日月无光

1
00:00:32,241 --> 00:00:36,529
因為我知道時間永遠只是時間
空間永遠只是空間

2
00:00:36,529 --> 00:00:40,331
T.S. 艾略特 - 聖灰星期三

3
00:00:41,377 --> 00:00:47,508
<i>他告訴我的第一個畫面
是1965年在冰島一條路上的三個小孩</i>

4
00:00:54,988 --> 00:00:57,218
<i>他說這對他而言
是一個快樂的畫面</i>

5
00:00:57,424 --> 00:01:00,416
<i>他嘗試了很多次
要將它與其他畫面連結在一起</i>

6
00:01:00,627 --> 00:01:03,152
<i>但始終辦不到</i>

7
00:01:03,363 --> 00:01:07,265
<i>他寫著:"我會將它單獨放在影片的開頭</i>

8
00:01:07,467 --> 00:01:09,662
<i>和很長一段的黑畫面一起</i>

9
00:01:09,869 --> 00:01:13,669
<i>如果他們沒能從影片看到快樂
至少他們能看見黑暗"</i>

10
00:01:46,374 --> 00:01:50,675
<i>他寫到: "我正從北海道 ─ 這個北方之島回來</i>

11
00:01:50,744 --> 00:01:55,008
<i>富有與匆忙的日本人搭乘飛機
其餘則搭乘渡輪</i>

12
00:01:55,116 --> 00:01:58,278
<i>等待,停滯,
片刻的睡眠 -</i>

13
00:01:58,386 --> 00:02:02,277
<i>說也奇怪,這都讓我想到過去與未來的戰爭</i>

14
00:02:02,688 --> 00:02:06,113
<i>午夜列車,空襲
核塵避難所</i>

15
00:02:06,290 --> 00:02:10,449
戰爭的微小碎片
都銘刻在日常生活之中

16
00:02:23,515 --> 00:02:27,075
<i>他喜歡這些停滯於時間中的脆弱時刻</i>

17
00:02:27,285 --> 00:02:32,381
<i>記憶,其唯一的功能就是留下記憶</i>

18
00:02:32,689 --> 00:02:39,685
<i>他寫著 "在多次遊走各地之後
只有腐敗能使我感興趣</i>

19
00:02:39,794 --> 00:02:44,558
<i>在這趟旅程,我如一位賞金獵人
無情地追逐著</i>

20
00:02:46,900 --> 00:02:49,868
<i>黎明時分,我們將抵達東京."</i>

21
00:03:11,360 --> 00:03:13,385
<i>他時常從非洲來信</i>

22
00:03:14,096 --> 00:03:18,692
<i>他將非洲的時間
與歐洲和亞洲相比較</i>

23
00:03:18,900 --> 00:03:24,095
<i>他說早在19世紀
人類已經觸及到被稱為"空間"的事物</i>

24
00:03:24,204 --> 00:03:29,071
<i>而20世紀最大的問題,則是"時間"的不同概念</i>

25
00:03:29,274 --> 00:03:29,839
<i>"順帶一題,</i>

26
00:03:29,942 --> 00:03:36,278
<i>你知道在巴黎島(Ile de France指巴黎的週邊)
能看到鴯?(emus)嗎?"</i>

