Flicker (92 page)

He listened patiently until I was finished. “Clarissa Swann. I know this name. I've seen reviews by her in the American papers they send me sometimes.”

“I'm sure they've kidnapped her.”

He nodded gravely. “Very likely. The others that were here, they knew less than she did. Yet even that was too much. The Frenchwoman had only interviewed me once. Before the war. Perhaps I was somewhat indiscreet with her; I was quite angry at the time. But there was no need to send her here.”

His words sparked an old memory. “What was her name, the Frenchwoman?”

He wagged his head, unable to remember. “Geneviève … ?”

“Geneviève Joubert?”

“Ah yes.”

“I looked for her in Paris a few years ago. People said she was dead. You mean they kidnapped her because of that one interview?”

“Afterward, when the war ended, she went digging a little deeper. She met a crazy old Jesuit. You know about Oculus Dei?”

“Rosenzweig?”

“Yes. He used to write me letters threatening to kill me. Imagine! She got too interested in what he told her. Still, she could have done no harm. It was cruel to bring her here. Cruel.” He must have known how madly curious I was about the film he'd been burning, but when I asked again, he continued to ignore the question. “I'm sorry about your friend Clare.” It was a touching remark sincerely intended. “She
was a very fine writer. Too good to be a critic really. Such a parasitic trade! Film critics … who reads them?”

That irked. I couldn't keep myself from putting in a good word for Clare and her “trade.” “She believed criticism has a high moral purpose.” He emitted a superior little smirk that irritated me still more. “For example, she regarded you as an unhealthy influence on film.”

He raised a curious eyebrow. “Unhealthy?”

“Evil, in fact.”
Take that! Score one for Clare.

He clucked under his breath indulgently. “There are so few who understand evil. It is bound to be shocking when we tell what we know. Most people would prefer to think of evil as a small, superficial blemish. Nothing permanent, nothing that
has
to be. An occasional cloud that passes across the sun. But no. It is the equal of the sun. It is the whole black night, in fact. You know the phrase—'an act of God.' Ah, but
which
god? It is very odd. In the church, they didn't believe I took evil seriously enough. They said I
played
with it for the aesthetic effect. But how else to teach its power to nonbelievers?” He mused upon the thought to himself for several moments. “But perhaps Miss Swann was right. My treatment of evil was very narrow, very sober. I never saw the humor there—like Browning, you know, with his freaks.”

Humor? In Todd Browning's
Freaks?
I'd seen the movie only once, and left partway through, fighting down nausea. I let the remark slip by unqueried, allowing a punctuating silence to settle in. As he well knew, there was another matter on my mind. Namely, the smoldering fire pit at our feet. I kicked a few pebbles into it and then asked more emphatically, “Now will you tell me what you're doing here?”

He smiled slyly. “Smoke signals. I hoped they would bring you—if you were still here to see them. I missed your company. I wondered if they had taken you away. So I decided to incinerate some excess stock.”

“Don't you know how dangerous it is to burn film?”

“Yes, yes, yes. But what can I damage here that matters? I wouldn't care if the whole island went up in flames. For me, worse than the danger, I hate the stink. I used to wait until I could see a ship or a plane. I hoped the smoke would attract attention. It never did.”

“But where did you get all this?”

“Where else? From our friendly jailers. Every supply ship brings me at least a few films. Once there were sixty-five in one delivery. Nazi propaganda, all of it. So many scenes of
der Führer
receiving
flowers from children. What do you suppose he did with all those flowers?”

“You mean to say you have some way to show these films?”

“If there is electricity, all one needs is a projector and a blank wall.”

Without another word, he shuffled away toward the bungalow, more sprightly in his step than he'd ever been before. I followed. But we didn't enter the house; we went around it to the generator shed that stood against the hillside. Inside I could hear the machine chugging away. The door was still padlocked as it had been when I paid my first visit.

“Why bother?” I asked as he took hold of the lock. “Afraid of burglars?”

