If I Had Four Dromedaries (Si j'avais quatre dromadaires)

Subject: An amateur photographer and two of his friends

comment on a selection of photos from around the world.

THE BEASTIARY Or, The Parade of Orpheus

The Camel

With his four camels,

Don Pedro d'Alfaroubeira

toured the world and admired it.

He did what I'd like to do.

If I Had 4 Camels

First Part THE CASTLE

The photo is the hunt

It's the instinct of hunting without the desire to kill

It's the hunt of angels...

You track, you aim, you fire and--clic!

--instead of a dead man, you make him eternal.

And here is something more...

...a sculpture organizes a certain face with a certain gaze

whose photo eternalizes you with your own gaze...a circle.

I look at myself from out of the photo that looks.

-All in all, an inferior kind of art: the art of viewing art.

-My brothers, art is neither inferior nor superior, it is art.

It doesn't always have to boast, that's not its quality.

It's like a nationality.

A hunchbacked Chinese doesn't cease to be Chinese.

There is life, and there is its double

and the photo belongs to the world of the double...eh!

Moreover it is there that there is a trap.

By approaching some faces,

you have the impression of sharing in the lives and deaths of their faces

--of human faces. It's not true:

if you participate in something, it's in the life and death of their images.

In any case, if one can say one thing modestly

it's that photography is a pleasure.

The number of times people said thanks, knowing they wouldn't get the picture.

Even in bizzare situations.

Some hairdressers, for example.

A boss even told her staff not to show their husbands...

Fine, that's Paris, that's Babylon...

But in Pyong-Yang, I began to shoot and all the ladies began to laugh...

Then why, in Cuba, did the outdoor barbers begin to chase me,

shouting and brandishing their scissors? That's the mystery!

"Since these mysteries are beyond me, let's pretend we're organizing them."

That's the motto of every photograph.

It's true, one cheats.

Between the Arctic Circle and the bottom of the Negev, things inevitably happen.

The sun rises, among others.

It's like for people suddenly seized: one can't help but feel possessed,

as if one had organized these daybreaks.

And then, I don't know, this feeling of gathering up the world, reconciling it,

of flattening out all the time zones...

It must be the nostalgia for Eden.

It's the same time everywhere.

I can't resist the kind of film that walks you from one dawn to the next,

saying things like, It is six o'clock on Earth,

six o'clock at Sain-Martin Canal,

six o'clock at the Göta Canal in Sweden.

Six o'clock in Havana.

Six o'clock in the Forbidden City of Peking.

The sun rises over Brussels,

and over Prague, over Tehran, and over Berlin.

The last passer-by of the night on the Notre-Dame square,

and on a street in Amsterdam, the first of the day.

Everyone is already on the English Promenade

but only one Chinese on the Great Wall.

The fountains of the Estonian Villa and Rome begin to flow at the same time,

the pretty nymphs of the Piazza Esedra.

A train enters the station at La Ciotat.

A train arrives in Jerusalem.

A station for a subprefecture of Jerusalem.

The snowplow trains wait in Kiruna Station.

The fastest train in the world leaves from a station in Tokyo.

It passes commuter trains full of sleeping Japanese,

already exhausted, already used up by the city.

There are new posters in the Paris metro

and in a cable car in Lausanne, a cabalistic sign.

A Yugoslavian hog considers the day to come.

In Paris, young women are presented as in a competition of idols.

In Santiago de Cuba, open-heart surgery begins.

Santiago de Cuba, the world's freest bodies.

The game on the street begins.

From the sidewalks of Santiago to those of Tel-Aviv,

to the sidewalks of Moscow.

In the Mosfilm Studio, Tatiana Lavrova prepares herself for shooting.

In Havana, someone distributes " capitalist parts"

parts taken from American or French cars.

like this 1950 model advertized in Shanghai, which never arrived.

A soviet dog in Moscow

A bourgeois dog in Paris.

A perfume store in Oslo that invokes the Nefertiti of Berlin.

Lottery in Cuba,

lottery in Lisbon,

and for this Japanese, his little personal lottery: the Pachinko

Some Chinese go to a meeting.

Some Koreans go to a meeting.

They pass some people who carry loads,

frown at some boats.

The game of the day begins.

