“What are you trying to tell me?” Half-afraid he would hang up, I held the receiver close to my ear so I could be sure to hear his answer.
“I made up the film I just described, but after the 1899 screening of The Dreyfus Affair there were riots in the streets; people were trampled to death. The film was banned in France until 1950, and no film could be made about the trial until 1974. The death I just described to you, however, was deliberate, not a random thing, not simply a man who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I believe that after the riots Méliès filmed a second ending that revealed what actually happened to that man and disclosed the identity of his assailant.”
“And you believe these scenes were tacked on to the reel in my possession?”
“Yes.”
I knew something of the story behind The Dreyfus Affair but didn’t really understand how this subject could turn what had previously been a form of cheap popular entertainment into something so incendiary. It was as if an invention associated with gum balls, pinballs, barkers, and shills had traveled to the province of cluster bombs and Molotov cocktails, and did so in little more than a wink. I was skeptical.
“The owners of Looney Tunes were curators of the remains of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, not of Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused, or the real spy, Esterhazy. They made films in which ducks and cats fall off cliffs, are smashed against doors, and bounce back completely. Looney Tunes was as far removed from the intrigues of a nineteenth-century espionage trial as possible. They wouldn’t have been interested.” I imagined cans of film stored in a safe, next to diamonds wrapped in flannel sleeves, securities and bonds, the deed to the house, and a will tucked into a manila envelope, accumulating dust and controversy.
“Just because they owned it doesn’t mean they watched it. It’s in bad shape and can’t be threaded up on any old projector. Even if it were to be screened you have to know what you’re looking for.” He had a point. It was unlikely Schlesinger or anyone else had looked at the film after 1899.
“I can’t just spool to the end. The film is so fragile I have to examine the whole thing first, and I have others I’m supposed to work on before I get to it.” I had opened the can and seen the condition of The Affair. It was possible the end had deteriorated beyond repair. “Give me your number and I’ll call you when I get to it.”
He then hung up on me.
How can you know what’s at the end of a film if you’ve never seen it? I said into the dead phone like some Dagwood Bumstead jabbering into a busted old rotary. I felt oddly numb, as when a relative or friend puts the receiver down, terminating the call with no warning or polite good-bye and you’re left wondering what kind of toes you inadvertently stepped on. Who was this Jack with a husky voice who knew my name and what I did? I imagined a man in a T-shirt with holes around the neck, tanned arms, leaning in a doorway and pinging rubber bands into a wastebasket across the room as he spoke.
I pushed the Dreyfus can aside as if it contained a long dormant explosive that could be sparked again at any unpredictable moment, tried to forget about the call, and went back to work on Train-Eating Sun Blinded by Eclipse.
A lewdly winking sun is about to swallow a locomotive when gradually an eclipse with a female face overshadows eyes, nose, and mouth. I began to think about what men did or had done to them in these films, and who or what was assigned a female identity. Comets, selenites, keys, houris, and musical notes were female. An advertisement for Parisian, Love on Credit came to life and the figure of a sinuous woman chased a few men around the set. Devils, astronauts, deep-sea divers, scientists, and planets were usually male, as well as travelers and most of the main characters. Men had things done to them, women were the agency of vexation. Women were more mutable than men, more susceptible to transformations that appeared painless, unlike the men whose bodies split or whose heads exploded. Men were tricked over and over with nothing left to do but raise their hats in order to scratch their heads. There were exceptions to this theory, but on the whole I would say roles were divided along those lines. Whether the stories were driven by the travels of a central character or by plot, the victims and travelers alike were generally men.
By evening I needed to rest my eye and took a walk down the hall. When work is slow Alphabet rents out some of the extra editing rooms. There are ten of them lined up on either side of a short corridor, each one behind a numbered door. They are rented out like any other kind of office space, and none of the doors are completely soundproof. Finding one’s way down the hall, listening as each sound track runs into the next, is like walking past a series of apartments whose doors have all been left open so that arguments, conversations, polemics, and shouting matches can be heard, one after the next. I used to walk to school past one house and then the next, and even if they were dark and locked up, as I walked past I knew what went on in a few of them. In this house a bully slept, a girl who picked her victims at random but with the finality of a court sentence. With the sound of gravel underfoot, breath misting on a cold early morning, I ran past hoping she wouldn’t be sitting on her screen porch or playing with her dog, an oversize highly strung dalmatian named Teency. She didn’t use her fists like scrappy or tough girls, but was a master of the taunt delivered in private when no one else was listening; each one was something you could take home with you and worry about like a time bomb that would go off in bursts over and over.
You and your family are always right there where the money is.
I’m going to do an experiment. If I drop a quarter will you pick it up?
Next door was a man who shot deer and brought them home, strapped to the top of his car. We watched from across the lawn while he smiled and called out to us to take a look at this or that beauty. I imagined they bled all over his garage.
There is a basic confusion concerning the newsreel film. They said that Lumière invented the newsreel — it was actually Méliès.
I stopped and listened. The sound track was in French, but someone was translating the dialogue aloud into English.
Lumière photographed train stations, horse races, families in the garden — the stuff of impressionist painting. Méliès filmed a trip to the moon, President Fallières visiting Yugoslavia, the eruption of Mount Pelée, Dreyfus.
I knocked and opened the door. Someone froze the frame. On the screen a woman’s face peered out from behind stacks of Mao’s little red books. Two annoyed faces turned in my direction.
“We were told we’d have complete privacy and quiet here. This is the third time we’ve been disturbed,” a woman in black-framed glasses snapped at me. “I paid good money to rent this space. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry seems to have a question to ask or something to announce as soon as they get to this door.”
“I was walking by and I wondered who was talking about newsreels and Lumière.”
“Jean-Pierre Léaud in Godard’s La Chinoise.” She pushed her glasses up on her head in exasperation at my stupidity and pointed to the screen.
Before I could thank her for the information and apologize for the interruption, I was pushed aside by a delivery boy from the Chinese restaurant down the street. He expressed frustration and in his agitation had nothing but blind disinterest in the image on the screen that held us transfixed. He had gotten lost and was sure the food in the bags he carried had gone cold.
“We ordered Mexican!” The Godard people rolled their eyes in disgust at