Flicker, p.34
Flicker, page 34
At the current rate of accelerating perceptual shrinkage, Julien predicted that the adolescent generation of the year 2000 would have no attention span whatever, hence no capacity to absorb any message longer than a single cinematic flash frame in duration. Even one-line gags and slapstick comedy would be incomprehensible to them. If, for example, they were to be shown a classic pie-throwing scene from the early silent films, they wouldn’t be able to recall, when the pie hit the face, where it had come from.
At that point, language, including the semiological structure of film, would have lost the last traces of grammatical coherence, which was based upon the ability to maintain minimal attentiveness from the beginning to the end of a simple declarative sentence—approximately three and a half seconds. When this fateful devolutionary moment arrived, no command issued even on the highest authority could be supplemented by ideological rationalization. Hypnosis would no longer be possible; propaganda of the simplest kind would cease to have any effect. The mystification of the masses would come to an end. There would be fewer and fewer who could take orders any longer; the revolution would be at hand, powered by a worldwide mass of teenage cretins whose means of communication would be limited to simian grunts, snorts, crude gestures, with only occasionally recognizable words. This final capitalist generation would be making its way in the world largely by means of smell, feel, and raw mammalian instinct. At that point, the revolutionary vanguard (which would apparently consist of movie critics and film students who had preserved enough brain power to understand the historical dialectic) would take charge of these humanoid primates and salvage whatever higher-order neurological material might still be functioning in the world. It would be touch and go until a new socialist state was built that could once again stretch the attention span and undertake what the Neurosemiologists called “the positive hypnotic reconstruction of consciousness.”
Saint-Cyr, slouching deep in his chair and watching me through wine-blurred eyes, was closely gauging my responses, which must have come across to him as a mixture of authentic fascination and barely contained incredulity. “This, you see, Professor Gates, is where Marx went wrong,” he explained when Julien had finished. “He was, after all, an economist, hence a man of abstractions. His great concept—the declining rate of profit—poof! it is a figment, a delusionary artifact. All this must now be reinterpreted. In Neurosemiological terms, it is the declining span of attention which is crucial. Materialism must become physicalism. The dialectic will have to be grounded in the nervous apparatus.”
“Yes, I see,” I answered, though I largely didn’t. Above all, I didn’t see how any of this connected with Castle. So I asked.
“But obviously, Professor Gates,” Saint-Cyr answered with a bored, now more than slightly drunken, air, “he more than all others elevates the dialectical fundament of film to the level of conscious manipulation.”
“You mean the flicker?”
“But of course. The opposition of light and darkness. The logic of history. The struggle of social forces. In the technology of film, class conflict becomes objective in the dominant expressive form of the industrial period. Castle knew this. He used this. He surrendered to it. Historically, this was the first step in liberating film from the imprisonment of art.”
There was an obvious point that needed to be addressed. “But is there any evidence that Castle was a Marxist?” I asked.
Saint-Cyr threw the question out of court. “This is of no consequence. Technology precedes ideology. We do not speak here of subjective preferences. In our view, Castle was an apolitical aesthetic technician, that is all. The essential point is that he grasped the autonomy of the medium. This we can extract from his work. The rest … it is so much historical detritus.”
“Do you know anything about Castle’s subjective preferences?” I asked. “If he wasn’t a Marxist, what was he?”
With a dismissive sneer, Saint-Cyr overrode the query. “Like most entertainers, he was prepared to be a bourgeois lackey. He produced for the market. The man himself is without revolutionary significance.”
“But you do believe Castle’s techniques can be used for Marxist purposes—if a filmmaker wished to do that?”
“For Marxist purposes and only for Marxist purposes. This is what the technology dictates. The more essentially filmic a work becomes, the more it becomes the servant of the historical dialectic. Personally, Castle might not have approved; but this is again of no consequence. We deal here with social forces that transcend personal intentions. Castle was prepared to accept the destiny of film for what it is. That is all that matters; it is our only interest in him.”
“Do you have any idea how Castle learned what he knew about film?” I asked.
