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[Airplane Passing Overhead]
♪♪ [Chorus Singing In Foreign Language]
♪♪ [Continues]
♪♪ [Ends]
[Man Narrating] This is the story of a man...
marked by an image of his childhood.
The violent scene which upset him...
and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later...
happened on the main pier at Orly, Paris Airport...
sometime before the outbreak of World War lll.
[P. A: Bell Chimes]
- [Narrator] Orly. Sunday. - [Woman On P.A. Speaking French]
There the parents used to take their children to watch the departing planes.
Of this particular Sunday, the child whose story we are going to tell...
was bound to remember the sight of a frozen sun...
of a stage setting at the end of the pier...
and of a woman's face.
Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments.
Only afterwards do they claim remembrance...
on account of their scars.
That face, which was to be a unique image of peacetime...
to carry with him through the whole wartime -
he often wondered if he had ever seen it...
or if he had dreamed a lovely moment...
to catch up with the crazy moment that came next:
The sudden roar, the woman's gesture, the fall of a body, shrieking people.
Only later did he realize that he had seen a man dying.
And soon afterwards, Paris was blown up.
♪♪ [Chorus Singing In Foreign Language]
♪♪ [Continues]
[Narrator] Many died.
Some fancied themselves to be victors.
Others were made prisoners.
The survivors settled beneath Chaillot...
in a network of galleries.
[Electrical Humming]
Aboveground, in Paris...
as in most of the world...
everything was rotten with radioactivity.
The victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats.
- [Humming Stops] - [Men Whispering]
[Men Whispering In German]
[Narrator] The prisoners were submitted to some experiments...
of great concern apparently to those who conducted them.
The outcome was disappointment for some...
death for others...
and for others, madness.
One day, they came to select a new guinea pig among the prisoners.
He was the man whose story we are now telling.
[Faint Thumping]
[Thumping Continues]
[Narrator] He was frightened.
He had heard about the head experimentator...
and was prepared to face a mad scientist...
a Dr. Frankenstein.
Instead of whom he met a reasonable man who told him in a relaxed way...
that the human race was doomed.
Space was off limits.
The only link with survival passed through time.
A loophole in time, and then maybe it would be possible to reach food...
medicine, energy.
This was the purpose of the experiment:
To throw emissaries into time...
to call past and future to the rescue of the present.
[Faint Thumping]
But the human mind balked.
To wake up in another time meant to be born again as an adult.
The shock would be too much.
Having sent only lifeless or unconscious bodies through different zones of time...
the inventors were now concentrating on men with very strong mental images.
If they were able to conceive or to dream another time, perhaps...
would they be able to live in it.
The camp police spied even on dreams.
This man was selected only because he was glued to an image of his past.
[Men Whispering]
[Men Whispering In German]
[Whispering Continues]
[Faint Heartbeat]
[Narrator] At first, nothing else but stripping out of the present.
They start again.
The man doesn't die, nor does he get mad.
He suffers. They continue.
[Heartbeat Continues]
[Rapid Heartbeat]
[Rapid Heartbeat Continues]
[Heartbeat Grows Louder, Faster]
[Heartbeat Slows]
[Narrator] On the 10th day, images begin to ooze like confessions.
A peacetime morning.
A peacetime bedroom.
A real bedroom.
Real children.
Real birds.
Real cats.
Real graves.
On the 16th day, he is on the pier at Orly.
Empty.
Sometimes he reaches a day of happiness...
but another one.
A face of happiness, but another one.
Ruins.
A girl who could be the one he is yearning for.
He crosses her path on the pier.
He sees her face in a car, smiling.
More images pour out and mix.
A museum.
Perhaps the museum of his memory.
[Men Whispering In German]
[Narrator] On the 30th day, they meet.
[Whispering Continues]
[Narrator] Now he is sure she is the one.
As a matter of fact, it's the only thing he may be sure of...
in the middle of this dateless world, which first stuns him by its splendor.
Around him, only fabulous materials:
Glass, plastics, terry cloth.
Once he gets out of this fascination, the woman has gone.
[Men Whispering In German]
[Narrator] The directors of the experiment tighten their control.
