Saint-Privat-des-Clèdes, in the Cévennes, June 1952. Lucien Rouvière has come home from Lyon after twenty-three years to bury his father in the family ground on the terrace, beside the chestnut-log hives. A promise of sale lies on the yard table, and a dealer is due on Saturday for the bees. In the middle of the burial psalm a swarm pours out of the seventh hive and settles on the lime tree in the village square. The neighbour who kept the bees with his father goes after it. The son stays at the grave. The André Bazin Simulacrum writes the film in five takes, each a single unbroken shot staged in depth. The camera never cuts away from what matters, and it does not tell the viewer where to look.
by André Bazin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
A Screenplay in Five Takes
LUCIEN ROUVIÈRE, forty-one, a fitter at a motor works near Lyon, home to bury his father
JOSÉPHINE MALAVAL, fifty-four, a widow, the neighbour across the gully
THE TEISSIER BROTHERS, fifty or so, who dig the grave
PASTOR ÉMILE COUDERC, up from the town for the burial
ERNEST PELLET, who keeps the café on the square
MIREILLE PELLET, eleven, his daughter
FIRMIN SALLES, the garde champêtre
BOUSQUET, a dealer in hives, from Anduze
MOURNERS AND VILLAGERS of Saint-Privat-des-Clèdes
THE BEES
ABEL ROUVIÈRE, seventy-four, keeper of the hives, is not seen.
Saint-Privat-des-Clèdes, a village in the Cévennes. Tuesday the third and Saturday the seventh of June, 1952.
Each take is a single shot. There is no cut inside a take.
ONE SHOT.
EXT. THE TERRACE OF THE ROUVIÈRE MAS — MORNING
Tuesday, the third of June, 1952. Half past seven. The sun has just cleared the far ridge and comes in low along the terrace, so that every stone in the wall has its own shadow.
The camera stands at the near end of the terrace, under a mulberry, at the height of a man's eyes.
Nearest to us, on the left, three headstones in the long grass, leaning a little, yellow with lichen. The newest can be read: CLÉMENCE ROUVIÈRE 1889–1931. Beside them, a heap of fresh earth, red-brown and full of stones, and a long hole. Two men are down in it to the chest: the TEISSIER brothers, fifty or so, in caps, their shirts dark down the back. Their shovels come up in turn, catch the sun, and throw.
Beyond them the terrace runs away from us along its dry-stone wall: a strip of ground ten paces wide between the wall and the drop. Below the edge, the crowns of chestnut trees.
Along the foot of the wall, on a shelf of flat stones, stand the hives: eight upright lengths of chestnut trunk, each about as high as a man's hip, grey, split, bound round with wire. Each has a slab of slate on its head and a stone on the slate. Bees are already coming and going at the low slots in their sides. The last log, the one nearest the steps, has no slate on its head; the slate leans against its foot.
At the far end, rough stone steps climb to a yard, and above the yard stands the house: schist walls, a roof of schist slabs, two windows. The shutters of one are closed. The other stands open, and a small mirror has been propped on its iron bar, above a stone basin.
At the first hive, nearest to us, is JOSÉPHINE MALAVAL, fifty-four, in a straw hat and a black dress that was some other colour last week; the dye has taken unevenly at the seams. Her forearms are burnt brown to the elbow. From her apron pocket she takes a roll of black crepe. She knocks once on the wood with her knuckle, bends to the slot, and speaks into it. We hear only the beginning:
JOSÉPHINE
Abèl es mòrt…
The rest goes into the hive. She tears off a length of crepe, passes it round the log, and knots it. Then the second hive: the knock, the low voice, the black band. Then the third. She does not hurry. Neither do the shovels.
Up in the yard, LUCIEN ROUVIÈRE, forty-one, comes out of the house in shirtsleeves and braces, the trousers of a black suit, a towel over his shoulder, a good steel watch on his wrist. At the basin he lathers his face and begins to shave in the little mirror, his back to us. After a few strokes he stops. He turns round and looks down at the terrace.
He comes down the steps with lather still on one cheek. His shoes are town shoes; on the fourth step the sole slides on the schist, and he puts a hand to the wall.
The elder Teissier straightens in the hole and calls up the length of the terrace.
TEISSIER
Monsieur Rouvière. A metre sixty. The same as for your mother.
Lucien stops on the bottom step.
LUCIEN
Yes. Thank you.
