On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959) - full transcript
This neighborhood
was designed...
for the wretched dignity
of the petty bourgeoisie,
for respectable occupations
and intellectual tourism.
The sedentary population
of the upper floors...
was sheltered from the
influences of the street.
The neighborhood itself
has remained the same.
It was the external
setting of our story,
where a few people
put into practice...
a systematic questioning of all the
works and diversions of a society,
a total critique of its
notion of happiness.
These people also scorned
?subjective profundity.?
The only thing that
interested them...
was a satisfactory concrete
expression of their own lives.
Human beings are not fully
conscious of their real lives.
Groping in the dark,
overwhelmed...
by the consequences
of their acts,
at every moment,
groups and individuals...
faced with outcomes
they had not intended.
They said that oblivion
was their ruling passion.
They wanted to reinvent
everything each day;
to become the masters
of their own lives.
Just as we do not judge
an individual by...
what he thinks
about himself,
we cannot judge such a
period of transformation...
by its own consciousness.
On the contrary,
this consciousness
must be understood...
as reflecting the contradictions
of material life,
the conflict between...
social conditions and the
forces of social production.
Advances in the
harnessing of nature...
were not yet matched
by a corresponding...
liberation of everyday life.
Youth passed away...
among the various
controls of resignation.
Our camera has
captured for you...
a few glimpses of an
ephemeral microsociety.
Knowledge of
empirical facts...
remains abstract
and superficial...
as long as it is not concretized by
being related to the whole situation.
This is the only method that
enables us to supersede...
partial and abstract problems,
and get to their
concrete essence,
and thus implicitly
to their meaning.
This group lived on the
margins of the economy.
It tended toward a role
of pure consumption,
particularly the free consumption
of its own time.
It thus found itself
directly involved in ...
qualitative divergences
from ordinary life,
but deprived of any means to
influence those divergences.
The group ranged over
a very small area.
The same times brought them
back to the same places.
No one wanted to
go to bed early.
Discussions continued
on the meaning of it all...
?Our life is a journey,
in winter and night.
We seek our passage . . .?
The literature they had
abandoned nevertheless...
exerted a delaying
influence,
expressed in some
affective formulations.
There was the fatigue
and the cold of morning...
in this much- traversed
labyrinth,
like an enigma that
we had to resolve.
It was a trompe-l?oeil reality...
through which we
had to discover...
the potential richness
of what was really there.
On the bank of the river...
evening began again;
and the caresses;
and the importance of a
world without importance.
Just as the eyes have a blurred
vision of many things...
and can clearly
see only one,
so the will can strive...
only imperfectly toward
diverse objects ...
and can completely
love only one at a time.
No one counted on the future.
It'd never be possible to be
together later, or anywhere else.
There would never
be a greater freedom.
The refusal of time
and of growing old...
automatically limited
encounters in this narrow...
and contingent zone,
where what was lacking
was felt as irreparable.
The extreme precariousness of
their methods for getting by...
without working was at the
root of this impatience...
which made excesses necessary
and breaks irrevocable.
We can never really
challenge any form...
of social organization...
without challenging all of
that organization?s...
forms of language.
When freedom is practiced
in a closed circle,
it fades into a dream,
becomes a mere
image of itself.
The ambiance of play
is by nature unstable.
At any moment ?ordinary life?
may prevail once again.
The geographical
limitation of play...
is even more striking than
its temporal limitation.
Every game takes place within the
boundaries of its own spatial domain.
Outside the neighborhood,
beyond its fleeting and continually
threatened changelessness,
stretched a half-known city...
where people met
only by chance,
losing their way forever.
The girls who found
their way there,
because they were legally
under the control of their...
family until the,
age of eighteen,
were often recaptured
by the defenders...
of that detestable institution.
They were generally locked up
under the custody of those creatures...
who among all the bad
products of a bad society...
present the most ugly and
repugnant appearance: nuns.
What makes most
documentaries...
so easy to understand...
is the arbitrary limitation
of their subject matter.
They confine themselves to
depicting fragmented social...
functions and their
isolated products.
In contrast,
imagine the full
complexity of a moment...
that is not resolved
into a work,
a moment whose development
contains interrelated...
facts and values...
and whose meaning
is not yet apparent.
This confused totality could
be the subject matter...
of such a documentary.
The era had attained a level of
knowledge and technologies...
that made possible, and
increasingly necessary,
a direct construction
of all the aspects...
of a mentally and materially
liberated way of life.
