PROFILE---RESUME ---FILM FANATIX--- RED PILL--- ZORROS
NIC's INTRESTS
Modeling, Texturing and Animating the unknown. Taking the medium to new heights, other world parrallel realities, Art, Film, Music, Quantum Particle Physics and Sleep when my computers are busy rendering my brainwaves down in the Lab!!
MUSIC INFLUENCES
take a deep breath....what is silence ? Silence is his Holy Voice!
Holst, Hendrix, Navajo, Satchmo, AllKindsOfTechno, Doors, Zorros, Alex, Darren, Greg and Daniel, Steppenwolf, Bob Dylan, Beatles, Stones, procul harum, elvis, saints, pistols, 1200 Mics, GMS, Bushman, mantrix, kophus resonator , moomoo, koru, bass nectar, nick taylor, ganga giri, texas faggott, ramones, maximal, stranglers, psyberpunk, fractal glider, space klub osstiroll, slinky, ankhamon, springsteen, ac/dc, Joy Division, loved ones, easybeats, Sacred Spirit, enigma, deep forest, creedence, killing joke, planet rave, yelo, pink floyd, Tsuyoshi Suzuki, Otter B, Alien project, astrix, luna orbit, luke psywalker, xerox & passenger, wrecked machines, yahel, johnny cash, atom, suria, bamboo forest, delerious, ghreg on earth, infected mushroom, goma, space tribe, panick, intelabeam, psycraft, rinkadink, logic bomb, rastaliens , melica, Hank Williams, Maytals, Axiom, Greig - Peer Gynt, miraculix, parasence, cosma, audio tech, bizzare contact, deviant species, timo mass, fatali, eskimo, dynamic, earthling, fantasy land, cyrus, jirah, protoculture, skazi, vikon injection, tikal, sonic surfers, soundaholix, tranan, ultima, yoko ono, buffy saint marie, vibe tribe, sub 6, Bach "OnAir" in G, Beethoven "Moonlight Sonata"and Symphony #5#9, Sha Na Na Na - Hey Hey hey - Goodbye ....Blue Mink,
the music of the pacific ocean after an all night beach doof!
TELEVISION
BEWARE OF WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION..... i watch a 3 inch black and white!
LITERARY INFLUENCES
"Super Nature" read this one in the seventies.
"Mystic Warriors of the Plains" Thomas E Mails
"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" Robert Brown.
"Journey to Ixtlan" Carlos Castaneda.
"The Stranger" /"the PLAUGE" Albert Camus.
"The Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea" Yukio Mishima.
"Clint Eastwood authorised Biography".
"The Ronin."japanese martial arts tale
"Maya 6.5 the Complete Reference"
Enid Blytons "Secret Seven" series
Colditz Escapes
The Wooden Horse
Reach for the Sky
Siddhartha
John M Allegro "The Cross and the Sacred Mushroom"
Alfred Kubin "the Other Side"
John Lennon "A Spaniard in the Works"
Jim Morrison " Poetry" written and spoken
"the Brotherhood of Eternal Love"
"The North american Indian the Complete Portfolios" Edward S Curtis.
"Full Moon' Michael Light. Out of this world photos from the us astronauts.
and of late a thesis on corn Silos versus holy KIvas in Pueblo Bonito, me find it maizing
FILM FANATIX ..deep influences
TOP 60 (not in order)
1. Blueberry (Renegade) (2004)
2. Dead Man (1995)
3. The Matrix (1999)
4. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967)
5. The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King (2003)
6. The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers (2002)
7. The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
8. Spirit - Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)
9. A Bullet for the General (1968)
10. Avalon (2001)
11. Ghost in the Shell (1996)
12. The Trip (1967)
13. Easy Rider (1969)
14. Sayat Nova (Color of Pomegranates) (1968)
15. On Power, Dissent, and Racism: A Discussion with Noam Chomsky
16. Blade Runner (1982)
17. Casablanca (1942 )
18. The Third Man (1949)
19. Kill Bill, Volume 1 (2003)
20. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
21. Platoon (1986)
22. Pulp Fiction (1994)
23. Sin City (2005, R)
24. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
25. The Fifth Element (1997)
26. What Dreams May Come (1998)
27. Eraserhead (1977)
28. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
29. Baraka (1993)
30. Kill Bill, Volume 2 (2004)
31. Altered States (1980)
32. The Emerald Forest (1985)
33. Apocalypse Now (1979)
34. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
35. Taxi Driver (1976)
36. The Animatrix (2003)
37. Sans soleil (Sunless) (1983)
38. Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
39. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2006)
40. This Sporting Life (1963)
41. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957, Unrated)
42. Enemy of the State (1998, R)
43. Double Indemnity (1944, Unrated)
44. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
45. Bliss (1985)
46. Brazil (1985)
47. Rumble Fish (1983)
48. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
49. Resident Evil regeneration (2008)
50. The Fountain (2006)
51. American Beauty (1999)
52. Dances With Wolves (1990)
53. The Lawnmower Man (1992, R)
54. Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within (2001)
55. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
56. The Shiralee(1957)
57.The Butterfly Effect
58.Ghost in the Shell 2, Innocence (2004)
