by Susan Daitch
“Once I beheaded a horse and obliterated an actor known for upstaging everyone on the set.”
“Don’t joke with me, Frances. This is one of the most serious projects I’ve assigned to you. Blow this and you can start packing. This is a big job and the future of Alphabet depends on it being done right and both of us getting paid.” Julius took the can out of my hands and replaced the lid.
“What’s going on, what’s so special about these?”
“In 1907 fifty negatives were stolen from the New York office of Star Films. They were never heard of again.” Julius paused, bent his knees, then straightened them quickly in what seemed like a gesture copied from an introduction to a martial arts class, as if he were saying: beginners, stand like this. He often looked as if he were saluting another officer the way Erich von Stroheim did in Grand Illusion.
“What would thieves want with films of unassigned value?” He posed a question to which I had no answer.
“It’s easier to strip copper wires than to extract silver from film emulsion.” I didn’t really know what I was saying, but I wanted to give the impression of participating in the conversation. Not unique paintings, Greek icons, or antiquities from the Aegean which could be held for ransom, these bits were considered the medium of cheap thrills, worthless multiples, and in 1907 no international black market existed for pirated silent films. Why would anyone bother?
“When the lock was picked and the door to Star Films gave, the thief must have been surprised to find little more than chintzy office furniture.”
“How do you know what was in there?”
“I’m guessing, Frances.”
So perhaps like the thief who put a lot of effort into breaking into a bus locker only to find a chewed pencil, he must have wanted some kind of compensation for his work, and just as the pencil was pocketed, so too the films were probably stolen for the sake of taking something. Even negatives whose whereabouts are documented often disintegrate into chips of celluloid, shreds of landscapes and chopped-up figures, pratfalls and botched rescues.
“For the lost negatives of Star Films there was no hope,” Julius appeared to conclude. “There were rumors that the films contained coded military secrets. If people were looking for the figure in the carpet what did they expect to find in Méliès’s fantastic acrobatics? The design of a canon secretly outlined in an underwater fantasy filmed behind a large fish tank, a superfast trigger mechanism clandestinely outlined in the trajectory of a tumbler’s flips, troop maneuvers signaled in Every Man His Own Cigar Lighter?”
I glanced at the newspaper on his desk, comparing the language used to describe crude images fleeing across screens of security cameras to film molecules, particles of nothing eddying into the corners of drawers. Julius cleared his throat. “I’m listening,” I said. When a job arrived Julius often felt he needed to give the staff some history, some background tracing the provenance of the films, but now he was talking about some kind of espionage. When I asked him whether he believed there was something in these old films or thought it was just a rumor, he ignored my question.
“Leon Schlesinger, producer of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, managed to acquire many of Méliès’s prints, believing they would someday be worth a fortune.”
“When did he acquire them?”
“Probably in the late 1930s, after Méliès himself died.”
I imagined a man standing in a room with a view of the Pacific Ocean on a day so bright he pretends he can see Easter Island, the Bikini Atoll, Honolulu, but not Pearl Harbor, not quite yet. He has his back to Europe, but a flood of refugees are working for him, so many that he occasionally feels he’s working not in Los Angeles, but strolling though the Babelsberg studios just outside Berlin. Even the newly acquired Looney Tunes venture, even their comic castles are built on the pratfalls of the Méliès’s canon so there’s no getting away from it, no one can have his feet as firmly planted in the New World as he thinks.
“My mother worked with some Schlesinger people, of course.” Julius cleared his throat again. “When Schlesinger died, his widow kept these films locked up. For years she sat on the Dead Sea Scrolls of cinema, allowing only limited access to Maronites in sunglasses, but finally the archive of prints was released.” Julius waved at stacks of cans and boxes labeled in French and English. I’d seen A Trip to the Moon, but the others were new to me. He pointed to one box as if it contained a bomb.
“These Méliès films have come from all over the world, Frances,” he turned to me. “Do we have enough Wet Gate in stock for this job?”
“We can’t use Wet Gate on these films.” According to the label on the can, The Dreyfus Affair was made in 1899.
