W.E. - I guess I'm the only survivor of my age of the school of non-commercial and extremely self-virtuous young artists that I was when I was your age. We wouldn't do anything we were asked to do, and we fought around it. Of course that kills most people. For some reason or other it didn't kill me. And I feel that since I've progressed rather slowly, I still have a long career ahead of me.
Could you tell us something about the experience of working with James Agee on the book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men?
W.E. - Oh yes. That of course is the most conspicuous thing I've done, entirely due to Agee. I have a lot of false renown because I was working with a tremendous man, and I'm embarrassed just talking about it because Agee's character doesn't fit the apotheosis he's gone through. He was a very humble man and also very opposed to all kinds of establishments, particularly including the academic, and to put his name in a circle like this— well, he didn't like to be in that kind of an atmosphere. But I will say, he was a great friend of mine before we went off and worked in the South together, and he was distinctly the leader-instigator of that project and I don't think we could have succeeded without his talent with people.
Incidentally, part of a photographer's gift should be with people. You can do some wonderful work if you know how to make people understand what you're doing and feel all right about it, and you can do terrible work if you put them on the defense, which they all are at the beginning. You've got to take them off their defensive attitude and make them participate. Agee was very good at that. He and I moved into some very remote but typical farming families in the Depression, at a time when everything just reeked of poverty. There wasn't a cent of money around. And these people were in terrible shape, but typically, because everybody else was. And I suppose, without meaning to, that what I was doing was photographing human poverty. I just couldn't help it. We were all in it. Everybody was desperate. I find that it's very hard to describe what that was like.
Did it take long to overcome their nervousness?
W.E. - Not really, because Agee was very gifted in the field that I was just talking about—making people feel all right. In fact, they began to love Agee and to be awfully interested. He also took great care to let them know that this was not an invasion or a burden that would set them back in any way. At that time we didn't know it was going to be a book —this was just for a magazine article—and he told them all about it and made them feel that they were participating. We made ourselves into paying guests, with their understanding, and they hadn't seen any money for the longest time, and although that wasn't a corrupt gesture it did make them feel a little bit ahead of the game. Since the game was zero right then.
How long was it before any of the work was actually published?
W.E. - It was quite some time, as a matter of fact. What was first done was a two-part article that was rejected by the magazine that had commissioned it, and Agee asked for a release of rights. He then got a small advance from a publisher and wrote the book, but it took three or four years. I believe we were there in 1936 and the book was published in '41, so there was a long period and a whole lot of sub-adventures—the book was rejected by the first publisher and taken to a second. It's a complicated and not very interesting story. But it's typical of the history of any venture. If you're going to start to do something you're going to have setbacks bringing it to fruition. Any venture is a rocky road. Your education is, too.
You talk about yourself rebelling against the Establishment and about the misfortunes of Depression times, but your photographs are not critical. I find them more of a glorification—glorification of the plain and simple reality.
W.E. - I'm pleased to hear you say that, because I didn't like the label that I unconsciously earned of being a social protest artist. I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me. I knew by then that nobody was going to do that. And that kind of history has repeated itself. People in the late '60s, not long ago, had those same ideas, and there hasn't been a single dent in the forces that they were going to bring down.
But certain photographs really do have political content, starting with, for example, Hine's photographs of children working in the mills at the turn of the century.
W.E. - Well, Hine can be used more than I can for that purpose—and there's a good reason. Hine did intend to arouse political action, or at least arouse an interest in child labor. I cared to have certain things read into my work, but I really don't intend to have my ideas and my work and my vision used as political action.
Since you raised the question of whether I'm a politically-minded artist or not, the answer is no, I'm not. I never undertake direct political action. Every time I've had a political idea it has proved perfectly wrong. For example, when I heard Mr. Nixon's speech—you remember the famous one that he made with his little dog—I was just convinced, "Well, that's the end of Richard Nixon." The next morning the country hailed him as a white knight.
In your picture of the dock workers in Cuba, it was obviously a very hard existence. The faces are as black as coal dust, or whatever it is they were working with, and yet your pictures seem to show them almost as cheerful.
W.E. - Well, you must remember, I didn't attempt to put that in. I want to record what's there, and you're right—those people have no self-pity and no sense of very much of anything. They were just as happy as you are, really. Are you happy? Maybe you're having a worse time than they were.
Do you think in photographing, say, suburban America—which is a very wide part of American life today—you could use the same approach, of just looking at the very surface to portray it?
W.E. - It doesn't work. I've tried. I thought, "Here's a great, significant sector of America," but I've been bored looking at the work of those who have done it and I've been bored with my own work.
But have you seen any good ideas in photographing suburban America?
W.E. - The movie called THE GRADUATE was satirical and quite true, quite penetrating, but that's not still photography. And there's a long tradition of it in writing, identified by Sinclair Lewis. His characters like Babbitt are relentless pictures of middle-class American life. But I can't imagine myself photographing a group of people sitting around a country club, or whatever they call it. I've never found them satirical enough material.
Some people have said that you knew more about America in the '30s than anybody else. How did you learn? You understood America.
W.E. - Well, yes, but only instinctively. That and many other questions come to me now as unanswerable and inexplicable. I knew a whole lot of things— I can see now in retrospect—instinctively and unconsciously, and that goes along with a theory of mine: that almost all good artists are being worked through with forces that they're not quite aware of. They are transmitters of sensitivities that they're not aware of having, of forces that are in the air at the time. I've done a lot of things that I'm surprised at now which show a lot of knowledge that I didn't have or knew I had. I can now learn something from my own pictures.
Was it hard to find America at that time after going to Andover?
W.E. - Well, that's a large and subtle question, and that's also something I don't know much about, but I've thought about it. Yes, I'm a product of a very Establishment place like Andover, for example, but I was always rather against it, even at the time. I didn't want to admit that I was in such a classical establishment, and I used to go around pretending that I wasn't, or that I was uneducated, and that was a youthful force. It was false thinking, but I've got my balance about that now.
Privilege, if you're very strict, is an immoral and unjust thing to have, but if you've got it you didn't choose to get it and you might as well use it. You're privileged to be at Yale, but you know you're under an obligation to repay what's been put into you.
Actually, in my generation only a very few people people were anti-establishment or were revolutionary or were artists. But now there's a great change, one of the most remarkable revolutions in thought and style that we have ever seen. For one thing, young people today have a place to go if they want to run away. We didn't have any place to go. The Communist Party let us down by the Stalin Pact and by the Moscow trials. The whole world offered us no escape from our condition and our past and authority. We couldn't get out of it. But if you look at a phenomenon like Woodstock you realize that there's a mass of people all in the same boat, who take care of each other. We had no strength in union. There wasn't any union.
Do you think that this change in consciousness has resulted in an increase in good photography?
W.E. - That's a complicated question. I have a theory that the extensive interest in non-commercial photography that can be taken seriously now is due to the association between your minds and your idealistic yearning for honesty. And you have assumed that photography is an artistic medium and that it is more adaptable to honest work than words and drawings and paintings. I believe that's responsible for the enormous interest in noncommercial photography, though I'm not sure you're right about thinking that this is an honest medium or one that opens up possibilities of honest expression.
It seems to me that you are an early pioneer of this very movement you've been describing. One reason for your appeal is that you have always been a photographer of extraordinary honesty and simplicity—that what you've been looking for in America is something unadorned and plain and true.
W.E. - You must remember that this is an unconscious phenomenon, and it is to me an amazing accident of art history and psychological history and American history that I was unconsciously working in terms that surfaced, so to speak, in your generation. You talk about simplicity. When I first made photographs, they were too plain to be considered art and I wasn't considered an artist. I didn't get any attention at all. The people who looked at my work thought, well, that's just a snapshot of the backyard. Privately I knew otherwise and through stubbornness stayed with it. I think I knew what I was doing but I didn't know that I was bringing into play these characteristics you're talking about. You talk about honesty. I didn't know I was honest—I was just doing that instinctively. It just so happens that in a university the habit of mind is reflective and analytical, but that's exceptional. The so-called man in the street, if he exists, is neither reflective nor analytical.
When you take pictures some kind of change occurs. There's something different between your photographs and if you went to that place and looked at it with the naked eye, and I was wondering—you must have reflected on this, just having taken all those photographs—what effect your mind has when you make the conscious decision to push the button.
W.E. - Indeed I have. I think it's fascinating, but it's insoluble also. But I'd venture, if I could do it in a humble way, to claim to be an artist, and the motivation of artists is a great mystery. Who knows why a paragraph by Tolstoy is an inspired and often an almost deathless thing. It's a piece of literature and high art, and a New York Times editorial never is. It couldn't be. Yet they're both uses of language.
Do you think it's possible for the camera to lie?
W.E. - It certainly is. It almost always does.
Is it all right for the camera to lie?
W.E. - No, I don't think it's all right for any thing or any body to lie. But it's beyond control. I just feel that honesty exists relatively in people here and there.
I guess what I'm trying to ask is, if you take a beautiful photograph of a garbage can, is it lying?
W.E. - Well, somebody wrote a whole essay called "There's No Such Thing as Beauty." And that's worth thinking about. A garbage can, occasionally, to me at least, can be beautiful. That's because you're seeing. Some people are able to see that—see it and feel it. I lean toward the enchantment, the visual power, of the esthetically rejected subject.
Is that simply because they present a challenge to you?
