"Look into it." "OK, I see your fingers." "To look into it, I'd have to get closer." "Yes, but it's just to get your eye line." "Get closer." "It's difficult to see the direction..." "MUSICIAN because my eyes dance about..." "I'II try to look, see?" "If I was looking there..." "I can see that girl over there." "One eye goes this way, the other that way." "I can see her, if she moves." "I can see everything." "My sight's great, I can see you all at once." "There are angels of light who are mediators... who mediate between the visible and the invisible worlds." "I often light candles to pray to the angels... the mediators." "One must believe in angels." "I certainly do." "But we haven't eyes like eagles, or falcons." "We live within... a possibility of seeing, which is our own." "Presuming our eyes... are normal." "We don't see... too little, or too much." "NOBEL PRIZE OF LITERATURE To illustrate this... if Romeo had the eyes of a falcon... he wouldn't have fallen in love with juliet... because the skin he would see... wouIdn't be a pretty sight." "A falcon's acute eyesight... doesn't see human skin as we do." "reality never really exists." "It's always a point of view... a conditioned look." "Man sees the world one way, animals another." "We have the illusion that..." "LITERATURE TEACHER dogs see as we do." "films can show a dog's point of view... as if it were ours... but it isn't." "Each experience of sight is limited." "We don't know things as they are, only according to our experience." "Knowing reality, then..." "If I believe God made my eyes... to see reality as it really is, great!" "But since we know that isn't so, it's not worth wasting time on it." "So now we are going to meet gabriel." "If the eye is the window of the soul... then you have to look through that window with another eye." "And that eye is also a window of the soul... and so you look through that window..." "POET with another eye." "The window doesn't look... what looks is an eye." "In a sense it's a complicated metaphor... and doesn't solve the real problem... of explaining what sight is... because this story about window of the soul leads to infinity... and never arrives at the soul itself." "fortunately, most of us... are able to see also with our ears..." "FILMMAKER and hear, and see with our brain... with our stomach, with our soul..." "Seeing happens partly through the eyes, but not entirely." "PHOTOGRAPHER, PHILOSOPHER" "But you are not seers, you are blind... because nowadays, we live in a world of blindness." "We see pictures through TV ready-made images." "We're unable to see that, we're blind... because we have lost the inner vision, we've no distance anymore." "Of course we do see in a generally blind way." "For exampIe, I have a small TV set... and I watch it without actually looking at it." "It's so clichéd... that I don't need to see it physically... in order to know what's on." "If I phone someone to check, they say..." ""you're right, that's what's happening."" "I went blind because of two accidents." "War wounds." "First I had an accident with my left eye... then in the right with a mine detonator." "I really am a war casualty, except that it was postwar." "I took my first photos when I was already blind, at school." "My sister bought a Zork 6, a Russian camera... which she lent me." "I took some pictures... of my schoolmates..." "Then I took the film to a photographer, who has already died." "miraculously they came out." "I was so surprised." "I thought..." ""I can't see pictures, but nevertheless I make them."" "I'm forty centimeters from the camera's focus." "Wait, I'II measure it." "Where are you?" "Wait, I must check the distance." "That's perfect." "That's my niece Verônica, I photographed her... in a field I saw one time." "I asked her to run and dance... she was wearing a little bell which I listened to... so I photographed the bell." "But the bell cannot be seen." "So it's a photography of the invisible." "Sometimes I feel things by myself." "Sometimes I hear a person... and turn the camera towards the voice, or someone tells me..." "Sometimes there are books which tell me..." "Sometimes it's my heart who tells me..." "If I'm in love with a landscape or with a woman..." "I try to make her mortal..." "I do biblical photos, I do female nudes for biblical reasons." "When Adam and Eve realized they were half naked they also realized... they had become mortals." "So I photograph women's mortality." "It's both tragic and beautiful." "I capture the mortality of women... to love them more in life, in time." "I remember when I was younger..." "I'd ask boys:" ""Can you see a pretty girl?"" "And I'd fall in love with a girl... who pleased them more than she pleased me." "Now, I prefer looking directly myself." "One shouIdn't speak other people's language... have others look for oneself, because, in this case... you exist through the other." "You must try to exist by yourself." "Are there other good-Iooking men here besides me?" "MODEL Not at all, not one." "I've another question." "I hope you're not too sad that..." "I can't look at you physically, only with a third