Flicker (43 page)

But there was another recollection rising out of a fog of confusion: little Zip Lipsky struggling to explain a system of film craft he'd never fully understood, but whose power had touched him more deeply than anybody else associated with Max Castle. All that about the slide, and the split lighting, and … yes, the flicker. Something about the flicker. “The flicker's basic,” he'd said. “It's like the heartbeat.”

Congratulations, Zip! Maybe Saint-Cyr beat me to the punch, but you knew all about it long before either of us.

Thanks to Jeanette's persuasive good graces, over the next several days I made my way into closer intellectual quarters with Saint-Cyr. Periodically the great man staged a soirée for selected pupils and peers. Jeanette, who had a special, obviously sexual, influence over her mentor, prevailed upon him to schedule an evening on Castle and allow me to attend. Perhaps she'd managed to clear me in Saint-Cyr's eyes as a deserving recipient of his gospel; or perhaps Saint-Cyr simply wanted to display some intellectual pyrotechnics for the visiting yahoo. He had at one point let me know that, if he were properly invited for the right sum, he might be willing to squander a few months of his time casting his pearls at an American university … UCLA would do. He may have thought I had some pull in such matters. I let him think so, and perhaps for that reason was summoned to the presence.

Saint-Cyr's flat was up a cul-de-sac on the Left Bank quaintly named La Rue du Chat Qui Pêche. From the street, it looked like a crumbly stone tenement leaning precariously above a busy cobblestone courtyard. Inside, the building had been gutted and modernized in a sleek, high-tech style. Saint-Cyr's spacious apartment on the top story was crammed with cinematic equipment for private screenings—including a pair of old but serviceable thirty-five-millimeter projectors. That evening there were about a dozen of Saint-Cyr's students and colleagues on hand; they were, I was given to understand, the command structure of the Neurosemiology movement. There wasn't a single person in the room who didn't have an intimidating knowledge of Max Castle's work. He'd become the centerpiece of their theory, in much the same way that Rossellini had once been the darling and chief exemplar of Neorealism.

Learning this was both encouraging and troubling to me. If word ever got around that Castle enjoyed so erudite a French following, his intellectual stock was bound to soar in value, if only by virtue of snob appeal. But it was a value that left me anxious. Among the Neurosemiologists, I felt like a color-blind student at an exhibition of Impressionist paintings; I had no idea what everybody else was seeing in the works on display.

With a careful eye for my reaction, Saint-Cyr announced that the evening's cinematic text would be an excerpt from (he paused for effect)
Simon the Magician.
One of Castle's long-lost films. I registered the appropriate amazement. At once, Saint-Cyr qualified his remark.
He felt reasonably certain the footage he had to show us was from
Simon;
there was no way to be absolutely sure. He possessed several untitled segments of sixteen-millimeter film amounting to some twenty minutes; the best guess he and his students could make was that the material had been culled from
Simon
and then recut many more times. Rather proudly, he explained, mainly for my benefit, that such butchery would render the film valueless to other critical methodologies; Neurosemiology could, however, work with mere scraps. As in the science of holography (a reference that meant nothing to me) every particle of the picture contains the whole.

Simon
was a film that had spent nearly fifty years in oblivion. After the German censors drove it from the screen in the early twenties, there was no record that it had ever again been caressed by the light of a projector. There was good reason to believe it might have been among the movies the Nazis destroyed. Eagerly, I asked Saint-Cyr where he'd found the film. In a private collection right here in Paris, he answered. Might I have the collector's name? Perhaps I could track down more of Castle's work. Saint-Cyr was amused to tell me there was little hope of that. The scraps of film he had came from an otherwise worthless collection of erotica, which he had already searched. Did I know, he wondered, that several excerpts from Castle movies had been circulating for years through the pornographic film trade in Europe? The fragments had been crudely chopped from their original context years ago and then reduced to sixteen-millimeter or eight-millimeter stock. The collectors usually had no idea where these snippets came from or what their historical value might be. The reprinting was generally of poor quality—often done by amateurs for home consumption.

Simon
had been especially popular among pornographers of the twenties and thirties who freely cut and retitled the more libidinous portions to suit their specialized tastes. In this form, remnants from Castle movies had been circulating for years as peephole scenes usually set in the ancient world. Saint-Cyr had recovered selections under such titles as “The Queen of Sheba's Private Bath,” “Roman Nights,” “The Pharaoh's Orgy.” The excerpt for this evening—his most recent acquisition—had been known to its collector as “A Night with Helen of Troy.”

Saint-Cyr switched on the projector. The film, a scratched and grainy square of watery-dull light, began suddenly with a woman being undressed by two dark-skinned attendants. A title frame cut
in; it read (in German) “Simon's Consort, the Beautiful Helen of Troy, Entertains the Guests of the Magus.” This, Saint-Cyr explained, was what allowed him to identify the excerpt as one of Castle's films. The original movie had been based on the life of the legendary charlatan and heretic Simon Magus, who was accompanied in his travels by a prostitute whom he advertised as the reincarnation of Helen of Troy. All of the extant fragments dealt with Helen: Helen bathing, Helen dancing, Helen lolling about on animal-skin rugs. Here we had Helen disrobing, removing a number of gauzy garments and lounging semi-naked on a luxurious couch. She is a lush, Rubenesque woman with meaty flanks and great, mushy breasts that roll heavily from side to side like unshelled eggs on a plate. But she moves with a fluid grace, her body gleaming with sweat or oil. The print was so blurred I couldn't identify the actress; Saint-Cyr was convinced it was the silent-screen beauty Hanna Ralph.