59.Sin City
60.2012 SHAMAN
INDEX
0-9
2012 SHAMAN,
2001: A Space Odyssey directed by Stanley Kubrick
27 LIGHT YEARS .
378 by Emergency Broadcasting Network
A
ACYBER TRIBAL EXODUS,
Apocalypse Now, Director Francis Ford Coppola
Avalon (mamoru Oshi),
Altered States,
A Bullet for the General,
APU trilogy Director Satyajit Ray
American Beauty,
Across the Universe, 2008 Julie Taymor
Aguirre: the Wrath of God (1972)
The Apu Trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959)
A Clockwork Orange directed by Stanley Kubrick
Alien directed by Ridley Scott
Altered States directed by Ken Russell
Apocalypto Director Mel Gibson
B
RENEGADE aka BLUEBERRY,
Brazil (1985)
Bliss (australian), Director Ray Lawrence
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Baraka directed by Ron Fricke
Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott
Butterfly Effect
Blair Witch Project
Brainstorm directed by Douglas Trumbull
Blue Velvet director David Lynch
BackRoads (1977) director phillip Noyce
Blood of a Poet director Jean Cocteau
Bridge Too Far, A (1977)
C
Citizen Kane, Director Orson Welles
Close Encounters of the Third Kind directed by Steven Spielberg
Contact directed by Robert Zemeckis
The Color Of Pomegranates ( Sayat Nova ? ) directed by Sergei Paradzhanov
Crop Circles: The Quest For Truth directed by William Gazecki
City of God (2002)
The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith.
Cyber Palestine (1999)
Condor, El (1970)
The Conversation with gene hackman
D
Dead Man,
The Decline of Western Civilization directed by Penelope Spheeris
Down By Law directed by Jim Jarmusch
Dune directed by David Lynch
The Day the Earth Stood Still "Klaatu, Barada, Nikto"
Day for Night (1973)
The Decalogue (1989)
Dracula(1936)
Detour (1945)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Dr. Strangelove Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
"Danger Man" (1964)
Dark Star
The Drug Store Cowboy
E
Easy Rider,
Emerald Forest,
8+1/2 , directed by Fredrico Fellini 63
Enter The Dragon
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Eagles Wing
Eragon (2006)
Enemy of the State
F
Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, (2001)director Hironobu Sakaguchi
Final Fantasy -Advent Children, DirectorTetsuya nomura
Fifth Element
For A Few Dollars More
The Fly (1986) directed by David Cronenberg
Fantastic Planet directed by Rene Laloux & Roland Topor
Forbidden Planet directed by Fred M. Wilcox
Finding Nemo (2003)
Face Off (1997) director john Woo
Forest Warrior
G
GHOST DANCE,
The Good The Bad and the Ugly, Director Sergio Leonne
Gospel according to St Matthew , Director Pablo passolini
The Ghost In The Shell directed by Mamoru Oshii
The Godfather, Parts I and II (1972, 1974)
Goodfellas (1990)
Guns of Navarone
H
HWY- Feast of Friends (Jim Morrison) ,
Hamlet
Hackers
Heroes seies I
I
The Incredible Shrinking Man,
The Illustrated Man
J
K
Kill Bill 1+2,
Koyaanisqatsi directed by Godfrey Reggio
Kung Fu (TV series)
L
Lord of the Rings1,2,3, Director Peter Jackson
the Lawnmower Man,
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
The Last Wave director Peter weir
M
The Man With a Camera (1929)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Metropolis (1927)
Morning of the Earth,
Mad Max, Director George Miller
Macbeth director polish
Mephisto,
Mystic River
The Matrix directed by The Wachowski Brothers
The Matrix Reloaded directed by The Wachowski Brothers
The Matrix Revolution directed by The Wachowski Brothers
Max Headroom
The Milky Way directed by Luis Bunuel
N
Notorious (1946)
the New World,
Nosferatu,
Natural Born Killer,
O
On the Waterfront (1954)
Once apon a Time in the West,
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest,
The Outer Limits
P
Psycho (1960)
Platoon,
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Pi directed by Darren Aronofsky
Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarantino
Peyote Road directed by Phil Cousineau and Fidel Moreno(vhs/ntsc)(1994)
The Prestige
Q
R
Raging Bull (1980)
Rainbow Bridge (Jimi Hendrix) (surf music anyone?)