27
00:03:42,555 --> 00:03:44,523
<i>他寫到在比熱戈斯(Bijago)群島</i>

28
00:03:44,724 --> 00:03:47,818
<i>是年輕女性選擇他們的未婚夫</i>

29
00:03:48,294 --> 00:03:52,924
<i>他也寫到在東京的郊區有一間供奉著貓的寺廟</i>

30
00:04:13,286 --> 00:04:18,213
<i>"我希望我可以描繪出
這對單純,毫不矯情的夫妻</i>

31
00:04:18,323 --> 00:04:22,087
<i>他們在貓的墓地掛上題了字的木條</i>

32
00:04:22,296 --> 00:04:25,322
<i>如此他們的虎斑貓將會受到保佑</i>

33
00:04:25,532 --> 00:04:28,467
<i>不! 她不是死了
她只是離去</i>

34
00:04:28,669 --> 00:04:32,070
<i>但在她死去那一天
並沒有人知道如何為她禱告</i>

35
00:04:32,273 --> 00:04:37,369
<i>如何為她向死亡說項
讓死亡能呼喚她真正的名字</i>

36
00:04:37,411 --> 00:04:40,444
<i>因此他們兩人在雨中來到那裡</i>

37
00:04:40,647 --> 00:04:46,644
<i>進行祭拜儀式
引導她從時間的深淵中步回正途"</i>

38
00:04:58,198 --> 00:04:59,489
<i>他寫到:</i>

39
00:04:59,700 --> 00:05:03,099
<i>"我將用我一生的心力
試著了解關於記憶的運行</i>

40
00:05:03,203 --> 00:05:07,700
<i>記憶並非遺忘的反面
而是遺忘的內在連結</i>

41
00:05:08,007 --> 00:05:14,034
<i>我們不是'記憶'事物,我們重寫記憶
就像我們去重寫歷史一樣</i>

42
00:05:14,279 --> 00:05:17,812
<i>人們要怎麼記得'口渴'呢?"</i>

43
00:05:28,897 --> 00:05:31,089
<i>他並不喜歡談論貧窮這件事</i>

44
00:05:31,200 --> 00:05:34,231
<i>但貧窮都存在於他所提到的事情中</i>

45
00:05:34,436 --> 00:05:36,871
<i>那是日本失敗的一面</i>

46
00:05:37,072 --> 00:05:42,300
<i>"一個充滿著流浪漢,遊民,邊緣人和韓國人世界</i>

47
00:05:42,411 --> 00:05:47,039
<i>他們無法負擔醫療藥品
轉而沉迷於酒精與發酵乳</i>

48
00:05:47,250 --> 00:05:51,586
<i>這個早晨我在淚橋
距離繁榮的鬧區只要20分鐘</i>

49
00:05:51,787 --> 00:05:56,951
<i>一個人在十字路口指揮交通
藉此展開他對社會的復仇</i>

50
00:05:57,225 --> 00:06:00,785
<i>對他們而言
享樂,意味著一瓶大罐的清酒</i>

51
00:06:01,094 --> 00:06:04,623
<i>能在他們死去之日
傾倒在他們的墓上</i>

52
00:06:34,763 --> 00:06:40,091
<i>這裡的人們公平地相互分享</i>

53
00:06:40,299 --> 00:06:45,659
<i>人與人之間最低的門檻
是與其它人一樣好,並相互了解"</i>

54
00:06:55,918 --> 00:07:00,054
<i>他還告訴我有關維德角島(西非)的碼頭</i>

55
00:07:00,456 --> 00:07:03,053
<i>"他們花了多少時間
只為等待一艘船?</i>

56
00:07:03,160 --> 00:07:06,826
<i>耐心就像是顆小卵石
等待隨時跳入水中</i>

57
00:07:07,097 --> 00:07:11,462
<i>他們是一群漫遊者,航行者
是世界的旅人</i>

58
00:07:11,568 --> 00:07:14,869
<i>他們因運送這些石材供葡萄牙人使用而興起</i>

59
00:07:15,071 --> 00:07:18,198
<i>這裡是當時殖民者的輸送站</i>

60
00:07:18,946 --> 00:07:25,111
<i>一無所有的人 空虛的人
各式各樣的人們</i>

61
00:07:27,513 --> 00:07:31,428
<i>老實說
你不覺得像電影學校教的一樣</i>

62
00:07:31,463 --> 00:07:34,546
<i>叫這些人不看鏡頭
是件很愚蠢的事情嗎?"</i>

63
00:07:43,843 --> 00:07:46,478
<i>他曾寫到:</i>

64
00:07:46,483 --> 00:07:49,676
<i>"薩赫爾(非洲南部)並不是唯一一個
已經無法挽回的地區</i>

65
00:07:49,827 --> 00:07:54,343
<i>當乾旱侵入了土地
如同水滲入漏洞的船</i>

66
00:07:54,476 --> 00:07:58,043
<i>在比索於狂歡節復活的動物</i>

67
00:07:58,043 --> 00:08:00,385
<i>將會再度的死去</i>

68
00:08:00,236 --> 00:08:04,054
<i>那時新的災難降臨,
沙漠將覆蓋整個薩凡納</i>

69
00:08:04,289 --> 00:08:09,471
<i>這是一個富有國遺忘,但仍存在的國度
只有一個例外</i>

70
00:08:09,489 --> 00:08:11,719
<i>日本</i>

71
00:08:11,625 --> 00:08:15,249
<i>我不斷的到來與離去
並不是為了這個國家的一個追尋</i>

72
00:08:15,648 --> 00:08:19,505
<i>而是一段旅程
呈現一種極端生存姿態的旅程"</i>

73
00:09:44,190 --> 00:09:46,076
<i>他向我提到清少納言(女作家)</i>

74
00:09:46,134 --> 00:09:48,431
<i>一位正要成為藤原定子公主的女子</i>

75
00:09:48,593 --> 00:09:51,736
<i>在11世紀,也就是平安時代</i>

76
00:09:51,649 --> 00:09:55,344
<i>"你是否曾經想過
歷史是如何生成的?</i>

77
00:09:55,591 --> 00:09:59,328
<i>統治者運用各種的策略
打擊敵人</i>

78
00:09:59,536 --> 00:10:03,899
<i>直到取得真正的權力
與家族世襲的傳統</i>

79
00:10:04,294 --> 00:10:07,966
<i>帝國的殿堂僅僅是一個
玩弄陰謀權術的遊樂場</i>

80
00:10:08,687 --> 00:10:11,257
<i>但藉由學習描繪那些</i>

81
00:10:11,411 --> 00:10:14,590
<i>對微物的憂愁與思考</i>

82
00:10:14,774 --> 00:10:18,594
<i>這一小群遊手好閒份子
為日本文化寫下了重要的註腳</i>

83
00:10:18,682 --> 00:10:21,036
<i>遠勝過那些野蠻的三流政客</i>

84
00:10:23,401 --> 00:10:25,537
<i>清少納言對條列清單有所狂熱</i>

85
00:10:25,969 --> 00:10:28,689
<i>像是'優雅的事物'</i>

86
00:10:28,961 --> 00:10:31,274
<i>或是'令人煩惱的事物'</i>

87
00:10:31,589 --> 00:10:34,240
<i>甚至是'不值得做的事物'</i>

88
00:10:34,585 --> 00:10:40,095
<i>有一天她完成了一個清單:
'觸動人心的事物'</i>

89
00:10:40,722 --> 00:10:43,803
<i>當我在拍攝時我才了解到
那並不是一個不好的標準</i>

90
00:10:43,890 --> 00:10:46,786
<i>我對他們的經濟奇蹟感到敬佩</i>

91
00:10:46,918 --> 00:10:50,990
<i>但我真的很想呈現它們街坊的慶典"</i>

92
00:14:26,765 --> 00:14:28,540
<i>他寫到:</i>

93
00:14:28,792 --> 00:14:32,649
<i>"回到了千葉的海岸
我想起了清少納言的清單:</i>

94
00:14:32,745 --> 00:14:36,779
<i> 所有的象徵符號只需要'命名'
它就被賦予了生命力</i>

95
00:14:37,091 --> 00:14:38,402
<i>只需'命名'</i>

96
00:14:38,610 --> 00:14:42,203
<i>對我們來說,太陽不會是太陽
如果它不是'光芒四射的'</i>

97
00:14:42,327 --> 00:14:46,083
<i>泉水也不會是泉水
如果它不是'清明如鏡的'</i>

98
00:14:46,118 --> 00:14:47,616
<i>我們插入了形容詞</i>

99
00:14:46,417 --> 00:14:51,080
<i>那是非常粗魯的
就像為商品加上了標籤</i>

100
00:14:51,255 --> 00:14:53,523
<i>日本俳句從不修飾</i>

101
00:14:53,742 --> 00:14:57,338
<i>他們只有一種方式去描述
船,石,霧</i>

102
00:14:57,465 --> 00:14:59,667
<i>蛙,牛,打招呼</i>

103
00:14:59,755 --> 00:15:03,221
<i>蒼鷺, 菊
以及所有的一切</i>

104
00:15:03,456 --> 00:15:07,336
<i>新聞報導最近詳述了
一個來自名古屋的男人的生命故事</i>

105
00:15:07,441 --> 00:15:10,011
<i>一個他所愛的女人去年過世</i>

106
00:15:10,111 --> 00:15:13,329
<i>而他在工作的時候將自己淹死
以一個日本式的方式,像一個狂人</i>

107
00:15:13,465 --> 00:15:16,391
<i>他似乎曾經為電子學做出了重大的貢獻</i>

108
00:15:16,426 --> 00:15:19,720
<i>然而在五月的某一天
他自殺了</i>

109
00:15:19,755 --> 00:15:23,985
<i>有人說他無法忍受聽到'春天'這個字</i>

110
00:15:58,757 --> 00:16:01,844
<i>他描述到他與東京的再度重逢:</i>

111
00:16:02,011 --> 00:16:04,336
<i>"就像一隻貓從假期中歸來</i>

112
00:16:04,415 --> 00:16:07,803
<i>因而重新開始去審視這個曾經熟悉的地方."</i>

113
00:16:07,967 --> 00:16:10,431
<i>他急於想知道
所以事物都在其應在之處</i>

114
00:16:10,536 --> 00:16:13,230
<i>銀座的貓頭鷹,新橋火車頭</i>

115
00:16:13,439 --> 00:16:16,601
<i>狐貍的寺廟,三越百貨的頂樓</i>

116
00:16:16,809 --> 00:16:20,007
<i>他發現頂樓已被小女孩和搖滾歌手入侵</i>

117
00:16:20,212 --> 00:16:23,663
<i>他學習到於今一個明星的成功與否
是由這群迷妹決定的</i>

118
00:16:23,886 --> 00:16:26,809
<i>而那些製作人很害怕這些女孩們</i>

119
00:16:26,844 --> 00:16:29,585
<i>他說到一個容貌醜陋的女人
在路人面前摘下她的面具</i>

120
00:16:29,788 --> 00:16:32,848
<i>如果他們沒有發現她的美麗
她就攻擊他們</i>

121
00:16:33,058 --> 00:16:34,948
<i>所有的事情都引起他的興趣</i>

122
00:16:35,060 --> 00:16:39,787
<i>他對足球明星或賽馬冠軍不屑一顧</i>

123
00:16:39,858 --> 00:16:44,746
<i>卻熱衷於最新的相撲巡迴賽和橫綱排名</i>

124
00:16:44,781 --> 00:16:48,530
<i>他也關心天皇家族以及王子的加冕</i>

125
00:16:48,565 --> 00:16:52,092
<i>或是定期出現在電視上的
東京輩份最高的黑道</i>

126
00:16:52,127 --> 00:16:54,581
<i>在教導小孩子
他自己永遠無法了解的善</i>

127
00:16:54,616 --> 00:17:00,769
<i> 回到原生國度和家庭的喜悅</i>

128
00:17:00,804 --> 00:17:05,468
<i>但他發現城市裡
卻有超過1千2百萬的外地居民隱藏其中</i>

129
00:18:11,210 --> 00:18:12,225
<i>他寫著:</i>

130
00:18:12,063 --> 00:18:16,987
<i>"東京是被火車交會且由電線交織而成的</i>

131
00:18:17,003 --> 00:18:19,055
<i>她正展現她的才華\血管(veins)</i>

132
00:18:19,631 --> 00:18:22,061
<i>有人說電視是讓她的人民水準下降</i>

133
00:18:22,067 --> 00:18:25,924
<i>但我卻從未看過這麼多人在街道上看書</i>

134
00:18:26,976 --> 00:18:28,678
<i>也許他們只在街上看書</i>

135
00:18:28,678 --> 00:18:32,141
<i>或也許他們只是在假裝看書,
看這些黃種人(Yellow man)</i>

136
00:18:32,176 --> 00:18:36,387
<i>我在紀伊國屋拿到了我的預約書,
那間在新宿的大型書店</i>

137
00:18:36,685 --> 00:18:42,054
<i>一位日本繪畫天才
早在電影出現的十世紀前就發明了電影銀幕</i>

138
00:18:42,101 --> 00:18:45,805
<i>他為連環漫畫裡那些悲劇性的女英雄,</i>

139
00:18:45,805 --> 00:18:51,230
<i>心碎的作家與被閹割的罪犯
討回了一些公道</i>

140
00:18:52,534 --> 00:18:56,236
<i>有時候他們得以逃離
有時你又會在牆上看見他們</i>

141
00:18:56,199 --> 00:18:58,895
<i>整個城市,都是一幅連環漫畫</i>

142
00:18:59,062 --> 00:19:01,006
<i>是Mongo星球(漫畫飛俠哥頓)</i>

143
00:19:01,105 --> 00:19:03,774
<i>怎麼會沒有人認出這些雕像,</i>

144
00:19:03,774 --> 00:19:06,701
<i>從巴洛克塑像到史達林的感官</i>

145
00:19:06,701 --> 00:19:10,643
<i>與那張巨大的臉
俯望著芸芸漫畫讀者</i>

146
00:19:11,214 --> 00:19:17,153
<i>圖像比人巨大,偷窺著那些窺淫者.</i>

147
00:19:24,795 --> 00:19:28,977
<i>當夜晚到來,都會區成為了鄉間小村.</i>

148
00:19:28,977 --> 00:19:34,054
<i>銀行大樓陰影下的墓碑
與車站和寺廟</i>

149
00:19:34,273 --> 00:19:37,800
<i>東京的每一區,又再次成為袖珍的小城鎮</i>

150
00:19:38,010 --> 00:19:40,444
<i>坐落在眾多摩天大廈之間"</i>

151
00:19:50,522 --> 00:19:54,420
<i>在新宿的小酒吧
使他想起了印度的橫笛</i>

152
00:19:54,430 --> 00:19:58,520
<i>它的聲音只能被演奏的人聽見</i>

153
00:19:58,618 --> 00:20:02,233
<i>他可能會大喊:
就像在高達的電影或莎士比亞的劇本裡</i>

154
00:20:02,501 --> 00:20:05,026
<i>"那個音樂是來自何方?"</i>

155
00:20:09,212 --> 00:20:12,424
<i>後來他告訴我他在西日暮里的餐廳用餐</i>

156
00:20:12,459 --> 00:20:16,766
<i>在那裡山田先生正演出
極具藝術技巧的"鐵板燒"</i>

157
00:20:19,990 --> 00:20:22,618
<i>他說要注意觀察山田先生的手勢</i>

158
00:20:22,821 --> 00:20:25,768
<i>以及他混合不同食材的技巧</i>

159
00:20:25,803 --> 00:20:29,006
<i>一種將基本的概念思考透徹的方式</i>

160
00:20:29,041 --> 00:20:32,361
<i>與繪畫,哲學和武術一樣</i>

161
00:20:32,396 --> 00:20:35,514
<i>他說山田先生以一種極為謙卑的方式</i>

162
00:20:35,514 --> 00:20:37,219
<i>保有著他純粹的風格</i>

163
00:20:37,310 --> 00:20:40,999
<i>而這對他來說
就像是用一把看不見的刷子</i>

164
00:20:41,074 --> 00:20:47,807
<i>為他在東京的第一天,寫下'The end"</i>

165
00:20:52,217 --> 00:20:56,014
<i>"我在電視機前面渡過了一整天,
那個記憶之盒</i>

166
00:20:56,940 --> 00:20:59,954
<i>我人在奈良,與神秘的鹿群為伍</i>

167
00:21:00,515 --> 00:21:01,841
<i>我拍下那個畫面</i>

168
00:21:01,876 --> 00:21:05,000
<i>卻不知道早在15世紀
松尾芭蕉(俳聖)早已寫道:</i>

169
00:21:05,035 --> 00:21:11,021
<i>'The willow sees
the heron's image upside down.'</i>

170
00:21:17,576 --> 00:21:20,101
<i>對於那些習慣西方通俗形式的眼睛來說</i>

171
00:21:20,312 --> 00:21:23,442
<i>廣告成為了一種俳句</i>

172
00:21:23,477 --> 00:21:27,146
<i>他們很顯然無法理解箇中滋味.</i>

173
00:21:27,181 --> 00:21:28,085
<i>有那麼一剎那</i>

174
00:21:28,287 --> 00:21:31,256
<i>我深深覺得我能理解日文了</i>

175
00:21:31,890 --> 00:21:35,451
<i>但那是因為NHK的一個有關
Gerard de Nerval(法國詩人)的節目"</i>

