“Well,” I over-enunciate, “I must bid you adieu as I have work to which I must presently attend.”
Nodding in a folksy manner, I turn to the door, my right shoulder inching back slightly as it anticipates Ingo’s gentle touch, beseeching me to stay for just a bit. “Don’t go!” he’d say. But it is not to be, and I must follow through, cross the hall, fumble for my key, enter, and close the door behind me. I do my trick of the sound of receding footsteps, while standing in place and watching Ingo through my security peephole. I am not certain what I am hoping to learn, but I have discovered through my research into the underrated and trailblazing work of filmmaker Allen Albert Funt that a person who believes thonself to be unobserved will act in a manner different from a person who believes thonself to be observed.
Ingo stays put.
DEFEATED, I RETURN to my work on Enchantment, but with little enthusiasm. Certainly there is important, essential work to be done here. It is likely that Ingo’s film is rubbish, not because he’s African American, but rather because most everything everyone does is. Rubbish is the rule, genius the exception, my father always said. Still, it might’ve offered a window into Ingo’s struggles as an African American. I can imagine his little film explores issues of racism in the way Micheaux did in Within Our Gates, but with considerably less skill. The film would most likely be a curio of some sort (maybe to be posted on Poems and Curios!). One does not discover buried geniuses willy-nilly. If Ingo is unknown, there is certainly a very good reason. There are cases, such as my own, in which the reasons are not valid and come down to simple bad luck and possible conspiracies against me because I have consistently spoken truth to power, and because the cabal of Jew—
My phone rings. It is a number both unfamiliar and local. I do not know anyone in town except the small-headed curator at the film society, the building manager, and—
“This is Ingo Cutbirth.”
“Ingo!”
“From across the hall.”
“Yes!”
“I’m your neighbor.”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“I saw your film,” he says.
This takes me aback. No one has seen my film.
“Gravity in Essence?” I ask, needing to be certain.
“I believe the critics to be wrong,” he says. “The film is not, as they have written, incompetent, pretentious, unrelatable, sophomoric, unbearable, precious, completely unrelatable—”
“You said unrelatable already.”
“I said unrelatable the first time, not completely unrelatable. Those are from different reviews. And it is neither. I was profoundly moved by the plight of the protagonist, B. Rosenstock Rosenzweig, as he, like his personal heroine, Bisadora Runcan, struggles to make one authentic gesture, albeit not in the world of dance, but in the realm of ideas.”
“The critics were unkind,” I say. “Thank you.”
“I, too, am a filmmaker,” he says.
“Yes. I know!”
“And I was hoping,” he continues, “perhaps you might be willing to assess my first effort. No one has seen it.”
“Thank you! Yes!”
“I will not share my reasons with you, but I do have them.”
“I understand.”
“Perhaps those reasons will become evident to you at some point in your life.”
“OK.”
“That I cannot and will not say,” he says.
“Time will tell,” I agree.
“I can tell you this: No man is one thing. Only a fool believes that. And a fool is also not only one thing, either.”
“That makes a lot of—”
“For sometimes a fool can be the wisest of men. ‘If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.’ Carl Jung said that. There’s a great deal of truth in that sentiment. And of course Jung was such a great influence on my work, indeed on the whole of the twentieth century, what with his introduction of the notion of the collective unconscience.”
“Unconscious,” I correct.
“What now?” he says.
“Collective unconscious,” I say.
“That’s what I said,” he says.
But it isn’t.
No matter. This Ingo Cutbirth is full of surprises. Now he sounds almost like me. How many times have I cited Jung on exactly this point as it pertains to my own life? My friend Ocky does a terribly mean (but playful!) impression of me reciting that very line (correctly!), and I must say Ingo almost sounds like Ocky now. Is Ingo imitating me? Is he imitating Ocky? Or is he a multifaceted individual with interests similar to my own? I am a horrible racist! No matter! I am going to see his movie!
I SIT ON a hardback wooden chair in the darkened apartment aface the portable tripodded movie screen, while behind me, Ingo threads the projector. The comforting, familiar chatter of the film-machine interface begins, and without titles or other fanfare, so begins Ingo’s film. It is black and white (the significance of this particular detail has not yet been revealed to me!) and ancient, a charmingly naïve stop-motion animation. A pause here to explain the history of the form. Stop-motion, sometimes called stop-movement or incremental step prop animation or object animation or three-dimensional animation or articulated prop animation or (colloquially and inaccurately!) Claymation, is nearly as old as the motion picture itself. The earliest example: Heinrich Telemucher’s 1891 short feature Ich Habe Keine Augapfel, in which two eyeballs drop from a man’s face and roll around for a long while on the floor. The film is important for two reasons other than its significance to the timetable of the history of animation. Number one, it is the first film in which someone’s eyeballs fall out. And secondly, this device became a staple of both Romanian silent films and early Japanese talkies. Whereas Romanian cinema used the device as a metaphor for the 1918 union of Romania with Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, the Japanese used it for straightforward comic purposes, often having the newly eyeless character exclaim, “Now I can see the way two balls on the ground see!” or “I look much taller from down here!” It eventually became so commonplace in Japanese cinema that one Japanese film critic quipped pithily, “All those eyeballs falling out is enough to make one wish one’s own eyeballs would fall out so one would no longer have to watch even one more movie in which someone’s eyeballs fall out.” Granted, it is pithier in Japanese, in which the entire sentiment is conveyed in kanji with just one character.
A long, jagged scratch, screen right on black leader, is my introduction to Ingo’s oeuvre. The line skips about merrily, then disappears, then reappears. It transforms into a kind of Morse code of dots and dashes, and then it is gone forever, replaced by the China Girl.
Ah, the famous, beautiful China Girl of cinema, to whose colorful countenance everything to follow is calibrated—she is both the watcher and the watched, both the seen and the unseen. It is from this self-contained, placid, Mona Lisa–smiling beauty that Momus springs, the mocker, the malevolent god of comedy, the presently defanged agent of humiliation, monstrous laugher from beyond the fifth wall, unseeable but ever felt, sister to Oizys, goddess of misery, who waits to envelop us in her viscous stew, and out of this the film begins in earnest: a birth, silent of course, the death-rattle chatter of sprockets, shutter spinning like that madman in Washington Square, the inevitable, relentless background noise of this clockwork universe to which we have