“This has been a matter of passing curiosity with us. There may be a connection between Castle and Etienne Lefebvre. Lefebvre participated in setting up the German UFA. Possibly there was some contact at that point.”
“You don’t know anything about his connection with a group of orphans?”
Saint-Cyr stared back blankly. “Orphans? No. Biography has no role to play in Neurosemiology. In fact, the less we know of the technician’s personal history, the better.”
“You mentioned Lefebvre just now. And I believe you have an interest in LePrince. Have you studied their work?”
Saint-Cyr nodded toward his other student, whom he introduced as Alain. Alain’s special field was the prehistory of cinema technology. “There is of course no work to study in the narrow aesthetic sense,” he informed me. “Lefebvre and LePrince were not filmmakers; they were inventors—like your Edison. Of interest here are the mechanisms they devised. The ’ardware.” He put the word in English.
Alain, I discovered, was in the process of reconstructing the early cameras, projectors, and film stock of these movie pioneers. Like most of Saint-Cyr’s students, he too seemed to have no interest in movies, but only in machines and optics and nervous reflexes. Alain went on to explain that some of the early technicians, like LePrince, had if only by accident unearthed the dialectical principles of motion pictures. “The machines were so primitive, the film content so negligible,” he observed, “that the inventors could not help but recognize the fundamental properties of the technology.”
Saint-Cyr broke in to clarify the point. “This is often the case in the growth of technology. Its true nature is more transparent in the initial stages, before a certain sophistication sets in and begins to rationalize the means of production. To take an obvious case: the exploitative nature of steam technology was more apparent in the early factory system than in later historical stages when, for example, the lunchroom was so generously provided alongside the assembly line. The more primitive the mechanism, the more naked is its social function.”
Alain resumed, observing that LePrince especially seemed to be aware of the communicative power of the flicker. For pioneers like him, it made no difference what they filmed and projected. Any trifling little vignette would do. A man doing somersaults, a horse performing tricks, the waves of the sea washing in. Such early demonstration pieces were, in Alain’s eyes, of far greater value than films like those of Griffith that distracted by telling stories. Fred Ott’s famous sneeze, as captured on film by Edison, was Alain’s ideal “movie,” the true culmination of the art. Beyond something like a sneeze, a pure, meaningless, totally uneventful event, the content of the work begins to obscure the basic action of the technology. If I understood Alain correctly, he seemed to be saying that movies were more truly movies before there were any movies!
“But, you see,” Saint-Cyr went on, “Castle understood that there must be content in order to arrest the attention of the masses. In Castle’s case, however—unlike such ignoramuses as Lumière or Griffith—content is expertly layered. The ‘flicker,’ as you call it, comes through with singular impact.”
“Layered” was one of Saint-Cyr’s technical terms. I’d come across it several times in his analysis of Castle. I gathered it meant the way the movie as a story connected with the movie as a ribbon of projected film running through the shutter. The story was the upper “layer”; the flicker was the lower “layer.” The trick was to join them into a kind of optical sandwich that let the stimulus of the projector penetrate the mind. Saint-Cyr was convinced that Castle had found some optimum means of doing this. Layering seemed to be as close as Saint-Cyr was willing to come to granting that movies had something to do with art. Castle was good at layering; Saint-Cyr admired him for that and was determined to find out how the trick had been turned. When he got into this phase of his theory, the technicalities soon proved too bewildering for me to follow. Yet I felt certain that Saint-Cyr’s layering was what Zip Lipsky had once called “compositing,” and had tried in vain to explain.
When Saint-Cyr finally gave me the chance to speak, I brought up the one other item that seemed most closely connected with his approach to Castle. I asked, “Have you ever heard of someone—a priest, I believe—named Rosenzweig?”
If the roof had caved in on us, it couldn’t have produced a greater shock. A flash of surprise lit up deep inside Saint-Cyr’s eyes, followed at once by an ice-cold stare. “You know this person?” he asked.
“Yes. Well, no. I’ve heard of him.”
“In the United States, you have heard of Rosenzweig?” I could sense the rising temper behind his words. I noticed the faces of the students go tense, including Jeanette’s. Back off, a voice inside me said.
