From Lisbon…
From Fritz.
"I need your help! I cannot continue.
"Come to Lisbon with all your stuff A.S.A.P.
"No phone. No fax.
"Write."
I might as well go in person.
Europe without frontiers.
No more barriers. Just free movement.
Ask me for my passport, please! At least look in my boot.
If you only knew how much I'm smuggling!
Testing, testing. One, two, three, four…
I've never been so far by car.
You can really see how Europe is becoming one big country.
The languages, the music and the news are different,
but as for the rest…
The countryside's always the same,
always telling the same story of an old continent
that's sick of war.
It's nice to drive and not think about anything,
let yourself be carried along by the road and by history.
Yes, I feel at home here.
It's my home country.
I'm looking for a book to teach me Portuguese.
What kind of book?
Big…
or small?
Small.
But you can already speak Portuguese.
Not well…
Not well. I'm a foreigner.
I'm a foreigner.
Are you English?
No, I'm French.
No, I'm German.
But I live in Portugal.
I'll never get it!
OK, a bit more…
Lesson number one: at the bookshop.
Hello.
What's that?
A flat tyre.
A flat tyre!
Uno flato!
Big or small?
Small, I hope.
That's all I needed!
A flat tyre!
I'm hurrying, Fritz. I'm on my way.
Nothing.
Goodbye forever.
In an air-conditioned bus.
I should have stayed on the motorway. I'm an idiot.
For heaven's sake!
Shit!
Friedrich?
Winter is here.
Good morning.
Fritz, where are you hiding?
About time!
What are you doing?
Are you crazy?
Who are you?
What are you doing in Friedrich's bed?
I don't understand.
I don't speak Portuguese.
You tell me!
"If only I were all people in all places."
Hello, Claudio.
Is that Claudio? Send him a kiss from me.
All right.
Silence, please!
A horse.
Galloping.
He's running fast.
He's galloping.
A match!
What's that?
Fried potatoes!
An egg.
A fried egg!
What did he say?
The cowboy is frightened.
What's that?
It's a car.
No, it's an animal.
I'm scared.
It's a lion!
He's hungry.
He's running away.
He's jumped.
It's cold.
It's freezing.
American?
European.
Tourist?
Working.
A worker.
Bless you.
Thanks.
See you tomorrow.
Goodbye, Mr Inverno.
When a guitar trills
In the hands of a good player
That guitar can teach
Anyone to sing
I want my coffin
To have an unusual shape
The shape of a heart
The shape of a guitar
Guitar, my dear guitar
I've come to cry with you
I feel life is more tender
When you cry with me…
Let's play Ainda.
We're ready.
I'm saying
Certain things
I'm learning
Some others
They're truths
They're quests
Friendships
Adventures
The one who reaches
Lives far away
From the change
From his name
Friendships
Adventures
The one who advances
Keeps his love
Keeps his hopes
Without favour
Ainda…
Pessoa.
Portuguese for "nobody".
Poems by Nobody.
He must have liked that.
He's underlined everything.
I'll get you!
Shit!
"Thought was born blind but Thought knows what is seeing…"
Fritz could have written that.
It sounds better in English.
Hello.
Nice, Fritz.
I like it.
Good afternoon, sir.
I saw you in a film
made by my friend Frederico Monroe, Friedrich.
Don't know him.
Help me find this man.
I can help you.
He had an old camera.
What? Is he mad?
– Can I come to your house? – Yes.
To talk about your life…
Thanks.
Let's go.
I stayed until I was 14.
I left home when I was 14.
I left because there were so many of us.
We needed money for food.
He didn't earn much as a cobbler.
As I liked chatting up girls back then,
I went to dances. And he…
When I didn't come home at night he'd hit me
with wet towels to wake me up.
I got sick of that so I left home…
You got a problem?
The one with the camera.
I'll rip you off.
Let's play Alfama before we go.
To bring us luck.
Even without keyboards it should be all right.
Thanks.
Alfama!
Now
That I remember
As time
Goes by
I wish
To return
To return to you
I wish to meet you again
Forgotten
With each day that passes
I've never again seen the grace
Of your eyes that I love
Bad tuck
It was a love that I didn't keep
Perhaps I was distracted
Whatever happens…
At last, the knife-grinder!
One of the classes?
It wasn't me filming!
"There was no electricity down there
I read, by candlelight, what I could get my hands on
"The Bible in Portuguese
"I reread the first epistle to the Corinthians
"A sea of emotions welled up in me
I am nothing, a fiction What do I want in this world?
"What do I expect of myself and everything?
"If I didn't have love…
"My God! I who have no love
"My God! I have no love."
