by Dana Spiotta
“It’s a very patriotic movie—from the settlers’ point of view, of course—and the interesting part is that Henry Fonda’s family is from that town, Fonda, his relatives were the European settlers who pushed the Five Nations out of there.” Meadow looked over at Carrie. Carrie laughed.
“Really? The same Fondas?” Carrie said. The road bypassed the old downtown, and now the pasture was replaced by a commercial strip that could have been on Route 3 in New Jersey or in the Valley in Los Angeles. A Super 8 motel. McDonalds, Friendly’s, Monro Muffler/Brake, Big Lots discount store, multiple car dealers. Carrie felt the dulling effect of the familiar commercial architecture.
“Are there enough people up here to even bother building these things?” Carrie said.
“I don’t get it either. This is the ugly arterial strip between Johnstown and Gloversville. But the downtowns are old and quite pretty, if deserted.”
Sure enough, Main Street in Gloversville was a series of intact turn-of-the-century storefronts largely empty, ornate cornices attached to limestone back buildings. There were big brick warehouses with large multipane windows, many panes missing and some of the windows covered in wood boards. “It is great that they haven’t torn down these empty warehouses.” The impressive village library was also built of limestone. “Look how grand some of these buildings are. It is shocking next to the rest of this place.”
“It takes money to tear things down. The preservation of poverty, they call it,” Meadow said. “So. Not only the same Fondas, but get this. In 1980, Jane Fonda came up here. On the anniversary of her great-great-great-grandfather’s death by Tory raiders, but also, apparently, to make amends for stealing all the Mohawk land. She may be helping some Mohawks who are trying to reestablish a community here.”
Carrie couldn’t stop herself from tilting her head and raising her eyebrows as she smiled to indicate a cartoonish level of skepticism. “Where did you hear that?” She was used to Meadow making things up, getting them slightly wrong, editing them or exaggerating them in the moment of the telling.
Meadow shrugged. “A Mohawk told me. He described it as a rumor.”
“I thought you said it was the Iroquois?”
“Carrie, come on. Mohawks are Iroquois. The Iroquois Confederacy, or the Five Nations, is made up of the Mohawk, the Seneca, the Oneida, the Onondaga, and the Cayuga.”
“Oh yeah. I guess I should know that.”
“I’ve been filming trains.”
“Trains?”
“All spring. Nothing but trains,” Meadow said. “Do you remember that movie Night Mail? We saw it in Jay Hosney’s class.”
They pulled up in front of a brick warehouse.
“Of course. That tedious documentary about Scottish mail being delivered.”
Meadow got out and Carrie followed, carrying her backpack and duffel of gear. Meadow went through the open exterior door and then unlocked an interior door that led to a stifling, dusty stairwell. After three flights, she pushed open a wood door with an opaque glass panel and a chain-hinged transom window above that. The studio space consisted of an open warehouse floor. The sun shone through the walls of tiny-paned windows, and the high-ceilinged, huge room was hot and airless.
“Not tedious,” Meadow said. “Night Mail devotedly follows the mail train as it speeds across the land and through the night.” Meadow had a slightly condescending habit of telling Carrie about movies even if she had seen them. As if Carrie needed them summarized and paraphrased to make sure she “got” it. As if Carrie watched things but had no relationship to them. But Carrie also understood that this was Meadow’s way of thinking. Meadow was building an idea about something, and she liked to think through talking. Once Carrie understood that, she didn’t feel condescended to. She instead felt a pleasing intimacy with Meadow and her great brain. Carrie knew how to be friends with Meadow.
“The train barely stops and we see all the automatic mechanisms to load and unload and sort the mail. It is a machine-age celebration of speed and technology.”
“I remember. There is a poem.”
“Right. An Auden poem, and music by Benjamin Britten. I have been thinking about it.”
“I can see that.”
“The poem and the music complicate the efficiency. Or counter it. Or maybe it is the long focus on only the train—anything looked at that closely becomes mysterious to us.” Meadow turned on a large fan. Some papers blew around, but it felt great on Carrie’s face.