W.E. - No, I'm just made that way. It's partly rather perverse. I got a lot of my early momentum from disdain of accepted ideas of beauty, and that's partly good, it's partly original. It's also partly destructive. I wasn't a very nice young man. I was tearing down everything if possible. I only see that in retrospect. It was just in me, as there are certain curious things in you that you'll wonder at, later on when you're my age, but you won't ever get to the bottom of.
To get back to the difference between non-commercial photography and journalism, if a picture is honest I don't see what difference it makes if it's hung in a gallery or printed on a page.
W.E. - I don't either. In fact, I'm rather suspicious of hanging a picture in a gallery. I cut out remarkable pictures from the daily press all the time.
Have you ever tried color film and do you think it renders a less honest image than black and white?
W.E. - No, I've tried it. I'm in a stage right now that has to do with color and I'm interested in it. But I don't think that the doors open to falsehood through color are any greater than they are through the manipulation of prints in black and white. You can distort that, too. I happen to be a gray man; I'm not a black-and-white man. I think gray is truer. You find that in other fields. E. M. Forster's prose is gray and it's marvelous.
Most of the people who have been doing color seem to be drawn to the dramatic, like Ernst Haas.
W.E. - I understand all that, but I've now taken up that little SX-70 camera for fun and become very interested in it. I'm feeling wildly with it. But a year ago I would have said that color is vulgar and should never be tried under any circumstances. It's a paradox that I'm now associated with it and in fact I intend to come out with it seriously.
At the beginning you said that you were a late starter and you felt that your career still had a long way to go. What are you doing now?
W.E. - Well, I just told you one thing. I'm very excited about that little gadget which I thought was just a toy at first.
What are you trying to do with it?
W.E. - Oh, extend my vision and let that open up new stylistic paths that I haven't been down yet. That's one of the peculiar things about it that I unexpectedly discovered. A practiced photographer has an entirely new extension in that camera. You photograph things that you wouldn't think of photographing before. I don't even yet know why, but I find that I'm quite rejuvenated by it.
What do you think of the modern emphasis on technology?
W.E. - Well, I don't think much of it and so I'm very confused about that new camera. I took it to England last summer and a friend of mine who is an art critic said, "But it's a precept that hard work and mastering a difficult technique is a necessary part of artistic achievement, and therefore this thing is immoral." True, with that little camera your work is done the instant you push that button.
But you must think what goes into that. You have to have a lot of experience and training and discipline behind you, although I now want to put one of those things in the hands of a chimpanzee and a child and see what happens. Well, not the chimpanzee—that's been done before. But I want to try that camera with children and see what they do with it. It's the first time, I think, that you can put a machine in an artist's hands and have him then rely entirely on his vision and his taste and his mind.
Maybe that's one of the worst things about the SX-70—that there is no technical hurdle. Just anyone can take shots.
W.E. - Well, that isn't the worst thing. That's always been true with anything, whether there's any technical need or not. For example, we're all taught to write, and anybody can sit down and write something. Not everybody can sit down and write something that's worth writing.
It seems that a lot of new pictures are just interested in displaying what's in the picture without much emotional feeling about it. Alfred Stieglitz said what he was most interested in was an intensity of feeling that he got from the object itself.
W.E. - I think in his case he was led into too much introspection about artistic matters. The more he thought about that, the less of an artist he became. When he began to think that he was photographing God, he was photographing nothing. But he did some wonderful work, say, around 1906 in the Paris streets. The reality of those streets—he caught it. He was a master technician, and those are very endearing works. But those pictures of clouds are nothing to me, absolutely nothing. And he thought they were the greatest things he ever did.
What do you tell your students?
W.E. - First of all, I tell them that art can't be taught, but that it can be stimulated and a few barriers can be kicked down by a talented teacher, and an atmosphere can be created which is an opening into artistic action. But the thing itself is such a secret and so unapproachable. And you can't put talent into anybody. I think you ought to say so right away and then try to do something else. And that's what a university is for, what it should be— a place for stimulation and an exchange of ideas and a chance to give people the privilege of beginning to take some of the richness of general life that's in everybody and has to be unlocked.
Originally published in Image Magazine, Vol. 17., No.4, December, 1974. Trouvé ici.
mardi 9 mars 2010
vendredi 5 mars 2010
Walker Evans
Walker Evans - General Store Interior, Alabama
Walker Evans - New Orleans Street Corner, 19362046
TIME: 2046 debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, but I've heard that you've made changes since then. How much has the film been altered?
Wong: It hasn't changed much. We just switched the sequence of certain scenes, and took out a few other scenes to compensate, because we are in a rush to catch the deadline of Cannes, so that version the sound and also the music is not perfect. We improved it, and also the special effects of the film. All this CG works hadn't been complete during Cannes. We put all the things that were supposed to be in the film back in their right place. Part of the delay is because I am working with CGI for the first time in my career. This is something beyond my control, and there are a lot of factors which are unpredictable.
TIME: What was it like watching the film for the first time at Cannes?
Wong: It is really a trip. We just finished the first reel of the film, one hour before we got on the plane. I didn't get any chance to watch the film as a whole in the cinema before that. We got to Paris the next morning. That night, I get to the cinema, and actually this is my first time to watch the film on a big screen, in front of the public. It's exciting because every moment you don't know what mistake will happen.
TIME: Why did the editing go down to the wire?
Wong: The structure was constantly changing. We can't be sure. Some of the scenes are supposed to be there, but at the last moment we look at the material we have, and it's not done yet. It's not perfect yet. So we have to take that scene out, and then we have to change the structure again, because you have to then delete not only one scene, but many scenes. We started this film at the same time as In the Mood for Love. And at first, these two films were two separate projects. But at the time it was extremely difficult for me [to keep them separate] because it was like falling in love with two women at the same time. So I tried to find a kind of connection between these two projects. So one day while shooting In the Mood, we were shooting in a hotel room, and the memories triggered something, so I thought why don't we call it 2046?
TIME: Is 2046 a continuation of In the Mood for Love?
Wong: A lot of people think that 2046 is like a sequel of In the Mood, but I don't think so. For me it's more like Mood is a chapter in 2046. It's like 2046 is a big symphony, and Mood is one of its movements.
TIME: How did the many changes in 2046 evolve? At first we were hearing the movie was going to have a futuristic feel, to be set in the year 2046, with robots and everything else, but that seems to have been dropped from the original version. What happened?
Wong: The whole thing, the reason we want the idea to make the film, comes from the promise the Chinese government gave to the Hong Kong people, of 50 years of no change. I think that would be very interesting, because 2046 is the last year of that promise. And I think, this is interesting, is there anything similar that is so unchanged in life? It has different layers this number can apply to a lot of things in life. In terms of a love story, normally when we fall in love with someone we're concerned with our promise. Will they change? Will I change? How can we make this moment last forever? I think this is a very interesting idea, to create a film based on that number, on that promise. So we start with that. Because of that number, I thought we could set the film in 2046, 50 years in the future, so naturally we start thinking about a futuristic story, sci-fi stuff. But I didn't want a realistic version of the future. What we are trying to achieve is like a manga, something like the imagination of a person in 1966 thinking about the future.
TIME: You had a much larger cast than usual, with a very large crew as well. How do you keep them all together and working for such a long, five-year production period?
Wong: To keep people working for a long time is very hard, to keep the spirit and the focus is extremely hard. We know that we were trying to do something that is very ambitious because we have a big cast, and so everyone is trying to deliver their best. To work together for five years is extremely hard, so you need the belief that we're really doing something. Even the cast needs to believe in something. Of course during the five years, some people will lose their faith and they have to leave, and some people will join in. We were supposed to be shooting the Eros project in Shanghai during the SARS period. At that time because we can't leave Hong Kong, we have to shoot in Eros in the city, and some of our crew members were coming from Taiwan. Their wives just went crazy, because they couldn't accept their husbands working on such a dangerous film, in such a dangerous city. But they still came.
TIME: Given your fairly iconoclastic working methods and long shoots, how do you convince people to sign onto your projects, especially newcomers? How do you get them to believe in you?
Wong: There's always a myth thing that we don't have a script or that everything is improvised. But that's not true. Most of the actors, when they join the production, they know their story. They don't know their whole story, but they know their chapter. Like Zhang Ziyi, because she knows she's going to play a ballroom dancer in the 60s, and she doesn't have any idea what that is. She's coming from a totally different background. I have to give her a lot of homework. I have to give her all of these films from the period, so she can understand the gestures, the actions. And also I give her all the costumes, because she has to get those manners down. So she simply took all the costumes back to the hotel, and wore them everyday until she was comfortable in them.
TIME: Were you happy with Zhang's performance?
Wong: Very much. Before 2046, everyone thinks about Zhang mostly through Crouching Tiger or Hero, because she's very good with action work. But I think she's more than that. She's a very very good actress, very sensitive. Very hard working.
TIME: What about Gong Li? How did she prepare for her role?
Wong: She played a gambler, so she went to Macau by herself to watch and prepare. She wouldn't take a production assistant with her. It was Macau undercover. She is very serious. She is very smart. She needs to have a lot of preparation.
TIME: Do all your actors need that level of preparation?
Wong: No. Like Faye Wong, she doesn't need to do that because we've worked before, and she always tries to make herself very relaxed.
TIME: 2046 features a lot of actors who are new to you, like Li and Zhang. Is it difficult to accustom them to your working methods?
