Read only as a last resort :
Initially there was work on memory and places.
The speaking man could have been a rhetorician of antiquity : To retain and organize their long speeches, rhetoricians memorized a series of places (loci) in which they inscribed mental images.
When it was time to speak, all they had to do was browse the place in mind, which brought up the images they had placed there.
This man retraces the places that articulate his thought ...
The words of the man are collages of sentences : Bergson, Bertolt brecht, Isidore Ducasse, Mao, Lu Xun, Guy Debord, from an anonymous poem from Kokin shû, from Dit du Genji (first great Japanese novel), by Shakespeare Automatic line return
"HandMade in China" summer 2004 in film with my Nikon FM2, a 35 / 1.4 and a mini-disc for sound.
Towards the end of the film, there appears a character written in white on a wall, I should have put a subtitle : this character = chai (1st tone) means here : "to destroy" and takes on its full meaning with the following images and the destruction of the hutongs (this traditional courtyard habitat) which is therefore also the destruction of memory.
And, at the end there is this.