Ran,
Resident Evil, Regeneration
Repo Man directed by Alex Cox
Robert Bresson, French Cinematographer
Rosemary's Baby directed by Roman Polanski
S
Spirit Stallion of the Cimmaron,
The Shiralee (1950)
Spiderman1,2,3,
The Searchers (1956)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Sunless (1983)
the Stranger, Director Orson Welles
SHAMAN of the AMAZON,
Sayat Nova (color of Pomegranites),
Sin City, Director Robert Rodriguez
the Shining, Director Stanley Kubrick
Scanners directed by David Cronenberg
Sins of the Father.
The Shining directed by Stanley Kubrick
The Sixth Sense directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Soylent Green directed by Richard Fleischer
Star Wars directed by George Lucas
Stone ,1970's Aussie Bike Gang Classic.
T
Taxi Driver (1976)
the Trip, director Roger Corman
The Third Man,
Taxi Driver, director Martin Scorsese
This Sporting Life
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, director Tommy Lee Jones
The Telepathic Motion-Picture Of The Lost Tribes
Tribulation 99 : Alien Anomalies Under America directed by Craig Baldwin
Tron
The Truman Show directed by Peter Weir
The Twilight Zone
U
Ulysses' Gaze (1995)
Umberto D (1952)
Unforgiven (1992)
Underbelly Series I (2008)and II (2009)
V
Video Feedback
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (2005) (VG)
W
White Heat (1949)
Wings of Desire (1987)
The Wall pink floyd
What Dreams May Come,
Withnail and I,
X
X Files REGENISIS
Y
Yojimbo (1961)
Yellow Submarine(1968)
Z
"Z' he lives
NO MORE HEROES
apart from the borish violence that this show unleashed on my primary state school , the technique of flashing back to the wisdoms learned in the past stayed in my mind for years to come, 101 conflict resolution, out of body consciousness, ok grasshopper.....
you are ready to leave!
FILM FACTS
an in depth fact finding mission to these films......
1-Peyote Road
2-BackRoads
3-Sunless Sans Soleil
4-Final Fantasy The Spirits Within
PEYOTE ROAD
Peyote Road directed by Phil Cousineau and Fidel Moreno(vhs/ntsc)(1994)
* The Peyote Road addresses the United States Supreme Court 'Smith' decision, which denied protection of 1st Amendment religious liberty to the sacramental use of Peyote for Indigenous people, one of the oldest tribal religions in the Western Hemisphere. Examining the European tradition of religious intolerance & documenting the centuries old sacramental use of the cactus Peyote, The Peyote Road explains how the Smith decision put religious freedom in jeopardy for all Americans.
Islands of the Sun
SUNLESS - SANS SOLEIL
SUNLESS aka SANS SOLEIL
Director:Chris Marker
Writer:Chris Marker
Release Date:2 March 1983
'Sans Soleil' opens with a ferry trip to Japan, with the camera peering at sleeping passengers. This is a perfect encapsulation of the film as a whole, a beautiful mixture of journey and dream. The film is ostensibly a documentary, that holier-than-thou genre convinced of its own superior truthfulness. And the film is full of documentary images, snapshots from the faraway places Marker visits, Japan, Africa, South America, San Francisco, Iceland, Paris. The film is full of the observations of the filmmaker about the cultures he observes.
But 'Sans Soleil' couldn't soar further from the prosaic ambitions of the documentary. Like the film it most resembles, Marker's own 'La Jetee', it is in fact a work of science fiction, as much about time travel as literal travel. Each place Marker visits is stripped of its familiarity, and made eerie, alien. Concrete images become springboards for dizzy philosophical speculations. The film moves with ease from the court of 11th century Imperial Japan to the revolutionary struggles in 1960s Africa to emus on the Ile de France to an interpretation of Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' to astrological rumination on a desert beach, and still remains thematically coherent and full of the most startling connections.
