A Team Nanban (594mgnav) Release
The first image he told me about
was of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965.
He said for him it was the image of happiness,
and that he'd often tried to link it to other images,
but it had never worked.
He wrote me, "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 Ηokkaido, the northern island.
Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane. Others take the ferry.
Waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep -
curiously it all makes me think of some past or future war:
night trains, air raids, fall-out shelters.
Small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life."
He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time,
memories whose only function was to leave behind memories.
He wrote, "After circling the globe, only banality still interests me.
On this trip I've tracked it relentlessly, like a bounty hunter.
At dawn, we'll be in Tokyo."
He used to write me from Africa.
He contrasted African time with European and Asian time.
He said that in the 1 9th century, mankind had come to terms with space,
and that the great question of the 20th would be different concepts of time.
"By the way,
did you know that there are emus in the lle de France?"
Ηe wrote that in the Bijago Islands,
it's the young girls who choose their fiancés.
He wrote that in the suburbs of Tokyo, there's a temple consecrated to cats.
"I wish I could convey the simplicity, the lack of affectation of this couple
who'd come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery
so that their cat Tora would be protected.
No, she wasn't dead. She'd just 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 in the rain
to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken."
He wrote...
"I'll have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering,
which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its inner lining.
We don't 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 that he wanted to show,
there were also the failures of the Japanese model.
"A world full of bums, of lumpens, of outcasts, of Koreans.
Too broke to afford drugs, they get drunk on beer or fermented milk.
This morning in Namidabashi, 20 minutes from the glories of downtown,
a character took his revenge on society by directing traffic at this intersection.
Luxury for them would be a large bottle of sake
of the type poured over tombs on the day of the dead.
I bought a round in a bar in Namidabashi,
a place where people stare at each other with equality.
The threshold below which every man is as good as any other, and knows it."
Ηe 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 pounce.
They're a people of wanderers, of navigators, of world travelers.
They arose from crossbreeding 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,
isn't it stupid to tell people,
like they teach in film school, not to look at the camera?"
He wrote...
"The Sahel is not only what is shown of it when it is too late.
Drought seeps into this land like water into a leaking boat.
The animals resurrected for carnival in Bissau
will be petrified again
as soon as a new attack has changed the savannah into a desert.
It's a state of survival that rich countries have forgotten, with one exception.
You guessed it: Japan.
My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts.
They're a journey to the extreme poles of survival."
He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon,
a lady-in-waiting to Princess Sadako in the 11th century,
during the Ηeian period.
"Do we ever know where history is really made?
Rulers used complicated strategies to fight one another,
while real power lay with a family of hereditary regents.
The emperor's court was but 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:
a list of 'elegant things,'
of 'distressing things,'
or even of 'things not worth doing.'
One day she drew 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 I really want to show the neighborhood celebrations."
He wrote...
"Coming back along the Chiba coast,
I thought of Shonagon's list of signs one need only name to quicken the heart.
Only name.
To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it is 'radiant,'
a spring not quite a spring unless it's 'crystal-clear.'
Ηere, interjecting adjectives
would be as 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 recently chronicled the story of a man from Nagoya.
The woman he loved died last year,
and he'd 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 couldn't bear to hear the word 'spring."'
He described his reunion with Tokyo.
"Like a cat home from vacation
who immediately starts to inspect familiar places."
He ran to see if all was where it should be:
the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive,
the Temple of the Fox above the Mitsukoshi department store,
which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers.
He learned it was now little girls who made and unmade stars,
and that producers trembled before them.
He was told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of passers-by
and scratched them if they didn't find her beautiful.
Everything interested him.
He who didn't give a damn about soccer stars or racetrack winners
asked feverishly about Chiyonofuji's ranking in the last sumo tournament.
He asked for news of the imperial family, the crown prince,
or Tokyo's oldest mobster, who appears regularly on television
to teach goodness to children.
The simple joys he'd never known -
returning to one's native land and family home -
he found among the city's 12 million anonymous residents.
He wrote...
"Tokyo is crisscrossed by trains, knit together by electric wires.
She shows her veins.
