"Reichenbach's film proves
"that despite robotism,
"the tendency towards depersonalization,
"the threat of the plural being victorious over the singular,
"the encroaching barracks and symmetry synonymous with death,
"everywhere you go you will find surprises, excesses,
"marvelous disorderliness,
"an instinct to disobey to the rules,
"a disobedience which spares us the platitudes
"and keeps alive the strange asymmetrical beauty
"of the human face."
AMERICA AS SEEN BY A FRENCHMAN
I spent 18 months in America, seeking out the mundane and the extraordinary.
My camera and I were welcomed everywhere, even in prisons.
Nothing you are about to see has been reconstructed.
I just wanted to show America with its strict rules and indulgence,
its meticulous habits, its good faith, its eternal desire for youth
and the freedom without which a film like this could not be made.
San Francisco on the evening of August 30th.
We enter America by way of the Golden Gate Bridge.
This bridge has been said to cross the void
with the exquisite audacity of a spider's web.
This spider's web is solid.
It is also practicable.
A thousand cars are crossing it at an even, orderly speed.
We drive.
We picked this bridge somewhat randomly as our starting point,
perhaps simply because it is big,
in keeping with the big country it opens onto.
All roads lead from here to all possible Americas.
And they are all possible.
The one that produces,
the one that thinks,
the one that troubles,
or the one that tempts.
It is the moment of choice and decision-making:
should we continue simply scratching the surface of America
in a landscape, however beautiful, that is merely a distraction,
or else shut our eyes
and abandon the set and any preconceived ideas
to delve deeper into the heart of America,
and only then,
open our eyes again
and wait for the people to reveal themselves?
That's when, in the half-light, we passed men, horses and carts:
a strange caravan coming from the west
and seeming to emerge from our childhood dreams.
When dawn broke, there they were.
They filled the horizon.
Where have they come from? Where are they going? Who are they?
They are ordinary citizens of the city of Houston.
Most of them work in offices,
and once a year they don boots, hire horses,
borrow carts from the museum
and embark solemnly on a sort of pilgrimage
along the former salt route.
They are driven by a nostalgia for adventure and heroic times.
For three days and three nights,
they will re-enact the exciting life of the pioneers.
The Indians have almost disappeared from the plains,
but their memory lives on in the hearts of all Americans.
Their story began here in these camps,
where these men of iron overcame the cold and their fear
so their grandchildren could come here to kiss
without fear in a night without traps.
Early this March morning,
on a deserted beach in Santa Monica in California,
two models must evoke the pleasures of summer
for a publicity photograph.
They don't know one another.
An agency has brought them together by chance.
Suddenly, by tacit agreement, they become aroused.
Professional conscientiousness,
or are they just caught up in their own game?
On an album cover they will be together forever.
Glorifying a certain idea of happiness
is the first principle of American advertising.
That's why so much work is invested in it.
Photographers are the Sunday painters of modern America:
cigarettes, camping equipment,
toothpaste and cars are all there,
like the donors in early paintings.
Another principle of advertising is to recreate life through movement.
With millisecond precision, the photographer will take a picture
which will illustrate the cover of a calendar intended for GIs.
It was in these studios that America created.
These images of tall girls, painted like pharaohs' wives,
as upright as horses,
will determine for women the world over
the universal canon of beauty,
at least for that year.
This water-skier is a model too.
We are at Cypress Garden, a paradise for amateur photographers.
They don't mind if there are 150 of them all taking the same shot,
a shot reproduced on some excellent postcards nearby.
For a modest price, you can photograph the world's most beautiful girls.
Or, if you prefer, steal a shot of a forbidden orchid.
In every American there is a photographer.
And in every photographer there is always a tourist.
If you meet them, don't be surprised
to see them touring the world without looking at it.
Their Kodak is their memory.
Once they return to their armchairs, their albums on their laps,
they will relax,
set about loving the world
and start traveling.
But when they travel in their own country,
do they see the same America as us?
