Sans Soleil (1983)

Alexandra Stewart: Narrator (English version)

Quotes 

• Narrator : 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?

• Narrator : 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.

• Narrator : 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.

• Narrator : 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.

• Narrator : 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.

  Narrator : By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?

• Narrator : Rumour has it that every third-world a 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.

• Narrator : 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.

  Narrator : 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."

• Narrator : 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?

• Narrator : Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.

• Narrator : 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.

• Narrator : 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?"

  Narrator : 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.'

• Narrator : Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty of certain corpses.

• Narrator : 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?

• [first lines] 

  Narrator : The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965. He said that for him that 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."

• Narrator : 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.

• Narrator : My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts, they're a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.

• Narrator : 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.

• Narrator : I did it all. All the way to the evening shows for adults - so-called. The same hypocrisy as in the comic strips; but, its 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.

• Narrator : I see her. She saw me. She knows that I see her. She drops me her glance; but, just at an angle where its still possible to act as though it was not addressed to me. And at the end, the real glance, straight forward, that lasted ainde 24th of a second - the length of a film frame.

• Narrator : If the images of the present don't change, then change the images of the past.

• Narrator : 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.

• Narrator : Poetry is born of insecurity.

• Narrator : The sad fate of the comic strip heroines: victims of heartless storywriters and of castrating censorship.

• Narrator : 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 10 years later in the midst of the same players, with the same blue lobsters of police, with the same helmeted adolescents, the same banners, and the same slogan, "Down with the Airport." Only one thing has been added: the airport, precisely.

• Narrator : What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of a generation of the 60s. 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 new how and no longer dared to utter.

• Narrator : Video games are the first stage in the plan for machines to help the human race. The only plan that offers a future for intelligence.

• Narrator : The youth that get together every weekend at Shinjuku obviously know that they're not on a launching pad toward real life - that they are life, to be eaten on the spot, like fresh donuts. Its a very simple secret. The old try to hide it and not all the young know it.

• Narrator : 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."

• Narrator : I have returned from a country where death is not a partition to cross through; but, a road to follow.

• Narrator : 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. In deed, the title of those Mussorgsky songs: Sunless.

• Narrator : 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.

• Narrator : The new Bible will be an eternal tape of a time that will have reread itself constantly, just to know it existed.

• Narrator : I remember that month of January in Tokyo. Or, rather, I remember the images I filmed in the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves from my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember the things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape? How has mankind managed to remember?

• Narrator : 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.

• Narrator : Do we ever know where history is made? Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another.

• Narrator : 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 to leaving price tags on purchases.

• Narrator : 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 face, you must give it another name and another face.

• Narrator : Even television newscasts bears witness to the fact that the magical function of the eye is at the center of all things.

• Narrator : Absolute beauty also has a name and a face.

• Narrator : The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye, used to Western atrocities in this field. Not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure. One slightly hallucinatory moment, I had the impression that I spoke Japanese.

• Narrator : The more you watch Japanese television, the more you feel it's watching you.

• Narrator : I spent the day in front of my TV set, that memory box.

• Narrator : Today, young right wing activists protest against the annexation of the northern islands by the Russians. Sometimes their answer 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.

  [sigh] 

  Narrator : Nothing is simple.

• Narrator : One has to believe in a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes through mercy or calculation to those who it recruits.

• Narrator : I'm writing you all this from another world. A world of appearances. In a way, the two worlds communicate with each other. Memories to one, what history is to the other: an impossibility. Legends are borne out of the need to decipher the undecipherable. Memories must make due with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.

• Narrator : Is it the property of islands to make their women into the guardians of their memory?

• Narrator : What gives the street its color in January? What makes it suddenly different is the appearance of kimonos. In the street and stores and offices, even at the stock exchange on opening day, the girls take out their fur-collared winter kimonos. At that moment of the year, other Japanese may well invent extra flat TV sets, commit suicide with a chainsaw, or capture two-thirds of the world market in semiconductors. Good for them. All you see are the girls.

• Narrator : In 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.

• [last lines] 

  Narrator : Will there be a last letter?