They say TV is making her people illiterate,
but I've never seen so many people reading in the streets.
Perhaps they only read in the street,
or perhaps they're just pretending 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 bit for the sad fate of the comic-strip heroines,
victims of heartless writers and a castrating censorship.
Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls.
The entire city is a comic strip.
It's planet Mongo.
One can't miss the statuary,
from plasticized baroque to Stalin-sensual,
and the giant faces with their imposing stares.
Pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.
At nightfall, the megalopolis breaks down into villages.
With its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, its stations and temples,
each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy, ingenuous little town,
nestled among the skyscrapers."
The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that lndian flute
whose sound can only be heard by the person playing it.
Ηe might have cried out - as in a Godard film or a Shakespeare play -
"Where is that music coming from?"
Later he told me he'd eaten at the restaurant in Nishi Nippori
where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of "action cooking."
He said that by carefully watching Mr. Yamada's gestures
and his way of mixing the ingredients,
one could meditate profitably on fundamental concepts
common to painting, philosophy and martial arts.
He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed,
in his impressively humble way, the essence of style...
and that it therefore fell to him
to use his invisible brush
to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words "The End."
"I spent the day in front of my TV, that box of memories.
I was in Nara with the sacred deer.
I was taking a picture,
unaware that in the 1 5th century Basho had written...
'The willow sees the heron's image upside down.'
Commercials become a kind of haiku
to the eye used to Western atrocities in the genre.
Not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure.
For one slightly hallucinatory moment,
I had the impression that I understood Japanese...
but it was a cultural program about Gérard de Nerval."
Memories of a visit to the tomb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
a simple and moving monument in stone
guarded by tall trees.
"8:40. Cambodia.
From Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge -
coincidence, or a sense of history?
In Apocalypse Now,
Brando uttered a few definitive - and incommunicable -
sentences on the subject:
'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 sly beauty of certain corpses.
One is sometimes stunned by so much cruelty.
One seeks its source in Asian people's long familiarity with suffering
that requires that even pain be ornate.
And then comes the reward:
The monsters are vanquished and Natsume Masako arises.
Absolute beauty too has a name and a face.
But the more you watch Japanese television,
the more you feel it's watching you.
Even television newscasts bear witness to the fact
that the eye's magical function is at the center of all things.
It's election time.
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 most indecipherable images are those of Europe.
I watch the images of a film whose soundtrack will be added later.
It took me six months for Poland.
But I have no difficulty with the local earthquakes,
though I must admit last night's quake helped me greatly to grasp the problem.
Poetry is born of insecurity:
wandering Jews,
quaking Japanese.
Living on a rug that jesting nature is ever ready to pull out from under them,
they've learned to inhabit a world of appearances,
fragile, fleeting, revocable,
of trains that fly from planet to planet,
of samurai fighting in an ever-shifting past.
It's called the impermanence of things.
I watched it all, even the evening shows,
the so-called adult shows.
The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips, but this is 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, like religions have always done."
That year, a new face appeared
among the great faces adorning the streets of Tokyo: the face of the pope.
Treasures that had never left the Vatican
were displayed on the seventh floor of the Sogo department store.
He wrote...
"It's curiosity, of course, but also a hint of industrial espionage.
I imagine them bringing out in two years
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 French department stores exhibit relics sacred to the Japanese
such as can be seen at Jozankei, on the island of Hokkaido?
At first, one smiles at this combination museum, chapel and sex shop.
As always in Japan, one admires how the walls between 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 render television's stratagems incomprehensible
but for the fact that sex organs may only be shown severed from the body.
One would like to believe in a world before the fall,
inaccessible to the complications of a puritanism
whose phony shadow was 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 pairs of coupling animals,
would then be the earthly paradise as we've always dreamed of 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 splendor of the gentle animals of Jozankei,
I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society,
the rift that separates men from women.
In life it seems to manifest in just two ways:
violent slaughter,
or a discreet melancholy resembling Shonagon's,
which the Japanese express in a single - and untranslatable - word.
Bringing man down to the level of the beasts
against which the church fathers inveighed
becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the 'poignancy of things,'
to a melancholy whose tone I can convey
by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi:
'Who said that time heals all wounds?
