bearing weapons and cigarettes
fell from the sky to clearings amid the glow of firelight.
A time of basements
and the desperate cries
of torture victims with children's voices.
The struggle of the shadows had begun.
Enter, here, Jean Moulin,
with his terrible cortege
of those who died in basements
without having talked, like you,
and perhaps even worse,
after having talked.
In a way, fear is the daughter of God
redeemed on Good Friday night.
She is no pretty sight,
sometimes mocked, sometimes cursed, repudiated by all.
But don't be mistaken. She's at every deathbed,
She intervenes on man's behalf.
That night
getting up at night
every night
faint light in the room
from where
mystery
nil from the window
no
almost nil
that doesn't exist
nil
Blank like a negative named Ilford, Kodak or Fuji.
All of a piece, needing to be blown upon
so it will stretch, depending on who blows:
Hitchcock, Langlois, Vigo. Dissolve.
Editing ideas together, no points of suspension.
This is no crime novel or Céline.
Leave him to literature. He deserved to suffer and re-enlist
book after book in the regiments of language.
With cinema, it is something else.
It is life.
Nothing new, but hard to talk about.
Tough enough to live and die it,
but to talk about it... There are books.
But cinema isn't books.
Just music and painting,
which can be lived but not really talked about.
So cinema, you see now,
what to say about it. Life is the subject.
Cinemascope and color its attributes, if we are broad-minded.
Life,
a beginning of life, like Euclid's parallel lines,
is a beginning of geometry.
There have been other lives, will be others,
a broken blossom, hunted lions,
the silence of a hotel in Sweden.
Others' lives are unsettling.
The life itself I'd like to blow out of proportion
to make it admired or reduced to its basic elements
for students and Earth dwellers in general
and spectators in particular -
The life itself I'd like to hold prisoner
by means of pans of nature,
fixed shots of death,
long and short takes, loud and soft sounds,
free and enslaved actors and actresses -
but life thrashes about worse than Nanouk's fish,
slips away like Monica's memories in the red desert around Milan.
All is eclipsed, and it so happens that
the only big problem in cinema
is where and why to start a shot
and where and why to end it.
When we know how many deaths,
not symbolic or simulated,
but real ones, one life costs,
we no longer care about meaning.
Only a life filled
to the bursting point gives meaning to life,
irreducible to any meaning.
By living the combination of all the body's forces,
life stops questioning itself
and accepts itself as pure answer.
Event
that no longer needs to proclaim its assent to itself
to become the greatest of assents.
Nothing can comprehend this relation of the body to the world.
The degree zero of the other is posited
when we utter the word "man".
There must be a Russian people in swaddling clothes.
These political slaves must have moral freedom.
These beasts in the hell of drunkenness
and massacres
must be doted with a recklessness unequalled in Europe.
These people, capable of anything
like cruel children and asleep in terrible impotence,
must be the only people in Europe
who still have a god.
Shut up, Cassandra!
So long as we're asleep!
For which curtain-rise do we rid ourselves of our dreams?
How do we dare, on waking,
bring them to light?
Oh, in the light,
each of us carries about us invisible dreams.
Music carries us all to that line of light
gleaming under the curtain
when the orchestra tunes its violins.
The dance begins.
Our hands slide and separate.
We lose ourselves in one another's gaze.
Bodies brushing delicately against one another,
trying not to tear one another from its dream,
to send him back into the dark,
to rid the night of the night which is not day.
As we loved each other.
It's what I like in cinema.
A saturation of magnificent signs
bathing in the light of their absence of explanation.
It cannot be spoken.
It can be written. Flaubert, no Pushkin.
Flaubert, Dostoevski. It can be written.
It can be composed. Gershwin. Mozart.
It can be painted. Cézanne. Vermeer.
It can be filmed. Antonioni. Vigo.
Miss!
What is it?
I took the shortcut.
- I have a secret. - Another one? What?
Turn off the headlights.
Yes, but history. What is it?
Deep down.
Malraux.
We all felt that the stakes were more obscure than political.
Braudel.
Measure the mass of people who deny their misery,
who want to be themselves,
to live their lives.
As if our lives were our own.