eye." "Otherwise I've got a little mirror." "That way you can see yourself." "Just in case the absence of being looked at frustrates you at all." "I don't think this is the case." "What do you say?" "Can you see it?" "Yes, I can." "Do you need it?" "Not at all." "You never discover yourself... thinking out of focus." "You believe you think straight, at certain times, more clearly... or at other times, you're in doubt, uncertain... but the idea of out of focus in our visual world... is very serious." "I don't think of myself as out of focus... but does that mean the world is out of focus, or that I am?" "The amazing experience I had... when I put on glasses for the first time... was noticing how many details one normally sees... which I hadn't seen before wearing glasses." "One thing I thought marvelous... was that trees were multiple." "I knew intellectually that the trees were made up of individual leaves." "But I just saw that mass." "When I put on glasses I noticed that... even if I couldn't see the individual leaves..." "I couId see the multiplicity which makes up a tree..." "That was a marvelous discovery." "I can't go on stage without glasses, or contacts." "ACTRESS I must be able to see the other actor..." "look into his eyes." "I don't even hear properly." "If my contacts faII out on stage, that's happened several times..." "I immediately feel emotionally disconcerted." "Not seeing a colleague on stage is like death to me." "I feed off seeing myself in the other person's eye." "although I listen, I have to see the other person." "ARTIST Mirrors aren't really... part of my Iife." "When you ask me whether I Iook in the mirror... whether I Iike seeing myself wearing glasses..." "I think it's just a passing figure." "It's almost like a shadow that passes." "I don't pay much attention." "I don't really pay attention." "And anyway, in order to see anything in the mirror..." "I have to be close... my double is too close, it's never far enough... there's never enough space." "Can you see me here?" "More or less." "And where are your glasses?" "At home, in their case." "And why aren't you wearing them?" "I'm embarrassed." "What?" "Embarrassed." "I remember being scared... it's a question of the other person's gaze... of him thinking I couId see when I couldn't, that scared me." "I had this fear." "I can't really explain exactly what scared me... and when I tried wearing the glasses, they were no Ionger the right ones." "I was ashamed." "Shame is a form of fear... the shame of wearing glasses... this presence of fear, it's more diffuse." "An image for this sensation would be when they disguise... a teenager's face, on TV, with those square computer graphics... to hide their identity." "I think that's an image... that corresponds to this feeling." "I think you are more aware of framing..." "For a while, when I was thirty or so, I tried contact lenses..." "Even when I had the lenses on, I was constantly looking for my glasses... because I saw sharp without the lenses... but I was missing the frame." "Your viewing... your seeing is more selective, I think..." "And you are more aware of what you actually see." "If I don't have my glasses, I feel..." "I see too much... and I don't want to see that much." "I want to see... more refrained." "As you said, this was an experience... that seemed painful, but it was very enriching... it leads to great subjectivity, it makes you think... so many things you normally never think about." "Today I consider it a good experience... although I thought it was bad at the time." "It makes way for subjectivity, in people, in relationships." "When we're only on the outside, and everything's fine, we're OK." "knowledge comes from what disturbs us." "Unrest makes us think, and seek things." "No, it never bothered me much." "It never really bothered me." "The only thing I always refused..." "WRITER which happened very rarely... were girls who asked me to take my glasses off in bed..." "I didn't like to take them off." "Not many partners ever asked me that." "Few girls asked me to take off my glasses." "I thought they were rather degenerate... insisting that I take off my glasses..." "I wouldn't usually do it." "I first saw the world..." "FILMMAKER through films." "I got to know the world later, after seeing films." "I started noticing I had trouble seeing in the cinema." "I couldn't see in focus at the cinema." "That's how I first noticed." "I used to see well... but at a certain moment I began not seeing well." "It wasn't in real life that I noticed, it was through films." "Men who wear glasses are much more kind, sweet and unprotected..." "Have you noticed?" "The act of seeing and of looking..." "NEUROLOGIST, WRITER it's not just looking out there... not just looking at what is visible but also, I think, looking at... what is invisible." "In a sense, that's what one means by imagination." "What I Ioved so much about books is that... whatever they gave you, it wasn't really inside the book... it was what you added, as a child... that made the story happen." "As a child, you could read between the lines and... you could add all your imagination." "Your