On The Passage of a Few Persons through a Rather Brief Period of Time

1959 DANSK-FRANSK EXPERIMENTALFILMSKOMPAGNI

Voice 1 (male announcer) This neighborhood was made for the 
 SUB-TITLE: PARIS 1952
 (Facade of buildings in the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Près) 
 wretched dignity of the petit-bourgeoisie, for respectable 
 occupations and intellectual tourism. The sedentary population of 
 the upper floors was sheltered from the influences of the street. 
 (Young people pass by)
 This neighborhood has remained the same. It was the strange setting 
 (A photograph of two couples drinking wine 
 at a table is studied by the camera in the 
 manner of an art film.)
 HANDEL: FORMAL LOVE THEME
 for our story. Here a systematic questioning of all the diversions 
 and works of a society, a total critique of its idea of happiness, 
 was expressed in acts.
 
 These people also scorned "subjective profundity." They were 
 interested in nothing but an adequate and concrete expression of 
 themselves.
 
Voice 2 (Debord, monotone) Human beings are not fully conscious of 
 their real life…usually groping in the dark; overwhelmed by the 
 consequences of their acts; at every moment groups and individuals 
 find themselves confronted with results they have not wished.
 THE MUSIC IS INTERRUPTED.
 
Voice 1 They said that Oblivion was their ruling passion. They 
 (Other faces)
 wanted to reinvent everything each day; to become masters and 
 possessors of their own lives.
 
 Just as One does not judge a man according to the conception he has 
 of himself, one cannot judge such periods of transition according 
 to their own consciousness; on the contrary, one must explain the 
 consciousness through the material conditions of material life, 
 through the conflict between social conditions and the forces of 
 social production.
 (The pope and other ecclesiastics)
 
 The progress achieved in the domination of nature was not yet 
 matched by the corresponding liberation of everyday life. Youth 
 (Young girls coming out of school)
 passed away among the various controls of resignation.
 (French police in the streets)
 
 Our camera has captured for you a few aspects of a provisional 
 micro-society.
 (A sequence in reportage style of cafe tables in Saint-Germain-des 
 Pres)
 
 The knowledge of empirical facts remains abstract and superficial 
 as long as it is not concretized by its integration into the whole -- 
 which alone permits the supersession of partial and abstract 
 problems so as to arrive at their CONCRETE ESSENCE, and implicitly 
 at their meaning. 
 
 This Group was on the margins of the economy. It tended toward a 
 role of pure consumption, and first of all the free consumption of 
 its time. It thus found itself directly engaged in qualitative 
 variations of daily life but deprived of any means to intervene in 
 them.
 
 The group ranged over a very small area. The same times found them
 (Night time in Les Halles)
 in the same places. No one went to bed early. Discussion on the 
 (Panoramic view over a very lively and packed square in Les Halles 
 at night)
 meaning of all this continued.
 
Voice 2 "Our life is a journey -- In the winter and the night -- We 
 seek our passage…"
 
Voice 1 The abandoned literature nevertheless exerted a delaying 
 (Several views of dawn over Les Halles)
 action on new affective formulations. 
 
Voice 2 There was the fatigue and the cold of the morning in this 
 much-traversed labyrinth, like an enigma that we had to resolve. It 
 was a looking glass reality through which we had discovered the 
 possible richness of reality. On the bank of the river, evening 
 (Paris -- the river Seine looking east)
 began once again; and caresses; and the importance of a world 
 (Piles of bricks on the Quai Saint-Bernard)
 DELALANDE: NOBLE AND TRAGIC THEME FOR SOLO BASSOON
 without importance. Just as the eyes have a blurred vision of many 
 things and can see only one clearly, so the will can strive only 
 incompletely toward diverse objects and can completely love only 
 (a girl) THE MUSIC DIES DOWN
 one at a time.
 
Voice 3 (Young girl) No one counted on the future. It would never 
 (Inside the labyrinth of bricks) (Police vans depart)
 be possible to be together later, or anywhere else. There would 
 (The Ile Saint-Louis at dusk) (Two very young 
 couples dancing on a beach next to a guitar player)
 never be a greater freedom.
 
