Sans Soleil

«‘The remoteness of places somehow makes up for the excessive proximity of times’.

Racine, second preface to Bajazet

Overture

The first image he told me about was that of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965. He told me that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried many times to associate it with other images, but that it had never worked. He wrote to me: ‘...I will have to put it alone one day at the beginning of a film, with a long black tail. If happiness was not seen in the image, at least the blackness will be seen'.

Act One

He wrote to me: ‘I am returning from Hokkaido, the northern island. The rich Japanese who are in a hurry take the plane, the others take the ferry. The waiting, the stillness, the continually interrupted sleep, all of it strangely reminds me of a past or future war: trains in the night, ceased alarms, atomic shelters... Little fragments of war embedded in everyday life'. He loved the fragility of those suspended moments, those memories that had served no purpose other than to leave, precisely, memories.

He wrote: ‘After a few rounds of the world, only banality still interests me. I chased it all the way with the doggedness of a prize-seeker. By dawn, we will be in Tokyo'.

He wrote to me from Africa. He juxtaposed African time with European time, but also with Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that what was at stake in the 20th century was the cohabitation of the times.

‘By the way, did you know that there are emus in the lle-de-France?’

He wrote me that in the Bijagos Islands it is the girls who choose their boyfriends. He wrote me that on the outskirts of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. ‘I wish I could tell you the simplicity, the absence of affectation of that couple who had come to lay a wooden tablet covered with characters in the cat cemetery. So their cat Tora would be protected. No, she was not dead, she had only escaped, but on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede for Death to call her by her true name. So it was necessary for them both to come there, in the rain, to perform the rite that would repair, at the breaking point, the fabric of time.

He wrote me: ‘I will have spent my whole life wondering about the function of memory, which is not the opposite, rather the other side of oblivion. One does not remember, one rewrites memory as one rewrites history. How to remember thirst?’

He did not like to dwell on misery, but among all that he wanted to show about Japan, there were also those excluded from the Model: ‘A whole world of tramps, of underclassmen, of no-caste, of Koreans. Too poor for drugs, they get drunk on beer, on fermented milk. This morning, in Namidabashi, twenty minutes from the splendours of downtown, a guy was taking revenge on society by directing traffic at an intersection. Luxury, for them, would be one of those big bottles of sakė that are poured over graves on the day of the dead.

I offered a round in Namidabashi's bar: that kind of place allows equality of gaze. The threshold below which every man is as good as another, and knows it'.

He told me about the embarkation pier on the island of Fogo in Cape Verde. ‘How long have they been there, waiting for the ship? Patient as stones, but ready to rush. They are a people of wanderers, of navigators, of globetrotters. They created themselves by dint of crossing over those cliffs that served the Portuguese as a port of marshalling between their colonies. People of nothingness, people of emptiness, vertical people. Let's face it, has anything more stupid ever been invented than telling people, as they are taught in film schools, not to look in the camera?’

He wrote: ‘The Sahel is not only what is shown of it when it is too late. It is a land where drought seeps in like water into a boat making water. The beasts resurrected for the time of a carnival in Bissau will be found petrified as soon as a new onslaught has turned a savannah into a desert. It is the state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten, with one exception – you guessed it, Japan... My incessant coming and going is not a search for contrasts, it is a journey to the two extreme poles of survival'. [...]

‘The most indecipherable images are those of Europe. I see the images of a film whose soundtrack will come later: for Poland it took me six months. No difficulties with local earthquakes – but it must be said that last night's had helped me a lot to circumscribe the problem. Poetry is born of insecurity: wandering Jews, trembling Japanese. Living on a rug that a prankish nature is always ready to pull out from under their feet, they have made a habit of evolving in a world of fragile, fleeting, revocable appearances, of trains flying from planet to planet, of samurai battling in an immutable past: it is what is called the impermanence of things’. [...]

‘Who said that time comes to the head of all wounds? It would be better to say that time comes to the head of everything except wounds. In time, the wound of separation loses its real edge. In time, the desired body will soon no longer be there, and if the desiring body has already ceased to be there for the other, what remains is a wound without a body'.