Do they see these frozen landscapes?
These strange inventions which sometimes make us feel
as if we are visiting another planet?
Do they get a sense of these still wild landscapes?
Do they have the same impression as us that the scene has been set
and these vast horizons are still waiting for something?
The Martians landing, perhaps, or the return of the pioneers.
Half-machine, half-insect,
with that way machines have of floating over the land
and that way insects have of thinking with their mandibles,
the pioneers have returned.
The plain is not the countryside.
It is a vast desert which has been tamed by these mechanics,
by these land engineers.
America has nine million farmers
but no peasants.
Gentle Mississippi with its showboats.
Walt Disney recreated it on a smaller scale for children
in his kingdom of Disneyland.
Every day, 25,000 people visit this world populated by automatons.
Here the Indians don't scalp.
The fire doesn't burn.
A cross between storybook, farce, fair and zoo,
this is the universe in miniature and the world of fairy tales,
where fake hippos frighten real children.
And in the evening, the boat returns effortlessly to port,
guided by rails.
America is composed of a thousand artificial worlds.
Close to Los Angeles, Ghost Town is a museum
dedicated to the heroic times of the Far West.
The train ticket buys you an attack by masked bandits
and a raid on a mail coach.
Extras imported from Hollywood play their role conscientiously
and bring this ghost town to life.
You travel in a dream wagon across a dream town.
You take in a dream adventure
and sit down next to your dream lover.
Here, everything is reconstructed.
But this lady is of the period.
She is the last remaining survivor from the days of the American Civil War.
She is 104.
The Old Fiddlers have come
to soak up the atmosphere of the past too,
and they end up being the most authentic characters in this museum.
The real faces resemble those in the cartoons.
You couldn't make them up.
You want an authentic American grandma,
complete with Bible and apple pie?
Here she is.
Walt Disney should sign her up.
We are in a cell.
This man has committed two murders.
He has been sentenced to 100 years in prison.
Every Sunday in October, at Huntsville prison in Texas,
a rodeo takes place.
The guests arrive. They are prisoners from neighboring towns.
They are dressed in regulation white overalls
made from cotton they have woven themselves.
We were permitted to watch this strange ceremony
where the most dangerous criminals were frisked before our very eyes.
The stadium is situated within the prison walls.
It holds 25,000 spectators.
People come from far and wide to watch this famously tough rodeo.
The biggest fans are soldiers from the military academy.
Let the games commence.
There is no contest in the world with higher stakes.
The prize for the most fearless is a reduction in their sentence.
In the same way as bullfighters kill their own death,
these prisoners sit astride their own freedom.
After the two-hour show, they all return to their prison.
The number written on their collar allows for a register to be taken.
One last treat from Huntsville:
a hot dog in their right hand and a hamburger in their left hand.
Part of the ticket sales will go towards the prisoners' emergency fund,
and the rest will be used to build their churches.
Thus provided for in the short term, the future and for eternity,
the prisoners return to their cells.
Everyone takes a curious souvenir away with them from this day.
First prize is a one-year reduction in their sentence,
and second prize a week's freedom with their wife.
What did this man win?
The memory of having been a clown for a day.
Huntsville, a ruthless prison but one without filth
and without rusty bars,
a prison without scorn which seeks to chastise without debasing.
A mini America behind bars,
where you can put your money in the bank
and go shopping at the drugstore.
Life continues with its eternal need to produce.
In the prisoners' world, it is threads.
And in the outside world, car number plates.
Here, hope is never totally lost.
This enormous ice cream, decorated like a bride,
is the first object of desire for American boys.
There is a ceremonial element to spinning pizzas too.
They fly through the air, performing their dance of seduction.
Nearby, Tom, Dick and Harry celebrate their joint coming of age.
Between them, they are 21 today.
They were three little children
Who ate more than elephants
When they grow up, they will recite
This song by Michel Legrand
These triplets with their sly glances
Are destined to appear in adverts
We are filled with hope
On seeing them guzzle their snacks
It seems a strange job
But in America it's well paid
Believe it or not, in this country
You can earn your bread and butter from eating it
Their sister isn't happy. She wants some dessert too.
