Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966) - full transcript
Subject: An amateur photographer
and two of his friends
comment on a selection of photos
from around the world.
THE BEASTIARY
Or, The Parade of Orpheus
The Camel
With his four camels,
Don Pedro d'Alfaroubeira
toured the world and admired it.
He did what I'd like to do.
If I Had 4 Camels
10
00:00:36,865 --> 00:00:39,865
First Part
THE CASTLE
The photo is the hunt
It's the instinct of hunting
without the desire to kill
It's the hunt of angels...
You track, you aim, you fire and--click!
--instead of a dead man,
you make him eternal.
And here is something more...
...a sculpture organizes a
certain face with a certain gaze
whose photo eternalises you
with your own gaze...a circle.
I look at myself from
out of the photo that looks.
-All in all, an inferior kind of art:
the art of viewing art.
-My brothers, art is neither
inferior nor superior, it is art.
It doesn't always have to boast,
that's not its quality.
It's like a nationality.
A hunchbacked Chinese
doesn't cease to be Chinese.
There is life, and there is its double
and the photo belongs to
the world of the double...eh!
Moreover it is there
that there is a trap.
By approaching some faces,
you have the impression of sharing in
the lives and deaths of their faces
--of human faces.
It's not true:
if you participate in something, it's
in the life and death of their images.
In any case, if one
can say one thing modestly
it's that photography is a pleasure.
The number of times people said thanks,
knowing they wouldn't get the picture.
Even in bizzare situations.
Some hairdressers, for example.
A boss even told her staff
not to show their husbands...
Fine, that's Paris, that's Babylon...
But in Pyong-Yang, I began to shoot
and all the ladies began to laugh...
Then why, in Cuba, did the
outdoor barbers begin to chase me,
shouting and brandishing their scissors?
That's the mystery!
"Since these mysteries are beyond me,
let's pretend we're organising them."
That's the motto of every photograph.
It's true, one cheats.
Between the Arctic Circle and the bottom
of the Negev, things inevitably happen.
The sun rises, among others.
It's like for people suddenly seized:
one can't help but feel possessed,
as if one had organized these daybreaks.
And then, I don't know, this feeling of
gathering up the world, reconciling it,
of flattening out all the time zones...
It must be the nostalgia for Eden.
It's the same time everywhere.
I can't resist the kind of film that
walks you from one dawn to the next,
saying things like,
It is six o'clock on Earth,
six o'clock at Sain-Martin Canal,
six o'clock at the Göta Canal in Sweden.
Six o'clock in Havana.
Six o'clock
in the Forbidden City of Peking.
The sun rises over Brussels,
and over Prague,
over Tehran, and over Berlin.
The last passer-by of the night
on the Notre-Dame square,
and on a street in Amsterdam,
the first of the day.
Everyone is already on the
English Promenade
but only one Chinese on the Great Wall.
The fountains of the Estonian Villa and
Rome begin to flow at the same time,
the pretty nymphs of the Piazza Esedra.
A train enters the station at La Ciotat.
A train arrives in Jerusalem.
A station for
a subprefecture of Jerusalem.
The snowplow trains
wait in Kiruna Station.
The fastest train in the world
leaves from a station in Tokyo.
It passes commuter trains
full of sleeping Japanese,
already exhausted,
already used up by the city.
There are new posters in the Paris metro
and in a cable car in Lausanne,
a cabalistic sign.
A Yugoslavian hog
considers the day to come.
In Paris, young women are
presented as in a competition of idols.
In Santiago de Cuba,
open-heart surgery begins.
Santiago de Cuba,
the world's freest bodies.
The game on the street begins.
From the sidewalks of Santiago
to those of Tel-Aviv,
to the sidewalks of Moscow.
In the Mosfilm Studio, Tatiana
Lavrova prepares herself for shooting.
In Havana,
someone distributes "capitalist parts"
parts taken from
American or French cars.
like this 1950 model advertised
in Shanghai, which never arrived.
A soviet dog in Moscow
A bourgeois dog in Paris.
A perfume store in Oslo that
invokes the Nefertiti of Berlin.
Lottery in Cuba,
lottery in Lisbon,
and for this Japanese, his little
personal lottery: the Pachinko
Some Chinese go to a meeting.
Some Koreans go to a meeting.
They pass some people who carry loads,
frown at some boats.
The game of the day begins.
In all these twists, there are
some who are different from others
They are distinguished by their dress,
and from the balconies on high in the
cities, they hear an untiring voice
by their uniform;
that says:
"One day, all of you will belong..."
Zakrit na remont
-"Closed for repairs."
Without a doubt, this is Moscow.
It's the building of the Sputniks and
the Vostoks at the Industrial Expo
-Those the little Koreans applauded
like victories of socialism.
-What is it now?
Victories of revisionism?
-One day there'll be Martians there,
I'm sure of it.
Waiting there, we described
the giant rockets, the space stations.
It is a fabulous place.
-That's not New York...
-No, no.
-It's the Air Museum in Meudon,
the most technological...
What is it now?
-No...
-What is it now? The most technological,
but at the other end of history.
-The same history. -No, Nungesser
and Gagarin weren't the same.
-Oh! That's romanticism...
-Because you were 10 at the time
of Nungesser and Coli?
-No my good friends,
for a simple reason:
because no dog has ever
flown across the Atlantic.
-What do you mean,
'revisionism'?
-The cosmonauts, I don't know,
but the pedestrians, yes.
Is that where the
cosmonauts buy their dogs?
It's the animal market in Moscow.
Why do I love the Russians?
One must see it in my images,
but it would be necessary to make them
understand it...
I'm not naïve.
In moments of goodness or humor,
they can applaud when a writer
is imprisoned for 7 years
because he displeased two dozen
old crabs...the same people...
...who can play like little kids
with flying wheels and water pistols.
It was epic, the water pistols.
In the week when they were imported,
one couldn't ring a friend's doorbell
without getting shot in the face.
That was already a while ago.
Remember, Varvara.
That was the time of the two-seater car.
[STALIN]
One still made one's way down toward
"Joseph Stalin" in a Volga
and one winter,
the chaperones of the 'little red'
could cross Gorki Park without
meeting a cop.
There, ten thousand participants
of the Youth Festival disembarked
from a boat called Molotov
when it had left Leningrad...
...and Baltika when it returned.
It was still better
than the water pistols.
In the streets one saw
little planetary systems:
a stranger in the center...and
the Muscovites played all around him.
Everything that helped the Russians'
preconceptions about foreigners,
and even more, those of the
foreigners about the Russians
was already contained in that summer.
It was the summer one first
heard Moscow Nights
by Soloviov-Sedoi,
when millions of people discovered
the kindness of the Russians,
Russian curiosity,
and it's strength that makes friendship
there charge like a calvary...