In all these twists, there are some who are different from others

They are distinguished by their dress,

and from the balconies on high in the cities, they hear an untiring voice

by their uniform;

that says: "One day, all of you will belong..."

Zakrit na remont

-"Closed for repairs." Without a doubt, this is Moscow.

It's the building of the Sputniks and the Vostoks at the Industrial Expo

-Those the little Koreans applauded like victories of socialism.

-What is it now? Victories of revisionism?

-One day there'll be Martians there, I'm sure of it.

Waiting there, we described the giant rockets, the space stations.

It is a fabulous place.

-That's not New York... -No, no.

-It's the Air Museum in Meudon, the most technological...

What is it now? -No...

-What is it now? The most technological, but at the other end of history.

-The same history. -No, Nungesser and Gagarene weren't the same.

Oh! That's romanticism...

-Because you were 10 at the time of Nungesser and Coli?

-No my good friends, for a simple reason:

because no dog has ever flown across the Atlantic.

-What do you mean, 'revisionism'?

-The cosmonauts, I don't know, but the pedestrians, yes.

Is that where the cosmonauts buy their dogs?

It's the animal market in Moscow.

Why do I love the Russians?

One must see it in my images,

but it would be necessary to make them understand it...

I'm not naïve.

In moments of goodness or humor,

they can applaud when a writer is imprisoned for 7 years

because he displeased two dozen old crabs...the same people...

...who can play like little kids with flying wheels and water pistols.

It was epic, the water pistols.

In the week when they were imported,

one couldn't ring a friend's doorbell without getting shot in the face.

That was already a while ago. Remember, Varvara.

That was the time of the two-seater car.

One still made one's way down toward "Joseph Stalin" in a Volga

and one winter, the chaperones of the 'little red'

could cross Gorki Park without meeting a cop.

There, ten thousand participants of the Youth Festival disembarked

from a boat called Molotov when it had left Leningrad...

...and Baltika when it returned.

It was still better than the water pistols.

In the streets one saw little planetary systems:

a stranger in the center...and the Moscowites played all around him.

Everything that helped the Russians' preconceptions about foreigners,

and even more, those of the foreigners about the Russians

was already contained in that summer.

It was the summer one first heard Moscow Nights

by Soloviov-Sedoi,

when millions of people discovered the kindness of the Russians,

Russian curiosity,

and it's strength that makes friendship there charge like a calvary...

It was also the summer one first saw

the girls play with the signs of a foreign coquettishness

and for the first time since the war, the U.S. flag waved.

It returned less innocently, two years after the American Expo of '59

It was the great seduction.

Abraham Lincoln married Marilyn Monroe

and they had many little refrigerators.

The Russians took all that very seriously, to the point of envy.

But there was a lot more common sense than expected.

Marian Anderson and Mickey Mouse were mobilized to jazz everyone up.

Evidently, most men focused on cars, and most women on fashion...

Since the Russians love books, there was a beautiful library.

They even had The Question by Henri Alleg

"Read my lips: It's not us Americans who would go and start a colonial war."

The greatest site was of course

the distribution of plastic bowls, hot out of a big machine

--and one of the greatest perplexities, of course:

the Contemporary Art Expo.

I also would have liked them to see the bit of cargo on Le Coubre,

you know, the one that exploded in the port of Havana

to which the Cubans made a monument just by changing their perspective.

I could launch into a great eulogy for the Russian gaze

but if I say everything I I think, I will sound like a racist.

It is true, however, that there is a line of sight

as there is a life-line.

There is not an American gaze, nor a Scandanavian gaze, nor a Black gaze

a Jewish gaze,

a Russian gaze...

If I say that it's a light that shines in the poor and dies in the rich,

I'll be roasted by the Russians.

It's also the gaze of icons.

Let's talk about icons...

A people who had this painter here, this gaze there

and resulted

in the Tretiakov Gallery.

All the same, it's curious that the Vikings knew of form

and not just a useful form, a breathtaking form,

and that the Soviet Academics didn't have the character to suspect it exists.

It's true that now there's a kind of official pop art

that is rather cool, but all the same...

Me, I'd to put all the academic apologists in a big boat

-And sink it? -No, no!

Lead it to Cienfuegos, Cuba.

I have a friend named Samuel Feijoo,

he directs a school for the peasants.

There's a sculpture of a peasant.

He called it "Hunger,"