He chuckled. “Afraid of
you
—when you first arrived. After all, what did I know about you? I was simply told that I had a companion. I didn't want you snooping.”

“Told? By whom?”

“Our faithful native retainers. Oh yes, they speak our language. French, English. It took me years to find this out.” He gave the rusty old lock a couple of tugs and it opened with a creak. “Anyway, it was only a dummy.” He threw the lock into the nearby shrubs, pushed open the door, and felt in the air for the string that turned on the one bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Waving me inside, he said, “Welcome to Paleolithic Productions. I will guide your tour personally.”

What I'd mistaken for a mere shed turned out to be the facade of a longish tunnel that had been dug into a shallow cave in the hillside. All the walls, including the rough natural rock and dirt at the rear, had been heavily coated with the same gummy whitewash used to brighten and cool the bungalow. The only light came from the bulb and the two bottle-glass windows, one on either side of the doorway. What I saw before me at once brought the phrase “medieval movies” to mind. It was the sort of motion-picture theater our Gothic ancestors might have built if the Dark Ages had been illuminated by electrical power. Indeed, it was more primitive than that. As my guide had said, it was a Stone Age cinema.
Sharkey would love this place,
I thought as I gazed around. It was a true catacombs, as busted-down minimal as a movie house could get, perfectly designed for an audience of vermin and grubs: Sharkey's kind of people. How I wished he were there to see it with me.

There at the far end, about twenty feet into the cave, was a small
soiled movie screen suspended crookedly from the stone ceiling. And at the center of the space just inside the door stood an archaic sixteenmillimeter projector mounted on an olive-oil barrel. The projector had been mended at several points with friction tape, wire, string; I couldn't believe it worked. Along the walls on both sides and at the rear were scores of film cans and cartons stacked on the dirt floor or precariously positioned in various crates and boxes that looked like the jetsam of the sea. Were there actually movies in all those canisters and boxes? If so, the man had an archive of a few hundred films.

“So this is how you amuse yourself, watching movies.”

He made a sour face. “Watching? Hardly. Most of what they send is
dreck.
The worst. I don't watch. There is nothing I care to watch anymore. I
make.
This isn't a theater. It's a studio.” He moved across to some lumpy, blanket-covered objects standing beside the metal casing that housed the generator. He slipped the cloth away from one of the objects, revealing a moviola—or rather, the skeletal remains of a dismantled moviola that had been stripped of about half of its parts. “For the first few years, I was lucky enough to have this. I cobbled it together from three machines. Then it wore out, more than I could repair. They wouldn't replace it. But some of the parts proved useful. Now I have only this, but it suffices.”

He drew back the blanket from another object. Under it was a bewildering Rube Goldberg mélange of machinery. I had to study it before I recognized it as a makeshift editing bench. Nearly lost among empty or half-filled film reels were two rewinds, and bolted to the table between them a battered Moviescope viewer that was even more taped and wired than the projector. “This actually works?” I asked.

He reached across the bench and gingerly connected two bare wires that were pinned against the wall. At once the little viewer lit up inside. In it, I could see a frame of film displayed in the machine. A woman's face upside down. He cranked the handle on one of the rewinds and, sure enough, the still film became a moving picture racing past the lens. Beneath a panning camera, the woman's torso emerged naked and gleaming with sweat; it was at once submerged in a tangle of bodies male and female. A riot of genitalia filled the screen. A skin flick. The dirty old man!

Conceivably one
could
cut film on a contraption like this. I noticed there was an antique Griswold splicer beside the viewer, some splice blocks, razor blades, bottles of cement, rolls of Mylar tape, something
that looked like a surgeon's scalpel. There was also a collection of paint jars, some brushes, and colored pencils.

“The cement and the tape are the most precious,” he explained. “I send letters begging for more with every supply boat. Sometimes I have to wait months. Then, a small mercy, I receive a few bottles, a few rolls … never enough. I've tried making synthetic mixtures. Beeswax, resin, bird dung, various juices. My best results have been with lime and tree sap, if one lets it harden sufficiently. Sometimes it sticks in the projector and the film burns. But often it holds until more cement arrives.”