It was also the summer one first saw
the girls play with the signs
of a foreign coquettishness
and for the first time since the war,
the U.S. flag waved.
It returned less innocently, two
years after the American Expo of '59
It was the great seduction.
Abraham Lincoln
married Marilyn Monroe
and they had many little refrigerators.
The Russians took all that
very seriously, to the point of envy.
But there was a lot more
common sense than expected.
Marian Anderson and Mickey Mouse
were mobilised to jazz everyone up.
Evidently, most men focused on cars,
and most women on fashion...
Since the Russians love books,
there was a beautiful library.
They even had
The Question by Henri Alleg
"Read my lips: It's not us Americans
who would go and start a colonial war."
The greatest site was of course
the distribution of plastic bowls,
hot out of a big machine
--and one of the greatest
perplexities, of course:
the Contemporary Art Expo.
I also would have liked them to
see the bit of cargo on Le Coubre,
you know, the one that exploded
in the port of Havana
to which the Cubans made a monument
just by changing their perspective.
I could launch into a great
eulogy for the Russian gaze
but if I say everything I I think,
I will sound like a racist.
It is true, however, that
there is a line of sight
as there is a life-line.
There is not an American gaze, nor a
Scandanavian gaze, nor a Black gaze
a Jewish gaze,
a Russian gaze...
If I say that it's a light that shines
in the poor and dies in the rich,
I'll be roasted by the Russians.
It's also the gaze of icons.
Let's talk about icons...
A people who had this painter here,
this gaze there
and resulted
in the Tretiakov Gallery.
All the same, it's curious
that the Vikings knew of form
and not just a useful form,
a breathtaking form,
and that the Soviet Academics didn't
have the character to suspect it exists.
It's true that now there's
a kind of official pop art
that is rather cool,
but all the same...
Me, I'd to put all the academic
apologists in a big boat
-And sink it?
-No, no!
Lead it to Cienfuegos, Cuba.
I have a friend named Samuel Feijoo,
he directs a school for the peasants.
There's a sculpture of a peasant.
He called it "Hunger,"
with the comment: hunger has no face...
And that there: "Thinking".
-That doesn't just
apply to socialist realism.
-Yes, it also goes for the
consumers of the Mona Lisa.
When a peasant from Dalarna pastes
cut out images of cars on his bed
because he needs them,
it's a truer movement toward art than
hanging a reproduction of a Van Gough
above an easy Lévitan.
-You speak of the painter, of course.
-Of course.
That doesn't stop other galleries
besides Tretiakov in Moscow
from showing some Picassos and
Renoir's, and admirable ones at that...
That's where the Russians come
to learn that painting exists.
They sometimes say that
they don't understand Picasso.
But they have a way of getting
him wrong in saying, "So...what?"
...and Picasso is forced to respond.
Whereas three fourths of the time,
he doesn't give a damn
for the looks of approval from
comprehending Parisians.
-It causes, it causes...
but what would he say if
he was born Russian, like me?
When he photographed a cosmetics ad,
an extravagant shirt with Brigete Bardot
Lucia Bosè and Marina Vlady,
the Soviet version of the Vespa,
or a vendor on Gorki Street,
when he found a jazz
orchestra in southern Siberia,
or a self-service
restaurant in a Moscow suburb,
he truly raved about
the Russian gaze and the Slavic soul.
He thinks like a European.
He thinks: thaw, elevating
the standard of living, liberalization,
comfort,
in brief, a turn toward this
consumer society
that he condemned with sarcasms
as he saw it materialize.
Between the bourgeois who already
rejoice at their black sheep
falling back in line and
the new romantic generation
that jumps with both feet
into Stalinism,
and who dreams of an impossible 1917,
between the Russians who have indeed
earned the right to breathe a little
and the Chinese who are cuckolding them,
we find ourselves there, we,
the sons of immigrants.
We have learned other countries,
we have learned other languages,
and despite all of that,
in our hearts there is
an imaginary homeland
for which we are hard to please...
...punctilious,
unjust...
When we go over there
it is not to be amazed
at how it resembles the West,
it is to understand, within
the dimension of a country,
the tenderness, which we learned
from decorated forefathers,
from chatty mothers,
and from little pig-tailed sisters.
-But that's a little different.
It's still a fashion show,
but it's in the factory,
during the break.
-Men's fashion too?
-Yes.
Elsewhere, the women follow it closely,
while the men are indifferent to it.
-Bores! All of them!
Do you like Moscow?
-The fist time, I hated Moscow.
Since it's true that, apart from the
monuments it's not a city that's very...
...beautiful.
And then one day everything changed.
I understood that this city is nothing
without its inhabitants.
It's not obvious, you know, there are
a lot of towns that carry on very well.
If one doesn't just have connections,
but true connections,
Russian connections, with some
Muscovites, one doesn't pass it up.
It's like in their hot pools in the
middle of the snow
it's the encounter of two worlds,
a frontier between
summer and winter.
Now, I love Moscow...
...I love...
Also it's probably
the only capital in the world where
I can say that I love
what remains of the rustic
in the rhythm of the street.
Dynamo Beach--it's not Coney Island,
it's The Grande Jatte.
And the metro--it's the Hall of Mirrors!
It is also the only city
where one can breathe,
it is surrounded by gardens, by parks.
The people go to see
real pears, real apples,
as we go to see Braque and Cézanne.
Even the chess tables in Gorki park
have an air of rustic festivity.
-Say then, the Grande Jatte, the Hall of
Mirrors, the ferris wheel...
It's the nostalgia for 1900
that you love in Moscow.
-I believe we have a myth
of 1900 that is just the image of an
epoch when people had space,
when they had time
to watch and to breathe...
Moscow's 1900 aspect is in the lucidity
of the Children’s Library engravings.
Save that one has put the daughters of
workers in the sleds of
the models' daughters
-Is this still Moscow?
-No, it's a Russian monastery.
The bell ringer was a
sailor on the Potemkin
-That's not true...
-It certainly isn't,
but nothing's really true in this place,
starting with the monks.
-Are there a lot of them?
-No, just a handful...
There, all that remains,
in a refectory built for a community
of several hundreds.
Don't accuse the atheist
Marxist propaganda too much:
it's a Russian monastery,
but it's not in Russia.
It's on Mount Athos in Greece.
And around it, the Greek monasteries
are in the same decrepit state.
I walked all morning,
I arrived at Xeropotamou
at the most hopeless hour: noon.
Perhaps since the mid-day siesta
resembles death more than sleep.
The corridors were cold,
I saw only one guard there,
who immediately disappeared.
Later, a cook offered me
a handful of olives and a dried fish--
the usual for the community.
Another course of beans.
