“Well, good luck to your sister and her barber friend,” Micah says, rising to investigate a wardrobe filled with props and costumes. It’s a great wooden coffin of a thing, more easily kept outdoors than in one of the huts, and as Micah sifts distractedly through its contents, he is reminded of being a child playing hide-and-seek in his father’s armoire. Inside, there are colonial-style hats and seafaring helmets, ruffs and frilly things, plastic shackles and chains. The stuff of dress-up and make-believe. Micah screws a helmet onto his head and places a bolt-action rifle and a realistic-looking prop version of the same on the ground before him. He considers both of these items with a quizzical expression—one the authentic article, the other its simulacrum. Then he picks up the longer of the pair, and—in a sudden sequence of simultaneous and well-executed movements—loads the rifle, raises its scope to eye level, presses its butt against his shoulder, and places Castor squarely within his sights.
“Wedding toasts aside,” Castor says, slowly redirecting the rifle muzzle with the back of his hand, “I’ve taken a closer look at the revised production schedule. O, Africa! is the real reason we’re here, isn’t it?”
“I came for the sea air.”
“We’re a thousand miles inland.”
“I was misinformed.” Micah puts the rifle he’s holding back into the wardrobe, leaving the other on the ground. He plops down onto the nearest blanket and with his bare foot begins nudging a shiny black disk across a wooden checkerboard. “Look—I win! I win!”
“Okay, Micah, you win. But I’d like to talk to you seriously for a moment about this script treatment of yours.”
“That’s fine, but must we be serious?” Micah asks of an empty, upturned bottle. “Aren’t some things too serious to take seriously?”
“Yes, now, putting aside how you brought us out here under false pretenses,” Castor says, “if we’re to continue shooting this epic of the Negro race, have you given any thought to the veracity of the thing?”
“The what?”
“Historic accuracy.”
“Oh, forget about all that.… Look: An elephant in the distance, Till slipping on a banana peel, a slave roundup—it’s all the same to me, just something to see.” Micah recalls the schoolboy essay exams he’d turned in filled with stick-figure drawings of Washington chopping down a cherry tree and Ben Franklin summoning bolts from the sky.
“But you know something about the topic, right?” asks Early, ogling the backsides of some of Spiro’s leavings, the dwarf having disappeared among lissome brown limbs.
“Your sister has some books in her apartment … but books won’t tell us how to make the movie work. Rose cares deeply about these things, but she can’t do what we can, she can’t imagine it like this. It’s not about the facts. I can tell you more about the slave trade, how the world really operates, from looking at this checkerboard.… We’re moviemakers.… Images are our authority.… Seeing is believing.… This is what will be.”
ELEVEN
The hours-long walk to the Citroëns was the first time the monarch and the movie director were together away from the eyes of the court, and witnessing the king out in nature, beyond the scrutiny of ceremonial duties, came as another form of instruction. Even more than the prospect of the hunt itself, Micah was delighted to have this uninterrupted stretch of time with the king: walking along paths, tracing hills, hearing him hum traditional songs as they went, watching how the man kept cool, a marvelous body moving through light and heat. It was like accompanying a sommelier down into a wine cellar: Everything about Mishi was expert and liquid; in the king’s company everything was big-barreled.
For the day’s expedition, the king dressed in a flowing gown of metallic gold thread; in motion he looked like an admiral butterfly, light bouncing off the white-and-yellow royal lineaments.
“Nice duds,” Micah says. “How’s the muntu coming?”
“Developing nicely,” the king says, responding to the compliment with a happy gastric sound and a fragrant fart. “Keep working at it.”
“Glad to hear it. Listen, what do the Malwiki make of all the filming? I know the other day couldn’t have been much fun for them.”
“Perhaps the rain has already washed away the memory,” Mishi answers slowly, referring to the re-created village massacre and the series of counseling sessions held in his private chambers in the days since. “I have for many years tried to protect my people from such visions, but the machinations of the world change so quickly. As with any advance, one must ask oneself whether it is better to be oil or sand.… Ah, look, our friends the giraffes!”