Voice 1 The refusal of time and growing old, automatically limited 
 (Some locations between Place Saint-Sulpice and rue Mazarine)
 encounters in this narrow contingent zone, where what was lacking 
 was felt as irreparable. The extreme precariousness of the means of 
 getting by without working was at the root of this impatience, which
 made excesses necessary and breaks definitive.
 
Voice 2 One never really contests an organization of existence 
 (The screen remains white)
 without contesting all of that organization's forms of language.
 
Voice 1 When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into
 (Tracking shots in a cafe, the camera's movement arbitrarily cut by 
 boards: "The passions and celebrations of a violent age"; "In the 
 course of movement and accordingly on the transitory side"; "The 
 most exciting suspense!")
 a dream, becomes a mere representation of itself. The ambiance of 
 play is by nature unstable. At any moment "ordinary life" can 
 prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even 
 than its temporal limitation. Any game takes place within the 
 (Board: "With marvellous decor specially made for the purpose!")
 more striking contours of its spatial domain. Around the 
 neighborhood, around its fleeting and threatened immobility, 
 (People pass along the Boulevard Saint-Michel in foggy weather)
 stretched a half-known city where people met only by chance losing
 (A couple at a table in a cafe)
 their way forever. The girls there, because they were legally under 
 the control of their families until the age of eighteen, were often 
 (In Japan several hundred police come into view running)
 recaptured by the defenders of that detestable institution. They 
 (The outside walls of the Chevilly-Laure prison)
 were generally confined under the guard of those creature who among
 the bad products of a bad society are the most ugly and repugnant: 
 nuns.
 
 What usually makes documentaries so easy to understand is the 
 (The screen remains white)
 arbitrary limitation of their subject matter. They describe the 
 atomization of social functions and the isolation of their products.
 One can in contrast envisage the entire complexity of a moment which
 is not resolved into a work, a moment whose movement indissolubly
 contains facts and values whose meaning does not yet appear. The 
 subject matter of the documentary would then be this confused 
 totality. 
 
Voice 2 The epoch had arrived at the level of knowledge and 
 (Violent confrontations between Japanese workers and the police. 
 General view of events. The police gain ground.)
 technical means that made possible, and increasingly necessary a 
 DIRECT construction of all aspects of liberated, affective and 
 practical existence. The appearance of these superior means of 
 action, still unused because of the delays in the project of 
 liquidating the commodity economy, had already condemned aesthetic 
 activity, whose ambitions and powers were both outdated. The decay 
 of art and of all values of former mores had formed our sociological
 background. The ruling classes monopoly over the instruments we had 
 (The screen remains white)
 to control in order to realize the collective art of our time had 
 excluded us from a cultural production officially devoted to 
 illustrating and repeating the past. An art film on this generation 
 can only be a film on its absence of real works.
 
 Everyone unthinkingly followed the paths learned once and for all, 
 (People pass by in front of the railings of the Cluny Museum)
 To their works and their homes, To their predictable future. For 
 them duty had already become a habit, and habit a duty. They did not 
 see the deficiency of their city. They thought the deficiency of 
 their life was natural. We wanted to break out of this conditioning,
 (Windows lit up at night in the Rue des Ecoles and the Rue Monagne-
 Sainte-Genevieve) HANDEL: FORMAL LOVE THEME
 in quest of another use of the urban landscape, in quest of new 
 passions. The atmosphere of a few places gave us intimations of the 
 future powers of an architecture it would be necessary to create to 
 be the support and framework for less mediocre games. We could 
 THE MUSIC ENDS
 expect nothing of anything we ourselves had not altered. The urban 
 (Some houses in Paris)
 environment proclaimed the orders and tastes of the ruling society 
 just as violently as the newspapers. It is man who makes the unity 
 of the world, but man has extended himself everywhere. Men can see 
 nothing around them that is not in their own image; Everything 
 speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive. There 
 were obstacles everywhere. There was a coherence in the obstacles 
 (English police on foot and horseback drive back demonstrators)
 of all types. They maintained the coherent reign of poverty. 
 (The screen remains white)
 Everything being connected, it was necessary to CHANGE EVERYTHING by
 a unitary struggle, or nothing. It was necessary to link up with the
 masses, but we were surrounded by sleep.
 
Voice 3 The dictatorship of the proletariat is a desperate 
 struggle, bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and 
 economic, educational and administrative, against the forces and 
 traditions of the old world.
 
