The Image Book (Le Livre d'image)

World's masters should be...

...wary of Bécassine: she is silent

Fairy's five fingers

together they make up the hand

Man's true condition:

to think with hands

Archives and Moral

Go fetch the books... we'll have a look

Image and Words

No bullshit

SIGNS AMONGST US PICTURE

It's like a bad dream

written in a stormy night

Moral fault was merged with state crimes

One would carry out the savior act

if we could drive to death

our way of thinking and talking

that want only to keep up appearances

Tell lies

I'm not sad that you are leaving

I'm not in love with you

I don't kiss you tenderly

Americans are trying to question a fighting girl

Insults, communist songs

more simply: cries of pain

Climb up on the chair!

You live with your parents?

To be or not being

Spring 1944, the war was over

Please, please

To be immortal has no interest for you?

What will become of me if I don't die?

It's our first quarrel

We have signed

With communists I'll go to death

but I'll not do one more step

He started it,... that's the truth

Shut up, Cassandra!

St. Petersburg's Evenings

War is here

Nothing is as handy as a text

To put into book

what would it be, into book

one puts reality?

And put reality into reality?

Holidays come to an end

I need one whole day

to tell the story of one second

I need a life time

for the story of one hour

I need eternity

for the story of one day

So horrible

It's in St. Petersburg

that de Maistre wrote the evenings

a day before the Battle of Moscova

Tortures are punishment

of man's wickedness

The executioner carries out divine fate

Heaven can only be soothed with blood

The innocent may pay for the guilty

During the evening, Count de Maistre went on

with his most foolish words

This is the law of destruction of the living

Every being must be sacrificed

Once more, we understood

that we didn't imagine

that war would end

without our victory

War is therefore divine

Who could believe that the victims

had shed their blood in vain?

By the end of the evening,

those words of French diplomacy

I wish you good luck

And Malraux said simply:

To transform our apocalypse into an army

or die, that's all.

Leave me alone!

All alone!

Those flowers between the rails, in the confused wind of travels

The Warsaw train

was approaching Petersburg at full steam

When a century

slowly dissolves into the next century,

some people

transform means of survival

into new means

It's the latter that we call art

No activity shall become an art

before its time is over

then, this art will disappear

Clearly, you're asleep

At least madam, will you explain to me?

Nothing, if you dream, accept your dreams

It's the sleeper's role

The words of Goethe had become dreadful

when heard in the nights of small Russian railways

We want to travel

Without steam

Or sails

To cheer up our jails

Spread through our minds

Stretched out like a screen

Our memories with their framed horizon

UNDER WESTERN EYES

Tell me why you were a spy?

Even among communists,

money is the most important

shall do exactly the same thing

All of them

The lush green

Of summer

Regal

blaze

of autumn

And the ruin of winter

Before spring

would bloom

again

Darkened by time

Not like sentinels,

No.

As if they were defending

the living against the dead

All of them

Before spring would bloom again

Spirit of Laws

The flag

The flag goes with the foul landscape

Arthur Rimbaud: Democracy

If I could make those who are in command

increase their knowledge

about what they have to prescribe

and that those who obey

would find a pleasure in obeying

I would be the most happy man

I'm calling prejudice

what one ignores oneself

It's no more permissible for a government

or for an individual

to be an assassin

Everything done in Europe is done by Europe

Here one massacres, one burns, one loots

One slits the throats of fathers and mothers

One sells little girls

So that to the living who sent them the carnage

the dead are sending the plague

We inform Europe's government this

France's destiny

followed that of America's

like in the romantic German fairy tales

The cat

that makes his master's ambitions derisory

It's when looking for how to teach men

that one may take part in this general virtue

that consists of love for all

Man

is able to know his own nature when shown

and to lose it when stolen from him

Secret and Law

It doesn't matter, all is grace

A man that justice has cut off from the living

belongs to the Bench

The prison belongs to the Bench,

which controls it absolutely

There is something wrong with the law

Society is based on a shared murder

Remember

Not by principle

but Europe does not have the necessary virtues

To slit the throat of the infidels

I prefer poor people

because they are the defeated

I knew neither rules nor exceptions

thirst for words, then the image

What does that mean, politics?

Virtue Terror

What is she saying?

I can't hear anything

She says that the poor will save the world

They will ask for nothing in exchange

They will do this huge deal

Central Area

It's a brief story

that of the mass extinction of species

Two groups

The richest billion and the poorest billion

the richest ravage the global environment

by producing waste

while the poorest destroy their resources

by lack of choice

However

to love those capable of doing this

What more can be expected of love?

If we were alive

but we are alive

You search inside of me something not living

That's pain

It's expecting too much