Sometimes I’m convinced Julius had a penchant for slickness in all its forms, that his apartment was coated with Formica and shellac, mirrors partially framed by cutouts from soft-core pornography printed on coated paper. As director of Alphabet he always preferred an image with as little visual static as possible, and so Julius loved Wet Gate, a substance that fills in abrasions and scratches. But Wet Gate, slippery and odorless, was no blessing. Every treatment has its risks, and it had been recognized for some time that old films treated with Wet Gate began to take on a Wet Gate look: images processed this way became too perfect and too sharp, as if photographed yesterday. Some felt it was a kind of fluid amber, but the image preserved underneath wasn’t necessarily true to the original.
“Drawn flames may be more believable when applied with dyes and chemicals than when photographed. We’ve seen it happen.” Julius preferred the synthetic choice more and more often. Like overheard conversation you repeat to one friend after another, the dialogue you invent may actually sound more realistic. “A little artificiality can enhance the image and restore accuracy,” he argued.
“1903, 1907.” I pointed to can after can, reading the dates out loud. “We agreed to interfere as little as possible in films made before 1940.” I shook my head in an attempt to make Julius appreciate the gravity of his decision. Some of the cans had notes on them, a short catalog of the other labs the films had passed through. The notes also described how they had been treated and what had been done to them. He held up a film labeled The Dreyfus Affair.
“Captain Dreyfus was tried in-camera.”
I told Julius I didn’t know what that meant.
“In a private, closed room, judged by a committee, not an open court.”
“A secret session.”
“Yes. Listen, no one remembers the Dreyfus trial, but I’ve got a lot of money riding on this project. And pay special attention to the last few feet of film.” Something had slipped. Julius Shute, known for his meticulousness, a conservator committed to each and every film, no matter how obscure the subject, now had glazed eyes. What was he hinting? Alphabet was in trouble and could afford to cut a few corners with multiple payments due, the exigencies and urgencies of the present were shoving Dreyfus and Méliès, Chaplin and Keaton onto a short moving sidewalk and out the door to make way for the next late blockbuster in need of a quick fix.
“Am I looking for codes about nineteenth-century military maneuvers, secret weapons munitions, buried treasure?” As a believer in signs, portents, conspiracy theories, the existence of the thing under the bed, I wasn’t being entirely sarcastic.
“Tell me first if you find anything unusual at the ends of the reels.” Julius was dead serious, his voice dry as bones.
He picked up his papers scattered on the table. Julius seemed oddly calm, like a man so sure of himself as he emerges from his personal helicopter that he forgets he shouldn’t get in the way of the blades when he stands up. Maybe it was a sedated kind of tranquility. Before leaving the room, he repeated the deadline for the restorations, and then I was left alone. It was night by the time I cleared my desk of previous projects and was able to turn to these very earliest of short, silent films. Instead of The Dreyfus Affair, one of the films Méliès made based on an actual event, I unspooled one of his “preconstruc
tions,” those fantastical films that first introduced the idea of special effects.
Every Man His Own Cigar Lighter. A man, a pedestrian with good intentions, is unable to find someone who will light his cigar. He gestures to people on the street as if asking: puts his cigar in his mouth, pushes his face slightly in their direction, but he is ignored. Flaneurs, boulevardiers, and streetwalkers either don’t understand his gestures or think he’s deliberately offending them in some way — since there was no sound track, I was just guessing. Desperate, he creates a double of himself who will light the cigar for him. This one I liked. There are times when it’s impossible to ask anyone for anything, all you can do is rely on yourself, split yourself in two. On the street, you’re too paralyzed to get a word out, everyone passes you with extreme hostility: Who are you? Who do you think you are? Don’t interrupt me with petty needs such as an inquiry after the time or directions. I don’t like your face. Get lost!
