Sans soleil Page #4

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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 sayswith 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 Ch 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 timethe 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, Odakyuall those names of ports.

The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams,

makes a single film of themthe 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 "justement" 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 sak 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 filmedwho 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.

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