It is this structure that creates the feel of science fiction, the linking of seemingly disparate images, symbols, stories, experiences, places to create a strange pattern which emanates something spiritual, that seems to make sense of increasing chaos, dislocation, displacement. But we are constantly reminded that these are secular, man-made, ad-hoc, arbitrary constructions, as phantom as the relationship in 'La Jetee', but, similarly, a necessary construction to cover the abyss.
The distortion of the soundtrack, the mixture of silence and mooged classics; the computer visuals of Marker's friend, known as The Zone, which seep conventional, representational images and turn them into ghosts, traces, stripped of history, recognisability, humanity; the film's fictional framework (the narrative comprises letters to the narrator by the filmmaker, Sandor Krasna) all add to this unsettling science fiction appropriation of the documentary genre.
When the history of cinema comes to be written in centuries to come, there will really only be two films that will survive from its first century, films dense, supple, playful, renewable enough, and full of enough possibilities for future direction, to transcend the local, the generic, the pretentious, the narrative. One is that final gasp of modernist cinema, 'Vertigo'; the other is this epitome of post-modernity. in many ways, 'Sans Soleil' is a stunning exegisis on Hitchcock's masterpiece (which had only just been re-released after two-decades withdrawel), echoing its circular structure, its concern with time, memory, the elusiveness of history.
'Soleil' locates the crisis of post-modernity in Japan, that most modern of modern capitalist societies. With the curiosity of an anthropologist, the good humour of an essayist, and the eye for the unusual of a rare filmmaker, Marker gives us a Japan we rarely see, even in the country's own cinema; on the one hand a culture of startling modernity, leading the way in computers, technology, department stores etc., on the other full of residual traditions, rituals, superstitions, ceremonies, going back centuries. The co-existence of these two time-scales has resulted in a kind of blur, a temporal vacuum, whereby all sense of time and perspective is lost, where religious ceremonies for the souls of stray pets co-exist with state-of-the-art video games.
Japan is like a ship that has lost its anchor, where all time is the same, and therefore irrelevant, just as Scottie Ferguson wanders around dazed, in a loop of fantasy and distorted memory. Without history, memory, a culture ceases to be a culture and lays itself open to all sorts of vulnerability. But this lack of foundation ironically leads to a greater freedom, particularly of the mind, and the film, as it reaches its conclusion, becomes visionary and hallucinatory.
'Soleil' is anything but bleak - its stories, myths, cultural tidbits, observations are unfailingly entertaining and full of good humour. Krasna compares the overcultured, saturated Japan to the timeless emptiness of Africa, to the spooky otherworldliness of Iceland, as his 'objective' narrative becomes increasingly a personal odyssey that must be teased out from hints and ellipses. In its focusing on the minutae, the forgotten, the arcane, the ephemeral, the back alleys, the garbage, but suggesting that 'Soleil' is ultimately only one film out of a possible multitude made possible by new technologies, Marker's film is at once profoundly democratic yet exhilaratingly idiosyncratic; an apocalyptic vision teeming with life.
Synopsis
Stretching the genre of documentary, this experimental film is a rich composition of thoughts, images and scenes, mainly from Japan and Guinea-Bissau, "two extreme poles of survival". Some other scenes were filmed in Iceland, Paris, and San Francisco. A female narrator reads from letters supposedly sent to her by the (fictitious) cameraman Sandor Krasna. Sans Soleil is often labeled as a documentary or travelogue, however it contains fictional elements and moves from one location to another without regard to a location-based narrative.
Much of the narration in Sans Soleil is a meditation on human memory.
Introductory quotations
The original French version of Sans Soleil opens with the following quotation by Jean Racine from his tragedy Bajazet (1672):
"L'Éloignement de pays répare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximité des temps." (The distance between countries somewhat repairs the excessive nearness of time.)
Marker replaced this quote with the following one by T.S. Eliot from "Ash Wednesday" (1930) for the English version of the film:
"Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place".
Sans Soleil was filmed entirely by Marker with a 16mm Beaulieu silent film camera in conjunction with a non-sync portable tape recorder (the film contains no synchronous sound).