The monks sleep in their cells,
the corridors were empty.
I saw an artless painting on
the wall, depicting a miracle.
On another,
the portrait of Metaxas, the fascist
dictator who disappeared 12 years ago.
Later, I met a young monk,
one of the rare young monks
in this empire of the elderly.
He came from the islands.
A hermit proposed that I
join the hermitage.
I declined.
I saw a cat on a table.
It was against the rules.
The peninsula is off limits
to women and female animals.
At least when one can prohibit them...
In fact, the rule says:
Beardless faces are prohibited.
There again, it
seems like it's made up.
All of the monasteries
have young novices,
but the shadow of femininity
they carry is not a reduction,
on the contrary...
-Ah, you won't see the women fight
over the Pope with umbrellas there,
as he's represented in the
Museum of Atheism in Leningrad...
-Where one explains that
there is no God in the sky,
since the cosmonauts haven't seen him!
But I wonder if the monks of Mt. Athos
are more advanced than the cosmonauts.
What was one of the highest sites
in Europe is now a site of agony.
Certainly, the rites continue.
And the images are there.
But the faces one encounters there
don't resemble the
Pantocrator or the glory of Christ.
They don't even look
like Christ crucified.
But perhaps like
the Christ of Gesthemane,
like Christ abandoned...
-It's bizarre...
No one believes in God any more,
but one speaks of Christ
with an air of understanding.
One cites him, one copies him,
one finds resemblances of him.
The Japanese have made a
Noh about the death of Christ,
the first Christian Noh in history.
The missionaries are no longer
burned in Japan--it's progress.
Progress toward indifference.
Fidel Castro wrote on the walls:
"To betray the poor
is to betray Christ."
It also seems to be
the opinion of the council.
Christ would be useful, then,
you'd need to have one in your home.
"Put Christ in your happiness."
As if, despite dispensing
with belief in him,
it was still useful
for someone, for some part
to be charged with carrying
all the misery in the world.
We live in the Castle.
There are worse things
than tyranny, than silence.
The distance between
those who have power
and those who don't.
The impossibility of communicating.
The only race line...
...is the Castle.
The poor live in its shadow.
They grow there.
And when they open their eyes,
how will they close them again?
-One day I saw the poor happy...
It was in Nanterre, in the slum,
the first day of Algerian independence.
One instant of happiness
paid for with seven years of war
-They were happy.
and one million deaths.
And the following day,
the Castle was still there.
And the poor are still there,
day after day.
And day after day,
we continue to betray them.
("One must not demolish the castle")
Second Part
THE GARDEN
("Elephant's Defence"
or "Tusk")
-How do you say "elephant" in Russian?
-"Slôn"
-"Slôn": That's obvious.
An elephant who's been
asked its name can only respond:
"Slôn"...
-Then all elephants are Russian.
-The elephant of Moscow
lives in a marvellous place.
Dourov corner.
Correct?
-"Dourov"
-Dourov was a genius who discovered
that species-relations
can be based on trust.
A little girl spent some
hours in a raccoon's cage,
she trusted it; by the end,
it did her laundry...
-Just like family.
-In public, to please her.
The work became another form of play.
-If I understand you well,
you're training children for docility?
You think trust can get you
washer-citizens as perfect as raccoons?
-We shot ourselves in the feet
with the law of the Jungle,
for there is also the law of the Garden.
The Jungle is the Castle of
the animals, but their garden...
-Could equally be
our model, is that it?
-Yes, as in the theatre:
Castle side, Garden side...
-What is he doing there?
-He's playing.
He's playing with a cat.
The cat's no longer playing.
He's dead. Strangled.
-There is a formula for the universe,
but not for childhood.
Nothing can explain both
the kids of the rich
and the kids of the poor.
Neither the starving
little Asians,
nor the little Irish
who beg in the streets,
neither the little blacks,
nor the little Persian students,
nor the little Arab...
There are no more United Children
than there are United Nations.
Children are first what they eat,
and what they are taught second.
It would be reassuring if there was a
children's-land under the fatherlands,
a class of children
beneath the classes,
or beyond,
and if it relied on trust,
truly.
But children are not a country.
At most they're a family.
"The Great Family of Men"
Fine, understood, man is a family.
So were the Atrides.
-I loved the coquettishness
of the Korean workers.
I imagined it as a new relation to work.
I thought twice about that years later,
when I re-visited the same fish cannery.
The difference between these workers
wasn't initially the standard of living,
nor in this unweighable
element, happiness.
It was precisely this:
a certain relation with one's work.
Work: a weight on life,
or a meaning given to life?
A suffered necessity?
Or a shared necessity?
A burden or an ascent?
I had asked to follow
a young worker for a day.
Naturally, I was shown the best.
The best in study, in construction,
in leisure--dreadfully boring...
Thus, I no longer asked anything
though it was only for myself that I
tried to surprise the Korean sweetness
and, above all, the change
in these Asian women
in whom alone all
revolutions would be justified.
The war was still everywhere nearby.
It didn't take much to rediscover
its color or provoke its echoes.
Recollected in memories,
revived by images and slogans,
I was less amazed
by finding its presence
than by its absence--
in the nonchalance of a man,
in the smile of a woman with her baby,
like a distracted kangaroo,
in the animated discussion
of peasants on the curb,
and in the wonder absolutely devoid of
impartiality that I always feel with
children who have slanted eyes.
With the Koreans,
it was also the beauty
and the science,
a science that goes far back,
back to their invention of
the printing press (before Gutenberg),
armour-plating (before Potemkin),
and their thousand ways
of living or painting,
which the Japanese have borrowed,
with the acknowledgement
for which they are known.
I'm not playing the eternal Korea
against the popular Korea.
Its atemporal dances--I seized them
at the time of their pause,
in a factory, in a workers'
club on the Pacific coast
--in time.
But before leaving Korea, another word.
I left this country where I had
worked, where I had friends.
I had received a telegram
greeting from them,
some images, magazines, and
tons of brochures--but not one letter.
From Cuba, I received one.
The whole world received one.
One evening, a few of us were to keep
this letter fresh in our pockets,
at the meeting to protest
the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The stage was full of the usual stars
and there were
familiar faces in the crowd.
I spotted one that belonged to an older
woman, to whom I ascribed a militant past
which was perhaps pure imagination
--but all the same,
her presence here, this evening,
this tender expression...
I thought she had lived a whole era
which for us was submerged:
1917,
the battleship Aurore,
the marines of Petrograd,
the rising of the Tempest over Asia.
She belonged to the only generation
in which life advanced step by step
with the Revolution, like a
tree planted at childhood.
A tree to which she had been
passionately attentive,
except when it came to injustice.
One day, however,
it was necessary to see the crimes
of Stalinism and the schisms of Mao.