Looming just ahead of them are two skyscraping beasts, munching on leaves high up in a tree, their priapic necks crossing each other like sabers, their hoofed and snorting presences stronger, more masculine and fearsome encountered in this proximity than at the zoo or under a circus tent.
“Oh, what we learn from animals!” the king marvels. “Each with its own signature upon nature, each its own vibration of muntu, each offering a reflection of human character as surely as every shadow casts its own penumbra. Take, for instance, the giraffe—always peering into the horizon, ambassadors of foresight and preparedness for the future. How much they have to teach us about ourselves!”
“Yeah, all that and their necks,” Micah says, “tell us everything we need to know about being men.”
Izzy preferred not speaking much around Cri, but he had grown entranced with the Malwiki language. Though it had a much smaller working vocabulary than American English, Malwiki had deeper poetic properties and greater associative depths. If the language lacked English’s ubiquity of metaphors and similes, it was because the individual words themselves, granted the full authority of physical objects, were inherently figurative.
“Everything is everything,” Cri explained when Izzy asked how the word for “sun” (tangu) could be the same as the word for “moon.” Rather than assign the Manichaean dualities of the West—where things were good or bad, black or white, spirit or flesh—the Malwiki placed little stock in the binary. The word for “brain” was the same as the word for “thinking” and “memory” and “invention” and “the school.” “Heart” was at once the proudly beating pump, the blood that the organ pulsed through veins, emotions of love and friendship and fidelity, and the faith that bound the community, all at the same time, each concept conversing with the others. Everything was everything.
“Your speech is so simple.” Cri chuckled. “So slow-moving.” Placing one pebble in front of the last, Cri attempted to illustrate to Izzy the English-language bricklayer’s approach toward building and concretizing meaning. He explained how this quality was true of every foreign language he’d encountered: how the desire to achieve specificity and linearity was a means of evasion, a way of hiding behind curtains of words, of using them to obfuscate or circumvent the mystery of things.
The way Cri understood it, filmmaking had much in common with the Malwiki tongue, with action occurring simultaneously in front of them and preserved in a perpetually unfolding past, time folding back on itself, head conversant with tail. Cri understood immediately that their cinematic endeavors were enchanted undertakings. Cameras were dream boxes from heaven. Lenses eyes of gods. Filmstrips sacred scrolls. Without ever having seen a movie, Cri suggested that were you to crack open a person’s head, ribbons of celluloid, ticker tapes of memory, are what you’d find pouring out.
It was because of this intuition that Izzy felt comfortable enlisting Cri’s help behind the camera after Micah left Izzy in charge of shooting the shipboard slave revolt. That morning they’d already staged in King Mishi’s underground chamber scenes of the slave ship’s holding area, with men and women shackled in shadow, bodies pressed together and made abstract, sinister.
It was the first time that Izzy had worked on set without Micah, and he was able to monitor how his shooting style differed from that of his dervish brother. Izzy took longer with his actors and worked toward achieving a greater s
ense of verisimilitude in performance style. Early was assigned the part of the mutinous slave, digging at the nail holding his chains to the floorboard until his fingers drew blood. When the prop didn’t immediately pry loose and Early asked him to call “cut,” Izzy kept the camera rolling and instructed Early that he’d have to find a way to pull the nail from the base, leading to a fiercely realistic piece of acting on the part of the amateur. Izzy also held shots for a beat longer than his brother might have, offhand moments bracketing the takes and candid revelations as important to him as the scenes themselves.
Shooting a sequence by himself allowed Izzy to recognize how alive he was to the possibilities of location shooting and the opportunities for visual discovery it provided. Working with twelve villagers in the cold half-light, he was thinking of shot transitions from Eisenstein’s Strike and Battleship Potemkin, he was thinking of Goya’s pitch paintings and van Gogh’s Potato Eaters, he was thinking of Christian iconography and Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs. Though they had storyboarded the sequence in advance, once Izzy was immersed in the chiaroscuro of the king’s chamber, he had the inspiration to dissolve from the long rusted nail—a nail held diagonally in the slave’s bloody hand like the very key to history’s redemption—to the slanting deck of the ship. This morning, for the first time, Izzy felt like a movie director.
