The call when it came was not from Mao, nor from Zhou Enlai, but from Chen Yi, the Foreign Minister and Vice-Premier, one of the five great heroes of Chinese Communism, a hero of the Long March. After thirty years, first fighting in the Revolutionary Army then leading it, he was the first man to enter Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai. The interview took place in the former Imperial Palace on the banks of Lake Zhonghai (the Central Sea) to which I was driven in a limousine with drawn blinds – I could not know then that I would have to wait until 2006 to discover the wonders of the Forbidden City. At fifty-eight, Chen Yi seemed to be in rude health. When I arrived he said, ‘We have three hours ahead of us, so we may speak calmly and weigh our words.’ In fact, the interview lasted precisely five hours, but I will not give an account of it here. Chen Yi was surrounded by assistants and secretaries feverishly jotting down his every word, my every question, and by diffident interpreters whom he corrected himself, for he spoke perfect French – he had, like a number of senior members of the Chinese Communist Party, worked as a labourer in the Renault factory in Billancourt – and we could have spoken without intermediaries had he chosen to. Of the five hours I spent with him, my host devoted an unquantifiable but to my mind significant period of time to the ceremony of spitting: two large golden spittoons sat on side tables to left and right of his armchair and, as the conversation led him to lean one way or the other, he dispatched the product of his expectorations with extraordinary precision, a Chinese method of pausing for thought. In general, his lengthy responses masked rather than revealed the keen intelligence I sensed in him. He gave me a world tour in geo-strategic waffle, but he was also sending a message to France and to Général de Gaulle who had made overtures to China. ‘The Chinese,’ Chen Yi essentially told me, ‘will not accept recognition until you dismiss Chiang Kai-shek’s diplomats. The same goes for the UN, we will not be a part of it until he is excluded. This does not mean we cannot forge amicable commercial and cultural ties with France. We greatly respect the French people and admire its considerable revolutionary tradition.’ In conclusion, he added that it would be more sensible for France not to intervene in the Middle East.
These pronouncements could not wait. I retired to my room in the Beijing Hotel and was given everything I could possibly need, secretaries, typists. Locked in, I wrote all through the night – my second sleepless night – and the whole of the following day, relating what I had seen in Tiananmen before giving an exact account of the interview itself. My text was carefully reread by Chen Yi in person who gave it his approval. It was essential that it appear in Le Monde, and, though I no longer knew anyone there, I sent it, in a long telex paid for by the Chinese government, to the editor-in-chief together with the necessary explanations, recommending that, if he were not prepared to publish it, he forward it to L’Express. This was indeed what happened. Le Monde pussyfooted while L’Express published the piece in its entirety, considering that Chen Yi’s pronouncements constituted ‘essential information, crucial to understanding the current situation’.
When I returned to France I wrote a number of theoretical articles about China that prompted calls from all over Europe, especially from Italian leftists who were very excited by the idea of the rural steelworks. I wrote nothing about North Korea, although it had been our host country. I thought about Kim Kum-sun, I worried about her and, though reassured by her letter, never in the intervening fifty years have I stopped thinking about her. I could not imagine her growing old, going grey; the memory, when I bring it to mind, is frozen in time. Long before, I had seen a British film by David Lean called Brief Encounter, starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, and I never thought of Kim without thinking of that film. Astonishingly, I saw the film again with Sartre in a small arthouse cinema in Montparnasse, and we both left the cinema in tears. We were both hopeless romantics. In fact, on another occasion, we watched Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings, starring Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth and particularly Richard Barthelmess, a film that completely satisfied my passion for flying and my taste for love stories. For Sartre, the film was a touchstone; he had seen it many times and never tired of it. On that occasion too we both cried. I sometimes told friends about my brief encounter with Kim, but it only made sense to do so if I could tell the whole story at length; it cannot be condensed. This happened rarely, and those who heard it said, ‘What a wonderful film it would be!’ When I began making and directing films myself, Kim was still very much in my mind, but Pourquoi Israël, Shoah and the others were a far cry from Taedong and the amorous wrestling of bare feet.
In the long years that preceded the ascetic retreat necessitated by the making of Shoah, I never felt any desire to go back to China; other countries, other continents were calling me. For me to return would have required a major event such as the one that presented itself twenty years after the release of Shoah. Over the years, Chinese cinephiles had had the opportunity to see the film only at festivals or in cinemas in Europe, America or even in Japan where, after all sorts of surprising events, the film had finally arrived ten years earlier. Some had succeeded in getting hold of video copies, and Shoah, though it had never been released in China, had a considerable reputation there. In September 2004, I was invited to screen it in Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai: a brilliant translator, Chang Xien Ming, had single-handedly taken it upon himself to translate the subtitles. I had met him the previous May at the Cannes Film Festival and doubted that he could finish the work before September for the opening of the first documentary film festival held in China, at which Shoah was to be screened. He did so. To perfection, probably, though I had no way of gauging the accuracy of his work. It was he who interpreted for me – consecutive rather than simultaneous interpretation – during the conferences I gave while there. I spoke for twenty minutes while he took notes, he then translated for a similar period, I’d recognize the proper names that he was obliged to leave in French; I had the feeling that he left nothing out. His sole mistake, albeit serious, and one of which I was not immediately aware, was to have translated into Chinese the untranslatable title, Shoah. This is an issue I will address in some detail later on. I confess that I was moved when I saw the Chinese ideograms appear on the screen beneath the words of Simon Srebnik, Filip Müller, Abraham Bomba or Rudolf Vrba, in vast, crowded theatres with film people and representatives – mostly female – from far-flung provinces brought to Beijing, a city they were seeing for the first time, together with students of both sexes and every possible discipline.
