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“Yes, my dear,” Clare answered wearily. “That's probably because every film student I've met since the publication of
Being and Nothingness
has been telling me. But we must be charitable. The man did go on to say a few intelligent things.”

Snobbishness, Clare would have me know, was among the cardinal intellectual sins, a vice which she was spared by natural immunity. Her standards, however lofty, came naturally and spontaneously to her. They weren't a costume worn for effect; they were her life's blood. When is a snob
not
a snob? When she cares to the point of hurting about the bad taste of her inferiors—and will pay the price to teach them better. In Clare's case, that meant again and again running The Classic into the red trying to force-feed her tiny audience on works of taxing quality. As for example—the time she proudly hosted the First American Dziga Vertov Festival.

“Who?” I asked.

“Dziga Vertov,” she repeated, as if I should know. I didn't. “The creator of the
Kino-Pravda
movement. It's one of the great experiments in documentary-film making. The Museum of Modern Art has the work of his entire school on loan from the Moscow Institute. It's a must.”

Kino-Pravda
turned out to be an hours-long montage of choppy, bizarrely edited newsreels from Russia of the 1920s and 1930s. Street scenes, barnyard scenes, endless footage of workers working, farmers farming, wheat growing. Now and then an interesting, if primitive innovation—as of 1932. One promising quick shot of a near-naked lady. Then more workers, more farmers. “Clare,” Sharkey lamented after the first preview, “nobody wants to see fossils like this.”

But Clare was adamant. “It's an important example of cinematic failure,” she insisted and set about preparing a packet of mimeographed notes to explain the historical importance of that failure.

The first night of the festival, every ambulatory Bolshevik in Los Angeles showed up. An audience of eight. There was weak applause. The second night, an audience of zero. Clare ordered Sharkey to run the films anyway, while she sat in the empty Classic, tears in her eyes, a curse on her lips. “Have they no culture?” she moaned, asking of the multitudes who had not come.

From Clare, I also learned the rough-and-tumble pleasures of serious argument. Often simply to exercise my wits, she would take unpredictable issue with my unschooled likes and dislikes. To begin with, playing cautious, I sought always to echo her opinions, but I'd sometimes misjudge. Once, knowing her deep admiration for Ingmar Bergman, I ventured to praise his
Wild Strawberries.
Immediately, Clare flashed out at me, claiming to loathe the film. “Whining, menopausal self-indulgence,” she called it—and for that night I was banished to the living-room couch to sleep alone. This was Clare's version of an “F.” Trimming my sails accordingly, the next time Bergman came up I confidently disparaged his
Virgin Spring,
only to discover that Clare adored the picture, regarding it as an authentic cinematic fairy tale. Exiled for another night to the lonely couch.

Clare could be just such a baffling mixture of bullying egotism and Socratic provocation. She wanted agreement, but not slavish imitation. In effect she wanted me to make up my own mind to see things her way. I was more than willing to play along, but at times the twists and turns of Clare's critical logic left me dazzled. Especially so when she found herself surrounded by the agreement of her inferiors—which included just about every other critic in the country. Far be it from Clare to follow the herd, or even appear to do so. In the presence of unwelcome consensus, she would insist on finding a better reason to like or dislike, the one reason everybody else had stupidly overlooked. Or, just possibly, she might simply decide to reverse her views on the grounds that it was now time to elevate the discussion to a higher level of analysis. She did this in a mode that suggested, for lack of anyone better suited to the task, she would have to serve as her own most challenging interlocutor. At first I mistook this for a kind of mere game-playing on her part. But no, she meant it seriously. It was her way of raising the cultural stakes—and of driving herself toward a more demanding analysis.

I remember when this happened with François Truffaut, one of Clare's Parisian confreres whose early movies she'd praised to high heaven. But then when his
Jules et Jim
came out to nearly universal acclaim, she made an abrupt about-face, contending that it was time to teach the man a thing or two. Yes,
Jules et Jim
was a great movie. That was precisely the problem. It was
too
good,
too
clever,
too
self-assured, a facile Cartesian exercise in human relations that lacked a convincing emotional messiness. “A film you can love so much, you want to hate it.”

