"This is the house of the skinned ones." "We are at the beginning of the night of the clocks." "One of them has just been opened." "The young woman has stepped out." "She now wanders among the skinned." "Those who are dead but not really dead." "Whose voices can be heard through their closed lips." "Are you the cousin of Michel Jean, the recently deceased filmmaker?" "What are you doing in this abandoned place, where you can only meet the phantoms of the past?" "I've come here to read this long forgotten novel." "It was he who gave it to me as a present." "That was the only time we met." "I was still a little girl." "We opened the book and read some random pages." "It was beautiful, very poetic." "These plants, those abandoned tracks leading nowhere and going in circles no train will ever ride on them." "This is a place very similar to him." "This was very dear to him." "At home he had a copy of it and when he came into his room his eyes searched for the book to make sure it was still there." "It made him calm somehow." "The cover fascinated him." "He called it the "Dreamflight"." "I am only one of his creations." "real and fictitious at the same time." "I am in his head, yet, at the same time I am here in front of you." "But are you real or a vision?" "You can see I am real, I have wings." "Phantoms don't have wings." "The have nothing." "Was it he who sent you?" "He can't send anybody anymore." "He is dead, buried somewhere at the Père Lachaise cemetery." "Surrounded by many of his fictitious creations." "They come and go." "I am a prisoner of the burned forrest, one of his most bizarre locations." "Go to the cemetery, then you will see." "You will see them all... how sad they are. wandering around." "But when you visit Père Lachaise, when you go to his house in Limoges, beware of the clocks." "They are portals, do you understand, they are dangerous." "Some lead to the burned forest, others to places beyond your wildest imagination." "Now go, and live the "Dreamflight"." "His dream." "Wait, you haven't told me if I will be able to see him." "Could he appear in front of me?" "Is he alive?" "Could he still be alive?" "And both disappear in the dark of a mysterious staircase." "It's the dead who dream of the living." "Not the other way round." "Maybe there is a dead person who is dreaming of me." "Who has dreams of me even though he is long gone." "Even though he is buried somewhere else." "He is everywhere, here. there... and every day and night, he is dreaming of me." "He has nothing else to do." "Who could he be?" "I do not know." "Maybe Michel Jean, he was a cousin." "I have seen him only once or twice, in my childhood." "They say he is dead." "Do you remember?" "I was a little girl." "We walked through the fields and you talked to me." "I can't remember about what," "I only remember the sound of your voice." "And now you are gone." "I can hear you in my head." "Yes." "I can hear you." "I don't always understand what you are saying." "If you are dreaming of me. please don't wake up." "Dream of me always forever." "If they see us they will think we are ghosts." "But we are ghosts." "Good day." "The gates are about to be closed." "Once the visitors are gone the ghosts can roam freely." "Don't you agree, Isabelle?" "And you are a ghost who knows my name?" "Certainly, I am one of those familiar phantoms from your cousin's imagination." "You know, Michel Jean." "You know Michel Jean?" "He is indeed a relative of mine." "I have inherited his country house." "I have never been there." "Then you should go there as quick as possible." "Maybe he is there, waiting for you." "He is dead, you know." "That doesn't matter." "The dead come back whenever they want." "I am sure you will meet him there." "Him... or one of his phantoms." "What about you?" "Oh, I am just passing by." "I am here and then suddenly somewhere else." "It is an amusing game, do you understand." "I become one of Michel Jean's creations." "And then I become myself again." "But... who am I?" "That is the question." "I am just a phantom that passes by." "That comes and goes." "Ah. there... take a look." "Look at this clock." "The Vicarage and its garden have lost none of their charm." "The Vicarage and its garden have lost none of their charm." "The Vicarage and its garden have lost none of its charm." "I am just a vision." "The Vicarage and its garden have lost none of their charm." "Don't look anymore, they are gone." "And you. what kind of phantom are you?" "Maybe another one of Michel Jean's creations?" "Maybe the ghost of Doctor Mabuse, or the ghost of the Marquis de Sade." "They used to call me Rhadamanth." "Move behind the curtain." "There you might find Michel