Flicker (42 page)

From the ponderous tone of his writings, I expected Saint-Cyr to be a much older, or at least older-looking man. Instead, he might have passed for being middle thirties. Otherwise he was every inch the intellectual cult figure: aloof, magisterial, undisguisedly contemptuous. Even his diminutive height gave him a certain Napoleonic air. Of course, there were the beard, the rumpled clothes, and the
admiring entourage: four students, three boys and a remarkably good-looking girl.

Welcoming him to my table, I proffered a copy of my museum brochure, reminding him of my credentials. Yes, he'd received my book. As if he were brushing crumbs from the table, he passed my gift along to one of the students, sniffing dismissively. “The filmography could be useful,” he commented. I supposed that consigned the rest of my work to oblivion, but I'd come determined to play deferential. I smiled and thanked him for the kick.

Then we talked about Clare, in whom he showed a genuine interest.

“She is writing now for the capitalist press?” he asked.

“For
The New York Times.”

“Doubtless for handsome pay. And the proletarian theater in California—she is finished with that?”

“Proletarian theater?”

“Where she showed films.”

“You mean The Classic? No, it's still going. Her friend Don Sharkey is running it. It's not actually very proletarian.”

“In America,” he turned to explain to his students, “this is how it goes. Culture is a supermarket. Intellectuals are purchased like merchandise off the shelves—if they have the right flavor. Chocolate, vanilla, tutti-frutti. But it all tastes the same.”

“Oh, I don't think that's true about Clare,” I protested, though feebly.

Saint-Cyr returned a weary look that made clear how profitless he found it to discuss such matters with the likes of mere me. But he offered a major concession. “Clarissa is of course a facile mind, within the limits of her feminine viewpoint. Unfortunately for her, the day of the aesthete is at an end in the study of film. The critic, historian, scholar—these have nothing more to offer.”

I had no interest in arguing general pontifical dictates, so I moved quickly to ask, “Have you had access to many of Castle's films? Your book mentions only two.”

“Two films—that is all.”

“Only two?”

“In most cases that is more than is necessary. My method does not require exhaustive viewing. In fact, the fewer films the better. Depth, you see, not extent. Reality is interiority. From a single shot, one can reconstruct the entire work of a director. However, Castle is an
exception. In his case, I have been forced to make a more extensive survey. Two films.”

“Neurosemiology is, I gather, a form of
auteur
theory,” I was guessing, trying to keep the conversation rolling long enough to gauge its direction.

Saint-Cyr gave an incredulous smirk. “Not at all! In fact, the contrary. We proceed from the tenet that all human intervention in cinema is negligible. The medium is autonomous.”

“I see.” I didn't see, but I was eager to press on. That proved difficult to do, since Saint-Cyr was granting me only marginal attention, tossing off table scraps of answers while keeping up a constant stream of discourse with his three male students, who were paying me no attention at all. They were exchanging papers among themselves that looked like computer printouts; what they had to say about them meant nothing to me. At one point, Saint-Cyr displayed one of these esoteric documents for me to study, commenting, “The future of film theory,” but not expecting me to understand. I smiled gratefully. He smiled at my smile, then turned back to his students. I noticed at that point that the girl was also being left out of the conversation. She looked reconciled to that. While the others chatted, she stared vacantly into her coffee, at the smoke from her cigarette, at the passing traffic in the street. Finally, her stare drifted in my direction and with it came a question.

“You are from the Los Angeles University?”

“UCLA, yes. I'm doing research on Max Castle.” I pushed my brochure across to her.

“Yes,” she said. “I have seen this.”

“Only a brochure, really.”

“Such studies—historical and aesthetic—they are still done in the United States?”

“Yes. And not here?”

“No, no. We have moved on. Victor has opened the frontier.” The statement sounded like a liturgical response learned by rote.