At our disposal.
That bastard Cioran.
Nothing we know remains without atonement.
We pay dearly, sooner or later,
the courage of our thoughts,
the indiscretions of our mind.
And young Péguy.
Ah, history...
Somber loyalty to fallen things.
I told you.
Witness means
martyr.
What's she doing here?
You see, Péguy,
she says,
today they appeal to the judgement of history.
The modern appeal.
The modern judgement.
Poor friends,
they think I'm the judge.
I'm just the registration clerk.
An apparatus has been erected, she says.
We live in a system in which everything can be done
except the history of what is done.
Everything can be completed
except the history of this completion.
You see, Péguy, she says,
night is always falling.
An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic,
but because the association of ideas
is distant.
Distant and just.
I was given a last name:
History.
And a first name: Clio.
What if it didn't concern a text,
but a movement? An idea,
reality, life.
Or simply, if it still concerned a text,
but wasn't about determining texts on a word,
but on an idea, or an intention,
or a movement,
or a usage
or a relationship.
When philosophy paints its grayness in grisaille,
a manifestation of life finishes growing old.
We cannot rejuvenate it with gray on gray,
only understand it.
Marguerite.
Germaine.
Happy unbirthday, Margarete.
Milena.
Right?
I didn't think about death.
There is no death.
Nothing is as handy
as a text.
Nothing as handy as a word in a text.
We had nothing but book
to put into book.
What would it be, when, into a book, into book,
one must put reality?
And with a turn of the screw,
put reality into reality.
What is always happening, my friend?
Night falls.
Vacations come to an end.
I need a day to tell the history of a second.
I need a year to tell the history
of a minute.
I need a life
to tell the history of an hour.
I need an eternity
to tell the history of a day.
We can do everything
except the history
of what we are doing.
It is my privilege to film
and live in France
as an artist.
Nothing like a country that every day walks further down
the path of its own inexorable decline.
Nothing better than
an ever more provincial country
run by a rotating crew of the same incompetents,
dishonest, corrupted by their support
of a permanently and totally corrupt regime.
What is better than living in a land
where justice is a bazaar?
What artist wouldn't dream of a such nation,
the world's fourth economic power, they say.
The refutation sleeps on our doorstep,
waiting for a coin to stifle the pangs
of the hungry.
I am the fugitive enemy of our times.
The totalitarianism of the present as applied mechanically
every day more oppressive on a planetary scale.
This faceless tyranny that effaces all faces
for the systematic organization of the unified time of the moment.
This global, abstract tyranny
which I try to oppose from my fleeting point of view.
Because I try,
because I try in my compositions
to show an ear that listens to time.
And try to make it heard
and to surge into the future.
Death already included in my time,
I cannot be the enemy of our times
because its task is to abolish time.
I do not see in this state
that a life is worth living.
As one century slowly dissolves into the next,
some individuals metabolize
the former means of survival into new ones.
These latter we call art.
The only thing that survives
from one epoch
is the art from it created.
No activity can become an art
until its proper epoch has ended.
Then,
this art will disappear.
Thus, the art of the 19th century
- cinema -
made the 20th century exist, which barely existed.
Men and women believed
in prophets. Now we believe in statesmen.
Nothing is further
from the image of the beloved than that of state.
Reason of state opposes sovereign value of love.
The state has no power, or has lost it,
to embrace before us the totality of the world.
This totality of the universe
given at the same time
outside, in the loved one as object
inside, in the lover as subject.
Cinema feared nothing of others or of itself.
It wasn't sheltered from time. It was the shelter of time.
Yes, image is happiness.
But beside it dwells nothingness.
The power of the image is expressed only by invoking nothingness.
It is perhaps worth adding:
The image, able to negate nothingness,
is also the gaze of nothingness on us.
The image is light.
Nothingness, immensely heavy.
The image gleams.
Nothingness is that thickness where all is veiled.
The most fleeting moments
possess an illustrious past.
If a man
passed through paradise in his dreams
and received a flower as proof of passage,
and on waking,
found this flower in his hand...
What is there to say?
I was that man.
Subtitles: Andrew Litvack
Subtitling: Vdm