I didn't believe a word he was saying. I knew at some point I'd have to recognize that I was living with a madman. This was the point. But even if none of this equipment was working, why was it here at all? “The orphans let you have this? They send it to you?”

“Most was here when I arrived. More than you see now. There were cameras, moviolas, projectors. It was all heaped up in the bungalow, which was a wreck when I first came. And movies. Cans and cans of them. A small mountain of movies. I was elated to find them, because, of course, there was a generator, electricity, all I needed to run the machines. This elation lasted, I would say for one minute. For then I saw. It was all rubbish, all of it. Useless, worn out, scrap. It came from the film schools. Whatever was used up or broken was sent here, a movie graveyard. I understood. It was somebody's sadistic idea of a fit punishment. I too was scrap. And this was my torment. Condemned to live out my days among decaying equipment, torn film. As a concept of damnation, it was worthy of Dante.

“But having nothing better to do with my time, I set to work tinkering. In the depths of the junkpile I found what I most needed: a box of Mylar. Twenty-four rolls. With this I could repair the film, I could even patch some of the machines. Then, with pieces from here and there, I succeeded in getting one of the projectors to run. Not for long. Nothing ever works for long. Bulbs burn out, belts snap, film breaks. I remember that first movie of my exile. It brought tears to my eyes. Josephine Baker.
Zou Zou.
Projected on a bedsheet without sound. Such a delight. I knew her in Paris. Alas, she was with me here for only ten minutes. Then the film caught fire—perhaps from her performance.
Le jazz hot,
eh?

“Still, I persisted. More equipment arrived, more film. Practice film, outtakes from editing classes, the most worthless kind of refuse, an insult to the taste. But even in this trash I found pieces of other
movies I could use—stock footage, newsreels, little snippets from the classics, even a few snatches from my own work as improved upon by some adolescent film butcher.

“It was not until three or four years later that things changed. One day, I received a good projector—used, but good—and some film that was in decent condition. Perhaps it was felt I had suffered sufficiently. Perhaps somewhere in the higher echelons of the church I have a secret benefactor—a fan, a former student of mine, someone who has decided to take mercy on me. In any case, I at once sent letters back by the supply ship pleading for forgiveness and requesting things. More and more often, my requests were granted. What they send is still secondhand, but usable. And then Albrecht came. Like yourself, he was a film scholar interested in my work. Poor boy! he had been contaminated with curiosity about Oculus Dei. So he was sent here to finish out his days. He was younger than you. Together, we built what you see, our ‘studio.' That solved my worst problem. The climate. Too hot. The film decays so rapidly in such heat, especially the splices. We dug out this cave and painted the walls. You see how cool it is. Too damp, yes. But the film lasts a little longer.”

Machines held together by string, film spliced with lime and sap … even if this was something more than a batty old man's wishful make-believe, an editing bench does not a movie make—not unless there is a movie to edit. If he was producing movies of any kind, how did he shoot them? And what was he shooting? There was no sign of a camera on the premises. “How do you do your filming?” I asked.

“No camera,” he said dismissively.

“Then where does your movie come from?”

He gestured imperiously to the canisters at the rear of the cave. “I have become the world's first cannibal moviemaker. My movie eats their movies. It is the survival of the fittest.”

“You're just sticking things together, that's all?”

“I think of it as pruning. As in the orchard. I prune away the excess until only the essence remains. Even in the best movie, there is excess; even in the worst, there is an essence—something humorous, something mysterious, something uncanny. Perhaps it is only a single shot: an eye, a smile, an actor's instinctive gesture, light reflected from a jewel. In my own films, there was often no more than a few seconds that really mattered. This would have been true, even if I had been blessed with all the money I wanted, all the resources. You
see, I am God here in my little celluoid universe. I decide what survives and what perishes. I have become the director of directors.”