Screen Tests

by Kate Zambreno

  Bette Davis Horror Film

  I hadn’t seen T. in many years, so I was surprised when she wrote me that she was visiting the city and asked if we could meet for a drink. I didn’t want to say no, but I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it. We had met working at the bookstore together in London a decade earlier, and I had dedicated my first novel to her, mostly because she was one of the only ones who read my writing, having kept in touch as a pen pal over the years. I think when I became a published author the shift caused a strain between us. She was partially the inspiration for the doppelgänger friend in one of my novels. I borrowed some of her mannerisms for the character, especially the way that she would launch into monologues describing the plots of entire films. T.’s cinephilia was partial to art horror, like Alejandro Jodorowsky and Takashi Miike. She always had a love of the bodily and weird. Her mother was a doctor, and she told me how she remembered playing with bones from a human skeleton kept in a closet as a child. Perhaps it wasn’t a surprise then that since we knew each other, T. had gone to school back home in Australia to become a nurse. She seemed almost embarrassed that that’s what she did now, working as a geriatric nurse, emptying bedpans. I think she may have wanted to be a writer, or a filmmaker, or to work somehow in film, but that never happened. While she was in the city, she told me, she was seeing a festival of Bette Davis horror films. She began telling me about the one where Bette Davis plays identical twins, one kills the other, and then has to be tried for murdering her husband, a crime that her twin, who she killed, had committed. I hadn’t seen it; the only Bette Davis horror film I had seen was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which is the first of what Renata Adler called the “Terrifying Older Actress Filicidal Mummy genre,” otherwise known, Wikipedia says, as psycho-biddy, or Grande Dame Guignol films. So few of the star system actresses resisted that final chapter in which they starred in horror films playing grotesques of their former selves. Vivien Leigh wouldn’t do it. Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Crawford, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis did. Bizarre, looking it up, that Bette Davis was only fifty-four and Joan Crawford fifty-six at the time they made What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. Isn’t it?

  Cinephile

  She was obsessed with literature and film but couldn’t seem to find a way to make a life out of it. For a while she worked as a travel agent to a London-based private military contractor during the Iraq War. Like the kind that operates black sites? I asked her. She had no idea and didn’t seem concerned. It paid a salary and good benefits and she seemed comfortable. I suggested perhaps she go to school to become a film archivist, or to think about working for a film festival, but she either wasn’t interested or didn’t see that as being possible. Perhaps she always wanted security, although she didn’t own her own place or buy expensive clothes. She spent all of her money on traveling to see films at international film festivals, and on DVDs and books. She also asked me to make her a list of books she should read. She read everything I suggested, like all the Dalkey Archive Press books, even though those were expensive to get abroad. When we saw each other, after all these years had passed, she only wanted to talk about what books I had read and what films I had seen. I asked her if she had seen Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, which was a film I thought about all the time. The cinephile in the film is such a fan of the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf that he impersonates him when he meets a somewhat wealthy family, which he then enlists to make a film, until he is ultimately tried for fraud. This was based on real-life events that happened in the late ’80s in Tehran. When the filmmaker Kiarostami heard about the trial, he immediately began work on a documentary about the impersonating cinephile, and received permission to film his trial, and also got the cinephile/impersonator and the family to agree to play themselves and reenact the events. At the end of the film when the impersonator meets the real-life Makhmalbaf, they ride together on a motorcycle through the traffic of Tehran, with Kiarostami’s film crew attempting to follow behind. There was something about this film that encapsulated for me this longing to be near art, that the impersonator and the family all feel, to be near the making of it, but how shut out they felt from the possibility that they could live the life of an artist. I thought about this film when talking to the cinephile. Had she watched it? Of course she had.

  Patty Hearst Wins the Westminster Dog Show

  Such nice movement in the flowing coat of Rocket the Shih Tzu, the winning top toy dog, as she walks for the judges in the green-carpeted ring at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, held annually at Madison Square Garden. Two years later Patty Hearst’s French bulldogs (her usual breed) also won top prizes. The media made much of the famous image of the newspaper heiress as Tania, posed for a Symbionese Liberation Army photograph, wearing a beret and brandishing a gun, having been kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment when she was nineteen. When I first moved to this city I tried to write a Kathy Acker–like riff for a Rotterdam-based art journal about the grainy black-and-white surveillance footage of Tania holding up Hibernia Bank, about the split images of Patty and Tania, plagiarizing lines from her ghostwritten memoir, and collaging it with the diary entry of the character of Patty in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, but my attempt wasn’t very good. I think it was too obvious. There was nothing that made me happier than various plays on the headline “Patty Hearst Wins the Westminster Dog Show.” It combines my two favorite things—small dogs and lives post-fame. “‘People move on,’ she said, smiling at Rocket.” Patty Hearst has grown-up daughters and grandchildren now. She is in her sixties. Dogs are her present-tense now. I place the photograph of Rocket with her hair held up in that purple bow, that little upturned face, next to the AP photograph of Patty Hearst with her hair held back, wearing a prim dress, being led from a federal building in handcuffs, and there is something there, in both of their expressions. I guess it’s true what they say.