She was pretty and pleasant, a slight, fair girl with sharp features and large, watery blue eyes. I wished I'd scheduled more time to lounge around the cafés with people—with girls—like her. No such luck. Saint-Cyr's heavy presence beside me was like a threatening cloud hanging over the city waiting to rain drowning torrents upon me—just me. There were, after all, things he knew that could erase the significance of all my work. Apparently he kept an ear out for his
name at all times. He picked up quickly on the girl's remark, using it as the opportunity to issue an edict.

“Within ten years, film scholarship, film criticism will no longer exist,” he announced with an air of bored but absolute authority. “They will wither away like the medieval trivium. Cinema will become an adjunct of neurophysiology. On the one hand, there will be studies of the apparatus; on the other, there will be studies of optical perception and brain anatomy. Between them, there will be nothing. Of all art forms, film is doomed to total objective comprehension. That is its destiny as the ultimate cultural artifact of bourgeois society: to be consumed by its own technology.”

I followed none of this, but nodded gravely, assuming an “ah yes” expression of profound appreciation. “But why do you concentrate on Castle's work in particular?” I asked.

“Because Castle alone of all directors grasped the essential phenomenology of film. In the entire history of motion pictures, only he and Lefebvre have understood the technology so profoundly. And of course LePrince.”

LePrince I recognized; Lefebvre I didn't. I continued to go along as if I understood. “I have a special interest in the subliminal devices you mention in your study. I discovered some of these myself, but I … ”

Saint-Cyr gave an impatient wave of the hand, a gesture of annoyance that squelched me. His students smirked knowingly. “Tricks. These are really of no significance. Amusing, yes. Castle has his entertaining side. But all this is still in the realm of content. Quite meaningless.”

I dared a challenging remark. “Well, I've found these effects to be quite powerful. Audiences seem … ”

“These tricks are what you call the ‘red herring.' Mere matters of aesthetic titillation that serve only to distract from analysis in depth.”

I felt like a high school physics student who had just told Einstein the marvelous discovery he'd made about the pendulum. Still, Saint-Cyr had struck upon a point with which I had to agree. “Yes, I've sensed there's something more in Castle's films, something deeper going on underneath the … tricks.”

“But of course. Neural dialectics.” He slipped the phrase into the conversation like a piece of litmus paper.

“Oh yes,” I said, having no idea what he meant. Saint-Cyr could tell I was faking. He smiled wickedly and reverted to being cagey.

I got no further with him that evening. He parried or ignored my questions. Would there be time to talk more, I asked. I had so many questions. His only answer was that he might possibly be at the café the following night. When he rose to leave, the girl decided to stay behind. Saint-Cyr lifted a disapproving eyebrow, then shrugged and left with the boys. The bill remained on the table for me to pay. Among them, Saint-Cyr and his students had consumed nine very expensive cognacs and five coffees in less than two hours.

Nursing my wounds, I sat wondering what I might do next to follow up on this abortive meeting. Nothing occurred to me. But here, on the other hand, was a lovely French girl who had decided to stick around. Why?

“Would you care to order another cognac?” I asked.

“Tell me about 'ollywood,” she said.

Her name was Jeanette, and she was, as I learned, younger than I would have guessed from her manner—barely seventeen. A bright child already attending the Sorbonne, studying film and a favored pupil of Saint-Cyr's. She was a charming mix of sophistication and naïveté, wise beyond her years, but still girlish. From the French film crowd, she'd picked up a then-fashionable obsession with American movies of the thirties and forties, a subject she felt she could discuss appropriately only in fractured English, the cinematic vulgate. With the taste came a fantasy image of ” 'ollywood,” the city of glamour and romance that hadn't existed even in the glory days of the big studios.