The shovels go on.
Lucien comes along the row to Joséphine, who has reached the fifth hive. She does not turn round. She finishes what she is saying into the slot before she straightens.
LUCIEN
Madame Malaval.
(she nods)
The coffee. Thank you.
JOSÉPHINE
There's bread in the drawer. The drawer sticks. You lift it, then you pull.
She tears the crepe. He watches her tie it.
Now the camera begins to move. It goes along the terrace at a walking pace, past the open grave and the two bent backs, which slip out of the frame on the left, past the first hives with their black bands, and it stops when the two of them stand in the middle of the frame with the rest of the row running on beyond them to the steps.
LUCIEN
Bousquet is coming on Saturday. From Anduze. For the hives.
She knots the crepe on the sixth.
JOSÉPHINE
Then they'll go in mourning.
She moves to the seventh. The knock; the voice; the black band. The slate on this one is grey with dust, and on it, in chalk, a column of dates runs down from edge to edge in a small, slanting hand: 1912 at the top, then year under year, some years twice, down to the last line, 19 mai 1951. Partway down, among them, one entry is larger and rounder than the others, written by someone pressing hard:
1927 L.
Whoever looks can read it. Lucien looks at the slate. He does not touch it.
Joséphine lays her palm flat on the slate, takes it away, and lays it there again. Then she steps past the eighth log without stopping.
LUCIEN
That one?
JOSÉPHINE
Empty. He always kept one empty.
She puts the roll of crepe back in her apron. For the first time she looks at his face, at the lather drying on his cheek.
JOSÉPHINE
Go and finish your face. They're coming up at half past ten.
She goes up the steps. She knows which ones are worn, and her feet do not slide. The camera goes with her, climbing behind her a step at a time.
EXT. THE YARD OF THE ROUVIÈRE MAS — CONTINUOUS
Beaten earth; a fig tree; the clède, a low drying-house black with old smoke, its door ajar. Under the open window, an iron table. On the table, a letter of two typed sheets, unfolded, held down by a leather razor case.
Joséphine crosses the yard toward a gap in the wall where a path goes off downhill. At the table she slows. She does not touch the letter. She goes on through the gap and down the path, and she is gone.
The camera lets her go. It comes to rest beside the table, and the letter is in the near corner of the frame, close enough to read its heading: PROMESSE DE VENTE.
Beyond the low parapet of the yard and below it lies the whole terrace. Lucien stands alone at the end of the row, the towel on his shoulder. Seven hives with black bands; the eighth bare. Farther along, the mulberry, the stones, the heap of earth. Farther still, across the gully, on the opposite slope, a small stone house with its door open, and below it a plank laid over the dry bed of a stream. After a while Joséphine comes out of the trees, small, crosses the plank, and climbs to her door. She goes in.
Down on the terrace the Teissier brothers lay their shovels across the hole and climb out, one pulling the other up by the wrist. They sit down on the heap of earth. One of them takes out his tobacco.
Lucien has not moved. Then he crouches by the seventh hive, low, his face at the height of the slot where the bees go in and come out, and he stays there.
The shot holds.
CUT TO:
ONE SHOT.
EXT. THE TERRACE OF THE ROUVIÈRE MAS — LATE MORNING
Eleven o'clock. No shadows left on the wall. The air over the slates is moving the way air moves over a stove.
The camera stands at the foot of the steps, at the far end of the terrace, looking up at the yard and the door of the house.
The door is open. Out of the dark of the front room comes the end of a coffin of pale new pine, then the two poles under it, then the four men carrying them: Lucien at the front on the left, in the black jacket now, buttoned; beside him a man of sixty with a white moustache; behind, the Teissier brothers in jackets that are too tight across the back. They cross the yard. At the top of the steps they stop, settle the poles on their shoulders, and come down slowly, feeling for each step. The coffin tilts toward us.
Behind them come the MOURNERS, a dozen of them, the men in black hats, the women in black scarves, and PASTOR ÉMILE COUDERC, a heavy man in a black gown with white bands at his throat, a book in his hand.
As the coffin passes us the camera turns with it, slowly, until it is looking along the terrace toward the mulberry: the length of ground it looked down in the early morning, seen now from the other end. Then it stops turning, and from now on it does not move.
