RAGTAG - A FILM MANIFESTO FROM A FORGOTTEN MOVIEGOER (Original Version)

FIRST CHAPTER - LIKE TEARS IN RAIN...



Welcome to the Speakeasy Mr. Moonshine
I know it’s pretty late but we are still open
Actually there is no curfew for the Dirty Pretty films on the horizon
Enjoy this Drugstore as a manifesto for pretentious Cowboys
Who saw too many films and think they Got Game
A letter from an Unknown Moviegoer to young poets
Spreading The Confessions of a Dangerous Mind touched by Dementia
Who just think it’s time for fre(n)sh young blood to hustle Cinema
An emergency call for Fury as a prohibited Streetcar Named Hadopi is on his way
A fate only Watchmen like us can face in Praise of cinema, That Obscure Object Of Desire,
It suddenly stroke like a Hole in My Heart, like a Beat That My Heart Skipped
A day I was thinking about the fate of Johnny after he Got His Gun
We reached a Point Blank and now we have to Stand Alone
Don’t worry I won’t deliver you another Strawberry Statement
I’m not Branded To Kill or Gun Crazy fueled with a Death Instinct
More a Ruthless Hustler or rather a Young Lieutenant
Who just draw why Lola is such a Fast Runner
The Unbelievable Truth can only lead to a Getaway
The specters are already filling our cities
All stuck in a Shock Corridor, this Silent Hill, victim of a stupid Catch-22
And it’s only our Far Country, on the Edge of Heaven, who dares reacting
Refusing to be the Casualties of an Oldboy doctrine
I just hope this Tropical Malady, as the Great Dictator would say, will reach our Metropolis
Where people hardly enjoy their Last life in the Universe and prefer to Walk The Line
Phantoms of Paradise who sold their soul in Touch of Evil
Beat, Beat, Beat being skipped deep in my heart
All these Passengers waiting for the Kiss of Death to get rid of their 21 grams
Is it a fucking Paranoid Punishment Park created to make us fear the return of the Elephant?
Why I can’t ear anymore the Love Songs from the Second Floor?
Do we have to buy a License to Live?
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
Been a while I’m in this Apartment, in A Lonely Place,
I don’t want to be a Taxi Driver all my life
I want to be a Rainmaker who Bites Human Beasts
Turning them into Stalkers who, Once outside, in the Joyless Street, the Street of the Shame,
Will be looking for Magnolias, Wild Strawberries and The Grapes of Wrath still around
Proving to themselves they’re maybe not useless Clockwork Oranges
But Fires Within serving Great Expectations
It’s so hard to be alone and Wild at Heart in this Inland Empire
I guess it’s time for us to Face/Off
We all need to invent lines of flight to a New World
A Breathless Vanishing Point to Zabriskie Point trough the Red Desert
Be Easy Riders and Men on the Moon
Under the Influence of the Bad Education movies gave us
Following the Paths of our Notorious and Inglorious fathers, these Basterds,
Because this text is mainly a homage,
Their memory in my skin and a thousand Bullets in the Head,
Hundred years after his manifest, to Filippo Marinetti and his Reservoir Dogs,
Fifty years after the New Wave, to François Truffaut and his Band of Outsides,
Twenty years after, to John Cassavetes,
Ten years after Stanley Kubrick left us…
Their Shadows in Paradise are still around waiting for a new breath…


CHAPTER II - THE MIRROR OF THE STREETS



All this started with a Bug in the Matrix
The Blast of an Angry Silence
A Crash rewriting the History of Violence with Scissorhands
These Floating Clouds taking the forms of Elevators to the Gallows
The Apocalypse Now beating down the Citizen Kane of this Free World
The Downfall of Babel under the hold, for already too long, of Hate and Contempt
Everything Gone in the Wind
All these Straw Dogs now earning Wages of Fear
Open your Eyes, it’s the Same Old Song
Already a long time we were Swimming with Sharks
Being Conformists in this Ghost World
In this Darwin’s nightmare on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
All these Syndromes and a Century
It’s just a Groundhog Day starting again, A Deer Hunter
Except now the Climates enable us to see the Devil’s Backbone
To catch the Invasion of Body Snatchers red-handed, already Knocking on Any Door
What do you expect now?
A Christmas Tale, Deliverance, a Sweet Hereafter, a sign from Zodiac
Or just a Brighter Summer Day?
The Harder you will Fall
In this Grand Illusion, this Dead Poets Society, this Sodom and Gomorrah
The Big Sleep is over my friends as we discover this Waking Life
We’re just luckier than the others
Why Mr. Moonshine?
Because in the City of Lost Children we all learned to master the Night and Fog
I could wish you Good night and Good Luck à Cabiria
But the Silence of the Lambs won’t solve this Vertigo
Lambs need to get their Jaws out and become the Brotherhood of the Wolf
The Time of the Wolf has started for the Princes of Darkness
For the Dancers in the Dark who Live by Night
Belonging to the After Hours, among the Scarecrows, this 25th Hour,
The Rising of the Moon spreading the Wind of Night in all these Dark Passages
While the City Sleeps, after the Last Metro, we could all be Dark Knights
After the Last Picture Show, we could become the Midnight Cowboys and Underground Barflys
The Warriors of the Open City who explore the Lost Highways, Two-Lane Blacktops and Yards,
Playing with the City Lights in the Badlands and the Sparrows in the Casino of Bob The Gambler
Our Colossal Youth turning down the Frontier of Dawn
Looking at himself, the Wild Child, in the mirror of the streets, with No Regrets For Our Youth,
Hanging on the Eastern Promise of Kids Return while escaping the Sentinel before Daybreak
Alone in the playgrounds of our Naked Childhood unable to say Au Revoir Les Enfants
Digging for the anarchist souls of the Sundance Kids, Alice, Pixote, Zazie and Antoine,
Investigating the Anatomy of a Murder,
The murder of our innocent child dreams, and of a certain cinema,
As Hunters in the Night of the Living Dead…