Wong: The script actually develops with the characters. If you want to make a film with an actor or actress, there must be something that attracts you. I'm trying to exploit it, the quality that they might not even be aware of themselves. Normally, I don't ask people to act certain persons. It's just be you. Like Gong Li when I'm making Eros with her, I have kind of a picture what if she's a gambler, or a hustler, it would be very interesting. It's something inside her that you find.
TIME: So the character and the actor co-exist in your mind?
Wong: Yes. There is no acting in it. It's like seamless, because they have that quality, at least according to my observation.
TIME: Your job is to bring that out?
Wong: Yes.
TIME: How do you relate your films to each other? What does 2046 have in common with the others?
Wong: I think Days of Being Wild, In the Mood and 2046 all fit in one continuous story. It would be a very interesting to put Days and Mood together with 2046 and let it become a complete story. If we think Days is a chapter of 2046, and Mood is a chapter of 2046, then 2046 is the complete story.
TIME: Does that help explain why 2046 took so long to complete, if it really is the final section of the a story you've been working on for almost 15 years? If Cannes hadn't been last May, would you still be working on it?
Wong: The thing is, when you say stop, and it's the end of the film, it doesn't mean it's the end really. Sometimes it means you are running out of money or running out of time. Like Days was supposed to be two parts. And Mood, the story should be a little longer, they [Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung] should have more encounters, though they never come together. There was an epilogue in my original idea. But you have to stop at that moment. But that doesn't mean you can't put these things back into another film. In a broader sense it's like a transection of different characters. Days, Mood and 2046 are like a trilogy, and this is the last chapter. At a certain point, it might take me years, I might come back to this period again. Now it's almost done. Maybe 10 years later, or much later, I think, well, we can have another chapter, or it can belong to someone else.
TIME: Does the act of dealing with those limitations, of time or money, help shape what the film ends up looking like?
Wong: Absolutely. To be a director is always to deal with the limitations, restrictions. Productions, creative, financial, there's so many restrictions and limitations. And sometimes the way you make the film is to cope with these problems. So a lot of people think your film is very stylized, you have a different way to make this film, you have your signatures, but much of it is due to your response to these limitations. The way we make films is to solve all of the problems. The thing is it's very hard to find a balance, because you find a way to solve the problem, and at the same time you want to keep as much of your original intention as possible.
TIME: If you had your preference, would you ever stop making this film?
Wong: For me to make films should be like a circus, we should just go from one town to the other, always on the road, and you stop when you think you should stop. To me, if there's no Cannes, no other reasons, you can make 2046 for another year. So that's why I think we have to present the film now. I agreed to send the film to France even though it was not completed yet. But I think it is a good thing to do because it means we have a deadline. I need a deadline. But I have my hesitation too. I have questions about these things [whether he should really keep working on the film]. Am I doing too much? Is it worth it? You are putting yourself in a prison. You are imprisoned by this situation. Actors can have a break, you can do another film, and come back. It's very hard. At the end you just want to get away from it as soon as possible. A few weeks ago, we finished the final mix, we spent a lot of time doing the sound, and at the end, the film is done. And I looked at the film and I realized that you have to say goodbye to this project, and you feel very very... You know it's not easy, and you know it's not a normal practice to make a film for five years. And I'm not sure we'll be able or willing to do that again in the future. This is a very special film. It is the hardest to let go. But you have to let go. And that's it. And move onto something else.
TIME: Were you disappointed to miss out on the Palme d'Or at Cannes?
Wong: No. For me, the reason to appear in Cannes is to have a deadline. That's the purpose. And to win an award in a festival is purely something that you can't control. It's up to timing, and the makeup of the jury.
TIME: Do you consider your films romantic?
Wong: For me, romanticism means you follow your heart more than your mind. If that's the case, the films are 75% romantic. The other 25% is the realities, the problem solving, and luck. I cannot describe in detail in the films which moment is like that [the nonromantic proportion], but overall it's 25%.
TIME: What about you? Are you romantic?
Wong: [Laughing] I'm 60% romantic.
TIME: Where do you see yourself in regards to other directors, Western and Asian? What can you take away from them?
Wong: I'm always curious about how directors make their films, because I didn't go to film school and I don't have any technical training. The way that I make films is the only way I know. So I'm curious sometimes how the other directors make their films. When I was very young, we watched a lot of films from different directors, and each of them give you a window, showing you how a film can be made in this way. So by the time you face all of these problems, you know you can solve by this alternative, or the other alternative.
TIME: Why do you make your films the way you do?
Wong: I'm not that self-analytical. I just do it by instinct, simply by instinct.
TIME: You started off your career as a screenwriter. Is it odd for someone who began their career as a writer to seemingly turn away from scripts altogether?
Wong: I worked as a writer for almost 10 years, and I realized the purpose of the script is as a prescription to make everyone seem to know what they're doing. And the role of the writer is like a psychiatrist to the director. During the productions, the director has a lot of queries. sometimes he has second thought on this idea and he want to make sure this line is perfect. And he needs a psychiatrist to tell him that what he's doing is right. And in my case, I'm my own psychiatrist, which kind of just makes things even worse.
TIME: For a filmmaker whose work is so consumed with desire and its frustration, you seem remarkably hands-off about actually showing sex. Why is that?
Wong: I think to describe a so-called love scene, or intercourse is very boring. There must be a point to your focus. Like in Eros, it's always about this person's perspective. It's about the hand, instead of the actual act. In 2046, the only physical relationship between Tony and the women is the story between him and Zhang Ziyi. The reason we want to have three parts of that story is because the character of Tony is always thinking about his past. And sometimes he has a fantasy about the future, but he's always missing the present. And that's why he wants to change, he wants to have physical contact, very solid relationships with someone else, and that woman is the woman next door, Zhang Ziyi. He wants to change, he wants to have direct contact with someone, another person. So his story with Zhang Ziyi is entirely straightforward, there are no second thoughts. He just wants to believe by instinct. And afterwards, when things don't work out well with Zhang Ziyi, he goes back to talking to himself, and writing. Writing is a way to have a dialogue with yourself. You can never compete with something in the past, in memory. Like some people said, we love what we can't have. In this world, the end becomes the beginning. It's very unfair for anyone around him [Tony] in the present, because they can never compete with his imagination or his memory. We love what we can't have, and we can't have what we love.
TIME: I heard that your cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, once claimed that all of your films were about the impossibility of love. Do you agree?
Wong: No, I don't think so, because if you have it [love] in your memory, it's already possible to me. He [Doyle] thinks that because he's very physical. [Laughs]
TIME: What's your working relationship like with Doyle and with your art director, William Chang?
Wong: It's a very long working relationship, and it makes a lot of things much easier. And actually we don't have to discuss much about the film. We don't need meetings. Sometimes I ever prefer that way because we need some suspense between each other. I have to guess what William is doing. By the time I get to the set, I have to respond to that. So that may be a very good way to inspire each other. Otherwise it would become very boring, like a very long relationship, a marriage, everything becomes very predictable, and you'd know that we are talking about the same thing all the time. We prefer to stay away form each other and have some mystery. Sometimes it's like a competition. They create something hard, and you have to solve it. And I create something hard. I will ask Chris if he can do something better. It's like a challenge. It works very well in our case.
TIME: Can you give an example from the making of 2046?
Wong: We're shooting in a small hotel, everything is very narrow, tight, and I decided to shoot in Cinemascope, which created a huge problem for the lighting and camera man because they don't have a stage or anything to put their light. So Chris has to create something on his feet, and for him, this is the first time he has used this format. Actually he's quite lost, and he has to find a new way to deal with this problem. Of course he complains, and we have mistakes and problems, but this is the way, the challenge, otherwise it will be the same thing. Everyone will sleep, it will be very boring. Especially if it takes five years to make a film.
TIME: How do you communicate with each other?
Wong: I think we speak almost the same language. We know that. And I think we respect each other very well. And I know that, this is the best way to deal with the films.
TIME: Can you ever imagine working with anyone else?
Wong: Sure, possibly. At some point for Chris, he needs some inspiration. He's a sailor, and he has to travel, and for me also, if I have a chance to work with another director of photography, it would be another challenge.
TIME: Now that 2046 is done, and that continuous story has been completed, what will your next project be? How do you start a new project? Do you start with an image?
Wong: Yes, you need to have the image. Sometimes you can start with the look of an actress, or a certain space, or even with a hand. Like Eros, I started the whole image with the single hand.
TIME: Your vision of Hong Kong is so individual, so different from the place we live in. What it's like to be an elegiac artist in a city that is constantly eating its own past?
Wong: It's like you try to keep something. That's why you have a story like 2046. You want to create a place in the world where what we think is nice, we can keep it that way. It's like the Hong Kong that we picture in our films is something from our impressions, from our memories, a certain wonderful moment of our city. And we want to keep that on film.
Interview réalisée par Bryan Walsh publiée le 27 septembre 2004 par Time Magazine.
Wong: It hasn't changed much. We just switched the sequence of certain scenes, and took out a few other scenes to compensate, because we are in a rush to catch the deadline of Cannes, so that version the sound and also the music is not perfect. We improved it, and also the special effects of the film. All this CG works hadn't been complete during Cannes. We put all the things that were supposed to be in the film back in their right place. Part of the delay is because I am working with CGI for the first time in my career. This is something beyond my control, and there are a lot of factors which are unpredictable.
