Sans Soleilby Chris Marker
The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in
Iceland, in
1965. He said that for him
it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times
to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day
I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long
piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at
least they'll see the black.
He wrote: I'm just back from
Hokkkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and
hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting,
immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think of a past
or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small
fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of those
moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function it being
to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the
world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip
I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn
we'll be in Tokyo.
He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European
time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind
had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th
was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way, did you
know that there are emus in the
Île de France?
He wrote me that in the
Bijagós Islands it's the young girls
who choose their fiancées.
He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a
temple consecrated to cats.
I wish I could convey to you the simplicity-the lack of affectation-of
this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat
cemetery so their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn't dead, only
run away. But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for
her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right
name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to
perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.
He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the
function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather
its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is
rewritten. How can one remember thirst?
He didn't like to dwell on poverty, but in everything he wanted to show
there were also the
4-Fs
of the Japanese model. A world full of bums, of lumpens, of outcasts,
of Koreans. Too broke to afford drugs, they'd get drunk on beer, on
fermented milk. This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes from the
glories of the center city, a character took his revenge on society by
directing traffic at the crossroads. Luxury for them would be one of those
large bottles of sake that are poured over tombs on the day of the dead.
I paid for a round in a bar in
Namidabashi. It's the
kind of place that allows people to stare at each other with equality; the
threshold below which every man is as good as any other-and knows it.
He told me about the Jetty on
Fogo, in the
Cape Verde islands. How long have
they been there waiting for the boat, patient as pebbles but ready to
jump? They are a people of wanderers, of navigators, of world travelers.
They fashioned themselves through cross-breeding here on these rocks that
the Portuguese used as a marshaling yard for their colonies. A people
of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people. Frankly, have you
ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people as they teach in
film schools, not to look at the camera?
He used to write to me: the
Sahel is not only what is shown of
it when it is too late; it's a land that drought seeps into like water
into a leaking boat. The animals resurrected for the time of a carnival
in Bissau will be petrified again, as soon as a new attack has changed
the savannah into a desert. This is a state of survival that the rich
countries have forgotten, with one exception: UN Japan. My constant
comings and goings are not a search for contrasts; they are a journey to
the two extreme poles of survival.
He spoke to me of
Sei Shonagon, a
lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning of the 11th century,
in the
Heian period. Do we
ever know where history is really made? Rulers ruled and used complicated
strategies to fight one another. Real power was in the hands of a
family of hereditary regents; the emperor's court had become nothing more
than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw
a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest
things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much
deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians. Shonagon had a
passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,' 'distressing things,'
or even of 'things not worth doing.' One day she got the idea of
drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart.' Not a bad criterion I
realize when I'm filming; I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want
to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.
He wrote me: coming back through the
Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon's list, of all those signs one has only to
name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun
unless it's radiant, and a spring not quite a spring unless it is
limpid. Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on
purchases. Japanese poetry never modifies. There is a way of saying boat,
rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them
all. Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from
Nagoya. The woman he loved died
last year and he drowned himself in work-Japanese style-like a madman.
It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics. And then
in the month of May he killed himself. They say he could not stand
hearing the word 'Spring.'
He described me his reunion with Tokyo: like a cat who has come home
from vacation in his basket immediately starts to inspect familiar
places. He ran off to see if everything was where it should be: the Ginza
owl, the
Shimbashi locamotive, the temple of the fox at
the top of the Mitsukoshi department store, which he found invaded by
little girls and rock singers. He was told that it was now little girls
who made and unmade stars; the producers shuddered before them. He was
told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of passers-by
and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful. Everything
interested him. He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant or
about the results of the Daily Double asked feverishly how
Chiyonofuji had
done in the last sumo tournament. He asked for news of the imperial
family, of the crown prince, of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears
regularly on television to teach goodness to children. These simple joys he
had never felt: of returning to a country, a house, a family home. But
twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.
He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains, tied together with
electric wire she shows her veins. They say that television makes her
people illiterate; as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in
the streets. Perhaps they read only in the street, or perhaps they just
pretend to read-these yellow men. I make my appointments at
Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in
Shinjuku.
The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent
CinemaScope ten centuries
before the movies compensates a little for the sad fate of the comic
strip heroines, victims of heartless story writers and of castrating
censorship. Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls.
The entire city is a comic strip; it's Planet Manga. How can one fail to
recognize the statuary that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin
central? And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book
readers, pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.
At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its
country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples.
Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town,
nestling amongst the skyscrapers.