176
00:21:35,661 --> 00:21:38,960
<i>"那些關於參觀盧梭墓碑的記憶,</i>

177
00:21:39,164 --> 00:21:41,530
<i>只是一個被高大樹木所守護</i>

178
00:21:41,733 --> 00:21:44,497
<i>簡單動人的紀念石牌"</i>

179
00:21:59,695 --> 00:22:03,078
<i>"8點40分,柬埔寨</i>

180
00:22:03,516 --> 00:22:06,510
<i>從盧梭跳接到紅色高棉(赤柬)/i></i>

181
00:22:06,660 --> 00:22:10,958
<i>是巧合,還是一種歷史觀</i>

182
00:22:11,363 --> 00:22:13,092
<i>在《現代啟示錄》裡</i>

183
00:22:13,298 --> 00:22:15,630
<i>馬龍白蘭度說了一些關鍵</i>

184
00:22:15,834 --> 00:22:18,200
<i>但難以理解的句子:</i>

185
00:22:18,403 --> 00:22:20,633
<i>'恐懼有著自己的臉孔和名字.</i>

186
00:22:23,901 --> 00:22:26,968
<i>你必需與恐懼為友.'</i>

187
00:22:28,375 --> 00:22:31,267
<i>為了驅逐那些有著面孔與姓名的惡靈</i>

188
00:22:31,384 --> 00:22:34,117
<i>你必須賦予它另一張面孔與另一個姓名</i>

189
00:22:35,187 --> 00:22:39,123
<i>對於日本恐怖片裡的一些屍體</i>

190
00:22:39,324 --> 00:22:41,724
<i>有人可能因為過於殘酷而遭到驚嚇</i>

191
00:22:41,927 --> 00:22:46,193
<i>但有人卻發現了
關於亞洲人長期承受苦難的源頭</i>

192
00:22:46,198 --> 00:22:48,793
<i>那些苦難是必要的
即便它被誇張化的</i>

193
00:22:48,800 --> 00:22:50,991
<i>最後才會得到補償</i>

194
00:22:51,002 --> 00:22:56,138
<i>當那些怪物消失了,而夏目雅子出現了</i>

195
00:22:56,173 --> 00:23:01,013
<i>全然的美麗
也同樣擁有著臉孔與姓名</i>

196
00:23:09,654 --> 00:23:12,254
<i>但當你看越多的日本電視</i>

197
00:23:12,257 --> 00:23:14,817
<i>你將越感覺到
是電視在看著你</i>

198
00:24:02,941 --> 00:24:05,671
<i>即便是電視新聞
承擔起了觀察事實的責任</i>

199
00:24:05,877 --> 00:24:09,365
<i>"電影眼"最神奇的功能
是它位於所有事物的核心</i>

200
00:24:09,400 --> 00:24:10,343
<i>現在是選戰時刻</i>

201
00:24:10,549 --> 00:24:12,608
<i>當選的候選人</i>

202
00:24:12,818 --> 00:24:16,310
<i>為達磨不倒翁點上了空白的眼睛,
幸運的象徵</i>

203
00:24:16,555 --> 00:24:21,003
<i>而敗選的候選人,失落但有尊嚴的
收起他們獨眼的達磨不倒翁</i>

204
00:24:21,149 --> 00:24:24,220
<i>世上最無法解釋的畫面
是來自歐洲的景象</i>

205
00:24:24,442 --> 00:24:28,816
<i>我看著影片中的畫面
它的聲部將會之後被加上</i>

206
00:24:28,836 --> 00:24:32,805
<i>因此我花了六個月時間去波蘭</i>

207
00:24:37,375 --> 00:24:41,286
<i>但此地的地震對我
卻不成問題</i>

208
00:24:41,321 --> 00:24:44,845
<i>雖然我必須承認昨夜的地震
讓我真正注意到這個問題</i>

209
00:24:45,417 --> 00:24:48,355
<i>詩總是誕生於憂患</i>

210
00:24:48,453 --> 00:24:51,589
<i>想想猶太人
地震中的日本人</i>

211
00:24:51,792 --> 00:24:55,514
生活在毯子上最滑稽是:
總是等著有人將毯子抽掉

212
00:24:55,514 --> 00:24:59,319
<i>他們已經學會居住在一個表面的世界</i>

213
00:24:59,319 --> 00:25:01,609
<i>脆弱的,短暫的,可以放丟棄的,</i>

214
00:25:01,609 --> 00:25:04,275
<i>如同會飛的火車
從此星至彼星</i>

215
00:25:04,275 --> 00:25:07,862
<i>如同武士決鬥
在一個永恆不變的過去裡</i>

216
00:25:08,073 --> 00:25:11,894
<i>這被稱做'萬物的無常'</i>

217
00:25:39,971 --> 00:25:43,085
<i>我甚麼都看─連他們所謂的深夜成人節目</i>

218
00:25:43,085 --> 00:25:48,098
<i>就像在連載漫畫的虛構
但這是一種虛假的鎖碼</i>

219
00:25:48,098 --> 00:25:52,213
<i>檢查並不會破壞整個節目
它也是節目的一部份</i>

220
00:25:52,217 --> 00:25:54,049
<i>而這個鎖碼也是訊息的一部份</i>

221
00:25:54,019 --> 00:25:59,758
<i>它指出了某些絕對要被隱藏的事物,
那是很多宗教一直在做的事情"</i>

222
00:26:12,804 --> 00:26:14,772
<i>那一年,有一個新面孔出現</i>

223
00:26:14,773 --> 00:26:19,730
<i>裝飾著東京街頭的一張偉大的臉
─教宗的臉</i>

224
00:26:19,765 --> 00:26:21,883
<i>那些永遠不會離開梵蒂岡的聖物</i>

225
00:26:21,918 --> 00:26:25,009
<i>卻被展示在Sogo百貨的七樓</i>

226
00:26:25,044 --> 00:26:26,881
<i>他寫到:</i>

227
00:26:26,191 --> 00:26:32,270
<i>"當然,這是出於好奇心
但也是刺探這個產業情資的機會</i>

228
00:26:32,305 --> 00:26:35,538
<i>我想像他們已經被拿出來兩年了</i>

229
00:26:35,573 --> 00:26:38,889
<i>呈現一個比較有效也比較廉價版本的天主教會</i>

230
00:26:38,924 --> 00:26:43,070
<i>但那同樣吸引人,因為它仍與神聖性連結在一起</i>

231
00:26:43,105 --> 00:26:46,697
<i>即使它已不再是原貌.</i>

232
00:27:23,975 --> 00:27:28,608
<i>而什麼時候法國的百貨公司才會展覽
屬於日本的宗教聖物</i>

233
00:27:28,614 --> 00:27:32,542
<i>或那些你在北海道的定山溪
會看到的物品?</i>

234
00:27:32,817 --> 00:27:39,222
<i>一開始,有人可能會對這種博物館
,教堂與情趣用品店的結合一笑置之.</i>

235
00:27:39,257 --> 00:27:44,402
<i>在日本,你會不斷讚嘆
日本不同領域間的阻隔是如此的小</i>

236
00:27:44,437 --> 00:27:47,630
<i>一個人可能同時注視這些雕像</i>

237
00:27:47,665 --> 00:27:49,235
<i>買下一個充氣娃娃</i>

238
00:27:49,270 --> 00:27:52,132
<i>並給繁衍之神一點微薄的香油錢</i>

239
00:27:52,132 --> 00:27:55,778
<i>這些都會在展覽中發生</i>

240
00:27:55,813 --> 00:28:00,600
<i>它也展示了某種他們的率直真城
那會使你對電視上的那些遮掩感到不可思議的</i>

241
00:28:00,635 --> 00:28:06,686
<i>只要你不提起這些性器官
很可能是從人體上取得的</i>

242
00:28:08,147 --> 00:28:11,593
<i>有人可能只願相信那個尚未墮落的世界</i>

243
00:28:11,593 --> 00:28:14,498
<i>那個難以進入的複雜清教徒世界</i>

244
00:28:14,520 --> 00:28:17,778
<i>那是美國佔領者所遮上的
一個欺騙的屏幕</i>

245
00:28:18,631 --> 00:28:21,068
<i>人們圍繞著他們所盼望的圍幕歡笑</i>

246
00:28:21,114 --> 00:28:24,134
<i>女人以一種友善的姿態觸碰它</i>

247
00:28:24,192 --> 00:28:27,192
<i>所有人共享著一種無染的純真</i>

248
00:28:27,359 --> 00:28:31,620
<i>這個博物館的第二部份,有許多動物配偶</i>

249
00:28:31,545 --> 00:28:34,967
<i>彷彿是人類不斷追尋的人間天堂</i>

250
00:28:35,205 --> 00:28:36,561
<i>雖然並不太肯定</i>

251
00:28:36,561 --> 00:28:39,727
<i>也許動物的純真
是迴避檢查的一種技巧</i>

252
00:28:39,727 --> 00:28:44,109
<i>但也有可能是一種無法達成和解的反照,</i>

253
00:28:44,355 --> 00:28:49,559
<i>而即使沒有原罪,這個人間天堂仍可能是失落的天堂</i>

254
00:28:49,559 --> 00:28:53,692
<i>從定山溪裡這些光滑亮麗的動物</i>

255
00:28:53,692 --> 00:28:56,773
<i>我看到日本社會本質的裂縫</i>

256
00:28:56,773 --> 00:28:59,740
<i>那個將男人與女人分離的裂縫</i>

257
00:29:00,416 --> 00:29:03,573
<i>他們的生命似乎只有兩種出路</i>

258
00:29:03,608 --> 00:29:08,830
<i>屠殺者, 或就像清木納言那樣憂思</i>

259
00:29:08,865 --> 00:29:13,941
<i>那是一個無法翻譯的
一個日文字所要表達的概念</i>

260
00:29:13,976 --> 00:29:16,973
<i>這個將人們帶回原始的獸性</i>

261
00:29:17,008 --> 00:29:19,745
<i>也同時被教堂裡的神父所譴責</i>

262
00:29:19,780 --> 00:29:24,494
<i>也成為對"萬物的無常"
一種如野獸般的挑戰</i>

263
00:29:24,529 --> 00:29:29,475
<i>我想用引用Samura Koichi的幾句話
來表達這樣的憂慮:</i>

264
00:29:27,832 --> 00:29:32,152
<i>"誰說時間能夠治癒一切傷口?</i>

265
00:29:32,187 --> 00:29:37,054
<i>應該說'時間能夠治癒一切,除了傷口'</i>

266
00:29:37,089 --> 00:29:41,612
<i>因為時間,這個裂縫超越了一切的限制</i>

267
00:29:41,647 --> 00:29:45,713
<i>因為時間,這個慾望的身體很快就會消失</i>

268
00:29:45,748 --> 00:29:49,649
<i>而如果這個欲望的身體
因為他人而中止其存有</i>

269
00:29:49,684 --> 00:29:54,818
<i>剩下的將會是超越肉體的傷害'"</i>

270
00:30:01,894 --> 00:30:07,096
<i>他寫到：李維史陀觀察到的日本人的秘密
─"萬物皆無常"</i>

271
00:30:07,096 --> 00:30:09,694
<i>這種能對事物進行思考的本領</i>

272
00:30:11,870 --> 00:30:12,786
<i>藉著進入並成為事物本身</i>