Mealtimes can be a party or a competition.
The first to finish the blueberry tart without using their hands
get to take part in the watermelon contest.
Every sunny weekend is the occasion for a giant barbecue.
Between Christmas and New Year's Day,
53,125,000 turkeys and ten times as many chickens
are herded towards consumers.
And yet sometimes, a miracle occurs.
Just look at this bird.
She is unique.
She is the advertisement for a breeder.
He has trained her.
She plays skittles.
The aim of the game is to release the grain into the trough
by raising all the skittles.
If she misses, she knows there's no point looking for grain.
The skittles first.
The bird, saved by advertising,
is onto a good thing as long as she stays in the limelight.
It's what's known as a conditioned reflex.
Is this comely girl the skittle or the grain?
That's not for us to decide.
At any rate, she is a good example of conditioning.
Her role is to advertise a factory that makes rescue apparatus.
They are relying on the customer's subconscious
to associate the woman with the apparatus in question
and to be vaguely expecting to see her arrive on her stretcher
in the event of a fire,
inspiring confidence.
Inspiring also, perhaps, a few budding arsonists.
But it's worth pointing out that this lady has a husband
and he's a wrestler.
Here the advertisement is more ceremonious.
And yet, it is just an advert for the launch of a gym
where this golden athlete teaches.
As always, the majorettes are part of the show.
The majorettes are a national institution.
No publicity parade, no election campaign,
no demonstration goes by without them putting in an appearance.
Their role is to enthuse the crowds.
If there is a majorette in every American girl,
in every American boy there is a musician.
Every university, every school, every sporting association
has its band which marches in uniform with military precision.
The Americans unite two sports
that we have a tendency to keep separate:
football and insurrection.
The cheerleaders are there to direct the cheers from the crowd.
Each of their gestures has a precise meaning
and encourages the crowd to encourage the players.
They are equally enthusiastic
whether they are defending their school colors
or the American colors.
On the aircraft carrier Ranger off the coast of Hawaii,
the sun left us alone with these men of the future,
hungry for space and science-fiction.
These young men are trained
to overcome their fear by dicing with death
and enjoy returning to the simple pleasures of daily life.
At the Red Cross in New York,
these same men are given free lessons
to prepare these future fathers for their future tasks.
Don't be fooled by their serious allure.
They are as bemused as you are
to find themselves in this comical situation.
The Americans never miss an opportunity to go to school.
You can learn at any age.
It's the best way to stay young.
After three weeks of lessons, they will qualify as fathers.
These technicians and spacemen apply themselves conscientiously
to learning how to handle babies.
With good humor and perhaps also the sense that they face a reality
that no amount of progress will permit them to dodge.
For, according to the wise words of Dr. Von Braun,
it would be a mistake to think that by getting nine women pregnant
you can have a baby in one month.
They are now ready to welcome one of these babies into the world.
According to statistics, babies are born in America
at a rate of one every 11 seconds.
To prove it, let's count together.
Eleven, ten, nine, eight,
seven, six, five,
four, three, two,
one, zero.
An American has just been born.
On the television screen in the hospital,
he appears to his father like breaking news.
The very latest.
We are at the pilot hospital in Hialeah in Florida.
As soon as they are born,
the babies are classified according to weight and size
and placed in an incubator to protect them from infection
where they will ripen like melons until they reach the statutory weight.
The new-borns soon transition from this temporary state
where the television watches them
to a more permanent stage where they watch the television,
which, moreover, broadcasts special programs for babies.
What is the name of the river which passes through Paris?
- It's the...? - Seine.
The Seine, the River Seine.
Name the colors, please.
Yellow.
Orange, purple, brown, gray.
And so begins the golden age of American life: childhood.
As soon as they can walk, children spend most of their time with neighbors.