The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that Indian flute whose sound
can only be heard by whomever is playing it. He might have cried out if
it was in a
Godard film or a Shakespeare play, "Where should this music be?"
Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori where
Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of 'action cooking.' He said
that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada's gestures and his way of mixing the
ingredients one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts
common to painting, philosophy, and karate. He claimed that Mr. Yamada
possessed in his humble way the essence of style, and consequently that
it was up to him to use his invisible brush to write upon this first
day in Tokyo the words 'the end.'
I've spent the day in front of my
TV set-that memory box. I was in
Nara with the
sacred deers. I was
taking a picture without knowing that in the 15th century
Basho had written:
"The willow sees the heron's image... upside down."
The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye, used to Western
atrocities in this field; not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure.
For one slightly hallucinatory moment I had the impression that I spoke
Japanese, but it was a cultural program on
NHK about Gérard de Nerval.
8:40, Cambodia. From Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge:
coincidence, or the sense of history?
In Apocalypse Now, Brando said a few definitive and incommunicable
sentences: "Horror has a face and a name... you must make a friend of
horror." To cast out the horror that has a name and a face you must give it
another name and another face. Japanese horror movies have the cunning
beauty of certain corpses. Sometimes one is stunned by so much cruelty.
One seeks its sources in the Asian peoples long familiarity with
suffering, that requires that even pain be ornate. And then comes the reward:
the monsters are laid out, Natsume Masako arises; absolute beauty also
has a name and a face.
But the more you watch Japanese television... the more you feel it's
watching you. Even television newscast bears witness to the fact that the
magical function of the eye is at the center of all things. It's
election time: the winning candidates black out the empty eye of Daruma-the
spirit of luck-while losing candidates-sad but dignified-carry off their
one-eyed Daruma.
The images most difficult to figure out are those of Europe. I watched
the pictures of a film whose soundtrack will be added later. It took me
six months for Poland.
Meanwhile, I have no difficulty with local earthquakes. But I must say
that last night's quake helped me greatly to grasp a problem.
Poetry is born of insecurity: wandering Jews, quaking Japanese; by
living on a rug that jesting nature is ever ready to pull out from under
them they've got into the habit of moving about in a world of
appearances: fragile, fleeting, revocable, of trains that fly from planet to
planet, of samurai fighting in an immutable past. That's called 'the
impermanence of things.'
I did it all. All the way to the evening shows for adults-so called.
The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips, but it's a coded hypocrisy.
Censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show. The code is
the message. It points to the absolute by hiding it. That's what
religions have always done.
That year, a new face appeared among the great ones that blazon the
streets of Tokyo: the Pope's. Treasures that had never left the Vatican
were shown on the seventh floor of the Sogo department store.
He wrote me: curiosity of course, and the glimmer of industrial
espionage in the eye-I imagine them bringing out within two years time a more
efficient and less expensive version of Catholicism-but there's also
the fascination associated with the sacred, even when it's someone
else's.
So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese
sacred signs such as can be seen at Josen-kai on the island of
Hokkaido? At first one smiles at this place which combines a museum, a chapel,
and a sex shop. As always in Japan, one admires the fact that the walls
between the realms are so thin that one can in the same breath
contemplate a statue, buy an inflatable doll, and give the goddess of fertility
the small offering that always accompanies her displays. Displays whose
frankness would make the stratagems of the television incomprehensible,
if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible only on
condition of being severed from a body.
One would like to believe in a world before the fall: inaccessible to
the complications of a Puritanism whose phony shadow has been imposed on
it by American occupation. Where people who gather laughing around the
votive fountain, the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture,
share in the same cosmic innocence.
The second part of the museum-with its couples of stuffed animals-would
then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it. Not so
sure... animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship, but
perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation. And even
without original sin this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost. In the
glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai I read the fundamental
rift of Japanese society, the rift that separates men from women. In
life it seems to show itself in two ways only: violent slaughter, or a
discreet melancholy-resembling Sei Shonagon's-which the Japanese express
in a single untranslatable word. So this bringing down of man to the
level of the beasts-against which the fathers of the church
invade-becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things, to a
melancholy whose color I can give you by copying a few lines from Samura
Koichi: "Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say
that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of
separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon
disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the
other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied."
He wrote me that the Japanese secret-what Lévi-Strauss had called the
poignancy of things-implied the faculty of communion with things, of
entering into them, of being them for a moment. It was normal that in
their turn they should be like us: perishable and immortal.