The socialist world was no longer
the place of a single fidelity
and a single fraternity.
It was necessary to face the nightmare:
The heirs of the only two
revolutions of the 20th century
arguing over the voices,
the alliances, and the territories...
Even when some of their brothers
were plunged in war
against the common enemy.
For the enemy hasn't changed.
Here, in Europe, and elsewhere,
the struggle continues,
the same against the same.
The police weren't mistaken about that.
They weren't mistaken about it anywhere.
Thus I imagined the
drama lived by this woman,
the drama lived by millions
of militants across the world,
who had given all they could give
to something, they believed,
that was greater than them
--and which, ultimately, drew
its grandeur from them.
-Tell me, do the Chinese seem
to have fun at the demos?
-The ones who try to prove the Chinese
lack humour are their newspaper editors.
-And him, he protests by himself?
-He prays on a street in Tokyo.
The Japanese consider themselves happy
as the first victims of the Americans.
It's there to be seen.
Would one atomic bomb on
Berlin have cleared Buchenwald?
-And there? What's that?
-Demo in Oslo.
I arrive in Oslo.
The Pussycats are there.
It is the event of the day
for the young Norwegians.
Their parents have more classical tastes.
Everything here is luxurious, calm,
and the complete
absence of voluptuousness.
A well dressed military
wearing the strange hats
of the Saint Cyriens, who
would've waged a war of secession,
guarding the leisure of a population
that's tranquil, rested...
resting...
A conformism without aggression,
something eternally new,
something eternally polished,
the apparent absence
of profound troubles,
of particular threats,
everything's smooth
and affected,
a likeable and civilized people
whose catchphrase is:
"Information...
...Demonstration...
...Cremation."
At the top of the
Scandinavian tree is Sweden.
At first sight, a masterpiece
of human societies,
according to the standards of the time.
There I met a teacher
who owned three refrigerators.
There the relations of production
know an unrivalled harmony,
and the proletariat bears
only a faint resemblance to
what we ordinarily designate by it.
Add to that some dream creatures,
some cities,
dream cities in any case (it's true),
Stockholm is in part
a model of urbanism,
the most beautiful actress of all time,
an irresistible
Nordic poetry in the air,
and a considerable civic
education effort on the ground,
with real nature
always in breath's reach,
its sprightly farmers,
the students on vacation, whom
one doesn't need to know about,
and beyond all that,
the most beautiful
landscapes in the world.
One needs to look closely
at this Scandinavian man.
He has everything
truly everything that the nine-tenths
of humanity doesn't dare to
imagine, even in their wildest dreams.
It's for his standard of living that
the Black, the Arab,
the Greek, the Siberian
and even the Cuban
militiaman are striving.
He has everything
the revolutions promised.
And when one shows him some Brecht,
--free moreover--
in the Stockholm gardens,
he doesn't really get the message.
-Then what do they lack?
-In my opinion one thing,
but it's not important...
Immortality.
They no longer hope to embark
on the stone boats of their ancestors.
You know, death is strange when
one no longer believes in eternal life.
In the face of total disappearance,
one happily becomes difficult to please.
One needs everything immediately.
The cemetery gardens
never successfully mask this:
their happiness doesn't
outweigh an eternal absence.
The light boredom that
bleaches Scandinavian life:
perhaps one comes to
accept it as eternity
It has its charms--
not for life, but for only one life.
The little currency of
nothingness, that's the passion.
Scandinavian perfection
offers a passionless happiness
--not a human happiness.
-Perhaps a people's cemetery
is a measure of their passion
In the blockade cemetery, in Leningrad,
one doesn't forget
the dead under the flowers.
One knows the price.
Look, it's the tomb of the son of Gorki.
Maiakovski's.
Tcheckhov's.
Some of the dead
have no tomb, like those at Pompei...
...or those of the Camps.
And sometimes, there are
tombs that have no dead.
("TO THE HUMAN PERSON")
-There's a tomb I like as well.
Webern's, in Mittersill.
That this century's greatest musician
was killed on his doorstep,
one evening, by an occupying military
like that, to enforce the curfew,
always seemed strangely under-noticed.
There it is, a neighbour
showed me the exact spot.
It's true--the military was American.
I've always asked myself what would
have happened if it was Soviet.
I think there's something of this story
in every international crisis
But it's surely better like that.
The destiny of Webern
wasn't to make a hullabaloo,
even in his death.
A man who was nothing but song
continued to be only song.
I met a man who lived his own death.
It was in Moscow,
during the Youth Festival.
I thought I saw the
Hungarian head somewhere,
foundering in a space of
distraction, absence...
It's useless to
fabricate the suspense for you:
it was the type the entire world saw
in the photos of gunfire in Budapest.
We said it was the police--
they confirmed he was a soldier
--it seems that
the difference is important.
In short, he survived.
Now he travels about
the popular democracies,
distributing a little propaganda
that recounts his death.
Sometimes one sees
this grin on their faces,
-There are those who live with death,
who are close to it every day.
this upside down smile that one also
sees on the heads of funerary urns.
These urns where, for
eternity, Samuel Beckett contains
one man and two women.
But the game is not equal.
Woman maintains a
particular relation with death.
It's not because she's more courageous
--although that's true.
Nor more patient
--though she's that too.
It's perhaps because she knows
that she holds--without pride,
oh, without pride--
one possible response.
In the museums' corridors,
in the rooms,
light and dark, of the museums,
beneath all pretext,
beneath all the hypocrisies,
beneath all of the divergent forms,
men seek only one thing,
the response to a single question:
all of the Desire of the world.
-There's another space of the museum...
He says what he means.
-What did he write there?
-In three languages: "life is ugly"
"das Leben ist langweilig"
--and I suppose, the
same thing in Swedish.
And that there:
"I love someone..."
-We are a little far from
the garden by this point.
-The important thing is not
how far it is, but that it exists.
And that it exists through our most
irrefutable part, our animal part.
This is not a refuge,
it's there, it's in us, it's as
true as cruelty, or the will to live.
There is indeed a Law of the Garden.
It expresses itself by
very simple gestures,
by the most simple gestures.
It isn't the Golden Age,
it's not the Lost Paradise
--that would be where the farmers of
Dalécarie represented the Hymn of Hymns.
It's true that, when one looks around,
there are horrors
and monsters, there's madness...
But there's already...an underground,
a clandestinity of happiness,
a Sierra Maestra of tenderness...
...something that advances...
....towards us, despite us,
thanks to us, when we have...
the grace...
and that announces,
for we do not know when,
the survival of the most beloved...
If I Had 4 Camels
674
00:48:10,877 --> 00:48:12,877
Voices
A film produced by
written and photographed by
CHRIS MARKER
Subtitles by zerohour
and two of his friends
comment on a selection of photos
from around the world.