CHAPTER III - SLEEP OR NOT TO SLEEP...



The more days are running, the more I feel the Stir of Echoes
All these ghosts asking me to take care of these fake Jesse James out there
I am just sick of all these Lost Weekends
I go to the movies looking for French Cinema and I can’t find these Three Colors anywhere
It’s just A Long Goodbye to Dragon Inn
Another Certain Tendency of our Cinema
Anyway, on Any Given Bloody Sunday, I’m ready to leave for a Gold Rush like Aguirre
Rushing Into the Wild and fighting for the Baby of Rosemary
For the memory of cinema in my Battleship but Monday morning it’s starting all over again
If… if only there was a Wild Bunch outside fighting for the same cause from Dusk Till Dawn
I guess it’s just an Arizona Dream, and I’m a Rebel Without a Cause following my Basic Instinct
But Paris and many other cities belong to filmmakers and I’m far from being the Last Mohican
There could be a new French Connection out there, a bunch of Dreamers…
Be Kind Rewind, it was just fifty years ago
These guys were the Searchers, The Peeping Tom, The Watchmen, The Eyes Without a Face
Maybe I shouldn’t Bring out the Dead that way and forget about Chinatown…
“Don’t look back”, the Mother and the Whore tell me when they are In the Mood for Love…
And I keep talking and talking like Martin and Quentin
Telling them how everybody forgot about this Band of Outsiders
The same way they did about La Commune
“They shoot horses, don’t they?”
Yeah girls, but it doesn’t mean the Flowers of the past should be Broken…
Angel Hearts and Regular Lovers are now Ghost Dogs treated as Pickpockets or Bicycle Thieves
There are Two or Three things I Know about cinema
Some seem to like it Running on Empty but I like it Hot
Since the days the Spider Woman told me “Kiss Me Deadly”
The first Tastes of Tea and Cherry grabbed me like a Mystic River of No-Return, a High Fidelity,
These Days of Heaven… this Splendor in the Grass… this Birth of a Film Nation…
I guess now we are just scared of this Holy Grail, Film History X, this fucking Rushmore,
Preferring to see us as a Doom Generation unable to shoot for truth
A Youth Without Youth
Dead before the Age of Innocence
Dead before the Revolution
Dead before exploring the potential of our Mysterious Skins and Eager Bodies
Saying film is No Country for Young Men, just a Requiem for a Dream
But what about the kids with guts ready for the 400 Blows?
To Have and Have not… To Be or not to Be…
Are we still the Children of Men? Or our Existenz is stuck in this Alien Videodrome?
In the Heat of the Night, the Blade Runner, this Man on Wire, is out there,
Among the Shadows of Doubt arising on Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive,
And in the Mean Streets of Metropolis, this Saudade in his head rise new questions
“Is there a Ghost in the Shell, or am I a Man Without a Past?
Lost in a Memento Frenzy, exploring the Consequences of his Love for Cinema
He feels puzzled in front of this oedipal quest, this Shame, this Marienbad Charade
How moviegoers have been able to let the Blood of the Poets dry?
How the ghosts of Langlois, Daney, Bazin and Truffaut can echo the fires of Fahrenheit 451?
Why are we trying to kill in Cold Blood the rise of a new Cinémathèque on this Network?
Out of the Past, there is no Sunshine for the Spotless Mind…
If only we were using the memory of our peers as lighthouses in the night
This cinema of bravery, boldness and subversion that already printed many Hearts and Minds
Let’s take a Time Out and go back to the Source, this Tree of Life, to catch our breath
A Second Breath as a matter of transmission for the Children of Paradise
And Freedom for Us Children of Cinema !