He wrote me: animism is a familiar notion in Africa, it is less often
applied in Japan. What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according
to which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart? When
they build a factory or a skyscraper, they begin with a ceremony to
appease the god who owns the land. There is a ceremony for brushes, for
abacuses, and even for rusty needles. There's one on the 25th of
September for the repose of the soul of broken dolls. The dolls are piled up in
the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon-the goddess of
compassion-and are burned in public.
I look to the participants. I think the people who saw off the kamikaze
pilots had the same look on their faces.
He wrote me that the pictures of Guinea-Bissau ought to be accompanied
by music from the Cape Verde islands. That would be our contribution to
the unity dreamed of by
Amilcar Cabral.
Why should so small a country-and one so poor-interest the world? They
did what they could, they freed themselves, they chased out the
Portuguese. They traumatized the Portuguese army to such an extent that it
gave rise to a movement that overthrew the dictatorship, and led one for a
moment to believe in a new revolution in Europe.
Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the
window.
This morning I was on the dock at Pidjiguity, where everything began in
1959, when the first victims of the struggle were killed. It may be as
difficult to recognize Africa in this leaden fog as it is to recognize
struggle in the rather dull activity of tropical longshoremen.
Rumor has it that every third world leader coined the same phrase the
morning after independence: "Now the real problems start."
Cabral never got a chance to say it: he was assassinated first. But the
problems started, and went on, and are still going on. Rather
unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism: to work, to produce, to
distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion, temptations of power and
privilege.
Ah well... after all, history only tastes bitter to those who expected
it to be sugar coated.
My personal problem is more specific: how to film the ladies of Bissau?
Apparently, the magical function of the eye was working against me
there. It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde that I could
stare at them again with equality: I see her, she saw me, she knows that I
see her, she drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is
still possible to act as though it was not addressed to me, and at the end
the real glance, straightforward, that lasted a twenty-fourth of a
second, the length of a film frame.
All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men's task
has always been to make them realize it as late as possible. African men
are just as good at this task as others. But after a close look at
African women I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men.
He told me the story of the dog Hachiko. A dog waited every day for his
master at the station. The master died, and the dog didn't know it, and
he continued to wait all his life. People were moved and brought him
food. After his death a statue was erected in his honor, in front of
which sushi and rice cakes are still placed so that the faithful soul of
Hachiko will never go hungry.
Tokyo is full of these tiny legends, and of mediating animals. The
Mitsukoshi lion stands guard on the frontiers of what was once the empire
of Mr. Okada-a great collector of French paintings, the man who hired
the Château of Versailles to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his
department stores.
In the computer section I've seen young Japanese exercising their brain
muscles like the young Athenians at the Palaistra. They have a war to
win. The history books of the future will perhaps place the battle of
integrated circuits at the same level as Salamis and Agincourt, but
willing to honor the unfortunate adversary by leaving other fields to him:
men's fashions this season are placed under the sign of John Kennedy.
Like an old votive turtle stationed in the corner of a field, every day
he saw Mr. Akao-the president of the Japanese Patriotic
Party-trumpeting from the heights of his rolling balcony against the international
communist plot. He wrote me: the automobiles of the extreme right with
their flags and megaphones are part of Tokyo's landscape-Mr. Akao is their
focal point. I think he'll have his statue like the dog Hachiko, at
this crossroads from which he departs only to go and prophesy on the
battlefields. He was at Narita in the sixties. Peasants fighting against the
building of an
airport on their land, and Mr. Akao denouncing the hand of Moscow behind
everything that moved.
Yurakucho is the political space of Tokyo. Once upon a time I saw
bonzes pray for peace in
Vietnam there. Today young right-wing activists protest against the
annexation of the Northern Islands by the Russians. Sometimes they are answered
that the commercial relations of Japan with the abominable occupier of
the North are a thousand times better than with the American ally who
is always whining about economic aggression. Ah, nothing is simple.
On the other sidewalk the Left has the floor. The Korean Catholic
opposition leader
Kim Dae Jung-kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean gestapo-is threatened with the
death sentence. A group has begun a hunger strike. Some very young
militants are trying to gather signatures in his support.
I went back to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the
struggle. The demo was unreal. I had the impression of acting in
Brigadoon, of waking up ten years later in the midst of the same players, with
the same blue lobsters of police, the same helmeted adolescents, the
same banners and the same slogan: "Down with the airport." Only one thing
has been added: the airport precisely. But with its single runway and
the barbed wire that chokes it, it looks more besieged than victorious.
My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution: if the images of the
present don't change, then change the images of the past.