All along the line, there were jagged splices that apparently cut away any material not related to Helen. Suddenly, after one of these cuts, she appears on a plush rug cuddling a python-sized snake. She strokes it fondly, kisses it, permits it to slither over her body, between her breasts, down her thighs. (How did Castle persuade the actress to do it?) Surrounding her are a number of leering, pop-eyed men. They watch hungrily. Helen teases them, offering her body, but then thrusting the snake at them to drive them off. Finally, she casts the loathsome beast aside and the men converge upon her. Close up, we see several clutching hands paw at her. Helen's form disappears beneath a crowd of bodies as the camera sways drunkenly.

The excerpt, which ran some seven minutes, broke off abruptly, followed by several seconds of leader. Then, just as abruptly, a second, better, print of the same material began. Saint-Cyr explained that this was part of the same reel he had purchased; this time, we should watch for the ending. This turned out to be a remarkable effect that had been edited from the first film we saw. Here at the conclusion Helen, naked and writhing, is caught up in a halo of shimmering light. Her image rolls in a full circle, around and around, and finally becomes a dizzy vortex melting into darkness. The camera draws away at the climactic moment, and we realize we are seeing Helen reflected in the watery curve of an eye. The camera continues to track back and the eye takes its place in a face that is twisted grotesquely with lust. It is one of Helen's spectators. The face is gross and stupid; the mouth gapes; a drop of saliva sparkles on the lips and falls. Suddenly
the superimposed form of Helen floats forward and curls about the face, which recedes until it is consumed into a shadowy cavern formed by her pubic thatch. This, in turn, begins to spin slowly, then more rapidly, filling the screen with a swirling darkness. I recognized this at once as the vertigo effect Castle had used at the close of
Shadows over Sing Sing,
less subtly handled here, but with quite as much impact.

Brief as it was, the excerpt explained why
Simon the Magician
had been banned as obscene. Even by the more relaxed censorship standards of the early twenties, the portions we had watched were blatantly lubricious. And, as Saint-Cyr observed, with the final sequence restored, the film's sexuality was touched with a radically unpleasant flavor. “Distasteful” was the word Saint-Cyr used. Another sprang to my mind: unclean.

The room fell hushed as a church as Saint-Cyr began his analysis of the film. His remarks, delivered with wit and energy, filled the next four hours of the evening, an intellectual tour de force that his followers seemed to expect. He began with a number of throwaway observations about the traces one could find, even in these disjointed excerpts, of sophisticated technique: the fluid mobility of the camera, the smooth montage effects, the precocious use of latensification. “At the most superficial level, one can see in Castle's work a polish far beyond anything achieved at this early period by other directors, not excluding Griffith, Murnau, Lang. And bear in mind, we are dealing with the films of a talent still in its early twenties.” But all this was made to seem hardly worth mentioning.

Saint-Cyr showed no greater interest in the film's subliminal effects. But over these he lingered for my benefit. His manner was mockingly apologetic, as if he were wasting his audience's time. “These little tricks seem to be of special interest to our American visitor,” he explained.

Offhandedly, Saint-Cyr tracked back through the final few minutes of the last sequence we'd seen: Helen's body turning and turning. He slowed the film and brightened the image, then slipped a nozzlelike attachment over the projector lens. This, he explained, was an invention of his own: a low-intensity enhancement filter. My heart gave a quick skip of excitement. My God! It was a
sallyrand,
or the equivalent thereof. Rather than holding it to the eye, Saint-Cyr connected it to the projector; but it was performing the same function as Zip Lipsky's viewer. With the filter in place, Helen's form immediately
dematerialized, lost in an undulating tracery of fine lines. A second superimposed pattern took shape. I could make nothing of it, but I distinctly cringed, as I might at an unsavory odor.

“Look closely now,” Saint-Cyr ordered. “Tilt your head like so, to the left.” I did as instructed. Vaguely, the lines and shadows assumed a shape. I could make out a face turned nearly upside down. It appeared to be masklike, unreal, yet strangely awful. The face of an exotic totem, African perhaps, or Mayan. A stern and scowling deity. The face moved with a solemn animation, filling the screen until it was positioned so that Helen's ample breasts became its eyes and the V of her groin its mouth. As she wheeled about, the face turned with her, coming right side up. The rolling of Helen's nipples in its deep eye sockets now gave it a goggling, maniacal look that was even more menacing. “Watch closely,” Saint-Cyr told us again. There was a blur of motion imploding from the edges of the screen, converging upon Helen's belly. Saint-Cyr stopped the film and adjusted the projector to enlarge the image. Now I could see a ghostly array of tiny drawings, figures of men tumbling directly toward the pubic triangle at the center of the screen. Saint-Cyr clicked the frames forward one by one; mechanically the mouth of the stern face opened, closed, opened, closed behind Helen's shadowy sex organ. The tiny figures jigged and cavorted into the vaginal maw. Teeth showed. A streak of blood leaked from the lips and began to spiral across the screen. In the final few seconds, the sheen of Helen's flesh became a watery film, the superimposed mouth and vagina becoming the core of a dark whirlpool that sucked the failing light into itself. In the enveloping darkness, I could, with the aid of Saint-Cyr's filter, discern a multitude of forms—human bodies—raining down into the deepening swirl, helplessly flailing, falling, consumed. When at last the sequence faded from sight altogether, I found myself in the grip of a depression, no, a despair that very nearly left me devoid of words. Deep inside of me, something continued to fall, taking with it all brightness, all vitality. Did the others in the room feel the same? I sensed a somberness all about me that began to grow claustrophobic. I tried to shake myself free of the malaise, asking, “But how was it done?”

“Gray light,” Saint-Cyr answered, as if I should understand the term. Then, condescendingly, he explained. “The face is of course an animation—a crude one. Méliès could have done as well. It is projected on a scrim at a low intensity—gray light, as we call it, light that is just below the threshold of conscious perception. The camera
photographs through the scrim, superimposing the face upon the scene.”