273
00:30:12,957 --> 00:30:15,970
<i>因此,他們很自然的會和我們一樣相信</i>

274
00:30:15,970 --> 00:30:19,075
<i>人會消逝而得永生.</i>

275
00:30:20,632 --> 00:30:25,630
<i>他寫到：在非洲也有相似的泛靈論信仰</i>

276
00:30:25,657 --> 00:30:27,682
<i>但很少與日本一起被討論</i>

277
00:30:27,892 --> 00:30:32,688
<i>而這種
視每一個造物都有其看不到的靈魂組成</i>

278
00:30:28,508 --> 00:30:35,641
<i>我們應該要怎麼稱呼如此的信仰呢?</i>

279
00:30:35,676 --> 00:30:38,530
<i>建一個工廠或一棟摩天大樓</i>

280
00:30:38,565 --> 00:30:42,386
<i>都會祭拜擁有這塊土地的神明</i>

281
00:30:42,421 --> 00:30:48,608
<i>有很多是祭拜刷子,算盤,甚至是縫紉針</i>

282
00:30:48,643 --> 00:30:53,286
<i>在9月25號有一個為娃娃裡的靈魂
舉行的安魂儀式</i>

283
00:30:53,556 --> 00:30:57,810
<i>他們將這些供奉著慈悲之神 - 觀音
的娃娃</i>

284
00:30:57,845 --> 00:31:02,915
<i>堆放在清水寺前
並當眾燒掉它們</i>

285
00:31:35,460 --> 00:31:37,325
<i>我看著那些參與者</i>

286
00:31:37,762 --> 00:31:40,189
<i>我想那些為神風特攻隊送行的人</i>

287
00:31:40,198 --> 00:31:42,760
<i>也有著同樣的神情"</i>

288
00:32:15,500 --> 00:32:17,627
<i>他寫到那些幾內亞比索(西非)的畫面</i>

289
00:32:17,835 --> 00:32:20,235
<i>應該要和維德角島的音樂放在一起</i>

290
00:32:20,238 --> 00:32:26,755
<i>做為我們向艾密卡?卡布拉(幾內亞比索獨立領袖)
統一夢想的致敬：</i>

291
00:32:26,755 --> 00:32:31,939
<i>'為什麼一個國家要為了世界的利益
而變得又小又窮?'</i>

292
00:32:31,974 --> 00:32:34,272
<i>他們已經盡力
他們解放了自己的國家</i>

293
00:32:34,307 --> 00:32:36,664
<i>他們把葡萄牙人趕走</i>

294
00:32:36,664 --> 00:32:41,995
<i>他們重創了葡萄牙的軍隊
促使葡萄牙本地進行反獨裁革命</i>

295
00:32:42,030 --> 00:32:46,915
<i>但他們仍要等待著
那遠在歐洲的革命能夠成功</i>

296
00:32:46,950 --> 00:32:49,022
<i>誰還記得這些事情?</i>

297
00:32:49,057 --> 00:32:53,080
<i>歷史會將已經喝光了的酒瓶
扔出窗外</i>

298
00:32:53,148 --> 00:32:56,307
<i>今天早上我到了比基吉迪(Pidjiguiti)的碼頭</i>

299
00:32:56,342 --> 00:33:01,895
<i>在那裡所有的起點都是1959年
當第一個受難者被殺害時</i>

300
00:33:01,930 --> 00:33:06,069
<i>也許在這片愁雲慘霧裡
很難辨認出非洲真正的容貌</i>

301
00:33:06,091 --> 00:33:12,878
<i>如同很難以從那些日覆工作的碼頭工人中
辨識出那些的受難者的身影</i>

302
00:33:12,897 --> 00:33:15,039
<i>有人說：每一個第三世界的領袖</i>

303
00:33:15,039 --> 00:33:18,093
<i>在獨立到來的那天早上
都刻下了同樣的一句箴言:</i>

304
00:33:18,128 --> 00:33:20,807
<i>'現在,真正的問題才正要開始'</i>

305
00:33:20,842 --> 00:33:26,387
<i>卡布拉沒有這樣的機會
他早已經遭到暗殺</i>

306
00:33:26,422 --> 00:33:30,558
<i>但問題仍然開始了
並會將一直,一直持續下去</i>

307
00:33:30,593 --> 00:33:34,499
<i>那些革命浪漫主義者並不感興趣的問題:</i>

308
00:33:34,534 --> 00:33:37,417
<i>工作,生產,分配</i>

309
00:33:37,452 --> 00:33:41,974
<i>對抗戰爭終了後的疲憊
和來自權力的誘惑</i>

310
00:33:42,009 --> 00:33:50,609
<i>最後歷史將會讓那些
期待著糖衣的人們嘗盡苦頭</i>

311
00:33:54,599 --> 00:33:57,453
<i>我個人的問題更特殊:</i>

312
00:33:57,488 --> 00:34:00,254
<i>如何去拍攝比索的女人?</i>

313
00:34:00,254 --> 00:34:04,555
<i>顯然,那些眼睛神奇的功能
就是反抗著我</i>

314
00:34:04,555 --> 00:34:07,759
<i>在比索和維德角島的市場</i>

315
00:34:07,794 --> 00:34:11,317
<i>我能夠以平等的姿態看著他們:</i>

316
00:34:11,384 --> 00:34:12,808
<i>我看她</i>

317
00:34:14,878 --> 00:34:17,058
<i>她也看我</i>

318
00:34:17,923 --> 00:34:21,024
<i>她知道我在看他</i>

319
00:34:22,698 --> 00:34:24,548
<i>她瞥了我一眼</i>

320
00:34:24,569 --> 00:34:29,021
<i>但那種角度好像是
卻又似乎不是向著我</i>

321
00:34:29,056 --> 00:34:31,969
<i>而在最後,直直地看著</i>

322
00:34:31,969 --> 00:34:37,276
<i>永恆的二十四分之一秒
電影一格的時間</i>

323
00:34:43,914 --> 00:34:47,574
<i>所有的女人都蘊含著一種永恆的特質,</i>

324
00:34:47,609 --> 00:34:51,926
<i>而男人的任務就在於
盡可能讓女人越晚了解這件事越好</i>

325
00:34:51,961 --> 00:34:55,157
<i>非洲的男人就像其它男人一樣擅長這件事</i>

326
00:34:55,492 --> 00:35:00,533
<i>但在看了非洲女人最後一眼後
我就沒有必要相信男人了"</i>

327
00:36:49,511 --> 00:36:52,384
<i>他告訴我關於"忠犬小八"的故事:</i>

328
00:36:52,430 --> 00:36:55,811
<i>"一隻每天都在車站等待主人的小狗</i>

329
00:36:55,823 --> 00:36:58,571
<i>他的主人已經死了
但小狗並不知道</i>

330
00:36:58,583 --> 00:37:01,551
<i>而他就一直等待下去,終其一生</i>

331
00:37:01,654 --> 00:37:04,976
<i>經過的人們會餵他食物</i>

332
00:37:05,023 --> 00:37:07,578
<i>在他死後,人們立了一座雕像</i>

333
00:37:07,961 --> 00:37:14,869
<i>雕像前的壽司和飯糰
讓忠犬小八的忠誠永誌不滅</i>

334
00:37:18,381 --> 00:37:23,078
<i>東京充滿了這種小傳說與動物代禱者</i>

335
00:37:23,078 --> 00:37:28,723
<i>三越獅矗立並守護著
原來屬於岡田先生王朝的領土</i>

336
00:37:28,723 --> 00:37:31,292
<i>他是一位法國繪畫的收藏家</i>

337
00:37:31,385 --> 00:37:37,456
<i>他僱用了凡爾賽宮
為他所擁有的百貨公司慶祝一百週年</i>

338
00:37:37,913 --> 00:37:42,379
<i>在百貨公司的電腦區
我曾看到日本年輕人運動他們的腦部肌肉</i>

339
00:37:42,314 --> 00:37:45,037
<i>就像年輕的雅典人在摔跤場一樣</i>

340
00:37:45,072 --> 00:37:46,583
<i>他們有一場仗要打贏.</i>

341
00:37:46,583 --> 00:37:50,004
<i>未來的史書將會把積體電路的戰爭</i>

342
00:37:50,039 --> 00:37:53,498
<i>與薩拉米斯(希臘)或阿金庫爾戰役(英法)相提並論</i>

343
00:37:53,539 --> 00:37:58,741
<i>但是歷史總會
留下一個區塊來紀念他的手下敗將:</i>

344
00:37:58,943 --> 00:38:03,988
<i>就像是這季的男性流行時尚
將會拜倒在約翰甘迺迪的魅力之下"</i>

345
00:38:39,510 --> 00:38:42,990
<i>像一隻為了還願的烏龜
而駐紮在廣場一角</i>

346
00:38:43,140 --> 00:38:48,105
<i>每天他都看到
日本愛國黨的主席赤尾先生</i>

347
00:38:48,105 --> 00:38:53,624
<i>在他的流動陽台上
宣揚他對抗國際共產主義的計策</i>

348
00:38:56,158 --> 00:38:57,883
<i>他寫到:</i>

349
00:38:57,883 --> 00:39:03,249
<i>"那些掛著擴音器和旗幟的極右派宣傳車
是東京景觀的一部份</i>

350
00:39:03,249 --> 00:39:06,535
<i>赤尾先生是他們的中心</i>

351
00:39:06,535 --> 00:39:09,512
<i>我想他以後也會有一座雕像,
像忠犬小八一樣</i>

352
00:39:09,512 --> 00:39:15,597
<i>立在那個他宣誓
並出發前往戰場的那個十字路口</i>

353
00:39:16,885 --> 00:39:19,810
<i>60年代的時候,他在成田</i>

354
00:39:19,892 --> 00:39:23,231
<i>農民抗議機場蓋在他們的土地上</i>

355
00:39:23,231 --> 00:39:29,369
<i>赤尾先生譴責那個在幕後主導
所有事情的莫斯科黑手</i>

356
00:39:29,378 --> 00:39:33,416
<i>有樂町是東京的政治廣場</i>

357
00:39:33,416 --> 00:39:36,749
<i>我曾經看過一個和尚在那裡
為越南祈禱</i>

358
00:39:36,825 --> 00:39:42,979
<i>今日,年輕的右翼份子
抗議蘇聯對北島的兼併</i>

359
00:39:42,979 --> 00:39:45,270
<i>有時候他們會得到答覆:</i>

360
00:39:45,270 --> 00:39:48,873
<i>以惡意的佔領
來達成與日本的貿易關係</i>

361
00:39:48,873 --> 00:39:54,251
<i>比起美國的聯盟好上千百倍
因為他們總在抱怨經濟上的侵略</i>

362
00:39:54,251 --> 00:39:57,620
<i>世事並不單純</i>

363
00:40:04,285 --> 00:40:07,779
<i>人行道的另一邊,左邊有個樓梯</i>

364
00:40:07,814 --> 00:40:11,403
<i>南韓天主教反對黨領袖金大鐘</i>

365
00:40:11,438 --> 00:40:15,073
<i>在73年在日本被南韓的蓋世太保綁架</i>

366
00:40:15,108 --> 00:40:17,606
<i>以撕票做為威脅</i>

367
00:40:17,641 --> 00:40:19,704
<i>有團體開始進行絕食抗議</i>

368
00:40:19,739 --> 00:40:24,876
<i>有非常多的年輕反抗份子一同簽字表達支持</i>