THE BEASTIARY
Or, The Parade of Orpheus
The Camel
With his four camels,
Don Pedro d'Alfaroubeira
toured the world and admired it.
He did what I'd like to do.
If I Had 4 Camels
10
00:00:36,865 --> 00:00:39,865
First Part
THE CASTLE
The photo is the hunt
It's the instinct of hunting
without the desire to kill
It's the hunt of angels...
You track, you aim, you fire and--click!
--instead of a dead man,
you make him eternal.
And here is something more...
...a sculpture organizes a
certain face with a certain gaze
whose photo eternalises you
with your own gaze...a circle.
I look at myself from
out of the photo that looks.
-All in all, an inferior kind of art:
the art of viewing art.
-My brothers, art is neither
inferior nor superior, it is art.
It doesn't always have to boast,
that's not its quality.
It's like a nationality.
A hunchbacked Chinese
doesn't cease to be Chinese.
There is life, and there is its double
and the photo belongs to
the world of the double...eh!
Moreover it is there
that there is a trap.
By approaching some faces,
you have the impression of sharing in
the lives and deaths of their faces
--of human faces.
It's not true:
if you participate in something, it's
in the life and death of their images.
In any case, if one
can say one thing modestly
it's that photography is a pleasure.
The number of times people said thanks,
knowing they wouldn't get the picture.
Even in bizzare situations.
Some hairdressers, for example.
A boss even told her staff
not to show their husbands...
Fine, that's Paris, that's Babylon...
But in Pyong-Yang, I began to shoot
and all the ladies began to laugh...
Then why, in Cuba, did the
outdoor barbers begin to chase me,
shouting and brandishing their scissors?
That's the mystery!
"Since these mysteries are beyond me,
let's pretend we're organising them."
That's the motto of every photograph.
It's true, one cheats.
Between the Arctic Circle and the bottom
of the Negev, things inevitably happen.
The sun rises, among others.
It's like for people suddenly seized:
one can't help but feel possessed,
as if one had organized these daybreaks.
And then, I don't know, this feeling of
gathering up the world, reconciling it,
of flattening out all the time zones...
It must be the nostalgia for Eden.
It's the same time everywhere.
I can't resist the kind of film that
walks you from one dawn to the next,
saying things like,
It is six o'clock on Earth,
six o'clock at Sain-Martin Canal,
six o'clock at the Göta Canal in Sweden.
Six o'clock in Havana.
Six o'clock
in the Forbidden City of Peking.
The sun rises over Brussels,
and over Prague,
over Tehran, and over Berlin.
The last passer-by of the night
on the Notre-Dame square,
and on a street in Amsterdam,
the first of the day.
Everyone is already on the
English Promenade
but only one Chinese on the Great Wall.
The fountains of the Estonian Villa and
Rome begin to flow at the same time,
the pretty nymphs of the Piazza Esedra.
A train enters the station at La Ciotat.
A train arrives in Jerusalem.
A station for
a subprefecture of Jerusalem.
The snowplow trains
wait in Kiruna Station.
The fastest train in the world
leaves from a station in Tokyo.
It passes commuter trains
full of sleeping Japanese,
already exhausted,
already used up by the city.
There are new posters in the Paris metro
and in a cable car in Lausanne,
a cabalistic sign.
A Yugoslavian hog
considers the day to come.
In Paris, young women are
presented as in a competition of idols.
In Santiago de Cuba,
open-heart surgery begins.
Santiago de Cuba,
the world's freest bodies.
The game on the street begins.
From the sidewalks of Santiago
to those of Tel-Aviv,
to the sidewalks of Moscow.
In the Mosfilm Studio, Tatiana
Lavrova prepares herself for shooting.
In Havana,
someone distributes "capitalist parts"
parts taken from
American or French cars.
like this 1950 model advertised
in Shanghai, which never arrived.
A soviet dog in Moscow
A bourgeois dog in Paris.
A perfume store in Oslo that
invokes the Nefertiti of Berlin.
Lottery in Cuba,
lottery in Lisbon,
and for this Japanese, his little
personal lottery: the Pachinko
Some Chinese go to a meeting.
Some Koreans go to a meeting.
They pass some people who carry loads,
frown at some boats.
The game of the day begins.
In all these twists, there are
some who are different from others
They are distinguished by their dress,
and from the balconies on high in the
cities, they hear an untiring voice
by their uniform;
that says:
"One day, all of you will belong..."
Zakrit na remont
-"Closed for repairs."
Without a doubt, this is Moscow.
It's the building of the Sputniks and
the Vostoks at the Industrial Expo
-Those the little Koreans applauded
like victories of socialism.
-What is it now?
Victories of revisionism?
-One day there'll be Martians there,
I'm sure of it.
Waiting there, we described
the giant rockets, the space stations.
It is a fabulous place.
-That's not New York...
-No, no.
-It's the Air Museum in Meudon,
the most technological...
What is it now?
-No...
-What is it now? The most technological,
but at the other end of history.
-The same history. -No, Nungesser
and Gagarin weren't the same.
-Oh! That's romanticism...
-Because you were 10 at the time
of Nungesser and Coli?
-No my good friends,
for a simple reason:
because no dog has ever
flown across the Atlantic.
-What do you mean,
'revisionism'?
-The cosmonauts, I don't know,
but the pedestrians, yes.
Is that where the
cosmonauts buy their dogs?
It's the animal market in Moscow.
Why do I love the Russians?
One must see it in my images,
but it would be necessary to make them
understand it...
I'm not naïve.
In moments of goodness or humor,
they can applaud when a writer
is imprisoned for 7 years
because he displeased two dozen
old crabs...the same people...
...who can play like little kids
with flying wheels and water pistols.
It was epic, the water pistols.
In the week when they were imported,
one couldn't ring a friend's doorbell
without getting shot in the face.
That was already a while ago.
Remember, Varvara.
That was the time of the two-seater car.
[STALIN]
One still made one's way down toward
"Joseph Stalin" in a Volga
and one winter,
the chaperones of the 'little red'
could cross Gorki Park without
meeting a cop.
There, ten thousand participants
of the Youth Festival disembarked
from a boat called Molotov
when it had left Leningrad...
...and Baltika when it returned.
It was still better
than the water pistols.
In the streets one saw
little planetary systems:
a stranger in the center...and
the Muscovites played all around him.
Everything that helped the Russians'
preconceptions about foreigners,
and even more, those of the
foreigners about the Russians
was already contained in that summer.
It was the summer one first
heard Moscow Nights
by Soloviov-Sedoi,
when millions of people discovered
the kindness of the Russians,
Russian curiosity,
and it's strength that makes friendship
there charge like a calvary...