Pessoa, December 1934.
Shortly before his death.
"If I could predict the future
"If I had all the secrets and knowledge
"And all the beliefs, if I could move mountains
"Without love
"I would be nothing."
Nothing. Yes, that's it.
The sun.
A bird.
The church.
Trees.
Pigeons.
A tram.
A ship.
Now the lady.
We'll do it again.
That was OK.
OK, but crap.
Look how you filmed it!
It's not my fault.
Really interesting!
I'll fast-forward.
You don't know how to film.
You keep shaking.
And you keep slipping.
Because the floor's slippery. What do you expect?
Great excuse!
Why do you keep shaking?
– I was nervous. – So was I.
Fallen again!
Look at that, it's rubbish!
You should buy me a tripod, then!
Day one of the experiment.
This machine records wherever I go, on automatic pilot.
I can be in this bakery
and my eyes are free to wander.
Just what I needed, a visual scratchbook.
Day two of the experiment.
I slowly get used to not being in control.
I try to let my feet walk
and my eyes roam.
The machine records on its own.
Day three of the experiment.
Solitude is a condition for what I'm doing.
Who could be ready to lose himself
and enter the life of a city, if not the lonely?
This reel's finished. Next one.
All right.
Day four of the experiment.
With film, time is so precious.
You try to concentrate everything on the moment the camera's running.
What happens before and after doesn't count.
Time is a whole new experience.
It has no peaks,
everything counts and is of equal importance.
I do not select any more.
What freedom!
Day six of the experiment, I'm tired of going back to the house.
The house keeps me from being with the city.
It creates a protection I no longer want.
My poor Friedrich,
you're a maniac!
I can feel my heartbeat pulse in these shots, literally!
My sight can glide over the city,
my eyes can touch it as if they were hands.
What I see and what I am become one.
He no longer exists on earth.
But He lingers… Where?
There really is an appropriate place for saints.
God exists.
The universe was created by Him.
And what's the use of the universe?
If men…
If mankind disappeared,
the universe would be useless.
Or does it have a purpose in itself,
without the existence of man?
We want to imitate God,
and that's why artists exist.
Artists want to recreate the world
as if they were little gods.
And they do a series of…
a constant rethinking about…
about history, about life,
about things going on in the world,
what we believe has been going on,
only because we believe.
Yes, because finally we believe in memory.
For all is gone.
How can we be sure that all we imagine has happened
has actually happened?
Whom should we ask?
This world…
This supposition, then, is an illusion.
The only true thing would be memory,
but memory is an invention.
Memory, really…
I mean, in cinema…
In cinema the camera can capture a moment,
but that moment is no more.
What cinema really does is bring back a phantom of that moment.
We can no longer be sure if that moment existed
other than on celluloid.
Or is film a guarantee of the existence of that moment?
I don't know.
Or I know less and less about it.
We live in permanent doubt.
Yet we keep our feet on the ground.
We eat, we enjoy life.
Calm down.
Are you blind?
Video tourists!
Complete idiots!
Vidiots!
This is the sound of pigeons in the editing room.
Now the sound of a broken leg… in stereo.
The sound of Friedrich's absence.
I can't!
All right.
Thank you.
What do I think about the world?
If I were ill I'd think about it.
What ideas do I have about things?
What opinions do I have on causes and effects?
What meditations have I had upon God?
I don't know.
For me, to think about that means shutting my eyes
and not thinking.
I have failed altogether.
As I've not achieved any design, perhaps it was all nothing.
Newton's binominal theory is as beautiful as the Venus de Milo.
The fact is, precious few people care.
I move from the window, sit down in a chair.
What shall I think about?
Dogshit.
Seven years of good luck.
Walking down the Rua São Mamede…
This neighbourhood is so poor
even the taxman doesn't come here.
I'm so ruined with love that beggar children stone me
in the alleys.
– You can keep it. – Thank you.
To die is to be no longer seen.
All is truth.
Man is unable to see his own face,
just as he's unable to stare at his own eyes.
If I were…
"If not I, then nobody."
Good morning, Ricardo.
The yellow one.
Good.
Guess what. Switzerland just beat Bolivia 4-1.
Haven't I seen this car before?
Day 21 of the experiment.
All around us, European post-electro garbage.
We're reaching the airport motorway.
A mile and a half to the right.
"I'd love to fall in love with love.
"Can you pass me a cigarette, please?
"We are shadows of ourselves."
Winter! Damn it!
What the hell are you doing in Lisbon?
Walking around,
eating ice-cream on a big stick.