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 disembodied wound."'
He wrote that the Japanese secret -
what Levi-Strauss called the poignancy of things -
implied the faculty of communing with things,
of entering into them, of being them for a moment.
It's only natural that, in their turn, they should be like us -
perishable and immortal.
He wrote, "Animism is a familiar notion in Africa.
It's less often applied to Japan.
What then shall we call this diffuse belief
according to which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart?
Building a factory or skyscraper
begins with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land.
There's a ceremony for brushes, abacuses, even rusty needles.
There's one on September 25th for the repose of the soul of broken dolls.
The dolls are piled up in the Temple of Kiyomizu -
which is consecrated to Kannon, the goddess of compassion -
and then burned in public.
I watched the participants.
I think the people who saw off the kamikaze pilots
had the same look on their faces."
He wrote 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 Amílcar Cabral.
"Why should a country so small and so poor interest the world?
They did what they could.
They chased Portugal out, so traumatizing its army
that it moved to overthrow its own dictatorship
and led one briefly 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 Pidjiguiti,
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 the 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 begin.'
Cabral never got a chance to say it. He was assassinated first.
But the problems began, and went on, and are still going on.
Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism:
to work, to produce, to distribute,
to overcome postwar exhaustion
and the temptations of power and privilege.
But after all, history's only bitter to those who expect a sugar coating.
My personal problem was more specific:
How to film the ladies of Bissau?
Apparently, the eye's magical function was working against me there.
In the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde,
I again encountered those egalitarian stares
and this sequence of glances that bordered on seduction.
I see her.
She sees me.
She knows I see her.
She glances my way,
but furtively, as if I'm not really the object of her gaze.
Finally, the direct gaze
lasting 1 /24th of a second, the length of a film frame.
All women have a built-in kernel of indestructibility,
and men's task has always been to keep them from realizing it
for as long 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 Hachiko the dog.
"A dog waited for his master every day at the station.
The master died, but the dog didn't know it,
and he continued to wait, all his life.
People were moved and brought him food.
They still place sushi and rice cakes before the statue erected in his honor
so that the faithful soul of Hachiko will never go hungry.
Tokyo is full of these small legends and animal intercessors.
The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard over what was once the empire of Mr. Okada,
a great collector of French paintings,
the man who rented the Château of Versailles
to celebrate the 1 00th anniversary of his department stores.
In the computer section of one such store,
I've seen young Japanese exercising their brain muscles
like young Athenians at the palestra.
They have a war to win.
History books of the future will perhaps rank the battle of the integrated circuit
with the battles of Salamis or Agincourt.
But they 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,
Mr. Akao, president of the Japanese Patriotic Party,
rails from his rolling balcony against the international communist plot.
He wrote...
"The extreme right's vans, with their flags and megaphones,
are part of the Tokyo landscape.
Mr. Akao is their focal point.
I think he'll have his own statue, like Ηachiko the dog,
at this intersection that he leaves only to go prophesy on the battlefields.
He was at Narita in the '60s:
Peasants fought an airport to be built on their land,
with Mr. Akao denouncing Moscow's hand in everything that moved.
Yurakucho is Tokyo's political arena.
I once saw a monk there pray for peace in Vietnam.
Today, young right-wing activists
protest the annexation of the northern islands by the Russians.
Sometimes they're told that Japan's commercial relations
with the abominable occupier to the north
are a thousand times better than with the American ally,
who's always whining about economic aggression.
Nothing is simple.
On the other sidewalk, the left has the floor.
Korean Catholic opposition leader Kim Dae Jung,
kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean Gestapo,
is threatened with a death sentence.
A group has begun a hunger strike.
Some very young activists gather signatures in his support.
I returned to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the struggle.
The demonstration was unreal.
I felt like I was in Brigadoon,
like I'd woken up ten years later amid the same actors,
the same blue-suited police and helmeted adolescents,
the same slogan, the same banners...
and the same goal: to fight the airport.
Just one thing has been added: the airport itself.
But its single runway hemmed in by barbed wire
looks more besieged than victorious.
My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution:
If the images of the present don't change, change the images of the past.