To those who, when discussing the Chinese and the Japanese, would say to me ad nauseam that they could never understand a film like Shoah, as it was not part of their experience, their world, I always stubbornly responded, ‘But why? There is only one humanity. If it is possible for me to be profoundly moved by a film like Ozu’s Tokyo Story, I don’t see why someone Japanese or Chinese might not be similarly overwhelmed by Shoah.’ It is always what is most particular that attains the universal, this is what is referred to as ‘l’universel concret’[‘the concrete universal’]. I remember my emotion, my admiration when I saw the Turkish film Yol by Yılmaz Güney, which, hour by hour, follows prisoners from an Ankara prison on a week’s home leave as they return to the snowy, glacial mountains of Kurdistan. For these men, so different from me, I felt a closeness, a kinship, even though they had been educated according to rigid traditions that lead to the tragedy that concludes the film. Never have I been made so aware that humans are human only because they have the capacity to transform that which oppresses them into something of value, and to sacrifice themselves for it. It is the very essence of humanity, but could also be called tradition, or even more, culture.
At the screening in Nanjing, the former imperial capital, forever marked by the terrible 1937 massacre I mentioned at the beginning of this book, I took questions late into the night from film students at the university. They had watched Shoah over the preceding two days, and I was struck by the subtlety and precision of their comments, by their unerrin
g ability to remember the film, the places and the protagonists, something that is not always the case. Suddenly, a female student asked, ‘What advice would you give me if I wanted to make a film about the massacre committed in this city by the Japanese?’ Her question was so broad that, for a moment, I thought I would not be able to reply, but I quickly recovered my wits and immediately responded, ‘Go to Japan!’ This seemed to enlighten all of them, none of them had thought of that, had been able to think of it. I then explained at length, translated by Chang, what had happened to me in Germany, in Poland. These young people were my friends by the time I left Nanjing for Shanghai, where I wanted to see the Huangpu River and the Bund once more. Almost fifty years after my first visit, China’s transformation was staggering and filled me with enthusiasm, but I will say nothing of it. Except for this: in Shanghai, I took a boat downstream on the Huangpu to its confluence with the Yangtze Jiang, where both become a boundless sea. During the three-hour trip, one feels physically the strength of China, the sense that it has of its own power and the pride with which it shows it. Though I have known Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau ivre’ all my life, it was only that afternoon, sailing down the Huangpu, which grew wider and wider as it approached the estuary, as part of an extraordinary flotilla of ships, private and military, merchant and tourist, of every conceivable shape and size, floating past immense shipyards whose streaming red pennants like tongues of flame seemed to be competing with one another; it was only then that I truly understood the last lines of the poem:
Je ne puis plus, baigné de vos langueurs, ô lames,
Enlever leur sillage aux porteurs de cotons,
Ni traverser l’orgueil des drapeaux et des flammes
I can no longer, bathed in your languors, O waves,
Obliterate the cotton carriers’ wake,
Nor cross the pride of pennants and of flags
Beijing, its ten ring roads, its skyscrapers built at dizzying speed, transforming the cityscape so much in a few short weeks that the Beijingers seem like strangers to their own city, which has become the epicentre of globalization. Beijing, the dazzling sight of the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven, finally open to all. Beijing by day, Beijing by night, with its restaurants, its bars, its Mongol prostitutes, sturdy and devastatingly beautiful.