“That’s better! Thank you.”
“It’s a meditation. Or it starts out celebrating and marveling at this unstoppable train. Trying to meet the power of it. But then—as if the filmmaker himself transformed during the night—the film becomes progressively breathless and dark. After all, that 1930s devotion to efficiency did lead to dark places.”
Carrie let the air cool her face, and then she walked around. “So you have been filming the trains as they come through?”
Meadow nodded. “I’ve shot a lot of footage while lying by the tracks as the train passes, filming at ground level. I’ve boarded the train in Amsterdam and stood on the joints between cars as they moved on the tracks. Filmed down through the spaces.”
“Have you climbed on top?”
“Not yet. But I would love that. I’m too scared, though.”
“I’m glad to hear that scares you.”
“I want to strap myself and my tripod onto the cowcatcher of a locomotive and film a phantom ride across the United States in real time. Just the POV of the locomotive eating track as the world unfurls around it. Sixty hours of pure one-shot cinema.”
“If only it were 1895,” Carrie said.
“If only,” Meadow said.
Carrie laughed. Meadow longed to be a barnstormer, a tightrope walker, an escape artist, an inventor. Or maybe she just liked the idea of film as a record of a filmmaker’s feat. The making of the film as the art, and the film itself as merely an artifact of that artistic act, not the art itself. Meadow wanted her inventiveness noticed, which Carrie considered a “showman” style: the dazzling concept that just points back to the filmmaker no matter where the camera is turned. Carrie would like to make a film of Meadow making films. See the girl strapped to a train!
“You want to watch some of it?” Meadow looked doubtful even as she suggested it.
“Sure.”
“Okay,” Meadow said. “Excellent.” But instead of making a move to one of the two projectors, Meadow walked over to a mini-fridge and pulled out two bottles of beer. She banged the bottle caps against the table edge: first one, then the other. She stood there and waited, holding a bottle out. Carrie walked to her and reached for the beer.
“Thanks.”
Meadow took a long swig and smiled. Her hair was cut short, and she looked lean and boyish in her jeans and sleeveless t-shirt. She seemed even more boyish when she pulled a cigarette out of the pack on the table and lit up. She squinted as she took a drag, and her bangs fell in her face. She folded one arm across her chest and braced it under the other arm and hand that held the cigarette, exposing—or showing off—her defined biceps. She looked older and tougher than Carrie did, especially since Carrie had gained weight (12.6 pounds) from eating so much starch in the dorm cafeteria all year.
The door to the hall pushed open, and a young man stepped through. He looked young, maybe sixteen. His chin-length hair was blunt cut and dyed black. His dark-lashed eyes stood out against his pale skin. He was wearing eyeliner, which, perhaps because it was smudged, made him look androgynous rather than girlish. He wore the same outfit as Meadow: sleeveless t-shirt and narrow-cut jeans. And like Meadow, he was skinny but muscular. He smiled at Carrie. He was beautiful, Carrie decided, if odd-looking.
“This is Local Dave,” Meadow said. He shook his head wearily. “Deke! A joke. His name is Deke, really. He’s a son of Gloversville, an outcast, and now h
e helps me make movies.” At the word outcast, Deke’s eyes widened and he held up his large hands and waved his ringed fingers at Carrie.
“I’m Carrie.”
“Hi,” he said. He stood next to Meadow and their shoulders touched. He leaned slightly against her. Leave it to Meadow to find the one gorgeously odd kid in Gloversville and make him her soundman/boyfriend.
“Meadow and I grew up together in LA.”
“He knows all about you, Carrie,” Meadow said. “I talk about you a lot.”
“You are best friends,” he said.