He showed me clashes of the '60s run through his synthesizer.
'Less deceptive pictures,' 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,'
in an homage to Tarkovsky.
What Narita brought back to me like a shattered hologram
was a fragment of the '60s generation.
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 utopian goal of uniting in a common struggle
those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth,
but it let out a primordial scream that better-adjusted voices no longer could.
I met peasants there who'd come to know themselves through the struggle.
In concrete terms, it had failed.
Yet all they had won in their understanding of the world
and of themselves
could only have been won 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 posturers and its careerists -
including those who made a career of martyrdom -
but it carried with it all those who said, like Che Guevara,
that they 'trembled with indignation at every injustice 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 gather every weekend at Shinjuku
obviously know they're not on a launching pad toward real life,
that they are life, to be eaten on the spot, like fresh donuts.
It's a very simple secret.
The old try to hide it, and not all the young know it.
The 10-year-old girl who tied her friend's hands
and threw her from the 13th floor
for speaking badly of their class team hadn't discovered it yet.
Parents who demand more special telephone lines
to prevent children's suicides
find out a little late that they kept the secret too well.
Rock is an international language for spreading the secret.
Another is peculiar to Tokyo.
For the Takenoko, 20 is retiring age.
They are baby Martians.
I go see them dance every Sunday in Yoyogi Park.
They want people to look at them but seem not to notice when they do.
They live in a parallel time stream.
An invisible aquarium wall separates them from their audience,
and I can spend a whole afternoon
watching a little Takenoko girl learn the customs of her planet.
Beyond that, they wear dog tags,
they obey a whistle, the Mafia extorts money from them,
a boy is always in charge."
One day he writes to me,
"Description of a dream:
More and more, my dreams are set
in the department stores of Tokyo,
the subterranean passages that parallel the city above.
A face appears, then disappears. A trace is found, then lost.
The folklore of dreams is so much intact that the next day, when I'm awake,
I realize that I continue to seek in this basement labyrinth
the presence concealed the night before.
I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine,
or if they're part of a totality, a gigantic collective dream,
of which the entire city may be the projection.
It might suffice to pick up any of the telephones lying around
to hear a familiar voice
or the beating of a heart -
Sei Shonagon's, for example.
All the underground passages lead to train 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 assembles all the fragments of dreams
and makes a single film of them, the ultimate film.
The tickets from the automatic dispenser grant admission to the show."
He told me of the January light on the stations' stairways.
Ηe said the city ought to be deciphered like a musical score.
One could get lost in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of details,
but that yielded the cheapest image of Tokyo:
overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman.
Ηe thought he saw more subtle cycles there:
rhythms, clusters of faces glimpsed 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 a musical instrument,
each step a note.
It all fit together like voices in a complicated fugue,
but it was enough to seize one and hang on to it:
the television screens, for example.
All by themselves they created an itinerary
that sometimes took unexpected turns.
It was sumo season,
and the fans watching the fights in the very chic Ginza showrooms
were the poorest of the Tokyo poor,
so poor they didn't have even a TV set.
Ηe saw them come, these lost souls of Namidabashi
with whom he'd drunk sake one sunny dawn.
How many seasons ago was that now?
He wrote me...
"Even in the stalls selling spare electronic parts
that some hipsters use for jewelry,
there is, in Tokyo's musical score, a particular staff
whose rarity in Europe condemns me to a real acoustic exile:
the music of video games.
They're built into tables.
You can drink and have lunch and go on playing.
The arcades open onto the street,
where you can listen and play from memory.
I witnessed the birth of these games in Japan.
I met them again later all over the world, but one detail was different.
At first it was the familiar game,
a politically incorrect battering aimed at killing off creatures
that were either prairie dogs or baby seals - I can't be sure which.
Here's the new Japanese variation:
lnstead of the critters, there are vaguely human heads identified by labels.
At the top, the chairman of the board.
In front of him, the vice president and directors.
In the front row, department heads and personnel manager.
The guy I filmed,
who was smashing up the hierarchy with enviable energy,
confided that it was not at all allegorical for him,
that he was thinking very specifically of his superiors.