They send him back.
Time rolls back again.
The moment happens once more. This time, she is near him.
He says something. She doesn't mind, she answers.
They have no memories, no plans.
Time builds itself painlessly around them.
As landmarks, they have the very taste of this moment they live...
and the scribbling on the walls.
Later on, they are in a garden.
He remembers there were gardens.
She asks him about his necklace -
the combat necklace he wore at the start of this war which is to break out someday.
He invents an explanation.
They walk.
They look at the trunk of a sequoia tree covered with historical dates.
She pronounces an English name he doesn't understand.
As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree, hears himself say...
"This is where I come from"...
and falls back, exhausted.
Then another wave of time lifts him up.
They probably give him another shot.
[Men Whispering In German]
[Narrator] Now she sleeps in the sun.
He knows that in this world...
where he has just landed again for a little while...
in order to be sent back to her...
she is dead.
She wakes up.
He speaks again.
Of a truth too fantastic to be believed, he retains the meaning:
An unreachable country, a long way to go.
She listens. She doesn't laugh.
Is it another day? He doesn't know.
They shall go on like this, in countless walks...
in which an unspoken trust...
an unadulterated trust will grow between them.
No memories, no plans.
Up to the moment where he feels ahead of them...
a wall.
[Man] Ja.
[Man Counting In German]
[Narrator] And this was the end of the first experiment.
[Men Whispering In German]
[Faint Heartbeat]
[Narrator] It was the starting point for a whole series of tests...
in which he would meet her at different times.
She welcomes him in a simple way.
She calls him her ghost.
One day she seems frightened.
One day she leans over him.
As for him...
he never knows whether he moves towards her...
whether he is driven...
whether he has made it up, or whether he is only dreaming.
[Birds Chirping]
[Chirping Continues]
[Heartbeat Thumping]
[Narrator] Around the 50th day, they meet in a museum filled with ageless animals.
Now they have hit the bull's-eye.
Thrown at the right moment, he may stay there and move without trouble.
The girl seems also to be tamed.
She welcomes, as a natural phenomenon, the ways of this visitor who comes and goes...
who exists, talks, laughs with her...
stops talking, listens to her...
then vanishes.
Once back in the laboratory, he knew something was different.
The camp leader was there.
From what was said around him...
he made out that after the brilliant result of the experiment in the past...
they now meant to ship him into the future.
Excitement made him forget for a moment that, then...
the meeting at the museum had been the last.
[Heartbeat Thumping]
The future was better protected than the past.
After many painful tests, he eventually caught some waves of the world to come.
He went through a brand-new planet...
Paris rebuilt...
10,000 incomprehensible streets.
Other men were waiting for him.
This was a brief encounter.
Obviously, they refused this slag of another time.
He said his piece:
Since humanity had survived...
it could not refuse to its own past the means of its own survival.
That sophism was taken for fate in disguise.
They gave him a power plant strong enough to put all human industry in motion again...
and the gates of the future were closed.
Some time after his return, he was transferred to another part of the camp.
He knew that his jailers would not spare him.
He had been a tool in their hands.
His childhood image had been used as a bait to condition him.
He had lived up to their expectations. He had played his part.
[Heartbeat Thumping]
Now he only waited to be executed...
with somewhere inside him the memory of a twice-lived fragment of time.
And deep in these limbos, he got the message from the men of the world to come.
They, too, traveled through time, and more easily.
Now they were there, ready to accept him as one of their own.
But he had a different request.
Rather than this pacified future...
he wanted the world of his childhood...
and this woman who perhaps was waiting for him.
Once again on the main pier at Orly...
in the middle of this hot prewar Sunday afternoon...
where he was now able to settle down...
he thought in a confused way...
that the child he had been was due to be there too, watching the planes.
But first of all, he looked for a woman's face at the end of the pier.
[Airplane Engine Rumbling]
He ran towards her.
And when he recognized the man who had trailed him since the camp...
he knew there was no way out of time...
and he knew that this haunted moment he had been granted to see as a child...
was the moment of his own death.
♪♪ [Chorus Singing In Foreign Language]
♪♪ [Ends]