Headless (1969) - full transcript
After the chaos,
the cosmos.
Thanks to a secular training,
I have attained an almost
perfect level of tolerance,
- of disdain, almost.
Over the course of an infinity,
I know that anything
can happen to a man;
his virtuous behaviour,
whether past or future
merits nothing but goodness.
He may, however, merit
nothing but betrayal,
as a result of his past
or future infamy.
Seen under this light,
all my acts are just,
but indifferent.
Under this light, I become
paralysed in contemplation.
No-one is anyone.
I am God, I am Eros,
I am a demon, I am the world.
A tiresome way to say
that I don't exist at all.
Stupidity and intelligenee thus
cancel each other out.
Sometimes, something
exceptionally exciting
will return me to the physical world.
This morning the city, there is an
elemental joy to be had in the rain.
But I have achieved such
perfect tranquility
that I no longer stand up.
A bird has nested on my chest.
I'm leaving.
It's time to abandon the bright
lights of the civilized world.
It's too late for attempts to be
reasonable and educated.
Which in any case make life
highly unattractive.
Whether secretly or not,
we must change completely,
or cease to exist altogether.
The world to which we belonged
gave us nothing to love
beyond the inadequacies
of each individual.
One's existence is limited
by one's commodities.
A world one cannot love to death
represents nothing more than
an obligation to work.
Compared to previous worlds
it is hideous,
the most ill-conceived of all.
In previous worlds,
one could lose oneself in ecstasy
which is impossible in this
world of educated vulgarity.
The advantages of a civilization
can be measured
by the ways in which men
profit from them.
Today's men profit from civilization
by becoming more degraded
than all of their predecessors
put together.
Life always seems to be
tumultuously incoherent;
its grandeur and its reality
to be found only in ecstacy
and in ecstatic love.
He who ignores
or misunderstands ecstacy
is an incomplete being whose
thought is reduced to mere analysis.
Existence is more than a restless void.
It's a dance which forces us
to dance fanatically.
When the objcet of thought
is dead and fragmentary,
the thought itself has an internal
life, like that of a flame.
There's no point in responding
to those who believe
that this world exists and justify
themselves accordingly.
When they speak, you can see
them without hearing them.
And even if you look at them,
you can see only what exists
far in the distance behind them.
There's no point in exciting
oneself "en route",
trying to attract the attention
of those who have only vague desires
such as wasting time, laughing
or becoming eccentric.
You have to advance
without a backward glance,
paying no attention to those
who haven't the strength
to escape their immediate reality.
Humanity overextends itself, trying to
be the raison d'etre of the universe.
If it becomes vital to the survival
of the universe, it becomes a slave.
An unfree existence is an
empty, neutered existence;
and a free existence is in danger.
As long as the earth engendered
nothing but ectaclysms,
trees and birds,
it was a free universe.
Liberty's gleam became tarnished
when the earth produced a being
who placed the laws of necessity
above the universe itself.
Man remained, however,
free from necessity.
He is free to resemble everything
in the universe that he was not.
He could ignore the thought
that it was either God or himself
that prevented everything else
from becoming absurd.
Man escaped his own brain
as one escapes from a prison.
Beyond the confines of his own
identity, he discovered, not God,
- who represents prohibition - but a
being who ignored all prohibitions.
Beyond my own identity
I discover a being who makes me
laugh, because he has no head,
who fills me with anguish, since he
consists of both innocence and crime.
He holds a weapon made
of iron in his left hand,
flames which resemble a
sacred heart in his right hand,
In the same burst of energy
he unites birth and death.
He is neither man nor God.
He's not me, he's more than me.
His stomach is a maze in
which he has lost himself,
in which I lose myself with him,
in which I find myself as him,
in other words, a monster.
In truth, the desert which
surrounds me is terrifying.
I'm the last man, crouching.
Spring, Summer,
Autumn, winter.
No-one answers me.
Rocks.
There you have it.
The absence of being.
Embrace the stones!
The ants!
And the silence...
The fire!
I'll tell you about the dinosaurs.
One day, in the forest,
I saw a dinosaur
grazing peacefully
and then suddenly
it was attacked by a tiger.
The tiger savagely gnawed at its tail
and the dinosaur didn't flinch,
it kept right on grazing.
Then suddenly
the dinosaur sort of rolled
over on its side
and died.
Dinosaurs realize that they're dead
ten minutes or so after their
actual physical death.
Their nervous system is so huge
that pain takes minutes and minutes
to travel through their body
and reach their brain.
All the women now live in the forest
alone, with their babies
on their backs
because that way it's easier to walk.
From time to time
they go into the cities
to visit the men.