Jean." "You are not sure?" "I have done it, take a look." "Give it a try." "Like that..." "And you, what is your finger pointing at?" "Maybe towards Michel Jean's fictitious creations?" "Your heart, it is your heart I am holding." "Your heart, which I have torn from your chest." "You. who used to be my sister you. who I used to love." "Or is it actually my own heart, beating in my hand?" "Each beat taking away a drop of blood." "And it flows, flows, red, down to the earth." "Is it you. who is haunting me?" "Me... and my heart." "Is it you who is haunting the dancing lady?" "Sister Martha will from now on be called Sister "Folies Bergère..." "I have torn out my own heart with my teeth." "With my fangs." "I drank my blood to color my lips." "Its taste still lingers in my throat." "Come, my beautiful ghost." "Come and kiss my bleeding heart." "What do you want, are you mad?" "Mad, mad you say?" "Who is mad?" "You?" "Me?" "Michel Jean?" "There is no burned forest." "And you also don't exist." "This angel, pointing at me. is in reality at the Père Lachaise, right next to the grave of Raymond Roussel." "All this is just a fragment of an old screenplay he never managed to turn into a movie." "He is dead, and you are just a leftover of his fantastic world." "Wandering around the cemetery." "following each of my steps." "Faded." "Abandoned images in search for a home." "In reality, you are dead." "Just like him." "That is a lie." "I am alive." "Look. my heart." "It is alive. it's beating." "We both are breathing." "You will see me again at his house." "Me and all his phantoms." "We all are alive." "We are waiting, patiently and in despair." "We are waiting for his return." "You know, it is the dead who dream of the living." "Not the other way round." "This woman in black, I think I know her." "Maybe from one of his movies?" "But she was surrounded by the sea, at the beach of Dieppe, where he so much loved to film." "A childhood memory he couldn't forget." "Wait!" "Are you looking for Michel Jean by any chance?" "Indeed. he is around here somewhere." "But you can only see him through the traces he has left." "One is the burned forest and the one that is trapped in there." "The other is the house he has given you." "The strolling lady is waiting for you." "And others too. m maybe." "Who is that strolling lady?" "The woman who walks with the dead." "You don't know her yet." "But when you see her you must follow her." "Take the train to Limoges." "Go to his house." "In places where people have lived something of them is always left behind." "The door is locked." "I can't enter my crypt." "I am cold, so very cold." "When you leave, please take me with you." "Don't leave me alone..." "in this sad place." "I am so alone." "I am waiting for him, do you understand?" "I am waiting for him." "I am waiting for him to come and get me." "I am waiting for this for such a long time." "Why doesn't he come and get me?" "Oh please, take me with you." "Be quiet, be quiet." "I remember one of his books." "There was a young girl, leaning out of a window, crying for help." "But nothing is real, not even this, and not even you." "You are just a delusion. hidden somewhere in the pages of a book." "I am cold, I am naked and I am alone." "Take me with you." "We are closing." "Nothing is real." "Has the moment come?" "Yes." "The tide has risen." "Then let us continue our journey." "It seems to me we have met before." "Maybe in Paris, at the Père Lachaise?" "I don't recall." "I am Madame Pezet. the guardian of the keys." "Come in." "Did you know Michel Jean well?" "I could hear his typewriter." "He wrote fast like the wind. sometimes for hours." "I stopped for a while to listen to him." "Yes, I knew him quite well." "What did he write?" "A screenplay. or a novel." "His face brightened when he talked about them." "Novel or film, it was all the same to him." "But nobody knows what became of all the things he wrote in this castle." "They were never published." "He died before they could be read." "A last film or a last novel." "we will never know what it was." "And now I am the guardian of the keys." "What are those stones?" "Memories. just memories." "He still inhabits some of these things." "As if he was living inside of them." "Maybe he is watching you, through that stone." "L will go now, it is late." "Sleep well." "But have a thorough look around." "Maybe he has left something for you to find." "You were at the burned forest, with your heart in your hand." "Your bleeding heart." "You were there when I read the "Dreamflight"." "The book which he gave to me as a present when I was a little girl." "A girl that never stopped thinking about him." "And now you are