TIME: What was it like watching the film for the first time at Cannes?
Wong: It is really a trip. We just finished the first reel of the film, one hour before we got on the plane. I didn't get any chance to watch the film as a whole in the cinema before that. We got to Paris the next morning. That night, I get to the cinema, and actually this is my first time to watch the film on a big screen, in front of the public. It's exciting because every moment you don't know what mistake will happen.
TIME: Why did the editing go down to the wire?
Wong: The structure was constantly changing. We can't be sure. Some of the scenes are supposed to be there, but at the last moment we look at the material we have, and it's not done yet. It's not perfect yet. So we have to take that scene out, and then we have to change the structure again, because you have to then delete not only one scene, but many scenes. We started this film at the same time as In the Mood for Love. And at first, these two films were two separate projects. But at the time it was extremely difficult for me [to keep them separate] because it was like falling in love with two women at the same time. So I tried to find a kind of connection between these two projects. So one day while shooting In the Mood, we were shooting in a hotel room, and the memories triggered something, so I thought why don't we call it 2046?
TIME: Is 2046 a continuation of In the Mood for Love?
Wong: A lot of people think that 2046 is like a sequel of In the Mood, but I don't think so. For me it's more like Mood is a chapter in 2046. It's like 2046 is a big symphony, and Mood is one of its movements.
TIME: How did the many changes in 2046 evolve? At first we were hearing the movie was going to have a futuristic feel, to be set in the year 2046, with robots and everything else, but that seems to have been dropped from the original version. What happened?
Wong: The whole thing, the reason we want the idea to make the film, comes from the promise the Chinese government gave to the Hong Kong people, of 50 years of no change. I think that would be very interesting, because 2046 is the last year of that promise. And I think, this is interesting, is there anything similar that is so unchanged in life? It has different layers this number can apply to a lot of things in life. In terms of a love story, normally when we fall in love with someone we're concerned with our promise. Will they change? Will I change? How can we make this moment last forever? I think this is a very interesting idea, to create a film based on that number, on that promise. So we start with that. Because of that number, I thought we could set the film in 2046, 50 years in the future, so naturally we start thinking about a futuristic story, sci-fi stuff. But I didn't want a realistic version of the future. What we are trying to achieve is like a manga, something like the imagination of a person in 1966 thinking about the future.
TIME: You had a much larger cast than usual, with a very large crew as well. How do you keep them all together and working for such a long, five-year production period?
Wong: To keep people working for a long time is very hard, to keep the spirit and the focus is extremely hard. We know that we were trying to do something that is very ambitious because we have a big cast, and so everyone is trying to deliver their best. To work together for five years is extremely hard, so you need the belief that we're really doing something. Even the cast needs to believe in something. Of course during the five years, some people will lose their faith and they have to leave, and some people will join in. We were supposed to be shooting the Eros project in Shanghai during the SARS period. At that time because we can't leave Hong Kong, we have to shoot in Eros in the city, and some of our crew members were coming from Taiwan. Their wives just went crazy, because they couldn't accept their husbands working on such a dangerous film, in such a dangerous city. But they still came.
TIME: Given your fairly iconoclastic working methods and long shoots, how do you convince people to sign onto your projects, especially newcomers? How do you get them to believe in you?
Wong: There's always a myth thing that we don't have a script or that everything is improvised. But that's not true. Most of the actors, when they join the production, they know their story. They don't know their whole story, but they know their chapter. Like Zhang Ziyi, because she knows she's going to play a ballroom dancer in the 60s, and she doesn't have any idea what that is. She's coming from a totally different background. I have to give her a lot of homework. I have to give her all of these films from the period, so she can understand the gestures, the actions. And also I give her all the costumes, because she has to get those manners down. So she simply took all the costumes back to the hotel, and wore them everyday until she was comfortable in them.
TIME: Were you happy with Zhang's performance?
Wong: Very much. Before 2046, everyone thinks about Zhang mostly through Crouching Tiger or Hero, because she's very good with action work. But I think she's more than that. She's a very very good actress, very sensitive. Very hard working.
TIME: What about Gong Li? How did she prepare for her role?
Wong: She played a gambler, so she went to Macau by herself to watch and prepare. She wouldn't take a production assistant with her. It was Macau undercover. She is very serious. She is very smart. She needs to have a lot of preparation.
TIME: Do all your actors need that level of preparation?
Wong: No. Like Faye Wong, she doesn't need to do that because we've worked before, and she always tries to make herself very relaxed.
TIME: 2046 features a lot of actors who are new to you, like Li and Zhang. Is it difficult to accustom them to your working methods?
Wong: The script actually develops with the characters. If you want to make a film with an actor or actress, there must be something that attracts you. I'm trying to exploit it, the quality that they might not even be aware of themselves. Normally, I don't ask people to act certain persons. It's just be you. Like Gong Li when I'm making Eros with her, I have kind of a picture what if she's a gambler, or a hustler, it would be very interesting. It's something inside her that you find.
TIME: So the character and the actor co-exist in your mind?
Wong: Yes. There is no acting in it. It's like seamless, because they have that quality, at least according to my observation.
TIME: Your job is to bring that out?
Wong: Yes.
TIME: How do you relate your films to each other? What does 2046 have in common with the others?
Wong: I think Days of Being Wild, In the Mood and 2046 all fit in one continuous story. It would be a very interesting to put Days and Mood together with 2046 and let it become a complete story. If we think Days is a chapter of 2046, and Mood is a chapter of 2046, then 2046 is the complete story.
TIME: Does that help explain why 2046 took so long to complete, if it really is the final section of the a story you've been working on for almost 15 years? If Cannes hadn't been last May, would you still be working on it?
Wong: The thing is, when you say stop, and it's the end of the film, it doesn't mean it's the end really. Sometimes it means you are running out of money or running out of time. Like Days was supposed to be two parts. And Mood, the story should be a little longer, they [Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung] should have more encounters, though they never come together. There was an epilogue in my original idea. But you have to stop at that moment. But that doesn't mean you can't put these things back into another film. In a broader sense it's like a transection of different characters. Days, Mood and 2046 are like a trilogy, and this is the last chapter. At a certain point, it might take me years, I might come back to this period again. Now it's almost done. Maybe 10 years later, or much later, I think, well, we can have another chapter, or it can belong to someone else.
TIME: Does the act of dealing with those limitations, of time or money, help shape what the film ends up looking like?
Wong: Absolutely. To be a director is always to deal with the limitations, restrictions. Productions, creative, financial, there's so many restrictions and limitations. And sometimes the way you make the film is to cope with these problems. So a lot of people think your film is very stylized, you have a different way to make this film, you have your signatures, but much of it is due to your response to these limitations. The way we make films is to solve all of the problems. The thing is it's very hard to find a balance, because you find a way to solve the problem, and at the same time you want to keep as much of your original intention as possible.
TIME: If you had your preference, would you ever stop making this film?
Wong: For me to make films should be like a circus, we should just go from one town to the other, always on the road, and you stop when you think you should stop. To me, if there's no Cannes, no other reasons, you can make 2046 for another year. So that's why I think we have to present the film now. I agreed to send the film to France even though it was not completed yet. But I think it is a good thing to do because it means we have a deadline. I need a deadline. But I have my hesitation too. I have questions about these things [whether he should really keep working on the film]. Am I doing too much? Is it worth it? You are putting yourself in a prison. You are imprisoned by this situation. Actors can have a break, you can do another film, and come back. It's very hard. At the end you just want to get away from it as soon as possible. A few weeks ago, we finished the final mix, we spent a lot of time doing the sound, and at the end, the film is done. And I looked at the film and I realized that you have to say goodbye to this project, and you feel very very... You know it's not easy, and you know it's not a normal practice to make a film for five years. And I'm not sure we'll be able or willing to do that again in the future. This is a very special film. It is the hardest to let go. But you have to let go. And that's it. And move onto something else.
TIME: Were you disappointed to miss out on the Palme d'Or at Cannes?
Wong: No. For me, the reason to appear in Cannes is to have a deadline. That's the purpose. And to win an award in a festival is purely something that you can't control. It's up to timing, and the makeup of the jury.
TIME: Do you consider your films romantic?
Wong: For me, romanticism means you follow your heart more than your mind. If that's the case, the films are 75% romantic. The other 25% is the realities, the problem solving, and luck. I cannot describe in detail in the films which moment is like that [the nonromantic proportion], but overall it's 25%.
TIME: What about you? Are you romantic?
Wong: [Laughing] I'm 60% romantic.
TIME: Where do you see yourself in regards to other directors, Western and Asian? What can you take away from them?
Wong: I'm always curious about how directors make their films, because I didn't go to film school and I don't have any technical training. The way that I make films is the only way I know. So I'm curious sometimes how the other directors make their films. When I was very young, we watched a lot of films from different directors, and each of them give you a window, showing you how a film can be made in this way. So by the time you face all of these problems, you know you can solve by this alternative, or the other alternative.
TIME: Why do you make your films the way you do?
Wong: I'm not that self-analytical. I just do it by instinct, simply by instinct.
TIME: You started off your career as a screenwriter. Is it odd for someone who began their career as a writer to seemingly turn away from scripts altogether?