They are given total independence to stop them becoming cry-babies,
an obsession of all American parents.
Did you know that the first hula-hoop contests
took place under the paternal wing of the police?
Parents had been worrying for some time.
A generation of children, stuck in front of the television,
were threatened with ankylosis.
The only effort they had to make
was to choose between a Western or a cartoon.
Suddenly, here was a way to get them into the great outdoors.
The police took the matter in hand
and set about generously distributing hoops and microgrooves.
The children followed the movement.
The human race was saved!
The golden age is the only time when magic is called by its proper name.
It is also the only time when you only need to believe in miracles
for them to happen.
When pigeons fly.
Horses fly.
Angels fly.
Men fly!
After the golden age, comes the age of the nickel.
Whatever the parents' position,
the child must earn a few dollars of their own pocket money.
After school, they do the evening paper round.
It is a familiar sight, seen every day at the same hour
along the avenues of all provincial towns.
The newspapers are thrown with dexterity.
Other children receive them,
impatient to find out the latest news,
not news of those fictional characters called Ike, De Gaulle and Khrushchev,
but news of the real heroes of this world:
Pogo, Superman, Dick Tracy,
and the little orphan, Annie.
The big event in the children's calendar
is the Soap Box Derby held every year in Akron, Ohio.
The day begins with the inevitable parade of fanfares and majorettes.
Next is the moment thousands of children have been waiting for.
The race begins.
These boys, aged eight to 14, have built these cars themselves
from identical materials:
planks, wheels and nails supplied by a tire company.
Preliminary rounds have selected two boys from each state.
The winners will receive a grant for their studies
and the promise, when they're 20,
of a job as an engineer in one of the tire factories
which has organized the competition.
It's time for the holidays.
Like in every country in the world,
the kids like to chase after what is forbidden.
But here, they will not be punished.
Parents overlook their children's bodily wounds
in order to avoid wounding their pride or giving them complexes.
The child who runs the fastest
or the child who is the most daring will be the most admired.
While they wait for real life to begin,
these young brains take a holiday.
And just as the blind see with their hands,
these young Americans think with their bodies.
The beach at Santa Monica is called Muscle Beach.
He's trying to cover his shadow.
Beaches make transitions easier.
From childhood to adolescence, for example.
From the robust, disordered life of the under-13s
to that of teenagers, aged between 13 and 20,
whose childish gestures suddenly change.
On warm summer afternoons,
these supple teenage bodies explore one another with gay abandon.
They don't talk much.
The spoken word isn't the main means of expression for these boys and girls.
They have a more secret, more pagan language of their own.
Once summer is over, the schools open their doors again.
These are free schools attended by rich and poor alike,
acting as a melting pot for American democracy.
For the boys, there is the future and the exam room.
For the girls too, of course.
But outside of lessons, they must acquire other assets,
such as shapely legs and winning smiles.
Friendship has trained them for these tomboyish games
and a sporting reality that will soon give way to love.
America is awash with girls dressed in white,
racing towards a happy future.
At majorette school the students learn their first moves in the art of seduction,
reminiscent of the mating flight of birds and insects.
On the university lawn, they secretly plan the final attack
which will lead to marriage.
Both sides observe one another.
The chosen ones will not be those who are best at translation,
nor the smartest-dressed, nor the cleverest,
but those who most resemble Miss America,
who herself resembles the all-American girl.
To be elected, Miss America must have all the virtues of an American girl.
She must be a strong woman too.
At judo classes, the defensive strategy
is the final stage in this liberal education.
A defensive strategy which, moreover, is perhaps
just an offensive strategy in disguise.
We find the caricature of seduction
at the College of Striptease in Los Angeles.
Of course, the Americans didn't invent nude women.
They existed before them.
But they were the first to think of giving them theoretical training.
Here, women learn, with apparently indefatigable aplomb,
the surprisingly complex rules of the art of frustration.
Students learn to recognize the subtle difference
between bold gestures that are tolerated
and those that carry penalties.