In the dark, huddled over a light box holding a magnifying loupe, looking over a strip of film, I talk to myself. What happened to these actors? You’re supposed to be dead, I tell them, you came within an inch of being taken out with the trash years after being lost, stolen and forgotten, lying around in a warehouse or a Looney Tunes archive. They were filmed in a glass house, Méliès’s Star Film Studios on the outskirts of Paris, a building whose interior I imagine as frozen yet full of potential for movement, a structure like the Visible Man who could be assembled and studied, organs glued together or snapped apart. Open jars of paint are blood cells, and Georges Méliès himself is iris, retina, and cataract. Under his critical surveillance set designers who fabricate volcanos, lunar surfaces, underwater wrecks react to his criticism like nerve endings about to explode. I’ve had it, Georges! Piss off! The Oedipus of early cinema, Méliès destroyed many of his films himself, behaving like those long, flexible pencils you see in joke shops that can be bent around to leave a trail of erasure rather than a line of words. What am I looking at? A girl travels to the North Pole in a vehicle labeled Aérobus de I’ingénieur Maboul.
“Hello, is this Frances L. Baum?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Jack Kews of Omnibus Film Archives, London. I’m calling about a film entitled The Dreyfus Affair, which I believe your company is working on.”
“What did you say your name was?” He had said it quickly, as if sneezing one word run together, and he repeated his name just as fast.
“What do you want to know about the film?” I had just gotten to work and was surprised to get a call this early in the morning. I hadn’t yet shut the blinds in my studio or even visited the Mr. Coffee machine. A half-eaten orange lay beside the unused Steenbeck; I hadn’t looked at a newspaper or spoken to anyone in the office.
“I’m in New York, and I’d like to take a look at the footage in your possession.”
“I’ve never heard of Omnibus Film Archives, London.” If this place really existed, I would have known about it.
He rattled off an address that meant nothing to me. His voice sounded youngish, but the Cary Grant mid-Atlantic accent and the politesse of a stranger asking for a favor frayed, and the voice betrayed its American roots. “While Méliès was shooting The Affair, the man who played Dreyfus disappeared, maybe was killed, and I think there are some answers as to how and why in that footage.”
“Whatever you’re going to discover, it’s old information, and you’re talking about a thirteen-minute silent film in terrible condition. It’s not going to tell you much.” Taking off my shoe I rubbed loops into the carpet pile with my left toe. “Anyone alive in 1899 would be dead now anyway, and whoever murdered him would be long gone as well.”
He paused for a long time as if deciding what to answer, then I heard a long, drawn-out yes.
“Look, I know about you and I know about your work, Frances. A film sputters into life; it’s silent, black and white. The figures move in the choppy, disjointed fashion customary to films made in 1899. They wobble and jerk from the rue du Bac, past shop windows crowded with mannequins: half men in high-collared shirts and headless women in long dresses like fluted columns. The crowd turns down a street filled with cheap theaters, garish posters cover the walls with images of acrobats, huge, gaping, laughing mouths, freaks, and so on. Entrance tickets are only a few centimes, and there are a fair number of choices. Which one does the crowd pick?”
“You’re giving me a lot of detail for early cinema.”
“Stay with me, Frances. The crowd descends on one theater in particular. Guess what? Méliès’s The Dreyfus Affair is playing. Because we’re not in real time, but in collapsed film time, the mob is swept in and out of the theater in seconds, but they’ve seen the film, you can assume that. Now they realize Méliès thinks Dreyfus is innocent, and so the mob is enraged. No, he’s guilty! Even the subtitles appear in the jagged lightning-line typeface that indicates urgency and wrath, but maybe even terror, too. Faces are angry, screaming, distorted from grimacing. The jerky figures are yelling, throwing rocks. Angry at the film and the man who made it, they’re rioting: smashing windows, breaking into fisticuffs. When the crowd disperses a man lies murdered on the street, apparently trampled to death, but as the camera closes in you notice a neat wound that would indicate he’s been stabbed.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” Half-afraid he would hang up, I held the receiver close to my ear so I could be sure to hear his answer.
“I made up the film I just described, but after the 1899 screening of The Dreyfus Affair there were riots in the streets; people were trampled to death. The film was banned in France until 1950, and no film could be made about the trial until 1974. The death I just described to you, however, was deliberate, not a random thing, not simply a man who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I believe that after the riots Méliès filmed a second ending that revealed what actually happened to that man and disclosed the identity of his assailant.”
