Flicker (95 page)

Searching further, I now began to pay attention to segments of film no more than a few frames long. Even these revealed the man's skill and daring. Here and there, I noted traces of color added to the film, things drawn or painted on the emulsion, overlapping the photographed picture. To see these I had to use the same magnifying glass he must have employed to make the additions. My God! the labor that had gone into these primitive animations, frame by frame, twenty-four frames for every running second of movement. It was plain crazy. He had toiled for days to paint, pencil, scratch words, figures, shapes upon film stock he knew was doomed to rot away unseen. The task must have required a ferocious concentration, like that of a bee or termite single-mindedly driven by its tyrannical instinct to achieve some minute insect project.

I soon discovered that my scholarly habits of mind hadn't deserted me. Sorting through the debris, I automatically began to categorize the images and motifs I was finding, heaping them up in little mounds on the bench. In one there was the recurrent image of a polyp or tentaclelike shape; it usually crept out of holes, tunnels, dark corners to slither over scenes of love, sex, romance. This nasty little cartoon exuded weblike tendrils that spread and tangled across the frame, finally knitting the lovers up like a spider's victims. Then there were any number of examples of the black bird flying over scenes of atrocity and devastation. This I recognized as the Cathar emblem of divine but powerless mercy. And pitted against the bird, there was the stalking panther, tiger, jaguar, usually spliced into idyllic scenes where it became the shadow that fell across all earthly delight. And finally there was the most intriguing footage of all, frame after frame
that seemed to be nothing more than the play of light and darkness: infernal blacks alternating with blazing whites, pinpoints of light against night skies, starbursts, lightning streaks. Where I could recover as much as several feet of such film intact, I could tell he'd been experimenting with wild rhythms and counterpoints of light and dark that were meant to enhance the effect of the flicker.

There was no way to tell if these artfully edited and altered fragments added up to some overall story, or if the various reels might simply be so many variations of Cathar themes of good and evil, suffering and salvation, heaven and hell. I was studying nothing more than pitiful scraps of the man's work. But even that little brought me a welcome sense of relief. I'd listened to his description of his work suspecting he was totally nuts. If there was film in the cans, it might be imbecilic hash revealing nothing but its maker's madness. Now at least I had the proof of a surviving talent at work—though it had been expended on a project that many, myself included, might be inclined to regard as psychotic. On the other hand, what are the standards of sanity for a one-man society existing in such isolated exile? Was there anything he might better have spent his time doing?

But having satisfied myself to that extent, what did I do next? I could, I suppose, amuse myself for the rest of my life combing through the ruins of his work, seeking out surviving images here and there, admiring the ingenuity of his utterly impractical editing techniques. For all that task might teach me, it would be a heartbreaking pastime.

Even more urgently, what did I say to him later today when he woke from his nap? He told me the movie would fall apart; but that was supposed to happen
after
I had screened it. Could I bring myself to tell him that he wasn't to have even the most minimal audience after all these years? Or did he know that? No one who handled film with such dexterity could really believe his work would survive the self-destructive chemistry of celluloid, the inherent instability of these zany splices. But if that was so, did he expect me to play along with the fantasy and humor him the next time we met by pretending I'd seen the film?

After this brief intermission, I glumly set about closing up the cartons and stacking them under the editing bench. As I did so, I came upon a half-opened carton that bore no number. It was less dusty than the others, possibly a recent piece of work. I looked inside and found a reel that was about half full. The film looked to be in decidedly better condition than anything I'd seen so far. Along the
coiled edge of the reel I could make out an extraordinary number of splices; the film must be a kaleidoscope of imagery. I unrolled a few feet of it; the stock was supple, the sprockets in good shape. Unrolling more, I came upon a segment that looked like a long stretch of eightmillimeter film cemented along one edge to a strip of blank film meant to lend it enough width to pass through the projector. The splice seemed to go on and on well into the reel. This was a very tricky piece of work, unlikely to stay together under the pull of the machine. Looking more closely, I saw that this part of the movie had been elaborately worked on. A sort of muddy glaze had been painted over it, then pocked and pitted. I was madly curious to know what effect these awesome labors had produced. Dared I try running it through the projector? Well, what did I have to lose?