  Dogs in Film

  I

  The little Italian greyhound that is always held in L’Avventura.

  II

  That moment in A Single Man when Colin Firth smells the head of the smooth fox terrier, remembering the smell of his own dogs, when they were still alive.

  III

  The eleven-second cameo in The Birds when Tippi Hedren, in blonde halo, stands in front of Davidson’s Pet Shop, and turns around to enter as Alfred Hitchcock exits quickly with his two Sealyham terriers Geoffrey and Stanley (Sarah stayed home). Hitchcock gave Tallulah Bankhead a Sealyham as a gift for staying to film Lifeboat despite the harsh conditions of the shoot, being soaked constantly in water, contracting two cases of pneumonia. She named the dog Hitchcock.

  Dogs in Video

  The way Joan Jonas uses her three dogs as a form of inspired accident, as they run into the frame or nudge her to play ball, in her video works. She drew her dogs’ heads over and over. Like a sickness, she has said. In her 2014 video Beautiful Dog she attached a GoPro camera to her poodle Ozu’s collar so we could see the world upside down through his back legs.

  La Chambre

  The poet and I teach similar material in our writing seminars at the college, although hers is bracketed as poetry and mine as nonfiction. We seem to be interested in the same artists at the same time. I don’t think she likes this, the poet, although it doesn’t bother me. There was that time we were both writing about Sarah Charlesworth’s Stills series. And now I see on her syllabus that she is teaching Chantal Akerman’s La Chambre (1972). I am teaching it as well. I like thinking about how slow Akerman’s works are, how they are about time and endurance and how this can connect to writing, I say to the poet. Yes, that’s what I’m thinking about as well, she says. It makes sense we are both thinking about Akerman, as she had just died the year before. Writing this, I rewatch La Chambre on YouTube. This is the first film that Akerman made when she came to New York in the 1970s. The film is ten minutes and twenty-five seconds, a moving still around a small apartment. The slow rotation of a red-back chair, a table with a breakfast scene, like a Vermeer still life,
oranges, apples, cups of coffee, coffeepot, croissant, a pack of smokes, the morning light of the window, the kettle on the stove, the bureau, the bedside table with more fruit, the young director lying in a rumpled bed, more chairs, a desk, a sink, a door, and again, as time moves throughout the day, various positions of Akerman in bed, sitting up, etc. When Barbara Loden saw Warhol’s ’60s films, like Sleep, which is of his lover John Giorno sleeping, or Empire, or I think it was Chelsea Girls, she said that she realized that a film could be boring. How Warhol purposefully slowed down the view of the Empire State Building in Empire to eight hours and five minutes. That film is an act of duration, of us watching time passing. I remember sitting through all three hours and forty-five minutes of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, at the movie theater in Chicago, and again in London. As I spoke to the poet, I was sitting on a couch in my small temporary office they gave me for the semester, the office of a poet laureate on sabbatical. I was in my third trimester of pregnancy. How slow and fast time passed then and now. All day I stayed there, on that couch, meeting students, my feet up. I still remember—the bookshelves of that office, the large Rilke section, the many boxes on the floor, the empty laundry detergent containers under the desk, that phone that never worked, that printer that never worked, the fan.

  Gertrude Stein, about 3 PM on a Saturday

  (after Anne Carson)

  I will come with you to the party, I said, if I can be someone other than my name. If I can be a person who is not my name, then I will come with you to the party.

  New York

  “Who does your foreign rights?” asked the philosopher, when I tried to speak to him about Wittgenstein.

  Plagiarism

  For a long time I worked on an essay about a fairly obscure American film made in the seventies by an actress, the only film she directed, that she starred in herself, an essay that I published in a small journal and thought perhaps I would turn into a book. For a couple of years it was all I worked on, slowly, as slow as the film itself. After the essay came out in the journal, I discovered a book in French that was about this same film and actress-director. It was written at approximately the same time as I had written my essay. This book won a significant literary prize in France and loving, critical attention for its English translation. I’m not saying it was the exact same text—her small, lyric monograph and my novella-length essay. For one, her book was more conceptually focused, while my essay drifted too much and was too much about me. Still, the similarities were uncanny. Had I unintentionally plagiarized her, or had she unintentionally plagiarized me? The whole situation reminded me of that anecdote of Salvador Dalí throwing a fit when in the audience for the screening of Joseph Cornell’s 1936 film Rose Hobart, which intercut the actress Rose Hobart’s scenes in East of Borneo with shots from a documentary about an eclipse, projected through blue glass and scored by a record of Nestor Amaral’s Holiday in Brazil that Cornell found in a junk shop. Knocking over the projector, Dalí accused Cornell of stealing the idea from his dreams. In a way, what the French writer and I were both doing was like Cornell’s film—an homage to our actress, slowed down to the speed of a silent film. Still I see the book in bookstores, the cover with an illustrated still of the actress-director’s face, and I feel that it is . . . not quite mocking me, you understand, but reminding me of something.