That's no doubt why the 'personnel manager'
has been clubbed so often and so hard that it was taken out of commission
and a baby seal reinserted in its place.
Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine.
To please me, he puts in my most beloved animals,
the cat and the owl.
He claims that only electronics
can deal with feeling, memory and imagination.
Mizoguchi's Arsène Lupin, for example,
or the no-less-imaginary Burakumin.
Ηow to show a category of Japanese that doesn't exist?
Yes, I saw them in Osaka, for hire by the day, sleeping on the ground.
Since the Middle Ages they've been doomed to grubby and thankless jobs,
but since the Meiji era, officially nothing sets them apart,
and their real name - the 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 unsurpassable philosophy of our time
is found in Pac-Man.
I didn't know, while sacrificing my 100-yen coins to him,
that he was to conquer the world.
Perhaps because he's the most perfect graphic metaphor of the human condition.
He puts into true perspective
the balance of power between the individual and the environment,
and he tells us soberly that though there's honor
in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks,
it never amounts to anything in the end."
He was pleased to see the same chrysanthemums
at funerals for both men and animals.
He described the ceremony held at the zoo in Ueno,
in memory of animals that had died during the year.
"For two years now,
a certain panda's death has rendered this day even more sorrowful,
a loss more irreparable, say the newspapers,
than the recent death of the prime minister.
Last year people really cried.
Now they seem to be getting used to it,
accepting that each year death takes a panda
as dragons carry off young girls in fairy tales.
I've heard this sentence:
'The partition separating life from death
doesn't seem as thick to us as it does to a Westerner.'
What I've 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 to see through the partition
to understand an animal's death."
"I've returned from a country
where death is not a partition to cross but a road to follow.
The Great Ancestor of the Bijago 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 to the other world.
If by accident one should meet them, it is imperative not to recognize them.
The Bijagos are part of Guinea-Bissau.
In an old film clip, Amílcar Cabral waves good-bye to the shore.
He's right. Ηe'll never see it again.
Luís Cabral made the same gesture 1 5 years later,
on the canoe that was bringing us back.
Guinea had by that time become a nation, and Luís was its president.
All those who remember the war remember him.
Like his half brother Amílcar, he was of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdian blood,
and, like Amílcar, a founding member of an unusual party, the PAIGC,
which, by uniting the two colonized countries in a single struggle,
sought to herald a federation of the two states.
I've heard the stories of former guerrilla fighters,
who'd fought in conditions so inhuman that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers
for having to bear what they themselves suffered.
I heard that and many more things
that make one ashamed for having used lightly, even if inadvertently,
the word "guerrilla" to describe a certain kind of filmmaking,
a word linked at the time to many theoretical debates
as well as bloody defeats on the ground.
Amílcar Cabral was the only one to lead a victorious guerrilla war,
and not only in terms of military conquests.
He knew his people. Ηe'd studied them at length.
Ηe wanted every liberated region to herald 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.
Amílcar was not afraid of ambiguities. He knew the traps.
He wrote...
"It's as though we're facing a raging river,
and those trying to cross are drowning.
But there's no choice. They must get to the other side."
Now the scene moves to Cassaca, February 17th, 1980,
but to grasp it properly, one must move forward in time:
In a year, Luís 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 Capeverdians will be fighting over Amílcar's legacy.
We'll see that beneath this ceremony of promotions,
seemingly perpetuating the brotherhood of the struggle,
there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness,
and that Nino's tears expressed not an ex-warrior's emotion
but the wounded pride of a hero
slighted at not being raised high enough above the rest.
Beneath each of these faces lies a memory,
and where there was to be one collective memory,
there are a thousand memories of men who parade their personal wounds
in the great wound of history.
In Portugal, swept up in turn by the breaking wave of Bissau,
Miguel Torga, who'd struggled all his life against the dictatorship, wrote,
'Every bit player represents only himself.
lnstead of seeking social change,
he seeks simply, in the revolutionary act,
to boost his own image.'
That's the way the breakers recede,
and so predictably that one must believe in an 'amnesia of the future'
that history bestows, out of mercy or self-interest,
on those it recruits.