The appearance of these
superior means of action,
though they remained unused
because of the delays...
in the project of abolishing
the commodity economy,
ad already revealed the
obsolescence of all aesthetic activity,
whose ambitions and powers
had both dwindled away.
The decay of art...
and of all the old
codes of conduct...
had formed our
sociological background.
The ruling class?s monopoly
on the instruments...
we needed in order to...
implement the collective
art of our time...
had left us completely outside
the official cultural production,
which was devoted to...
illustrating and repeating
the past.
An art film on
this generation...
can only be a film about
its lack of real creations.
Others unthinkingly followed the
paths learned once and for all,
to their work and
their home,
to their predictable future.
For them duty had already
become a habit,
and habit a duty.
They did not see the
deficiency of their city.
They thought the deficiency
of their life was natural.
We wanted to break out
of this conditioning,
in search of different uses
of the urban landscape,
in search of new passions.
The atmosphere of a few
places gave us intimations...
of the future powers
of an architecture...
that it would be necessary...
to create in order to provide the
setting for less mediocre games.
We could expect nothing
of anything...
that we ourselves
had not altered.
The urban environment
proclaimed the orders...
and tastes of the
ruling society...
just as violently as
the newspapers.
Man unifies the world,
but man has extended
himself everywhere.
People can see nothing around
them that is not their own image;
everything speaks to
them of themselves.
Their very landscape
is animated.
Obstacles were everywhere.
And they were
all interrelated,
maintaining a unified
reign of poverty.
Everything was connected,
it was necessary...
to change everything through
a unitary struggle, or nothing.
It was necessary to link
up with the masses,
but sleep was
all around us.
The dictatorship of the proletariat
is a relentless struggle,
bloody and bloodless,
violent and peaceful,
military and economic,
educative and
administrative,
against the forces and
traditions of the old society.
But in this country,
it is once again...
the men of order
who have rebelled...
and reinforced their power.
They've been allowed to
aggravate the grotesqueness...
of the ruling conditions
according to their will,
embellishing their system with the
funereal ceremonies of the past.
Years,
like a single instant
prolonged to this moment,
come to an end.
What was directly lived...
reappears frozen
in the distance,
engraved in the tastes
and illusions of an era...
and carried off with it.
The appearance of events
that we have not created,
of events that others have
in fact created against us,
now obliges us to be
aware of the passage of time...
and its results,
to assess the transformation
of our own desires into events.
What differentiates the
past from the present...
is precisely its
out-of-reach objectivity.
There is no more should-be;
being has been consumed...
to the point of ceasing
to exist.
The details are already
lost in the dust of time.
Who was afraid of life,
afraid of the night,
afraid of being taken,
afraid of being kept?
What should be
abolished continues,
and we continue to
wear away with it.
We are engulfed.
Separated from each other.
The years pass and we
haven?t changed anything.
Once again, morning
in the same streets.
Once again the fatigue of so
many similarly passed nights.
It is a walk that has
lasted a long time.
Really hard to drink more.
Of course one might
make a film about it.
But even if such a film
succeeded in being as...
fundamentally incoherent
and unsatisfying...
as the reality
it dealt with,
it could never be more
than a re-creation ?
as impoverished and false
as this botched tracking shot.
There are now people
who pride themselves...
on being authors of films,
as others were of novels.
Even more backward than
the novelists, since...
they are unaware of the
decomposition and exhaustion...
of individual expression
in our time,
unaware that the arts of
passivity are over and done.
They are sometimes praised
for their sincerity since...
they dramatize with
more personal depth...
the conventions of which
their life consists.
There is talk about
?liberating the cinema.?
But what does it matter to us
if one more art is liberated...
to the point that
Tom, Dick or Harry...
can use it to complacently
express their servile sentiments?
The only interesting venture is
the liberation of everyday life,
not only in a
historical perspective,
but for us, right now.
This project implies
the withering away...
of all the alienated
forms of communication.
The cinema, too,
must be destroyed.
In the final analysis,
stars are not created by
their talent or lack of it,
or even by the film
industry or advertising.
They are created by the
need we have for them.
A pathetic need, arising out of
a dismal and anonymous life...
that would like to enlarge
itself to the dimensions...
of cinematic life.
The imaginary life on the screen
is the product of this real need.
The star is the
projection of this need.
The advertisements
during intermissions...
are the truest reflection of
an intermission from life.
To really describe
this era,
it'd no doubt be necessary
to show many other things.
But what would
be the point?
The point is to understand,
what has been done,
and all that remains
to be done,
not to add more ruins...
to the old world of
spectacles and memories.
