by Jonathan Coe
Robert gave a short, mirthless laugh, and snapped the exercise book shut with surprising alacrity. He didn’t want Terry – or anybody else – to know that he had started writing a poem about Sarah.
‘Mind if we interrupt your labours?’ Terry asked.
‘We?’
‘Yes, I’m supposed to be meeting some people.’
‘No, that’s all right. Sit down. I’ve got some news for you, anyway. I think I may have solved your accommodation problem.’ Then he told him about Sarah’s newly vacant room.
Terry had recently decided to leave his campus hall of residence, because of a noisy next-door neighbour who was preventing him from getting the necessary fourteen hours’ sleep a day. He liked the idea of coming to live at Ashdown, and the arrangement was already settled by the time his friends joined them at the table. They were both film students, one called Luke, the other Cheryl; they wore the traditional film department uniform of black Oxfam cast-offs, and, like Terry, looked sorely in need of a few square meals and a long holiday in the sun.
‘What’s this book, then?’ asked Luke, picking up The House of Sleep.
Robert winced to see him handling it. He felt as though a holy relic were being defiled.
‘It’s just something I found on the shelf,’ he said. He tried to take the book back, but Luke was hanging on to it.
‘So who’s Frank King, then?’ He looked at one of the front pages, and ran his eye down the list of other novels by the same author. ‘It says here that one of his books was made into a film.’
‘That’s right,’ said Terry. ‘The Ghoul, it was called. Filmed in 1932, with Boris Karloff and Cedric Hardwicke.’
‘The Ghoul? I never heard of it.’
‘Ah!’ Terry beamed with triumph. ‘That’s because all the prints have gone missing. In England and America, anyway.’
Robert discreetly replaced the book on the shelf.
‘So how do you know about it?’ asked Luke.
‘Well, I’ve been reading this piece about lost films. And in fact –’ Terry paused, looking pleased with himself ‘– I’ve developed a theory about them. Do you want to hear it?’
‘Great,’ said Cheryl. ‘Another of your theories.’ She was smiling, though.
It seemed that Terry’s latest theory had been conceived that very morning, after a particularly tantalizing and elusive dream, something to do with apple blossom, and a blondehaired woman, a sunlit hillside and a broad-brimmed hat. It concerned lost films and lost dreams, and Robert, for one, was quite happy to listen and let it wash over him, if only to purge himself of the memory of his latest encounter with Sarah and Veronica.
‘I know it’s a cliché to say that films are like dreams – like a collective unconscious,’ Terry began, ‘but I was thinking that nobody’s ever really followed the idea through. There are different sorts of dreams, aren’t there? And so obviously there are horror movies, which are like nightmares, and then there are dirty movies like Deep Throat and Emmanuelle, which are like wet dreams.’ He sipped from his mug of treacly hot chocolate, warming to his subject. ‘Then there are remakes, and stories which keep getting told again and again, and those are like recurring dreams. And there are consoling, visionary dreams, like Lost Horizon or The Wizard of Oz. But when a film gets lost, and it’s never been shown, and the print goes missing and nobody’s ever seen it, that’s the most beautiful kind of dream of all. Because that’s the kind of dream that might just have been the best one you’ve ever had in your life, only it slips from your mind just as you’re waking up, and a few seconds later you can’t remember a thing about it.’
‘Does that ever happen, though?’ Robert asked. ‘I mean, surely if someone’s gone to all the trouble and expense of making a film, then they’re not just going to lock it away in a vault and never show it to anyone.’
For the benefit of this naïf, the movie experts ran through an inventory of all the lost movies they could think of: the eight-hour version of Greed, Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown who works in the Nazi concentration camps, the missing reels of The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles’s legendary The Other Side of the Wind, The Blockhouse – a Second World War drama starring Peter Sellers, shot entirely in a warren of underground bunkers beneath the island of Guernsey – the missing gas chamber scene from Double Indemnity, the four deleted sequences from The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes…
‘But Wilder’s such a middlebrow talent, anyway,’ said Terry. ‘Who would ever go to the trouble of restoring one of his films?’
‘He’s my favourite director, actually,’ said Luke. ‘Who’s yours?’