He wrote me that the Japanese secret, that suffering of things to which Lévi-Strauss had given a name, presupposed the capacity to be in communion with things, to enter into them, to be them in moments. It was normal for them to be like us – perishing and immortal. [...]

He wrote me that we should put Cape Verdean music on the pictures of Guinea Bissau. It would be our contribution to the unity dreamt of by Amilcar Cabral.

‘Why should such a small and poor country be of interest to the rest of the world? They did everything they could. They liberated themselves, they drove out the Portuguese, they traumatised the Portuguese army to the point of giving birth within it to the movement that brought down the dictatorship and made people believe for a moment in a new revolution in Europe... Who remembers all this? History throws its empty bottles out the window. [...]

My personal problem was more circumscribed: how to film the women of Bissau? Apparently the magical function of the eye played against me in this case. It was in the markets of Bissau and Cape Verde that I found the equality of the gaze and that series of figures so close to the ritual of seduction: I see her – she has seen me – she knows I see her – she offers me her gaze, but at the very angle at which it is still possible to do so as if it were not directed at me – and finally the real, direct gaze, which lasted 1/25th of a second, the time of an image.

All women hold a small root of indestructibility, and it has always been the job of men to make sure they realise this as late as possible. African men are as gifted as others for this exercise, but on closer inspection of African women, I would not necessarily consider them as winners’. [...]

‘My friend Hayao Yamaneko found a solution: if the images of the present don't change, change the images of the past.... He showed me the scuffles of the 1960s treated with the tuner. Less deceptive images, he says with fanatical conviction, than those you see on television. At least they offer themselves for what they are, images, and not the transportable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls the world of his machine: the Zone – in homage to Tarkovsky.

What Narita gave me back an intact fragment of, like a shattered hologram, was the image of the 1960s generation. If to love is to love without illusions, I can say that I loved it. She often exasperated me, I did not share her utopia, which was to unite in the same struggle those who revolt against misery and those who revolt against wealth, but she uttered the primordial scream that better-placed voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared, to scream. [...]

‘Of course, I will never make this film. Yet I collect the scenarios, I invent the routes, I place my favourite creatures in it, and I even give it a title, that of Moussorgsky's melodies, Sans soleil. On 15 May 1945, at 7 a.m., the American 382nd Infantry Regiment stormed a hill in Okinawa renamed Dick Hill. I suppose the Americans themselves believed they were conquering Japanese land and knew nothing about the Ryukyu civilisation. I knew nothing about it either, except that the faces of the women in the Itoman marketplace spoke more to me of Gauguin than Utamaro. During centuries of dreamy vassalage, Time had not moved in the archipelago, then came the break. Is it a property of the islands to make women the repositories of their memory? I came to know that, as in the Bijagos, it is through women that magical knowledge is transmitted: each community has its priestess, the Noro, who presides over all rites except funerals. The Japanese defended their positions palm to palm, by the end of the day the two reformed subsections of L Company had only advanced halfway up the hill. A hill similar to 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 earth, of fire, she speaks of them as members of her family who have had some success. All bow before the Goddess-Sister who is the reflection, in the absolute, of a privileged relationship between brother and sister. Even after death the sister has spiritual predominance. At dawn the Americans stopped, it still took more than a month of fighting for the island to surrender - and fall into the modern world. Twenty-seven years of American occupation, the re-establishment of a contested Japanese sovereignty and, two kilometres from the bowling alleys and petrol stations, Noro continues to dialogue with the gods. After her, the dialogue will cease. The brothers will no longer know that their dead sister is watching over them.

By filming this ceremony I knew I was witnessing the end of something. Magical cultures that disappear leave traces in those that succeed them, this one will leave none. The fracture of history was too violent. I touched this fracture on the top of the hill, as I had touched it on the edge of the pit where two hundred girls had committed suicide with a bomb, in 1945, so as not to fall alive into the hands of the Americans. People have their pictures taken in front of the pit. Souvenir lighters in the shape of bombs are sold in front of it'. [...]

