“Julius, why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe what I’m saying is that sometimes what the client of the moment wants trumps what a long-dead director actually shot. It happens. Also, we need to get paid as quickly as possible.”
There was a boy who stood so close to me in a film preservation class that there was barely a molecule of air between our sleeves. We shared editing tables, joked about rewriting movies and adding Godzillas where they didn’t belong. I thought he was just a work buddy, but then I wasn’t so sure an arm was just something for reaching for the next canister. I wondered what he saw in me, and what projection of his fantasies I might have been. Images of a one-eyed woman were too obvious and unbearable to think about.
Hey Cyclops, what makes you think you can be so choosy?
I pretended to examine the Méliès film in which a man was turning himself into a cigarette lighter, and in the silence Julius walked out.
I could make two copies: a doctored version for Julius, an accurate copy for myself. One of the two I would clean up, using gallons of Wet Gate, drawing into the emulsion if streaks of rain or lightning bolts had faded, but in the second copy I’d leave every mark, scuff, and crack. The negative can’t be read with the naked eye, but with copies I can experiment. There is no master, no original. After five copies, degradation of the image makes it unreadable. The Air Force once tried making numerous copies of surveillance films. What they were left with proved Julius’s M&M’s theory. After a certain point you get diverticulation, the emulsion falls off. Russian satellites or Iraqi tanks disintegrate into bottle shapes and tin cans, a Méliès-like transformation from signifiers of harm to pedestrian bits and pieces: an unwitting but complete conversion of swords into plough shares.
“Hello, Frances?”
“I was waiting for your call. What happened? You stood me up. Don’t ask me for any more favors. You can take your exploding heads and buy yourself a watch.”
“You weren’t alone.”
“So what?”
“I didn’t want an audience.”
“Are you two years old, or what? I don’t know anything about you so I brought a friend.”
“While in prison one of the General Staff’s star forgers in the conspiracy to frame Dreyfus, a man named Colonel Henry, slits his own throat.” Jack resorted to Dreyfusspeak.
“How do you know that’s the scene I’m working on now? The print is very worn here. His razor emerges with a grand sweep, an arc of light. Henry’s body is so blurred and grainy, the image gives the impression that a disembodied arm has appeared from foggy atmosphere and severed a head which has already been guillotined.” I backed up the film, thinking I might have missed a figure entering his cell. “Now he’s only sitting at his desk writing a letter to his wife.”
“Doll-like and unseen, Madame Henry will be capable of hysterical courtroom outbursts when the judge, Bertulus, refers to the late forger, Henry. The mystery of Henry’s suicide, never solved, was that a shut razor was found in his hand. Had he slit his throat himself he would have had no time to calmly shut the razor, lie down, and prepare to expire.”
Then the phone went dead.
“The Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt gave an elaborate costume ball in their house and garden in Paris. The theme was white; any costume was admitted but it had to be all in white. A large white dance floor was installed in the garden with the orchestra hidden in the bushes. I was asked to think up some added attraction. I hired a movie projector which was set up in a room on an upper floor, with the window giving out on the garden. I found an old hand-colored film by the pioneer French film-maker, Méliès. While the white couples were revolving on the white floor, the film was projected on this moving screen — those who were not dancing looked down from the windows of the house. The effect was eerie.”
Man Ray, Self Portrait, 1963. Courtesy of Jack Kews
The snippet had arrived in the mail along with the usual kinds of advertisements for film equipment and personal inquiries about specific jobs that I occasionally receive at Alphabet. Colonel Henry’s suicide splashes over a skirt. One of Méliès’s heads explodes at an elbow. A rocket lands in someone’s eye. Apart from the Dreyfus film, which is somewhat stark, these films are crowded, packed with images. Méliès nearly always filled black space as if he had a fear of emptiness. No cave, room, door, fireplace remained black for long, sooner or later something would emerge from it. In The Conquest of the Pole, a huge figure eats the explorers, but the barren tundra is soon inhabited when the monster throws them up again. I stood in the dark, relatively empty room. I waited for Jack Kews or anyone to burst in. Nothing happened.
I worked through the night to try to reach the end of the film, but there was too much damage, and it was slow going.
After Henry’s suicide Dreyfus leaves Devil’s Island, returning to France for a second trial at Rennes. Although a great deal of evidence to prove his innocence has been established, he will again be found guilty, but for the moment there’s still hope. He lands at the port of Quiberon in Bretagne. I held the film up to the light. A storm has been brewing. The forks of lightning that were hand drawn on the film have all but disappeared, only traces of them remain. Figures of Dreyfus and his guard ascend steps leading to the quay. Sailors, probably sitting on the floor, sway back and forth as if they’re rocked by actual waves in an actual boat; otherwise the scene is gray and static like a nineteenth-century sculpture garden.
Prints from the 1890s are very dark. I turned out the light and laid the carefully unspooled strips across a light table. I wanted to jump ahead, but the storm needed repair. Too many frames had degenerated to dotty atmosphere, pointillist and vague. As creditors threatened and Alphabet’s accounts had the dry heaves, Julius wanted all these scenes dissolved. Kews, on the other hand, sent notes and left messages: preserve what you can then cut to the epilogue.
Louis Kahn wrote that a boy walks around the city and the city tells him what to do with himself. Architects may not be the only ones who look at the exterior of buildings and the layout of streets, parks, and bridges as a kind of visual or tactile guide indicating appropriate behavior and suggesting what to do next. I think his theory about walking around the city works well for girls, too. During lunch I went to the public library. The main branch was just a few blocks from Alphabet, its steps already littered with fallen leaves, and its hours reduced. Others on their lunch breaks brushed the detritus aside in order to sit on the steps and eat hot dogs, slices of pizza, drink sodas, and stare at the street. As I climbed the steps, I felt I ought to have been watching the street too, balling up paper wrapping and reading headlines over someone’s shoulder, yet I continued up the steps with a sense of purpose, aiming toward computer terminals and the smell of binding glue. The process would take about an hour. I looked up Artificially Arranged Scenes: the Films of Georges Méliès, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, All the President’s Men, the testimony of Oliver North and other transcripts from the Iran-Contra hearings published in book form, and a biography of John Lennon. I handed my list to the librarian, but he came back empty handed. None of the books were on the shelves. He checked the computer and told me the same person had taken each out, and all were overdue.
“We’ll send him a postcard to see that they’re returned. Try us again at the end of the week.”
“I think I know the man who took them out.” There were hundreds of thousands of people with