He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer:
pictures that are less deceptive he says-with the conviction of a
fanatic-than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to
be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an
already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an
homage to Tarkovsky.
What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an
intact fragment of the generation of the sixties. If to love without
illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it. It was a generation
that often exasperated me, for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a
common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt
against wealth. But it screamed out that gut reaction that better
adjusted voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.
I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the
struggle. Concretely it had failed. At the same time, all they had won in
their understanding of the world could have been won only through the
struggle.
As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains in the
name of revolutionary purity, while others had studied capitalism so
thoroughly to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives.
Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists,
including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom.
But it carried with it all those who said, like Ché Guevara, that they
"trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the
world." They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity, and
their generosity has outlasted their politics. That's why I will never
allow it to be said that youth is wasted on the young.
The youth who get together every weekend at Shinjuku obviously know
that they are not on a launching pad toward real life; but they are life,
to be eaten on the spot like fresh doughnuts.
It's a very simple secret. The old try to hide it, and not all the
young know it. The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend from the
thirteenth floor of a building after having tied her hands, because she'd
spoken badly of their class team, hadn't discovered it yet. Parents who
demand an increase in the number of special telephone lines devoted to the
prevention of children's suicides find out a little late that they have
kept it all too well. Rock is an international language for spreading
the secret. Another is peculiar to Tokyo.
For the takenoko, twenty is the age of retirement. They are baby
Martians. I go to see them dance every Sunday in the park at Yoyogi. They
want people to look at them, but they don't seem to notice that people do.
They live in a parallel time sphere: a kind of invisible aquarium wall
separates them from the crowd they attract, and I can spend a whole
afternoon contemplating the little takenoko girl who is learning-no doubt
for the first time-the customs of her planet.
Beyond that, they wear dog tags, they obey a whistle, the Mafia rackets
them, and with the exception of a single group made up of girls, it's
always a boy who commands.
One day he writes to me: description of a dream. More and more my
dreams find their settings in the department stores of Tokyo, the
subterranean tunnels that extend them and run parallel to the city. A face
appears, disappears... a trace is found, is lost. All the folklore of dreams
is so much in its place that the next day when I am awake I realize
that I continue to seek in the basement labyrinth the presence concealed
the night before. I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine, or
if they are part of a totality, of a gigantic collective dream of which
the entire city may be the projection. It might suffice to pick up any
one of the telephones that are lying around to hear a familiar voice,
or the beating of a heart, Sei Shonagon's for example.
All the galleries lead to stations; the same companies own the stores
and the railroads that bear their name. Keio, Odakyu-all those names of
ports. The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the
fragments of dreams, makes a single film of them-the ultimate film. The
tickets from the automatic dispenser grant admission to the show.
He told me about the January light on the station stairways. He told me
that this city ought to be deciphered like a musical score; one could
get lost in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of details.
And that created the cheapest image of Tokyo: overcrowded,
megalomaniac, inhuman. He thought he saw more subtle cycles there: rhythms,
clusters of faces caught sight of in passing-as different and precise as
groups of instruments. Sometimes the musical comparison coincided with plain
reality; the Sony stairway in the Ginza was itself an instrument, each
step a note. All of it fit together like the voices of a somewhat
complicated fugue, but it was enough to take hold of one of them and hang on
to it.
The television screens for example; all by themselves they created an
itinerary that sometimes wound up in unexpected curves. It was sumo
season, and the fans who came to watch the fights in the very chic
showrooms on the Ginza were the poorest of the Tokyo poors. So poor that they
didn't even have a TV set. He saw them come, the dead souls of
Namida-bashi he had drunk saké with one sunny dawn-how many seasons ago was that
now?
He wrote me: even in the stalls where they sell electronic spare
parts-that some hipsters use for jewelry-there is in the score that is Tokyo
a particular staff, whose rarity in Europe condemns me to a real
acoustic exile. I mean the music of video games. They are fitted into tables.
You can drink, you can lunch, and go on playing. They open onto the
street. By listening to them you can play from memory.
I saw these games born in Japan. I later met up with them again all
over the world, but one detail was different. At the beginning the game
was familiar: a kind of anti-ecological beating where the idea was to
kill off-as soon as they showed the white of their eyes-creatures that
were either prairie dogs or baby seals, I can't be sure which. Now here's
the Japanese variation. Instead of the critters, there's some vaguely
human heads identified by a label: at the top the chairman of the board,
in front of him the vice president and the directors, in the front row
the section heads and the personnel manager. The guy I filmed-who was
smashing up the hierarchy with an enviable energy-confided in me that
for him the game was not at all allegorical, that he was thinking very
precisely of his superiors. No doubt that's why the puppet representing
the personnel manager has been clubbed so often and so hard that it's
out of commission, and why it had to be replaced again by a baby seal.
Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine. To please me he
puts in my best beloved animals: the cat and the owl. He claims that
electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory,
and imagination. Mizoguchi's Arsène Lupin for example, or the no less
imaginary burakumin. How one claim to show a category of Japanese who do
not exist? Yes they're there; I saw them in Osaka hiring themselves out
by the day, sleeping on the ground. Ever since the middle ages they've
been doomed to grubby and back-breaking jobs. But since the Meiji era,
officially nothing sets them apart, and their real name-eta-is a taboo
word, not to be pronounced. They are non-persons. How can they be
shown, except as non-images?
Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the
human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence. For the
moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time is contained in the
Pac-Man. I didn't know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him
that he was going to conquer the world. Perhaps because he is the most
perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate. He puts into true perspective
the balance of power between the individual and the environment. And he
tells us soberly that though there may be honor in carrying out the
greatest number of victorious attacks, it always comes a cropper.
He was pleased that the same chrysanthemums appeared in funerals for
men and for animals. He described to me the ceremony held at the zoo in
Ueno in memory of animals that had died during the year. For two years
in a row this day of mourning has had a pall cast over it by the death
of a panda, more irreparable-according to the newspapers-than the death
of the prime minister that took place at the same time. Last year
people really cried. Now they seem to be getting used to it, accepting that
each year death takes a panda as dragons do young girls in fairy tales.
I've heard this sentence: "The partition that separates life from death
does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner." What I have
read most often in the eyes of people about to die is surprise. What I
read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity, as if
they were trying-in order to understand the death of an animal-to stare
through the partition.
I have returned from a country where death is not a partition to cross
through but a road to follow. The great ancestor of the Bijagós
archipelago has described for us the itinerary of the dead and how they move
from island to island according to a rigorous protocol until they come
to the last beach where they wait for the ship that will take them to
the other world. If by accident one should meet them, it is above all
imperative not to recognize them.
The Bijagós is a part of Guinea Bissau. In an old film clip Amilcar
Cabral waves a gesture of good-bye to the shore; he's right, he'll never
see it again. Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later on
the canoe that was bringing us back.
Guinea has by that time become a nation and Luis is its president. All
those who remember the war remember him. He's the half-brother of
Amilcar, born as he was of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdean blood, and like
him a founding member of an unusual party, the PAIGC, which by uniting
the two colonized countries in a single movement of struggle wishes to be
the forerunner of a federation of the two states.
I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters, who had
fought in conditions so inhuman that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers
for having to bear what they themselves suffered. That I heard. And
many more things that make one ashamed for having used lightly-even if
inadvertently-the word guerrilla to describe a certain breed of
film-making. A word that at the time was linked to many theoretical debates and
also to bloody defeats on the ground.
Amilcar Cabral was the only one to lead a victorious guerrilla war, and
not only in terms of military conquests. He knew his people, he had
studied them for a long time, and he wanted every liberated region to be
also the precursor of a different kind of society.
The socialist countries send weapons to arm the fighters. The social
democracies fill the People's Stores. May the extreme left forgive
history but if the guerrillas are like fish in water it's a bit thanks to
Sweden.
Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguities-he knew the traps. He wrote:
"It's as though we were at the edge of a great river full of waves and
storms, with people who are trying to cross it and drown, but they have no
other way out, they must get to the other side."
And now, the scene moves to Cassaque: the seventeenth of February,
1980. But to understand it properly one must move forward in time. In a
year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison, and the weeping man he
has just decorated, major Nino, will have taken power. The party will
have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other will
be fighting over Amilcar's legacy. We will learn that behind this
ceremony of promotions which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the
brotherhood of the struggle, there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness, and
that Nino's tears did not express an ex-warrior's emotion, but the
wounded pride of a hero who felt he had not been raised high enough above
the others.
And beneath each of these faces a memory. And in place of what we were
told had been forged into a collective memory, a thousand memories of
men who parade their personal laceration in the great wound of history.
In Portugal-raised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau-Miguel
Torga, who had struggled all his life against the dictatorship wrote:
"Every protagonist represents only himself; in place of a change in the
social setting he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation
of his own image."