This, of course, was a favourite game. Terry puckered his lips. ‘I don’t think I have one,’ he said. ‘Or at least, I’m sure that he’s out there, somewhere, but I just haven’t found him yet.’
‘Him?’ said Cheryl.
‘It would have to be someone of… uncompromising integrity. Someone who writes as well as directs. Film for me is fundamentally the expression of one artist’s personal vision.’
If the others thought that he was being pretentious, they held their tongues.
‘I want to write myself, eventually. And direct. I’m writing a script at the moment, in fact.’
Robert sipped his stone-cold coffee, Cheryl started unwrapping a sugar cube and Luke examined his nails.
‘I’ll tell you about it, shall I? It’s the life story of this man, you see, and he’s going to be played by the same actor all the way through and it’s going to be shot over a period of fifty years. You’ll see him age from a young boy to an old man in the space of one and a half hours. Brutal jump cuts from his face at the age of twenty, full of youthful enthusiasm, to his face at the age of seventy, lined with bitterness and disillusionment. A vertiginous, fast-forward chronicle of hope withering into despair.’
There was a short pause. Then Luke said: ‘Rather difficult to insure, I would have thought,’ and got up to pay the bill.
∗
Christmas came and went, the spring term began, and within a few weeks Terry decided that he had at last discovered his favourite director. In the small hours of one Saturday morning, BB Cz screened a subtitled print of Il Costo della Pesca (Dearly Have We Paid for the Mullet), Salvatore Ortese’s 1947 neorealist drama of two rival families in the small fishing village of Trapani. Although he was distantly familiar with the name of this little-known Italian film-maker, Terry had never seen any of his work before; and its impact was immediate, revelatory, like a thunderclap. He watched it alone, in the darkness of Ashdown’s television room, after drinking half a bottle of red wine: before the film started his senses were muddled and he felt ready for bed, but within five minutes he was wide awake again, and rushed upstairs to his bedroom in order to retrieve a notebook in which to record his responses. He was transfixed by the extreme close-ups of the ancient, weathered old fishermen’s faces (‘face as landscape’, he wrote in the book), by the stark black and white photography of the austere Sicilian coastline (‘landscape as character’, he added) and by the primal simplicity of the drama and its rigorous concentration on the painful economics of the characters’ lives (‘vigorous concatenation pinful ergonomics’, he wrote, having finished off the rest of the bottle). It seemed to Terry that here at last was a director who, by combining an unaffected sympathy for the lives of ordinary people with a plain but finely-judged cinematic vocabulary, represented everything he thought the medium should aspire towards.
Later in the afternoon that same Saturday, he arrived at the university library just before it was about to close and photocopied the entry for Ortese from the Cambridge Companion to Film:
ORTESE, SALVATORE (1913-75). Italian director, worked in editing and dubbing from the mid-thirties and was rumoured to have assisted ROSSELLINI (qv) on the screenplay of Luciano Serra, Pilota (1938). He directed numerous short documentaries during the war, and made his feature film début with Il Costo della Pesca (Dearly Have We Paid for the Mullet, 1947) which along wi
th Rossellini’s Roma, Città Aperta and De Sica’s Sciuscià (both qv) marked the first flowerings of neo-realism. His films of the 1950s, including Paese Senza Pietà (Land Without Pity, 1951) and the more upbeat Morte da Fame (Death from Starvation, 1955), show his continuing commitment to the movement which he felt had been betrayed by his fellow directors, particularly De Sica, the sentimentality of whose Umberto D (1952) he publicly reviled. As the Italian cinema of the 1960s fell under the sway of fashionable sex comedies and the gaudy excesses of Federico FELLINI (qv), the bleakness of Ortese’s view of economic and human relations merely intensified, and his one colour film for a major studio from this period, É la Vita! (Life’s Like That, 1964), had to be re-shot because its ending was considered unduly pessimistic. (The film concerns a loving mother who turns prostitute in order to pay for her schizophrenic son’s medical treatment. Finally she becomes housemaid to a wealthy Florentine couple, but in Ortese’s original version, just as she has almost raised enough money for her family to move out of their cramped and unsanitary apartment, she loses both her legs in a freak vacuum-cleaning accident.) Ortese’s last film has never been publicly shown. A reputedly horrific, remorseless indictment of the military establishment, and – in its director’s words – ‘a hymn to the degradation of the human spirit’, Sergente Cesso (Latrine Duty [US: The Army Stinks], 1972) failed to find a distributor and indeed has only ever been seen by a handful of people, including one Italian critic who is said to have left a screening after only ten minutes and told reporters that Ortese ‘should be put to sleep like a sick animal’. Unable to raise any more money for film projects, Ortese spent the last three years of his life as a virtual recluse in the Tuscan mountains, where he died of pneumonia in the winter of 1975.
