:19:01
He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted.
:19:05
The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris,
:19:09
and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree,
outside of time.
:19:17
The painted horse at San Juan Bautista,
his eye that looked like Madeline's:
:19:21
Hitchcock had invented nothing,
it was all there.
:19:24
He had run under the arches of the promenade in the mission
as Madeline had run towards her death.
:19:29
Or was it hers?
:19:35
From this fake tower
the only thing that Hitchcock had added
:19:37
he imagined Scotty as time's fool of love,
finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it.
:19:44
Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time,
a zone that would belong only to him
:19:50
and from which he could decipher
the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate
:19:55
when he had pulled Madeline out of San Francisco Bay,
:19:58
when he had saved her from death
before casting her back to death.
:20:00
Or was it the other way around?
:20:19
In San Francisco I made the pilgrimage of a film
I had seen nineteen times.
:20:22
In Iceland I laid the first stone of an imaginary film.
:20:26
That summer I had met three children on a road
and a volcano had come out of the sea.
:20:31
Encore un coup de... *I don't know*
:20:36
The American astronauts came to train before flying off to the moon,
in this corner of Earth that resembles it.
:20:40
I saw it immediately as a setting for science fiction:
the landscape of another planet.
:20:43
Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet
for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away.
:20:50
I imagine him moving slowly, heavily,
about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles.
:20:55
All of a sudden he stumbles,
and the next step it's a year later.
:20:59
He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border
along a sea bird sanctuary.