On the third day of shooting, our gaffer fell asleep while guarding our gear. Don’t solicit for help with flyers taped over ER urinals. Our equipment was stolen. The rest of us were at Don Don’s Pizzeria, denuding the buffet. Isabel had made soggy, tumorous PB&Js the crew refused to eat. I still owe the Bast Film Department a sizable sum for the equipment.
In our films, the viewer was an abstraction. We scored them with avant-garde saxophone bleating, grunts dubbed from dominatrix tapes, or bizarre narrations determined to develop and defeat a possible story. Nudity was mandatory to get attention in class, so we’d use the middle-aged. Our films were, at their worst, obnoxious pleas for attention, motivated by the fear of failure rather than the pleasure of creation. The artistic process bears any intention. These films were snooty, wooden, and crass. Adulthood begins with the admission of one’s mediocrity.
58.
HISTORICAL PUNISHMENTS FOR ADULTERY
DIR. MADELINE TRADIRE-JONSON
31 MINUTES
Fines, caning, burning, branding. By hanging, beheading, starvation, strangulation, the pouring of molten lead down the throat. Whipping, genital mutilation, impaling. Imprisonment. A fine of ten dollars. Grounds for divorce. To be made to wear a crown of wool to signify the adulterer’s soft nature. The Egyptians cut off the nose. A Tenidean king beheaded his own son with an ax for cheating on his wife. It should be noted, the punishment was harsher for the woman than the man. The tortures of the Ming Dynasty, too cruel to mention. Brands on the face. To be clad in immodest garments and made to stand in the market for eleven days. The law of Leviticus decreed lapidation. According to the code of Hammurabi, the adulterers might be spared if the forgiveness of the wronged was given. Drowning, castration, flaying alive. No dynasties of female rulers exist in the historical record. If one goes back far enough into the fuzziness of thealogy, there are stone fertility icons, in the era of cave paintings. Medea murdered her own children to punish Jason for leaving her for a younger woman. A matriarchy might be as bloodthirsty.
59.
DRIPS OF GLORY
DIR. LI CRASTNER-LI
87 MINUTES
Altarpiece exists as an accumulation of signatures. The successful artist must have a supernatural tolerance for boredom. There are contracts to review, papers to sign, notaries to procure. The liability waivers for shots I have planned took weeks to formulate, even with an adviser, because I refused to reveal them to Jonson, and buried them in a long list of hypotheticals I might like to shoot.
Jonson hired a woman to ghostwrite his columns for the paper. I offered, per usual, to write under his byline, but he was worried I would make him look bad.
I said, Bad? What do you mean, bad?
He said, Naive, underinformed, or overly enthusiastic.
I said, Never.
He said, You have enough to do here.
Jonson insisted I attend an acting workshop with a coach known for mentoring two of the actresses monopolizing award season. He paid the eight thousand dollars without comment. A double-jointed woman in an indigo kerchief ordered us to imagine we were willows, hydrants, toads, gravel, burlap, ice, lettuce, planets.
Next, we played a game called Last Supper. We drew for the Apostles. I was Bartholomew, who has the power to manipulate the weight of objects in folk tradition. The instructor, playing the Sacrifice, informed us that one at the table would betray her. We pulled faces. My gasps weren’t convincing, and I made a note not to be surprised in the film. With my facial difficulties it might be best to stick to neutrality.
During the sack of Rome, two barbarians made to cart off a small statue of Saint Bart from an alcove in a palazzo. To their surprise, it was too heavy to move. Unable to budge the statue, they decided to cast it off of the pedestal to smash on the marble below. It did not budge. They moved on. An aged servant, who had polished the statue for decades, came and removed it to safety.
Like in Da Vinci’s picture, we sat on the same side of the table. Since the ratio of students to apostles was not 1:1, several students were assigned two apostles, which they were instructed to switch between every ten seconds. Beards were offered, robes donned, sandals rejected. My face, communicating low blood sugar, was taken to be pensive mourning.