here, in his world." "I belong to two worlds." "Sometimes I am part of one, sometimes part of the other." "Where am I really?" "Maybe nowhere." "No more here than in the burned forest." "I am truly alive only in the universe of Michel Jean." "I am waiting for him... everywhere." "In the burned forest of his fantastic world. in the shadows of his house." "But it is impossible for me to meet him." "I don't exist for real." "I am not dead." "I simply don't exist." "Oh, excuse me." "I just wanted to ask if you need anything." "Tell me what you know about his death." "He was on a trip." "One day they brought his body in a sealed coffin." "He was buried at the Père Lachaise, you know, in Paris." "Where was he traveling to?" "No idea." "But if the coffin was sealed and nobody has seen the body how can we be sure it was him?" "We can't." "Maybe the coffin was empty." "Maybe he is still alive." "What else do you know about him?" "You must have been very young." "Was about ten or so." "I was a very shy little girl." "He took me for a walk through the countryside." "I remember well, it was the day before his departure." "He held my hand and that bothered me." "I didn't want to be treated like a child." "You know, at ten you think you are all grown up." "I stumbled over stones and roots." "Suddenly he started talking, without looking at me." "As if he was talking to himself." "But I knew somehow he was talking to me." "Can you rem ember his words?" "He said: "In the opening scene of William Wellman's movie Yellow Sky seven horsemen arrive in a little western village." "Tired they go into the dusty saloon and at the bar they observe a painting on the opposite wall." "It is a naive painting of a naked woman." "Sitting on a rebelling horse." "It is just like in "Dreamflight". an opening to the poetry of another world." "One of the men starts talking, it is Gregory Peck." "He says: "I would like to know where this horse is going"?" "The very same scene is in The Ox-Bow Incident. also by William Wellman." "Here, Henry Fonda stars, not Gregory Peck." "Then Michel Jean said:" ""I am leaving to find out where that horse went." "And when I know, you will follow me, little girl." "Maybe you will still love me then. "" "And I replied: "I will always love you. "" "That was all he said." "I have never seen him again." "Maybe he did find what he was looking for." "But he is dead." "That's what they say." "But is it him who is dead, or is it you, who is not yet alive?" "He mentioned a forest, which he burned down." "The storm seems to have passed." "Madame Pezet?" "Madame Pezet?" "The clock is a passage between the rooms of clocks." "Where his body is at rest and this very place." "If he is in there, he accepts your encounter with his image." "Is the clock empty then I will return in a few moments to kill you." "Don't open it." "Please. this clock must remain closed." "Do you understand, this is a different "Dreamflight"." "Much more powerful than the old cover of a book." "The dream is indeed inside this clock." "What are you talking about?" "You don't enter clocks." "This one you do, to fly somewhere else." "We have meet at the railroad tracks in Paris." "It was you also in the burned forest of his fantasy world." "Now you are here." "Why?" "He wanted me to play in his last film." "The film he couldn't make." "Where is he now?" "Will he ever shoot La Nuit transfigurÃ©e, the film he was trying so hard to make but nobody wanted to have?" "I wanted so badly to be filmed by him one last time." "In my mind I played over and over again the parts and the death scenes he had written for me." "Where could all his screenplays be hidden?" "Amidst all the piles of paper in this house?" "Michel Jean and his last screenplay are maybe up there." "Near the bleeding doll, the queen of Sabah, near Cheri Bibi and Fatalitas." "And his friends he talked about:" "Eric Losfeld and Ado Kyrou," "Boris Joyeux, Jean Boullet, Michel Gay..." "Oh god, why do I feel so lonely and abandoned all of a sudden?" "I am just a statue of white marble. waiting down below." "Waiting for him to come and get me." "Don't leave me alone." "Come back." "They have killed me." "Look, my head, cut off." "The dead bury the dead." "You have no business here." "Just tell me if he is still in this house." "Maybe you will find him in a corner somewhere." "Maybe he lives inside the clock." "Who knows." "Maybe he is dead after all." "It is you, am I right?" "You are guiding all this." "You are sending these visions to me." "Delusions right out of Michel Jean's fantasy world." "All his creations, all those, which I met at the" "Père Lachaise cemetery, right next to his grave." "His friends." "The appearance