But it was Kim Kum-sun I was thinking about, and whether there was a possibility, however remote, of my getting from Beijing to North Korea; I should seize the opportunity. No, not that: I did not want to see Kim again, as an old woman; I had long avoided that kind of face-to-face meeting. Besides, I would not want to bet on life-expectancy in North Korea: she might well be dead. I had been told so often ‘It would make a wonderful film!’ that I had considered it, telling myself that if one day I were to make what is called a fictional film, I would tackle this part of my personal history and weave it into the great course of history. In my own ‘brief encounter’, there were many episodes that could be powerfully cinematic: the nurse’s first appearance with Ok and the caps, her transformation on Sunday, the voracious kiss, the long march along the towpath, the dizzying whirl of boats, the language of bare feet, the sketches, the napalmed breast, the shouts of tonmou, the capsizing, the agonizing walk back through the ruins. The prospect of having to film such sequences did not frighten me; on the contrary it excited me. The serious and crucial problem to me was the city, ruined and being rebuilt, the singing brigades, the climate of fear; in other words how to create a truthful reconstruction of the time, of a totalitarian world, of the curious Western sympathizers we were. It would require thousands of extras, sets, a huge, Hollywood-style budget. I was not sure either that I was capable of filming a fictional version nor, deep down, was I even sure I wanted to. I was beset by these many certainties and this one doubt, and as soon as I reached Beijing, I inquired about the possibility of going to North Korea. Only small numbers of tourists, I learned, were granted a visa for four days, or a week at most, and then only on payment of an exorbitant sum in hard currency. I decided that I wanted to be clear in my own mind, to see what changes there had been since 1958, hoping that this return to the distant past would help me make the right decision about my prospective film. Assuming that those who had been in charge during my first visit would long be gone, I imagined that no one would remember and that all records would have disappeared; on the form, I declared that I had never been there. To get from Beijing to Pyongyang, one went either by rail or by air: the first entailed a forty-eight-hour journey with a stop of indeterminate length at the Sino-Korean border before travelling north at a snail’s pace through the septentrional regions of North Korea since there had recently been a catastrophic explosion that had destroyed a railway station and two trains, resulting in countless victims. I feared borders more than anything else, marked by the terrifying memory of something that had happened to me in 2000, four years earlier, at Brest-Litovsk when, during the filming of Sobibór, I wanted to travel with my equipment and crew from Poland to Belarus. We waited for eight hours on the way out as cameras and film were seized in order to be examined; I had no idea to whom I could protest, I was sent from one official to another, forced to respect their breaks for lunch and dinner while we had no way of getting anything to eat or drink. The return journey from Minsk was even worse: we spent a whole night and the following morning stranded in a car park reserved for Belarusian customs, forced in the freezing cold to keep the engine running to stay warm until we ran out of petrol. In principle, taking the plane to Pyongyang obviated such torments but it required a certain fatalism on the part of the passenger since the planes were ancient, patched-up Ilyushins that, it was rumoured, periodically crashed. In the end, of course, I decided to fly and found myself at Beijing international airport with a tiny group of Anglo-Saxon tourists – about ten in all, including Scots, Englishmen from Hong Kong, an American couple and their two children – all of whom were clearly making the visit in sympathy with the hard-line Communism they expected to find when we landed. My criticisms, when I dared to voice them, found no echo among them. Hardly had I taken my seat on the plane when I was enveloped by the characteristic smell, the greenish colour, the shabbiness typical of People’s Democracies, all of which, with a shudder of fear, immediately transported me back in time to the GDR, to Bulgaria, to Poland, to Czechoslovakia, to Cuba, even before we had left the ground.
Unsurprisingly, Pyongyang airport did not look remotely familiar. Since it is in the middle of nowhere, a dead end, there were few tourists, and so whole flocks of uniformed officials threw themselves carnivorously upon every passenger, fastidiously examining passports, visas, faces, waving additional forms to be filled in, trying to confiscate my PDA and my cellphone – which in any case were useless in this far-flung place – carefully counting every dollar I was carrying with me, although the entirety of my stay had been paid for in advance in Beijing. The other tourists suffered this hellish procedure with beatific smiles and not a murmur of complaint. After two hours, we were finally loaded onto a minibus where two trained, tame interpreters, a young man and a young woman, delivered the same speech, she in English to everyone else, he in French, to me alone. I told him that I understood English and he did not need to bother, but he followed the orders he had been given. In any case, both their French and English were barely intelligible, their vocabulary was poor, their syntax faulty. Interpreters such as Ok in 1958, with his delightfully archaic French, no longer existed. What did become clear from their mumbo-jumbo was that the Korean people had no desire to meet foreigners, that we were forbidden to go off on our own, that the only space where we were free to wander was our hotel, and that we were to follow our itinerary to the letter. The itinerary stated that we would first go to our hotel and as soon as we had registered and settled in, we were to be taken to the Pyongyang Grand Theatre, because the performance would start on the dot. Afterwards, back to our hotel, dinner and nighty-night. As the minibus drove through Pyongyang, I ignored this prattle and scrutinized the cityscape, looking for s
ome landmark I might recognize, some vestige of the past by which I might get my bearings and find lost time. Pyongyang looked to me as though it had been completely rebuilt; there were broad avenues devoid of traffic and indeed pedestrians. I thought I recognized the avenue along which Kim and I had walked after crossing the ruins, but I could not see the Taedonggang Hotel. The hotel we were staying in was some distance upriver, far from the bridge I had crossed when taking Gatti to the hospital and the scene of my fateful rendezvous with Kim. We crossed a bridge that had not existed in 1958, one that connected the riverbanks, arching over Yanggakdo Island, which could be accessed by a slip road. Our hotel, a fifty-floor American-style skyscraper, towered above the river from the centre of the island. From the bridge to the hotel was a distance of about two kilometres and there was only one road. The forecourt in front of the hotel was utterly deserted; I asked the interpreter whether there were any taxis and he answered, ‘It is forbidden.’ The vast lobby was also empty, the only living souls, sitting or standing, stationary or walking, were the caps. I recognized them at once, although they no longer wore caps: the uniform had changed, but not their function. My room, on the fortieth floor, had no view of the city. I went back down to the lobby and asked if I might change it, and for a considerable supplement for the four-night stay, this was done, but I did not even have time to see the new room, as the interpreters were already vociferating that we had to get to the theatre.
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