Influences
The sequence in San Francisco references Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and even his own previous film La Jetée. Marker's use of the name "The Zone" to describe the space in which Hayao Yamaneko's images are transformed is a reference to Stalker, the film by Andrei Tarkovsky, and the book upon which that film was based: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
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: UN 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?
FINAL FANTASY
FINAL FANTASY facts!
Two years after the events in "Final Fantasy VII", a disease called 'Seikon-Shoukougun', or 'Geostigma', is spreading through the planet. This disease is believed to have been caused by the body fighting off foreign material that invaded the body two years earlier, at the end of "Final Fantasy VII". Guilt-ridden and haunted by his past, ex-SOLDIER Cloud Strife has decided to live a secluded, solitary life away from his friends while maintaining "Strife's Delivery Service", whose headquarters is located in Tifa Lockheart's bar, the Seventh Heaven. Tifa's bar serves as an orphanage for children stricken with Geostigma. Here, Tifa keeps an eye on Barret's six-year-old daughter, Marlene, while Barret searches the planet for an alternative energy source to the Planet's energy, Mako. One day, Cloud receives a phone call from the former Shinra, Inc. president, Rufus, asking him for protection from a mysterious man named Kadaj. Kadaj, in the meantime, along with his brothers Loz and Yazoo, are searching for their "mother", and seem to believe that Cloud knows where to find her. Meanwhile, Vincent Valentine has been wandering the planet gathering information on Kadaj's scheme, and Cloud and his friends must come together again to fight these new enemies. Written by Andrea
Two years after "Final Fantasy 7", life seems to have returned to a state of normality after Sephiroth's attempts at mass genocide and the danger of Meteor. On the edge of the ruins of the metropolis Midgar, a new city has thrived, called the Edge and at it's center lies a monument that entails no one will forget Meteor and the ones who died. Cloud Strife, the hero who defeated Sephiroth, is a delivery boy now, no longer interested in fighting wars or leading rebellions. The world is at peace, and AVALANCHE is gone it's separate ways. Tifa Lockheart has reopened the new 7th Heaven, in the Edge, looking after Marlene and other orphans, including Denzel. Barret Wallace is working with the WRO in finding new energy sources to supply the world now that Mako is no longer used. Cid Highwind is also working with the WRO, as an airship pilot and leader of their air fleet. Reeve (and Cait Sith) is now heading the WRO and working, striving, to create a better world for all. Vincent Valentine has returned to solace, switching his places between his mansion home in Nibleheim and the Sleeping Forest, and the Forgotten City. Yuffie Kirisagi is back in Wutai, though what the Ninja is doing is unknown to all. But despite this lull in adventure, there is something that is striving the world. Geostigma, the Sephiroth, JENOVA's memetic legacy. A disease that counters the body's own defence system in on itself and causes it to destroy itself. Rufus ShinRa, ex-President of Midgar, is a sufferer of the disease, along with the ex-SOLDIER Cloud, and lives now in his hide-away home the Healin Lodge with his faithful bodyguards, the Turks. But who are the mysterious silver haired band, known as Kadaj's Gang? Kadaj, Loz and Yazoo, all of silver hair and teal eyes. Who are these strange people, who appear so much like Sephiroth? Written by Olek Tamarani
Trivia for
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
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* photos * board * trailer * details
* The total production time on the film was over four years. By the time the final shots were rendered, some of the earlier ones had to be redone because they didn't match anymore. Also, the software used to create them had become more advanced (and hence more detail was possible).
* Dr. Aki Ross' hair is only half as dense as the average human crop, however, that still left 60,000 strands to put realistically into motion. When designing the computer graphics, a fifth of the time spent was devoted to those 60,000 hairs.
* After shooting and initial animation wrapped, completed scenes were fed to Square Pictures' custom and (more or less) homemade "render farm" computer network (which consisted of 960 individual Pentium III-933MHz workstations) and processed into single frames. During this rendering process, the raw animation had the textures and extremely fine detail added by the network cluster. Each frame has twice the resolution of a high-definition TV signal and contains 10 megabytes of data.
* The name of the character Dr. Sid is a reference to the Final Fantasy game series. Most incarnations of the game include a character in some fashion named Cid and in each game but Final Fantasy VII, Cid is an older, wiser character.
* Chocobos (a bird creature found in many Squaresoft games including Final Fantasy) can be seen in two different spots. Once on a man's briefcase and another time on Aki's pyjamas.
* The name of the character Gen. Hein is a reference to Robert A. Heinlein, author of "Starship Troopers".
