O, Africa!

by Andrew Lewis Conn

  “You mustn’t move,” the kindly portraitist instructed, generously obscuring Izzy’s hands behind Micah so the boy could relieve his nervous energy across knuckle and palm. “If you do, the photograph will be ruined.” Though the exposure time seemed endless to the fidgety child, it was the first occasion during which an adult not a schoolteacher or a family member had asked Izzy to participate in some serious undertaking, and Izzy brought all his four-year-old’s concentration and fixity to the task.

  It was this image of his parents that had appeared to Izzy that day in the field with Cri, his mother and father looking out at him from that formal studio portrait taken twenty-odd years ago, goggle-eyed, having done all they could to prevent themselves from blinking, less a Jewish family from Brooklyn than a stunned school of netted fish.

  “It’s a way of preserving the present,” his father explained afterward, “like your mother canning peaches for the winter.”

  No it’s not, Izzy thought now, witnessing shovelfuls of African earth being laid atop his fallen friend, the cameraman tempted to memorialize the scene with nothing more than its vanishing visual imprint. It’s so they’ll remember what you look like when you’re dead.

  THIRTEEN

  Soon their last hours with the tribe were upon them. Under a tree as bent as the crook in an elderly man’s arm, Izzy and King Mishi sit high on a bluff overlooking the village as it continues being battered by waves of wind and rain. It felt to them all that entire seasons had transpired since the company’s arrival, but the truth could be measured by a single moon passing from ripest fruit to thinnest melon slice. They couldn’t stay.

  This was a pact unspoken between the men until the day after the funeral, when Micah told Izzy, “I’ve made contact with Bloat. Späten will be here in two days. You should tie up any loose ends.”

  No one had touched the film equipment since the dual disasters with Spiro and the lion. When Izzy went to retrieve the trunks, buried in a trench near the spot where he had first spotted Cri in the bathing pond, they were covered in mud and slime, a wormy welcome for a pirate plunderer. Izzy had wished everything to be washed away, but upon inspection the film cans appeared safe and dry.

  It was King Mishi who had requested this final private audience with Hiding Feather on the morning of the company’s departure. As he sat on their privileged perch, Izzy was reminded of his meeting with Marblestone atop the Wonder Wheel those many lifetimes ago.

  In the days since the lion attack, King Mishi has recovered much of his strength, drawing vitality from the fallen animal and shaking off a dangerously high fever like a man shrugging out of an overcoat. His left shoulder was badly mauled, a cornice gouged from a mighty doorframe, but this only seemed to add to the glamour of the man, as some ancient statues improve their nobility through lost noses and limbs.

  “If you look inside me, this is what you would see,” King Mishi begins, holding his hand out flat against the landscape and watching clusters of rain perform their chaotic dance, then turning his hand over and sweeping it across the ravaged view of the village, “this grim magnificence.”

  A lava-colored frog leaps into Izzy’s lap. It’s small, no bigger than a dime, with brilliant black polka-dot patterns on its rump, bulging eyes, and self-satisfied cheeks. Izzy guesses from the frog’s phosphorescent color that it’s poisonous, but wanting to remain as close to nature for as long as he can, he allows the animal to sit there, inhaling the earthy earth.

  “I did not have to return, Isidor,” the king says, calling the cameraman by his name for the first time. “After I completed my schooling in the West, there were opportunities never to look back. But home proves a powerful draw no matter how far one travels. Even if one departs physically, home is not something one easily leaves. I suspect that in time you will discover this to be true as well.”

  “King, it would bring me the greatest happiness were I allowed to say good-bye to Cri.”

  “When Talli reconvenes the council, the prince will be judged and punished. Until then, not even his father can intervene. My most favored son, and I am powerless to help.” Water streaks across the king’s face; in the rain it is impossible to distinguish the work of clouds from that of lachrymal glands. “You have developed great affection for each other.”

  “Yes, King.”

  “This is where all good things live,” King Mishi says, placing a hand over the Westerner’s heart. “You will reside there for the prince as well.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Our time together grows short, and there are many things I wish to tell you.”

  “We never meant to hurt you—” Izzy blurts.