imagination really completes the words." "And I felt that, when I was starting to see movies, I saw them like that." "I wanted to read between the lines." "And at that time, it was possible." "The westerns of John Ford, you could read between the images." "There was so much space between every shot... that you could still project yourself into it." "Today, movies are sort of completely closed, wall to wall... there's no more space to dream yourself into it." "Most of the films that come out today don't leave you any space." "What you see is what you get." "You don't have to dream yourself into it because they come complete." "I'm very dominated by primitive things..." "I think they govern my soul..." "POET more than my eyes." "I don't have..." "My own things do not come to me through my eyes... they don't come in, they appear inside me... from inside." "They don't enter through my eyes." "unfortunately I don't think this is what you want to hear." "The eye sees... memory... reviews things... and imagination is what "transsees"... transfigures the world... which makes another world for the poet and the artist in general." "Transfiguration is very important for the artist." "It's not just as if the eyes, you know... if one says that the eyes are the windows of the soul... it suggests, somehow, in a sense, that the eyes are passive... or that things just come in." "But the soul and the imagination go out..." "I mean, what one sees is continually modified by what one knows... what one hopes, what one wishes, by one's emotions... by the culture, by the latest scientific theories..." "I think sort of a..." "Look." "Once one has seen iron filings on top of a magnet... and what a magnetic field looks like..." "I think this enters one's imagination, in a way..." "I can see, in a sense, the invisible field around the magnet." "I can't see it, but I can see it." "I can see it with the eyes of the mind." "My father's sister, my aunt, she was my favorite aunt, she was blind." "When I was little, I always tried to run around with closed eyes... because I really wanted to know what it was to not be able to see." "So I tried and see how long I couId go in the house, without seeing." "I think I never made more than half an hour." "Then, I just couldn't physically bear it, I had to open my eyes." "She lost her eyesight when she was seven or eight years old... and ever since never saw anything anymore." "And I just couldn't imagine how it was not to be able to see." "I was very preoccupied with that when I was a kid." "BELO HORIZONTE'S COUNCILMAN" "Turn first left, here." "ArnaIdo, how come you know the way, if you can't see?" "You make a map in your head." "I made a model of BeIo Horizonte." "Park anywhere here, to fetch a girl who lives in that building there." "You can see, I have to pay attention to other reference points... downhill, turns, street noise... they're the signs I use as references." "Do you remember how this square look like?" "Yes, I have it in my mind." "It's a square... surrounded by old buildings, from when the city was founded." "Niemeyer's building in on the corner... at the far end, the governor's palace." "On the other side... there's the ice cream place..." "I was born with retinal degeneration... so when I was about 1 7, 1 8, 1 9..." "I went completely blind." "The first difficulty is accepting being blind." "There was a facilitator..." "I have been brought up in a house... with 40 other people..." "It was my grandparents' house with their 1 0 children... and all of us, grandchildren." "That protected me from being over-protected by mom and dad." "They couldn't give... more attention to one than the other... there were so many of us... 50 people at lunch, every day... so you had to struggle to survive." "When I was born, my father had been blind for a Iong time already." "He was already used to it." "difficult moments..." "You ask me if there were difficult moments..." "I can't remember any specially difficult moment." "I never thought to myself:" "how difficult this is." "I can't remember... my parents having a special attitude... treating me any different from my seven brothers." "I don't know whether... they didn't give me special treatment out of discrimination... knowing they should not treat me differently... or whether it was impossible." "My father earned very little." "Instead of finding it a problem, on the contrary... we wanted to take dad to school, so everyone could meet my father." "We were proud of him." "Hey guys, you must meet my father!" "He is blind!" "It was almost like an advantage over the other girls." "My father knows, I took him to school several times... to prove that he really can't see." "Besides, I used to have a tough time, just like the others." "I was given things to do... by my uncles too: "Do this..." "go buy me some cigarettes."" "And I'd fool around with all my twenty cousins... all the same age, it was bedlam." "When I began learning to read..." "I wanted to read to him." "I wanted him to listen to me." "There was no way he could read to me." "So I had that incentive, that was different from other people." "I always