Day two. Murders, seductions, breakups. An embarrassing incident between two of the students. One did not understand the other was in character. After the second session, I made a deal with the instructor, Dame Judith Badchen-Hannesruck, the costar of A Short Film About Disappointment, that she would report to Jonson I attended each of the ten six-hour lessons if I endorsed her methods in this column. Honored viewer, try her. She is certainly the best acting coach I have ever worked with.
Drips of Glory, a salacious biopic of Helena Cod, the inventor of passive painting, is the best film about an artist. Cod stood in the vicinity holding a brush, allowing a fan to blow drips onto the canvas. She stood by, bored, smoking, talking for hours on her Pinger with the miniaturist George Fubbon. Cod did not have friends. For her final two years she did not leave her apartment, a caliginous penthouse in the Zone. Admirers brought her barbiturates and grapefruit. Despite the tabloid rumors, she was not ill a day in her life. Her body was impervious to abuse. Cod died when a boar’s head fell on her, allegedly while she was pleasuring herself. Maybe this detail was a rumor spread by fundamentalists. Then again, what kind of person would think of such a thing?
Because it has no sympathy for her, the film is a success.
The workshop fructified my stupidity, already abundant. During the remaining sessions, I hid in the projectionist’s room at the Conspicuous. It is has been automated for decades. Mold, an earring. I threw out the rotting pinups and poetry drafts left by degenerate projectionists. I stared at blank canvases I brought along, thinking Bellono’s thoughts.
A mind free of the corruptions of secularity. The night sky was unknown. The eye of god lay behind its lens. How would Bellono subordinate light for his purposes? Neither literature nor orchestral music had been invented. The chains of verse were unforged. The bickering, aspersions, and assassinations of local politics passed for entertainment. Maybe sex, but it was hard for me to imagine sex being pleasurable before bathing was widespread. The rational was trying to wiggle out from under the muffling curtain of spiritual authority. The rational was getting clubbed and burned for its efforts.
Cod’s last words:
Without my canvases, I might’ve been happy but I wouldn’t have been joyous.
60.
LE VOL
DIR. ARMAND GRAISSE
85 MINUTES
My favorite heist film is Le Vol. It is almost a century old. See it Friday, at one, three, five, or seven. The Runaway Seven is programming crime films through the end of next week. The French film crime best, the Spanish childhood, the Italians courtship, the Swedes extinction, and German cinema is undistinguished. Maybe they can have deviancy.
Leon and Birgitte covet the high-test chocolate produced at the Guillory factory, in the banlieue of Levallois. There is a Guillory billboard outside their flop window. Every morning a taunt. Guillory’s cacao beans come from Conejo, a village on the Venezuelan coast. The beans are farmed by a cooperative that Guillory pays an exorbitant wage with the condition that they sell all their beans to him. The terroir of the bean is exceptional. Inferior beans are destroyed by Guillory himself. He smashes them into dust with a small hammer, then uses a small brush to whisk them into a small trash can. Under guard, the beans are shipped to the factory. A single bar is traditionally priced to the cost of an hour with the capital’s best masseuse and a magnum of Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque. Because Leon and Birgitte can’t afford a single bar, they decide to steal it all. A buyer in Morocco, the Speck, is willing to buy the shipment for eighty-eight euros a pound. The price is an insult, but few people can fence a ton of stolen chocolate.
Birgitte’s cousin in Marseilles has a boat for
the crossing. They commandeer a semi. The owner gets his leg crushed under the tire. American crime films support the myth of the well-meaning outlaw, whereas the crooks in European films don’t give a shit. Blame existentialism.
The Guillory factory is guarded by two sooty drunks and two adorable Bordeaux mastiffs. Leon and Birgitte’s curricula vitae, as relevant to the heist, is selling dirty postcards, breaking into a museum of locomotives for kicks, shoplifting puppies, and dashing on a chow mein tab on New Year’s Eve.
A hunk of drugged hamburger sedates the mastiffs. Remi and Henri, the guards, get sozzled on a case of Gaston Chiquet that Leon borrowed from his grand-mére’s cellar and left gift wrapped outside the gate. They wander off for chiens chauds. Birgitte backs the semi onto the loading dock. They load it with Guillory’s finest.