Act Four

Every time he returned from Africa, he stopped off at the island of Sal, which is really a salt rock in the middle of the Atlantic. At the far end of the island, past the village of Santa Maria and its cemetery with painted tombs, one only has to continue in the same direction to encounter the desert.

He wrote me: ‘I understood the visions. Suddenly one is in the desert as in the night. Everything that is not there no longer exists. To the images that are proposed one does not want to believe. [...]

Lost at the end of the world, on my island of Sal, in the company of my proud dogs, I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I shot in January in Tokyo. Now they have replaced my memory, they are my memory. I wonder how those who don't film, don't photograph, don't videotape, how mankind can remember... I know, he wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be the eternal magnetic tape of a Time that will have to be incessantly re-read just to know that it existed'. [...]

‘And then, when all the feasts are over, all that remains is to collect all the ornaments, all the accessories of the feast and, by burning them, make a feast of them. This is the Dondo-yaki. A Shinto blessing on these remains that are entitled to immortality like the dolls of Ueno. The last stage, before their disappearance, of the suffering of things. The one-eyed spirit presides for the last time at the top of the stake. It is necessary that abandonment be a feast, that laceration be a feast, that the farewell to all that is lost, broken, worn out, be ennobled by a ceremony. It is in Japan that de Montherlant's wish could be fulfilled, that divorce be a sacrament.’ [...]

‘The town of Heimaey stretched out below us and when, five years later, Haroun Tazieff sent me what he had just shot in the same place, all I needed was the name to realise that nature makes its Dondo-yaki. The island's volcano had woken up. I looked at those images and it was as if the entire year 1965 had just been covered in ash.

It only had to wait and the planet was doing the work of Time itself. I saw again what had been my window, I saw familiar rooftops and balconies emerge, the landmarks of the walks I took every day through the city and up to the cliff where I had met the children. The cat in the white socks that Garouk had had the delicacy to film for me naturally found its place, and I thought that of all the prayers to Time that had marked this journey, the most fitting was that of the lady in Go To Ku Ji who said simply to the cat Tora: ‘Beloved cat, wherever you are, may your soul know peace’.

And then the journey entered the Zone in turn. Hayao showed me my images already affected by the lichen of Time, freed from the lie that had prolonged the existence of those moments swallowed up by the Spiral’. [...]

‘Even though I wasn't expecting any letters, I would stop in front of the poste restante, because one must honour the spirits of torn letters, and in front of the airmail counter, to greet the spirits of unmailed letters. I measured the unbearable vanity of the West that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, the said over the unsaid. I would walk along the small shops of the garment merchants, hear Akao's voice in the distance, broadcast over the loudspeakers, which had risen a semitone. Finally I descended into the cellar where my maniacal companion is busy with his electronic graffiti. After all, his language touches me because it addresses that part of us that persists in drawing outlines on prison walls. A chalk to follow the contours of what is not, or is no longer, or not yet.

A piece of writing that everyone will use to compose their own list of things that make the heart beat, to offer it or to erase it. At that moment, poetry will be made by everyone, and there will be emus in the Zone'.

He writes to me from Japan, he writes to me from Africa. He writes me that he can now fix the gaze of the woman in the Praia market, which lasted only the time of a picture. 

Will there one day be a last letter?'». (From the screenplay of the film, in Chris Marker, ed. by Bernard Eisenschitz, Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema – Pesaro 1996, Dino Audino Editore, Roma 1996, pp. 54-71)

Travel Notes [Cinemambiente 1998]

Gute Reisende sind herzlos

Good travelers are heartless

Elias Canetti

From the travelogues of Hale's Tours to reportages on great exploits and exotic lands, from the road movie to the thousands of invented and untold stories of conquered spaces and lost or rediscovered identities, the theme of travel has accompanied the entire history of cinema, in all its genres and areas of production, the very metaphor of the new medium capable of restoring the movement of the world.

The brief itinerary proposed here allows us to observe some areas of the prolific relationship between the camera and the environment constituted by the travel film. These are works and materials that concern different dimensions of travel – some probably permanently disappeared – in which constant, however, is the exercise of looking at a reality, a place, a culture, an “elsewhere” reached through physical movement. Colonial conquest, exploration, scientific discovery, family vacation, as well as ritual and soul-searching, are the main passages of this reconnaissance, which reveals first and foremost the importance of the possibility of creating images, which document but also represent a determining factor shaping travel itself.