  “But by pointing your cine-film machines at the Malwiki, you claimed us. Do you not appreciate that even now? With your camera hanging around your neck like a talisman even as we say good-bye to each other, do you not recognize how the Malwiki will be left so very different from how you found us? How with this invention you slip the lock of time, how with this device you remake yourself as a god? That is not a crime, Hiding Feather, it’s a sin. Do you understand?” He holds Izzy’s hand between his own. “Only time is God. Time is God. Time is God.”

  POT OF TROUBLE 1929 77m/BW w.: Henry Till, Mildred Mack, Ernest Morrison, Marion Lewis, James Wintz. Dir.: Micah Grand. VHS, DVD $19.98 IMPERIAL **½

  Shoddily made, with a distracting preponderance of cheap-looking rear-projection shots, Henry Till’s final silent picture finds his “glasses” character pursued through a patently phony, corrugated-cardboard, back-lot Africa. While there are incidental pleasures here involving a lost expedition and stolen idols, snapping crocodiles and garden-hose snakes, shrunken heads and cannibal kingdoms, they are all of a stripe that viewers have seen done before, and done better.

  If the film distinguishes itself at all, it is for an offhand bit of business involving Ernest Morrison (aka Our Gang’s Sunshine Sammy). The iconic instant of the film—familiar from Academy Awards tribute reels and civil-rights commemorative specials—has Till’s explorer character sharing a bubbling cauldron with the child at the picture’s climax. The pair of them sweating profusely, Till drags a finger down the boy’s cheek: “It doesn’t run!” he marvels about the boy’s dark skin. Innocently repeating the act, the boy answers the man with, “Neither does yours!”

  This challenge is, one suspects, the timid and humorous flip side, forty years before the fact, of “They call me Mr. Tibbs!” and the hothouse atmosphere and bursting attitudes of 1960s American cinema. If there is a great subject here—the terrible treatment of blacks in silent pictures—it is sidled up against only to be eschewed, like a shy schoolboy who brings himself to the dance but is unable to separate himself from the gymnasium wall. The resultant slapstick, while serviceable, is doubly disappointing given that the man in the white suit, at thirty-two, is at the pinnacle of his athletic artistry.

  Text © 2001, Dean N. Crown, Cinema’s Crown Companion, All Rights Reserved

  MICAH J. GRAND (1900–1973), b. Brooklyn, New York

  1923–1925: more than 100 two-reel pictures (including Bothered Blue, The Kenosha Kid, Think Big, American Idyll, Knock on Wood, All the Marbles, Crazy Chester Followed Me!, Drop the Soap, etc.). 1925: Sweet Thirteen. 1925: The Cat and the Canary. 1925: Mr. Bosley’s Busy Ball-game. 1925: Scaredy Spooks. 1926: The Pink Parasol. 1926: Bedtime Story. 1926: Mama’s Boy. 1927: Under the Bandshell. 1927: Girls’ Night Out. 1927: Cops and Robbers. 1927: Nine Lives. 1928: Penthouse Sweet. 1928: Hopping Mad! 1928: Moonshine Madness. 1928: Home Sweet Home. 1928: Quicktime. 1929: Pot of Trouble.

  What are we to make of the tradition of cinematic brothers, those fraternal pairs who begin with the wondrously named Lumières and extend through to our modern-day brothers Boulting, Coen, Dardenne, Farrelly, Hughes, Polish, Quay, Scott, Taviani, Weitz, even, very recently, the siblings Wachowski? Does the bond of brothers—so much competitiveness, so much child’s play—provide some distillation of the roughhouse rivalry, the big-baby boyishness, that charact
erizes our great infantilized industry-art?

  So Micah and Isidor Grand (nés Grombotz), twin sons of a Jewish pediatrician from Brooklyn. Isidor, the more technically minded of the two, pulled from optometry school to serve as director of photography for his brother’s pictures. And Micah—as big-spirited, precocious, and anti-intellectual as Welles, separated from the more prodigious artist by just fifteen short years and a premodernist sensibility—a teenager hustling his way onto Brooklyn’s Vitagraph studio lot, charged with helming two-reelers by the time he’d turned twenty, his first feature at the ripe age of twenty-three.