369
00:41:05,191 --> 00:41:09,133
<i>我回到成田參加其中一個受害者的生日</i>

370
00:41:09,133 --> 00:41:11,192
<i>示威抗議是非常不真實的</i>

371
00:41:11,192 --> 00:41:13,513
<i>我覺得我好像正在演《南海天堂》</i>

372
00:41:13,548 --> 00:41:16,879
<i>十年後醒來卻還是看到同一群人</i>

373
00:41:16,879 --> 00:41:20,930
<i>同一群藍衣服帶著鋼盔的警察</i>

374
00:41:20,930 --> 00:41:23,289
<i>同樣的旗幟,同樣的標語</i>

375
00:41:23,324 --> 00:41:26,306
<i>'打倒機場'</i>

376
00:41:26,517 --> 00:41:29,455
<i>只有一個東西多了：那座機場</i>

377
00:41:29,490 --> 00:41:32,285
<i>而那條唯一道路
和那些滿佈的鐵絲網</i>

378
00:41:32,290 --> 00:41:36,256
<i>讓機場看起來看像是被包圍而非勝利</i>

379
00:41:49,838 --> 00:41:54,038
<i>我的伙伴山貓駿雄想到了一個解決辦法</i>

380
00:41:54,038 --> 00:41:59,384
<i>如果現在的影像無法改變
那就改變過去的影像</i>

381
00:42:00,478 --> 00:42:04,768
<i>他給我60年代衝突的畫面
用他的合成器處理</i>

382
00:42:04,582 --> 00:42:08,066
<i>'畫面不那麼虛假了'他堅定而熱情的說</i>

383
00:42:08,066 --> 00:42:10,057
<i>'比起你看到的那些電視畫面</i>

384
00:42:10,057 --> 00:42:14,488
<i>至少他們是由自己表明他們是誰 ─ 影像</i>

385
00:42:14,494 --> 00:42:20,111
<i>不是包含著無法接近的現實
並簡單而可攜帶的一種形式 .'</i>

386
00:42:21,171 --> 00:42:27,433
<i>駿雄把他的機器世界叫做"禁區",
來向塔可夫斯基致敬</i>

387
00:43:15,249 --> 00:43:19,257
<i>成田所帶給我的東西
如同破碎的全像片</i>

388
00:43:19,257 --> 00:43:21,779
<i>是一整個60世代的完整碎片</i>

389
00:43:21,779 --> 00:43:26,340
<i>如果沒有帶著任何幻想的愛仍叫做愛
我曾經愛它</i>

390
00:43:26,340 --> 00:43:29,102
<i>那是一個時常令我感到氣憤的世代</i>

391
00:43:29,102 --> 00:43:32,892
<i>因為我無緣與他們一起分享</i>

392
00:43:32,892 --> 00:43:36,912
<i>那個將對抗貧窮
與對抗富有勢力團結起來的烏托邦</i>

393
00:43:36,912 --> 00:43:44,996
<i>但他們已將那些再也不敢,也不知如何表達的勇氣
與革命之聲吶喊出來了</i>

394
00:43:47,639 --> 00:43:51,794
<i>我在那裡遇到的農民,
透過抗爭來進一步了解他們自己</i>

395
00:43:51,908 --> 00:43:53,921
<i>具體而言,他們失敗了</i>

396
00:43:53,921 --> 00:43:57,340
<i>然而與此同時
他們所贏得到對這個世界的了解</i>

397
00:43:57,340 --> 00:44:02,155
<i>唯有透過抗爭才能贏得</i>

398
00:44:02,388 --> 00:44:07,713
<i>有一些學生以維護革命正統之名
互相殘殺對方</i>

399
00:44:07,939 --> 00:44:11,561
<i>而有些學生為了徹底打倒資本主義而研究它</i>

400
00:44:11,561 --> 00:44:14,131
<i>但現在卻成為它最成功執行者</i>

401
00:44:14,131 --> 00:44:17,876
<i>如同其他地方的社會運動
每個運動都有其本身的態度與革命者</i>

402
00:44:17,847 --> 00:44:22,346
<i>包括那些以殉道為其志業者</i>

403
00:44:22,346 --> 00:44:26,088
<i>但也有出現如同切格瓦拉那樣的人</i>

404
00:44:26,088 --> 00:44:30,903
<i>他們會'因罪惡而感到憤怒而顫動'</i>

405
00:44:30,903 --> 00:44:34,519
<i>他們想要賦予這樣的胸懷一個政治上的意義,</i>

406
00:44:34,519 --> 00:44:37,943
<i>而他們的胸懷也能延續他們的政治生涯</i>

407
00:44:37,943 --> 00:44:44,249
<i>這也是為什麼我絕不會同意有人說
'年輕人總是浪費他們的年輕'"</i>

408
00:44:58,613 --> 00:45:01,739
<i>"那些每個週末都聚集在新宿的年輕人</i>

409
00:45:01,739 --> 00:45:04,850
<i>顯然他們知道他們不是在一個
通往真實人生的發射台</i>

410
00:45:04,850 --> 00:45:09,200
<i>他們就是人生,在那裡吃新鮮的甜甜圈</i>

411
00:45:09,200 --> 00:45:11,391
<i>有一個很簡單的秘密</i>

412
00:45:11,391 --> 00:45:15,041
<i>年長的人想要隱藏
不是所有年輕人都知道</i>

413
00:45:15,041 --> 00:45:18,504
<i>那個10歲的少女
先將她的朋友的手綁住</i>

414
00:45:18,504 --> 00:45:22,404
<i>只因為她說了他們班的壞話
接著把她從13樓丟下去</i>

415
00:45:22,404 --> 00:45:24,589
<i>那個女孩也還不知道那個秘密</i>

416
00:45:24,589 --> 00:45:27,491
<i>那些為了要防止小孩自殺</i>

417
00:45:27,491 --> 00:45:29,426
<i>而要求增加緊急電話數量的父母</i>

418
00:45:29,426 --> 00:45:33,760
<i>也因為被保密很好
而晚了一點才發現</i>

419
00:45:34,398 --> 00:45:37,959
<i>也許搖滾樂是散播這個秘密的一種國際語言.</i>

420
00:45:38,042 --> 00:45:41,365
<i>另一種則是東京特有的</i>

421
00:45:45,628 --> 00:45:49,601
<i>對於竹之子族來說
20歲是退休的年齡</i>

422
00:45:49,713 --> 00:45:51,557
<i>他們是火星人小孩</i>

423
00:45:51,557 --> 00:45:55,352
<i>我每個星期天都去代代木公園看他們跳舞</i>

424
00:45:55,511 --> 00:46:00,005
<i>他們想要人們看他們
但他們似乎不想要去注意其它人在做什麼</i>

425
00:46:00,005 --> 00:46:01,980
<i>他們活在另一個平行時空裡:</i>

426
00:46:02,157 --> 00:46:06,730
<i>一個看不見的水族館玻璃
將他們與被他們吸引來群眾分離</i>

427
00:46:06,818 --> 00:46:08,617
<i>我可以花一個下午的時間</i>

428
00:46:08,617 --> 00:46:16,419
<i>看一個Takenoko小女孩,很明顯是剛開始學
學習他們星球的習俗</i>

429
00:46:28,752 --> 00:46:30,182
<i>除此之外,他們都戴著狗牌</i>

430
00:46:30,182 --> 00:46:32,942
<i>他們服從口哨
黑道向他們勒索要錢</i>

431
00:46:32,942 --> 00:46:35,965
<i>而且成員毫無意外地清一色是女孩</i>

432
00:46:35,965 --> 00:46:38,960
<i>而且都是由一個男孩指揮"</i>

433
00:47:33,817 --> 00:47:38,619
<i>有一天他寫到:"描寫夢境</i>

434
00:47:39,402 --> 00:47:43,973
<i>一次又一次,我夢境裡場景
都能在東京的百貨公司找到</i>

435
00:47:43,993 --> 00:47:48,342
<i>與城市平行的地下道</i>

436
00:47:48,727 --> 00:47:52,029
<i>人們的臉出現而又消失
那些足跡顯露卻又隱藏</i>

437
00:47:52,029 --> 00:47:56,498
<i>那些如同民間傳說的夢境,是如此的完整
而當我隔天醒來</i>

438
00:47:56,498 --> 00:47:59,941
<i>我發現我仍然在那地下迷宮中繼續尋找</i>

439
00:47:59,941 --> 00:48:03,374
<i>那些曾隱沒在夜晚中的存在</i>

440
00:48:03,881 --> 00:48:06,281
<i>我開始猜想那些夢是否真的屬於我</i>

441
00:48:06,483 --> 00:48:10,442
<i>或是只是一個巨大的集體夢境的一部份</i>

442
00:48:10,654 --> 00:48:13,411
<i>連整個城市也只是其投影</i>

443
00:48:13,411 --> 00:48:17,059
<i>如果把隨處可見的電話接起來</i>

444
00:48:17,059 --> 00:48:19,134
<i>你可能聽到一個熟悉的聲音</i>

445
00:48:19,134 --> 00:48:20,871
<i>或一個跳動的心</i>

446
00:48:20,871 --> 00:48:22,339
<i>那也有可能是清少納言的心</i>

447
00:48:22,339 --> 00:48:25,647
<i>所有地下過客都向著車站前進</i>

448
00:48:25,647 --> 00:48:29,099
<i>那些商店和鐵路都寫著同樣的名字</i>

449
00:48:29,185 --> 00:48:33,641
<i>京王,小田急
那些大公司之名</i>

450
00:48:33,641 --> 00:48:37,174
<i>那被沉睡的人所佔據的列車
聚合了所有夢的碎片</i>

451
00:48:37,174 --> 00:48:41,568
<i>剪成了一支屬於他們的電影
一支最後的電影</i>

452
00:48:41,568 --> 00:48:45,180
<i>自動化票櫃給予了他們入場的票券."</i>

453
00:53:50,089 --> 00:53:54,018
<i>他告訴我在他在車站階梯
看到的屬於一月的光</i>

454
00:53:54,018 --> 00:53:57,424
<i>他說這個城市可以被當成樂譜一樣解析</i>

455
00:53:57,811 --> 00:54:02,798
<i>一個人很有可能迷失在如弦樂流動的大眾
與大量的音符細節當中</i>

456
00:54:02,798 --> 00:54:05,441
<i>而你將會得到東京最廉價的畫面</i>

457
00:54:05,441 --> 00:54:08,479
<i>擁擠,自大,毫無人性</i>

458
00:54:09,142 --> 00:54:11,322
<i>他認為他看到更細微的循環</i>

459
00:54:11,322 --> 00:54:14,975
<i>節奏,面孔的群相
匆匆的閃現</i>

460
00:54:14,975 --> 00:54:18,759
<i>如器樂的合奏般多樣而精準</i>

461
00:54:18,759 --> 00:54:22,554
<i>時常音樂與日常生活是不謀而合的</i>

462
00:54:22,589 --> 00:54:26,326
<i>銀座的索尼大樓階梯
本身就是一個樂器</i>

463
00:54:26,529 --> 00:54:29,470
<i>每一步都是一個註釋</i>

464
00:54:29,470 --> 00:54:33,045
<i>它們都像複雜的賦格曲(fugue)裡,
