The Currency of Paper

by Alex Kovacs

  For his first ten years of filming, Maximilian couldn’t decide whether he preferred black-and-white or colour film. In his view, the former tended to capture a more precise image, striking the retina with a direct vividness, reducing an object to its most essential qualities, revealing its naked inner face. Black-and-white also produced a sort of dream-world in which all ordinary reality was transformed into a realm of light and shade, within which almost anything could become beautiful, could come to resemble drifts of silver smoke floating across an expanse of glittering water.

  Colour, however, expanded the dimensions of lived reality, amplifying its elements, whilst also providing a mirror, producing images that corresponded with a false exactitude to the world as observed. In the end, he found colour to be the more exciting of the two mediums because it presented a greater number of possibilities for arrangement and manipulation. There was simply more that could be created with colour; it held an enormous number of potential combinations of tone and form, an endless palette of gradations of light.

  Alternating between the two mediums, Maximilian explored the potential of both, returning to the same locations to capture them on whatever latest type of film had been made available, whether it was Super 8, 16mm, 35mm, or even video, before editing the results together meticulously, cutting between one or another image of the same place, rendered in different forms of resolution that provided highly distinct records of particular times in particular places. Whenever new types of film came onto the market, it always seemed to Maximilian that cinema itself had changed, as if it now contained more, as if another subtle and important shift had taken place, ensuring that the future would now be witnessed in a slightly different way.

  A part of him wanted to capture every last street corner and doorway, until his film project became a map of every potentiality available in the city, an encyclopaedia of forgotten locations and neglected vantages. For a long time he was even foolish enough to consider this as a genuinely workable plan. But the longer he spent filming, the more evident it became that completing a portrait of the entire city was far beyond his means. When first encountered, film had deceived him, he decided; given him the illusion that it was within his power to grasp the totality of a place, a situation, a person. Filming was an activity that came close to enacting this fantasy of possession, a fact which urged him onwards with this project for many years.

  Once completed, his film ran for 429 minutes. At three junctures he placed spaces for short intervals, in case there would ever be any public. He knew that even the most dedicated of audiences would find the experience of watching his film to be a test of their patience. Anyone wishing to see his work would have to sacrifice an entire day of their lives. Despite possessing knowledge of this fact, Maximilian did not worry a great deal about whether the length would be received well. In the end he had simply made the film that he believed in making.

  In its final form, the film had no opening credits, commencing instead with the words “Film No. 4,” before launching into a barrage of names, words which all appeared across the spaces of the screen in large white capital letters, accompanied by long black-and-white tracking shots of buildings and empty streets, against the distant sound of a theremin swelling and pulsing in the background, all of which was then followed by an ellipsis of black leader.

  What follows is confusing, incoherent, obscure. Telephones ring in anonymous rooms at night without being answered. A persistent layer of grey cloud glares down from above. Rain swilling along the streets seeps into gutters, gathers leaves and small objects, forms opaque mirrors. A thronging tide of pale, tired bodies presses onwards across the wet and indistinct pavements with hands that have reached out to hold the vivid objects of shop window displays. Long corridors of abandoned institutional buildings are shown in a state of deterioration, with sheets of pale wallpaper peeling away from their walls, prongs of dirty light falling through their shattered ceilings. Close-ups of the artefacts appearing in these locations alternate with one another: broken plastic dolls missing limbs or eyes, forgotten clothes catalogues bulging with old rain, shattered windows lingering amongst pools of mud.

  For ten minutes at a time the film might follow the gradual drift of objects caught in the Thames, or the billows of smoke curling away from the chimney of a crematorium. Abruptly the viewer would then be jolted into a montage sequence of furious cross-cutting in which a flurry of images might be accompanied by cascading sheets of electronic sound or the rousing campfire songs of a Cajun folk singer. At times the only thing that seemed to join two sequences together was the fact that somehow they existed side-by-side within the boundaries of the same film.

  At any given moment things might shift into a more playful mode. There are irreverent abstract interjections. There are jokes. In one sequence, a series of stylized tableaux is created from hundreds of bright-coloured clock-faces, assembled in Maximilian’s living room and placed into a number of patterns and shapes, then filmed from a great variety of angles. Whenever it seemed to him that his film was in danger of becoming particularly dour or depressive, he would liven the tone with some stock footage of circus performers or tap dancers.

  Without warning he might cut in images that had been appropriated from newsreels, public information films, cartoons, or old advertisements. Snippets of archive material showed how locations he had filmed at a later date would once have appeared. He included frames dominated by the Day-Glo colours of corporate logos, extracts from interviews with deceased politicians, rows of flashing lights in fairgrounds, footage of tower blocks being constructed or demolished. These insertions came from the history of the city, or rather the history of images of the city, reminding audience members that many of the same spaces the city’s current residents traversed so regularly were once occupied by multitudes of both Victorians and Edwardians. In one instance the flickering ghost of a cab driver and his horse passed in front of the camera, confronting the cameraman and audience directly with a shared sinister gaze before disappearing from sight for eternity.

