by Gail Jones
Speed perturbed and excited her. It was the penetration of vicinity, the counteraction of sensible space. Chronometers, speedometers – instruments supercharged against the desolation of the still.
When Alice was a child she liked to watch the weather report on television. Each evening, before the list of tidal figures and temperatures and barometric predictions, one of the stations showed a wide-angled prospect of the city, taken from its tallest building, looking out across the river, across bridges and highways. Eight hours were filmed and condensed to one or two minutes; this process was contrived to make heaven itself speed. Light arose and receded, clouds streamed in from the ocean, gathered and dispersed, rain filtered down in drifting, diaphanous waves, swept the screen with shadow, then disappeared in an instant. Boats and ferries on the river whisked past like apparitions, their wakes unfurling in patterns that looked like stitches sewn into the water. In the corner of the screen, barely discernible, a digital clock flicked figures with alarming swiftness, showing not time’s arrow, but time’s perpetual superfluity. Fleetingness. Relentlessness. Irretrievability. The film of the weather was transfixing because it was so unnatural, yet it provided the illusionist gratification, at once terrifying and beautiful, that one might speed up time, that one might push nature faster, that there was a perspective, somewhere, somewhere up very high, of panoramic relativity.
Norah also loved the speedy weather. The sisters watched it together, sucking at ice cubes, lying on their bellies with their four legs waving in the air. Time-travelling in their lounge room with the aid of the camera’s shrewd lie.
Mr Sakamoto was waiting in drizzling rain outside the cinema. His felt hat bore a fringe of raindrops along the rim. He had already bought the tickets. When he saw Alice approach, he looked concerned.
‘What have you done to yourself?’ he asked, his tone alarmed.
And Alice realised that all afternoon she had worn the bloody scarf, strident as a blazon, decorating her chest as if she were the survivor, the one who was walking wounded, as if she had been kicked with steel boots in the pit of the Métro. Alice unwound the scarf with some embarrassment and stuffed it into her shoulder bag.
‘Someone was hurt,’ she said cryptically. ‘Don’t worry; it’s not my blood.’
And although she could tell Mr Sakamoto wanted to know more, Alice fell silent.
What happens in a movie theatre? There is a transitional phase between the real and the screen, in which one views ironically, with everyday scepticism. Then at some point one falls headlong into the screen – there is an occult coalescence, a portal, a transfer, where the evidence of the senses is suddenly hijacked into fakery and exaggeration. It is a kind of release of self, a benign absorption. Ninotchka told the story of a Bolshevik apparatchik (Greta Garbo), who came to Paris in the thirties to supervise a delegation of three idiots, abroad with the task of selling jewels confiscated from White Russians. It was farcical and lighthearted, with a witty script. Ninotchka began as an ideologue, but was converted through love to enjoy the decadence of the capitalist West, which she nevertheless insisted was crumbling into destruction. Paris was a city of lavish attractions and overflowing desire. At the nadir of her ideological betrayal, Ninotchka wore a ridiculous hat, which she had bought as a guilty secret. This, and learning to laugh, were the symbols of her defection.
All through the movie Alice could hear Mr Sakamoto’s response. He snorted, chuckled, exclaimed, laughed outright. Around them other cinema patrons also laughed; in the extraterrestrial light of the black-and-white movie they looked glazed with pleasure, heightened and abstracted into filmy emotions. Alice could see the rumbling of their shoulders and their backward jerks of amusement. It was something childish; it was something profoundly of the body. Encouraged by this disinhibition, Alice began also to laugh, and found that the spirit of sadness she had carried all afternoon, the taint of the Métro, and the woman who had stained her, gradually dissipated. When they swept outside, into the cold street, she felt she had been cleansed by comedy.
Mr Sakamoto was still cheerfully smiling. ‘Wasn’t it wonderful?’ he exclaimed. ‘I love the scene where Ninotchka finally laughs.’
Over drinks in a small bar Alice told Mr Sakamoto of the incident in the Métro, of the journey to the bookshop. She told him about the woman with the tattooed arm. Then she said that although she was studying modernity, she had bought a novel by Henry James.
