- Headlines. - Writing.
- Eden. - Architecture.
Composition.
- Make-up. - Catherine Jourdan.
- Performance. - Sharp objects.
- Games. - Viscous substances.
- Mise-en-scene. - Flowing blood.
Catherine Jourdan. Richard Leduc.
- Pierre Zimmer. - Sexual violence.
Juraj Kukura.
- In the labyrinth. - Sylvain Corthay.
- Murder. - Lorraine Rainer.
- Sex. - Jarmila Kolenicova.
- Playing cards. - Distance.
- Chess games. - Luawik Kroner.
Theatricality.
- Phantasm. - Francois Gervai.
Laboratory. Catherine Robbe-Grillet.
EDEN AND AFTER
Eden and After.
- Eden and After. - Objective.
- Eden. - Subjective.
Injective.
Surjective.
Bijective.
Images and lights.
Editing.
Score.
Objects. Pictures.
To imagine.
Imagination.
Ghost
Phantom.
Haunted house.
Mirror.
Rotary mirror.
Parallel mirror.
Distorting mirror.
Cinema.
Reality.
My life.
Two girls to hold her arms.
Hurt her if she moves too much.
Spread her legs.
Make her stay like that.
Lambda to the power of N over factorial N.
Multiplied by
sum from V equals zero
up to the infinite of -1 to the power of V.
Factorial N plus 2V over factorial 3V plus 2.
T to the power of 3V plus 2.
The image of an application F ls a part of the arrival of F
formed by the images of first F elements.
A relation of equivalence in an entirety E
is a reflexive, transitive and symmetrical relation.
Number of degrees of freedom ls synonymous with size.
If V is size N
N vector of V constitutes a basis only -
When looking for a geometric spot,
if you have three dots not in a line,
don't think the result is a circle.
For nothing looks more like a circle than two circles.
And nothing looks more like two circles
than a lemniscate to a Pascal's snail.
The image of a sum is the sum of the images.
Here you are.
Six shots. Just one bullet.
A one in six chance of being killed.
Five.
Four shots in the air, the fifth a success.
There remains one chance in five.
One in four.
One in three.
One chance in two of dying.
Come on, shoot!
Of course, this is stupid.
Not more stupid than anything else.
He's dead.
How was it?
Average.
It'd be better with real bullets.
There is always the risk of a splinter in one eye.
Let's go to bed.
- I'm bored! - Fucking, always fucking.
- Sell that thing. - What thing?
That daub's worth a fortune.
- What would we do with the money? - A voyage.
- Where to? - Anywhere. Somewhere else.
What does it mean?
It's called Composition No. 234.
Your uncle had some imagination!
We'll go on a trip to a warm and dry country.
A naked and gleaming country.
- Hard. - With vigor.
Tough, transparent, rigid.
El cetera.
The desert.
In order to get money,
we're going to sell the blue square No. 234 to an American museum:
bequeathed to eternal culture by the deceased uncle of Violette.
And to obtain the picture we'll treacherously murder
his niece!
Now comes the scene of the poison.
DRINK BLOOD
BLOOD = LIFE
If this story bores you, then you're heartless.
Me, I have heart.
So big I'm fed up.
Death march for our friend Boris.
Just across the university,
there's a big cafe, all glass and steel,
called Eden.
We go there after class, or before, or instead of.
In there, we invent our stories,
we act our parts.
In there, we pretend to be happy or sad,
to be in love, to break up, to have adventures,
since in our studious and useless life
nothing ever actually happens.
The waiter who brings the lemonades mixed with quinine or cocaine
ls called Franz.
That Franz pretends to be bizarre and ominous.
He's said to deal in mythological goods:
drugs, white trafficking for the Middle East,
armored cars,
tanks camouflaged as baskets of flowers,
ingots of gold, mirages.
His name isn't likely Franz, but rather Francois Gervai,
Daniel Dupont, Jean Robin or anything else.
Newspapers say our generation has lost faith, the notion of values.
That we take refuge in false paradises,
that our favorite games are homosexual prostitution
and group raping.
After reading all that we've tried everything just to see.
We've played seriously, with steadiness.
It's amused us... moderately.
Marie-Eve ls jealous.
She pretends to pretend to be jealous.
But she fools no one. She says she'll commit suicide.
Who knows why.
My room is empty foo.
Just a large bed and the blue-and-white picture,
my uncle's last souvenir.
I liked it in the past.
I liked my uncle too, in the photos.
I've never known my father either.
He died in Indochina.
I'm lying, of course.
That running boy is Marc-Antoine.
He plays the hunted man looking for an outlet,
knowing too well he'll be caught.