Leon torches the factory to drive up the price of their chocolate bars. Sirens, gunfire, the road. They sleep at a truck stop. On the radio the next morning is news of the crime. Perps unknown, armed. They pull over to try one. It’s an uncomfortably warm September day. When they rip the case open, they find the chocolate inside has melted into delicious, profound, unsalable glop.
The perverts who slash paintings from museum frames, the clumsy jewel thieves, the vault drillers who hit the water main, the bunglers who drop sculpture when skulking from the Vatican during Easter Mass, understand this frustration. It is not the destruction of the object which stings, it is the refutation of one’s organizational genius. Leon disappears at the port. Birgitte repents by apprenticing herself to Monsieur Guillory.
61.
PRETENDERS AND USURPERS
DIR. CHARLIE STEWART
18 MINUTES
Vespasian, commander of the legions of Egypt and Judaea, who took control after Nero’s suicide. Valerian, the first Roman emperor taken as prisoner of war. Claudius; Domitian, who was assassinated and his name condemned to oblivion; Marcus Aurelius. The Pan-African chiefs of staff. Diocletian, who grew sick of the impertinence of the Romans and retired. The Shadow Presidents. Henri, count of Chambord. Edward III, who started the Hundred Years’ War over his claim to the French throne, who had to overthrow his mother’s lover at age seventeen, and who ruled England for fifty years. Henri Arleagen. Charlemagne was not entitled to all of Western Europe. Henry VI, who went insane, came to his senses on Christmas Day, and started the Wars of the Roses. The Stuarts and the Jacobites. Hippolytus of Rome, Celestine II, Clement VIII.
62.
THE BAYOU DREAD
DIR. ARTHUR POCCORA
86 MINUTES
I’m not sure what the purpose of recalling this is. To delight and console myself. A memory is a small fantasy that grows in the repetition. Facts cannot be established. The circumstances of Isabel taking Osvald as a sexual partner is a horror vacui I must fill with conjectures. My complicity in my assassination ought to be mentioned as a preparatory measure, an exfoliation, before forgiveness is available. Saying the words is not the same as forgiving. Flapping one’s arms does not produce flight.
A glacé quip and a pinch on the ass would have stopped their flirtation, but I did not act because, theatergoer, I was curious to see what might happen.
The idea climbed the winzes of Isabel’s unconscious for diversion, as prefatory revenge, as punishment, as attraction. What was the sign given Osvald, what was the nature of the permission, I’ll never know, I know. I can’t not. I have to.
I left them alone to see a matinee. She was to show him her design portfolio. It was The Bayou Dread, early Poccora, and I didn’t want to see it, but the miasma in our apartment made me uneasy. Corrupt summer. The dregs of pollution on one’s body. Women with armpit stains on the bus, men waiting in parking lots. The Bayou Dread sulked after devouring each victim. The prospect of being eaten left them cross, but none could escape their torpor long enough to run away. They grumbled as this limb, then that one, then their head disappeared into its maw.
What was the sign?
Returning from the movies without haste, I found a wine bag on the landing in our back stairwell. A viognier, emptied, poking out from behind a fire door. It was not hidden. The distinction is important. Details matter when one’s conscience is under review. By leaving the bag, Osvald could claim he fired a shot across the bow rather than jabbed an ice pick in the dark. I was given an opportunity to intervene but did not. Isabel was not a drinker due to the stimulants. Things giggled from her control.
A ripe piece of fruit has fallen from the tree. If he doesn’t take it, the ants will. He will starve. Keep it light, with white. How clumsy to bring a warm bag. Chilling would indicate premeditation. Osvald left it behind the stairwell door as a challenge. The wine bag was his idea of being sporting.
I padded upstairs to gore the lock with my key. Not even an odor. Maybe Osvald ran out the front entrance. Unravished Isabel varnishes my lips with her blushing tongue, wondering if she has my attention now. She’s tipsy.
She said, Osvald left.
She said, He made suggestions for the improvement of my portfolio.
I said, That’s an awfully formal way to put it.
Rehearsal. After allowing her to grope me, I retreat to the shower. Her face falls. I’m sorry, Isabel. I am not sure what has happened to me.
