by the same author
Swallowing Film: Short Film Fiction
Black Cat, Green Field
Teaching Creative Writing
Signs of Life: Cinema and Medicine (with A. Moor)
Small Maps of the World
Moon Dance
camera phone
brooke biaz
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com
Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621
Characters, Names, Places, Recipes and Cocktails contained in this book are not meant to be actual Persons or Things and should not be considered, approached, or treated, as such.
© 2010 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Biaz, Brooke.
Camera phone / Brooke Biaz.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60235-162-2 (pbk. : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-163-9 (adobe ebook)
I. Title.
PR9619.3.H324C36 2010
823’.914--dc22
2009049118
Printed on acid-free paper.
Cover image:
Cover design by David Blakesley
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paperback and eBook formats from Parlor Press at www.parlorpress.com or at brick-and-mortar and online bookstores everywhere. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [email protected].
contents
part 1
There were years when I went to the cinema almost every day and maybe even twice a day . . . It was a time when cinema became the world to me. A different world from the one around me, but my feeling was that only what I saw on the screen possessed the properties required of a world, the fullness, the necessity, the coherence, while away from the screen were only heterogeneous elements lumped together at random, the materials of life, mine, which seemed to me utterly formless.
Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni
Capture the action. . . . Video clips are ideal for those unexpected great moments that happen when you’re out there, enjoying life.
Sony Ericsson, The K770i Cyber-shot™ phone
one
Being There
1979, 130m
Comedy, PG-13
Lorimar (U.S.)
1
Man, there is Karen. Close-up. Tight as you like. Humping her fist like a seahorse riding a warm current. Up and down she goes, her head thrown back in and out of frame. This is high-key, off-balanced, improv and it’s Expressionist, I guess. Cinema vérité. My camera phone loves her. It absolutely does. It’s like watching Rogers with Astaire, Kahn with Hank, Lassie with Joey. She sweeps away a cobweb which has floated down from the basketball hoop above the doorjamb. To which I say: “Nice. Real nice. Go on.” I bounce over the duvet to catch her eyes which, momentarily but significantly, pause on me. She is Kim Basinger in Nadine, only smarter, of course. For a moment I have what is certainly eye-contact, an address to my phone, but in Karen’s body not in any words. Then she’s away again, doing her thing. Moonlight through the window, which is a bay but not a casement, moves in and out like a tide. Sallow and dusty, it moves softly in. What a romance! I’m planning all match cuts here. From me at the window shooting into the dark. To me in the kitchen, using a low-angle which elevates things considerably. To me, a breathless Cameron Crowe, Joe Dante, Gus Van Sant, Atom Egyoyan, John Woo, bounding from bed to bathroom to bay window to bed. I shoot all night in our flat above the Halfmarket while my camera phone seduces her in ways she has never heard of. She thanks me for coming up with the idea of making a film of her life.
This is not, well, the whole story. But the pleasure, nevertheless, is going to be all mine.
2
Below, the morning beach traffic mewls a steady aching spewm. It’s sickening, hard-hearted and as pumpingly urgent as a drum . . . but it does not distract me from Karen who wakes shortly in the bed beside me, rolls over aglow with something that I can only describe as escape and points, with her pale and somewhat anorexic fingers ringed in Balinese silver she bought on vacation in . . . well guess?, Bali; and, here and there with Amerindian turquoise, toward my phone.
From my cane chair, I stand up to pan the room, which is shabby but large and solidly built. Langford Terrace, our building, a good-sized share on the Halfmarket, is Victorian in