When I finished typing her program notes for The Classic's second-run showing of the film, I let her know how surprised I was. “I thought you'd really like it. It's so true to life.”

“Oh? Whose life?”

“Well, ours. Yours and mine … and Sharkey's. We're a sort of
ménage à trois,
aren't we?”

I might as well have stepped on a land mine. The emotional explosion that followed was my first lesson in how personally Clare could take a movie.
“Jules et Jim
is an exquisitely contrived piece of self-congratulatory masculine bullshit about a cardboard cutout of a woman who drives herself off a bridge because the two men who've shared her body turn out to be total jerks. Apparently Mr. Truffaut can't think of anything else the dumb broad might do with the rest of her life. Is that the kind of loser you think
I
am?” But she made sure to add, the outrage flaming in her eyes, “And, Goddamit! It's as close to a perfect movie as I've ever seen. Which makes it all the worse.”

That little miscalculation cost me a full week's sentence on my solitary couch, including two humiliating nights that Clare spent with another student.

By the end of my first year with Clare, my intellectual course was set. I'd scrapped prelaw and, with a certain sense of pompous self-importance, declared myself a film-studies major specializing in history and criticism. Clare encouraged the choice, or rather demanded it—not entirely because of my aptitude, which was yet to put in an appearance. In me, she saw her chance to relive the education that had been denied to her. I went along unresistingly. Naive I may have been, but not too obtuse to overlook a golden opportunity when it presented itself. Clare was offering me a ready-made academic career. I grasped it. She, as a student during the war years, had been ahead of her time. Now, a decade and a half later, the universities were opening up eagerly to the study of film; at UCLA the subject was booming. If Clare had been willing to return to school—but she'd never have considered it—she would have had all the intellectual leverage she needed against the literary fuddy-duddies. I returned in her place, equipped with all her tastes and insights. But where she had been a pushy young woman in the stuffy male world of the academy, I arrived as a tactful young man, a good (meaning docile) student who had a positive knack for charming his teachers. Clare never could help raising hackles; it was her nature. Nevertheless, she
reveled in my progress as she watched me move among the scholars with a smooth and soothing ease. I was her hand-groomed agent infiltrating the hostile citadel of the university, armed with her once-despised critical views, many of which I wasn't ashamed to take over like lessons learned by rote. Convinced of my teacher's brilliance—and all too aware of my own strictly second-rate talents—I was prepared to be the perfect conduit.

Over a three-year period together, Clare and I screened nearly the entire repertoire of film classics or at least as much as could be rented on the market. We arranged pioneering festivals and retrospectives both heavy (Fritz Lang, Von Stemberg, Renoir) and light (Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire, Harold Lloyd). Sometimes, when The Classic was running a special series, movies arrived four and five at a time, small towers of battered metal canisters that filled our tiny projection booth to the limit. Then I'd cut classes to sit with Clare through film after film, a veritable cinematic orgy. We brought in our meals—great, sopping corned-beef sandwiches from Moishe's—and didn't emerge again until after the evening program ended and we'd locked the doors. I came to think of the dark grotto of The Classic as a salt mine tunneling down into the bowels of the earth. Working through films with Clare, as she compiled her notes, was true intellectual labor: stop the movie, talk, run it again, talk some more, then run it again. If she judged we needed a closer reading, she could be a sure hand on the inching knob, expertly clicking the film along, exposing each delicate celluloid square to its ordeal by fire in the perilous film gate … eight seconds, nine, ten, and then on its way in just that last split second before it showed signs of melting. Her touch was the gift of instinct. On one occasion, we saw
Intolerance
through four times with Clare dissecting Griffith shot by shot, cut by cut, for my benefit. On another, she spent sixteen analytical hours on
Triumph of the Will,
teaching me Leni Riefenstahl's diabolical skills as a film propagandist, every angle of the camera, every least nuance of lighting. “The single most gifted woman filmmaker,” Clare commented sourly, “and she had to be a fink.”