  If Grand is little celebrated, little known, the question begs to be asked: What to make of the midlevel directors of the silent era, the journeymen and craftspeople who sprang up and pressed the medium forward an inch or two when the movie industry more closely resembled factory work than picture making? How best to honor those poets of pie, kings of custard?

  For Grand was a talented shooter, restricted neither by literature (there’s not an adapted play, story, or book in the bunch) nor by the early si lents’ predilection to film a popular stage performer’s “act.” Looking at the Grand brothers’ pictures from the mid- and late 1920s, one is struck by the boldness of their camera movement, the confidence of compositions, the fluidity of action, all of which, in their agility and elegance, both mimic and honor the filmmakers’ finest leading man and on-screen collaborator, the redoubtable Henry Till, the least deviant, least sexed-up, least narcissistic of the great silent clowns. In Quicktime—with its justly famous tour of the old Coney Island and its delightful cameo by Babe Ruth—some pinnacle of silent film artistry has surely been reached. We are here within hailing distance of Keaton’s train, Chaplin’s boot.

  What, then, to make of this? For the directing half of the duo, a final film at thirty and still four decades of living after that! Though the career appears tragically foreshortened by the coming of sound, Mr. Grand enjoyed his forty more years, if not as a second-tier auteur ripe for rediscovery, then certainly as a professional-minded, hardworking artisan. His was a worthy, varied career. Despite the fact that Grand must now be considered a lesser light, he was a wunderkind still, whose flaring and cooling might illuminate the present.

  After the feature work dried up, there was some noteworthy, albeit improbable, agitprop theater in the 1930s and ’40s (including the legendary original Off-Broadway production of Landlord!). There was, later in the 1950s and ’60s, erratic yeoman’s work in television, often in collaboration with his brother, for shows that included The Philco Television Playhouse, The Outer Limits, Route 66, Marcus Welby, M.D., and Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law.

  There also was work that was better than good: The Grand brothers were there with cameras on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for Marian Anderson’s historic concert in 1939. Six years later they were among the first to bring to the world documentary proof of the death camps. And they returned to the shadow of the sixteenth president again, twenty years later and not quite yet elderly, to record Martin Luther King Jr. recount his great dream and its suggestion of a new America that might lie open and in wait. A sophisticated visual and moral intelligence, then, belied by a relatively thin filmography.

  One last thing: The tale of the tape is framed by curious feature-length bookends, 1925’s Scaredy Spooks and 1929’s Pot of Trouble. If in the first picture Till’s “glasses” character engages in the usual race-baiting inside the sheet- and flour-filled confines of a haunted house peopled by minstrel-show servants, in the second one, set in a Hollywood back-lot Africa, there are stabs at a tentative reconciliation of the races that still jangle.

  More provocative still is the rumor of sequences for a film shot on location in Africa and of a very different picture straining to be made. Let the record show that Grand, his cameraman brother, Till, and a small film crew did in fact sojourn in and around the Congo region for some weeks in 1928–29. And from that trip the Grand brothers promised to generate a catalog of stock sequences of the African bush for the financially imperiled Imperial Pictures to license to other studios for use in adventure serials and sword-and-sandal beefcake. Let us also submit into the record that during this journey Grand’s longtime first assistant director, Oscar Spiro (after whom, legend tells us, Hollywood’s holiest totem is named), was accidentally killed, bringing the endeavor to ruin.

  What occurred during the making of the mysterious African project? What shape was it meant to take? How did it come to be lost? What these queries suggest most profoundly, perhaps, is that Dream City contains within itself a counterhistory of films lost, pictures collapsed, projects forestalled, fantasy collaborations that never were, and movies neither brave nor insistent enough to force themselves into existence.