That's the way the breakers recede. And so predictably that one has to
believe in a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes
through mercy or calculation to those whom it recruits: Amilcar murdered
by members of his own party, the liberated areas fallen under the yoke
of bloody petty tyrants liquidated in their turn by a central power to
whose stability everyone paid homage until the military coup.
That's how history advances, plugging its memory as one plugs one's
ears. Luis exiled to Cuba, Nino discovering in his turn plots woven
against him, can be cited reciprocally to appear before the bar of history.
She doesn't care, she understands nothing, she has only one friend, the
one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse: horror. That has a name and a face.
I'm writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In
a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what
history is to the other: an impossibility.
Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable.
Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped
would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the
projector. Madness protects, as fever does.
I envy Hayao in his 'zone,' he plays with the signs of his memory. He
pins them down and decorates them like insects that would have flown
beyond time, and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time:
the only eternity we have left. I look at his machines. I think of a
world where each memory could create its own legend.
He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying
impossible memory-insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the spiral of
the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a
cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye.
In San Francisco he had made his pilgrimage to all the film's
locations: the florist Podesta Baldocchi, where James Stewart spies on Kim
Novak-he the hunter, she the prey. Or was it the other way around? The tiles
hadn't changed.
He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco where Jimmy
Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline. It seems to be a question of
trailing, of enigma, of murder, but in truth it's a question of power and
freedom, of melancholy and dazzlement, so carefully coded within the
spiral that you could miss it, and not discover immediately that this
vertigo of space in reality stands for the vertigo of time.
He had followed all the trails. Even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores
where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead,
whom she should not have known. He followed Madeline-as Scotty had
done-to the Museum at the Legion of Honor, before the portrait of a dead
woman she should not have known. And on the portrait, as in Madeline's
hair, the spiral of time.
The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared had disappeared
itself; concrete had replaced it, at the corner of Eddy and Gough. On the
other hand the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods. On it Madeline
traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines that
measured the age of the tree and said, "Here I was born... and here I died."
He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted. The
sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, and the hand pointed
to a place outside the tree, outside of time.
The painted horse at San Juan Bautista, his eye that looked like
Madeline's: Hitchcock had invented nothing, it was all there. He had run
under the arches of the promenade in the mission as Madeline had run
towards her death. Or was it hers?
From this fake tower-the only thing that Hitchcock had added-he
imagined Scotty as time's fool of love, finding it impossible to live with
memory without falsifying it. Inventing a double for Madeline in another
dimension of time, a zone that would belong only to him and from which
he could decipher the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate
when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay, when he had saved
her from death before casting her back to death. Or was it the other
way around?
In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film I had seen nineteen
times. In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film. That
summer I had met three children on a road and a volcano had come out of the
sea. The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the
moon, in this corner of Earth that resembles it. I saw it immediately as a
setting for science fiction: the landscape of another planet. Or rather
no, let it be the landscape of our own planet for someone who comes
from elsewhere, from very far away. I imagine him moving slowly, heavily,
about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles. All of a sudden he
stumbles, and the next step it's a year later. He's walking on a small
path near the Dutch border along a sea bird sanctuary.
That's for a start. Now why this cut in time, this connection of
memories? That's just it, he can't understand. He hasn't come from another
planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the
human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to
perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical
consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of
men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost
forgetting, and who-through some peculiarity of his nature-instead of
drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its
shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the
world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait,
to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and
painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of
time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché
Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third
Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past
is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their
present.
Naturally he'll fail. The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible
to him as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children
of a rich one. He has chosen to give up his privileges, but he can do
nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose. His only
recourse is precisely that which threw him into this absurd quest: a song
cycle by Mussorgsky. They are still sung in the fortieth century. Their
meaning has been lost. But it was then that for the first time he
perceived the presence of that thing he didn't understand which had
something to do with unhappiness and memory, and towards which slowly, heavily,
he began to walk.
Of course I'll never make that film. Nonetheless I'm collecting the
sets, inventing the twists, putting in my favorite creatures. I've even
given it a title, indeed the title of those Mussorgsky songs: Sunless.
On May 15, 1945, at seven o'clock in the morning, the three hundred and
eighty second US infantry regiment attacked a hill in Okinawa they had
renamed 'Dick Hill.' I suppose the Americans themselves believed that
they were conquering Japanese soil, and that they knew nothing about the
Ryukyu civilization. Neither did I, apart from the fact that the faces
of the market ladies at Itoman spoke to me more of Gauguin than of
Utamaro. For centuries of dreamy vassalage time had not moved in the
archipelago. Then came the break. Is it a property of islands to make their
women into the guardians of their memory?