一同結合起來的聲音</i>

465
00:54:33,045 --> 00:54:37,901
<i>但只要能掌握其中一種聲音就足夠了</i>

466
00:54:37,901 --> 00:54:40,288
<i>以電視為例</i>

467
00:54:40,323 --> 00:54:42,696
<i>它本身就能提供一趟旅程</i>

468
00:54:42,696 --> 00:54:45,557
<i>而且往往有令人意想不到的曲折</i>

469
00:54:45,557 --> 00:54:46,901
<i>那時是相撲賽季</i>

470
00:54:46,936 --> 00:54:50,672
<i>那些會在銀座雅致的轉播間裡觀看比賽的人</i>

471
00:54:50,672 --> 00:54:53,333
<i>是東京窮人裡最貧困的</i>

472
00:54:53,333 --> 00:54:56,289
<i>他們窮到連一台電視都沒有</i>

473
00:54:56,289 --> 00:54:58,500
<i>他看著他們
那些在晴朗的早晨</i>

474
00:54:58,500 --> 00:55:01,531
<i>醉倒在淚橋上,早已死去的靈魂</i>

475
00:55:01,531 --> 00:55:05,455
<i>至今多少四季已更迭逝去了呢?</i>

476
00:56:34,543 --> 00:56:36,537
<i>他寫到:</i>

477
00:56:36,630 --> 00:56:39,715
<i>"即使是在那些販賣電子零件的攤販市場裡</i>

478
00:56:39,727 --> 00:56:42,003
<i>(很多內行人會來這裡挖寶)</i>

479
00:56:42,003 --> 00:56:45,469
<i>那裡也是東京樂譜裡不可或缺的一部份</i>

480
00:56:45,568 --> 00:56:49,297
<i>它使我真正感到被放逐到
不同於歐洲的聲響異境</i>

481
00:56:49,297 --> 00:56:51,833
<i>我指的是那些電玩的音樂</i>

482
00:56:52,029 --> 00:56:53,874
<i>它們被裝進桌上電玩裡</i>

483
00:56:53,874 --> 00:56:56,927
<i>你可以在上面喝東西,吃東西,然後繼續玩</i>

484
00:56:56,927 --> 00:56:58,832
<i>它們就被擺在街道上</i>

485
00:56:58,832 --> 00:57:02,076
<i>透過聽覺,你可以在你的記憶裡遊玩</i>

486
00:57:29,218 --> 00:57:31,434
<i>我看著這些遊戲的出現</i>

487
00:57:31,434 --> 00:57:37,031
<i>不久之後我就在世界的各個地方與他們相遇
只有一件地方有點不同</i>

488
00:57:37,031 --> 00:57:38,993
<i>最初遊戲讓人覺得很熟悉:</i>

489
00:57:39,403 --> 00:57:43,381
<i>原本是一種把出現在你眼前的
我不確定是牧羊犬或小海豹</i>

490
00:57:43,593 --> 00:57:48,292
<i>他們出現時就打他們的反生態遊戲</i>

491
00:57:48,361 --> 00:57:51,044
<i>日本卻發展出不同的東西:</i>

492
00:57:51,148 --> 00:57:56,776
<i>不再是用動物,而是換成認不出是誰的人頭</i>

493
00:57:56,811 --> 00:57:59,234
<i>最上面一層貼上社長的標籤</i>

494
00:57:59,609 --> 00:58:01,757
<i>再下來是次長和常務</i>

495
00:58:01,757 --> 00:58:06,304
<i>最下面是部長和課長</i>

496
00:58:06,304 --> 00:58:10,243
<i>我拍的那個男人
正在打擊他階層組織裡的敵人</i>

497
00:58:10,395 --> 00:58:13,989
<i>後來向我坦承他不只把這個當成嘲諷</i>

498
00:58:13,989 --> 00:58:17,251
<i>他就是把人頭當作他的上司.</i>

499
00:58:17,251 --> 00:58:20,667
<i>這也就是為什麼"課長"</i>

500
00:58:20,667 --> 00:58:23,825
<i>會被打得這頻繁而且用力</i>

501
00:58:24,167 --> 00:58:28,063
<i>並在不久之後人頭被換回成小海豹</i>

502
00:58:32,942 --> 00:58:37,036
<i>山貓駿雄用他的機器發明了一個遊戲</i>

503
00:58:37,265 --> 00:58:40,639
<i>為了要取悅我,他把我最愛的動物放進去:</i>

504
00:58:40,639 --> 00:58:42,805
<i>貓和貓頭鷹</i>

505
00:58:50,598 --> 00:58:57,072
<i>他說只有電子的材質
才能夠處理情感,記憶,及想像</i>

506
00:58:57,072 --> 00:58:59,330
<i>像是溝口建二的亞森羅賓</i>

507
00:58:59,536 --> 00:59:02,437
<i>或是更引人想像的"部落民"(日本少數民族)</i>

508
00:59:02,639 --> 00:59:06,935
<i>要如何跟別人說
我們呈現了一群不存在的日本人</i>

509
00:59:06,935 --> 00:59:13,418
<i>沒錯,他們是存在的
我在大阪看過他們在等人雇用他們,並睡在地上</i>

510
00:59:13,418 --> 00:59:17,606
<i>從中世紀以來他們注定只能做辛苦卑賤的工作</i>

511
00:59:17,606 --> 00:59:21,783
<i>但從明治時期以後,他們沒有被獨立出來</i>

512
00:59:21,818 --> 00:59:27,119
<i>而他們真正的名字:
穢多(eta)一個圖謄字,一直不被承認</i>

513
00:59:27,119 --> 00:59:28,799
<i>他們是非人</i>

514
00:59:28,799 --> 00:59:34,708
<i>他們要如何被呈現,除了被當做非影像(non-image)?</i>

515
00:59:37,786 --> 00:59:42,287
<i>電玩是人類機器競賽計劃的第一個舞台</i>

516
00:59:42,463 --> 00:59:46,151
<i>也是未來人類智能發展唯一的道路</i>

517
00:59:46,186 --> 00:59:51,060
<i>今日,我們看待當代社會的世界觀
也可以在"小精靈"裡看到</i>

518
00:59:51,060 --> 00:59:53,924
<i>我並不知道要到什麼時候</i>

519
00:59:53,924 --> 00:59:57,053
<i>那個花盡我所有百元硬幣的傢伙
能征服這個世界</i>

520
00:59:57,053 --> 01:00:01,260
<i>也許因為他是一個對於人類命運
完美的圖像化隱喻</i>

521
01:00:01,505 --> 01:00:06,671
<i>它將真實的社會裡
人類與環境的權力抗衡關係納入其中</i>

522
01:00:06,671 --> 01:00:11,718
<i>並冷靜地告訴我們:
即便我們取得了無數次戰勝的光榮</i>

523
01:00:11,718 --> 01:00:15,110
<i>最後我們仍將失敗"</i>

524
01:00:59,234 --> 01:01:04,648
<i>他很高興能看到同樣一種菊花
能同時用在人與動物的葬禮上</i>

525
01:01:04,648 --> 01:01:07,445
<i>他描述了在上野動物園舉行的儀式</i>

526
01:01:07,445 --> 01:01:09,836
<i>為了紀念那一年所有死去的動物</i>

527
01:01:10,083 --> 01:01:13,928
<i>對於兩年前
前來為已死去的熊貓的哀悼隊伍</i>

528
01:01:13,928 --> 01:01:17,889
<i>根據新聞的說法
比起同一時間過世的內閣總理</i>

529
01:01:17,889 --> 01:01:20,620
<i>他們對熊貓的過世更感到無法接受</i>

530
01:01:20,655 --> 01:01:25,175
<i>去年,人們真的哭了
現在他們已經比較習慣了</i>

531
01:01:25,175 --> 01:01:26,707
<i>他們開始接受每一年</i>

532
01:01:26,707 --> 01:01:30,971
<i>死神都會把熊貓帶走,
而他們死後會變成一條龍的這個童話故事</i>

533
01:01:30,971 --> 01:01:32,589
<i>我聽過這種說法:</i>

534
01:01:32,841 --> 01:01:35,591
<i>'生與死的分別</i>

535
01:01:35,591 --> 01:01:39,379
<i>對我們而言,並不像西方人所想的如此遙遠'</i>

536
01:01:39,379 --> 01:01:45,535
<i>我過去最常從人們眼中看到的
是對死亡的震驚</i>

537
01:01:45,535 --> 01:01:50,027
<i>而我從日本小孩眼中看到的,
是好奇</i>

538
01:01:50,027 --> 01:01:53,849
<i>好像他們想要穿透那層分離</i>

539
01:01:53,849 --> 01:01:56,887
<i>試著去了解動物的死亡"</i>

540
01:03:19,996 --> 01:03:22,227
<i>"我曾經去過另一個國度</i>

541
01:03:22,331 --> 01:03:25,797
<i>那裡生與死不是分離而是一條追尋的道路</i>

542
01:03:26,435 --> 01:03:28,926
<i>偉大的比熱戈斯群島的祖先們</i>

543
01:03:29,138 --> 01:03:31,072
<i>已經為我們描述過那趟死亡旅程</i>

544
01:03:31,274 --> 01:03:35,404
<i>以及他們如何根據他們嚴謹的儀式
從一個島到另一個島</i>

545
01:03:35,611 --> 01:03:40,514
<i>直到他們抵達了最後的海灘
他們在那裡等待航向另一個世界的船</i>

546
01:03:40,974 --> 01:03:46,077
<i>如果你意外地遇到了那艘船
無論如何都不能指認出它</i>

547
01:03:49,252 --> 01:03:52,357
<i>比熱戈斯是幾內亞比索的一部份</i>

548
01:03:52,562 --> 01:03:56,464
<i>在一段舊影像片段裡,
艾密卡?卡布拉對著岸上揮手道別</i>

549
01:03:56,666 --> 01:03:59,794
<i>他是對的,他再也看不到它了</i>

550
01:03:59,869 --> 01:04:02,603
<i>路易斯?卡布拉在15年後也做了同樣的動作</i>

551
01:04:02,805 --> 01:04:05,330
<i>他站在獨木舟上將我

除了忽闪而过的两个香港街景和在日本单元中某个电视屏幕中出现的“西游记”三个字，没有阳光也同样没有中国元素，却在光怪陆离的异国风情和沉缓的幕后音中令我得到似乎惟有在梦境中才能体会到一种强烈的生命体验的共鸣，似乎帮我找到了一种表达方式，将人生的积郁混合在良莠不齐的人文视界中冷静的表达出来，这种纯粹的情绪化的元素让我十分享受即使对电影技法运用的无知也能体验到的崇高感和敬畏感。
我无法表达，我似乎只能复述，在画外音提及sunless的来由时出现的幽暗的林荫道下的喷水池，以及那些粗颗粒的阴暗冷寂的令人发慌的田园风光，以及无数sunless的令我着迷的画面：白鸟栖息的树冠，卢梭的墓碑，东京的冷漠街景，旧金山的锈红色大桥下的吞噬黑石的白色海浪。我在想，导演一开始就提及日本文学修辞的乏匮，光是词语本身便足以表达蕴意。所以我又想，这部电影对我便是一个宏大精密的修辞。

一大堆碟中挑来挑去不知选那张，有些刻意地不去选日本影片，不是日本电影难看，而是拍得太好，结果总在看了。所以，似乎这次要和自己拧着不看日本电影。
结果，竟然还是一部关于日本的电影（碟的封面可能是搞错了），如果要给此片写关键词的话可以有：人类学、文化、流动、面孔等等，意象，甚至说旁白叙述中的内容如此丰富，好象无从说起，只能说让我对日本产生了一丝向往，想去看看。