On the right, near enough to touch, the row of hives, the eighth and bare one first, then the seventh, then the others going away with their black bands. On the left, the edge of the terrace, the drop, and the tops of the chestnuts. Far off, under the mulberry, the open grave with its heap of earth, and the three stones.
Joséphine is standing between the eighth hive and the seventh, her back against the wall, her hands folded on her apron. She has taken off the straw hat; she wears a black scarf like the other women. The coffin went by her at the distance of an arm. Lucien did not turn his head, and neither did she.
The procession goes away from us along the terrace and gathers at the grave. The bearers lower the coffin onto two ropes laid across the hole. The mourners stand round it, in the sun, the women in front. The pastor opens his book. His voice comes back to us along the terrace, clear but small:
COUDERC
Je lève mes yeux vers les montagnes… D'où me viendra le secours ? Le secours me vient de l'Éternel, qui a fait les cieux et la terre.
(he reads on, to the last verse)
L'Éternel gardera ton départ et ton arrivée, dès maintenant et à jamais.
He closes the book on his finger.
COUDERC
Abel Rouvière was born on this ground, and he worked it, and now he is given back to it. He was not a man for long speeches. I will not make one over him.
The four men take the ropes and let the coffin down, hand under hand. Lucien is on the near side of the grave, with his back half to us. When the ropes come up slack he bends, takes a handful of earth from the heap, and throws it. The sound of it on the lid reaches us late.
They begin to sing. It is one of the old psalms of Geneva, slow, every syllable given its own note, a dozen voices that do not quite agree about where the note is.
At the seventh hive, near us on the right, the slot in the log has grown dark. Bees are packed at the opening, more than can go through it. Then they are coming through it: not flying out one by one, as all morning, but running out over the lip and down the bark, a brown stream of them, and lifting off the bark into the air.
In half a minute the air in front of the hives is full of bees, turning, rising, until the slates and the wall behind are seen through them as through a fall of hail. The sound changes. Under the singing there is now a roar, low, steady, like a threshing machine heard from a field away.
At the grave they go on singing. Nobody there has turned round.
Joséphine has not moved from the wall. The bees go round her head and her shoulders. She keeps her hands folded. She is watching the seventh hive.
The cloud lifts. It rises above the wall, catches the sun, and comes away along the terrace in a long slow shape that keeps changing, glittering at its edges. It reaches the mourners.
One voice stops. Then two. A woman puts her hand flat on her scarf. An old man takes off his hat and holds it in front of his chest. The pastor does not stop singing, and the voices nearest him go on with him. Nobody runs. The bees pass over their heads and round them, and for a long moment the mourners and the grave and the mulberry stand inside the roar.
Then the cloud tilts to the left, slides over the edge of the terrace, and pours down over the chestnut tops toward the roofs of the village below, out of the frame. The roar goes with it, fainter, and is gone.
The singing is thin but it has not stopped.
In front of the seventh hive, a few bees left behind turn in the empty air. The other hives go on with their ordinary traffic.
Joséphine pushes herself away from the wall. She looks along the terrace to the grave. At the grave, Lucien has turned round, and he is looking at her.
She goes to the edge of the terrace, on the left. Flat stones jut out of the face of the retaining wall below it, one under another, a stair for one person. She steps down onto the first, then the next, her hand on the top of the wall; her shoulders go down, her head, the black scarf; she is gone among the chestnuts.
The camera does not follow her. It stays where it is, with the hives and the grave.
At the grave the psalm comes to its last line, and the voices stop, not together.
The elder Teissier picks up his shovel and drives it into the heap. The first full shovel of earth goes into the hole.
Lucien stands where he is. His face is turned to the left edge of the frame, where she went down.
CUT TO:
ONE SHOT.
EXT. THE SQUARE, SAINT-PRIVAT-DES-CLÈDES — NOON
The camera is in the shade of the café door, at the low side of the square, looking up the slope of it.
Nearest, three iron tables and their chairs. On the edge of one sits MIREILLE PELLET, eleven, barefoot, a school slate on her knees and a stump of chalk in her fingers.
In the middle of the square, the lime tree, old, its trunk leaning, every bough of it in flower. The whole tree hums with bees working the flowers, a high thin sound that never stops. From the underside of a low bough, out over the paving, hangs something else: a mass of bees the size of a man's head, longer than it is wide, dark brown, its surface crawling over itself, never still. Its sound is lower than the tree's.