At first, unthinkingly, I labored to disabuse her of this quaint illusion. “It's not quite like that anymore,” I informed her. “It never really was.” At this, she looked cross, almost like a little girl whose lollipop had been swiped. At once I realized this was a dumb move on my part. What the hell was I doing? If she preferred to believe, or pretend, that Tinsel Town was still alive and sparkling, why should I be the one to tell her differently? After all, 'ollywood accounted for her interest in me. So out came all the movie-star anecdotes I could remember or concoct. I was surprised how many there were stashed away in the corners of my memory. Thanks to my youthful friendship with Geoff Reuben the consummate movie-trivia magpie, I seemed to be extraordinarily well equipped for this game. Walt Disney … Bogart … Garbo … the Marx Brothers … the evening became movie trivia elevated to the level of sophisticated banter, in the sense that we both pretended to be above such things while we wallowed
in them. This delighted Jeanette, even though her fascination, I soon saw, was a sort of crazy, wised-up act. By some strange, convoluted logic, she viewed this make-believe movie world, which it was permissible to enjoy, as a compendium of everything American and capitalistic that a French intellectual was required to despise. It was fraudulent, manipulative, crass, tasteless, trashy, cheap, vulgar, philistine—but all the same a brashly authentic culture of the people. She'd learned from Saint-Cyr a way to treat this maze of contradictions as philosophically coherent. The logic escaped me, but the evening was turning out to be a thoroughly rewarding little flirtation.

Toward midnight she asked if I would like to come back to her place and see her collection of old movie posters. Better and better. Two hours later we were in her bed, sharing a postcoital interlude of movie gossip about Hedy Lamarr and Errol Flynn and Clark Gable. Was Hedy really a lesbian, and was Errol really a Nazi, and did Clark really have false teeth? In the course of this cozy, drifting chat, she dropped the phrase “neural dialectics.”

“And what exactly does that mean?” I asked at once, but as casually as possible.

“You know, the … how do you call it? The ‘flicks.'”

“Flicks?”

“How the light goes. Off-on, off-on. You call it ‘flicks,' yes?
Les flicks.
The movies.”

I didn't follow this; her imprecise English wasn't helping. I moved the conversation back into French.

“You understand,” she said, “about the Zoetrope?”

“You mean Victor's magazine.”

“No, no. The Zoetrope.” She twirled her fingers. “The little toy that makes pictures. Dickson, Reynaud, LePrince, Lefebvre … ”

Yes, I recognized the names, or most of them. They were men associated with early experiments in motion pictures and film projection. Reynaud was in on the invention of the Zoetrope, Dickson had worked with Edison, LePrince was the mysterious film pioneer Sharkey had once told me about. So what?

“You understand,” she continued, “it is all persistence of vision. Without this, there would be no movies, yes?”

She was of course right. Persistence of vision is the optical illusion that underlies motion pictures. Every film-studies textbook dutifully reviews this peculiar quirk of the human eye that allows moviemakers to mobilize photographs and so breathe life into still pictures. To say
les flicks
couldn't exist without it was true. But that was like saying there could be no music without sound waves, no painting without color pigments. What sense did it make to talk about art at such a primitive perceptual level? Why would anyone take a serious interest in primitive old contraptions like the Zoetrope, which was to modern movies what the oxcart was to a rocket ship? I was missing all the connections.

“Is this what Victor means by neural dialectics?” I asked.

“But of course. It is the light against the dark, the conflict of historic forces. This is the basis of Neurosemiology.”

We waded a bit farther into the subject, but the waters grew murkier with each step. At a certain point along the way, I began to feel that Jeanette's grip on the ideas we were discussing was far from secure. She had that marvelous French ability to sound canonically certain of all she said, as if she were expounding pure Cartesian principles. But I could tell that she was repeating phrases she'd memorized from Saint-Cyr's lectures and writings. What was more, she had only the foggiest notion how Castle's work related to Saint-Cyr's theories. Here she left me suspended amid nagging questions, until at last we let cinematic metaphysics drop and spent the remainder of the night in other, less mentally taxing, amusements.

Nevertheless, the few fragmentary ideas I salvaged from my night with Jeanette had a certain teasing resonance. I'd heard these things, or something very like them, before. My mind reached back to the hours I'd spent with Sharkey in the projection booth at The Classic. In those wild, rambling exchanges, I'd also been talking to someone who wanted me to believe that the operation of the projector, the fusion frequency and neuromechanics of the eye might be more important than the content of the movies on the screen below. Of course that was kooky old Sharkey, hardly the one to make logical sense of such things. What he'd told me had all but faded from my mind.