Wong: I worked as a writer for almost 10 years, and I realized the purpose of the script is as a prescription to make everyone seem to know what they're doing. And the role of the writer is like a psychiatrist to the director. During the productions, the director has a lot of queries. sometimes he has second thought on this idea and he want to make sure this line is perfect. And he needs a psychiatrist to tell him that what he's doing is right. And in my case, I'm my own psychiatrist, which kind of just makes things even worse.
TIME: For a filmmaker whose work is so consumed with desire and its frustration, you seem remarkably hands-off about actually showing sex. Why is that?
Wong: I think to describe a so-called love scene, or intercourse is very boring. There must be a point to your focus. Like in Eros, it's always about this person's perspective. It's about the hand, instead of the actual act. In 2046, the only physical relationship between Tony and the women is the story between him and Zhang Ziyi. The reason we want to have three parts of that story is because the character of Tony is always thinking about his past. And sometimes he has a fantasy about the future, but he's always missing the present. And that's why he wants to change, he wants to have physical contact, very solid relationships with someone else, and that woman is the woman next door, Zhang Ziyi. He wants to change, he wants to have direct contact with someone, another person. So his story with Zhang Ziyi is entirely straightforward, there are no second thoughts. He just wants to believe by instinct. And afterwards, when things don't work out well with Zhang Ziyi, he goes back to talking to himself, and writing. Writing is a way to have a dialogue with yourself. You can never compete with something in the past, in memory. Like some people said, we love what we can't have. In this world, the end becomes the beginning. It's very unfair for anyone around him [Tony] in the present, because they can never compete with his imagination or his memory. We love what we can't have, and we can't have what we love.
TIME: I heard that your cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, once claimed that all of your films were about the impossibility of love. Do you agree?
Wong: No, I don't think so, because if you have it [love] in your memory, it's already possible to me. He [Doyle] thinks that because he's very physical. [Laughs]
TIME: What's your working relationship like with Doyle and with your art director, William Chang?
Wong: It's a very long working relationship, and it makes a lot of things much easier. And actually we don't have to discuss much about the film. We don't need meetings. Sometimes I ever prefer that way because we need some suspense between each other. I have to guess what William is doing. By the time I get to the set, I have to respond to that. So that may be a very good way to inspire each other. Otherwise it would become very boring, like a very long relationship, a marriage, everything becomes very predictable, and you'd know that we are talking about the same thing all the time. We prefer to stay away form each other and have some mystery. Sometimes it's like a competition. They create something hard, and you have to solve it. And I create something hard. I will ask Chris if he can do something better. It's like a challenge. It works very well in our case.
TIME: Can you give an example from the making of 2046?
Wong: We're shooting in a small hotel, everything is very narrow, tight, and I decided to shoot in Cinemascope, which created a huge problem for the lighting and camera man because they don't have a stage or anything to put their light. So Chris has to create something on his feet, and for him, this is the first time he has used this format. Actually he's quite lost, and he has to find a new way to deal with this problem. Of course he complains, and we have mistakes and problems, but this is the way, the challenge, otherwise it will be the same thing. Everyone will sleep, it will be very boring. Especially if it takes five years to make a film.
TIME: How do you communicate with each other?
Wong: I think we speak almost the same language. We know that. And I think we respect each other very well. And I know that, this is the best way to deal with the films.
TIME: Can you ever imagine working with anyone else?
Wong: Sure, possibly. At some point for Chris, he needs some inspiration. He's a sailor, and he has to travel, and for me also, if I have a chance to work with another director of photography, it would be another challenge.
TIME: Now that 2046 is done, and that continuous story has been completed, what will your next project be? How do you start a new project? Do you start with an image?
Wong: Yes, you need to have the image. Sometimes you can start with the look of an actress, or a certain space, or even with a hand. Like Eros, I started the whole image with the single hand.
TIME: Your vision of Hong Kong is so individual, so different from the place we live in. What it's like to be an elegiac artist in a city that is constantly eating its own past?
Wong: It's like you try to keep something. That's why you have a story like 2046. You want to create a place in the world where what we think is nice, we can keep it that way. It's like the Hong Kong that we picture in our films is something from our impressions, from our memories, a certain wonderful moment of our city. And we want to keep that on film.
Interview réalisée par Bryan Walsh publiée le 27 septembre 2004 par Time Magazine.
jeudi 4 mars 2010
2046
Dans une scène de In the Mood for Love, Chow referme la porte de sa chambre d'hôtel sur laquelle on peut lire le numéro 2046. Cela veut-il dire que vous aviez déjà 2046 en tête au moment du tournage de In the Mood for Love ?
Wong Kar-wai : C'est mystique, vous savez ! En fait, nous avons tourné les deux films en même temps. Nous avons tourné la partie futuriste de 2046 à Bangkok et, en même temps, nous y tournions In the Mood for Love. Un jour où nous tournions une scène de In the Mood..., j'ai remarqué que le numéro de la chambre était trois mille et quelques. Je me suis alors dit : pourquoi ne pas plutôt décider qu'elle porte le numéro 2046, titre du film d'anticipation que je venais de commencer en parallèle ? C'était seulement un clin d'œil. Mais peu à peu s'est imposée une connexion plus profonde. A tel point qu'après avoir terminé In the Mood for Love, quand je me suis remis à l'écriture de 2046, tout est parti de cette chambre.
Qu'est-ce qui vous a amené à reprendre le même personnage que dans In the Mood for Love ?
Dans la première version du scénario de 2046, le personnage principal était un facteur du futur. Mais j'ai considéré qu'en 2046 plus personne n'aurait encore besoin d'un facteur, puisque personne n'enverrait plus de lettres. Et puis, à force de tout articuler autour de cette chambre, je me suis convaincu qu'il fallait reprendre le même personnage. Il vit dans son monde, ce chiffre 2046 devient pour lui une obsession. Cette obsession signifie qu'il ne s'est pas remis de son passé, qu'il vit encore dans cette époque de sa vie.
Selon vous, Tony, M. Chow de 2046, est-il le même personnage que dans In the Mood for Love ?
Tony Leung : Non, pour moi, ce sont deux personnages très différents. Le premier jour où je suis arrivé sur le plateau, Kar-wai m'a dit que je jouerais le même personnage, mais qu'il voulait que je le joue différemment, comme s'il s'agissait d'un autre personnage. Un play-boy très sombre, presque cynique, à la Bukowski. Pour moi, ça a été très dur, parce qu'il porte la même coiffure, les mêmes vêtements et le même nom. Dans ces conditions, c'est très difficile de jouer différemment. Il faut trouver une allure, une voix, une façon de marcher différentes.
Il est différent par rapport à In the Mood for Love, mais il est également différent dans chaque épisode du film. On n'a pas le sentiment que c'est la même personne selon qu'il est avec Zhang Ziyi ou avec Faye Wong.
Absolument : j'ai essayé de le jouer différemment dans sa relation avec chacune de ces femmes. Avec le personnage de Gong Li, on peut penser qu'il en est très amoureux. Mais, en fait, non : il essaie juste de trouver quelqu'un pour remplacer le personnage de Maggie Cheung. Avec le personnage de Zhang Ziyi, je ne pense pas qu'il soit amoureux : il cherche juste une compagnie. Quand vient la période de Noël, vous pouvez sentir de façon très lourde le poids de la solitude. Il garde une apparence joyeuse, mais au fond il crève de solitude. Je ne pense pas que Chow soit profondément amoureux d'elle. Et finalement, il découvre qu'elle est tombée amoureuse de lui : ça l'effraie un peu. Ce qui est intéressant, c'est à quel point In the Mood for Love est présent dans 2046 : pas par les images proprement dites du film on ne voit quasiment pas Maggie , mais on sent que Chow est incapable de passer à une autre histoire. C'est vraiment quelque chose de difficile à jouer : faire sentir qu'on n'est pas dans le même film, mais que l'état du personnage dans 2046 est directement affecté par ce qu'il a vécu dans In the Mood for Love. On a beau être profondément déterminé à se débarrasser du passé, on est toujours à sa merci.
Quand on voit dans le taxi Tony et Maggie Cheung, est-ce un plan de In the Mood for Love ou avez-vous retourné cette séquence ?
WKW : On l'a retournée. Ils portent les mêmes costumes, mais c'est en noir et blanc. Et cette fois, on a tourné en Cinémascope. C'est la première fois que j'utilise ce format. Je voulais filmer les mêmes situations dans un autre format. Hong-Kong est une ville très étroite, où toutes les lignes sont verticales : ces paysages urbains rendent très différemment en Cinémascope.
On a l'impression que pour vous le rêve absolu serait de retourner ou remixer, d'un film à l'autre, toujours la même scène.
Pour moi, ce n'est pas la même scène. Je n'ai pas eu le sentiment de l'avoir déjà tournée. Ici, le point de vue est celui de M. Chow. On est au centre de son cerveau. Il revoit les moments les plus forts de sa vie et revient le fantôme de Maggie dans In the Mood for Love. Ce n'était pas cet état que je filmais en tournant les scènes de taxi de In the Mood... Les personnages que j'ai créés dans mes films précédents resurgissent parfois. En fait, je repense à mes premiers films, et je me dis : il n'aurait pas dû lui arriver ça ou ça. Alors je les reprends et je leur fais vivre d'autres choses. L'idéal serait un public qui n'aurait pas vu un seul de mes films et commencerait par 2046. Il aurait ensuite la curiosité de voir mes autres films : par exemple, ce spectateur qui aurait découvert Chow dans 2046 aurait envie de savoir pourquoi il est si fermé, se demanderait d'où viennent ses blessures, et il irait voir In the Mood for Love pour comprendre le secret de sa souffrance.