That is to say,
to visit a couple of men.
I think it's great.
It makes for moments
of great intensity.
And then...
And then what?
Then they return to their mountains
a little more alone,
a little crazier.
A back and forth
which never ends.
That which touches from afar
and which creates.
Chinese people live in your caves!
Watch out!
Our air is a bit dry.
We have a furious desire for daylight.
Our head does not yet exist.
We leave strained axioms behind us,
sterilized and ready to use.
Have you heard Nero's story?
He strangled himself.
"Oh, what an artist
is dying within me!"
This world is frozen.
I'm not sure what we're going to do
but it'll be the terror of the earth.
The trash, they're all in the trash.
There's garbage everywhere up there.
There's nothing but garbage.
I'm no longer far away
from that final instant
when every aspect of my being,
by means of fusion and synthesis
becomes the promise and the absence
of a future that doesn't belong to me.
Please grant me my silence,
allow me to take my leave.
We live our own interior lives
as well as those of the others.
We now see Europe as a blank slate.
They throw us in amongst the dead.
Does anything happen in
moderation on this earth?
At this very moment, in Paris
a man is making himself a brain.
Do you think he'll ask himself
the same question?
We live our lives according
to the boundary
which separates the absence
of Gods from the absence of men.
I'm making progress,
I'm making progress,
I'm making progress.
We're going to bring you
the terrible laughter of the idiot.
We have to get out of here.
We've had enough
we have to leave.
Enough.
- Yes, enough.
They're throwing us in the garbage.
- Let's get out of here.
The ones up above.
- They have us stuek here.
They keep throwing us in the garbage.
We have to get out of here.
I've had enough.
- At last...
It's those ones up above
that have keeping us here.
We have to get out of here.
- Never mind, we're leaving.
We have to leave right away.
Enough.
- Enough.
Oh, I'm sorry!
I swear, in two years time
we'll have the whole
earth in convulsions.
I'm lying down.
I'm waiting for the head...
of a stillborn child.
I can't stand
the facility of fiction.
I demand reality.
I'm going mad.
Oh, you make it easy to see
the misery which has befallen us.
Thank you, thank you, your highness.
Thank you. Thank you, your highness.
I feel like I'm made of lead.
The absolute banality.
Nothing.
Come on.
Nothing is going to happen to me.
Adaptation: Moira Tierney
the cosmos.
Thanks to a secular training,
I have attained an almost
perfect level of tolerance,
- of disdain, almost.
Over the course of an infinity,
I know that anything
can happen to a man;
his virtuous behaviour,
whether past or future
merits nothing but goodness.
He may, however, merit
nothing but betrayal,
as a result of his past
or future infamy.
Seen under this light,
all my acts are just,
but indifferent.
Under this light, I become
paralysed in contemplation.
No-one is anyone.
I am God, I am Eros,
I am a demon, I am the world.
A tiresome way to say
that I don't exist at all.
Stupidity and intelligenee thus
cancel each other out.
Sometimes, something
exceptionally exciting
will return me to the physical world.
This morning the city, there is an
elemental joy to be had in the rain.
But I have achieved such
perfect tranquility
that I no longer stand up.
A bird has nested on my chest.
I'm leaving.
It's time to abandon the bright
lights of the civilized world.
It's too late for attempts to be
reasonable and educated.
Which in any case make life
highly unattractive.
Whether secretly or not,
we must change completely,
or cease to exist altogether.
The world to which we belonged
gave us nothing to love
beyond the inadequacies
of each individual.
One's existence is limited
by one's commodities.
A world one cannot love to death
represents nothing more than
an obligation to work.
Compared to previous worlds
it is hideous,
the most ill-conceived of all.
In previous worlds,
one could lose oneself in ecstasy
which is impossible in this
world of educated vulgarity.
The advantages of a civilization
can be measured
by the ways in which men
profit from them.
Today's men profit from civilization
by becoming more degraded
than all of their predecessors
put together.
Life always seems to be
tumultuously incoherent;
its grandeur and its reality
to be found only in ecstacy
and in ecstatic love.
He who ignores
or misunderstands ecstacy
is an incomplete being whose
thought is reduced to mere analysis.
Existence is more than a restless void.
It's a dance which forces us
to dance fanatically.
When the objcet of thought
is dead and fragmentary,
the thought itself has an internal
life, like that of a flame.
There's no point in responding
to those who believe
that this world exists and justify
themselves accordingly.
When they speak, you can see
them without hearing them.
And even if you look at them,
you can see only what exists
far in the distance behind them.
There's no point in exciting
oneself "en route",
trying to attract the attention
of those who have only vague desires
such as wasting time, laughing
or becoming eccentric.