“Yes,” Carrie said. “We are.” It was nice to hear it. She liked to think Meadow felt that way, even if she never believed that Meadow exactly needed anything from her. That night they ate thickly cheesed delivery pizza, drank wine, and watched a movie projected on a sheet Deke had hung on the warehouse wall. Meadow ran the projector. Meadow used their old teacher, Jay Hosney, to help her rent movies from MoMA and the New Yorker Theater and other film libraries. They watched a 16 mm print of Antonioni’s Red Desert. Meadow rented it for a week, and she had already seen it five times.
Carrie watched Monica Vitti framed against the vast rusted hull of a ship. A good film to see if you are making films in the midst of industrial ruin, like a leather tannery or a glove factory.
And then Meadow showed Carrie her train film. Train films, rather. She had made a dozen of these short, odd documents. As Carrie looked at some very impressive and distorted close-to-the-tracks shots, Carrie wondered: what had it been like up here this past spring, with Meadow in a frenzy, in an obsession with something? Manic, possessed, as if she were enacting some cliché of an artist? All these repetitions and her relentless revisions of one idea were interesting, but what for? Who could even say what they were?
In high school, when Meadow decided films were her thing (and it was like that, a big decision, an announcement, as if her biography were already being written, as if the biopic were being filmed, bold-print supertitles appearing over her head), she began to obsess over old cinema artifacts: viewers, lenses, projectors, film stocks. She built a Mutoscope by hand. She bought old spectrographs, Kinetoscopes, and zoetropes and rebuilt them. She played with them. It was as if she had to go through the discovery of film step by step, all on her own. She had to invent it all for herself. Carrie often felt perplexed by Meadow’s extremes. Making a film was already hard enough. Why not just step in and go from here? Why be so difficult and take the long way to everything?
After months of making Carrie watch silent films, Meadow moved on to specific filmmakers: John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks. Then it was the European New Wave, then she discovered Japanese filmmakers, then the American filmmakers of the ’70s. Then the cinéma vérité documentaries, direct cinema, and kino-pravda. She had a passion for comprehensiveness that wasn’t really possible. The dishonest part of it was the way she seemed to embrace things by rejecting what she had previously embraced. John Ford had to be seen as vastly inferior to Howard Hawks. It was Godard vs. Truffaut. As if engaging art became a conversion experience. Which felt juvenile and, well, reductive to Carrie. Carrie enjoyed a film even as she could see its flaws. She didn’t need to be obsessed or disillusioned. That exhausted her. She consciously sought out films made by women. She didn’t care if they were nakedly commercial productions or hardly seen lost films. She liked to think about Ida Lupino or Lina Wertmüller as well as Penelope Spheeris or Amy Heckerling. She liked the idea of taking a genre—say the high school film—and doing a really interesting version of it. Not breaking the form, but pushing it in subtle ways. You would get an audience, right? And there could be room for unexpected things. Even subversive things.
It was unclear, at the end of the night, where Carrie would sleep. Meadow hadn’t thought about it, apparently. They went back to the apartment Meadow rented near the warehouse and Carrie slept on the couch under a sheet and with a throw pillow under her head. She heard murmurs from Meadow’s room. She tried not to listen, and then she put her headphones on and listened to Maria Callas sing.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT STATION
I
Meadow showed Carrie the train movies even though Meadow knew Carrie wouldn’t appreciate what had gone into them. All spring Meadow had risen at five every day, not for any practical reason but for the feeling of immersion. She needed to feel the pain of her devotion. She drove the old Subaru down to Route 5s, which runs parallel to the Mohawk River. She knew it was a horse trail once, the one narrow pass between the mountain ranges if you needed to go west, and of course everyone always needed to go west. First the Erie Canal paralleled the Mohawk, then the railroad, then I-90. Meadow loved how each thing remained even as it was surpassed by new technology: the river, the canal, the railroad, and the Interstate lay right next to one another like a graphic depicting two centuries of progress. But her attention was drawn to the freight trains; their approach and passing were infinitely more beguiling than the semitrucks that monotonously thundered down I-90.