Subtitles by hellboytr based
on the translation by Ken Knabb
was designed...
for the wretched dignity
of the petty bourgeoisie,
for respectable occupations
and intellectual tourism.
The sedentary population
of the upper floors...
was sheltered from the
influences of the street.
The neighborhood itself
has remained the same.
It was the external
setting of our story,
where a few people
put into practice...
a systematic questioning of all the
works and diversions of a society,
a total critique of its
notion of happiness.
These people also scorned
?subjective profundity.?
The only thing that
interested them...
was a satisfactory concrete
expression of their own lives.
Human beings are not fully
conscious of their real lives.
Groping in the dark,
overwhelmed...
by the consequences
of their acts,
at every moment,
groups and individuals...
faced with outcomes
they had not intended.
They said that oblivion
was their ruling passion.
They wanted to reinvent
everything each day;
to become the masters
of their own lives.
Just as we do not judge
an individual by...
what he thinks
about himself,
we cannot judge such a
period of transformation...
by its own consciousness.
On the contrary,
this consciousness
must be understood...
as reflecting the contradictions
of material life,
the conflict between...
social conditions and the
forces of social production.
Advances in the
harnessing of nature...
were not yet matched
by a corresponding...
liberation of everyday life.
Youth passed away...
among the various
controls of resignation.
Our camera has
captured for you...
a few glimpses of an
ephemeral microsociety.
Knowledge of
empirical facts...
remains abstract
and superficial...
as long as it is not concretized by
being related to the whole situation.
This is the only method that
enables us to supersede...
partial and abstract problems,
and get to their
concrete essence,
and thus implicitly
to their meaning.
This group lived on the
margins of the economy.
It tended toward a role
of pure consumption,
particularly the free consumption
of its own time.
It thus found itself
directly involved in ...
qualitative divergences
from ordinary life,
but deprived of any means to
influence those divergences.
The group ranged over
a very small area.
The same times brought them
back to the same places.
No one wanted to
go to bed early.
Discussions continued
on the meaning of it all...
?Our life is a journey,
in winter and night.
We seek our passage . . .?
The literature they had
abandoned nevertheless...
exerted a delaying
influence,
expressed in some
affective formulations.
There was the fatigue
and the cold of morning...
in this much- traversed
labyrinth,
like an enigma that
we had to resolve.
It was a trompe-l?oeil reality...
through which we
had to discover...
the potential richness
of what was really there.
On the bank of the river...
evening began again;
and the caresses;
and the importance of a
world without importance.
Just as the eyes have a blurred
vision of many things...
and can clearly
see only one,
so the will can strive...
only imperfectly toward
diverse objects ...
and can completely
love only one at a time.
No one counted on the future.
It'd never be possible to be
together later, or anywhere else.
There would never
be a greater freedom.
The refusal of time
and of growing old...
automatically limited
encounters in this narrow...
and contingent zone,
where what was lacking
was felt as irreparable.
The extreme precariousness of
their methods for getting by...
without working was at the
root of this impatience...
which made excesses necessary
and breaks irrevocable.
We can never really
challenge any form...
of social organization...
without challenging all of
that organization?s...
forms of language.
When freedom is practiced
in a closed circle,
it fades into a dream,
becomes a mere
image of itself.
The ambiance of play
is by nature unstable.
At any moment ?ordinary life?
may prevail once again.
The geographical
limitation of play...
is even more striking than
its temporal limitation.
Every game takes place within the
boundaries of its own spatial domain.
Outside the neighborhood,
beyond its fleeting and continually
threatened changelessness,
stretched a half-known city...
where people met
only by chance,
losing their way forever.
The girls who found
their way there,
because they were legally
under the control of their...
family until the,
age of eighteen,
were often recaptured
by the defenders...
of that detestable institution.
They were generally locked up
under the custody of those creatures...
who among all the bad
products of a bad society...
present the most ugly and
repugnant appearance: nuns.
What makes most
documentaries...
so easy to understand...
is the arbitrary limitation
of their subject matter.
They confine themselves to
depicting fragmented social...
functions and their
isolated products.
In contrast,
imagine the full
complexity of a moment...
that is not resolved
into a work,
a moment whose development
contains interrelated...
facts and values...
and whose meaning
is not yet apparent.
This confused totality could
be the subject matter...
of such a documentary.
The era had attained a level of
knowledge and technologies...
that made possible, and
increasingly necessary,
a direct construction
of all the aspects...
of a mentally and materially
liberated way of life.