Below it, the war memorial, a stone soldier on a block of stone, names cut in the block. On the step of the memorial sits Joséphine. She has taken off her scarf and holds it folded in her lap. She is looking up.
Beyond the tree, at the top of the square, the temple: whitewashed, no tower, a sundial painted on its wall. Beyond the temple, the street climbs between walls and is lost among the roofs, and above the roofs the chestnut terraces go up in steps to the sky.
ERNEST PELLET comes out of the café past the camera, in his apron, a wooden ladder on his shoulder and an empty crate in his free hand. He crosses to the tree, sets down the crate, and leans the ladder against the bough, carefully, a hand's width from the cluster. The cluster does not change.
JOSÉPHINE
They're Abel's. Out of his seventh hive.
PELLET
Abel's in the ground, Joséphine.
(he tests the ladder with his foot)
This is the commune's square. Whoever takes them, has them.
A bell on a bicycle, twice. FIRMIN SALLES comes pedalling slowly up from the bottom of the square, past the camera on the right, a cap on his head and a brass plate on a leather strap across his chest. He gets off, holds the bicycle by the handlebars, and looks at the tree, the ladder, the woman on the step.
FIRMIN
They came down from the Rouvière place. I saw them go over.
PELLET
Then tell her. Commune ground.
Firmin takes off his cap, wipes the band of it with a finger, and puts it back. He speaks as if he were reading it off a notice.
FIRMIN
The owner of a swarm can claim it back as long as he hasn't stopped following it. If he has stopped following it, it belongs to the owner of the ground where it settles.
He looks at Pellet, then at Joséphine.
FIRMIN
So. Who followed them?
JOSÉPHINE
I did.
FIRMIN
You're not the owner.
Nobody says anything. Pellet looks at Joséphine. She looks back at him. Mireille has stopped writing.
FIRMIN
(with a shrug)
Then they're the commune's. And the commune doesn't keep bees.
(he turns the bicycle round)
I write nothing down till somebody does something.
He does not get on the bicycle. He stands holding it.
Far off at the top of the frame, where the street comes out from between the walls above the temple, there is a figure in black, small, coming down. It is Lucien. He walks at an even pace, not fast, keeping to the shady side of the street. Under one arm he carries something round and pale. Over the other arm, a folded white cloth.
He passes the temple and comes down into the square. Now it can be seen what he is carrying: an old basket of coiled straw, shaped like a bell, dark with age at the rim.
Pellet, one foot on the bottom rung, looks at the basket. Then at the son. He takes his foot off the ladder.
PELLET
It's yours, then.
LUCIEN
It was in the clède. Where it always was.
Joséphine stands up.
Lucien goes under the bough and looks up at the cluster. It hangs above his head, out of reach of his arms, turning slowly on itself. He looks at the ladder, and at the basket in his hands.
JOSÉPHINE
Not now.
(he looks at her)
Tonight. When it's cool. They'll be heavy, and they'll stay where you put them.
Firmin puts a foot on his pedal.
FIRMIN
Nobody's done anything yet.
He pushes off and rides away down the square, past the camera, and out of the frame. His bell rings once, farther off.
Lucien sets the basket on the nearest of the iron tables beside Mireille, and the white cloth on top of it. He carries a chair into the shade of the lime, puts it down under the bough, and sits, in his black jacket, buttoned. Joséphine sits again on the memorial step. Mireille slides off her table and sits on the paving between them, her slate in her lap.
Now the camera moves. It comes forward out of the café door, slowly, across the square, and stops at the edge of the lime's shade, where the three of them fill the frame from side to side: the man on the chair, the girl on the ground, the woman on the step, and above them the bough with the dark mass hanging from it, and above that the tree, loud.
Pellet leaves his ladder where it is and goes back past the camera into the café. He comes back with three glasses of water on a tin tray, sets the tray on the paving by the chair, and goes in again. Lucien takes a glass and drinks. Mireille takes one. The third stays on the tray.
The shot holds.
It holds while nothing happens. Bees come and go between the cluster and the sky, a few at a time. The shade of the lime slides over the paving, and the sun gets to Joséphine's black skirt, then her knee. She moves along the step into the shade, without looking down. Mireille's chalk goes back and forth on the slate. Lucien sits with his hands on his knees.
Far up the square, a woman crosses in front of the temple with a basket of washing, looks down at the three of them under the tree, and goes on.
