Flicker (45 page)

Alain, I discovered, was in the process of reconstructing the early cameras, projectors, and film stock of these movie pioneers. Like most of Saint-Cyr's students, he too seemed to have no interest in movies, but only in machines and optics and nervous reflexes. Alain went on to explain that some of the early technicians, like LePrince, had if only by accident unearthed the dialectical principles of motion pictures. “The machines were so primitive, the film content so negligible,” he observed, “that the inventors could not help but recognize the fundamental properties of the technology.”

Saint-Cyr broke in to clarify the point. “This is often the case in the growth of technology. Its true nature is more transparent in the initial stages, before a certain sophistication sets in and begins to rationalize the means of production. To take an obvious case: the exploitative nature of steam technology was more apparent in the early factory system than in later historical stages when, for example, the lunchroom was so generously provided alongside the assembly line. The more primitive the mechanism, the more naked is its social function.”

Alain resumed, observing that LePrince especially seemed to be aware of the communicative power of the flicker. For pioneers like him, it made no difference
what
they filmed and projected. Any trifling little vignette would do. A man doing somersaults, a horse performing tricks, the waves of the sea washing in. Such early demonstration pieces were, in Alain's eyes, of far greater value than films like those of Griffith that distracted by telling stories. Fred Ott's famous sneeze, as captured on film by Edison, was Alain's ideal “movie,” the true culmination of the art. Beyond something like a sneeze, a pure, meaningless, totally uneventful event, the content of the work begins to obscure the basic action of the technology. If I understood Alain correctly, he seemed to be saying that movies were more truly
movies
before there were any movies!

“But, you see,” Saint-Cyr went on, “Castle understood that there must be content in order to arrest the attention of the masses. In Castle's case, however—unlike such ignoramuses as Lumière or Griffith—content is expertly layered. The ‘flicker,' as you call it, comes through with singular impact.”

“Layered” was one of Saint-Cyr's technical terms. I'd come across it several times in his analysis of Castle. I gathered it meant the way the movie as a story connected with the movie as a ribbon of projected film running through the shutter. The story was the upper “layer”; the flicker was the lower “layer.” The trick was to join them into a kind of optical sandwich that let the stimulus of the projector penetrate the mind. Saint-Cyr was convinced that Castle had found some optimum means of doing this. Layering seemed to be as close as Saint-Cyr was willing to come to granting that movies had something to do with art. Castle was good at layering; Saint-Cyr admired him for that and was determined to find out how the trick had been turned. When he got into this phase of his theory, the technicalities soon proved too bewildering for me to follow. Yet I felt certain that Saint-Cyr's
layering was what Zip Lipsky had once called “compositing,” and had tried in vain to explain.

When Saint-Cyr finally gave me the chance to speak, I brought up the one other item that seemed most closely connected with his approach to Castle. I asked, “Have you ever heard of someone—a priest, I believe—named Rosenzweig?”

If the roof had caved in on us, it couldn't have produced a greater shock. A flash of surprise lit up deep inside Saint-Cyr's eyes, followed at once by an ice-cold stare. “You know this person?” he asked.

“Yes. Well, no. I've heard of him.”

“In the United States, you have heard of Rosenzweig?” I could sense the rising temper behind his words. I noticed the faces of the students go tense, including Jeanette's.
Back off,
a voice inside me said.

“Just a passing remark or two. Clare met him in Paris at the Cinémathèque. It was many years ago. By now, he may be dead, for all I know. Really, I know next to nothing about him.”

“Yes? And why do you see fit to mention this person?” Saint-Cyr's expression shifted from anger to deep suspicion.

“It's simply that some of your work reminds me of his. Or rather, it reminds me of things I've heard said about his theories.”

Saint-Cyr's voice was a cold explosion. “I referred to Rosenzweig just now as a ‘person.' This was an error. Rosenzweig is not a person. He is a cartoon. A cartoon does not have theories, Professor Gates. A cartoon has, above its head, a small balloon in which little idiotic words are written. One reads these words and laughs. You believe this has some relationship to me?”