The components of violence and cultural imposition of Western voyages of conquest in the first decades of the century are, for example, shown in the work of recovery and reworking of original materials carried out by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, who with the power of images alone manage to construct a lucid discourse on the role of the camera as an expression of a will to appropriation and domination. It is the same colonialist gaze analyzed by Peter Kubelka in his African journey in the 1960s, following a group of whites engaged in a safari.

The reliance on cinema as a possibility to record the real, to bear witness to natural events and human endeavors appears evident in the works of volcanologist Haroun Tazieff, who filmed apocalyptic scenarios and spectacular eruptions, or in the conspicuous documentation left by Alberto Maria De Agostini during his wanderings in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, or again in the images of early mountaineering expeditions to the great peaks, not without political implications in some cases, such as the document on the ascent of Nanga Parbat in 1938, which becomes an example of Nazi propaganda. The exploration of the environment as a human challenge, a ground for confrontation with the force and sometimes the hostility of nature, is still visible in the first filmed documentations of Antarctic expeditions, in which the narrative and spectacular vocation of cinema peeps out even where one would presume total adherence to realistic subject matter.

What becomes immediately clear in this chapter of the history of travel is that there is no truly achieved goal and conquered space, if not properly documented, no expedition and enterprise that can renounce being filmed and thus make its own contribution to the construction of an imaginary made of heroes and great adventures, of immense spaces real and unknown. Immersed in the silence of their innocence, and in the seduction of their genesis – possible in many cases despite difficult environmental conditions and thanks to daring actions – such images enchant today as they did then. The crossing of a last sailing ship filmed by Henrich Hauser, in which neither places of departure nor points of arrival are shown, becomes the emblem of the experience in itself of movement, a hymn to the deepest sense of travel. Of which the deviations from the desired outcomes, the failures, renunciations, tragedies or simply the impossibility of creating the longed-for image (the summit as well as the return) must also be collected. But the fascination with travel to distant and extreme lands can also become an explicit advertising tool, as happened with the African and Asian cruises organized by Citroën between the 1920s and 1930s, in which human enterprise and produced image turn out to be totally inseparable.

Another type of relationship with the environment is that traceable in home movies shot during family vacations: Gustav Deutsch rereads anonymous materials from the 1950s and 1960s, offering an interesting catalog on the amateur gaze in its attempt to capture places – in this case those deputed to tourism – and preserve memories.

Travel as an encounter with “other” worlds and cultures, rapprochement and self-discovery, is the theme finally of some works in which the dialogue with the environment is constructed on the basis of the awareness that movement is not the prerogative of the person holding the camera. Ulrike Koch's documentation of the migration of nomadic Tibetan herders to the great salt lakes of the Himalayan plateau, a tribute to a sacred dimension of travel; Bill Viola's contemplation of natural landscapes and animal presences, Chris Marker's reflections from the “two extreme poles of survival” – Japan and Africa – or even the crossed gaze proposed in another work by Deutsch (who juxtaposes his images of an Austrian in Morocco with those of a Moroccan in Austria), suggest modes of travel based on dialogue, confrontation, meditation: observing the movement of nature and its inhabitants, with respect and hesitation, leads to a movement of consciousness, a production of thought, an activation of memories. The relationship with a place is no longer established through topographical and cultural appropriation, but through an appreciation of differences, the maintenance of a subjectivity and a historical understanding. Travel as discovery and adventure belongs perhaps only more to mythology and nostalgia, just as the very conditions of image production and consumption turn out to be profoundly transformed with respect to the eras evoked here. The cognitive potentialities of travel, and therefore of the images borrowed from it, are then entrusted, rather than to a movement in space guided by a ravenous gaze in search of the pure and the uncontaminated, to an ability to stand in any different place, to let this otherness speak and be absorbed, also tracing its historical motivations and welcoming the dimension of memory that that place can give off in those who try to approach it.