Joséphine reaches for the third glass and drinks.
Lucien stands. He unbuttons his jacket, takes it off, and hangs it on the back of the chair. He sits down again in his shirtsleeves.
CUT TO:
ONE SHOT.
EXT. THE SQUARE, SAINT-PRIVAT-DES-CLÈDES — EVENING
The camera is up on the temple steps, at the top of the square, looking down it. The light comes level across the paving, and everything that stands has a long shadow lying beside it.
Nearest, a few paces below, the white sheet is spread on the paving under the low bough, its corners weighted with pebbles, a flat stone at its edge. Above it hangs the cluster, tighter than at noon, and darker. Few bees leave it now.
Pellet's ladder leans against the bough where he left it. Lucien's chair still stands under the tree, his black jacket on its back.
Beyond the tree, the memorial; the tables; Pellet in his café doorway with his arms folded. Round the low side of the square, at a distance they have chosen for themselves, a loose ring of people: the Teissier brothers in clean shirts, women from the burial with their scarves pushed back, two old men on the café bench, Firmin holding his bicycle. Below them all, the valley, blue already.
Mireille is nearer than anyone, squatting at the edge of the sheet.
Lucien comes into the frame from behind the camera, in his shirtsleeves, rolled to the elbow, the straw basket in his hands. Joséphine walks beside him. She puts her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder and both hands on the uprights.
He climbs. Four rungs, five. He holds the basket mouth upward under the cluster, so close that the lowest bees touch the rim and walk onto the straw. He looks down at her.
JOSÉPHINE
Ara.
He gathers the basket against his chest with his left arm. With his right hand he takes the bough above the cluster and pulls it down once, hard.
The cluster comes away all together and drops into the basket. The basket sinks in his arm with the weight. For a moment there is no sound but the bough springing back and the leaves shaking. Then the hum comes up out of the basket, louder and higher than before, and bees rise round his head, hundreds, lit gold by the low sun. They settle on his shirt, his bare forearms, his hair, the back of his neck.
He comes down one rung at a time, the basket held against him, his free hand on the ladder. In the ring of people nobody moves. Firmin has taken off his cap.
Lucien kneels on the sheet, turns the basket over, and sets it mouth down on the cloth. Joséphine slips the flat stone under one side of the rim, leaving a gap two fingers wide. Bees spill out across the white and fill the air at the height of their faces.
Lucien looks at the back of his left hand. Joséphine takes his wrist, turns the hand to the light, and scrapes once across the skin with her thumbnail. She lets go. He wipes the hand on his trousers.
The camera stays where it is.
The bees on the sheet begin to move all one way, toward the gap under the rim. They go in walking, a dark band across the cloth, unhurried. At the gap some stand still, tails lifted, wings going so fast they blur.
Joséphine kneels and watches the band. Mireille crawls up beside her and points.
MIREILLE
That one's longer than the others.
Joséphine catches the girl's hand before it reaches the cloth.
JOSÉPHINE
Leave her be.
Whoever looks along the band may see the one Mireille saw, or may not. It goes under the rim with the rest.
Down at the café, Firmin takes a little notebook from his breast pocket, writes something short in it with a pencil, and puts it back. He puts on his cap and walks his bicycle away out of the square. Pellet goes inside.
Lucien gets up from the sheet. He walks toward the camera, bees still on his shirt, up the slope until he is close, closer, and sits sideways on the lowest temple step, just below the camera, turned half back toward the square. His face, in profile, fills the frame.
He is sweating. A bee walks along his collar and over its edge onto his neck. He does not brush it off. He is looking down the square, at the sheet.
Beyond his face, small and sharp, Joséphine kneels by the basket on the white cloth, Mireille beside her, and the band of bees goes on going in.
The shot holds.
The light goes off the paving and up the trunk of the lime, and off the lime onto the roofs. The square turns grey.
Lucien gets up and walks back down to the sheet. It is empty now except for a few bees at the rim. Joséphine takes the stone away, brings the corners of the sheet up over the basket two by two, and knots them. Lucien lifts the bundle in both arms.
Mireille runs to the chair, takes the black jacket off its back, and puts it over his shoulder.
Lucien and Joséphine come up the square, past the camera, into the street above the temple. The camera turns and goes after them, at their pace.