I fastened the reel to the battered little Bell & Howell and carefully threaded the film through its creaky innards. Like the viewer on the bench, the projector also had to be hot-wired to pull its juice. As soon as the connection was made, it came to life with a grumpy little growl like an animal waking from hibernation. I switched the lamp on; it stabbed its blank shaft of light across the room to brighten the lopsided screen. I turned off the overhead bulb, took a deep breath, and pressed the
FORWARD
button. There was a lurch and a slap as the leader began to click through the film gate. By God, the thing worked! I brought the beam to a sharp focus. Two big words occupied the screen… .

“The End.”

Then, just as they faded away, a Castle trademark appeared. Eyes. Just eyes, the face around them blacked out. But even masked off, there was no mistaking these eyes. Large, mascara-ringed, shining with tears, they were the eyes of Charlie Chaplin, the closing shot from
City Lights.
They held the screen for only a few seconds and then were replaced by another image, blending in rapidly … and then another, another, another. Split-second cuts flashing by, too quick to register. Still I was certain I caught the faces of familiar stars. Bogart, Gérard Philipe, Garbo, Marlon Brando. Then something I couldn't miss, a favorite film: a snatch from the cremation scene at the end of Truffaut's
Jules et Jim.

About then, I got the point. These were memorable endings, the sort of invasive final images that stake out a lifelong claim in the mind. A death, a closing door, a farewell wave. The ending of a movie—so I'd long believed—was a moment out of time, a spectral transition
from the illusion of the film to the illusion that passes for real life. In its own small way, it's an aesthetic apocalypse, the end of one world, the resumption of that other which begins on the streets beyond the theater. Where it's done well, it packs the whole picture into a single, persisting memory. Flashing before my eyes now was a prize collection of just those moments clipped from scores of movies, each one precisely cut to capture that experience of completion. But they were all sorrowful completions. None of the shots I could identify was a happy ending; all were moments of grief, loss, resignation. The last in the series was the terrible immolation from Dreyer's
Joan of Arc,
just that instant when the body slumps against the ropes and the flames take it.

And then the flames were fading, replaced by the segment of eightmillimeter film I'd inspected before I rolled the movie. This was at first so grainy and dismally lit that I couldn't get a fix on it. It did, however, manage to produce an immediate mood. Absolute, total despair. I couldn't tell why; I had no idea what I was looking at. It had the appearance of yellowed newspaper photos blown up ten or twenty times, so gritty I could feel it like sand rubbed into my eyes. It hurt to stare at the screen, as I struggled in vain to piece the picture together.

Again, the words “The End” took shape on the screen, this time followed in an accelerating succession by “Fin,” “Das Ende,” “Fine,” a graceful cascade of final frames artfully arranged into a mobile collage from scores of movies in all languages. The grainy image returned. This time I succeeded in getting a visual grip on it. I was looking at a super-slow-motion overhead shot of people on a city street all moving toward one point, a dark square at the center where they vanished. What was it? A pit, a tunnel? Squinting hard, I felt sure it was a subway entrance. New York? No, more likely the London Underground. The crowd, slowed to a crawl, flowed like a dirty, turgid river along the sidewalk, turned, headed down the stairs. That was all. Just that, endlessly
that.
At a few points, I thought I spotted helmeted or uniformed figures. That, and the style of the clothing, gave a wartime atmosphere to the scene. London during the blitz? Possibly. Somebody had planted a camera above a London sidewalk and let it run, relentlessly recording this commonplace street scene. Why would anyone do that? No telling. Yet as utterly uneventful as the film was, after several moments its very ordinariness began to assume an eerie quality. The ceaseless funereal tread of the crowd
became a death march, thousands trudging with robotic deliberation toward the concrete underworld. There was nothing to watch, yet I was watching, certain that something was about to happen. It was that experience only movies can capture: impending action off-camera about to intrude from the edges of the screen—the mummy's hand, the blow to the head, the pie in the face. One feels it coming, waits for its arrival with strained expectation.