Amílcar murdered by members of his own party,
the liberated areas fallen to 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 like one plugs one's ears.
Luís, exiled to Cuba,
and Nino, himself a target of later plots,
can summon each other endlessly before history's court -
but history doesn't care.
It has only one friend, the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse:
the 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 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 caught in the furnace of the projector.
Madness protects, as fever does.
I envy Hayao and his Zone.
He plays with the signs of his memory.
He pins them down and decorates them like insects
that have flown beyond time
and that he can 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 that only one film had been capable
of portraying impossible memory, insane memory:
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
In the spiral of the opening titles,
he saw time covering a field growing ever wider as it moved away,
a cyclone whose present moment contains the motionless eye.
In San Francisco he'd gone on a pilgrimage to all the film's locations.
The florist Podesta Baldocchi,
where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak,
he the hunter and she the prey -
or was it the other way around?
The tile floor hadn't changed.
He'd driven up and down the hills of San Francisco,
where Jimmy Stewart - Scottie - follows Kim Novak - Madeleine.
It seems to be about pursuit, mystery and murder,
but in truth it's about power and freedom,
melancholy and dazzlement,
so carefully coded within the spiral that you could miss it
and not immediately notice that this vertigo of space
in reality stands for the vertigo of time.
He'd followed every trail,
even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores,
where Madeleine prayed at the grave of a woman long dead
whom she should not have known.
He'd followed Madeleine - as Scottie had done -
to the Museum of the Legion of Honor,
before the portrait of a dead woman she shouldn't have known.
And on the portrait, as in Madeleine's hair,
the spiral of time.
The Victorian hotel where Madeleine disappeared had itself disappeared.
Concrete had replaced it at the corner of Eddie and Gough.
But the cross-section of redwood trunk was still in Muir Woods.
On it, Madeleine traced the short distance
between two of those concentric lines that measure the age of the tree and said,
"Ηere I was born, and there I died."
He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted:
the redwood was in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris,
and the hand pointed to a place beyond the tree -
outside of time.
This painted horse at San Juan Bautista,
with an eye that looked like Madeleine's -
Ηitchcock had invented nothing. It was all there.
He'd run under the arches in the mission
as Madeleine had run towards her death -
but was it really hers?
From this fake tower - the only thing Ηitchcock added -
he imagined Scottie as "Time's Fool of Love,"
unable to live with memory without falsifying it,
inventing a double for Madeleine in another dimension of time,
a Zone that would belong only to him,
from which he could decipher the undecipherable story
begun under the Golden Gate when he pulled Madeleine out of San Francisco Bay,
when he'd 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'd seen 19 times.
In Iceland, I laid the first stone of an imaginary film.
That summer, I'd met three children on a road,
and a volcano had risen up out of the sea -
the Set Designer at work once again.
American astronauts trained in this lunar landscape before flying to the moon.
I immediately saw it as a setting for science fiction,
the landscape of another planet -
No, let it be our own for someone who comes from very far away.
I imagine him lumbering about like a deep-sea diver
in this volcanic soil that sticks to the soles.
All of a sudden he stumbles, and with the next step it's a year later.
Ηe's walking on a small path near the Dutch border,
along a seabird sanctuary.
That's for a start.
Why this cut in time, this connection of memories?
That's just it. He can't understand.
He comes not from another planet but from our future.
4001, when the human brain has reached the era of full employment.
Everything works to perfection -
all that we now allow to slumber, including memory.
The logical result: Total recall is memory anesthetized.
After so many stories of men who forgot how to remember,
here's the story of one who forgot how to forget...
and who, through some peculiarity of his nature,
instead of being proud 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 prehistory.
He wants to understand.
He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice,
and he reacts to it like Che Guevara or youth of the '60s - with indignation.
He's a third worlder of time.
The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past
is as unbearable to him as the existence of poverty in their present moment.
Naturally, he will fail.
The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him
as the poverty of a poor country is to the children of a rich one.
He's chosen to give up his privileges,
but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose.
His only comfort is precisely what threw him into this absurd quest:
a song cycle by Mussorgsky.
It's still sung in the 40th century.
