The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (9 page)

“The film is only one frame long,” Laing says.

I understand he wants to move on.

“Then it’s not a film,” I say.

“It’s the only part of the film that survives.”

“Title?”

“
The Murderous King Addresses the Horizon
. 1910. A fragment.”

Laing is sitting at the table now and he tells me about the film frame, which he produces from a yellow envelope from beneath the blue velvet chair. It’s actually not a film frame, but a paper print from the Library of Congress, Laing says, referring to the early method for securing copyright of films from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Rather than strike extra prints of films, paper versions were made, an opaque from the film negative printed onto various sorts of paper, which were coiled tightly and preserved. The frame that Laing produced was actually stolen, Edison told me later, from the vaults of the Renovare Company, which had been commissioned to convert the paper prints to 16 mm acetate safety film stock. An image from a forgotten film, by a forgotten director although, as Laing reminds me, the concept of the director was alien in early cinema, and more than likely it was the cameramen who dictated the composition of space within the shots and all sort of other decisions we now associate with the role of the director. In fact—and for some reasons he seems adamant on this point—early filmmaking was an intensely collaborative enterprise with interchangeable roles, so that there was no clear distinction between who did what at the various stages of production. What Laing calls the “assembly line” mode of Hollywood production, perfected during the studio era, didn’t exist yet and it was no surprise, Laing insists, that Hollywood’s method of production followed so closely and emerged at nearly the same historical moment as Henry Ford’s assembly line: film and automobile as imagined as a grouping of interchangeable parts assembled by a series of workers trained to do one or two jobs expertly and therefore alienated from the overall process of the entire project. But this, this early frame comes from a time before that, when filmmaking was still an organic enterprise and when films were created
by small groups (“collectives” is the word Laing uses) of people working together to create a shared object.

Laing begins to spin out the narrative, the “secret history” of this particular fragment, the sole surviving ghost image of a film that someone had taken the time to transfer to a paper print and register at the Library of Congress.

“It’s a story about the woman, taking notes, at a wooden desk in a wide-planked, bright office in a film from 1910, her hair done up in the style of the day in the years before the ‘war to end all wars’ which, beginning just four years after this film frame, will claim millions. There is a man—stately, king-like—across the room from her, watching. With murderous intent, as I recall. He wears some sort of uniform. I’d swear it involves a Nazi arm band, blinking in blood red, but that’s impossible, of course, in 1910.

“There are so many details in the film frame, but which ones are important? Neither of them are looking directly at each other. He might be dictating; she might be taking notes. Or perhaps she is simply recording information, tallies that indicate some dark, bloody statistic. There is in fact—if you examine the frame closely, which I happened to do during the dead-time of my life then, after Marlene had accused me (falsely) of ‘unpardonable actions’ and subsequently exiled herself from me—nothing written at all on her pad of paper. There is the carved face on the wall above her head. There is his seat cushion. There is the overexposed window behind him, which is open. There are many objects on her desk whose meaning can only be guessed at. It’s not fair that we don’t know.”

Laing gets up from the table, goes into the motel room, and comes back with a yellowed folder, removes a stack of typed pages, and shuffles through them with the blank intensity of a person teleported back and forth through time so often that his very self becomes stretched into something that exists both then and now. The pages contain Laing’s theories about what
happens after the frame, in the way that we sometimes wonder what happens in the moments right after the instant captured in a photograph and I’m struck for the first time by the degraded sadness of the whole enterprise. Laing and I talking about these destroyed films as if they mattered any more, or as if they ever mattered, and to make things worse, the black night accumulating around us with greater and greater force, as if leaking in from parts of the universe that carry with them a special kind of evil, the kind that we can’t even imagine, the kind that you can’t find in Blake or Milton or with telescopes trained at the cosmos or in particle colliders or in Indian mounds or even in the terrible things that one person will do to another person alone in a dungeon. There’s a stillness in the black night that surrounds us and Laing seems to respect this silence somehow and in that void we share I have a terrible thought: that one of the missing children is right now, at this very moment, aware of us out here on the motel landing and I too become aware of him, the boy chained to a tree, his bare chest pressed hard against the bark, forest mud stuffed into his ears and nose, a lantern hanging from a branch swaying beside him, a lodge in the distance with a yellow light on inside, the sound of a tractor engine coughing to life in the distance, and the boy’s thoughts running in a weird relay circuit between me and him. These thoughts come to me in a terrible rush so hard and fast and with such force that the image of the boy sticks to the inside of my skull.

Laing begins to read from the pages, and, like a slow dissolve, it takes more than a few seconds for the image of the boy to dissipate. “In the ‘Western’ from which the film still is taken the man is the new sheriff and the woman his young wife, and when she sees a man’s throat slit behind a barn and the way he tries to hold his life in as it bleeds through his fingers, something in her mind will become dislodged and even the act of acting happy will be impossible for her. In the ‘great train robbery’ version her husband will act the hero, stupidly, to the bandits (including
a boy no older than ten) who are about to burst into the photograph from off-screen right and demand the cash from the day in the hidden drawer next to the man’s left knee. In the ‘Civil War nostalgia’ version she will treat the house slave with unexpected compassion, subtly reinforcing the fact that she, the mistress of the house, has the power to confer such compassion. In the ‘domestic melodrama’ version she will be the mistress, seated in the very chair where he first fell in love with her, the light coming in from the window at frame left, illuminating her face in such a way that makes us wonder even now, over one-hundred years later, what she is thinking about.