The appearance of these
superior means of action,
though they remained unused
because of the delays...
in the project of abolishing
the commodity economy,
ad already revealed the
obsolescence of all aesthetic activity,
whose ambitions and powers
had both dwindled away.
The decay of art...
and of all the old
codes of conduct...
had formed our
sociological background.
The ruling class?s monopoly
on the instruments...
we needed in order to...
implement the collective
art of our time...
had left us completely outside
the official cultural production,
which was devoted to...
illustrating and repeating
the past.
An art film on
this generation...
can only be a film about
its lack of real creations.
Others unthinkingly followed the
paths learned once and for all,
to their work and
their home,
to their predictable future.
For them duty had already
become a habit,
and habit a duty.
They did not see the
deficiency of their city.
They thought the deficiency
of their life was natural.
We wanted to break out
of this conditioning,
in search of different uses
of the urban landscape,
in search of new passions.
The atmosphere of a few
places gave us intimations...
of the future powers
of an architecture...
that it would be necessary...
to create in order to provide the
setting for less mediocre games.
We could expect nothing
of anything...
that we ourselves
had not altered.
The urban environment
proclaimed the orders...
and tastes of the
ruling society...
just as violently as
the newspapers.
Man unifies the world,
but man has extended
himself everywhere.
People can see nothing around
them that is not their own image;
everything speaks to
them of themselves.
Their very landscape
is animated.
Obstacles were everywhere.
And they were
all interrelated,
maintaining a unified
reign of poverty.
Everything was connected,
it was necessary...
to change everything through
a unitary struggle, or nothing.
It was necessary to link
up with the masses,
but sleep was
all around us.
The dictatorship of the proletariat
is a relentless struggle,
bloody and bloodless,
violent and peaceful,
military and economic,
educative and
administrative,
against the forces and
traditions of the old society.
But in this country,
it is once again...
the men of order
who have rebelled...
and reinforced their power.
They've been allowed to
aggravate the grotesqueness...
of the ruling conditions
according to their will,
embellishing their system with the
funereal ceremonies of the past.
Years,
like a single instant
prolonged to this moment,
come to an end.
What was directly lived...
reappears frozen
in the distance,
engraved in the tastes
and illusions of an era...
and carried off with it.
The appearance of events
that we have not created,
of events that others have
in fact created against us,
now obliges us to be
aware of the passage of time...
and its results,
to assess the transformation
of our own desires into events.
What differentiates the
past from the present...
is precisely its
out-of-reach objectivity.
There is no more should-be;
being has been consumed...
to the point of ceasing
to exist.
The details are already
lost in the dust of time.
Who was afraid of life,
afraid of the night,
afraid of being taken,
afraid of being kept?
What should be
abolished continues,
and we continue to
wear away with it.
We are engulfed.
Separated from each other.
The years pass and we
haven?t changed anything.
Once again, morning
in the same streets.
Once again the fatigue of so
many similarly passed nights.
It is a walk that has
lasted a long time.
Really hard to drink more.
Of course one might
make a film about it.
But even if such a film
succeeded in being as...
fundamentally incoherent
and unsatisfying...
as the reality
it dealt with,
it could never be more
than a re-creation ?
as impoverished and false
as this botched tracking shot.
There are now people
who pride themselves...
on being authors of films,
as others were of novels.
Even more backward than
the novelists, since...
they are unaware of the
decomposition and exhaustion...
of individual expression
in our time,
unaware that the arts of
passivity are over and done.
They are sometimes praised
for their sincerity since...
they dramatize with
more personal depth...
the conventions of which
their life consists.
There is talk about
?liberating the cinema.?
But what does it matter to us
if one more art is liberated...
to the point that
Tom, Dick or Harry...
can use it to complacently
express their servile sentiments?
The only interesting venture is
the liberation of everyday life,
not only in a
historical perspective,
but for us, right now.
This project implies
the withering away...
of all the alienated
forms of communication.
The cinema, too,
must be destroyed.
In the final analysis,
stars are not created by
their talent or lack of it,
or even by the film
industry or advertising.
They are created by the
need we have for them.
A pathetic need, arising out of
a dismal and anonymous life...
that would like to enlarge
itself to the dimensions...
of cinematic life.
The imaginary life on the screen
is the product of this real need.
The star is the
projection of this need.
The advertisements
during intermissions...
are the truest reflection of
an intermission from life.
To really describe
this era,
it'd no doubt be necessary
to show many other things.
But what would
be the point?
The point is to understand,
what has been done,
and all that remains
to be done,
not to add more ruins...
to the old world of
spectacles and memories.
Subtitles by hellboytr based
on the translation by Ken Knabb