  Dream

  I had a dream about M. last night. We saw each other in a large crowd. Then, the crowd thinned, and I became aware that M. was going to perform a couples dance with a man whose face I never saw and whose body I was even less aware of. It wasn’t a competition but a performance. Her dancing partner flew her in the air. At some point she stood on top of a horse. It was not a surprise to me how good she was. M. is good at everything, I remember thinking in my dream. Afterwards, we found each other in the crowd, and were happy to see each other. You could really be a dancer, I said to her then. She was humble, as M. usually is. She was never good enough to go pro, she said, so she just does it for fun. I woke up in a panic, realizing I was expected to now be a professional writer. And I wasn’t good enough. Or, I explained to M. over email, it wasn’t what I wanted. If I could only write throughout my entire life with the electricity of the amateur.

  Introductions to B. Ingrid Olson

  BODY PARSED, THREE ROOMS

  To write an introduction is to double oneself. Is to fold one’s thoughts into another. To fold one’s body into another body. To fold one’s text into another text. What is my body and what is your body. What is my text and what is your text. What is my space and what is your space. We have to remove our limbs in order to fit inside this book. How to write an introduction for a book that will be destroyed after a certain period of time. Only those who are in the dark room can read it. Is this utopian, I wonder. I stay inside a dark room and write. Time has a different insistency now.

  I read Elizabeth Grosz’s Architecture from the Outside. I copy half of it down in my notebook, and then can’t read my handwriting. From her introduction: “One cannot be outside everything, always outside: to be outside something is always to be inside something else.” I like thinking about this but don’t really know what this means. I write this out on a pad of paper; my hand hurts. I am in the room reading. I am on the couch. I type this out on my computer, and my laptop becomes part of my body. I am inside this book; I am inside this room; I am inside this body; I am outside this book; I am outside this room; I am outside this body. In my notebook I write this down again, to try to understand it: “One cannot be outside everything, always outside: to be outside something is always to be inside something else.”

  I ask the man in the room with me what I should write about. I ask, Do you remember when I spoke about this book, the one that had open windows and doors? Does it have open windows or doors, or does it have no windows or doors? I ask, Do you remember when I was inside of it, and I could not go outside of it, the book became my body, or was my body always a book? While waiting to write my notes on this book, I drink a green smoothie that he made for me. I name a future and imaginary child. I become the couch, scattered with books and notebooks. I look at boots online for my feet. I write three emails. I look at a photograph on my phone of a pregnant body. I google “Why does my baby have red cheeks?” I receive a package in the mail. I write this introduction while very full, and crouched over a pillow on the couch, and in another position, my legs in the air. I write this introduction while wearing leggings and an open robe, my breasts accessible. I write this introduction while wearing the same white set of overalls with coffee stains for four days. My body is a sentence. These gestures are ellipses.

  Time has passed. It’s been years. I have been asked to add a note to the second edition. My feelings about the book remain the same.

  FOREHEAD AND BRAIN

  I realized I was extremely miserable when I wrote the previous introduction. Now I am extremely happy. Or perhaps I was happy the entire time. I read a paragraph and then have to rest. I lie down on the sofa. I lay the book down. I lay myself down because I am now the book. I write a sentence and then have to check my email. After I write I am hollowed out. Do I even have a brain. I put the book up to my forehead and lay it on my brain. I put the book on my crotch and take a photograph. I wonder whether the book is a container, and what it is a container for. Perhaps it is a container for thoughts. Perhaps it is a container for language. Perhaps it is a container for memory. It is something like a brain. Is the mind a room. I spend time looking at images of the illustrations of the brain from Vesalius’s The Fabric of the Human Body. I want to write about the Dark Room of This Book, furnished with a stretched cloth. A frame with cloth stretched over it is a painting. A frame with cloth stretched over it is a body. A frame with a cloth stretched over it is a window or a table. The body is a house. Vesalius was one of the first to dissect human beings in a surgical theater, not just animals as before, because of religion. He dissected the brains of convicts, mo
st likely. He thought there was just fluid in the ventricles, not the soul like everyone else. Medical illustrations want to make the body an open window so we can see the structures within. What is a skull but a vitrine for the brain. What occupies the theater of the forehead is the front matter, the dura, the folds. Now we know something of what the cerebral cortex stores, in future mappings of the frontal lobes: movement, speech, memory, intelligence. I look at an illustration of Vesalius’s horizontal dissection of the brain. The strange illustration of the man with the beard and nose, his head hollowed, like he is awake or surprised.