Tag Archives: night

gran via, 2004

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George, Madrid 2004

Walking on a Friday night with John the Nigerian and George from Sierra Leone.  Jaunty, bouncing down the bright slope lit in the glare of numerous headlights.  There are no shadows.  It seems Madrid is a city without shadows, whether violently over-exposed in the long sharp daylight or blanketed in electric night, even the darkeness is bright, composed of overlapping rays of light.

What is normally intimate, is here public.  Nigerian, Camerounian, Benin ladies line the “great way” calling to potential clients, in several languages offering blowjobs.  John is steely, silent as we pass each small group, but George is perenially jocular, waving as a few of the ladies call him by name: My brodda, I no see you long time, wey you dey? 

Nevertheless, our steps do not slow.  We are on a mission, searching for the Chinese street vendor who the night before sold John a packet of “marlboros” hastily rolled by unskilled hands.  John clutches the cigarettes angrily, disgusted with their flat bent forms. For 3€ he is sure he deserves more.

The vendor stares at John, unrecognizing, deaf to complaints made in halting, urgent Spanish.  When John leans dangerously close to his face, the vendor jumps, displaying an agility his earlier stoicism belied. The argument ensues, circular, incomprehensible to all but the most knowledgeable onlookers.

I call out to the combatants, asking in English if I may take their photos.  John immediately strikes an indignant pose, while the vendor stares resolutely away from my camera. I snap this shot and we are off back up Gran Via, the way we came.

John, Madrid, 2004

screen memory

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Escaping her disgust with herself, she walks out into the night to haunt a familiar tea room—to meet a familiar stranger. An encounter with the stranger, her lover, who asks her to stay here in Hiroshima is the beginning of a slow walk through the empty streets of the night city.

He’s going to kiss me. He’s going to kiss me and I’ll be lost.

She walks on, passing two strolling guitarists, lovers embracing in back seat of a parked car, another car slowing, almost stopping as it passes her, a lone lady in the night. The flickering of Japanese neon is cut with day-lit memories of the sober street signs marking the corner walls of her small French village. Her thoughts drift between both places she must eventually leave, between doomed love affairs. The filmmakers create these flashes of memory through cuts which link tracking shots that seem to keep the camera at the same up-turned angle, creating for the viewer the experience of walking the streets in two different places simultaneously, eyes turned slightly upward to read the signs.

I met you. (Hiroshima)
I remember you. (French village)
This city was tailor-made for love. (Hiroshima)

The walk through post-Nuclear-holocaust Hiroshima at night is full of memories of war-time France. A neon Eiffel Tower flashes on and off like a beacon atop a Japanese bar. One place often bleeds into another—this sort of time travel is possible at night on an aimless stroll, away from oneself.  Both places are bound by war. This walk is evidence of the inevitability and impossibility of love across cultures.

walking the night city

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The Sudden Walk

by Franz Kafka
translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

When it looks as if you had made up your mind finally to stay at home for the evening, when you have put on your house jacket and sat down after supper with a light on the table to the piece of work or the game that usually precedes your going to bed, when the weather outside is unpleasant so that staying indoors seems natural, and when you have already been sitting quietly at the table for so long that your departure must occasion surprise to everyone, when, besides, the stairs are in darkness and the front door locked, and in spite of all that you have started up in a sudden fit of restlessness, changed your jacket, abruptly dressed yourself for the street, explained that you must go out and with a few curt words of leave-taking actually gone out, banging the flat door more or less hastily according to the degree of displeasure you think you have left behind you, and when you find yourself once more in the street with limbs swinging extra freely in answer to the unexpected liberty you have procured for them, when as a result of this decisive action you feel concentrated within yourself all the potentialities of decisive action, when you recognize with more than usual significance that your strength is greater than your need to accomplish effortlessly the swiftest of changes and to cope with it, when in this frame of mind you go striding down the long streets – then for that evening you have completely got away from your family, which fades into insubstantiality, while you yourself, a firm, boldly drawn black figure, slapping yourself on the thigh, grow to your true stature.

All this is still heightened if at such a late hour in the evening you look up a friend to see how he is getting on.

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