They are constantly at the mercy of a borderline incident,
of a line being crossed, of disputed territory.
In other words, a no-man's land.
For striptease has its rules.
And from one state to the next, from one town to the next,
the limits of immodesty vary and different conventions apply.
Who comes to take these lessons?
Professional striptease artists or amateurs seeking perfection
who have pondered the words of Luther
when he says that sometimes, in order to vanquish him,
you need to conceal your weapons from the Devil.
Disconcerting America!
There is no other country
where the institution of marriage is more respected.
And yet, there exists in certain car parks
a chapel which offers motorists in a hurry a fixed-price ceremony.
For a small supplement, an actress playing the role of a family member
showers the newly-weds with lucky rice.
Honeymoon.
Disconcerting America!
These cement encampments,
these motels which have sprung up along the roadsides like mushrooms,
would hardly seem to suggest of Americans
that they are traditionally attached to the intimacy of the family home.
Birds of a feather flock together.
The American nation produces enough twins
for them to hold their own conference every year in Huntington.
It is an opportunity for them to savor the pleasure of assembling
and resembling one another.
Houses built on stilts, streets made of duckboards.
This surprising island is Fire Island,
where the animals seem to be holding a conference of their own.
The two main races in American society live side by side here:
the dog race which is well-meaning, sociable and excessively demonstrative,
and the cat race which is more secretive, upright and darker
and whose attentive immobility conceals reserves of movement and violence.
These children of violence, these cat men, have an ideal:
to escape the day-to-day reality.
They are America's gypsies.
They cross the country, following the seasons like migratory birds.
This motorcycling world has its own heroes and myths.
Leathers, insulating tape, boots and a guitar
are their emblem and their rallying sign.
Elsewhere, more fans gather along the roadsides,
waiting for the Hot Rods to pass by.
With old chassis bought from the scrapheap for a few dollars
and engines boosted to the max,
DIYers in love with forbidden speed and passionate about mechanics
build these racing cars which travel at speeds of 155 mph.
These races are a tranquillizer for these young men,
frustrated all week by having to stick to the 55 mph speed limit.
"I go faster than the wind, faster than the blood in my veins,
"faster than the sap in the tree,
"faster than the waters of the Mississippi," said James Dean.
Every Sunday, America is filled with the sound of games based on violence,
especially of the mechanical kind.
All over the country, cars zoom, motorbikes fly,
fairground rides go round and round.
It's a fine line between pleasure and torment.
In another era, these iron wheels would have been instruments of torture.
In all these forms of entertainment, the accident remains accidental,
so there was a need to come up with the deliberate accident,
the ragtime of abrupt ends,
the polka of catastrophes, the ultimate challenge,
the contest of the Hell Drivers.
To swell our national pride,
these guys from Kansas putting on a display here
are called "The Parisians".
Here is one of the Parisians in question.
He takes his act from show to show with equal success.
It is as if this civilization, based on comfort,
took childish pleasure
in seeing the symbols of that comfort scorned and demolished.
There... the ceremony is over.
The children learn that cars die too.
She is said to be an Italian princess.
We'll never know exactly what she was doing there,
surveying the rubble.
Looking for souvenirs, perhaps.
We'll never know exactly what she was doing there.
We'll never know, either, why these cars drowned.
At dawn, on the banks of the Mississippi in New Orleans,
while the fog lifts,
these characters are waiting for the black king's boat
to open the black carnival.
In the next neighborhood, the white carnival is under way.
We've seen black men made up as black men.
Here are women dressed as naked women.
But while their bodies are dressed in plastic bodysuits,
their souls are stripped bare.
This is a far cry from our tired Lent carnivals
where people dress up out of habit and somewhat haphazardly.
Here, the carnival has lost none of its intensity.
The disguise is a confession, the mask a secret.
The carnival has been parading obscene lamentations all day.
Ash Wednesday is about to start in a few hours.
Everything must be restored to order by dusk.
It is then, as night falls,
that the strangest characters start to emerge.