You have to advance
without a backward glance,
paying no attention to those
who haven't the strength
to escape their immediate reality.
Humanity overextends itself, trying to
be the raison d'etre of the universe.
If it becomes vital to the survival
of the universe, it becomes a slave.
An unfree existence is an
empty, neutered existence;
and a free existence is in danger.
As long as the earth engendered
nothing but ectaclysms,
trees and birds,
it was a free universe.
Liberty's gleam became tarnished
when the earth produced a being
who placed the laws of necessity
above the universe itself.
Man remained, however,
free from necessity.
He is free to resemble everything
in the universe that he was not.
He could ignore the thought
that it was either God or himself
that prevented everything else
from becoming absurd.
Man escaped his own brain
as one escapes from a prison.
Beyond the confines of his own
identity, he discovered, not God,
- who represents prohibition - but a
being who ignored all prohibitions.
Beyond my own identity
I discover a being who makes me
laugh, because he has no head,
who fills me with anguish, since he
consists of both innocence and crime.
He holds a weapon made
of iron in his left hand,
flames which resemble a
sacred heart in his right hand,
In the same burst of energy
he unites birth and death.
He is neither man nor God.
He's not me, he's more than me.
His stomach is a maze in
which he has lost himself,
in which I lose myself with him,
in which I find myself as him,
in other words, a monster.
In truth, the desert which
surrounds me is terrifying.
I'm the last man, crouching.
Spring, Summer,
Autumn, winter.
No-one answers me.
Rocks.
There you have it.
The absence of being.
Embrace the stones!
The ants!
And the silence...
The fire!
I'll tell you about the dinosaurs.
One day, in the forest,
I saw a dinosaur
grazing peacefully
and then suddenly
it was attacked by a tiger.
The tiger savagely gnawed at its tail
and the dinosaur didn't flinch,
it kept right on grazing.
Then suddenly
the dinosaur sort of rolled
over on its side
and died.
Dinosaurs realize that they're dead
ten minutes or so after their
actual physical death.
Their nervous system is so huge
that pain takes minutes and minutes
to travel through their body
and reach their brain.
All the women now live in the forest
alone, with their babies
on their backs
because that way it's easier to walk.
From time to time
they go into the cities
to visit the men.
That is to say,
to visit a couple of men.
I think it's great.
It makes for moments
of great intensity.
And then...
And then what?
Then they return to their mountains
a little more alone,
a little crazier.
A back and forth
which never ends.
That which touches from afar
and which creates.
Chinese people live in your caves!
Watch out!
Our air is a bit dry.
We have a furious desire for daylight.
Our head does not yet exist.
We leave strained axioms behind us,
sterilized and ready to use.
Have you heard Nero's story?
He strangled himself.
"Oh, what an artist
is dying within me!"
This world is frozen.
I'm not sure what we're going to do
but it'll be the terror of the earth.
The trash, they're all in the trash.
There's garbage everywhere up there.
There's nothing but garbage.
I'm no longer far away
from that final instant
when every aspect of my being,
by means of fusion and synthesis
becomes the promise and the absence
of a future that doesn't belong to me.
Please grant me my silence,
allow me to take my leave.
We live our own interior lives
as well as those of the others.
We now see Europe as a blank slate.
They throw us in amongst the dead.
Does anything happen in
moderation on this earth?
At this very moment, in Paris
a man is making himself a brain.
Do you think he'll ask himself
the same question?
We live our lives according
to the boundary
which separates the absence
of Gods from the absence of men.
I'm making progress,
I'm making progress,
I'm making progress.
We're going to bring you
the terrible laughter of the idiot.
We have to get out of here.
We've had enough
we have to leave.
Enough.
- Yes, enough.
They're throwing us in the garbage.
- Let's get out of here.
The ones up above.
- They have us stuek here.
They keep throwing us in the garbage.
We have to get out of here.
I've had enough.
- At last...
It's those ones up above
that have keeping us here.
We have to get out of here.
- Never mind, we're leaving.
We have to leave right away.
Enough.
- Enough.
Oh, I'm sorry!
I swear, in two years time
we'll have the whole
earth in convulsions.
I'm lying down.
I'm waiting for the head...
of a stillborn child.
I can't stand
the facility of fiction.
I demand reality.
I'm going mad.
Oh, you make it easy to see
the misery which has befallen us.
Thank you, thank you, your highness.
Thank you. Thank you, your highness.
I feel like I'm made of lead.
The absolute banality.
Nothing.
Come on.
Nothing is going to happen to me.
Adaptation: Moira Tierney