Its meaning has been lost, but for the first time, he glimpsed
the presence of that thing he didn't understand,
which had to do with unhappiness and memory,
which he must grasp at all cost,
and toward which, slowly, heavily, he began to walk.
Of course, I'll never make that film.
Nonetheless, I'm collecting sets, devising plot twists,
putting in my favorite creatures.
I've even given it a title,
indeed, the title of those Mussorgsky songs:
Sunless."
"On May 15th, 1945, at 7:00 a.m.,
the 382nd US Infantry Regiment
attacked a hill in Okinawa they had renamed Dick Hill.
I suppose they believed they were conquering Japanese soil
and knew nothing about Ryukyu civilization.
Neither did I,
except that the faces of the market ladies at Itoman
spoke to me more of Gauguin than of Utamaro.
Through centuries of dreamy vassalage, time had not stirred in the archipelago.
Then came the rupture.
Is it a property of islands to make women the guardians of their memory?
I learned that, as in the Bijagos, magic knowledge is passed on through women.
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 remnants of L Company
had gotten only halfway up the hill -
a hill like the one where I followed some villagers
on their way to a purification ceremony.
The noro communicates with the gods of the sea,
of rain, of earth, of fire.
She speaks of them as of family members who've made good.
All bow down before the Sister Deity, a reflection, in the absolute,
of a privileged relationship between brother and sister.
Even after her death, the sister maintains her spiritual predominance.
At dawn the Americans withdrew.
Fighting went on for a month before the island surrendered -
and toppled into the modern world.
Twenty-seven years of American occupation,
Japan's disputed sovereignty restored.
Two miles from bowling alleys and gas stations,
the noro continues her dialogue with the gods.
When she's 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 for those who follow.
This one will leave none.
The rupture in history has been too violent.
I touched that rupture at the top of the hill,
as I had at the edge of the ditch
where 200 girls used grenades in 1945 to commit suicide
rather than fall into American hands.
People have their pictures taken here.
Grenade-shaped cigarette lighters are sold nearby as souvenirs.
On Hayao's machine,
war resembles letters being burned, shredded in a fiery frame.
The code name for Pearl Harbor was "Tora, tora, tora,"
the name of the cat the couple in Gotokuji was praying for.
So all of this will have begun with the name of a cat pronounced three times.
Off Okinawa, kamikazes dived on the American fleet.
They would become a legend, and 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 to see how fast flesh separates from bone.
Only their last letters would reveal that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers,
nor were they all swashbuckling samurai.
Before drinking his last cup of sake,
Ryoji Uebara had written,
'I've always thought that Japan must live free 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'm a machine,
a bit of magnetized metal that will plaster itself to an aircraft carrier,
but on the ground, I'm a human being, with feelings and passions.
Please excuse these disorganized thoughts.
I'm leaving you with a rather melancholy picture,
but in the depths of my heart, I'm happy.
I've spoken frankly. Forgive me."'
Every time he came back from Africa, he stopped at the lsland of Sal,
a salt rock in the middle of the Atlantic.
At the end of the island,
beyond the village of Santa María and its cemetery of painted tombs,
one need only walk straight ahead to meet the desert.
He wrote...
"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 that there are emus in the lle de France?
'Island of France' sounds strange on the lsland of Sal.
My memory superimposes two towers,
the one in the castle ruins of Montepilloy that Joan of Arc used as a camp,
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 pasted on
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 empty frontier
a small touch of the seaside resort that makes the rest even more unreal.
They feed the stray dogs that live on the beach.
My dogs seemed pretty nervous that evening.
They played with the sea as I'd never seen them before.
Listening to Radio Ηong Kong later on, I understood.
That was the first day of the lunar new year,
and for the first time in 60 years,
the sign of the Dog met the sign of Water."
"Out there, 11,000 miles away,
a single shadow remains immobile among the long moving shadows
that the January light casts on the ground in Tokyo:
the shadow of the Asakusa monk.
For in Japan too the Year of the Dog is beginning.
Temples are filled with visitors who toss their coins
and pray, Japanese-style -
a prayer slipped quietly into life without interrupting it.