And so there was a ‘lost’ Ortese film! Terry felt a sudden thrill as he read these last sentences. He knew at once that it would become his obsession to trace both the known and the unknown work of this director. On Monday morning he called in at his supervisor’s office and received her permission to make Ortese’s life and career the subject of his third-year dissertation.
Obsessions, of course, can never be shared. Over the next few weeks, whenever he tried to explain his feelings about these films, or arranged screenings for his friends in the projection rooms on campus, he came up against a solid barrier of boredom and incomprehension. It was on one such occasion, late in the spring term, that he had a minor quarrel with Robert over aesthetics.
‘Why don’t you ever like cheerful films?’ Robert asked him, as they left the film department and walked through the campus car park. ‘Why do you only like films that are miserable and depressing? Why aren’t your favourite films the same as everyone else’s – like Casablanca, or that one with James Stewart at Christmas?’
‘Because they’re not the work of real artists,’ said Terry. ‘And there’s no mystery about them, no enigma.’
‘Oh, but that’s so elitist. In fact you’re the ultimate elitist, aren’t you? Because you’re convinced that the only film worth seeing is one that nobody can ever see.’
It was true that although he had sent out more than twenty letters about Ortese to archives and resource centres all over the world, Terry had so far been unable to locate a single viewing print of his most elusive film. None the less, this had not stopped him working on a 5000-word essay entitled ‘Screening the Unscreenable: A Case Study of Audience Responses to Salvatore Ortese’s Latrine Duty’, which his supervisor had adored, and which he was now preparing to submit – with her encouragement – to a prestigious national film magazine called Frame.
‘And that’s another thing,’ said Robert. ‘I think it’s ridiculous that you’ve written an article about a film you haven’t even seen.’
‘But has anybody seen it? That’s exactly the point. Does it even exist?’
‘I think you’re going mad. I worry about you, you know. I worry for your mental health and your physical well-being.’
‘You should talk,’ said Terry. They had reached his car, and he searched his pockets for the keys. ‘You’re the one with the weird fixation.’ He realized this sounded harsh, and asked more kindly: ‘Robert, when are you going to get over her?’
‘Why should I want to do that?’
Terry sighed, and eased himself into the driver’s seat. ‘Are you not coming with me, then?’
‘No. She said she might be eating at Jonah’s. I think I’ll go and look for her there.’
‘It’ll end in tears,’ said Terry, starting the engine. ‘I’m warning you.’
Robert remembered something. ‘There was a guy looking for you this morning. A strange little guy. American accent.’
Terry grimaced. ‘Not Joe Kingsley?’
‘That’s the one. Said he had something important to ask you.’
‘I’m sure it can wait,’ said Terry, and drove off along the campus ring road at irresponsible speed, glancing into his mirror only once to see the figure of Robert, still standing in the car park, rooted, forlorn.
8
For many years now, Terry had not given a moment’s thought to Salvatore Ortese or his mythical ‘lost’ film. But when he left the Clinic on Tuesday morning and took the bus on to campus, he was astonished by the speed with which those memories came rushing back; astonished by the sharpness and immediacy with which he experienced, once again, those ancient pangs of hunger for forbidden knowledge. They began to steal over him as soon as he entered the library. Its doors slid open automatically with a noise like a seductive exhalation of breath (another instant reminder of his student days), and soon he found himself standing by the old familiar shelves: the rows upon rows of green-backed volumes he had once pored over so fanatically that he had almost learned them by heart: Positif, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, Cahiers du Cinéma. It was here, he remembered, that the search had begun, when he had trawled through every yearly index to these publications and followed up even the tiniest reference to Ortese and his films. How passionate he had been, in those days; how driven. In his interview with Dr Dudden, Terry had described it as a period of depression: but he realized now that this was wrong. Maybe he had been sleeping for almost fourteen hours a day, but at least he had had an objective then, a goal. When did all that energy become dissipated; when did he allow it to be swept away by randomness?