They’d set aside provisions for the safari the night before, Micah manfully taking it upon himself to help prep for the trip, drunkenly and in haste. There were canisters of gasoline and canteens filled with water. There were maps and field guides. There were canvas totes and duffel bags packed with cans of waxy insect repellent and sanitary supplies. There were binoculars and flashlights. There was a field camera and cans of film stock. There was the rifle and some flares.
Now the ark of imagery was filling. Before setting out into the veldt, on the outskirts of the village they had seized upon zebra and crocodile, distant herds of dwarf antelope and water buffalo traveling like motes through blocks of sunshine, wickedly smiling crocodiles with forepaws raised like cornered bank robbers, baby elephants with rubberized limbs and jump-rope trunks, large birds that opened and folded their wings like spoked umbrellas as they rose and dove.
“The lion is king, this is true,” Mishi explains after relaying the story of his first killing, the act of a brave and unruly seventeen-year-old that led to his ascension, a terrifying yet humorous story of nighttime battle involving a coconut to the head, a fisherman’s net, and the future king’s being doused in pungent floods of lion urine. “But he is also much like a spoiled child, an infant accustomed to receiving his mother’s teat each time he cries.”
“Should we come across one,” Micah asks, loading a fresh magazine in the changing bag as they drive, “how close should we get?”
“For your cine-film preservation project?” Mishi holds thumb and forefinger together like a chef deciding how much salt to add to a pot of stew, then spreads wide the distance between the digits. “We’ll see. Wait for a signal from your king.”
The set for the shipboard slave rebellion, which wouldn’t have passed muster on the auditorium stage of an elementary school, looks convincing enough when seen through the viewfinder. A platform the dimensions of a king-size bed, an old piece of railing borrowed from Späten’s ship, a white sheet for the ship’s sail, all of it docked at the lip of the bathing pond, doubling for the Atlantic. Framed correctly, edited cunningly, augmented by postproduction trickery, there’d be a ship where there was no ship. This thin slice, this cardboard cutout, would carry the authority of oceans.
Playing captain was Spiro. Planted atop a costume crate, photographed from below, the first assistant director with his flinty, long-distance stare looked authentically seafaring, the gray in his face the color of a man who hadn’t seen a woman, a citrus fruit, or a strip of land in many months.
“Feels like we’re kids playing dress-up,” says Early, stripped to the waist and covered with berry juice, lash marks blooming across his spine like a perverse family tree. “Just making things up as we go.”
“That’s a good sign,” says Izzy, who recognizes the feeling: doing all the prep work so you could be relieved of it and be fully in the moment, alive and in sync with a world of spinning plates, where the off-the-cuff, the spontaneous, the improvisational, ends up flicking at the important stuff—becomes the important stuff.
“Arrgh, slave!” Spiro says, standing with hands on his hips, his shooting coat flaring behind him magnificently in the wind. “Why did Lincoln pick his nose?”
“Fuck you, midget!”
“To free the boogies, arrrrrgh!”
“Midget, I’m going to drive a nail into your neck this next shot.”
“Save something for the performance,” Izzy suggests, laughing to himself that here they were, a gallery of misfits—a black kid, a Jew fairy, and a circus freak—halfway around the world, pulling levers on the American culture machine.
With Till out of commission and Spiro and Early appearing in nearly every shot in this sequence, Izzy was depending on Cri to serve as best boy, meaning the prince would be responsible for handling props, taking meter readings, and negotiating reflectors for lighting continuity as the sun wheeled around the afternoon sky. Watching Cri begin to grasp how and why they were shooting things in fragments, out of chronological order, at variable focal lengths, inviting the prince into an understanding of Izzy’s visualization process and the secret pride he took in his technical expertise—it all afforded the cameraman a kind of voluptuous pleasure. Izzy, sensing how Cri was understanding the fundamentals of montage, how discontinuous units of dramatic action would later be stitched together through the miracle of the new art, was beginning to believe that the mad project had the potential to transcend language and culture.
“Shiver me timbers,” Spiro grumbles, watching Izzy and Cri go about their work with unabashed affection. “The jungle is atwitter with rum, sodomy, and the lash!”