‘So what is the problem?’ he asked. ‘You are large enough to contain contradictions. We are all large enough – are we not? – to contain contradictions.’
Mr Sakamoto had first seen Ninotchka when he was eight years old. He had understood nothing of the plot – although his sisters had tried to explain Bolshevism and the idiotic delegation – but was seduced by Greta Garbo’s luminous white face (‘as though she wore Japanese rice powder’) and the perceptibly sexual cadence of her laugh.
‘It was a deep laugh,’ he said, ‘not a meretricious tinkle, such as passes for female laughter in movies today …’
Afterwards he and his sisters had gone to a teahouse where they all practised imitating Greta Garbo’s laugh. Sachiko was the best. She threw back her head and let loose a thunderous sound. Accidentally she knocked over a cup of green tea, and then laughed again, with the others joining in. The owner of the teahouse thought they were misbehaved: three children laughing at nothing, talking in foreign languages and playing the fool.
Mr Sakamoto smiled knowingly. ‘Not that I’ve seen many contemporary movies,’ he added.
That night, Alice lay in bed, insomniac, thinking of Garbo’s face, thinking of cinema. Mr Sakamoto was right; she would have to include it. Something in his story about the children practising a film-star laugh had impressed and moved her. She saw the three of them in a sepia light, hunched together in conspiratorial play, emboldened and united by movie-life mimicry. The screen carried fantasies writ large, but also bestowed games, gestural repertoires and collective stories; bestowed, moreover, a few images that stayed a lifetime, as if produced in intaglio. It was not mere absorption, but some kind of transaction. Not loss of self, but some fictive complication. Alice had heard the stuttering turn of the film strip, gearing up into expanded vision, had seen the cone of dusty light gleaming in the darkness, then the roaring big-headed lion, the list of august names, before the swiftly seamless – voilà! – conveyance-to-elsewhere. She had felt Mr Sakamoto settle and relax beside her and begin to chuckle at the very first scene. Aerospace light flashed down upon them. They were rocketed off at twenty-four frames per second.
Let me tell you, wrote Mr Sakamoto, about the felicitously named Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, fine fellows with black eyes and handlebar moustaches, who invented, as we all know, the cinématographe – the cinema – in 1895. Their story begins with Antoine, their father, a hale and hearty fellow, a singer and artist, who married at nineteen, and had an energetic appreciation of all things new. He set himself up as a painter of portraits, then as a portrait photographer, in Lyon, France. His son Louis, by the time he was eighteen, had established a factory in the city for producing photographic glass plates. This was an immensely successful business, employing three hundred people and producing fifteen million plates a year, for sale all over Europe.
In 1894 Antoine was invited to Paris to see a demonstration of Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope machine. This was a kind of large wooden box, with a viewing peephole at the top, by which one person at a time, leaning forward, peering from above, could see tapes of film composed at Mr Edison’s studios. Antoine stood above the box, removed his top hat, and looked deep into its fancy chute of darkness. He saw there a slim woman dancing seductively with veils trailing from her arms. ‘Mon dieu!’ Antoine hurried back to Lyon, excited by animated images, and charged his sons with the task of devising a means by which these films could be projected for an audience, like magic lantern shows. One year later, they had it: the cinématographe, a box on a tripod. Hand-cranked, it both rec
orded and then projected images into the world. With an ingenious sprocket, a claw for moving film, they had found a device to put framed pictures into motion.