“Just a passing remark or two. Clare met him in Paris at the Cinémathèque. It was many years ago. By now, he may be dead, for all I know. Really, I know next to nothing about him.”
“Yes? And why do you see fit to mention this person?” Saint-Cyr’s expression shifted from anger to deep suspicion.
“It’s simply that some of your work reminds me of his. Or rather, it reminds me of things I’ve heard said about his theories.”
Saint-Cyr’s voice was a cold explosion. “I referred to Rosenzweig just now as a ‘person.’ This was an error. Rosenzweig is not a person. He is a cartoon. A cartoon does not have theories, Professor Gates. A cartoon has, above its head, a small balloon in which little idiotic words are written. One reads these words and laughs. You believe this has some relationship to me?”
“Oh no, not at all,” I rushed to assure him. “Not in the least. I’m sure whatever resemblance there may be is a matter of pure coincidence. As I understand it, Rosenzweig also believes the content of films is unimportant. I don’t really understand how he comes to that conclusion. In any case, his orientation seems to be theological.”
Saint-Cyr spat out the word in a spasm of contempt. “Theological!” I realized I wasn’t doing a very good job of placating him. His fury was now just barely controlled. “You do not know that this maniac has made an attempt on my life?”
That jarred me. “No, I didn’t know that. I know he tried to shoot Henri Langlois.”
“Yes. And myself. This was not reported in the United States?”
“Not that I recall.”
He turned to his students with an exasperated gesture that said “Didn’t I tell you?” Then to me: “Of course the capitalist press would not report such matters. And what instead? The measurements of Miss America? The baseball? The price of hot dogs? In the land of the Robber Barons, who would be interested in knowing that the leader of the Neurosemiological movement came within an inch of losing his life? But apparently Rosenzweig, the assassin, is the talk of the town.”
“No, please,” I protested, “don’t misunderstand. Rosenzweig is completely unknown, I assure you. My God, the man’s psychopathic. Why wasn’t he put away after he tried to shoot Langlois?”
“Our bourgeois law deals very leniently with the mad. Especially when the maniac in question aims his weapon to the left. In this case, after his attack upon Langlois, our Jesuitical cineast was placed in a most comfortable asylum for rehabilitation. From this asylum he wanders away again and again. Where does he go? In search of me. And why? Because this medieval anachronism, this reactionary obscurantist, this decadent clerical scum has been encouraged to believe there is some similarity of thought between us.” A bitter sneer. “So he begins to dog my steps. Wherever I teach, wherever I speak, always he is in my audience. Even if I cannot see him, I can smell him. The man reeks. I try to have him intercepted at the door and turned away. Nevertheless, he insists he is my ally, my teacher! This is intolerable. I notify the authorities, who put him back in the booby hatch. And again he walks away. This time he is convinced I have stolen his so-called theories. And—boom, boom. Fortunately for me, as for Langlois, the cur is cross-eyed.”
“Then he’s still alive?”
“Let us hope not. You will understand if I have not concerned myself with the fate of le père Rosenzweig.”
“Yes of course. Do forgive me for bringing the subject up.”
I could tell I wasn’t forgiven. Instead, I was dismissed. “And now, Professor Gates, I believe our soirée is at an end. Perhaps you have learned something of value from our little tutorial.”
“A great deal,” I assured him. But his expression made it clear he felt he had squandered an evening of his precious time.
“Do you understand all that—about the cameras and projectors?” I asked Jeanette the next afternoon when we met for coffee.
“A little,” she said. “The subject is very technical.” She was by now willing to unbend with me and be more candid. “Victor does not expect all his students to master these technicalities. I, for example, have much more interest in the aesthetic superstructure of the technology.”
“Aesthetic superstructure. You mean what the movie is about … the story, for example?”
“Yes. Victor feels this is perhaps more appropriate to the feminine mentality. It is less analytical.”
“Oh? Well, let me tell you, I care a great deal for what movies are about. I really can’t believe it’s of no importance what the characters do and say. I mean—that’s what people go to the movies for, isn’t it?”