“There are the precise moments that existed immediately after the seconds in the film from which this frame was taken, moments that while lost to documented reality exist nonetheless. In these, after the director is satisfied, the woman will throw her hands to her mouth in laughter. Her brother (his name, let’s say, is Edward) will laugh also, because this is what they have always done; this is their way. She laughs and then he laughs. Sometimes they don’t even know why. No, wait: he knows why. When she (her name is Evelyn) was a girl, she nearly died of scarlet fever, the rash slowly spreading from her neck to arms to back as if she were being consumed by her very own body. He stayed with her for those two weeks (he was ten; she was seven), sleeping on the wooden floor beside her bed, and listening to her labored breathing and the mysterious, incoherent phrases she would sometimes call out during her fevered nightmares. And sometimes, now, years later, when her face flushes in embarrassment, he calls her Scarlet, and she smiles and laughs. And then he laughs. It is these small, private exchanges that—in a way that even he himself does not fully understand—give order to his life.”

Laing puts the notes or whatever he’s been reading from down. His face looks, for a moment—and I’m not sure exactly how to say this—like that of a man who expects Satan himself
to appear in the doorway. His hands tremble slightly. He finishes his glass of bourbon, pours another, and continues reading.

“But there is also a darker version of events, one in which Evelyn never wakes up from the scarlet fever, and Edward, perhaps too sensitive to the tragedies of this world, as if even the sight of a broken-winged sparrow fluttering in the street gutter would tinge his day with sadness, never recovers from the loss. Oh, he appears to. And in this version of the story the woman in the film frame is not his sister at all, but rather some other person, hurried in from the outer offices of wherever this was shot to sit at the desk and pretend she’s writing. And even at the moment this is filmed, Edward can feel himself being torn between two possibilities: the so-called real world and the world of magic cast by the very movies he has helped to produce.

“The only book he has ever truly loved is Henry James’s
The Golden Bowl
, which he first read several years prior to this film, when it was still James’s latest book. And in that novel (whose words to him are like steel cage bars that either protect him from something terrible or else trap him away from something wonderful), one phrase especially has stuck with him:
the darkening shadow of a false position
. That’s how he feels now, looking at this film frame: that ever since his sister’s death (for she died, not ‘nearly died’) he has lived more and more comfortably beneath the darkening shadow of a false position. The false position of hope.

“The most horrendous—but also the truest—version of what happens in the moments after this film was shot is that there will be a knife fight between them, whoever they are, and fuck Henry James, because this will be the real thing. She will strike first, out of lustful revenge (‘You promised. I was the only one!’) and he will be wounded in the arm and leap out of his chair, scattering papers. He has no knife per se, so he reaches for the silver letter opener as she takes another jab at him, puncturing his leg. He falls back against the wall. A framed picture falls.
She shakes her hair loose and for a moment it’s possible that, rather than kill each other, they’ll have sex right then and there. But then he lunges at her with the letter opener and punctures the soft flesh beneath her ribs. Her white blouse is stained in crimson blood (
scarlet
you might say were this the different version of the story) and she lunges right back at him and gets him in the same spot, beneath his ribs, and life leaks out of both of them now. And then, unexpectedly, she jabs him again, and again, in the same spot. It’s as if she has prepared all of her life for this very moment. In desperation he lunges for her in agonized fury and bites her arm so hard he breaks a tooth.”

Laing, at this point, is reading from his typed notes as if he himself cannot understand it, a word of it. Something in his voice, the way he stutters between the words, distances him from what he’s saying, and for the first time he pauses and looks at me long enough to cast or break a spell. It begins raining, and we pull the table back into the room. The cone-like object swivels off the table and Laing tries to catch it and that’s when I see, in the gap of his collar as he bends down, tattooed on the back of his neck, an image of a disk with grooves cut into it. I recognize it immediately as a film projector shutter, the small circle of plastic that rotates just in front of the film as it passes through the projector’s light, providing a regular interval of darkness between each frame to create the illusion of continuous motion. It always struck me as strange that what the brain needs to be tricked into seeing still images as moving images is something that actually
breaks
the continuous motion of images, shuttering them from our eyes intermittently and so quickly that we don’t notice. This separation, this darkness that comes between us and the images we want to see, is necessary if we want to see them, otherwise, dragged in front of the projector’s bulb with no interruption, they would appear as a muddled blur, images running together in a way that suggests chaos rather than ordered motion.

In the motel room something has changed. The wind and rain gust against the door, blowing it open until I shoulder it shut and lock it. Laing and I are either some place that looks very much like the original room, or else we are still in the original room and it’s been altered slightly. So how was the room different? In some ways, admittedly, the changes were simply the result of the passing of time. It was brighter, for instance. But other differences were harder to understand. Why was the TV set smaller, or the peephole in the door higher so that now I had to stand on my toes to see through it? And the cheap heavy curtain across the window that looks out onto the balcony is the color of lilac now, though to be honest perhaps it was always lilac.

Laing continues, his voice slightly lower, as if someone or something else was listening in and this part was just for me.

“Just over a month before this movie was made, a bomb destroyed the
Los Angeles Times
building, killing over 20 people, and when he hears gunshots outside the window his mind is seized with the images of the mangled dead in Los Angeles, their severed parts in the dust only to be re-animated in the second coming (‘He will come again to judge the living in the dead’) and this epiphanic moment of his gives her time to finish him off, to gut him like she gutted deer so many times as a young girl with her full-bearded uncle in Oneonta, New York.

“There is so much blood now on the wall and the window and the desk and the floor that she slips. Somewhere, not far away, a camera is rolling and Edwin S. Porter is directing a scene from the short film
The Greater Love
. The earth passes through the tail of Halley’s Comet, and a woman in Philadelphia is said to die from the resulting cyanogen gas. President William Howard Taft has a nightmare in which the sheets of his bed metamorphose into sheets of black quicksand that suck him into outer space. H. G. Wells republishes his story ‘When the Sleeper Awakes’ which contains the lines ‘We have our troubles… this is a time
of unrest.’ There is so much blood now, even the sepia can’t disguise the color.