FINAL CHAPTER - THE MOONLIGHT SONATA



I guess now we should all meet On the Waterfront, close to The Pier,
And Under the Sun of Satan, throw bottles at the sea with films inside
Or follow the Woman on the Beach to hide them Under the Sand
Maybe the sea will inspire us to be Navigators like Tabarly, Breaking the Waves
To build a new Atalante, make up a Fight Club or a Breakfast Club
A new kind of Fellowship for the Misfits, the Outsiders, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
And simply just stay here in this Central Station where we are all Strangers on the Train
Where I ask you now to “Be With Me” and "Stand by Me"
And let’s be this Army of Shadows, this Red Circle, where the Goodfellas meet the Lusty Men
Following the Hidden Odysseys of Kubrick, Malick, Salinger and Pynchon
Behind red cameras and laptops, our Modern Times pencils,
Let’s open the Pandora Box and play Funny Games
Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs as much as Pierrot le Fou
Establish new Rules for this Game, Rules for this new Attraction
The Godfathers of the industry are saying
“Thank you for watching, thank you for paying”, but why not interacting?
Getting rid of the Ruling Class of fake Idols around
All these supposed Kings of Comedy only deserve a visit of the Exterminating Angel
Heroes are for Sale, it’s too late for them
The Day of the Outlaw has started
It’s Playtime for the Heavenly Creatures
Take a camera and remix your favorite films, the recent ones, the lost ones
As Reprises for the audience
Let the Rumble Fish swim away, Kill the Mockingbird, Cross the Thin Red Line,
Forget about the Tarnation, leave your Rear Window for a new Platform
Where, your Eyes Wide Shut, you will share a Naked Lunch with an Andalusian Dog
This is not a Weird Science, this is no Theoreme
Forget about the Box and Enter the Void
This is Cinema, a subversive Game for the United Anartists
Ready for Big Risk and Short Cuts
A Pot Luck where the Virgin is Stripped Bare by her Bachelors
A Temporary Autonomous Zone serving as a draft for a New World
Describing how chaotic our world is, where kids are adults and adults would like to be kids again
Let’s start as modern critics drawing our inspirations from DJ, sweders and ready-makers
Not on a piece of paper this time but through images and videos
Let’s Write on the Wind that will carry us and start a new Conversation with Cinema
Critics finally exposing themselves and relocating the characters they love in their cities
Printing new stories and memories on buildings and streets
Making us travel and praising the Imitation of Life
The streets of the Holy Drinker, the Savage nights and the Best of Youth
And building a new Rio Bravo as a Nest to counter the Assault
Let’s make movies Redacted and edited and free the culture of true cinema
Starting with the 402 Film Bricks I threw at you in this text
This industry will think we are Public Enemies and give us Zero For Conduct
And cast some of us as the new Al Capone for their next prohibition flick
Just because when we don’t want to sleep alone,
We like to dance a Last Mambo with a Millenium Actress or a Waltz with Bashir
They already think we are a bunch of modern Pirates of the Caribbean
Violating copyrights while we’ll be promoting young filmmakers
Who deserve more attention from the media and the masses
Because they don’t have any money for marketing
Bringing back, at the forefront of the stage, rare filmmakers and their Forgotten Silver
Standing as a Hitchhiker’s Guide for younger generations
Making them Curious about the Case of Cinema, relishing films instead of consuming them
As Forces of Evil facing the powerful and formatted Storytelling of the Industry,
This Mechanic Ballet,
Filling this dead space with unselfish love and a demystifying spirit,
Fighting against the Desert of the Real, this virtual reality, dull and neutral,
As a No Man’s Land where the filmmakers of the future will have to impose a new voice
And make people rediscover cinema and reality when they don’t expect it
In this Joint Security Area, this Carlito’s way, where Raiders of the Lost Ark will Meet John Doe
An event, this Close Encounter of the Third Kind, will make us aware that the Base of Air is Red
And that, besides all this Contempt for people like us, resigned people remain the true enemies
How Unbreakable the Undertow and Butterfly Effect can be
I still don’t know if there is Still Life out there, in my streets,
I still don’t know if we can make it Before Sunrise
Nobody Knows How much Coffee and Cigarettes we gonna need during the Battle in Heaven
And if we will have to be Carabineers, and Shoot the Piano Player this Week-End,
To Write Our Music and give birth to our dancing Lone Star
Only Angels with Dirty Faces have Wings of Desire
Don’t look Back to the Future
As future is a thing of the past
And don’t forget this Last Detail
You Only Live Once
And Your Mother Too

- BINX BOLLING, THE MOONSHINER -