Voice 1 In this country it is once again the men of order who have 
 (A demonstration of while colonists in Algiers, May 1958. General 
 Massau and General Salan. A company of parachutists marches towards 
 the camera)
 rebelled. They have reinforced their power. They have been able to 
 aggravate the grotesqueness of the ruling conditions according to 
 their will. They have embellished their system with the funeral 
 ceremonies of the past.
 (General De Galle speaks on a rostrum and bangs his fist)
 
Voice 2 Years, like a single instant prolonged to this point, come 
 (The screen remains white)
 to an end.
 
Voice 1 That which was directly lived reappears frozen in the 
 (The star of an advertising film Monsavon) (A girls face)
 distance, fitted into the tastes and illusions of an era carried 
 (A cavalry charge in the streets of a town)
 away with it.
 
Voice 2 The appearance of events that we have not made, that 
 (The screen remains white)
 others have made against us, obliges us from now on to be aware of 
 the passage of time, its results, the transformation of our own 
 desires into events. What differentiates the past from the present
 (The face of another girl)
 is precisely its out of reach objectivity; there is no more should 
 (A starlette in a bath)
 be; being is so consumed that it has ceased to exist. The details 
 (Tracking shot of the starlette in the bath) (The solar eruption 
 shot continues its rising movement)
 are already lost in the dust of time. Who was afraid of life, 
 afraid of the night, afraid of being taken, afraid of being kept?
 
Voice 3 That which should be abolished continues, and we continue 
 (In Japan a dozen police with helmets and gas masks continue to 
 advance across a large space, now cleared, slowly firing tear gas 
 grenades)
 to wear away with it. We are engulfed. We are separated. The years 
 pass and we have not changed anything.
 
Voice 2 Once again morning in the same streets. Once again the 
 (Day breaks over a Paris bridge) (Slow panorama across the Place 
 des Victoires at dawn)
 DELALANDE: NOBLE AND TRAGIC THEME (REPRISE)
 fatigue of so many similarly passed nights. It is a walk that has 
 lasted a long time.
 THE MUSIC DIES DOWN
 
Voice 1 Really hard to drink more.
 (The screen remains white)
 
Voice 2 Of course one might make a film of it. But even if such a
 (A film crew around a camera)
 film succeeds in being as fundamentally incoherent and unsatisfying
 (The tracking shot across the cafe, as seen before, but uncut and 
 with a series of faults: people getting into the edge of the frame, 
 reflections in the lens, camera shadow, with a panorama drawn at the
 end of the shot)
 as the reality it deals with, it will never be more than a 
 re-creation -- poor and false like this botched tracking shot.
 
Voice 3 There are now people who flatter themselves that they are 
 (The screen remains white)
 authors of films, as others were authors of novels. They are even 
 more backward than the novelists because they are ignorant of the 
 decomposition and exhaustion of individual expression in our time, 
 ignorant of the end of the arts of passivity. They are praised for 
 their sincerity since they dramatize, with more personal depth, the
 conventions of which their life consists. There is talk of the 
 liberation of the cinema. But what does it matter to us if one more
 art is liberated through which Pierre or Jacques or Francois can 
 joyously express their slave sentiments? The only interesting 
 venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in the 
 perspective of history but for us and right away. This entails the
 withering away of alienated forms of communication. The cinema too
 has to be destroyed.
 
Voice 2 In the final analysis, stars are created by the need we
 (A car stops. Tracking shot of the star of Monosavon coming 
 downstairs)
 have for them, and not by talent or absence of talent or even by
 (Two images of the film's clapboard recorded for two shots already
 seen)
 the film industry or advertising. Miserable need, dismal, anonymous
 life that would like to expand itself to the dimensions of cinema 
 (Horse riders in the Bois de Boulogne)
 life. The imaginary life on the screen is the product of this real
 need. The star is the projection of this need.
 
 The images of advertisements during the intermissions are more 
 (The advertising starlette shows how much she likes the soap and 
 smiles to the audience)
 suited than any for evoking an intermission of life.
 
 To really describe this era it would no doubt be necessary to show 
 (The screen remains white until thirty seconds after the last word 
 is spoken)
 many other things. But what would be the point? Better to grasp the
 totality of what has been done and what remains to be done than to 
 add more ruins to the old world of the spectacle and of memories.