“Oh no, not at all,” I rushed to assure him. “Not in the least. I'm sure whatever resemblance there may be is a matter of pure coincidence. As I understand it, Rosenzweig also believes the content of films is unimportant. I don't really understand how he comes to that conclusion. In any case, his orientation seems to be theological.”

Saint-Cyr spat out the word in a spasm of contempt. “Theological!” I realized I wasn't doing a very good job of placating him. His fury was now just barely controlled. “You do not know that this maniac has made an attempt on my life?”

That jarred me. “No, I didn't know that. I know he tried to shoot Henri Langlois.”

“Yes.
And
myself. This was not reported in the United States?”

“Not that I recall.”

He turned to his students with an exasperated gesture that said “Didn't I tell you?” Then to me: “Of course the capitalist press would not report such matters. And what instead? The measurements of Miss America? The baseball? The price of hot dogs? In the land of the Robber Barons, who would be interested in knowing that the leader of the Neurosemiological movement came within an inch of losing his life? But apparently Rosenzweig, the assassin, is the talk of the town.”

“No, please,” I protested, “don't misunderstand. Rosenzweig is completely unknown, I assure you. My God, the man's psychopathic. Why wasn't he put away after he tried to shoot Langlois?”

“Our bourgeois law deals very leniently with the mad. Especially when the maniac in question aims his weapon to the
left
. In this case, after his attack upon Langlois, our Jesuitical cineast was placed in a most comfortable asylum for rehabilitation. From this asylum he wanders away again and again. Where does he go? In search of
me.
And why? Because this medieval anachronism, this reactionary obscurantist, this decadent clerical scum has been encouraged to believe there is some similarity of thought between us.” A bitter sneer. “So he begins to dog my steps. Wherever I teach, wherever I speak, always he is in my audience. Even if I cannot see him, I can smell him. The man reeks. I try to have him intercepted at the door and turned away. Nevertheless, he insists he is my ally, my
teacher!
This is intolerable. I notify the authorities, who put him back in the booby hatch. And again he walks away. This time he is convinced I have stolen his so-called theories. And—boom, boom. Fortunately for me, as for Langlois, the cur is cross-eyed.”

“Then he's still alive?”

“Let us hope not. You will understand if I have not concerned myself with the fate of
le père
Rosenzweig.”

“Yes of course. Do forgive me for bringing the subject up.”

I could tell I wasn't forgiven. Instead, I was dismissed. “And now, Professor Gates, I believe our
soirée
is at an end. Perhaps you have learned something of value from our little tutorial.”

“A great deal,” I assured him. But his expression made it clear he felt he had squandered an evening of his precious time.

“Do you understand all that—about the cameras and projectors?” I asked Jeanette the next afternoon when we met for coffee.

“A little,” she said. “The subject is very technical.” She was by now willing to unbend with me and be more candid. “Victor does
not expect all his students to master these technicalities. I, for example, have much more interest in the aesthetic superstructure of the technology.”

“Aesthetic superstructure. You mean what the movie is about … the story, for example?”

“Yes. Victor feels this is perhaps more appropriate to the feminine mentality. It is less analytical.”

“Oh? Well, let me tell you, I care a great deal for what movies are about. I really can't believe it's of no importance what the characters do and say. I mean—that's what people go to the movies for, isn't it?”

“You are very American,” she observed playfully. But I gathered she liked me for being very American.

“About this man Rosenzweig,” I went on. Did she know if he was still alive and where he might be? She did. After he'd taken a shot at Saint-Cyr—about six years before—there had been a trial. The magistrate had ordered him removed from Paris to a mental institution in Lyons. Unless he'd wandered off again, he must still be there.

We spent one more night together, a gentle, loving night. Somewhere in the languid middle of it, Jeanette confessed that she would rather be a movie star than anything else in the world. She made the admission under her breath, like a child confessing a naughty deed. “You must never tell Victor I said this.”