  Intertitles were also used, in a variety of fonts, sizes, and colours, sometimes acting as pieces of concrete poetry, or quoting from a variety of texts in often oblique and surprising ways. These quotations included sentences taken from newspaper articles, tourist brochures, and political manifestoes, as well as fragments of handwritten advertisements discovered in shop windows and portions of letters found lying in the streets. These words could transform what had been previously described only in images, deepening and broadening the scope of a given sequence, so that parallels were drawn between a variety of disparate subjects, until the film seemed to have branched outwards, touching upon hundreds of different issues and themes.

  In the late 1980s, Maximilian began to devote his attention to the soundtrack for his film, setting out to construct a complex, layered background that would shift the entire focus of the finished project. Long stretches of the final cut were to remain silent, while others were soon provided with blasts of strange music, waves of natural sound, voices from radio plays, shrieking dissonances, and static.

  Eventually he began to compose and record segments of voice-over monologue. In the finished film, his own voice breaks through the other effects from time to time, often engaging in lengthy speeches, providing a sense of continuity, as well as an elusive fictional narrative ostensibly involving a number of persons who are never actually seen in the film. Teasing descriptions of the activities of these persons are frequently given in the voice-overs, but their identities are never formally stated, and the relationships that they maintain with one another are only ever hinted at, their precise motivations (or, indeed, actions) never being made entirely clear. All that we are definitively told about them, apart from various examples of their thoughts and behaviours, is the fact that each person mentioned in the film is a practicing photographer.

  The film attempted to interrogate the meaning of photography, the extent to which it is or is not capable of recording memo
ries, of successfully describing the world. The various characters discuss these ideas and related issues, often illustrating their arguments with photographs and pieces of footage, which tend to lead only towards further questions and lines of thinking. This mysterious state of affairs is compounded by the fact that almost everything of importance to these people seems to occur away from the screen, in hidden rooms, behind obscured windows, often at parties where all of the characters would congregate, where they themselves would be unsure of what was being spoken of barely a few footsteps away.

  Ultimately, however, the film could not be reduced to the particulars of story. The narrative, such as it was, was only one element in a morass of conflicting signifiers. The idea was that repeated viewings would always reveal new layers, fresh insights into what was being said or shown. At times Maximilian felt as if his film merely consisted of a compendium of other possible films, a catalogue of styles and approaches, shifting in tone from a plateau of lofty seriousness to playfulness and irony. Many of the scenes felt to him like nothing more than tentative sketches, brief illuminations that could become starting points for other films, perhaps films of similarly extended length, heading down different roads, but all arriving at last at precisely the same place in which they had initially originated.

  Views of a Forgotten Building

  (1963–1981)

  This photograph became Maximilian’s favourite image of the city. A relatively insignificant location, emptied of people, captured in the midst of winter.

  Whenever he saw the image he felt that the church was drawing him in, inviting him to enter through its dark doorways. Somehow it felt as if important occurrences or meetings must have taken place within its vicinity. This was a place that suggested a fragment of a story, a scene from a forgotten film.

  Perhaps an important scene, from either the beginning or the end of the film, a film that few had watched and which had rapidly disappeared from public memory. Perhaps the camera would move inside the church, observe the few solitary figures huddled in prayer, the backdrop to secret exchanges. A large funereal organ drone might accompany the drifting camera. Sinister occurrences would surely ensue: silent gunshots, or a strangling, a knife silently falling into the bulges of flesh lying above the hips. Or perhaps there would be nothing more than orders given or received on this neutral ground, a slight nod of the head between one man and another, resulting in the murder of another man elsewhere, in another city, on another day.

  In another film the same location might be used for different purposes. Perhaps two characters, people who the film has followed for some time, strangers to each other, finally come to meet outside this building, exchanging a few words before entering the church in silence, the camera following them, observing their responses to each other and to the church, before they separate, never to encounter one another again.

  Maximilian first came across the photograph by accident, searching for something else at the library. Any image of the city was suddenly of interest to him, could potentially lead him to some new, secret location, could provide some sort of insight into how he might make his own film. Amongst the hundreds of photographs that passed before his eyes within the space of a few days, this was this one that spoke to him. Turning a page, it was suddenly before him.

  He identified the church almost immediately, only a few days after he first saw the photograph. It didn’t take long for him to find himself disappointed with the actual location, a place which could never inspire him in quite the same way as its image had done. Somehow the photograph was quite divorced from what it depicted. Despite having an undeniable beauty, it seemed to him that all feelings of mystery were absent from the church itself. Afterwards, he took to grasping, vainly, for his sense of the original image, for many years to come.