It's then that we saw the stranger watching us through the window.
Red wine.
I can show you something similar.
Give me two empty bottles.
Take them.
You stand beside her.
Drop one.
Now the other.
Pick up the pieces.
Give me your hand.
I learned that trick in Africa.
I spent 30 years of my life there.
Ghosts of horsemen against the sunsets.
Africa is another ancient continent.
Matter becomes magic.
The black spirit, the obscure conscience of our reason.
Dead matter that is no longer rigid.
Dead matter becomes magic.
The blue water, the white sand,
and the hidden barrier that reveals itself to you.
Eyes full of reflections of the desert.
The young prisoners are now locked in cells
where no light gets in.
The wizards prepare powders of poisonous plants
capable of changing people suddenly,
while priestesses
continue to do their sacred dances.
Meanwhile, women have to suffer
a long series
of initiation trials.
The mage dances around large fires until collapsing.
If one of you wishes to try the experiment,
I have here some of the “powder of fear.”
Suddenly, everything was normal again:
faces, objects, gestures.
At least, in appearance.
As if Eden and its patrons tried to appear reassuring.
From then on, it's all a bit blurred.
Or rather, it's more confused in my memory.
During the rest of the evening we played improvised scenes...
directed by that stranger.
He said our games were too abstract.
He told us:
Before I came in [ watched you through the window.
The gestures were stiff,
as though you were ill at ease in new clothes.
Or afraid to get dirty or to leave prints.
Break it.
You juggle ideas but you won't get involved with living matter,
as if you weren't born yet.
You smile. You"re sheltered.
Outside, there are rain, snow and sun.
And the night.
Here, everything is air-conditioned.
It's never cold nor warm.
Whoever draws the shortest straw will have to break his own shell
in front of everyone.
Bend her on the table.
I can teach you another game.
Give me a key.
It would be better if it were her key.
Hers.
- Tonight. - Yes. Where?
You choose.
The channel in front of the factory.
What's your name?
Violette. And yours?
They call me Duchemin.
- I have to go. I have an appointment. - Is it important?
I'll know soon.
- Are you coming with me? - No, I have to work.
- You'll come? - I will.
My uncle's last souvenir.
I liked it in the past.
I liked my uncle too, in the photos.
That picture is empty and dull. I used to look at it for hours.
Now, I know it's worth a lot of money and I like it less.
I've never known my father either.
He died in Indochina.
We've often played at war.
Resistance, heroism, treason,
Interrogations with torture...
- Please, on which side is the water? - The water?
- The channel with the barges. - That way.
Or this way. It's the same.
You're in the middle of an eight.
Two immense cylinders side by side.
Let me explain.
Or else you could get lost and might never get out.
Not to be.
Or else, play.
That's the dilemma.
No feelings.
None of my feelings exists...
except those I'm playing to test out.
Come in my arms, my Ophelia
Or else [ drown instead of you
Shit! That's Macbeth now.
After the last door,
I'm surprised to see it's becoming light.
How could such a long time have elapsed
since those cries chased me away from the spot of my date
and forced me to hide in the factory?
I feel I awake out of a confused sleep
with the fear of being late for school.
Anyway, I go back to the channel.
Now it's broad daylight and I easily find the bridge.
No one there, of course.
The stranger must've grown weary of waiting.
Marc-Antoine!
Marie-Eve!
Boris!
Jean-Pierre!
- Come quickly. Come! - What's up?
- I think he's dead. - Who is dead?
- Duchemin. - Who is Duchemin?
Last night
you all went into that new factory near the channel.
No, we stayed here.
He was there.
- Who was? - The stranger.
The crabs ate him!
Haven't you smoked a bit?
And my bag?
My bag.
- You left your bag here? - No.
- Where was it? - I don't know. Lost.
Elementary, my dear Watson.
The bag came here and ate the corpse.
- My key. - Must be at the cafe.
What will I do without my key?
Come and sleep at my place.
Nobody believed my story of a corpse.
After all, there was no trace of it.
You don't believe me either.
- Are you sure he was dead? - Yes.
- Sure it was him? - Yes, here's the proof.
I found it in his jacket when I pulled him out.
IN JERBA, AS AGREED. CLAUDE
He was called Eric.
- He only gave his last name. - Dutchman.
Yes, something like that. I thought it was Duchemin.
Jerba is the land he spoke about.
It really looks like blood. Was he wounded?
I don't remember.
- Isn't Franz here? - Who is Franz?
- The waiter here. - So the former waiter was named Franz?
Why “the former”?
Because he stopped working here last night.
So suddenly?
Surely not. My arrival was decided some while ago.