Vous travaillez donc pour la postérité plutôt que pour le public, qui découvre vos films dans l'ordre chronologique...
Le temps ne va pas toujours de l'avant, mais procède parfois par retours en arrière. Quand nous tournions en Argentine, à Buenos Aires, je ne savais absolument pas pourquoi nous étions là. Un de mes acteurs, Leslie, a dit : "Peut-être qu'on n'est pas là par hasard." Pendant le tournage, vous tournez certaines prises sans vous poser de questions, et puis c'est seulement à l'arrivée que vous réalisez à quel point ce plan est la clé de tout le film. J'ai souvent l'impression que le temps passe à l'envers : que le futur est derrière nous.
Il y a une constante dans vos films : vous filmez la plupart du temps des personnages seuls ou en couple. Il est très rare que vous filmiez trois ou quatre personnes dans le même plan.
Dans 2046, j'ai tourné quelques scènes de groupe. Pour le reste, je tiens à tourner avec des acteurs que je connais bien, que j'apprécie, ce qui réduit forcément leur nombre à l'écran. Je vois aussi une autre explication : je tiens à maîtriser ce que dit chaque acteur, la façon dont il se tient. Les scènes de groupe sont donc épuisantes pour moi car je dois veiller à chaque personne qui se trouve dans le cadre. Mais surtout, je pense que ce sont mes histoires qui dictent ce grand nombre de solos ou de duos. Je n'ai plus envie de filmer que des moments de grand intimisme, de grande intériorité.
Avez-vous tourné beaucoup de scènes qui n'apparaissent pas dans le montage final ?
Oui, beaucoup. On aurait pu tirer un long métrage de chacune des rencontres de Chow avec un nouveau personnage féminin. Mais on ne pouvait évidemment pas tout mettre. J'ai dû renoncer à beaucoup de scènes brillantes. On a assez pour faire trois films d'une heure et demie.
Vous y pensez sérieusement ?
Non, parce que ce serait une autre histoire. Or l'histoire que je veux raconter aujourd'hui, c'est celle qu'on voit dans 2046. Peut-être que plus tard j'aurai envie de faire un autre montage, peut-être aussi avec le matériel de In the Mood for Love. Je pourrais imaginer d'entièrement remonter autrement la matière des deux films confondus. On verra dans dix ans.
Pensez-vous que vous allez à nouveau filmer le Hong-Kong contemporain ?
C'est une question que je me pose souvent. Je n'ai pas filmé le Hong-Kong contemporain depuis au moins huit ou neuf ans. J'ai ressenti le besoin de filmer une histoire située dans les années 60 quand j'ai pris conscience il y a quelques années que les décors de ces années-là étaient en train de complètement disparaître. Or j'y suis évidemment très attaché puisque c'est dans ce décor que j'ai grandi. Ce sont des lieux mais aussi des visages comme celui de Rebecca Pan, la logeuse d'âge mûr dans In the Mood for Love. Mes films ont un aspect documentaire : il faut enregistrer tout ça avant que ça ne disparaisse. Mais depuis que je ne filme que les années 60, je me suis aperçu que le décor contemporain était lui-même en train de changer très rapidement. Il faut donc que je revienne vers l'époque contemporaine. Sinon je serais comme Tony dans 2046, toujours en train de courir derrière une chose qui s'évanouit (rires) ! Voilà, pour moi, la trilogie sur les sixties que forment Nos années sauvages, In the Mood for Love et 2046 est désormais close.
Pour vous, le tournage représente-t-il une grande bataille pour finir le film, y compris éventuellement contre vous-même ? Parce qu'il y a cette légende autour de vous depuis In the Mood for Love selon laquelle vous n'arrivez pas à finir vos films.
Oui, finir est le plus dur. Quand pouvez-vous lâcher ? La première difficulté, c'est de décider comment vous allez ouvrir le film. Quelle est la scène la plus intriguante ? Et après, il faut créer une fin aussi forte ! Souvent, je trouve assez facilement le début, mais j'ai du mal à inventer une fin aussi forte.
Cela vous est-il déjà arrivé de flirter avec le désastre économique, ou vous sentez-vous au contraire très responsable ?
Je produis mes films moi-même depuis mon deuxième film, pour la simple et bonne raison que personne d'autre ne veut le faire ! Je fais donc très attention et tente d'être le plus responsable possible. S'il y a un risque, c'est d'abord moi qui le prends. Donc oui, nous avons pris des risques, mais jusqu'à présent nous avons réussi à éviter ce désastre économique dont vous parlez. Le fait d'accepter que le film soit présenté à Cannes était un risque puisque nous savions que la postproduction était loin d'être terminée. Mais nous avons accepté parce que j'ai besoin de ce genre de contrainte pour mettre un terme à la production.
Extrait d'un entretien réalisé le 20 octobre 2004 par Jean- Marc Lalanne pour les inrocks, qu'on peut lire ici en entier.
Wong Kar-wai : C'est mystique, vous savez ! En fait, nous avons tourné les deux films en même temps. Nous avons tourné la partie futuriste de 2046 à Bangkok et, en même temps, nous y tournions In the Mood for Love. Un jour où nous tournions une scène de In the Mood..., j'ai remarqué que le numéro de la chambre était trois mille et quelques. Je me suis alors dit : pourquoi ne pas plutôt décider qu'elle porte le numéro 2046, titre du film d'anticipation que je venais de commencer en parallèle ? C'était seulement un clin d'œil. Mais peu à peu s'est imposée une connexion plus profonde. A tel point qu'après avoir terminé In the Mood for Love, quand je me suis remis à l'écriture de 2046, tout est parti de cette chambre.
Qu'est-ce qui vous a amené à reprendre le même personnage que dans In the Mood for Love ?
Dans la première version du scénario de 2046, le personnage principal était un facteur du futur. Mais j'ai considéré qu'en 2046 plus personne n'aurait encore besoin d'un facteur, puisque personne n'enverrait plus de lettres. Et puis, à force de tout articuler autour de cette chambre, je me suis convaincu qu'il fallait reprendre le même personnage. Il vit dans son monde, ce chiffre 2046 devient pour lui une obsession. Cette obsession signifie qu'il ne s'est pas remis de son passé, qu'il vit encore dans cette époque de sa vie.
Selon vous, Tony, M. Chow de 2046, est-il le même personnage que dans In the Mood for Love ?
Tony Leung : Non, pour moi, ce sont deux personnages très différents. Le premier jour où je suis arrivé sur le plateau, Kar-wai m'a dit que je jouerais le même personnage, mais qu'il voulait que je le joue différemment, comme s'il s'agissait d'un autre personnage. Un play-boy très sombre, presque cynique, à la Bukowski. Pour moi, ça a été très dur, parce qu'il porte la même coiffure, les mêmes vêtements et le même nom. Dans ces conditions, c'est très difficile de jouer différemment. Il faut trouver une allure, une voix, une façon de marcher différentes.
Il est différent par rapport à In the Mood for Love, mais il est également différent dans chaque épisode du film. On n'a pas le sentiment que c'est la même personne selon qu'il est avec Zhang Ziyi ou avec Faye Wong.
Absolument : j'ai essayé de le jouer différemment dans sa relation avec chacune de ces femmes. Avec le personnage de Gong Li, on peut penser qu'il en est très amoureux. Mais, en fait, non : il essaie juste de trouver quelqu'un pour remplacer le personnage de Maggie Cheung. Avec le personnage de Zhang Ziyi, je ne pense pas qu'il soit amoureux : il cherche juste une compagnie. Quand vient la période de Noël, vous pouvez sentir de façon très lourde le poids de la solitude. Il garde une apparence joyeuse, mais au fond il crève de solitude. Je ne pense pas que Chow soit profondément amoureux d'elle. Et finalement, il découvre qu'elle est tombée amoureuse de lui : ça l'effraie un peu. Ce qui est intéressant, c'est à quel point In the Mood for Love est présent dans 2046 : pas par les images proprement dites du film on ne voit quasiment pas Maggie , mais on sent que Chow est incapable de passer à une autre histoire. C'est vraiment quelque chose de difficile à jouer : faire sentir qu'on n'est pas dans le même film, mais que l'état du personnage dans 2046 est directement affecté par ce qu'il a vécu dans In the Mood for Love. On a beau être profondément déterminé à se débarrasser du passé, on est toujours à sa merci.
Quand on voit dans le taxi Tony et Maggie Cheung, est-ce un plan de In the Mood for Love ou avez-vous retourné cette séquence ?
WKW : On l'a retournée. Ils portent les mêmes costumes, mais c'est en noir et blanc. Et cette fois, on a tourné en Cinémascope. C'est la première fois que j'utilise ce format. Je voulais filmer les mêmes situations dans un autre format. Hong-Kong est une ville très étroite, où toutes les lignes sont verticales : ces paysages urbains rendent très différemment en Cinémascope.
On a l'impression que pour vous le rêve absolu serait de retourner ou remixer, d'un film à l'autre, toujours la même scène.