I learned that-as in the Bijagós-it is through the women that magic
knowledge is transmitted. Each community has its priestess-the noro-who
presides over all ceremonies with the exception of funerals.
The Japanese defended their position inch by inch. At the end of the
day the two half platoons formed from the remnants of L Company had got
only halfway up the hill, a hill like the one where I followed a group
of villagers on their way to the purification ceremony.
The noro communicates with the gods of the sea, of rain, of the earth,
of fire. Everyone bows down before the sister deity who is the
reflection, in the absolute, of a privileged relationship between brother and
sister. Even after her death, the sister retains her spiritual
predominance.
At dawn the Americans withdrew. Fighting went on for over a month
before the island surrendered, and toppled into the modern world.
Twenty-seven years of American occupation, the re-establishment of a
controversial Japanese sovereignty: two miles from the bowling alleys and the gas
stations the noro continues her dialogue with the gods. When she is gone
the dialogue will end. Brothers will no longer know that their dead
sister is watching over them. When filming this ceremony I knew I was
present at the end of something. Magical cultures that disappear leave
traces to those who succeed them. This one will leave none; the break in
history has been too violent.
I touched that break at the summit of the hill, as I had touched it at
the edge of the ditch where two hundred girls had used grenades to
commit suicide in 1945 rather than fall alive into the hands of the
Americans. People have their pictures taken in front of the ditch. Across from
it souvenir lighters are sold shaped like grenades.
On Hayao's machine war resembles letters being burned, shredded in a
frame of fire. The code name for Pearl Harbor was Tora, Tora, Tora, the
name of the cat the couple in Gokokuji was praying for. So all of this
will have begun with the name of a cat pronounced three times.
Off Okinawa kamikaze dived on the American fleet; they would become a
legend. They were likelier material for it obviously than the special
units who exposed their prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria and
then to hot water so as to see how fast flesh separates from the bone.
One would have to read their last letters to learn that the kamikaze
weren't all volunteers, nor were they all swashbuckling samurai. Before
drinking his last cup of saké Ryoji Uebara had written: "I have always
thought that Japan must live free in order to live eternally. It may
seem idiotic to say that today, under a totalitarian regime. We kamikaze
pilots are machines, we have nothing to say, except to beg our
compatriots to make Japan the great country of our dreams. In the plane I am a
machine, a bit of magnetized metal that will plaster itself against an
aircraft carrier. But once on the ground I am a human being with
feelings and passions. Please excuse these disorganized thoughts. I'm leaving
you a rather melancholy picture, but in the depths of my heart I am
happy. I have spoken frankly, forgive me."
Every time he came from Africa he stopped at the island of
Sal, which is
in fact a salt rock in the middle of the Atlantic. At the end of the
island, beyond the village of Santa Maria and its cemetery with the
painted tombs, it suffices to walk straight ahead to meet the desert.
He wrote me: I've understood the visions. Suddenly you're in the desert
the way you are in the night; whatever is not desert no longer exists.
You don't want to believe the images that crop up.
Did I write you that there are emus in the Ile de France? This
name-Island of France-sounds strangely on the island of Sal. My memory
superimposes two towers: the one at the ruined castle of
Montpilloy that served as an
encampment for Joan of Arc, and the lighthouse tower at the southern tip of
Sal, probably one of the last lighthouses to use oil.
A lighthouse in the Sahel looks like a collage until you see the ocean
at the edge of the sand and salt. Crews of transcontinental planes are
rotated on Sal. Their club brings to this frontier of nothingness a
small touch of the seaside resort which makes the rest still more unreal.
They feed the stray dogs that live on the beach.
I found my dogs pretty nervous tonight; they were playing with the sea
as I had never seen them before. Listening to Radio Hong Kong later on
I understood: today was the first day of the lunar new year, and for
the first time in sixty years the sign of the dog met the sign of water.
Out there, eleven thousand miles away, a single shadow remains immobile
in the midst of the long moving shadows that the January light throws
over the ground of Tokyo: the shadow of the Asakusa bonze.
For also in Japan the year of the dog is beginning. Temples are filled
with visitors who come to toss down their coins and to pray-Japanese
style-a prayer which slips into life without interrupting it.
Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal in the company of
my prancing dogs I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I
remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They
have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder
how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape.
How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The
new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to
reread itself constantly just to know it existed.
As we await the year four thousand and one and its total recall, that's
what the oracles we take out of their long hexagonal boxes at new year
may offer us: a little more power over that memory that runs from camp
to camp-like Joan of Arc. That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong
radio picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo, and that the
memory of a precise color in the street bounces back on another
country, another distance, another music, endlessly.