Stranded at the end of the world, on my lsland of Sal,
in the company of my prancing dogs,
I remember that January in Tokyo,
or rather I remember the images I filmed that January in Tokyo.
They've replaced my memory.
They are my memory.
I wonder how people remember things
who don't film or photograph or tape them.
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 4001 and its total recall,
that's what the New Year oracles
that we take out of their long hexagonal boxes offer us:
a little more power over that memory
that runs from camp to camp, like Joan of Arc,
that a shortwave announcement from Hong Kong Radio
picked up on a Cape Verde lsland 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 lsland of France are no less enigmatic
than the kanji of Tokyo
in the miraculous light of the New Year.
It's Indian winter.
It's as if the air were the first element
to emerge purified from the countless ceremonies the Japanese use
to wash off one year before entering the next.
A full month is just enough
to fulfill all the duties that courtesy owes to time,
the most interesting being the acquisition,
at the temple of Tenjin, of the Uso bird,
that, 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 the kimonos.
In the street, in stores, in offices,
even at the stock exchange on opening day,
girls bring out their fur-collared winter kimonos.
At that time of year,
others may invent extra-flat TV sets, commit suicide with chain saws,
or capture two-thirds of the world market for semiconductors - good for them!
All you see are the girls.
January 15th is Coming-of-Age day,
an obligatory celebration in the life of a young Japanese woman.
City governments distribute bags filled with gifts, date books, advice:
how to be a good citizen, mother, and wife.
On that day, every 20-year-old girl can phone her family for free,
no matter where in Japan.
Work, 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.
Ηow long will they take to forget the secret?
And when all the celebrations are over,
all that remains is to collect the ornaments and accessories
and burn them in one more celebration.
This is dondoyaki,
a Shinto blessing of the debris that has a right to immortality,
like the dolls at Ueno.
The last stage in the poignancy of things before they disappear.
Daruma, the one-eyed spirit, reigns supreme atop 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 children striking the ground with long poles.
I only got one explanation, a rather peculiar one.
I thought it might be a small, intimate ritual,
but it was to chase away moles.
And that's where my three children from Iceland
came and grafted themselves in.
I picked up the whole shot again,
adding the somewhat hazy ending,
the frame trembling under the force of the wind.
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 arm's length, at zoom's length,
until its last 24th 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'd just shot in the same place,
I lacked only the name to know that nature performs its own dondoyaki.
The island's volcano had reawakened.
I looked at those pictures,
and it was as if all of 1965 had just been covered in ash.
So all one had to do was wait,
and the planet itself would stage the working of time.
I saw again what had been my window.
I saw familiar roofs and balconies emerge,
the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day,
down to the cliff where I'd met the children.
The cat with white socks that Haroun had kindly filmed for me
naturally found its place,
and I thought that of all the prayers to time that I'd studied this trip,
the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of Gotokuji,
who said simply to her cat Tora,
"Beloved cat, wherever you are, may your soul rest in peace."
And then, in its turn, the journey entered the Zone.
Hayao showed me my images already touched by the moss of time,
freed of the lie that had prolonged the existence of those moments
swallowed by the spiral.
When spring came
and 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.
Though the street was empty,
I waited at the red light, Japanese-style,
to leave space for the spirits of broken cars.
Though 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 hail the spirits of unmailed letters.
I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West
that has always favored being over non-being,
what is spoken over what's left unsaid.
I walked along the little stalls of clothing dealers.
In the distance I heard Mr. Akao's voice reverberating from the loudspeakers,
now a half tone higher.
Then I went down to the basement
where my maniac friend busies himself with his electronic graffiti.
In the end his language touches me,
for he talks to that part of us that 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 of us will use to draw up
his own list of things that quicken the heart -
to offer up or to erase.
In that moment, poetry will be made by everyone,
and there will be emus in the Zone."
He writes to me from Japan.
He writes to me from Africa.
He says he can now summon up the look on the market lady's face in Praia
that had lasted only the length of a film frame.
Will there be a last letter someday?
A Team Nanban (594mgnav) Release
IN THE FRENCH AUDIO VERSION,
THE LETTERS OF SANDOR KRASNA WERE READ BY FLORENCE DELAY