Film Life

Once, in February, I saw or remembered having dreamed seeing Fellini strolling in cape and fedora with his entourage up the Champs Elysées. How seedy Paris felt, how gray and frayed as the wind rumpled the clouds overhead like trash bags and Fellini vanished into a cinema as if into his grave.

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In July, the doldrums not yet upon me, nothing can dispel the projections across time and space, from genre to genre, dream to dream, as Hara Setsuko and I hiked in the hills outside Kamakura, talking about her work on Kurosawa’s mutilated masterwork The Idiot, though I knew I was dreaming, not just because she never gave interviews after the death of Ozu, but also because I could understand her Japanese perfectly.

*

Everything eludes me in August, time itself seems to lose its giddy-up, hours linger on into days, weeks refuse to end, and wherever I am, I catch sight of ghosts out of the corner of my eye, a glimpse, a fraction of a glimpse, suggestion only—a man with Truffaut’s eyes reflected in the window of a train at the Odeon Metro Station; Tati with a cane stepping carefully off the ascending escalator in La Samaritaine shortly after I had stepped on the one descending.

*

In September life and film fuse, I don’t know why, or is it that film and life are in competition, for on Boulevard St. Michel I see Juliette Binoche encounter her character from Caché and the two of them pass through one another without speaking a word or leaving a visible trace behind.

*

In November Naruse returns to me like a slow 360 pan around the barren landscape of a post-war Tokyo suburb, then tracks me ascending again and again the three flights of stairs to my apartment in Stuttgart-West—where I come upon myself in bed watching, for the fifth time, Naruse’s Sound of the Mountain.

*

 Down alleys and decades and in cinemas I plummet toward and then into and through THE END.

*

 “The auditorium was empty,” Godard said as we left a sparsely attended January screening of For Ever Mozart at the art deco Arcades on Faubourg de l’Hôpital in Neuchatel, his cigar butt clamped firmly in his mouth, then mumbled more to himself than to me, “Light without life, the death of cinema,” and we hunkered in our overcoats against the wind off the frozen lake like refugees.