The teenagers spend the night waiting.
A wait which sometimes ends in theft.
It is as if they needed it to feed a part of themselves
with the only thing they haven't yet experienced: punishment.
At Houston police station, there is an identity parade.
Six boys are suspected of having robbed a garage.
From the shadows, a witness looks on and points out the culprit.
There.
It was him.
Every night, dozens of kids file through here,
guilty of crimes that are more or less explicable,
but also of acts of violence that are gratuitous and crazy.
In the eyes of the American creed, they have all the vices.
Laziness, brutality and, worst of all, unhappiness.
In their stubborn silence,
they shout in the faces of their parents and teachers
that all is not well, that life is not easy.
Their gangs speak of nostalgia for community,
their cruelty speaks of nostalgia for love.
In the void they couldn't fill,
humans are raising these pathetic creatures.
Those who are too hard to be returned to their parents
spend some time in a prison cell.
It barely touches them.
They have the patience of a rock and the same indifference.
Our inquisitive presence among them doesn't seem to surprise them
or to irritate them.
They are elsewhere.
They are on a journey.
Like all dreams, the prisoner's dream is ephemeral.
It dissipates with the first light of day
and the strange ceremonial of the meal served to the guilty children.
America believes the prophets when they speak the language of the Bible.
As for the refusal to speak of these opaque young minds,
perhaps in response to the din of those speaking in their name,
God's silence is the only language left for making prophesies.
That's why in this country that is so apparently happy,
content with thinking that there is paradise on earth,
we sometimes felt, like an impatience to be elsewhere,
the call of an invisible world, of a new America to discover.
Is this dream America at the end of the desert?
Or at the end of life?
The paths leading to God are infinite.
The ways of calling upon his salvation too.
The Holy Rollers are Christians.
The temples of this sect are open to all.
The faithful are not visionaries but believers,
who want to purge themselves of their sins
and, through this pious swaying, chase the demon from their souls.
Elsewhere, other cults light up.
This need to give a physical form to the fervor shown by the Holy Rollers
is apparent across America in the dance of lights.
We sensed it from our first contact with the world of advertising.
Marketing is an excuse for creating beauty.
And the beauty amounts to more than the pleasure it gives.
It is an offering to the gods.
American nights, with their comets and imaginary zodiac,
are full of these offerings.
We are driving to Las Vegas, amidst the colorful constellations
of cinemas and casinos,
set in motion by our speed like a procession greeting us.
Las Vegas, the most illuminated city in the world,
founded in the middle of the vast Nevada Desert,
is the capital of gambling and luck.
Luck.
The prisoner in his prison.
The little boy with his ice cream.
The black man at his carnival.
The girl with her plans.
Luck.
Their luck.
This gift bestowed on each American citizen at birth
that they carry with them along the paths of life,
like a guarantee of happiness, always within arm's reach,
no matter what.
In the casinos of Las Vegas,
where the law permits people to gamble for money,
eight million people a year pray to Lady Luck.
Her sign is the dollar and her slot machines are the prayer wheels.
San Francisco, Louisiana, Texas...
America, if I'm not lost in your mazes,
it's because I haven't tried to understand,
nor to deduce, nor to explain.
It's because, if I may be so bold, I loved you, purely and simply.
New York, accused of being a city without a heart or a past,
in your reflections I discovered your treasures and your cathedrals.
New York, November 18th. We are leaving America.
The one we saw.
For there are as many Americas as there are people observing it.
Everyone makes their own discovery,
and, mark my words, they only make it for themselves.
We are quite ready to see this city and this country
as a huge shop whose slogan might be,
as we read on the front of a real shop:
"If you don't know what you want, come in because we have it."
But it would be too easy to confine America to its strangeness.
This way of life, so often criticized but so often imitated,
is the human art of subjugating to their powers
what they thought was their fate.
It might be the fate of the whole of Europe in 20 years.
And if it is to be ours,
perhaps it was worthwhile giving it due consideration.