It was also the summer one first saw
the girls play with the signs
of a foreign coquettishness
and for the first time since the war,
the U.S. flag waved.
It returned less innocently, two
years after the American Expo of '59
It was the great seduction.
Abraham Lincoln
married Marilyn Monroe
and they had many little refrigerators.
The Russians took all that
very seriously, to the point of envy.
But there was a lot more
common sense than expected.
Marian Anderson and Mickey Mouse
were mobilised to jazz everyone up.
Evidently, most men focused on cars,
and most women on fashion...
Since the Russians love books,
there was a beautiful library.
They even had
The Question by Henri Alleg
"Read my lips: It's not us Americans
who would go and start a colonial war."
The greatest site was of course
the distribution of plastic bowls,
hot out of a big machine
--and one of the greatest
perplexities, of course:
the Contemporary Art Expo.
I also would have liked them to
see the bit of cargo on Le Coubre,
you know, the one that exploded
in the port of Havana
to which the Cubans made a monument
just by changing their perspective.
I could launch into a great
eulogy for the Russian gaze
but if I say everything I I think,
I will sound like a racist.
It is true, however, that
there is a line of sight
as there is a life-line.
There is not an American gaze, nor a
Scandanavian gaze, nor a Black gaze
a Jewish gaze,
a Russian gaze...
If I say that it's a light that shines
in the poor and dies in the rich,
I'll be roasted by the Russians.
It's also the gaze of icons.
Let's talk about icons...
A people who had this painter here,
this gaze there
and resulted
in the Tretiakov Gallery.
All the same, it's curious
that the Vikings knew of form
and not just a useful form,
a breathtaking form,
and that the Soviet Academics didn't
have the character to suspect it exists.
It's true that now there's
a kind of official pop art
that is rather cool,
but all the same...
Me, I'd to put all the academic
apologists in a big boat
-And sink it?
-No, no!
Lead it to Cienfuegos, Cuba.
I have a friend named Samuel Feijoo,
he directs a school for the peasants.
There's a sculpture of a peasant.
He called it "Hunger,"
with the comment: hunger has no face...
And that there: "Thinking".
-That doesn't just
apply to socialist realism.
-Yes, it also goes for the
consumers of the Mona Lisa.
When a peasant from Dalarna pastes
cut out images of cars on his bed
because he needs them,
it's a truer movement toward art than
hanging a reproduction of a Van Gough
above an easy Lévitan.
-You speak of the painter, of course.
-Of course.
That doesn't stop other galleries
besides Tretiakov in Moscow
from showing some Picassos and
Renoir's, and admirable ones at that...
That's where the Russians come
to learn that painting exists.
They sometimes say that
they don't understand Picasso.
But they have a way of getting
him wrong in saying, "So...what?"
...and Picasso is forced to respond.
Whereas three fourths of the time,
he doesn't give a damn
for the looks of approval from
comprehending Parisians.
-It causes, it causes...
but what would he say if
he was born Russian, like me?
When he photographed a cosmetics ad,
an extravagant shirt with Brigete Bardot
Lucia Bosè and Marina Vlady,
the Soviet version of the Vespa,
or a vendor on Gorki Street,
when he found a jazz
orchestra in southern Siberia,
or a self-service
restaurant in a Moscow suburb,
he truly raved about
the Russian gaze and the Slavic soul.
He thinks like a European.
He thinks: thaw, elevating
the standard of living, liberalization,
comfort,
in brief, a turn toward this
consumer society
that he condemned with sarcasms
as he saw it materialize.
Between the bourgeois who already
rejoice at their black sheep
falling back in line and
the new romantic generation
that jumps with both feet
into Stalinism,
and who dreams of an impossible 1917,
between the Russians who have indeed
earned the right to breathe a little
and the Chinese who are cuckolding them,
we find ourselves there, we,
the sons of immigrants.
We have learned other countries,
we have learned other languages,
and despite all of that,
in our hearts there is
an imaginary homeland
for which we are hard to please...
...punctilious,
unjust...
When we go over there
it is not to be amazed
at how it resembles the West,
it is to understand, within
the dimension of a country,
the tenderness, which we learned
from decorated forefathers,
from chatty mothers,
and from little pig-tailed sisters.
-But that's a little different.
It's still a fashion show,
but it's in the factory,
during the break.
-Men's fashion too?
-Yes.
Elsewhere, the women follow it closely,
while the men are indifferent to it.
-Bores! All of them!
Do you like Moscow?
-The fist time, I hated Moscow.
Since it's true that, apart from the
monuments it's not a city that's very...
...beautiful.
And then one day everything changed.
I understood that this city is nothing
without its inhabitants.
It's not obvious, you know, there are
a lot of towns that carry on very well.
If one doesn't just have connections,
but true connections,
Russian connections, with some
Muscovites, one doesn't pass it up.
It's like in their hot pools in the
middle of the snow
it's the encounter of two worlds,
a frontier between
summer and winter.
Now, I love Moscow...
...I love...
Also it's probably
the only capital in the world where
I can say that I love
what remains of the rustic
in the rhythm of the street.
Dynamo Beach--it's not Coney Island,
it's The Grande Jatte.
And the metro--it's the Hall of Mirrors!
It is also the only city
where one can breathe,
it is surrounded by gardens, by parks.
The people go to see
real pears, real apples,
as we go to see Braque and Cézanne.
Even the chess tables in Gorki park
have an air of rustic festivity.
-Say then, the Grande Jatte, the Hall of
Mirrors, the ferris wheel...
It's the nostalgia for 1900
that you love in Moscow.
-I believe we have a myth
of 1900 that is just the image of an
epoch when people had space,
when they had time
to watch and to breathe...
Moscow's 1900 aspect is in the lucidity
of the Children’s Library engravings.
Save that one has put the daughters of
workers in the sleds of
the models' daughters
-Is this still Moscow?
-No, it's a Russian monastery.
The bell ringer was a
sailor on the Potemkin
-That's not true...
-It certainly isn't,
but nothing's really true in this place,
starting with the monks.
-Are there a lot of them?
-No, just a handful...
There, all that remains,
in a refectory built for a community
of several hundreds.
Don't accuse the atheist
Marxist propaganda too much:
it's a Russian monastery,
but it's not in Russia.
It's on Mount Athos in Greece.
And around it, the Greek monasteries
are in the same decrepit state.
I walked all morning,
I arrived at Xeropotamou
at the most hopeless hour: noon.
Perhaps since the mid-day siesta
resembles death more than sleep.
The corridors were cold,
I saw only one guard there,
who immediately disappeared.
Later, a cook offered me
a handful of olives and a dried fish--
the usual for the community.
Another course of beans.
The monks sleep in their cells,
the corridors were empty.