Pour moi, ce n'est pas la même scène. Je n'ai pas eu le sentiment de l'avoir déjà tournée. Ici, le point de vue est celui de M. Chow. On est au centre de son cerveau. Il revoit les moments les plus forts de sa vie et revient le fantôme de Maggie dans In the Mood for Love. Ce n'était pas cet état que je filmais en tournant les scènes de taxi de In the Mood... Les personnages que j'ai créés dans mes films précédents resurgissent parfois. En fait, je repense à mes premiers films, et je me dis : il n'aurait pas dû lui arriver ça ou ça. Alors je les reprends et je leur fais vivre d'autres choses. L'idéal serait un public qui n'aurait pas vu un seul de mes films et commencerait par 2046. Il aurait ensuite la curiosité de voir mes autres films : par exemple, ce spectateur qui aurait découvert Chow dans 2046 aurait envie de savoir pourquoi il est si fermé, se demanderait d'où viennent ses blessures, et il irait voir In the Mood for Love pour comprendre le secret de sa souffrance.
Vous travaillez donc pour la postérité plutôt que pour le public, qui découvre vos films dans l'ordre chronologique...
Le temps ne va pas toujours de l'avant, mais procède parfois par retours en arrière. Quand nous tournions en Argentine, à Buenos Aires, je ne savais absolument pas pourquoi nous étions là. Un de mes acteurs, Leslie, a dit : "Peut-être qu'on n'est pas là par hasard." Pendant le tournage, vous tournez certaines prises sans vous poser de questions, et puis c'est seulement à l'arrivée que vous réalisez à quel point ce plan est la clé de tout le film. J'ai souvent l'impression que le temps passe à l'envers : que le futur est derrière nous.
Il y a une constante dans vos films : vous filmez la plupart du temps des personnages seuls ou en couple. Il est très rare que vous filmiez trois ou quatre personnes dans le même plan.
Dans 2046, j'ai tourné quelques scènes de groupe. Pour le reste, je tiens à tourner avec des acteurs que je connais bien, que j'apprécie, ce qui réduit forcément leur nombre à l'écran. Je vois aussi une autre explication : je tiens à maîtriser ce que dit chaque acteur, la façon dont il se tient. Les scènes de groupe sont donc épuisantes pour moi car je dois veiller à chaque personne qui se trouve dans le cadre. Mais surtout, je pense que ce sont mes histoires qui dictent ce grand nombre de solos ou de duos. Je n'ai plus envie de filmer que des moments de grand intimisme, de grande intériorité.
Avez-vous tourné beaucoup de scènes qui n'apparaissent pas dans le montage final ?
Oui, beaucoup. On aurait pu tirer un long métrage de chacune des rencontres de Chow avec un nouveau personnage féminin. Mais on ne pouvait évidemment pas tout mettre. J'ai dû renoncer à beaucoup de scènes brillantes. On a assez pour faire trois films d'une heure et demie.
Vous y pensez sérieusement ?
Non, parce que ce serait une autre histoire. Or l'histoire que je veux raconter aujourd'hui, c'est celle qu'on voit dans 2046. Peut-être que plus tard j'aurai envie de faire un autre montage, peut-être aussi avec le matériel de In the Mood for Love. Je pourrais imaginer d'entièrement remonter autrement la matière des deux films confondus. On verra dans dix ans.
Pensez-vous que vous allez à nouveau filmer le Hong-Kong contemporain ?
C'est une question que je me pose souvent. Je n'ai pas filmé le Hong-Kong contemporain depuis au moins huit ou neuf ans. J'ai ressenti le besoin de filmer une histoire située dans les années 60 quand j'ai pris conscience il y a quelques années que les décors de ces années-là étaient en train de complètement disparaître. Or j'y suis évidemment très attaché puisque c'est dans ce décor que j'ai grandi. Ce sont des lieux mais aussi des visages comme celui de Rebecca Pan, la logeuse d'âge mûr dans In the Mood for Love. Mes films ont un aspect documentaire : il faut enregistrer tout ça avant que ça ne disparaisse. Mais depuis que je ne filme que les années 60, je me suis aperçu que le décor contemporain était lui-même en train de changer très rapidement. Il faut donc que je revienne vers l'époque contemporaine. Sinon je serais comme Tony dans 2046, toujours en train de courir derrière une chose qui s'évanouit (rires) ! Voilà, pour moi, la trilogie sur les sixties que forment Nos années sauvages, In the Mood for Love et 2046 est désormais close.
Pour vous, le tournage représente-t-il une grande bataille pour finir le film, y compris éventuellement contre vous-même ? Parce qu'il y a cette légende autour de vous depuis In the Mood for Love selon laquelle vous n'arrivez pas à finir vos films.
Oui, finir est le plus dur. Quand pouvez-vous lâcher ? La première difficulté, c'est de décider comment vous allez ouvrir le film. Quelle est la scène la plus intriguante ? Et après, il faut créer une fin aussi forte ! Souvent, je trouve assez facilement le début, mais j'ai du mal à inventer une fin aussi forte.
Cela vous est-il déjà arrivé de flirter avec le désastre économique, ou vous sentez-vous au contraire très responsable ?
Je produis mes films moi-même depuis mon deuxième film, pour la simple et bonne raison que personne d'autre ne veut le faire ! Je fais donc très attention et tente d'être le plus responsable possible. S'il y a un risque, c'est d'abord moi qui le prends. Donc oui, nous avons pris des risques, mais jusqu'à présent nous avons réussi à éviter ce désastre économique dont vous parlez. Le fait d'accepter que le film soit présenté à Cannes était un risque puisque nous savions que la postproduction était loin d'être terminée. Mais nous avons accepté parce que j'ai besoin de ce genre de contrainte pour mettre un terme à la production.
Extrait d'un entretien réalisé le 20 octobre 2004 par Jean- Marc Lalanne pour les inrocks, qu'on peut lire ici en entier.
梁朝偉 Tony Leung Chiu-Wai
2046 reportedly took five years to complete?
Tony Leung: We didn't shoot it all at once though. We were shooting it on and off. We encountered a load of difficulties, because there are a lot of big stars in the film and they don't expect to shoot that long and they had committed to other projects in-between. So there were scheduling problems with the actors. And then the SARS epidemic happened in-between, so not only show business, but all the other businesses, were shut down. There wasn't anyone willing to work at that time. And the epidemic lasted quite some time. Then there were the locations. We weren't shooting in only one country. We were shooting in three countries. We were only able to shoot indoors in Hong Kong, and we had to shoot outdoors in Bangkok. Because we weren't able to find the kind of streets in Hong Kong that existed in '68. It had changed that much. There were also the labor costs. We had to build the futuristic set in China. Another reason that it took so long is that the filmmakers are perfectionists [laughs].
How long did your part take to shoot?
About a year total, but once again, we were shooting on and off. I've done three other movies in-between! [laughs]
Was it hard to get back to the character of Chow each time you returned to the project?
Really tough. To stay in a character for five years is really tiring. It was really hard every time I went back to the set. I needed 1-2 weeks to warm up to get back to him again.
And he's not a real happy guy. You probably didn't look forward to inhabiting his skin.
Sometimes. But at least there were so many beautiful actresses in the film. That helped.
You've made a number of films with Wong Kar Wai. What is your collaborative process like from the start of a project?
I think that the way Kar Wai works is that he wants people to stimulate him. To inspire him. He gives a lot of freedom to everyone on the set. Not just the actors, but all of the crew. Our relationship is very strange. We never talk on the set. He'll just give me a little hint, a little clue, at the very beginning [as to what the project is about]. I start off knowing very little. We develop everything on the set, as we shoot. What I know at the very beginning is just my character. That's how we work together. We've always done it that way. It's how we worked together back on Days of Being Wild, in our early days. No one will work like Wong Kar Wai. I find it quite inspiring. Sometimes you have more space in creating your character. Because he will not give you a specific direction, so you can do whatever you want. Nothing is right or wrong, because you don't know what is right or wrong. Every time is like an adventuresome journey. No one knows what is happening during the shooting. And no one knows what the story is about. Not just me, but everyone on the set. And we shoot so much footage that we can cut it into five different movies.
But do you think that Wong Kar Wai has it set in his mind what the film is going to be from the very start?
I'm not sure. I think that he might have an idea at the very beginning, but he changes as he goes along.
Does he have a solid script in terms of the dialogue?
Sometimes. We used to give us the script for that day. When we arrive on the set, they give us the script of that day.
2046 contains a few characters who have appeared in Kar Wai's other films. You've spoken about this film as almost a summation of all your previous films together. Do you think you'll revisit these characters again?
I hope not [laughs]. I don't want to revisit Mr. Chow again. I think we should do something different. I talked to Kar Wai on the set, and said that this is the best we can do, in terms of the types of movies we've been doing since Days of Being Wild to 2046. We can't do it better and we should try something different.
Did you spend much time thinking about the Chow from In the Mood for Love while developing his current incarnation?
I tried to avoid thinking of that original Mr. Chow. Because on the first day, Kar Wai told me that he wanted to play me the same character again, but that he wanted me to play it differently this time. That he wanted me to play him as a dark, cynical playboy. And he wanted me to act differently, but with the same face. So I was trying to get rid of that Mr. Chow, to get rid of his past. Very much like what the character did in the movie. I didn't ask Kar Wai why he wanted me to do that on the first day, but I think he had a reason. When I saw the movie, I realized that Chow is trying to get rid of his past, but things keep reminding him of it. In the first few months, while I was trying to create this new Mr. Chow, I would jump back to the old Mr. Chow subconsciously. I don't know why. I had this difficulty. And Kar Wai kept reminding me, "No, Tony, this is not right. This is the voice of the old Mr. Chow." I was trying to create a new Mr. Chow, but things kept reminding me of In the Mood for Love. The scenes, the room number, everything. You're trying to be a new man but things just keep reminding you of the past. This is how I felt on the shoot. One day I discussed with the art director, "Do you know what we are trying to do? 2046 or In the Mood for Love? It seems like everything just keeps reminding me of In the Mood for Love." At the time, I didn't know that the story would be about lost memories [laughs]. But it works for the character and it really helps.