told him what I was seeing and learning." "My girls learned to eat very young because I fed them..." "I'd feed MadaIena, for instance... and put rice in her ear, her hair." "So I'd put the tray on the floor, she'd mess around..." "learning to eat very young, and to talk too, because... she'd point out something to me, and I wouldn't know what it was." "There's this story about my father, I know because he told me... and he also told my mother, 20 years later... that when I was little, still a baby... he was in the sea with me." "A wave came... and threw me in one direction, and he fell in the other." "There was no one else, and he was saying: where's my daughter?" "Jesus, that was terrible." "It was late afternoon, there was no one around." "I couId still see the contrast... the water was all white with the reflections of the sunset... and my daughter, when she catches the sun... she gets really tanned, black almost." "So there I was, standing still... when something dark passed in the milky water..." "I put out my hand, and it was her." "That's how I got my gray hair." "It was like a century of anxiety all in 1 0-20 seconds." "When I dream, I see images..." "I ask what color things are, what they're like, what shape." "And then I dream about them." "I have erotic dreams... dreams about women, about images..." "I have normal dreams, I guess they're like yours." "But in my sex life, relationships with women..." "I think I have the same difficulties we all have... fear, and all that... but not in bed, not making love." "I don't have any problems there." "Don't you miss seeing?" "Not really..." "I mean... my hands, when it comes to touching... my partners always like it... because I explore more with my hands." "And in the dark... my partners always ask..." "Do you want the light on, or off?" "And they always want it completely dark... to be equal... most of the time." "FILMMAKER" "I can look at you and you probably see that I can look at you." "As before, when I was looking at somebody... that somebody always turned and, who am I talking to... which is terribly, terribly upsetting, because... you don't get that contact with people." "I remember my mother, always looking at me with very... a very depressed and sad way... kind of, looking at you but not communicating with you..." "looking through you and saying..." ""Oh, my poor child." "Oh, how horrible."" "And that has affected my..." "sort of... that I'm a failure, because my mother look at me that way." "But I was determined not to be a failure and fight back... and do what I can... choose a profession where, something that I had, which nobody else has... can turn that piece of ash..." "turns it into... a jewel." "DIRECTED BY MARJUT RIMMINEN" ""Many Happy Returns" is very much about the trauma of being deformed." "But, I did make the film for another reason, really." "In that film... the damage was done mentally to the child... by seeing and witnessing things that are... difficult and traumatic." "You damaged your vision, in a way and... the film was much about that rather than being deformed." "I wanted to be a princess, just like my schoolmates... and play the part of the Ieading princess in the school play." "But I was never ever chosen to be the princess." "And then, my part was to be a king." "And most of the time on the stage..." "I was under a gray cloth... being enchanted as a stone." "And right at the end of the play, when the spell was broken..." "I was allowed to raise, and be a king... for about two minutes, and that was the end of the play." "That was my part." "So, I didn't want... after a while, I did not want to be the Ieading lady..." "I started imagining things." "And the fact that I am a film maker... in fact, animator, animation film maker..." "I play all the parts because..." "I move my puppets or I draw the characters myself... so, I'II do the acting for all of the parts." "And I Iove that!" "Now, at last, I got that princess role... which I always wanted at the school." "The... what's the word... the paradox of this all is that... now I had my last eye operation, which was fairly successful... and the eye is correct..." "and nobody has noticed!" "Nobody said: "Hey, what happened to your eye?" "How wonderful!"." "Nobody has noticed." "So, obviously, all this trauma has been for what?" "It's my internal damage." "And I guess that's what I've been trying to deal with in that film... that the damage was really you lost an eye... and you became deformed, and your face was like a wrinkled... prune, because... you are ugly because you have a squint... which nobody noticed..." "Tragic, isn't it?" "FILMMAKER" "That question, are there moments when you do things differently..." "I remember when I was shooting "Jacquot de Nantes"... which is called "Jacquot" in other countries." "It's the life... childhood and adolescence of Jacques Demy... when he was a child and they called him "Jacquot"." "So, I was shooting the film that he had told me the story... and he was there, watching the shooting of himself, as a child... and that was happening in a garage in Nantes, where he had been raised..." "I used