Sans Soleil / Sunless
The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.
He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.
He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?
He wrote me that in the Bijagós Islands it's the young girls who choose their fiancées.
He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. I wish I could convey to you the simplicity—the lack of affectation—of this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn't dead, only run away. But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.
He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?
He didn't like to dwell on poverty, but in everything he wanted to show there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model. A world full of bums, of lumpens, of outcasts, of Koreans. Too broke to afford drugs, they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk. This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes from the glories of the center city, a character took his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads. Luxury for them would be one of those large bottles of sake that are poured over tombs on the day of the dead.
I paid for a round in a bar in Namidabashi. It's the kind of place that allows people to stare at each other with equality; the threshold below which every man is as good as any other—and knows it.
He told me about the Jetty on Fogo, in theCape Verde islands. How long have they been there waiting for the boat, patient as pebbles but ready to jump? They are a people of wanderers, of navigators, of world travelers. They fashioned themselves through cross-breeding here on these rocks that the Portuguese used as a marshaling yard for their colonies. A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people. Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?
He used to write to me: the Sahel is not only what is shown of it when it is too late; it's a land that drought seeps into like water into a leaking boat. The animals resurrected for the time of a carnival in Bissau will be petrified again, as soon as a new attack has changed the savannah into a desert. This is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten, with one exception—you win—Japan. My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts; they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.
He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning of the 11th century, in the Heian period. Do we ever know where history is really made? Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another. Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents; the emperor's court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians. Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,' 'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.' One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart.' Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming; I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.
He wrote me: coming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon's list, of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant, and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases. Japanese poetry never modifies. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all. Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from Nagoya. The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work—Japanese style—like a madman. It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics. And then in the month of May he killed himself. They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'
He described me his reunion with Tokyo: like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket immediately starts to inspect familiar places. He ran off to see if everything was where it should be: the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store, which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers. He was told that it was now little girls who made and unmade stars; the producers shuddered before them. He was told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of passers-by and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful. Everything interested him. He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant or about the results of the Daily Double asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done in the last sumo tournament. He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears regularly on television to teach goodness to children. These simple joys he had never felt: of returning to a country, a house, a family home. But twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.
He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains, tied together with electric wire she shows her veins. They say that television makes her people illiterate; as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets. Perhaps they read only in the street, or perhaps they just pretend to read—these yellow men. I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku. The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope ten centuries before the movies compensates a little for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines, victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship. Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls. The entire city is a comic strip; it's Planet Manga. How can one fail to recognize the statuary that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central? And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book readers, pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.
At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples. Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.
The small bar in Shinjuku reminded him of that Indian flute whose sound can only be heard by whomever is playing it. He might have cried out if it was in aGodard film or a Shakespeare play, “Where should this music be?”
Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of 'action cooking.' He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada's gestures and his way of mixing the ingredients one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts common to painting, philosophy, and karate. He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed in his humble way the essence of style, and consequently that it was up to him to use his invisible brush to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words 'the end.'
I've spent the day in front of my TV set—that memory box. I was inNara with the sacred deers. I was taking a picture without knowing that in the 15th century Basho had written: “The willow sees the heron's image... upside down.”
The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye, used to Western atrocities in this field; not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure. For one slightly hallucinatory moment I had the impression that I spoke Japanese, but it was a cultural program onNHK about Gérard de Nerval.
8:40, Cambodia. From Jean Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge: coincidence, or the sense of history?
In Apocalypse Now, Brando said a few definitive and incommunicable sentences: “Horror has a face and a name... you must make a friend of horror.” To cast out the horror that has a name and a face you must give it another name and another face. Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty of certain corpses. Sometimes one is stunned by so much cruelty. One seeks its sources in the Asian peoples long familiarity with suffering, that requires that even pain be ornate. And then comes the reward: the monsters are laid out, Natsume Masako arises; absolute beauty also has a name and a face.
But the more you watch Japanese television... the more you feel it's watching you. Even television newscast bears witness to the fact that the magical function of the eye is at the center of all things. It's election time: the winning candidates black out the empty eye of Daruma—the spirit of luck—while losing candidates—sad but dignified—carry off their one-eyed Daruma.
The images most difficult to figure out are those of Europe. I watched the pictures of a film whose soundtrack will be added later. It took me six months for Poland.
Meanwhile, I have no difficulty with local earthquakes. But I must say that last night's quake helped me greatly to grasp a problem.
Poetry is born of insecurity: wandering Jews, quaking Japanese; by living on a rug that jesting nature is ever ready to pull out from under them they've got into the habit of moving about in a world of appearances: fragile, fleeting, revocable, of trains that fly from planet to planet, of samurai fighting in an immutable past. That's called 'the impermanence of things.'
I did it all. All the way to the evening shows for adults—so called. The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips, but it's a coded hypocrisy. Censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show. The code is the message. It points to the absolute by hiding it. That's what religions have always done.
That year, a new face appeared among the great ones that blazon the streets of Tokyo: the Pope's. Treasures that had never left the Vatican were shown on the seventh floor of the Sogo department store.
He wrote me: curiosity of course, and the glimmer of industrial espionage in the eye—I imagine them bringing out within two years time a more efficient and less expensive version of Catholicism—but there's also the fascination associated with the sacred, even when it's someone else's.
So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs such as can be seen at Josen-kai on the island of Hokkaido? At first one smiles at this place which combines a museum, a chapel, and a sex shop. As always in Japan, one admires the fact that the walls between the realms are so thin that one can in the same breath contemplate a statue, buy an inflatable doll, and give the goddess of fertility the small offering that always accompanies her displays. Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems of the television incomprehensible, if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible only on condition of being severed from a body.
One would like to believe in a world before the fall: inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation. Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain, the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture, share in the same cosmic innocence.
The second part of the museum—with its couples of stuffed animals—would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it. Not so sure... animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship, but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation. And even without original sin this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost. In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society, the rift that separates men from women. In life it seems to show itself in two ways only: violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy—resembling Sei Shonagon's—which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word. So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts—against which the fathers of the church invade—becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things, to a melancholy whose color I can give you by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi: “Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied.”
He wrote me that the Japanese secret—what Lévi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things—implied the faculty of communion with things, of entering into them, of being them for a moment. It was normal that in their turn they should be like us: perishable and immortal.
He wrote me: animism is a familiar notion in Africa, it is less often applied in Japan. What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart? When they build a factory or a skyscraper, they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land. There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses, and even for rusty needles. There's one on the 25th of September for the repose of the soul of broken dolls. The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon—the goddess of compassion—and are burned in public.
I look to the participants. I think the people who saw off the kamikaze pilots had the same look on their faces.
He wrote me that the pictures of Guinea-Bissau ought to be accompanied by music from the Cape Verde islands. That would be our contribution to the unity dreamed of by Amilcar Cabral.
Why should so small a country—and one so poor—interest the world? They did what they could, they freed themselves, they chased out the Portuguese. They traumatized the Portuguese army to such an extent that it gave rise to a movement that overthrew the dictatorship, and led one for a moment to believe in a new revolution in Europe.
Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.
This morning I was on the dock at Pidjiguity, where everything began in 1959, when the first victims of the struggle were killed. It may be as difficult to recognize Africa in this leaden fog as it is to recognize struggle in the rather dull activity of tropical longshoremen.
Rumor has it that every third world leader coined the same phrase the morning after independence: “Now the real problems start.”
Cabral never got a chance to say it: he was assassinated first. But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on. Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism: to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion, temptations of power and privilege.
Ah well... after all, history only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated.
My personal problem is more specific: how to film the ladies of Bissau? Apparently, the magical function of the eye was working against me there. It was in the marketplaces of Bissau and Cape Verde that I could stare at them again with equality: I see her, she saw me, she knows that I see her, she drops me her glance, but just at an angle where it is still possible to act as though it was not addressed to me, and at the end the real glance, straightforward, that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second, the length of a film frame.
All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men's task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible. African men are just as good at this task as others. But after a close look at African women I wouldn't necessarily bet on the men.
He told me the story of the dog Hachiko. A dog waited every day for his master at the station. The master died, and the dog didn't know it, and he continued to wait all his life. People were moved and brought him food. After his death a statue was erected in his honor, in front of which sushi and rice cakes are still placed so that the faithful soul of Hachiko will never go hungry.
Tokyo is full of these tiny legends, and of mediating animals. The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard on the frontiers of what was once the empire of Mr. Okada—a great collector of French paintings, the man who hired the Château of Versailles to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his department stores.
In the computer section I've seen young Japanese exercising their brain muscles like the young Athenians at the Palaistra. They have a war to win. The history books of the future will perhaps place the battle of integrated circuits at the same level as Salamis and Agincourt, but willing to honor the unfortunate adversary by leaving other fields to him: men's fashions this season are placed under the sign of John Kennedy.
Like an old votive turtle stationed in the corner of a field, every day he saw Mr. Akao—the president of the Japanese Patriotic Party—trumpeting from the heights of his rolling balcony against the international communist plot. He wrote me: the automobiles of the extreme right with their flags and megaphones are part of Tokyo's landscape—Mr. Akao is their focal point. I think he'll have his statue like the dog Hachiko, at this crossroads from which he departs only to go and prophesy on the battlefields. He was at Narita in the sixties. Peasants fighting against the building of an airport on their land, and Mr. Akao denouncing the hand of Moscow behind everything that moved.
Yurakucho is the political space of Tokyo. Once upon a time I saw bonzes pray for peace in Vietnam there. Today young right-wing activists protest against the annexation of the Northern Islands by the Russians. Sometimes they are answered that the commercial relations of Japan with the abominable occupier of the North are a thousand times better than with the American ally who is always whining about economic aggression. Ah, nothing is simple.
On the other sidewalk the Left has the floor. The Korean Catholic opposition leader Kim Dae Jung—kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean gestapo—is threatened with the death sentence. A group has begun a hunger strike. Some very young militants are trying to gather signatures in his support.
I went back to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the struggle. The demo was unreal. I had the impression of acting in Brigadoon, of waking up ten years later in the midst of the same players, with the same blue lobsters of police, the same helmeted adolescents, the same banners and the same slogan: “Down with the airport.” Only one thing has been added: the airport precisely. But with its single runway and the barbed wire that chokes it, it looks more besieged than victorious.
My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution: if the images of the present don't change, then change the images of the past.
He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.
What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties. If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it. It was a generation that often exasperated me, for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth. But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.
I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the struggle. Concretely it had failed. At the same time, all they had won in their understanding of the world could have been won only through the struggle.
As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains in the name of revolutionary purity, while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives. Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists, including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom. But it carried with it all those who said, like Ché Guevara, that they “trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world.” They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity, and their generosity has outlasted their politics. That's why I will never allow it to be said that youth is wasted on the young.
The youth who get together every weekend at Shinjuku obviously know that they are not on a launching pad toward real life; but they are life, to be eaten on the spot like fresh doughnuts.
It's a very simple secret. The old try to hide it, and not all the young know it. The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend from the thirteenth floor of a building after having tied her hands, because she'd spoken badly of their class team, hadn't discovered it yet. Parents who demand an increase in the number of special telephone lines devoted to the prevention of children's suicides find out a little late that they have kept it all too well. Rock is an international language for spreading the secret. Another is peculiar to Tokyo.
For the takenoko, twenty is the age of retirement. They are baby Martians. I go to see them dance every Sunday in the park at Yoyogi. They want people to look at them, but they don't seem to notice that people do. They live in a parallel time sphere: a kind of invisible aquarium wall separates them from the crowd they attract, and I can spend a whole afternoon contemplating the little takenoko girl who is learning—no doubt for the first time—the customs of her planet.
Beyond that, they wear dog tags, they obey a whistle, the Mafia rackets them, and with the exception of a single group made up of girls, it's always a boy who commands.
One day he writes to me: description of a dream. More and more my dreams find their settings in the department stores of Tokyo, the subterranean tunnels that extend them and run parallel to the city. A face appears, disappears... a trace is found, is lost. All the folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day when I am awake I realize that I continue to seek in the basement labyrinth the presence concealed the night before. I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine, or if they are part of a totality, of a gigantic collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection. It might suffice to pick up any one of the telephones that are lying around to hear a familiar voice, or the beating of a heart, Sei Shonagon's for example.
All the galleries lead to stations; the same companies own the stores and the railroads that bear their name. Keio, Odakyu—all those names of ports. The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams, makes a single film of them—the ultimate film. The tickets from the automatic dispenser grant admission to the show.
He told me about the January light on the station stairways. He told me that this city ought to be deciphered like a musical score; one could get lost in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of details. And that created the cheapest image of Tokyo: overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman. He thought he saw more subtle cycles there: rhythms, clusters of faces caught sight of in passing—as different and precise as groups of instruments. Sometimes the musical comparison coincided with plain reality; the Sony stairway in the Ginza was itself an instrument, each step a note. All of it fit together like the voices of a somewhat complicated fugue, but it was enough to take hold of one of them and hang on to it.
The television screens for example; all by themselves they created an itinerary that sometimes wound up in unexpected curves. It was sumo season, and the fans who came to watch the fights in the very chic showrooms on the Ginza were the poorest of the Tokyo poors. So poor that they didn't even have a TV set. He saw them come, the dead souls of Namida-bashi he had drunk saké with one sunny dawn—how many seasons ago was that now?
He wrote me: even in the stalls where they sell electronic spare parts—that some hipsters use for jewelry—there is in the score that is Tokyo a particular staff, whose rarity in Europe condemns me to a real acoustic exile. I mean the music of video games. They are fitted into tables. You can drink, you can lunch, and go on playing. They open onto the street. By listening to them you can play from memory.