Isabel moved out, but I did not dispose of the bag. Every day when I climbed the stairs to my door it remained on the landing, the conqueror’s flag.
63.
GOOD QUEEN BESS
DIR. EDNA RENSINGTON
129 MINUTES
The middle of the week. The door to the office trailer opened. Jonson behind the blooms of his disappointment. It was a performance. He had to demonstrate to himself his feelings or what he would like his feelings to be. Maybe Seel, maybe not.
He said, Sorry, I had business.
Jonson sucked at a pouch of electrolyte gel.
Trouble with Lucretia. A divorce would end Altarpiece. My film would evaporate while Jonson regathered our funds. I’ve contracts lined up, deliveries of ordnance and ribbon, caterers to sample. Matériel is inbound. Bribing the Transit Authority to get cargo precedence. The lens designers will not fear my displeasure in the future if I bow out now. Costumers are on retainer at a motel two nodes out, threatening to mutiny over the bathrooms and linen. Pings begin, Dear sir.
Jonson has a warehouse east of the Zone that he believes is an ideal space for Bellono’s studio. We’d have to rip off the ceiling. The towers of the financial district hoard the light. Also, the warehouse is far from a commercial rail platform. I don’t know how he proposes to get equipment in and out.
He pinged the designer who lit the sumptuous turd Good Queen Bess. The thought of that idiot fondling my light distresses me. It will be all natural light. We don’t need bulbs and filters. Philistines fake what already exists in perfection. Jonson wants to build the set downtown so he can bring his cronies through. The set will be closed. I will not allow any idiots on the set. Passes will be issued, guards posted. Palms cut and blood mingled. Oaths sworn.
He said, Let’s go eat.
I said, Okay. Flip to choose.
He said, I choose, I pay.
A loud night. Fireworks and shouting. Dependence Day. In the Exceptional Conservationists railcar, filled with vines and ferns, we sat with our legs crossed. Jonson is not an exceptional steward of his power, water, refuse. Someone edited his data bracket to give him access to the EC car. Maybe he donated money to a reclamation project and was awarded it as a perk. Us, plus an old guest woman, who was reading. We had disturbed her privacy, which she had earned and we hadn’t.
I said, When you were gone, I sent back the dolly hardware. I decided I did not want a tracking shot after all. The shots should be stationary, like paintings themselves.
He said, You rented a quarter mile of track. Are they going to return the deposit?
I said, I didn’t rent the track, I b
ought it. They are reluctant to accept the return of the equipment since we were hard on it when we shot Equipment Test XI. Specifically the scene that was set on the set of a film, when we had to track the tracking shot, and accidentally crushed the rails under the wheels of the crane.
He said, You need to learn to budget if you ever want to make another film.
I said, Who said I wanted to make another film? I might be making this film for a decade.
The argument dragged on like dutiful weeknight sex. My face Dr. Gachet’s.
He said, I don’t want to talk about this any more on an empty stomach. Every conflict in history was initiated before dinner.
Neu Refectory, Jonson’s spot this month. At a low bar of beaten zinc with ten stools, facing an open kitchen. In the shadows, Jonson and I looked like aging heartthrobs.
Because I do not try to pay, I am his valued dining companion. He can be a pedant. Proper xiaolongbao. Soulful bún bò huế. Veritable knishes. Whores’ pasta. The fantasy of authenticity, that there is a place, a culture, that is realer, that one can go there and partake of the realness.
Jonson donates to hunger charities. He wields the word inanition like the threat of blackmail over dessert, and passes the hat. His dining companions think his speeches in poor taste, coming after his tableside presentation of his Madeira and seedcake, or the profiteroles he has flown to Paris to purchase.
An executive for celebrity narrative management I had met at one of Jonson’s dinners, whom Jonson knew from his fussy, secretive club, told me a story when I ran into him on the rail platform. Jonson had given a pitch for his charity at the club meeting the week previous. The man wrote a check. Displeased with the amount, Jonson called him in the morning and chided him until the man agreed to write one for a larger amount. Jonson’s organization cashed both checks.
A Short Film About Disappointment Page 17