this camera, an Erikson Camex." "It works frame by frame." "And I remember thinking..." "I do that fiction about the youth of Jacques but he is there, alive... and maybe not alive for longtime, since he was ill." "And I thought, technically, even literally, when you say... what can you do for somebody, you say "oh, he stayed very near... as near as possible" to somebody who is suffering or in pain..." "And, as a film maker, being near is near." "So, I filmed what other people can see, his face, arms... and hands... which means nothing specially intimate..." "like in his bath or..." "at home..." "But the way I filmed his arms, and hands, and face... so near, so near..." "the texture of that man... the skin..." "you can see each hair..." "like... you're inside the skin..." "it's very very near." "I think that is a vision I only had because I was afraid to loose him." "And I lost him." "He died, maybe six months after we did these shots." "DIRECTED BY AGNÈS VARDA After you, I won't have... any other love..." "After you, my heart shall be forever closed..." "In this world, nothing attracts me but your smile..." "In this world, nothings touches me but your eyes..." "So blue..." "I don't think somebody else could have done... exactly the shot the way I made them." "So, again, vision is altered by feelings... strong feelings." "We are all sort of emotional creatures." "And I think all of our perceptions, all of our sensations... all of our experiences are charged with emotion... personal emotion." "And, I think, in a sense... the emotion will get coded with the image." "interestingly... sometimes the emotion can get separated off from the image." "people who have this problem which is called Capgras syndrome... may faiI to recognize their husband... their wife or children... and insist they are being deluded." "They will say:" ""You are not really my husband." "You look like him, but you are an imitation." "You're not real." "You've taken his place."" "What seems to happen here is that... the emotional feeling of warmth and familiarity is missing." "There is visual recognition but no emotional recognition and... in this situation, the person is thrown into a contradiction." "And they have to infer that they are being deceived... that this is a trick of some sort." "And I think this brings out that visual recognition, visual memory... and every form of perception has to be inseparably linked with emotion." "And that if it gets separated... from the proper emotion... then there can be a severe breakdown." "What is seeing?" "It's an interpretation." "Everything we see is measured by our concepts... and values." "There are so many things that are the same..." "Octavio Paz says: "Sometimes we pass by a wall and we only see a wall." "One day it reveals itself in a different way..." "like something else we've never seen before"." "I often went to the Opera at Lisbon... always up in the upper balcony... where I couId see a crown." "The royal box was down below." "It stretched right up... with a golden crown on top." "From down in the stalls the crown looked magnificent." "But from where we were, it was in four sections... and hollow, covered in spider webs and dust." "That's a lesson I've never forgotten." "I never forgot this lesson." "To know things you must go round them... go right around them." "For instance, I see normally." "I think this is normal for me." "And my eyes never stop." "I'm not wearing glasses so you can can see that my eyes never stop." "This is how they are." "I'II let you ask a few questions... before speaking to you about sight about what sight is." "Go right ahead, tell us." "I can go ahead?" "well, for instance... when I started dating girls." "There was this game we'd play called "secret wedding"." ""Secret wedding"." "Ten boys stood here... and ten girls opposite... all about 9 or 1 0 years old." "Everyone stood there... and there were all those pretty girls." "So my eyes went like this." "could you see the pretty girls?" "perfectly well." "Yes, when looking at women, my sight works all right." "I can see a little better." "But the distance was from here to where you are now." "I know that when I Iook at people... they never know who I'm looking at." "That was an advantage... to be looking at one of those girls, because they were all pretty... but we always like one more than the others." "I had my eye on one of them, but my eyes never settle on anyone." "There was always one or two that liked me." "I don't know what it is about my charisma..." "I've plenty of charisma, to this day, for this sort of things..." "So suddenly the girl would say:" ""Me?" And another one too." "I would look and say, yes, you." "Two or three would come over... cause I couldn't point at this or that one." "So two or three would come and then I couId choose." "You, you there, come here." "Did having different eyesight affect your personality?" "Not at all." "I think it enhanced my personality... that happens when... you feel that something like this is hindering you." "I never felt anything." "As I told you, I owe this to my upbringing." "I never missed having good sight... because