It would not be unkind to say that the brothers Auguste and Louis lacked the artistic flair of their excitable father. At the world’s first screening, in the Grand Café in Paris, they showed images of their employees leaving the factory and a train arriving at a station, and would continue to film commonplace and even trite occurrences for years to come. They had no notion of story, or of special effect. Each film strip was fifty seconds of ordinary looking. A fixed camera position. Copycat filming. In 1895, however, it caused a sensation. How the café patrons ducked and cried out when the train moved towards them! How they exclaimed with relief and laughed when it stopped on the screen! This small sequence had about it the glow of inauguration. The train pulls up, heaves, pauses before us, and passengers begin in jerky fast motion to disembark. There are women in mutton-chop sleeves and puffy dresses of tulle, and men with hats and waistcoats, almost trotting along. A woman in a hat of extravagant size seizes a girl by the hand and charges towards the camera. One passenger, only one, seems to notice the camera on the platform. He is a sprightly young lad, perhaps only nineteen or twenty. He pauses, scrutinises, bends for a curious moment to examine this unknown box. He edges away, unsure. He is the first man in history screened thus, made self-conscious, selected from the crowd by the return of his gaze. It is a riveting moment. We in the audience love him. We make him the historical vehicle for all that phantasmically follows.
From the window of her studio, Alice watched the students at their break. They all seemed to be aged between fourteen and seventeen, and were therefore at the vulnerable, gawky age of indistinct character, vague ambition and obligatory fights with parents. As time passed, she began to see them individually, and felt a kind of long-distance affection for a few she habitually observed. There was a boy – she called him Leo – who was always alone. He had light brown hair and a thin angular face, and he always stood apart, moving in small, autistic jerks to the sound of his clamped-on headphones. Music was either his singular passion, or the device by which he excluded himself from others (or recognised their exclusion) in a socially plausible way. Leo always wore the same clothes – a sweater with a hood, tattered jeans – and did not smoke. His narrow body was restless, driven by music only he could hear, pounding directly into his eardrums. There was something pitiable about him, something lost.
Alice also liked to observe ‘the lovers’, whom she called Gisele and Sylvain. They spent much of each break together, against the wall, embracing and kissing. Their kisses had an intense prolongation and a gorgeous succulence. When they disengaged, they stood close together, the planes of their bodies still touching, their arms still entwined. The other students seemed to respect the relationship and did not interrupt or intrude. Sometimes Alice saw Sylvain joking with the others – his possession of Gisele gave him a certain swagger – but mostly they were interlocked, alone in their own way as Leo, listening to his music.
Among the students there was also a conspicuous girl. She was popular, and laughed loudly, in a way Mr Sakamoto would like. She wore what appeared to be layers of rags and had spiky purple hair. Her confidence was wonderful to behold. ‘Arlette’ seemed to attend school only infrequently, but when she did, she was highly visible, attracting others, making noise, slipping between groups, linking them with her own intentions. The students around her talked on mobile phones and sent text messages to each other. They were all in a circuit of voices and signs; they were their own community.
Alice thought about her students, back at the university in Australia. They would now be attending lectures and writing essays. Feigning interest, nodding, pretending to have read the text. She did not miss her teaching. What she missed was contact with youth, with those who practised an assertion in the world that they took to be theirs, who saw their cities as intelligible territory, written for them, replete, awaiting, charged with intensities, who lived knitted in uttermost, secretive ways.
When Mr Sakamoto had said goodbye after the movie he had held up his hand to the side of his face, with the fingers curled and the thumb extended, making the shape of a telephone.
‘I’ll call you,’ he’d said as Alice began moving away.
‘I don’t have a phone,’ she had replied with a grin. ‘I’ll call you. Tomorrow. At the hotel.’
It was only later that she realised she had never seen anyone of Mr Sakamoto’s age make the telephonic shorthand gesture. It was an action only young people performed. It was a code of twenty-something stockbrokers and fashion designers. Of cool baristas and film students and girls-who-wanted-to-be-models. Mr Sakamoto belonged to times other than his own; the habits of his body displayed forms of appropriated youthfulness. Perhaps the telephone had unfixed him, made him radically contemporary.
‘Tell me exactly how Bell’s telephone worked.’
‘Well,’ said Mr Sakamoto, ‘there is first of all the medieval principle of rays in emanation …’
‘Seriously,’ she insisted.
‘Two things, that’s all. Number one: electromagnetism. Electric currents generate a magnetic field around themselves. The stronger the current, the stronger the field. You send a current through a coil of wire, and the iron core of the coil is magnetised. The current can be varied in strength and the electromagnet can vibrate a flexible iron diaphragm and create a sound, any sound, even a human voice. Number two: induction. Induction is about using sound itself to vary the current. Induction means that a changing magnetic field generates currents in the circuit. So when the sound of a voice vibrates, the changes in the magnetic field induce a similarly varying current.’
