Read Online But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens - Free Book Online
Authors: Marceline Loridan-Ivens
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that were verywell received throughout the world. In France, we were taken as propagandists for the great Communist devil and its millions of ants in blue uniforms. We wanted to build a bridge between the East and the West, we wanted to study the society that claimed to change the relationship between men, we tried to listen to the Chinese people rather than their leaders, whose censorship and excesses we understood only too well. We were seeking the idea of revolution itself, in vain. Our movies opened with Chinese tales, where people were trying to move mountains.
I was probably a woman under the influence. I was obsessed with Joris. But I needed that dependency, the strength and convictions of a man like him. He was the school I’d never finished. The love that would save me. He represented a land far away. The antidote to your absence. I often disagreed with him, and told him so. I liked the idea of revolution, but I wasn’t a Communist; I’d spent time with the Party for a few months but rejected it rather than back theSoviet reign of terror. I sowed a seed of doubt in Joris’s mind. He wrote about it in his memoirs. “How could two people who were so close to one another in their aspirations, their revolt, their sense of justice, find themselves so far removed on ideological questions? It was the moment when I had to take a position and try to see what was fair and what wasn’t.” I like those lines—they express how we complemented one another, they show our mistakes and how we tried to find our way, as well as how sincere we were.
It’s futile trying to describe things to a dead man: years, countries, people, films he’ll never know. And yet, I caught myself, just the other day, talking to you out loud about China. Just like that, alone in my Paris apartment, I was telling you that certain major universities in China have started courses on Judaism and the Talmud. I was forging links and similarities between the Chinese and our people. Between the Chinese people and me. I remembered that even when I was very little, China played a part in my dreams. That in school,we were told to sell the silver wrappers from chocolate bars to send money to the Chinese children who were victims of the famine; and after the war, I liked opening the door to a bookstore in the 5th arrondissement that was full of books with bone clasps; and the first time I went to China and ate wontons, I thought of the kreplach we had at home. I talked to you as if to vindicate myself. I was really only talking to myself. A long time ago, in the middle of my life without you, I cloaked myself in illusions, became frozen on the inside so I wouldn’t have to think about anything anymore, so I could run away. And so I distanced myself from you.
Joris died in 1989, when China was experiencing the student uprising he’d so hoped for. “What’s happening in China?” he asked from his deathbed. We held our breath with the rest of the world. He died along with the bloody crushing of the rebellion. Victim of a dream that had gone so wrong. The Italian newspaper la Repubblica wrote: “The final crime of Deng Xiaoping was the death of Joris Ivens.” His death devastated me.
Henri said: “You ended up marrying your father.” He said “your father,” not “our father.” I was shocked at the time. Then I thought about it. He hadn’t taken your place—that was impossible; he hadn’t been a protector—I’d taken care of him as much as he’d taken care of me. We were two artists, two recluses. But I had married a man of your age, an heir to the exalted nineteenth century that believed in the continuous, automatic progression of History. I had loved a man you would have loved. Joris had surely understood that as well, but he never spoke to me about it. And he too left me alone in the ruins of the twentieth century.
His friend, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, opened a roll of film and wrote a message on it for him. He entrusted me
I was probably a woman under the influence. I was obsessed with Joris. But I needed that dependency, the strength and convictions of a man like him. He was the school I’d never finished. The love that would save me. He represented a land far away. The antidote to your absence. I often disagreed with him, and told him so. I liked the idea of revolution, but I wasn’t a Communist; I’d spent time with the Party for a few months but rejected it rather than back theSoviet reign of terror. I sowed a seed of doubt in Joris’s mind. He wrote about it in his memoirs. “How could two people who were so close to one another in their aspirations, their revolt, their sense of justice, find themselves so far removed on ideological questions? It was the moment when I had to take a position and try to see what was fair and what wasn’t.” I like those lines—they express how we complemented one another, they show our mistakes and how we tried to find our way, as well as how sincere we were.
It’s futile trying to describe things to a dead man: years, countries, people, films he’ll never know. And yet, I caught myself, just the other day, talking to you out loud about China. Just like that, alone in my Paris apartment, I was telling you that certain major universities in China have started courses on Judaism and the Talmud. I was forging links and similarities between the Chinese and our people. Between the Chinese people and me. I remembered that even when I was very little, China played a part in my dreams. That in school,we were told to sell the silver wrappers from chocolate bars to send money to the Chinese children who were victims of the famine; and after the war, I liked opening the door to a bookstore in the 5th arrondissement that was full of books with bone clasps; and the first time I went to China and ate wontons, I thought of the kreplach we had at home. I talked to you as if to vindicate myself. I was really only talking to myself. A long time ago, in the middle of my life without you, I cloaked myself in illusions, became frozen on the inside so I wouldn’t have to think about anything anymore, so I could run away. And so I distanced myself from you.
Joris died in 1989, when China was experiencing the student uprising he’d so hoped for. “What’s happening in China?” he asked from his deathbed. We held our breath with the rest of the world. He died along with the bloody crushing of the rebellion. Victim of a dream that had gone so wrong. The Italian newspaper la Repubblica wrote: “The final crime of Deng Xiaoping was the death of Joris Ivens.” His death devastated me.
Henri said: “You ended up marrying your father.” He said “your father,” not “our father.” I was shocked at the time. Then I thought about it. He hadn’t taken your place—that was impossible; he hadn’t been a protector—I’d taken care of him as much as he’d taken care of me. We were two artists, two recluses. But I had married a man of your age, an heir to the exalted nineteenth century that believed in the continuous, automatic progression of History. I had loved a man you would have loved. Joris had surely understood that as well, but he never spoke to me about it. And he too left me alone in the ruins of the twentieth century.
His friend, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, opened a roll of film and wrote a message on it for him. He entrusted me
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