I saw an artless painting on
the wall, depicting a miracle.
On another,
the portrait of Metaxas, the fascist
dictator who disappeared 12 years ago.
Later, I met a young monk,
one of the rare young monks
in this empire of the elderly.
He came from the islands.
A hermit proposed that I
join the hermitage.
I declined.
I saw a cat on a table.
It was against the rules.
The peninsula is off limits
to women and female animals.
At least when one can prohibit them...
In fact, the rule says:
Beardless faces are prohibited.
There again, it
seems like it's made up.
All of the monasteries
have young novices,
but the shadow of femininity
they carry is not a reduction,
on the contrary...
-Ah, you won't see the women fight
over the Pope with umbrellas there,
as he's represented in the
Museum of Atheism in Leningrad...
-Where one explains that
there is no God in the sky,
since the cosmonauts haven't seen him!
But I wonder if the monks of Mt. Athos
are more advanced than the cosmonauts.
What was one of the highest sites
in Europe is now a site of agony.
Certainly, the rites continue.
And the images are there.
But the faces one encounters there
don't resemble the
Pantocrator or the glory of Christ.
They don't even look
like Christ crucified.
But perhaps like
the Christ of Gesthemane,
like Christ abandoned...
-It's bizarre...
No one believes in God any more,
but one speaks of Christ
with an air of understanding.
One cites him, one copies him,
one finds resemblances of him.
The Japanese have made a
Noh about the death of Christ,
the first Christian Noh in history.
The missionaries are no longer
burned in Japan--it's progress.
Progress toward indifference.
Fidel Castro wrote on the walls:
"To betray the poor
is to betray Christ."
It also seems to be
the opinion of the council.
Christ would be useful, then,
you'd need to have one in your home.
"Put Christ in your happiness."
As if, despite dispensing
with belief in him,
it was still useful
for someone, for some part
to be charged with carrying
all the misery in the world.
We live in the Castle.
There are worse things
than tyranny, than silence.
The distance between
those who have power
and those who don't.
The impossibility of communicating.
The only race line...
...is the Castle.
The poor live in its shadow.
They grow there.
And when they open their eyes,
how will they close them again?
-One day I saw the poor happy...
It was in Nanterre, in the slum,
the first day of Algerian independence.
One instant of happiness
paid for with seven years of war
-They were happy.
and one million deaths.
And the following day,
the Castle was still there.
And the poor are still there,
day after day.
And day after day,
we continue to betray them.
("One must not demolish the castle")
Second Part
THE GARDEN
("Elephant's Defence"
or "Tusk")
-How do you say "elephant" in Russian?
-"Slôn"
-"Slôn": That's obvious.
An elephant who's been
asked its name can only respond:
"Slôn"...
-Then all elephants are Russian.
-The elephant of Moscow
lives in a marvellous place.
Dourov corner.
Correct?
-"Dourov"
-Dourov was a genius who discovered
that species-relations
can be based on trust.
A little girl spent some
hours in a raccoon's cage,
she trusted it; by the end,
it did her laundry...
-Just like family.
-In public, to please her.
The work became another form of play.
-If I understand you well,
you're training children for docility?
You think trust can get you
washer-citizens as perfect as raccoons?
-We shot ourselves in the feet
with the law of the Jungle,
for there is also the law of the Garden.
The Jungle is the Castle of
the animals, but their garden...
-Could equally be
our model, is that it?
-Yes, as in the theatre:
Castle side, Garden side...
-What is he doing there?
-He's playing.
He's playing with a cat.
The cat's no longer playing.
He's dead. Strangled.
-There is a formula for the universe,
but not for childhood.
Nothing can explain both
the kids of the rich
and the kids of the poor.
Neither the starving
little Asians,
nor the little Irish
who beg in the streets,
neither the little blacks,
nor the little Persian students,
nor the little Arab...
There are no more United Children
than there are United Nations.
Children are first what they eat,
and what they are taught second.
It would be reassuring if there was a
children's-land under the fatherlands,
a class of children
beneath the classes,
or beyond,
and if it relied on trust,
truly.
But children are not a country.
At most they're a family.
"The Great Family of Men"
Fine, understood, man is a family.
So were the Atrides.
-I loved the coquettishness
of the Korean workers.
I imagined it as a new relation to work.
I thought twice about that years later,
when I re-visited the same fish cannery.
The difference between these workers
wasn't initially the standard of living,
nor in this unweighable
element, happiness.
It was precisely this:
a certain relation with one's work.
Work: a weight on life,
or a meaning given to life?
A suffered necessity?
Or a shared necessity?
A burden or an ascent?
I had asked to follow
a young worker for a day.
Naturally, I was shown the best.
The best in study, in construction,
in leisure--dreadfully boring...
Thus, I no longer asked anything
though it was only for myself that I
tried to surprise the Korean sweetness
and, above all, the change
in these Asian women
in whom alone all
revolutions would be justified.
The war was still everywhere nearby.
It didn't take much to rediscover
its color or provoke its echoes.
Recollected in memories,
revived by images and slogans,
I was less amazed
by finding its presence
than by its absence--
in the nonchalance of a man,
in the smile of a woman with her baby,
like a distracted kangaroo,
in the animated discussion
of peasants on the curb,
and in the wonder absolutely devoid of
impartiality that I always feel with
children who have slanted eyes.
With the Koreans,
it was also the beauty
and the science,
a science that goes far back,
back to their invention of
the printing press (before Gutenberg),
armour-plating (before Potemkin),
and their thousand ways
of living or painting,
which the Japanese have borrowed,
with the acknowledgement
for which they are known.
I'm not playing the eternal Korea
against the popular Korea.
Its atemporal dances--I seized them
at the time of their pause,
in a factory, in a workers'
club on the Pacific coast
--in time.
But before leaving Korea, another word.
I left this country where I had
worked, where I had friends.
I had received a telegram
greeting from them,
some images, magazines, and
tons of brochures--but not one letter.
From Cuba, I received one.
The whole world received one.
One evening, a few of us were to keep
this letter fresh in our pockets,
at the meeting to protest
the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The stage was full of the usual stars
and there were
familiar faces in the crowd.
I spotted one that belonged to an older
woman, to whom I ascribed a militant past
which was perhaps pure imagination
--but all the same,
her presence here, this evening,
this tender expression...
I thought she had lived a whole era
which for us was submerged:
1917,
the battleship Aurore,
the marines of Petrograd,
the rising of the Tempest over Asia.
She belonged to the only generation
in which life advanced step by step
with the Revolution, like a
tree planted at childhood.
A tree to which she had been
passionately attentive,
except when it came to injustice.
One day, however,
it was necessary to see the crimes
of Stalinism and the schisms of Mao.