I saw these games born in Japan. I later met up with them again all over the world, but one detail was different. At the beginning the game was familiar: a kind of anti-ecological beating where the idea was to kill off—as soon as they showed the white of their eyes—creatures that were either prairie dogs or baby seals, I can't be sure which. Now here's the Japanese variation. Instead of the critters, there's some vaguely human heads identified by a label: at the top the chairman of the board, in front of him the vice president and the directors, in the front row the section heads and the personnel manager. The guy I filmed—who was smashing up the hierarchy with an enviable energy—confided in me that for him the game was not at all allegorical, that he was thinking very precisely of his superiors. No doubt that's why the puppet representing the personnel manager has been clubbed so often and so hard that it's out of commission, and why it had to be replaced again by a baby seal.
Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine. To please me he puts in my best beloved animals: the cat and the owl. He claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory, and imagination. Mizoguchi's Arsène Lupin for example, or the no less imaginary burakumin. How one claim to show a category of Japanese who do not exist? Yes they're there; I saw them in Osaka hiring themselves out by the day, sleeping on the ground. Ever since the middle ages they've been doomed to grubby and back-breaking jobs. But since the Meiji era, officially nothing sets them apart, and their real name—eta—is a taboo word, not to be pronounced. They are non-persons. How can they be shown, except as non-images?
Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence. For the moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time is contained in the Pac-Man. I didn't know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him that he was going to conquer the world. Perhaps because he is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment. And he tells us soberly that though there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks, it always comes a cropper.
He was pleased that the same chrysanthemums appeared in funerals for men and for animals. He described to me the ceremony held at the zoo in Ueno in memory of animals that had died during the year. For two years in a row this day of mourning has had a pall cast over it by the death of a panda, more irreparable—according to the newspapers—than the death of the prime minister that took place at the same time. Last year people really cried. Now they seem to be getting used to it, accepting that each year death takes a panda as dragons do young girls in fairy tales.
I've heard this sentence: “The partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner.” What I have read most often in the eyes of people about to die is surprise. What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity, as if they were trying—in order to understand the death of an animal—to stare through the partition.
I have returned from a country where death is not a partition to cross through but a road to follow. The great ancestor of the Bijagós archipelago has described for us the itinerary of the dead and how they move from island to island according to a rigorous protocol until they come to the last beach where they wait for the ship that will take them to the other world. If by accident one should meet them, it is above all imperative not to recognize them.
The Bijagós is a part of Guinea Bissau. In an old film clip Amilcar Cabral waves a gesture of good-bye to the shore; he's right, he'll never see it again. Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later on the canoe that was bringing us back.
Guinea has by that time become a nation and Luis is its president. All those who remember the war remember him. He's the half-brother of Amilcar, born as he was of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdean blood, and like him a founding member of an unusual party, the PAIGC, which by uniting the two colonized countries in a single movement of struggle wishes to be the forerunner of a federation of the two states.
I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters, who had fought in conditions so inhuman that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers for having to bear what they themselves suffered. That I heard. And many more things that make one ashamed for having used lightly—even if inadvertently—the word guerrilla to describe a certain breed of film-making. A word that at the time was linked to many theoretical debates and also to bloody defeats on the ground.
Amilcar Cabral was the only one to lead a victorious guerrilla war, and not only in terms of military conquests. He knew his people, he had studied them for a long time, and he wanted every liberated region to be also the precursor of a different kind of society.
The socialist countries send weapons to arm the fighters. The social democracies fill the People's Stores. May the extreme left forgive history but if the guerrillas are like fish in water it's a bit thanks to Sweden.
Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguities—he knew the traps. He wrote: “It's as though we were at the edge of a great river full of waves and storms, with people who are trying to cross it and drown, but they have no other way out, they must get to the other side.”
And now, the scene moves to Cassaque: the seventeenth of February, 1980. But to understand it properly one must move forward in time. In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison, and the weeping man he has just decorated, major Nino, will have taken power. The party will have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy. We will learn that behind this ceremony of promotions which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the brotherhood of the struggle, there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness, and that Nino's tears did not express an ex-warrior's emotion, but the wounded pride of a hero who felt he had not been raised high enough above the others.
And beneath each of these faces a memory. And in place of what we were told had been forged into a collective memory, a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration in the great wound of history.
In Portugal—raised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau—Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life against the dictatorship wrote: “Every protagonist represents only himself; in place of a change in the social setting he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation of his own image.”
That's the way the breakers recede. And so predictably that one has to believe in a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes through mercy or calculation to those whom it recruits: Amilcar murdered by members of his own party, the liberated areas fallen under the yoke of bloody petty tyrants liquidated in their turn by a central power to whose stability everyone paid homage until the military coup.
That's how history advances, plugging its memory as one plugs one's ears. Luis exiled to Cuba, Nino discovering in his turn plots woven against him, can be cited reciprocally to appear before the bar of history. She doesn't care, she understands nothing, she has only one friend, the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse: horror. That has a name and a face.
I'm writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility.
Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector. Madness protects, as fever does.
I envy Hayao in his 'zone,' he plays with the signs of his memory. He pins them down and decorates them like insects that would have flown beyond time, and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time: the only eternity we have left. I look at his machines. I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.
He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye.
In San Francisco he had made his pilgrimage to all the film's locations: the florist Podesta Baldocchi, where James Stewart spies on Kim Novak—he the hunter, she the prey. Or was it the other way around? The tiles hadn't changed.
He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline. It seems to be a question of trailing, of enigma, of murder, but in truth it's a question of power and freedom, of melancholy and dazzlement, so carefully coded within the spiral that you could miss it, and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space in reality stands for the vertigo of time.
He had followed all the trails. Even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead, whom she should not have known. He followed Madeline—as Scotty had done—to the Museum at the Legion of Honor, before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known. And on the portrait, as in Madeline's hair, the spiral of time.
The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared had disappeared itself; concrete had replaced it, at the corner of Eddy and Gough. On the other hand the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods. On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines that measured the age of the tree and said, “Here I was born... and here I died.”
He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted. The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree, outside of time.
The painted horse at San Juan Bautista, his eye that looked like Madeline's: Hitchcock had invented nothing, it was all there. He had run under the arches of the promenade in the mission as Madeline had run towards her death. Or was it hers?
From this fake tower—the only thing that Hitchcock had added—he imagined Scotty as time's fool of love, finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it. Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time, a zone that would belong only to him and from which he could decipher the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay, when he had saved her from death before casting her back to death. Or was it the other way around?
In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film I had seen nineteen times. In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film. That summer I had met three children on a road and a volcano had come out of the sea. The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon, in this corner of Earth that resembles it. I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction: the landscape of another planet. Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away. I imagine him moving slowly, heavily, about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles. All of a sudden he stumbles, and the next step it's a year later. He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border along a sea bird sanctuary.
That's for a start. Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories? That's just it, he can't understand. He hasn't come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.
Naturally he'll fail. The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children of a rich one. He has chosen to give up his privileges, but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose. His only recourse is precisely that which threw him into this absurd quest: a song cycle by Mussorgsky. They are still sung in the fortieth century. Their meaning has been lost. But it was then that for the first time he perceived the presence of that thing he didn't understand which had something to do with unhappiness and memory, and towards which slowly, heavily, he began to walk.
Of course I'll never make that film. Nonetheless I'm collecting the sets, inventing the twists, putting in my favorite creatures. I've even given it a title, indeed the title of those Mussorgsky songs: Sunless.
On May 15, 1945, at seven o'clock in the morning, the three hundred and eighty second US infantry regiment attacked a hill in Okinawa they had renamed 'Dick Hill.' I suppose the Americans themselves believed that they were conquering Japanese soil, and that they knew nothing about the Ryukyu civilization. Neither did I, apart from the fact that the faces of the market ladies at Itoman spoke to me more of Gauguin than of Utamaro. For centuries of dreamy vassalage time had not moved in the archipelago. Then came the break. Is it a property of islands to make their women into the guardians of their memory?
I learned that—as in the Bijagós—it is through the women that magic knowledge is transmitted. Each community has its priestess—the noro—who presides over all ceremonies with the exception of funerals.
The Japanese defended their position inch by inch. At the end of the day the two half platoons formed from the remnants of L Company had got only halfway up the hill, a hill like the one where I followed a group of villagers on their way to the purification ceremony.
The noro communicates with the gods of the sea, of rain, of the earth, of fire. Everyone bows down before the sister deity who is the reflection, in the absolute, of a privileged relationship between brother and sister. Even after her death, the sister retains her spiritual predominance.
At dawn the Americans withdrew. Fighting went on for over a month before the island surrendered, and toppled into the modern world. Twenty-seven years of American occupation, the re-establishment of a controversial Japanese sovereignty: two miles from the bowling alleys and the gas stations the noro continues her dialogue with the gods. When she is gone the dialogue will end. Brothers will no longer know that their dead sister is watching over them. When filming this ceremony I knew I was present at the end of something. Magical cultures that disappear leave traces to those who succeed them. This one will leave none; the break in history has been too violent.
I touched that break at the summit of the hill, as I had touched it at the edge of the ditch where two hundred girls had used grenades to commit suicide in 1945 rather than fall alive into the hands of the Americans. People have their pictures taken in front of the ditch. Across from it souvenir lighters are sold shaped like grenades.
On Hayao's machine war resembles letters being burned, shredded in a frame of fire. The code name for Pearl Harbor was Tora, Tora, Tora, the name of the cat the couple in Gotokuji was praying for. So all of this will have begun with the name of a cat pronounced three times.
Off Okinawa kamikaze dived on the American fleet; they would become a legend. They were likelier material for it obviously than the special units who exposed their prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria and then to hot water so as to see how fast flesh separates from the bone.
One would have to read their last letters to learn that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers, nor were they all swashbuckling samurai. Before drinking his last cup of saké Ryoji Uebara had written: “I have always thought that Japan must live free in order to live eternally. It may seem idiotic to say that today, under a totalitarian regime. We kamikaze pilots are machines, we have nothing to say, except to beg our compatriots to make Japan the great country of our dreams. In the plane I am a machine, a bit of magnetized metal that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier. But once on the ground I am a human being with feelings and passions. Please excuse these disorganized thoughts. I'm leaving you a rather melancholy picture, but in the depths of my heart I am happy. I have spoken frankly, forgive me.”
Every time he came from Africa he stopped at the island of Sal, which is in fact a salt rock in the middle of the Atlantic. At the end of the island, beyond the village of Santa Maria and its cemetery with the painted tombs, it suffices to walk straight ahead to meet the desert.
He wrote me: I've understood the visions. Suddenly you're in the desert the way you are in the night; whatever is not desert no longer exists. You don't want to believe the images that crop up.
Did I write you that there are emus in the Ile de France? This name—Island of France—sounds strangely on the island of Sal. My memory superimposes two towers: the one at the ruined castle of Montpilloy that served as an encampment for Joan of Arc, and the lighthouse tower at the southern tip of Sal, probably one of the last lighthouses to use oil.
A lighthouse in the Sahel looks like a collage until you see the ocean at the edge of the sand and salt. Crews of transcontinental planes are rotated on Sal. Their club brings to this frontier of nothingness a small touch of the seaside resort which makes the rest still more unreal. They feed the stray dogs that live on the beach.
I found my dogs pretty nervous tonight; they were playing with the sea as I had never seen them before. Listening to Radio Hong Kong later on I understood: today was the first day of the lunar new year, and for the first time in sixty years the sign of the dog met the sign of water.
Out there, eleven thousand miles away, a single shadow remains immobile in the midst of the long moving shadows that the January light throws over the ground of Tokyo: the shadow of the Asakusa bonze.
For also in Japan the year of the dog is beginning. Temples are filled with visitors who come to toss down their coins and to pray—Japanese style—a prayer which slips into life without interrupting it.
Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal in the company of my prancing dogs I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.
As we await the year four thousand and one and its total recall, that's what the oracles we take out of their long hexagonal boxes at new year may offer us: a little more power over that memory that runs from camp to camp—like Joan of Arc. That a short wave announcement from Hong Kong radio picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo, and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces back on another country, another distance, another music, endlessly.
At the end of memory's path, the ideograms of the Island of France are no less enigmatic than the kanji of Tokyo in the miraculous light of the new year. It's Indian winter, as if the air were the first element to emerge purified from the countless ceremonies by which the Japanese wash off one year to enter the next one. A full month is just enough for them to fulfill all the duties that courtesy owes to time, the most interesting unquestionably being the acquisition at the temple of Tenjin of the uso bird, who according to one tradition eats all your lies of the year to come, and according to another turns them into truths.
But what gives the street its color in January, what makes it suddenly different is the appearance of kimono. In the street, in stores, in offices, even at the stock exchange on opening day, the girls take out their fur collared winter kimono. At that moment of the year other Japanese may well invent extra flat TV sets, commit suicide with a chain saw, or capture two thirds of the world market for semiconductors. Good for them; all you see are the girls.
The fifteenth of January is coming of age day: an obligatory celebration in the life of a young Japanese woman. The city governments distribute small bags filled with gifts, datebooks, advice: how to be a good citizen, a good mother, a good wife. On that day every twenty-year-old girl can phone her family for free, no matter where in Japan. Flag, home, and country: this is the anteroom of adulthood. The world of the takenoko and of rock singers speeds away like a rocket. Speakers explain what society expects of them. How long will it take to forget the secret?
And when all the celebrations are over it remains only to pick up all the ornaments—all the accessories of the celebration—and by burning them, make a celebration.
This is dondo-yaki, a Shinto blessing of the debris that have a right to immortality—like the dolls at Ueno. The last state—before their disappearance—of the poignancy of things. Daruma—the one eyed spirit—reigns supreme at the summit of the bonfire. Abandonment must be a feast; laceration must be a feast. And the farewell to all that one has lost, broken, used, must be ennobled by a ceremony. It's Japan that could fulfill the wish of that French writer who wanted divorce to be made a sacrament.
The only baffling part of this ritual was the circle of children striking the ground with their long poles. I only got one explanation, a singular one—although for me it might take the form of a small intimate service—it was to chase away the moles.
And that's where my three children of Iceland came and grafted themselves in. I picked up the whole shot again, adding the somewhat hazy end, the frame trembling under the force of the wind beating us down on the cliff: everything I had cut in order to tidy up, and that said better than all the rest what I saw in that moment, why I held it at arms length, at zooms length, until its last twenty-fourth of a second, the city of Heimaey spread out below us. And when five years later my friend Haroun Tazieff sent me the film he had just shot in the same place I lacked only the name to learn that nature performs its own dondo-yaki; the island's volcano had awakened. I looked at those pictures, and it was as if the entire year '65 had just been covered with ashes.
So, it sufficed to wait and the planet itself staged the working of time. I saw what had been my window again. I saw emerge familiar roofs and balconies, the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day, down to the cliff where I had met the children. The cat with white socks that Haroun had been considerate enough to film for me naturally found its place. And I thought, of all the prayers to time that had studded this trip the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of Gotokuji, who said simply to her cat Tora, “Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you.”
And then in its turn the journey entered the 'zone,' and Hayao showed me my images already affected by the moss of time, freed of the lie that had prolonged the existence of those moments swallowed by the spiral.
When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his cry half a tone, I took the green train of the Yamanote line and got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office. Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light—Japanese style—so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars. Even if I was expecting no letter I stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters, and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters.
I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid. I walked alongside the little stalls of clothing dealers. I heard in the distance Mr. Akao's voice reverberating from the loudspeakers... a half tone higher.
Then I went down into the basement where my friend—the maniac—busies himself with his electronic graffiti. Finally his language touches me, because he talks to that part of us which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls. A piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not, or is no longer, or is not yet; the handwriting each one of us will use to compose his own list of 'things that quicken the heart,' to offer, or to erase. In that moment poetry will be made by everyone, and there will be emus in the 'zone.'
He writes me from Japan. He writes me from Africa. He writes that he can now summon up the look on the face of the market lady of Praia that had lasted only the length of a film frame.
Will there be a last letter?