Her secret was surely safe with me. I wasn't likely to be telling Victor very much of anything in the foreseeable future. “Shall I tell you something?” I asked, trading confidence for confidence. “I'd give anything to be Jean-Paul Belmondo for just one day.”

That brought her cuddling closer in my arms. “Not Bogie?” she asked. “You would not prefer to be Bogie?”

“Well, sure. Bogie. But first of all Belmondo.”

“And I,” she returned. “Simone Signoret. Or Jeanne Moreau.”

“And of course there's Marlon Brando.”

“And Barbara Stanwyck.”

“And …”

And so on, long into the night.

Before I scheduled the trip to Lyons, I made inquiries with the French police. In which asylum had Victor Saint-Cyr's assailant been placed? And if I went there, would I be able to see him? I had to maneuver my way through several hours of French bureaucratic congestion before I found out what I wanted to know. The answer to the first question was Saint Hilaire Hospice. Despite the religious name, it was part of the state system of mental institutions, in this case a “home” for the criminally insane. The answer to the second question was: yes, there were visiting hours three times each week. I phoned ahead to reserve an hour with Karl-Heinz Rosenzweig (as I learned his name to be). Sooner or later my pursuit of Max Castle was bound to lead me into the world of the mad. The time had apparently arrived.

I might easily have spent my entire fellowship year with Saint-Cyr, seated at the master's feet absorbing the higher mysteries of Neurosemiology. Even if I'd cared to do that, my gaffe about Rosenzweig had queered my chances. Under the best of circumstances, Saint-Cyr would have had little enough time to spare for the bumpkin from California; now that I'd witlessly associated myself with his insane, would-be assassin, I might have had to spend weeks begging my way back into favor. And what would that finally gain me? There wasn't much more I could learn from him without first following the route his students took, a long detour through physiology, mathematics, computer science … a hopeless prospect for me. Every fiber of my being rose up in opposition to Saint-Cyr and his clanking, mechanistic system. My love affair with the movies had begun with sexy women and western heroes, high adventure and great romance. I didn't want to get “beyond” such things; I didn't really believe anyone could. If Saint-Cyr was right about movies, then I might as well believe that poetry was created by pencils, not by poets.

At the same time, I had to grant that the man was on to something where Castle's films were concerned. Saint-Cyr had burrowed farther
into their technical depths than I had. And he'd found things in those depths: images and motifs of undeniable power, all there even in the seemingly worthless scraps of film he was working with. I sensed too that Saint-Cyr was right in believing that this repertory of subliminal tricks, fascinating as it might be, really served to mask Castle's darker intentions. But I was just as sure that he was dead wrong in taking those intentions to be political. Saint-Cyr talked a glib case for his interpretations, but I knew with all the conviction in me that what I felt when I opened myself to Castle had nothing to do with politics. On the contrary. If I trusted my intuition, it told me that the darkness that lay at the heart of Castle's work reached out to annihilate all loyalties, the political as well as the personal. If there was a message hidden in Castle's art, I was certain it came echoing up from some historical stratum far older than anything accounted for in Saint-Cyr's philosophy. Since I'd first seen the
Judas
, I was haunted by qualities I sensed there that might be called primitive, tribal, even elemental. The categories in which he worked—sin, guilt, sacrilege—were things our age would have to rediscover in his films. Perhaps that was why I was risking a visit to Rosenzweig. I had reason to believe that, mad as he might be, he had the right fix on Castle.

Whatever Saint Hilaire originally was (a convent I was told, dating back to the eighteenth century) it could never have been a happy place. Its gloom went deeper than the centuries of grime and dilapidation that burdened its stones. The sheer brooding bulk of the place, its few and narrow windows, the rusting spear-topped iron fence that girdled it, all marked it out as a place of cheerless confinement. The interior of this antique pile, though renovated, purchased its cleanliness at the cost of sterility; worse than making do on a stingy ration of sunlight, it relied on a surplus of acidically fluorescent illumination in all its rooms and corridors. No shadows were permitted, but the place was a dungeon nonetheless.