“And you believe these scenes were tacked on to the reel in my possession?”
“Yes.”
I knew something of the story behind The Dreyfus Affair but didn’t really understand how this subject could turn what had previously been a form of cheap popular entertainment into something so incendiary. It was as if an invention associated with gum balls, pinballs, barkers, and shills had traveled to the province of cluster bombs and Molotov cocktails, and did so in little more than a wink. I was skeptical.
“The owners of Looney Tunes were curators of the remains of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, not of Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused, or the real spy, Esterhazy. They made films in which ducks and cats fall off cliffs, are smashed against doors, and bounce back completely. Looney Tunes was as far removed from the intrigues of a nineteenth-century espionage trial as possible. They wouldn’t have been interested.” I imagined cans of film stored in a safe, next to diamonds wrapped in flannel sleeves, securities and bonds, the deed to the house, and a will tucked into a manila envelope, accumulating dust and controversy.
“Just because they owned it doesn’t mean they watched it. It’s in bad shape and can’t be threaded up on any old projector. Even if it were to be screened you have to know what you’re looking for.” He had a point. It was unlikely Schlesinger or anyone else had looked at the film after 1899.
“I can’t just spool to the end. The film is so fragile I have to examine the whole thing first, and I have others I’m supposed to work on before I get to it.” I had opened the can and seen the condition of The Affair. It was possible the end had deteriorated beyond repair. “Give me your number and I’ll call you when I get to it.”
He then hung up on me.
How can you know what’s at the end of a film if you’ve never seen it? I said into the dead phone like some Dagwood Bumstead jabbering into a busted old rotary. I felt oddly numb, as when a relative or friend puts the receiver down, terminating the call with no warning or polite good-bye and you’re left wondering what kind of toes you i
nadvertently stepped on. Who was this Jack with a husky voice who knew my name and what I did? I imagined a man in a T-shirt with holes around the neck, tanned arms, leaning in a doorway and pinging rubber bands into a wastebasket across the room as he spoke.
I pushed the Dreyfus can aside as if it contained a long dormant explosive that could be sparked again at any unpredictable moment, tried to forget about the call, and went back to work on Train-Eating Sun Blinded by Eclipse.
A lewdly winking sun is about to swallow a locomotive when gradually an eclipse with a female face overshadows eyes, nose, and mouth. I began to think about what men did or had done to them in these films, and who or what was assigned a female identity. Comets, selenites, keys, houris, and musical notes were female. An advertisement for Parisian, Love on Credit came to life and the figure of a sinuous woman chased a few men around the set. Devils, astronauts, deep-sea divers, scientists, and planets were usually male, as well as travelers and most of the main characters. Men had things done to them, women were the agency of vexation. Women were more mutable than men, more susceptible to transformations that appeared painless, unlike the men whose bodies split or whose heads exploded. Men were tricked over and over with nothing left to do but raise their hats in order to scratch their heads. There were exceptions to this theory, but on the whole I would say roles were divided along those lines. Whether the stories were driven by the travels of a central character or by plot, the victims and travelers alike were generally men.
By evening I needed to rest my eye and took a walk down the hall. When work is slow Alphabet rents out some of the extra editing rooms. There are ten of them lined up on either side of a short corridor, each one behind a numbered door. They are rented out like any other kind of office space, and none of the doors are completely soundproof. Finding one’s way down the hall, listening as each sound track runs into the next, is like walking past a series of apartments whose doors have all been left open so that arguments, conversations, polemics, and shouting matches can be heard, one after the next. I used to walk to school past one house and then the next, and even if they were dark and locked up, as I walked past I knew what went on in a few of them. In this house a bully slept, a girl who picked her victims at random but with the finality of a court sentence. With the sound of gravel underfoot, breath misting on a cold early morning, I ran past hoping she wouldn’t be sitting on her screen porch or playing with her dog, an oversize highly strung dalmatian named Teency. She didn’t use her fists like scrappy or tough girls, but was a master of the taunt delivered in private when no one else was listening; each one was something you could take home with you and worry about like a time bomb that would go off in bursts over and over.