I don't know how others see." "I don't know how people see me." "travelling by bus is wonderful." "Great fun." "traveling by bus is fun." "I'm sitting there seeing marvelous things... no one else can see, only me." "Everyone thinks I can't see but they see less than I can." "This inner vision I have... it's the one we develop more... if the other isn't so good." "The place of the inner vision is right here, from where all of us... humans, see the most... it's right here." "It's from where we see the most." "And where we hear more isn't here." "That's just the technical part, for the conventional things in life." "This is where we hear more... what we call the nape of the neck." "This is where we hear more." "You can tell because when we hear something marvelous... no one does this." "Everyone does this." "Sometimes sight hinders the other vision... the inner vision." "I remember when I was about 30..." "I said in an interview, the press gave a Iot of attention to it..." "I had asked God to make me blind for a while... a temporary blindness... because there are other things I felt I couId develop more." "One sees so many ugly things... this hinders the accuracy of vision... our vision of what we want to do in life." "I was in a restaurant in Lisbon... alone... and I suddenly thought..." ""What if we were all blind?"" "And then, almost immediately..." "I answered my own question." ""But we are all blind, really."" "blind to reason, blind to our sensibility... blind to everything which stops us... from being functional people... in human terms... makes us just the opposite, aggressive, egotistical, violent." "well, that's how we are." "And the spectacle the world offers us is just that." "An unjust world, a world of suffering devoid of justification." "Worse, of justified suffering." "We can explain what happens but we can't justify it." "The image which I miss the most is the one everyone misses... seeing oneself with one's own eyes." "Others think they see themselves with their own eyes... but they need a mirror like I do." "But for me, mirrors are different." "That's also lucky too... because that way I can't drown in the water like Narcissus." "I'm Narcissus with no mirror, so that's lucky." "Evgen!" "In French." "ACTRESS" "I touched her, I touched her face..." "I mean, I Iooked closely." "For you who see, I touched her." "But to me, a blind man, I Iooked at her close up." "Then he made this photograph and when I got the photograph back... the very strange discovery I had was that... first, he put an owl on my shoulder." "For instance, my mother always called me... when I was a child..." "` my little "owl"... because I didn't want to go to sleep at night." "I wanted to live at night." "I still have that problem." "It's something nocturnal... because I photographed Hanna in darkness... and then I put Minerva's owl, Athene's owl... to symbolize wisdom... her wisdom and, at the same time... the gaze which is created in darkness... in the world of owls... in the world of wisdom." "And it was at the border of not being me and yet being me." "This is very interesting because... he's photographing in a mental... mental pictures." "Language and images are linked... the word is blind, but it is the word which makes things visible." "Being blind, the word makes things visible, create images." "Thanks to the word, we have images." "Nowadays images create themselves." "They are no Ionger the result of the word." "And that's serious." "There must be a balance between words and images." "MicheIangeIo never saw Moses... didn't follow him to Mount Sinai... didn't see how he threw the tablets on the golden calf." "But he read the text." "What's your handwriting like, Hanna?" "This is typewritten." "It was not written by me..." "My handwriting is rather illegible." "Go on, write here, Hanna." "It's pretty!" "And I write SchyguIIa like that." "OK." "Yes." "We've never lived in plato's cavern so much as today." "Nowadays we truly live in plato's cavern." "The very images which show us reality... in some way substitute reality." "We're in a world... which we call an audiovisual world." "In effect, we're repeating the situation... of the people imprisoned... or tied up, in plato's cavern..." "looking ahead, seeing shadows... and believing these shadows are reality." "AII these centuries were necessary... for plato's cavern to finally appear... at a time in the history of humanity, which is now." "And it will become more so." "We see so many things out of context." "Most of the images we see, we see them out of context." "Most of the images we see are not trying to tell us something... they are trying to sell us something." "Most of the stuff we see, magazines, television... they are trying to sell us something." "But the most basic human need... is that something is telling us something." "Like a child, when it goes to sleep... it wants to hear a story... not so much because it cares about the story... but the very act of story telling creates security... and comfort." "Even when we grow old... we still love the comfort and security that comes out of a story... whatever it is