* The twin towers of the World Trade Center do not appear in any of the New York shots (except in the concept drawings on the DVD).
* Aki Ross was named #87 on Maxim Magazine's "Hot 100" list for 2001, and was featured on the cover of the supplemental insert. She is the only nonexistent person to date to make that list.
* This was the first Final Fantasy not scored by series composer Nobuo Uematsu, the man behind the music of all ten FF games (excluding FF Tactics, composed by Masanari Iwata/Hitoshi Sakimoto). His music is so loved by fans that it is often released on separate CDs by popular demand.
* Due to the poor performance of the film at the box office, Square Pictures announced its "retirement" from the film business in October 2001. The studio did, however, go on to produce the short film Final Flight of the Osiris (2003) in a similar realistic CGI style to Final Fantasy, which played in theaters before Dreamcatcher (2003) and was released as the first of a series of short films set in the Matrix on DVD entitled The Animatrix.
* When Aki Ross is overlooking Old NYC, the map on her wrist computer is an actual map of the streets of New York.
* The Seiko wrist watch worn by Aki Ross (known as the "wrist halo"), which produces the map of NYC, is a digital recreation of an actual Seiko watch made specifically to tie in with the movie. A different design was with numerous cosmetic changes was sold publicly.
* During the conference scene where Hein and Sid debate how to kill the Phantoms. Some of the faces are in the audience are modeled on behind the scenes personnel.
* The day and month shown after Aki's first dream is director Hironobu Sakaguchi's wife's birthday.
* The serial number 102171, that's found on the side of the Black Boa, is the birth date of one of the artists who designed and textured the ship.
* The Deep Eyes Squadron has four members, a reference to the Final Fantasy game series, where in six of the ten games, you are limited to four people in your team, despite the fact that there are usually more than five characters.
* During preproduction, the script went through 50 incarnations. In one such form there was a small child named Meg, who had a much larger part in the overall story. In the final version of the film the fifth spirit was drawn from a terminally ill child. This is the only reference to Meg left in the final version.
* All backgrounds are hand painted.
* When the movie was digitally-projected (Texas Instruments DLP), it became the first ever to include a "genuine" 8-channel Sony SDDS soundtrack. "Prototype" 8-channel soundtracks had been in use by SDDS since 1993, but the one for this movie is considered the first perfected standard of the format.
* The first computer-generated animated motion picture with photo-realistic characters.!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* Prior to the film's release, there was speculation that the photo-realistic computer-generated "actors" would revolutionize moviemaking. There were news reports of plans for the "digital actress" used for Aki Ross to appear in another movie, or possibly be included in a live-action production amongst real actors. The box office failure of this film put those plans on hold, however a special sequence created for the special edition version of the DVD, which opens disc 2, does in fact show Aki and other FF characters interacting with real people.
* In an earlier version of the script, Cid and Aki were originally grandfather and granddaughter. Aki's last name was also different: she was originally Aki Shishido. The relationship and names were changed late enough into production that many of the animators and staff didn't even know of the modification of the script until the film was nearly finished.
* The flying Phantom in the wasteland sequence is a boss fought on a beach in the Final Fantasy VII game.
* Columbia Pictures' first theatrically-released animated feature in 15 years.
* For fun, the producers created a music video featuring the characters (led by Aki) dancing in a Michael Jackson-like production number. This can be found on the DVD release.
My Ancient Cinema in Byron Bay 1996-7
I painted it inside and outside, doors and floors. Showed 16mll Films such as Surf Classics, Brave Heart, Baraka, Once Apon A Time, Never Ending Story(kids matine), Ren and Stimpy (for special kids), Anti Logging Films from the crew at Evans Head, Mayan Film and Information Nights, Premier of Trance Planet, Ghost In the Shell, Mad Max 1, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Konyanisquatsi The Invisible People and many more.
Eventually with a video projector, hired the cinema out for many Doofs such as "Beyond the Brain" and when Terence McKenna spoke in both the Cycad Garden and the Epi Center. For the next evolution turned the cinema into production and editing Pad. Sitting with all those empty seats editing my own techno videos for projecting at parties from byron to nimbin to sydney and brisbane. This felt a little Citizen Kanish ! With my big speaker system I could and would party all by myself and at other times I would be sitting anonymously amongst the crowd watching films and having a good time... and across the road the Pacific Ocean......
thanks for stoppin by amigos
email touchesclouds@gmail.com