Terry brooded over this question as he succumbed to an illicit cup of coffee in the empty restaurant attached to the campus Arts Centre. He had been hoping for a nostalgic visit to Jonah’s, the old self-service cafeteria, but it seemed to have disappeared. There had been many changes to the university in the last twelve years: this restaurant itself was new, brand-new, shiny with mirrored surfaces and chrome furniture and the reflecting glass of a dozen colourful abstracts. The cinema next to it was new as well, and there was a new concert hall and theatre, called the Stephen Webb Centre: a detail which might have given Terry pause for thought, had he actually noticed it. But he was far too busy contemplating the mystery of his lost ideals; too busy trying to remember, among other things, the last piece of research he had done on Ortese. It must have been during his trip to Italy in November 1984. Terry had been to Milan, to write about the making of a film – although Frame had never used the article – and had then travelled down to Rome for a few days, where he talked his way into the Cinecittà archives by diligently courting the sweet and sexy brown-eyed receptionist whose job it was to keep the likes of Terry at bay. Finally she had granted him access to the stills library, and there, after spending more than a dozen hours knee-deep in transparencies and eight-by-ten black-and-whites, he had found (and yet he had forgotten this; how could he have forgotten it?) almost what he was looking for. He had found, at any rate, proof that the film existed; proof that it was more than the product of mere rumour and journalistic speculation. He had found a photograph.
One photograph. A poor memento, perhaps, of the film which to Terry’s fevered imagination had become the artistic equivalent of the Holy Grail: but all
the more precious for precisely that reason. And what had become of it? This was the incredible part: Terry could scarcely remember. He had brought it back from Italy with him, certainly, and must have stashed it away somewhere, but he had changed addresses at least six times since then, and had no idea whether the photograph would have survived all of these moves. The idea that it might be lost suddenly horrified him.
How could his attitude towards this priceless relic have become so cavalier? If Latrine Duty had run for two hours, at twenty-four frames per second, this meant that out of the 172,800 images which made up the film, he had obtained (stolen would be the more correct term) what was quite possibly the only surviving remnant. Today, for the first time in twelve years, the hugeness of this realization returned to him. He began to doubt whether he could wait until the end of his stay at the clinic before rushing back to London and searching for it, amongst the boxes and files full of junk that nowadays passed for furniture in his flat.
Terry ordered another cup of coffee, then found to his surprise that he couldn’t finish it. He thought that perhaps it was too bitter, and added some sugar, but this didn’t help. He noticed that his hands were starting to shake. He felt wide awake, but with a strange, nervy, artificial excitement that interfered with the more deep-seated restfulness he had felt settling upon him during the last few days. He decided, most unusually for him, that it was time for a walk.
He walked for most of the afternoon: into town, at first, in search of old haunts which he was not surprised to find long vanished. The Café Valladon was gone, replaced by a Christian bookshop. The Planetarium was gone, replaced by a Tourist Information Centre and a scrawny museum offering interactive local history. The library was still there, though, and so was The Half Moon, and so was The Crown Hotel where his parents had sometimes stayed, and so was the cinema which was currently showing, he noticed with a micro-flicker of professional interest, Toy Story, The Birdcage and Chalk and Cheese 4. There was still a faded air about the place, a mustiness like the faint odour of sad memories you find when opening a long-disused drawer. Very soon he began to feel thoroughly depressed. And so he set off along the cliff path, the route back towards Ashdown which he had always indolently disdained as a student, but which now beckoned irresistibly with its promise of vigorous exercise and a cleansing sea breeze. Terry calculated that if he made good time, he would arrive ten minutes early for his five o’clock appointment with Dr Dudden.