And do you think Kar Wai knew that conflict would be there for you and that it would help the film?
Yes, but he never revealed it to us during the shooting.
Kar Wai's shots seem incredibly meticulous in their construction. Even in the smallest, seemingly least consequential ones, there is great design in the camera movement and framing.
He spends a lot of time on every shot. We spend a lot of time waiting there, in a sense. He averages 3-4 hours on a shot. So we didn't do much on one day of shooting. He spends lots of time on the lighting and camera movement. And we do it over and over again. Many takes. Even the very intense scenes, like I did with Gong Li, the kissing scene...he'd do it forty times. And Gong Li would have to cry forty times! And it's exhausting. Every time we'd do that shot in a 1,000 foot magazine. We'd do a ten minute take for every shot.
Does he give you lots of correction in-between takes or do you just keep doing it over and over?
We usually just keep doing it. He feels that everything is okay, but something is off...the lighting, the camera movement, so we have to do it all over again.
It sounds like Stanley Kubrick's style of working a bit. The repeated takes and the meticulous perfectionism.
Uh-huh. I sometimes think that Kar Wai is trying to make you exhausted [laughs]. To make you get rid of all those skills you have. Because in the first few takes you still have a lot of energy and are trying to do some technical thing. And I think he hates that very much. He wants you to just be yourself. No techniques. No skills. I think that's why he kept doing things over and over again. Because then you get exhausted and just act naturally.
What do you think happens to Chow after this film? Can he ever be happy?
No. He'll never be happy. Because he loves to live in his dreams. He loves to live in the past, and he never wants to take any more risk. He never wants to commit to any relationship anymore because he doesn't want to get hurt. I think he's a coward in some respects. He can't take failure well. So his ideal relationship is in the past.
What does the title 2046 mean to you?
In the film, it means a room number, or the train to the past. To me, 2046 means something very personal. A secret that you can not share with others. I have this kind of thinking.
Entretien avec Terry Keefe, trouvé ici.
Tony Leung: We didn't shoot it all at once though. We were shooting it on and off. We encountered a load of difficulties, because there are a lot of big stars in the film and they don't expect to shoot that long and they had committed to other projects in-between. So there were scheduling problems with the actors. And then the SARS epidemic happened in-between, so not only show business, but all the other businesses, were shut down. There wasn't anyone willing to work at that time. And the epidemic lasted quite some time. Then there were the locations. We weren't shooting in only one country. We were shooting in three countries. We were only able to shoot indoors in Hong Kong, and we had to shoot outdoors in Bangkok. Because we weren't able to find the kind of streets in Hong Kong that existed in '68. It had changed that much. There were also the labor costs. We had to build the futuristic set in China. Another reason that it took so long is that the filmmakers are perfectionists [laughs].
How long did your part take to shoot?
About a year total, but once again, we were shooting on and off. I've done three other movies in-between! [laughs]
Was it hard to get back to the character of Chow each time you returned to the project?
Really tough. To stay in a character for five years is really tiring. It was really hard every time I went back to the set. I needed 1-2 weeks to warm up to get back to him again.
And he's not a real happy guy. You probably didn't look forward to inhabiting his skin.
Sometimes. But at least there were so many beautiful actresses in the film. That helped.
You've made a number of films with Wong Kar Wai. What is your collaborative process like from the start of a project?
I think that the way Kar Wai works is that he wants people to stimulate him. To inspire him. He gives a lot of freedom to everyone on the set. Not just the actors, but all of the crew. Our relationship is very strange. We never talk on the set. He'll just give me a little hint, a little clue, at the very beginning [as to what the project is about]. I start off knowing very little. We develop everything on the set, as we shoot. What I know at the very beginning is just my character. That's how we work together. We've always done it that way. It's how we worked together back on Days of Being Wild, in our early days. No one will work like Wong Kar Wai. I find it quite inspiring. Sometimes you have more space in creating your character. Because he will not give you a specific direction, so you can do whatever you want. Nothing is right or wrong, because you don't know what is right or wrong. Every time is like an adventuresome journey. No one knows what is happening during the shooting. And no one knows what the story is about. Not just me, but everyone on the set. And we shoot so much footage that we can cut it into five different movies.
But do you think that Wong Kar Wai has it set in his mind what the film is going to be from the very start?
I'm not sure. I think that he might have an idea at the very beginning, but he changes as he goes along.
Does he have a solid script in terms of the dialogue?
Sometimes. We used to give us the script for that day. When we arrive on the set, they give us the script of that day.
2046 contains a few characters who have appeared in Kar Wai's other films. You've spoken about this film as almost a summation of all your previous films together. Do you think you'll revisit these characters again?
I hope not [laughs]. I don't want to revisit Mr. Chow again. I think we should do something different. I talked to Kar Wai on the set, and said that this is the best we can do, in terms of the types of movies we've been doing since Days of Being Wild to 2046. We can't do it better and we should try something different.
Did you spend much time thinking about the Chow from In the Mood for Love while developing his current incarnation?
I tried to avoid thinking of that original Mr. Chow. Because on the first day, Kar Wai told me that he wanted to play me the same character again, but that he wanted me to play it differently this time. That he wanted me to play him as a dark, cynical playboy. And he wanted me to act differently, but with the same face. So I was trying to get rid of that Mr. Chow, to get rid of his past. Very much like what the character did in the movie. I didn't ask Kar Wai why he wanted me to do that on the first day, but I think he had a reason. When I saw the movie, I realized that Chow is trying to get rid of his past, but things keep reminding him of it. In the first few months, while I was trying to create this new Mr. Chow, I would jump back to the old Mr. Chow subconsciously. I don't know why. I had this difficulty. And Kar Wai kept reminding me, "No, Tony, this is not right. This is the voice of the old Mr. Chow." I was trying to create a new Mr. Chow, but things kept reminding me of In the Mood for Love. The scenes, the room number, everything. You're trying to be a new man but things just keep reminding you of the past. This is how I felt on the shoot. One day I discussed with the art director, "Do you know what we are trying to do? 2046 or In the Mood for Love? It seems like everything just keeps reminding me of In the Mood for Love." At the time, I didn't know that the story would be about lost memories [laughs]. But it works for the character and it really helps.
And do you think Kar Wai knew that conflict would be there for you and that it would help the film?
Yes, but he never revealed it to us during the shooting.
Kar Wai's shots seem incredibly meticulous in their construction. Even in the smallest, seemingly least consequential ones, there is great design in the camera movement and framing.
He spends a lot of time on every shot. We spend a lot of time waiting there, in a sense. He averages 3-4 hours on a shot. So we didn't do much on one day of shooting. He spends lots of time on the lighting and camera movement. And we do it over and over again. Many takes. Even the very intense scenes, like I did with Gong Li, the kissing scene...he'd do it forty times. And Gong Li would have to cry forty times! And it's exhausting. Every time we'd do that shot in a 1,000 foot magazine. We'd do a ten minute take for every shot.
Does he give you lots of correction in-between takes or do you just keep doing it over and over?
We usually just keep doing it. He feels that everything is okay, but something is off...the lighting, the camera movement, so we have to do it all over again.
It sounds like Stanley Kubrick's style of working a bit. The repeated takes and the meticulous perfectionism.
Uh-huh. I sometimes think that Kar Wai is trying to make you exhausted [laughs]. To make you get rid of all those skills you have. Because in the first few takes you still have a lot of energy and are trying to do some technical thing. And I think he hates that very much. He wants you to just be yourself. No techniques. No skills. I think that's why he kept doing things over and over again. Because then you get exhausted and just act naturally.
What do you think happens to Chow after this film? Can he ever be happy?
No. He'll never be happy. Because he loves to live in his dreams. He loves to live in the past, and he never wants to take any more risk. He never wants to commit to any relationship anymore because he doesn't want to get hurt. I think he's a coward in some respects. He can't take failure well. So his ideal relationship is in the past.
What does the title 2046 mean to you?
In the film, it means a room number, or the train to the past. To me, 2046 means something very personal. A secret that you can not share with others. I have this kind of thinking.
Entretien avec Terry Keefe, trouvé ici.
Sunless VI
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?
Chris Marker. Trouvé ici avec d'autres textes.
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?
Chris Marker. Trouvé ici avec d'autres textes.
Walker Evans
Walker Evans - Posters covering a building near Lynchburg to advertise a Downie Brown Circus, 1936Sunless V
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 Gotokuji 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.
Chris Marker
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 Gotokuji 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.
Chris Marker
Sunless IV
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.
Chris Marker
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.
Chris Marker
mercredi 3 mars 2010
Sunless III
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.
Chris Marker
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.
Chris Marker
Walker Evans
Walker Evans - Liberty Theater, New Orleans, Louisiana,1935
Walker Evans - Shoeshine stand, Southeastern U.S, 1936Sunless II
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.
Chris Marker
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.
Chris Marker
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