with the dress of roses, rising from a crypt." "The winged lady I met next to the abandoned tracks." "All these ghostly figures all this is your work." "What mysteries surround you?" "Are you an incarnation of Michel Jean?" "A sign he is sending from the empire of the dead?" "What is hidden in your inner side?" "Is it the inner world?" "The world in which you are now residing?" "Now go to him!" "Look at her beauty." "Look, how naked, how tempting and desirable she is." "Don't you want to be like her?" "Show yourself, just as she shows herself." "Offer yourself. just as she offers herself." "Kiss her." "Show her your love, just as we all have shown her ours." "They are watching me." "They all observe my honoring of this female." "Her magic." "I can feel their eyes on me." "I can feel their living stare on me." "With sundown the time of the metamorphosis arrives." "What was frozen in an existence of wax on moment ago now becomes a living delusion." "Maybe the delusion of Michel Jean." "Or of Madame Pezet. or Kim." "Or of Isabelle herself." "It is a strange ballet, that takes place in front of the young girl lost inside the labyrinth of the clocks." "The visions of Michel Jean will turn into a nightmare." "Suddenly, it was magical." "We were part of the images." "We were all the characters at the same time." "We were the book, we were the diary of adventures and travels by sea and land." "Where is reality where is dream?" "I believe there used to be a rock and the sea, and seagulls." "A strange ballet will take place where the settings will collide places, time and characters will blend under the unemotional stare of a sorceress, making statues appear at the gates of the island." "We have come to kill you." "You will become one of the skinned ones." "You will be locked with us, forever, inside the clock." "Because we love you." "Our love is a love that kills." "Isabelle. come, come!" "I love you." "Isabelle." "Take us with you, Isabelle!" "We want to come with you." "Don't stay." "Run." "Leave us to our death." "Go back to live, fast!" "Leave us behind and run!" "Run." "Isabelle. run away!" "We will protect you!" "Run to the clock, it will take you back!" "Enter the clock. it is the only way to leave this place." "Run, Isabelle, quick, quick, quick, run away!" "If you go, you take his live with you." "You have understood nothing." "Come back!" "Why did you leave?" "This isn't real." "Nothing is truly real." "Poor, bleeding doll." "Poor, dying delusion." "You have ceased to exist." "You will die just like the little girl." "Offering her blood to the grail." "If you die first, I will follow you." "If you die first, I will follow you, too." " I swear on my blood." " I. too. swear on my blood." "Maybe I will join them." "If I can find him again, I will get the most rewarding roles." "The most touching death scenes, the most violent death scenes." "Death in the movies is so much more graceful than in real life." "Because because Death does not really exist." "This is not the place for you to be." "Come, I will help you to get out of here and get back to your own world." "Do you always walk through clocks to get back home?" "You look familiar, I have seen you before." "In one of his first films, a vampire story." "Are you an illusion?" "Are you dead?" "I died in the film, but in reality I am alive." "You know, death in the movies is more beautiful than real death." "I died drinking my own blood." "Surrounded by the flames of my burning coffin." "And tomorrow I might die a very trivial death in my bed while sleeping." "Only the dead can step into this house." "For the living the entrance is forbidden." "But you are here." "And so am I." "Indeed, we both are characters from his last film." "The film he is currently shooting." "He isn't shooting anything, he is dead." "Is that what you think?" "Maybe we are actually the dead ones." "And what character were you playing?" "A female vampire, of course." "Emerging from the mysterious depths" "and from within a clock. just like you did a moment ago." "A queen of the abyss, playing piano inside a chapel, accompanied by skeletons." "Listen..." "Listen, the wind blowing around me." "The wind that blows from the swamps and the cursed places." "Listen." "What are you doing here in his house?" "L was nearby and remembered him living here." "So... here I am." "I remembered the cemetery, bathed in a strange light." "It was less macabre than fantastic." "We were no longer surrounded by the dead, rather by the essence of dreams." "Violence became a thing of beauty, without brutality." "He liked violence, but only the fake, unrealistic one." "He is dead, but his creations might still be alive and