What a joy it was exploring this phantasmagoria of the mind called movies! And what a privilege to have Clarissa Swann for my personal guide. Eventually there would be those who regarded her as a highly conservative critic, a remnant of the old school no longer in touch with the hot new ideas. But when I was her star pupil, she was among the few in America who were fully conversant with the latest European
theories. Within the next few years, she would catch the crest of New Wave enthusiasm in America and ride it to a success she'd all but stopped hoping for. For whatever Clare did to make my mind the mirror of her own during that entrancing interval of my life, I can only be grateful. Because, for all her quirky angles and bitter antagonisms, she was a staunchly humanistic spirit. Though she could talk cinematic technique with the best of them, she never allowed the medium to outweigh the meaning of the film. She insisted that movies were something more than a bag of optical illusions; they were literature for the eye, potentially as great as anything ever written for the page. From her I learned always to listen for the statement, watch for the vision. Or at least that's how I looked at movies until Max Castle ushered me into a darker science of the cinema. At which point I discovered that as vast and well-furnished as Clare's intellectual universe might be, there was a trapdoor within it that opened into the uncharted depths.

One day while The Classic was featuring a Howard Hawks series, I arrived at the theater in the early afternoon hoping to sit through another of Clare's illustrated lectures on one of her favorite directors. But when I entered the darkened auditorium, there was already a movie on the screen—and it wasn't Howard Hawks. It was a dim, yellowing print with a blurry sound track, so crudely spliced and so bereft of sprockets that it lurched spastically through the projector, garbling the dialogue and chopping the images into near incoherence. The scene was a morose Gothic interior: vast halls, shadowy stairways, mullioned windows glowing with spooky moonlight. Buxom ladies wearing Regency gowns and carrying guttering candles wandered along eerie corridors in the dead of night; ghoulish servants lurked in the corners. I could recognize none of the actors. What I managed to catch of the mangled script was a compendium of clichés. “I thought I heard a scream in the night,” one of the lusty beauties remarks. “I'm sure it was only the wind, milady,” the cadaverous butler answers with a furtive roll of his eyes.

Now this, I felt absolutely certain, was a very bad movie. Still, if Clare was watching it … and not just watching it—devouring it. When I entered the projection booth where she was stationed at the little window, she was deeply immersed in the film, too absorbed to register my arrival with more than a quick, cool glance. Slipping up behind her, I offered the greeting she most appreciated: a kiss in the hollow of her neck, my hands, searching out the flesh of her belly,
gliding gently upward. It was the way Jean-Claude Brialy embraces Juliette Mayniel in
Les Cousins.
(Were Juliette's breasts, like Clare's, also bare beneath her sweater?) Clare usually melted a bit when I did that. But this time she gave an annoyed start and pulled away.

“What's this?” I asked as I settled in beside her at the window.

“A bit of a lark,” she answered impatiently. “It's called
Feast of the Undead.”

I didn't immediately place the title. Wanting to be sure of my ground, I waited a few minutes more, then ventured to comment, “It looks pretty … bad.”

It's crap.

“Oh.” After a pause, I asked, “Why are we watching it?”

“
We
aren't.
I
am. You don't have to.”

“Well, why are
you
watching it?”

“It may be the only Max Castle movie in captivity. At least it's the only one I've been able to get hold of.”

Ah yes. Castle. The vampire guy. The one the French couple had mentioned at Moishe's that night. Since then, Clare had brought him up two or three times more. I recalled hearing her on the phone making inquiries with distributors and film libraries. I had the impression he was haunting her, I guessed because she felt irked that she hadn't been able to recognize his name when it came her way.

“It isn't in very good condition,” I remarked, observing the obvious.

“Scrap quality. Best I could find. Channel Five was going to show this on the late, late, late show. Decided it was unprojectable. They don't even want it back. Good thing—because I've already burned about ten feet out of it in the machine. We may not make it to the end.”