“Yes it is!” Izzy says, the headlights of his soul all lit up, kissing the African boy on the nape of the neck as he brushes past. “Yes it is!”
The lion is sleeping when they come upon it in an open yellow field. King Mishi is first to spot the animal, uttering a single, satisfied syllable: “There.” They steal up to it slowly, killing the engine and leaving the automobile doors ajar as they exit the vehicle a few hundred yards away, dust clouds ringing their trouser cuffs as they step into the scene. The Akeley is in Micah’s hand, the rifle in Castor’s. Though the situation is one of tremendous displacement, the men feel safe in the presence of the king, who moves with a dancer’s surety toward the astounding vision, his glinting yellow robes rhyming with the lion’s coloration, the gold of cold beer at a ball game on a sunny day.
With the animal lying on its side, its torso rises and falls like a baby’s cradle, and the men are lulled and disarmed by the gentle rhythm. Afforded the luxury of examining the lion at rest, they first appreciate the animal less as a living being than as a startling contribution to the physical universe, things made more interesting and threatening for containing impressions of the uncanny and disjunctive.
Waves of color bring finer definition. There are oranges and whites and pinks and blacks—deepest black around the eyes and snout and feet—the rough, porous pads on the underside of the animal’s paws suggesting something prehistoric, cracked, crumbling. The lion’s mane, however, looks soft and cottony—what you might use to pad a basket before sending a baby down the Nile. Then the arrival of shapes. The animal’s face is enormous—the head half the size of its body—and a surprising, elongated distance exists between its close-set eyes and boxy snout. The tail, the thickness of Micah’s forearm, has a life independent of its owner, swatting away lake flies and swinging regularly even while the animal is at rest. In its length the lion is as big as a good-size sofa, its shimmering velvet suggesting a couch you might find in a sitting room at Versailles.
Raising twin forefingers like condu
ctor’s batons, King Mishi indicates that the others should stay put while he makes an initial investigation, sun-dried grass and twigs on the ground crackling like hay as he approaches the animal. His heart keeping steady percussion, a powerful memory of fear-conquering returns to Micah: daring himself as a child to sit in the front seat of the Chase Through the Clouds at Brighton Beach. Time’s same unwinding occurs to him now. He recalls the slow, sinister cranking as the roller-coaster carriage yanked uphill, dragging him toward the pivot of fear. The conjoined, rising sense of dread and exhilaration as he inched his way up at that unlikely angle, street life, seascape, and buildings disappearing from his field of vision as he was pulled higher. Then a terrible leveling-off and a moment of looking out from that marvelous height as he was pushed far over the tracks, seemingly set free of the rails. And, finally, a roaring animal release, relief bursting from him like clouds of confetti as he lifted a few inches up and off his seat, gasps flying free as he punched his way downhill, the awesome sense of transcending ancient forces and fears as, the first drop triumphantly surmounted, he rocketed along reborn a faster, better, braver Micah.
The camera lends him courage now. Micah raises the Akeley to his face, sockets his eye to the viewfinder, and begins operating the instrument. The otherwordly vision is immediately tamed, subdued, made less threatening, through the distantiating filter. And it is as soon as Micah begins cranking the mechanism, as soon as frames of emulsion start making their Icarus pass through the shutter to get stamped by light’s imprint, as soon as that inch-wide rectangular frame is tossed over the animal’s image like a net, that the lion’s sleepy eyes open and it lets rip a yawn that wouldn’t be out of place during a late inning of a dull ball game. Rousing itself, the beast lopes somnolently, its head upright, duly taking note of the strangers and their varying distances from itself. He looks weary, heavy-lidded, like a middle-aged accountant handed a folder of tax returns to file just before day’s end. The animal remains complacent, drowsy even—nothing more than a big house cat sitting on a windowsill contemplating a bird on a telephone pole—until it registers that it is being photographed. Locking eyes with Micah through the mechanical intermediary, the animal communicates its outrage with a slowly raised lip that exposes a terrible length of incisor. Having made its displeasure known, the lion inhales, bringing the volume of its chest to full immensity. Then, slimming itself, the animal rears back on its hind legs and catapults through the air.
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