“You are very American,” she observed playfully. But I gathered she liked me for being very American.
“About this man Rosenzweig,” I went on. Did she know if he was still alive and where he might be? She did. After he’d taken a shot at Saint-Cyr—about six years before—there had been a trial. The magistrate had ordered him removed from Paris to a mental institution in Lyons. Unless he’d wandered off again, he must still be there.
We spent one more night together, a gentle, loving night. Somewhere in the languid middle of it, Jeanette confessed that she would rather be a movie star than anything else in the world. She made the admission under her breath, like a child confessing a naughty deed. “You must never tell Victor I said this.”
Her secret was surely safe with me. I wasn’t likely to be telling Victor very much of anything in the foreseeable future. “Shall I tell you something?” I asked, trading confidence for confidence. “I’d give anything to be Jean-Paul Belmondo for just one day.”
That brought her cuddling closer in my arms. “Not Bogie?” she asked. “You would not prefer to be Bogie?”
“Well, sure. Bogie. But first of all Belmondo.”
“And I,” she returned. “Simone Signoret. Or Jeanne Moreau.”
“And of course there’s Marlon Brando.”
“And Barbara Stanwyck.”
“And …”
And so on, long into the night.
15 ROSENZWEIG
Before I scheduled the trip to Lyons, I made inquiries with the French police. In which asylum had Victor Saint-Cyr’s assailant been placed? And if I went there, would I be able to see him? I had to maneuver my way through several hours of French bureaucratic congestion before I found out what I wanted to know. The answer to the first question was Saint Hilaire Hospice. Despite the religious name, it was part of the state system of mental institutions, in this case a “home” for the criminally insane. The answer to the second question was: yes, there were visiting hours three times each week. I phoned ahead to reserve an hour with Karl-Heinz Rosenzweig (as I learned his name to be). Sooner or later my pursuit of Max Castle was bound to lead me into the world of the mad. The time had apparently arrived.
I might easily have spent my entire fellowship year with Saint-Cyr, seated at the master’s feet absorbing the higher mysteries of Neurosemiology. Even if I’d cared to do that, my gaffe about Rosenzweig had queered my chances. Under the best of circumstances, Saint-Cyr would have had little enough time to spare for the bumpkin from California; now that I’d witlessly associated myself with his insane, would-be assassin, I might have had to spend weeks begging my way back into favor. And what would that finally gain me? There wasn’t much more I could learn from him without first following the route his students took, a long detour through physiology, mathematics, computer science … a hopeless prospect for me. Every fiber of my being rose up in opposition to Saint-Cyr and his clanking, mechanistic system. My love affair with the movies had begun with sexy women and western heroes, high adventure and great romance. I didn’t want to get “beyond” such things; I didn’t really believe anyone could. If Saint-Cyr was right about movies, then I might as well believe that poetry was created by pencils, not by poets.
At the same time, I had to grant that the man was on to something where Castle’s films were concerned. Saint-Cyr had burrowed farther into their technical depths than I had. And he’d found things in those depths: images and motifs of undeniable power, all there even in the seemingly worthless scraps of film he was working with. I sensed too that Saint-Cyr was right in believing that this repertory of subliminal tricks, fascinating as it might be, really served to mask Castle’s darker intentions. But I was just as sure that he was dead wrong in taking those intentions to be political. Saint-Cyr talked a glib case for his interpretations, but I knew with all the conviction in me that what I felt when I opened myself to Castle had nothing to do with politics. On the contrary. If I trusted my intuition, it told me that the darkness that lay at the heart of Castle’s work reached out to annihilate all loyalties, the political as well as the personal. If there was a message hidden in Castle’s art, I was certain it came echoing up from some historical stratum far older than anything accounted for in Saint-Cyr’s philosophy. Since I’d first seen the Judas, I was haunted by qualities I sensed there that might be called primitive, tribal, even elemental. The categories in which he worked—sin, guilt, sacrilege—were things our age would have to rediscover in his films. Perhaps that was why I was risking a visit to Rosenzweig. I had reason to believe that, mad as he might be, he had the right fix on Castle.