  Text © 2007, Dean N. Crown, Crown’s Cinematic Suspects, Third Edition, Expanded and Updated, All Rights Reserved

  ONE

  It was only once Micah had returned—after sorting through a Santa sack’s worth of mail and Marblestone’s telegrammed entreaties; after bills were paid and checkbook was precariously balanced; after lonely, dutiful love was made to Margaret and together at Benjamin’s bedside they endured a vomit-ridden dark night of the soul; after his first hot bath and a proper shave; after all the hooks and clasps that yoked him to his terrestrial existence as a twentieth-century American husband, father, and professional had taken their measure, weighted his resolve, sunk into him, and deposited him like a wriggling fish onto the deck of his daily routine—only once he found himself standing in the browning half-light of Rose’s apartment-building hallway on West 140th Street, not knowing whether she’d still be living there or not, only then did he consider how little the experience might have changed him, how a shedding of skins might also prompt the regeneration of the same.

  The thing that guided him here like the North Star was something he had never mentioned to her. On Rose’s windowsill was a small framed photo of her around the age of five or six, outrageously tomboyish and Afro-headed, looking away but smiling, fiddling with the brass buckle of her pretty blue Sunday dress. Past the accumulated unhappiness and adult disappointment, beneath the layers of bruising sexual experience and learned expectation that had settled over her like sediment, he’d caught glimpses of that girl. Generally Micah loathed indulging in that kind of sentimentality—the world was a blisteringly tough place, childhood an idyll, illusions best left for the screen. But he’d catch her looking at him sometimes in a certain way with what could only be described as hope, and there it was: the tenderness they allowed to pass between them despite themselves.

  She drove him nuts. He had traveled halfway around the world to escape her and invisibly pay homage to her and complete the project of pushing her from memory, and still he couldn’t stop thinking about her. At the outset he was confident they understood the situation in outline: the transaction that was taking place, what each was getting from the other, the contract they had signed. It alarmed him how his emotional equipment was outmatched by the weightiness of this lift. It enraged him to be caught in the gears of this self-perpetuating crazy-making machinery, the whole nagging thought apparatus that just wouldn’t quit. It humiliated him to have become someone who spends his mental hours weighing outcomes and consequences, like a man circling a billiards table lining up endless series of shots he never takes.

  She had taken up permanent residence in his skull, like some terrible tenant who wouldn’t stop complaining. Even three thousand miles away, there was no escaping her dominion. How he hated her for rupturing his certitude and well-being and ease! He’d had better-looking women. He certainly didn’t trust her. She was a grouchy broad and a world-class pain in the neck. He didn’t like her entirely. He loved her completely.

  If she’s in, keep it light. Make like a knock-knock joke, he instructs his folded hand as it disrupts her peaceful door. Micah who? Exactly!

  Her chin is sharper than he’d remembered. His first thought, looking at her beautiful frowning face, is that y
ou could chip ice on it, which makes him crave a drink. Looking at her through a sliver of open door-jamb, he notices how her eyes turn Asiatic when she looks at him, and he marks, too, the determined tilt of her nose, like a speedboat planing through water. She seems unfazed to find him here, his skin now almost as dark as hers, twelve pounds lighter than she’d seen him last. Taking in all of her—her facial moles, her skeptical mouth, her questioning eyebrows, the Egyptian eyeliner, the light brown curls descending like streamers from her dark hive of hair, the modest glint of wedding ring on one of the fingers she brings to her mouth—his months-long menagerie of imaginings superimpose themselves upon the actual. She strikes him now, as never before, as a real-life heroine, a brave woman who a hundred years ago would’ve crossed the frontier by herself in a wagon train, single-handedly fended off a pack of Comanche with a water pistol, given birth alone outside under a bowlful of stars, then opened a can of beans with her teeth, strung a guitar with catgut, and sung songs to her baby by campfire.

  “You got a haircut?”

  “No,” she answers, uncertain whether she is directing the word to his query or to the more general question of him.

  “You had your hair crimped?”

  “Try again.”

  “You let your hair down.”

  “Thanks for noticing. What are you doing here, Micah?”

  “Is that any way to treat a friend?”

  “You promised never to be my friend, remember?”

  “Yes, that’s right. I left my watch.”

  “Why are you here, Micah?”

  “You don’t understand.” Having shouldered his way inside the apartment, the magic amber-lit box as he’d remembered it, but littered, too, with foreign objects—a stained brown jacket hanging slack on a wooden hanger, suspenders draped over a chair, a bottle of whiskey on the kitchen table, a large pair of boxy black shoes—all stamps of another man’s presence. “It’s special.”