What was it that held me so tenaciously? I decided it had to do with the texture of the picture. The grain had been made so coarse that I felt I was observing a world reduced to its very atoms. Below the visible surface, every constituent particle of the scene was on the verge of flying apart. And I was waiting to see that happen, wanting to see what lay underneath.

I might not have realized how gripped I was by this strange excerpt if my attention hadn't been diverted from the screen. I heard a snapping sound and, looking down, saw the first break in the film, the loose end coming through and falling short of the take-up reel. Only when I looked away did I experience how unwilling my eyes were to stop watching. I felt angry, even slightly panicked, to be distracted. I reached out to catch the end of the film and tried to provide enough tension to keep the movie flowing. That wasn't easy to do; twice the projector jammed, leaving no choice but to stop and rethread. The film continued to break, and twice more, when splices caught in the gate, the picture on the screen turned slowly brown, then red, as the film sizzled under the lens. Each time I lost several feet of the movie. Still I persevered, finally getting the feel of the tension right in my hands as I took over from the take-up reel. I was simply letting the film fall away on the floor with no thought of how I'd ever reassemble this mess on the spool.

But as these problems drew my eye from the screen, I realized that the room about me had changed. It was suffused with a pulsing, subaqueous light. The movie reflecting off the screen was producing the same uncanny fascination I had found long ago when I first saw the
Judas
and fell under the hypnotic spell of the flicker. What a pity I'd never have the chance to study the effect, or even to witness it a second time. The movie was dying in my hands while I watched, breaking, spilling away in pieces after the only viewing it would ever have—just as its maker had said it would.

Back on the screen, the unending parade of the doomed millions continued. If my attention hadn't been jerked away by the projector,
how deeply I might by now be immersed in the scene, still waiting for its disintegrating surface to crumble—as at last it did. I'm sure it was well before my eye registered their appearance, subtle hairline fissures began to form across the crowd. They grew deeper, opened wider. Something behind was emerging, something I both wanted and feared to see. A thought leapt to mind as vividly as if it had been recorded on the sound track: we live on film, on a film, the skin of
a
bubble, what is real lies behind, waiting to push through, swallow us up, reclaim us. It may not be nice.

What was emerging? A light whose brightness punished my sight. The atoms of the picture were spinning off into that light. How had he managed to achieve such a brilliant intensity? Finally the light began to fold and crinkle, taking on shadows, a shape. It assumed a familiar outline, a nuclear cloud mushrooming up and up, ever so slowly, I was certain I saw something inside that cloud. An eye, was it? A single, terrible, unblinking eye fixed upon me, driving its cruel gaze into me. A sudden irrational impulse came over me. I wanted to hide. I didn't want that eye to see me. Because I knew it was there to judge me. I blushed to realize how childish the response was. It was exactly the way I had once felt as a kid when the monster appeared on the screen and I tried to hide under the seat. But this monster was nothing but that eye … if indeed there really was an eye there.

Before I could decide for sure, it was gone. Or at least I sensed it was gone, replaced by a mercifully blank white screen. Nothing. Just white leader running through, running and running. But not so. Like the blackness that filled the screen at the end of
Shadows over Sing Sing,
this white also riveted the attention. There was some absorbing tempo to what I watched; it stroked like a finger in the dark of the room, a sensuous tickling at the rear of the retina, deep in, reaching deeper. I became aware of a small gyrating spot on the screen. Yes, that's what I was watching for. Or was it a trick of the eye? At first I couldn't tell. In the pulsing white void, the spot writhed and grew larger. Yes, it was really there. It had wings. It was the black bird, or rather an animation of the bird etched on the film. Not even a smooth animation, but a crude, jumpy little cartoon.