about." "The structure of the story creates meaning." "And most of our life happens without much meaning..." "So are all sort of craving for meaning." "In the future, we'II have something like... 500 TV channels." "And that's really amazing... from a point of view... of entertainment, information, culture even... although I have my doubts about that..." "And I said..." "This is important." "But suppose I have 500 newspapers delivered to my home every day." "If I did that, people would call me crazy." "How could I possibly read 500 newspapers every day?" "And how many conclusions would I come to reading 500 newspapers?" "Of course, it's impossible." "I haven't even the time for it." "There is no point in having those 500 newspapers at home." "I think it's... it's the same with all the other stuff that we have too much of..." "We have too much of many things these days." "And the only we don't have enough of is time." "Most of us have too much of everything." "And, too much of everything means you get numb." "The overflow of images today, means that, basically... we are unable to pay attention." "basically, we are unable to be touched by images." "Stories have to be extraordinary to touch us today because... simple stories, we just can't see them anymore." "We're living in a kind of audiovisual amusement park... where sounds and images are multiplied." "More or less, I believe this is going to happen... that we'II feel increasingly lost." "First of all, lost to ourselves." "Then, lost in relation to the world." "We'II end up wandering around without really... knowing who we are, what we are for... what meaning our existence has." "I have another example." "again about Jacques Demy." "I made a documentary when he was shooting..." ""The Young girls of Rochefort", in 1 966." "I found the images much later but... there is a scene that is in a bar... and he had bought a new sweater, a white sweater." "And in that bar there is Catherine Deneuve, lovely like an angel... with a little dress, pink and yellow... she's divine, she's 24..." "And here is Jacques, so proud to have the new sweater." "He takes the tag off and he starts to put the sweater... and he puts the sweater, and he puts the sweater... and I stay on him." "After a while, you don't even look at that beauty, Deneuve... you just look at the man, putting his sweater on... so slowly that, you know, it's almost funny." "And I remember, in the narration I say that... never, a journalist, a reporter... would have kept filming my darling putting his sweater on... only me, because nobody would have stayed to see that." "And he does this, and he does that, and it's endless." "And I stayed." "And then, when I see that later, now that he is gone..." "I was always mad at him, because he was so slow... and because I filmed him, I say, now I forgive him totally... now that it is on an image, that people can see how slow he was... people smile, because it's funny in a way, you know... because you really forget Catherine, just look at the sweater..." "I think only me, loving him in that way... could have filmed that image." "So, the alteration is not because you are ill, or sick or blind..." "I think it's the feeling you have, your position... in the moment of the filming." "Your relation, your thread with the subject, the person you are filming... or the time of your life and all that." "Don't you believe?" "In the beginning, it was a family film." "DIRECTED BY AGNÈS VARDA RosaIie was happy to be there... and the mother too, although she was continually afraid to disturb..." "A journalist would never have filmed my beloved, so long... putting his sweater... in a rhythm that was his own." "There's nothing simpler than..." "Nothing could be simpler, could it?" "nevertheless, arriving at it... at this reduction of tragedy, of tragic foreboding..." "Beethoven must have suffered a great deal in order to reach it." "But he succeeded... this synthesis." "It's simple and it isn't." "simplicity isn't carelessness, not at all." "simple, substantive... the only thing which something could be." "That which cannot be reduced." "That's how I define simple." "I think that's close... to my idea of beauty." "I spend a Iarge part of the day in the garden, outside..." "looking at the plants... and above all, following their growth." "This preoccupation of mine with things which grow... in this case plants... and what happens to them... the flower, the fruit... if they're sick, if there are weeds, anything at all..." "This special attention... to the growth of a tree or any plant... there may be another reason I'd never thought of before." "That now I'm 77 years old... with my Iife coming to an end... it's as if I needed to watch things... which are still starting out, which grow." "I go down to the garden, just to be there, to look." "And sometimes I even, I wouldn't say, to speak with them... since they do not answer... but I comment out, more or less loud... on how they are, whether they look well or not... it's a little pathetic... ridiculous, but anyway." "Push, now." "Here comes gabriel, his little hands first." "Raimunda, look over here."