  In reality, these were streets, walls, windows, trees that were just like many others in the city. They contained nothing particularly remarkable for him when seen or touched. Observed in colour, in the cold air, surrounded by people and cars, the church no longer seemed to him unusual or worthy of note.

  After placing a copy of the original photograph in a frame above his bed, he would often find himself staring at its forms, trying to decide what it was that he felt he could see in the image, why he found it so fascinating. He liked the steeple, shaped like a wizard’s hat, placed at the top of the structure, the grandeur of the large windows in the buildings that framed the church on each side symmetrically. The trees in the park behind the church bereft of leaves. There was a sense of the city sprawling onwards beyond the frame, into a manifold profusion of other buildings and rooms. Equally, there was a sense in which the city seemed to have been emptied of its people, leaving only buildings and deserted streets behind.

  Reasoning with himself, he came to the conclusion that the religious character of the building was of no interest to him. Religion had nothing to do with his attraction to this place. He would attend services in the church now and then, over the years, slipping away before the end of proceedings, having no desire to meet either the parishioners or the priest. Whilst he discovered little of interest to him on these occasions, the sporadic views of the interior that he thus obtained satisfied a strain of curiosity that he could not seem to expunge.

  He would frequently return to this location with one of his movie cameras, filming the church and surrounding streets from many angles, capturing many different qualities of light, on occasions when the streets were crowded with groups of tourists, and on other occasions when the streets were deserted and ringing with silence.

  Shots of the church appeared at many different moments in his finished film, the result of many attempts to capture the spirit of the building. He was to find that despite all of these efforts, he could never recapture the initial attachment that he had developed for the place. The strange excitement which the image had provoked in him soon wore off, leaving only an insistent desire on his part to live through the past once more, to return to the place in which he had originally found himself. But such a desire was of course, and despite all his efforts, still impossible to fulfil.

  These streets, this church, this image belonged for him more firmly within the realm of myth and fiction than most other places. It seemed to him that possibilities for extraordinary narratives linger within certain locales while remaining entirely absent from others. Why this should be the case, he could not say, but he found it a difficult truth to deny.

  Eventually he realised that he no longer needed to know why the photograph appealed to him. Attempts at explanation only led to the formation of false answers, which at best contained only partial truths, being for the most part ideas that had happened to take precedence at a specific moment in time, on a particular occasion, with no relevance even minutes later. Finally, Maximilian understood that he was the sort of person who could derive more pleasure from not knowing specific answers, who thrived on uncertainty, chance, ellipsis.

  On What Has Been Discarded

  (1964–1992)

  It was in the late spring of 1964 that he caught glimpse of a trail of scrawled black writing coating the surface of a white tissue, blown and billowing profusely against a row of black iron railings.

  This particular object drew him with an uncanny power. He crossed the street with haste, snatching at what he could now see was a paper napkin, claiming it as his. The markings on the paper were legible, but soon stood revealed as a shopping list. Maximilian’s excitement deflated at once.

  Still, he stuffed the curious article into his suit pocket and took it home with him, a decision he couldn’t entirely explain at the time. This was to be the inauguration of a new and great collection, the first of several thousand paper napkins that Maximilian would come to appropriate, label, and conserve.

  His collection would include paper napkins of almost every species imaginable. Cloth napkins never had any particular appeal for him. At first he was solely interested in examples of the form that held either drawings or text, th
is due to a wish to explore the impulse that had led him to appropriate that first, chance object, to somehow justify the hope that he had felt on that day, the momentary belief that he had stumbled upon something of note. What he most wanted, he decided, would be to find evidence of some genius toiling in obscurity, inscribing napkins with brilliant asides before throwing them to the winds, for the delectations of who knows what audience.

  Over the decades that followed, there would only be two or three occasions when Maximilian found new exhibits for his collection that seemed to affirm his initial stirrings of hope. For the most part, however, the writing he came across in this fashion could be dismissed as junk. Not to be dissuaded, Maximilian came in time to be fascinated by the simple fact that these objects were so readily dismissed. To his delight, he was to discover that if one actively sought out napkins bearing writings or drawings, there was never any shortage of such artefacts on hand.

  Almost every instance of “napkin writing” he discovered was of no interest from a literary perspective. Jottings and notes dominated, along with a number of lists and reminders, calculations of sums, and shorthand directions to particular locations. Only rarely did he discover anything striving for what Maximilian would have considered as depth or posterity to be found on a paper napkin, a sorry state of affairs that was yet another trial for Maximilian’s desire to think only the best of his fellow citizens. However, when he did on occasion turn up a piece of napkin-writing possessed of even the vaguest merit, he became elated, repeatedly analysing the author’s syntactical choices and attempting thereby to deduce information about his or her face, lifestyle, personality. Maximilian would fantasize that the author was a kindred spirit who had also come to understand the inherent perfection of paper napkins. Admittedly, this seemed a sad impossibility and ultimately his sense of isolation from other human beings was only strengthened by his fervent collecting.