Meadow discovered that she could get to the tracks in a number of unprotected places in between stations. Sometimes she had to climb over a fence. At first she brought her lightweight Super 8 camera, but later she used her video camcorder. Other times she set up her expensive 16 mm camera and made Deke come to record sound. Oh, the sound of a train! The first rhythmic sounds of the approach, the wheels of the train clicking fast against the tracks. The way the rhythm gathered and the volume increased as the train grew closer. It created—a train approaching, that is—its own suspense. Not suspense, exactly. Momentum that intensified and created a need for satisfaction. And then, just as she anticipated, the sound built to a roar. The train went by in a huge rush: the clamor as it rattled the switch track, the whistle announcing its passing if it approached a station, the beeping alarm of the crossing signal if it cut through a road. The passing was a satisfying rush: you were in it, the longed-for moment, the powerful mechanical thing speeding by and dwarfing you. It overwhelmed you, but even in the midst of it you knew it would be over soon. The noise, the movement, the friction of metal on metal: it will all pass you by.
Meadow filmed the trains by lying in the cold wet mud and pointing the camera right at the point of contact of wheels on tracks. She also filmed pointing the camera up at the train from the same vantage. She filmed them from far away, like a train passing in an old country song. She boarded the passenger train in the tiny station in Amsterdam and rode it one stop to Schenectady, then boarded a westbound train back to Amsterdam. She spent the short rides kneeling in the joint between two cars. She stuck her camera close to the gap where she could see and hear the tracks as the train rushed over them. She saw a blur where the ties would be, and the camera lurched when the train lurched. She practiced keeping the camera steady. Then she held her body loosely and let the camera lurch with the train. The mechanical solidity and simplicity, the weight of the train on the track, the power of the constant friction—all of this she wanted to find a way to put in a film. And the longing of the train, the Saturday reproach of a train whistle in the distance that seemed to say, Why are you here and not on a train? Going, going, gone on a train.
Meadow sent her film to a lab in New York City on Forty-fourth Street. She collected the reels and watched them on the editing console in the studio she had set up in the Gloversville warehouse. She marked the film with wax pencil. She had two-minute or eight-minute segments clipped to a wire and hanging around her. She tried the sound out of sync, so that the noise didn’t match the images. She tried it synced, then she varied the volume so the sound dropped in precise places. Then she abandoned the sound she had recorded altogether. Variables, so many of them that they overwhelmed her. Other times the possibilities excited her so much she got up in the middle of the night to work or take notes.
Meadow tried to add some of the Britten music to her films. Then she tried something more repeti
tive and tense, Steve Reich. Or something lush and melodic, Gershwin. Music can invisibly amplify, or music can be an ironic counterpoint to the images. Music can seduce or make you feel slightly off, uncomfortable. She always thought that a pushy film score was cheating, but she realized maybe she just wanted to eliminate variables to make things simpler. She was simple, plain. She knew nothing. She needed to see movies! How did they use music? Sound effects? Silence? There is true silence—which feels like negative sound, it almost sucks you out—and then there is movie silence with ambient sounds, like breathing and chair scraping. She paired her train images with music bright and nostalgic. Then just the sound of the river, which seemed so pastoral and almost invisible next to the train, but now suddenly had a fighting chance for her attention. She then filmed the outmoded, obsolete, obscure Mohawk River. The train in deep background. She filmed just the river—untrained or pretrained. She cut these together. The river disturbed and obliterated by the train. In a logical sequence. In a sequence of no logical chronology. The left and right expectations resisted. You lose logic, you lose legibility. It unnerves. Yes! She shot the untrained, unmanned world: birds, river, the wind on the leaves. The river roar made faint by the train roar. But then it returns after the train passes. If she took away the sound and let the train pass in the background without its steady clack clack clack, it still found its rhythm in your head. You supplied the clack clack clack from a hundred other movie or real-life trains. You could do that, play on the sounds already in people’s heads. The memory of trains. But not even that: the memory of trains seen in movies. Was it fair or good or right to count on—even consider—an assumption of memory? But isn’t that what all film counted on, a kind of shared memory of everything we have seen in the movies?