In my spare time I'm recording sounds for a film about Lisbon.
Nothing important.
My film?
I'm not doing that movie any more.
Good to know.
Thanks for the invitation, anyway.
That was a long while back.
You never showed up, matey!
That's funny.
Who's standing in front of you?
And who's been living in your house for the last three weeks?
Ricardo, why didn't you tell me?
You don't speak much, do you?
The boy's mute, you know?
Maybe he didn't want you to know.
Maybe he shouldn't be your only source of your information.
Maybe, even, I was a little late, but…
That's another story.
I'm here now,
that's for sure.
It sounds like you're a little mad at me.
Does it? At you?
Well, any resemblance to any living person is strictly coincidental.
Let me show you something.
Where was I?
"I'd love to fall in love with love…"
Here's my film museum!
In front of us, the big screen!
Well, what's left of it.
The projection room, but that's just a memory too.
Images ain't what they used to be!
They can't be trusted any more.
We all know that. You know that.
When we grew up, images were "telling stories"
and "showing things".
Now they're
selling stories and things.
They've changed under our very eyes.
They don't know how to show anything any more.
They've plain forgotten.
Images are selling the world,
and at a big discount!
When I came here to make this movie I thought I could beat the drift.
We talked about it, man, remember?
I wanted to shoot in black and white on this hand-cranker,
like Buster Keaton in The Cameraman.
Cranking in the streets on my own, a man with a camera.
E viva Dziga Vertov!
Pretending that the whole history of cinema hadn't happened
and that I could just start from scratch,
one hundred years later.
Well, it didn't work, Winter.
That is, for a while it seemed to work,
but then it all collapsed.
I really love this city.
And most of the time I really saw it,
in front of my eyes.
But pointing a camera
is like pointing a gun.
And each time I pointed it, it felt like…
life was drained out of things.
And I cranked and I cranked,
but with each turn of the old handle
the city was receding,
fading further and further,
like the Cheshire cat.
It was becoming unbearable.
Man, I took a real beating.
That's when I called for your help.
And for a while
I lived with the illusion
that sound could save the day,
that your mike could pull my images out of their darkness.
It's… hopeless.
It's all hopeless.
Hopeless.
But there is a way, Winter,
and I'm working on it.
Listen. An image that is "unseen" cannot sell anything.
It's pure,
therefore true and beautiful.
In one word: innocent.
As long as no eye contaminates it,
it's in perfect unison with the world.
If it isn't seen,
the image and the object it represents belong together.
It's only once we look at the image
that the thing in it…
dies.
There it is, Winter.
My "library of the unseen image"!
Every tape was shot with nobody looking through the lens.
Nobody saw them while they were recorded,
nobody verified them afterwards.
I shot every goddamn one on my back!
Those images show the city as it is,
not as I'd want it to be.
There they are, in the first sweet sleep of innocence,
ready to be viewed by some future generation,
with eyes different from ours.
Don't worry, mate, we'll both be dead!
Testing, testing, one, three…
Two, three…
This…
This is a message for Friedrich,
the king of the garbage image emporium…
This is a message for Friedrich,
the king of the garbage image emporium,
the Dziga Vertov of the 1990s,
the Einstein of the "unseen image".
It's nothing to look at.
It's only a message in a bottle, or rather in a bag…
Very funny, Winter!
You're into bags, aren't you?
Oh, Fritz, did you get lost?
Those toy-images have footed you.
Now you're at a dead-end,
your face against the wall.
Turn around and trust your eyes again.
No, they're not on your back.
And trust that old hand-cranker.
It can still turn out moving pictures.
Why waste your life on disposable junk images
when you can make indispensable ones
with your heart
on celluloid?
That's all I had to say, Fritz.
Moving pictures can still do what they were invented for
a hundred years ago.
They can stiff be
"moving"…
Your "nobody" friend Mr Pessoa
wrote something that moved me:
"In broad daylight
"even sounds shine."
Damn it, Friedrich!
You're sitting in that car.
Come on, move your ass!
Finish your movie.
I'm rolling, Winter!
It's coming.
It's behind you. Turn and shoot, quick!
Let's go!
Shit, it's a reverse angle.
Shoot!
Where's the handle?
Stay there, stay there!
– Where's the handle? – You've lost it?
The light's right. It's now or never!
Winter, roll, roll!
No, you're shaking too much.
I can't see a thing. It's a tunnel, it won't print.
The damn handle! Turn!
Stick to the mikes, you're a lousy operator.
Now you're talking!
What angle is that?
The light's right.
The handle again.
This camera's driving me crazy!
Subtitling by TVS – TITRA FILM