EXT. THE CALADE — CONTINUOUS
The lane climbs steep between dry-stone walls, cobbled with stones set on edge. It is almost dark between the walls; the sky above is still pale. Joséphine goes first. Lucien comes behind, feeling for each stone with his feet. The hum goes with them, muffled in the cloth.
EXT. THE TERRACE OF THE ROUVIÈRE MAS — CONTINUOUS
They come down the steps from the yard, and the camera comes down after them and stops on the bottom step.
The row of hives in the dusk, the black bands on seven of them. At the far end, under the mulberry, the mound of the grave.
At the eighth log Lucien sets the bundle down. Joséphine undoes the knots. He holds the basket upside down over the open top of the log and strikes its rim once against the wood. The bees go down into the hollow with a sound like something poured.
Joséphine picks up the slate that has leaned against the foot of the log since morning and holds it out. He lays it on the log. She gives him the stone, and he puts the stone on the slate.
From inside the log, the low hum.
Joséphine folds the sheet over her arm, goes past him and up the steps, and is gone.
Lucien sits down on the end of the stone shelf, beside the eighth hive, the jacket still on his shoulder.
Across the gully, after a time, a window lights up.
CUT TO:
ONE SHOT.
EXT. THE TERRACE OF THE ROUVIÈRE MAS — MORNING
Bees at a slot cut low in a log of chestnut: going out one after another, coming in, landing short and walking the last inch. Some come home with pale yellow loads packed on their hind legs. Above the slot, a slab of slate, and a stone on the slate.
It is the eighth hive. It fills the right of the frame, at the height of its own slot. The camera has been set down low beside the bottom step.
Saturday, the seventh of June. Eight in the morning. It has rained in the night. The slates are still dark at their edges, and water stands in the hollow of a stone.
Beyond the eighth, the row goes away along the wall: seven hives with their bands of crepe, which the rain has turned from black to a rusty brown. One band has come loose and hangs by its knot. On the end of the shelf the straw basket stands upside down, drying. At the far end of the terrace, under the mulberry, the grave is a long mound of red earth, and on the mound there is a jam jar of marguerites. Past the mulberry the ground falls away into the gully, and on the far slope the small stone house has its door open. Joséphine is on her doorstep with a bowl held against her hip.
Behind the camera, up in the yard, a motor runs, coughs, and stops. A van door. Two voices, not near.
The hum of the eight hives. A blackbird somewhere down in the chestnuts.
Lucien comes down the steps past the camera in his shirtsleeves, and after him BOUSQUET: sixty or more, short, in a beret and a blue work-jacket gone white at the elbows. At the bottom Bousquet stops and looks along the row with his hands in his jacket pockets.
BOUSQUET
Eight? You told me seven.
LUCIEN
Eight.
Bousquet goes along the row. At the third hive he lifts the stone off, raises the edge of the slate a finger's breadth, puts his eye to the gap, and lets it down again. He does the same at the fifth. He talks as he goes, and Lucien answers him, but they are going away from us, and what they say stays down there under the hum.
At the far end Bousquet takes off his beret to the grave and puts it on again. The two men stand by the mulberry. Bousquet talks with his hands. Once he turns and points back along the row with his whole arm; Lucien looks where he points and says something short. Across the gully, Joséphine has set her bowl down on the step.
Bousquet holds out his hand. Lucien takes it.
They come back along the terrace. Bousquet passes the eighth hive without a look and goes up the steps behind the camera. Lucien stops at the bottom step. In the yard the motor catches at the second try, turns, and goes off down the lane, changing gear twice, until it can no longer be heard. Along the wall the eight hives stand where they stood.
Lucien crouches by the eighth. For a while he only watches the slot, the bees going past his face. Then he takes a stub of chalk out of his trouser pocket, lays his left hand flat on the slate to hold it steady (the back of the hand is still a little swollen), and writes along the near edge in a plain, upright hand:
3 juin 1952
He looks at it. He puts the chalk away and stands.
He looks across the gully. On the far slope Joséphine is standing in her doorway. She stays there as long as he does.
Lucien goes up the steps past the camera and out of the frame.
Across the gully, Joséphine picks up her bowl and goes in.
The shot holds.
The eight hives, the brown bands on seven of them, the mound and the jar of marguerites, the open door across the gully; and at the slot nearest us the bees going out and coming in, under the fresh chalk.
FADE OUT.
✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾
THE END
Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Andreā Bazīnō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
André Bazin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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