‘I think I prefer the principle of rays in emanation.’
‘Yes,’ admitted Mr Sakamoto. ‘Voice; it’s really all about voice. It’s about ripples in the air, patterns of ripples, as in a Japanese raked garden. Do you know the raked garden? Have you seen them in photographs?’
Alice nodded.
‘The raked garden always looks to me like an image of sound waves. Gardens, ocean, the beauty of energy transmission. Tele-phone: sound at a distance.’
They were walking slowly together by the river. The sun was shining and traces of early spring blossom, like flakes of brown tissue, hung in the moderate wind. There were dogs and pigeons; there were babies in strollers. Roller skaters swept along the footpaths, weaving between pedestrians with imperious confidence. The streets were lively, bright.
Mr Sakamoto halted. ‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s the third one I’ve seen.’ He pointed to the word ‘nuance’ in white paint, in a neat cursive hand, at the foot of a wall. ‘Superior graffito, don’t you think?’
They stood looking together, each in meditation.
‘Do you know,’ asked Alice, ‘about Mr Eternity?’
All the way to the bistro – which Mr Sakamoto had insisted on revisiting, in order, he said, to comprehend the battle between the waiters – Alice told him the story.
There was once in Sydney, Australia, a man called Arthur Stace. Born in 1884, he was of a miserable background; his mother, father and siblings were all alcoholics. He grew up in poverty. At twelve he was made a ward of the state; he got his first job at fourteen, working in a coal mine, and by fifteen found himself in gaol. In his twenties he engaged in various criminal activities and then in the First World War he served in France, returning physically and spiritually broken. He was suffering shell shock and the effects of mustard gas, and was also partially blinded in one eye. Arthur sank further and further into a life of dereliction and alcoholism, buying methylated spirits, ‘white lady’, at sixpence a bottle. Some time in 1930 he visited a Baptist food handout centre, and heard a fire-and-brimstone preacher give a remarkable sermon. The preacher stated he would like to shout the word ‘ETERNITY’ in every street in Sydney. This was Arthur Stace’s conversion experience. He was overcome with a need to write the word ‘eternity’, i
n chalk or crayon, on the pavements of Sydney. For thirty-seven years – rising at 5 a.m., praying, then following God’s directions to a particular site – he inscribed the word almost half a million times. He wrote in a copperplate hand, with a flourish on the ‘E’ and an extended tail on the ‘Y’, which served to underline the whole word. Urban myths abounded about Mr Eternity, but he was unmasked in the fifties and with great shyness and humility accepted the identity and confessed his inscriptions. He died, aged eighty-three, in 1967, having gifted to the city these frail repetitions, this heavenly mania, this lovely obsession.
‘It’s a true story,’ Alice added emphatically.
Mr Sakamoto stopped. ‘It’s a wonderful story. ‘Nuance’ and ‘eternity’: these are the two dimensions of haiku. I shall give you a book, one of my favourites. In translation, of course.’
They had halted at a florist shop, before a line of cyclamen. The pink and purple flowers had a stunning vivacity. Alice could smell the scent of turned soil, cross-hatched with small implements.
‘Wait here,’ she said.
Mr Sakamoto waited as Alice bought a pot of bright flowers, wrapped in tissue paper. When she emerged from the florists she handed the purchase to her friend. He looked surprised. He bowed and appeared abashed.
‘No one has ever bought me flowers before,’ he said shyly.
In the bistro they discussed the time of modernity as Mr Sakamoto observed the waiters. He did not accept, he said, that all was despotic acceleration and unholy speed. The hunger for nuance and eternity infiltrated the lives of everyone, even the speediest executive. It was this that caused a businessman to pause, in dim light, and listen in the shadows to his sleeping child breathing.
‘You’re romanticising,’ Alice accused him. ‘He’s neglected his children and is just checking to see what they look like.’