At the end of memory's path, the ideograms of the Island of France are
no less enigmatic than the kanji of Tokyo in the miraculous light of
the new year. It's Indian winter, as if the air were the first element to
emerge purified from the countless ceremonies by which the Japanese
wash off one year to enter the next one. A full month is just enough for
them to fulfill all the duties that courtesy owes to time, the most
interesting unquestionably being the acquisition at the temple of
Tenjin of the
uso bird, who according to one tradition eats all your lies of the year to
come, and according to another turns them into truths.
But what gives the street its color in January, what makes it suddenly
different is the appearance of kimono. In the street, in stores, in
offices, even at the stock exchange on opening day, the girls take out
their fur collared winter kimono. At that moment of the year other
Japanese may well invent extra flat TV sets, commit suicide with a chain saw,
or capture two thirds of the world market for semiconductors. Good for
them; all you see are the girls.
The fifteenth of January is
coming of age day: an obligatory
celebration in the life of a young Japanese woman. The city governments
distribute small bags filled with gifts, datebooks, advice: how to be a good
citizen, a good mother, a good wife. On that day every twenty-year-old
girl can phone her family for free, no matter where in Japan. Flag,
home, and country: this is the anteroom of adulthood. The world of the
takenoko and of rock singers speeds away like a rocket. Speakers explain
what society expects of them. How long will it take to forget the secret?
And when all the celebrations are over it remains only to pick up all
the ornaments-all the accessories of the celebration-and by burning
them, make a celebration.
This is dondo-yaki, a Shinto blessing of the debris that have a right
to immortality-like the dolls at Ueno. The last state-before their
disappearance-of the poignancy of things. Daruma-the one eyed spirit-reigns
supreme at the summit of the bonfire. Abandonment must be a feast;
laceration must be a feast. And the farewell to all that one has lost,
broken, used, must be ennobled by a ceremony. It's Japan that could fulfill
the wish of that French writer who wanted divorce to be made a
sacrament.
The only baffling part of this ritual was the circle of children
striking the ground with their long poles. I only got one explanation, a
singular one-although for me it might take the form of a small intimate
service-it was to chase away the moles.
And that's where my three children of Iceland came and grafted
themselves in. I picked up the whole shot again, adding the somewhat hazy end,
the frame trembling under the force of the wind beating us down on the
cliff: everything I had cut in order to tidy up, and that said better
than all the rest what I saw in that moment, why I held it at arms
length, at zooms length, until its last twenty-fourth of a second, the city
of Heimaey spread out below us. And when five years later my friend
Haroun Tazieff sent me the film he had just shot in the same place I
lacked only the name to learn that nature performs its own dondo-yaki; the
island's volcano had awakened. I looked at those pictures, and it was as
if the entire year '65 had just been covered with ashes.
So, it sufficed to wait and the planet itself staged the working of
time. I saw what had been my window again. I saw emerge familiar roofs and
balconies, the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day,
down to the cliff where I had met the children. The cat with white socks
that Haroun had been considerate enough to film for me naturally found
its place. And I thought, of all the prayers to time that had studded
this trip the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of Gotokuji, who
said simply to her cat Tora, "Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you."
And then in its turn the journey entered the 'zone,' and Hayao showed
me my images already affected by the moss of time, freed of the lie that
had prolonged the existence of those moments swallowed by the spiral.
When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his
cry half a tone, I took the green train of the Yamanote line and got
off at Tokyo station, near the central post office. Even if the street
was empty I waited at the red light-Japanese style-so as to leave space
for the spirits of the broken cars. Even if I was expecting no letter I
stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honor the spirits
of torn up letters, and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of
unmailed letters.
I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never
ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is
left unsaid. I walked alongside the little stalls of clothing dealers. I
heard in the distance Mr. Akao's voice reverberating from the
loudspeakers... a half tone higher.
Then I went down into the basement where my friend-the maniac-busies
himself with his electronic graffiti. Finally his language touches me,
because he talks to that part of us which insists on drawing profiles on
prison walls. A piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not,
or is no longer, or is not yet; the handwriting each one of us will use
to compose his own list of 'things that quicken the heart,' to offer,
or to erase. In that moment poetry will be made by everyone, and there
will be emus in the 'zone.'
He writes me from Japan. He writes me from Africa. He writes that he
can now summon up the look on the face of the market lady of Praia that
had lasted only the length of a film frame.
Will there be a last letter?