The socialist world was no longer
the place of a single fidelity
and a single fraternity.
It was necessary to face the nightmare:
The heirs of the only two
revolutions of the 20th century
arguing over the voices,
the alliances, and the territories...
Even when some of their brothers
were plunged in war
against the common enemy.
For the enemy hasn't changed.
Here, in Europe, and elsewhere,
the struggle continues,
the same against the same.
The police weren't mistaken about that.
They weren't mistaken about it anywhere.
Thus I imagined the
drama lived by this woman,
the drama lived by millions
of militants across the world,
who had given all they could give
to something, they believed,
that was greater than them
--and which, ultimately, drew
its grandeur from them.
-Tell me, do the Chinese seem
to have fun at the demos?
-The ones who try to prove the Chinese
lack humour are their newspaper editors.
-And him, he protests by himself?
-He prays on a street in Tokyo.
The Japanese consider themselves happy
as the first victims of the Americans.
It's there to be seen.
Would one atomic bomb on
Berlin have cleared Buchenwald?
-And there? What's that?
-Demo in Oslo.
I arrive in Oslo.
The Pussycats are there.
It is the event of the day
for the young Norwegians.
Their parents have more classical tastes.
Everything here is luxurious, calm,
and the complete
absence of voluptuousness.
A well dressed military
wearing the strange hats
of the Saint Cyriens, who
would've waged a war of secession,
guarding the leisure of a population
that's tranquil, rested...
resting...
A conformism without aggression,
something eternally new,
something eternally polished,
the apparent absence
of profound troubles,
of particular threats,
everything's smooth
and affected,
a likeable and civilized people
whose catchphrase is:
"Information...
...Demonstration...
...Cremation."
At the top of the
Scandinavian tree is Sweden.
At first sight, a masterpiece
of human societies,
according to the standards of the time.
There I met a teacher
who owned three refrigerators.
There the relations of production
know an unrivalled harmony,
and the proletariat bears
only a faint resemblance to
what we ordinarily designate by it.
Add to that some dream creatures,
some cities,
dream cities in any case (it's true),
Stockholm is in part
a model of urbanism,
the most beautiful actress of all time,
an irresistible
Nordic poetry in the air,
and a considerable civic
education effort on the ground,
with real nature
always in breath's reach,
its sprightly farmers,
the students on vacation, whom
one doesn't need to know about,
and beyond all that,
the most beautiful
landscapes in the world.
One needs to look closely
at this Scandinavian man.
He has everything
truly everything that the nine-tenths
of humanity doesn't dare to
imagine, even in their wildest dreams.
It's for his standard of living that
the Black, the Arab,
the Greek, the Siberian
and even the Cuban
militiaman are striving.
He has everything
the revolutions promised.
And when one shows him some Brecht,
--free moreover--
in the Stockholm gardens,
he doesn't really get the message.
-Then what do they lack?
-In my opinion one thing,
but it's not important...
Immortality.
They no longer hope to embark
on the stone boats of their ancestors.
You know, death is strange when
one no longer believes in eternal life.
In the face of total disappearance,
one happily becomes difficult to please.
One needs everything immediately.
The cemetery gardens
never successfully mask this:
their happiness doesn't
outweigh an eternal absence.
The light boredom that
bleaches Scandinavian life:
perhaps one comes to
accept it as eternity
It has its charms--
not for life, but for only one life.
The little currency of
nothingness, that's the passion.
Scandinavian perfection
offers a passionless happiness
--not a human happiness.
-Perhaps a people's cemetery
is a measure of their passion
In the blockade cemetery, in Leningrad,
one doesn't forget
the dead under the flowers.
One knows the price.
Look, it's the tomb of the son of Gorki.
Maiakovski's.
Tcheckhov's.
Some of the dead
have no tomb, like those at Pompei...
...or those of the Camps.
And sometimes, there are
tombs that have no dead.
("TO THE HUMAN PERSON")
-There's a tomb I like as well.
Webern's, in Mittersill.
That this century's greatest musician
was killed on his doorstep,
one evening, by an occupying military
like that, to enforce the curfew,
always seemed strangely under-noticed.
There it is, a neighbour
showed me the exact spot.
It's true--the military was American.
I've always asked myself what would
have happened if it was Soviet.
I think there's something of this story
in every international crisis
But it's surely better like that.
The destiny of Webern
wasn't to make a hullabaloo,
even in his death.
A man who was nothing but song
continued to be only song.
I met a man who lived his own death.
It was in Moscow,
during the Youth Festival.
I thought I saw the
Hungarian head somewhere,
foundering in a space of
distraction, absence...
It's useless to
fabricate the suspense for you:
it was the type the entire world saw
in the photos of gunfire in Budapest.
We said it was the police--
they confirmed he was a soldier
--it seems that
the difference is important.
In short, he survived.
Now he travels about
the popular democracies,
distributing a little propaganda
that recounts his death.
Sometimes one sees
this grin on their faces,
-There are those who live with death,
who are close to it every day.
this upside down smile that one also
sees on the heads of funerary urns.
These urns where, for
eternity, Samuel Beckett contains
one man and two women.
But the game is not equal.
Woman maintains a
particular relation with death.
It's not because she's more courageous
--although that's true.
Nor more patient
--though she's that too.
It's perhaps because she knows
that she holds--without pride,
oh, without pride--
one possible response.
In the museums' corridors,
in the rooms,
light and dark, of the museums,
beneath all pretext,
beneath all the hypocrisies,
beneath all of the divergent forms,
men seek only one thing,
the response to a single question:
all of the Desire of the world.
-There's another space of the museum...
He says what he means.
-What did he write there?
-In three languages: "life is ugly"
"das Leben ist langweilig"
--and I suppose, the
same thing in Swedish.
And that there:
"I love someone..."
-We are a little far from
the garden by this point.
-The important thing is not
how far it is, but that it exists.
And that it exists through our most
irrefutable part, our animal part.
This is not a refuge,
it's there, it's in us, it's as
true as cruelty, or the will to live.
There is indeed a Law of the Garden.
It expresses itself by
very simple gestures,
by the most simple gestures.
It isn't the Golden Age,
it's not the Lost Paradise
--that would be where the farmers of
Dalécarie represented the Hymn of Hymns.
It's true that, when one looks around,
there are horrors
and monsters, there's madness...
But there's already...an underground,
a clandestinity of happiness,
a Sierra Maestra of tenderness...
...something that advances...
....towards us, despite us,
thanks to us, when we have...
the grace...
and that announces,
for we do not know when,
the survival of the most beloved...
If I Had 4 Camels
674
00:48:10,877 --> 00:48:12,877
Voices
A film produced by
written and photographed by
CHRIS MARKER
Subtitles by zerohour