Really?
When you arrived here, did you find a key?
There's one on the piano.
I feel at once something's changed.
The blue-and-white picture has vanished.
Stolen without the lock being forced.
I discover I've known it for a long while.
That absurd game with my key,
last night's accident, which was surely a crime,
and Franz's abrupt departure.
Only the red-stained postcard ls left to me.
The image, a plain wall of a house,
reminds me of a short film about Tunisia,
which we saw last week at Cinema Eden.
The whitewashed walls of the house
against which the blue geometry of the doors and windows stands out
The balustrade seems like a still photo
as the sun flattens out the surfaces
and removes every effect of death.
The sand foo from the early hours,
deprived of shadows and perspective,
abolishes distances, making them impassable.
Are the famous oases only mirages that have never been reached by any visitor?
And yet no one wants to erase them from the maps
because they seem close, scintillating and real.
Water,
a mirror created by the contact of the air with the burning sun,
but deceptive because one could go for hours towards the open sea
without penetrating it.
- A fine house. - Yes. Is it far?
Not much. By that road.
The second or third block.
You can walk there.
Thank you.
What shall we do now she's arrived?
We must Kill her at once.
No, not at once.
After she's talked.
- I decide right now! - And the picture?
Is it you who'll find it?
You know this house?
This house isn't special.
They're all alike. Could be this one.
That's the day I met Dutchman for the first time.
He was a sculptor or something like that.
He collected cast-out things,
rather big ones which he painted in vivid colors
with naked models.
They were still or frozen In strange and awkward poses
among frames and metal structures.
He pronounced only rare words.
Maybe he wasn't talking at all.
His face, his stature, his pale eyes and gray temples
reminded me of someone violently.
But that impression vanished at once.
Maybe it was that well-known phenomenon called immediate memory
or 'memory of the future.”
When I came info that house,
there was another girl
whom [ seemed to recognize too.
She sat for Dutchman,
but she was probably his mistress (too.
He still had the same slow gestures
of a ploughman accustomed to clay, or of a stone cutter,
with his motionless eyes, his absent look.
What are you looking for?
Nothing. But I've found it.
What? The picture?
What picture?
No.
I found what I didn't know I was looking for.
You found it?
- No, nothing. - You searched poorly.
- No, it's not here. - Franz is making fun of us.
I'll see to it.
Let me go!
They shut me up in a cellar or a kind of cell,
my hands chained behind my back and a blindfold over my eyes.
The first day, I made the blindfold slip
by rubbing my face against the straw.
But they struck me so hard that they tore my clothes to shreds.
And they blindfolded me again.
I don't know when as I can't tell days from nights.
They want to know where the picture is. What picture?
I told them the truth: that I didn't know and didn't care.
But they didn't believe me.
You haven't found that picture yet??
Why?
Because I found out where you hid it.
Let me go, please.
You're hurting me.
Wait. I'll explain everything.
Don't move so much.
Now you'll remain quite still...
and tell me where the picture is hidden.
And if you won't tell me -
Where's the picture?
Check. Nothing doing with Duchemin.
He won't swap the picture for Violette.
So what will we do with that girl?
I've already said: We'll make her talk.
When we know where the picture is, we'll take it ourselves.
You'll never find it.
How do you know?
Why isn't Sonia here?
I'm not Sonia's guardian.
Violette, listen to me.
They'll kill you anyway.
Swallow this powder, and it'll be over.
Who are you?
Nobody.
Stand up.
Take off my chains. It'll be easier.
Want to know if I like you?
Drink this and you'll know my thoughts.
Marc-Antoine?
The small picture. I no longer liked it.
I had already forgotten it.
They could do what they wanted with it. I didn't care.
Boris was dead. Sonia was dead.
Maybe Marc-Antoine and Marie-Eve too.
And I didn't care.
Dutchman was dead. I didn't care about that either.
And now, it was Jean-Pierre's turn. What for?
For that absurd little painting.
A few million francs.
It's impossible.
Or then, for what other reason?
I walked at random without thinking of anything.
I found the sea again.
Now I'm again alone in my room.
Nothing has happened yet.
Presently, I'll go and meet my friends at Eden.
They'll all look tired as if they'd gone far.
Franz will still look like a villain in a play.
We'll drink lemonade with quinine or cocaine.
To get rid of our boredom we'll have games of hide-and-seek and such.
Al the end of the evening, when the game reaches its climax,
suddenly there'll be a great silence.
Slowly, one after the other,
we'll turn our heads towards the windows.
On the other side of the glass we'll see the stranger, just arrived,
looking at us with his pale eyes
and already pushing the door.