wander around here and there." "I am sure you have met a few." "That's possible." "When I am alone with his souvenirs, the stones from the beach where he used to film." "that iron rose there on the bed when I touch them or just observe them careful}; it is." "As if he was sending visions." "incredible images. his images." "Certainly the beach. the castles." "the girl with the candle as if his dreams were haunting me." "You are lucky." "I am here for over two hours and I haven't seen anything nor met anyone." "Since he sends you images." "maybe you can hear him as well?" "Please give him the best regards from Dominique." "He will understand." "Today is the day." "The hour has come in which we will create the triumph of the immortal race through a pact." "The vast nights of blood will open the doors to the world for us." "Many others will follow to taste immortality." "The entire universe will be a feast of blood and we will occupy the best seats." "We, the vampires, and I am their queen." "Why are you looking for him?" "You hardly knew the man." "It's the little girl from long ago that is searching for him." "I can only see his delusions. his creations." "But you, you are of a different kind." "I am something else." "I am his inspiration." "I am the white rose. from the song he loved so much." "In his first film. you can see me enter a train." "That film is now a lost film." "He is still searching for it." "Who knows?" "Maybe you will find his lost reels." "Maybe his isn't dead." "Maybe he is inside the clock." "Even if he is not alive anymore. he still dreams of me." "Of the little girl I was and to whom he talked back then." "As the winged lady in the burned forest said:" ""It's the dead, dreaming of the living." "Not the other way round. "" "Good day." "Here I am." "Are you Michel Jean?" "Maybe I am Michel Jean, or maybe one of his creations." "Who can say?" "Look at me. emerging from everywhere." "From this clock, or even from this coffin." "Majesty, you were betrayed." "Or even from inside this mirror." "I am him and then again I am not." "Actually, I am relentlessly searching for the lost film L'itinéraire Marin." "Do you happen to know where the lost reels might be?" "I don't know." "I think I have seen them somewhere." "There you go, here they are." "But, those are the stills from the film L'itinéraire Marin I was talking about." "There, that's me." "In younger years." "And here, look, that's Gaston Modot." "The great actor from the films of Bunuel and Renoir." "L'âge d'or." "La règle du jeu." "Do you remember?" "And Chauffard, my friend, who also appeared in Le Square by Marguerite Duras." "She also wrote the dialogue for L'itinéraire Marin, by the way." "Fardoulis Lagrange and his son Pascal." "Ah, the beach, the beach of Pourville." "I guess it's there the reels could be." "I will go back to Pourville." "The lost film is very probably there." "Will you come with me?" "Quick, the door is closing." "Farewell, I am leaving for the fantasy world." "Take me to the statue, that's my place." "I cannot die, I don't exist." "My death is just an illusion." "My existence is just a delusion." "Do you understand?" "Do you understand?" "Why?" "Why?" "No reason." "L will die again." "Everything brings me doom." "The gallows, the spike, poison." "All that cuts, stabs or strangles, to end a life that never existed." "I..." "I am dying." "I feel this time it is final." "I am suddenly scared." "I am so terribly scared." "Is it Michel Jean's delusions that scare you, you little fool?" "They are him, I am him." "We all are his novels, his movies, his riddles." "All genuine riddles cannot be solved." "Go... in there... go to him." "Look here, I am entering the clock." "I am not afraid." "Are you too scared?" "Don't be." "All those creations of Michel Jean, all movies, all cries." "They haunt my mind." "So, I will burn everything." "L will burn my memory so it will perish." "With the flames the images he left for us will perish." "And with them my own memory." "My mind is empty." "Empty" "I can only see the present, this giant cemetery with all the crosses and graves surrounding me." "Which one is his, which one belongs to..." "What was his name?" "I have forgotten his name." "I will remember." "His name was written on the tombstone." "But which one is it." "This one maybe?" "Or this one?" "I don't know anymore." "I cannot remember anything anymore." "Not even my own name." "There is only him and me in this cemetery." "Him and me.." "...walking ahead with small steps... searching..." ""searching... those names engraved in stone.." "I who cannot remember anymore." "I who cannot remember my own name." "I searching, searching, searching..."