They Do the Same Things Different There
Page 22
One might have expected that there would have been a pronounced propagandist element to the films. But the Ottoman Turks are never referenced, and instead what is offered to us is cheap comedy and heightened melodrama. The longest extant extract—and, sadly, one of the most tedious—is a case in point. A moustachioed villain, sniggering silently to camera, ties a damsel in distress to a set of railway tracks. The damsel is left there for no fewer than six minutes of static inaction, as we wait for a train to come and flatten her; however, since we are many centuries shy of the invention of a locomotive engine, it is unclear how much jeopardy the girl can really be in. The tracks are not the important part; it is the villain. Wearing a gabardine common in fashion at the time, he looks like an everyday Byzantine. He’s not given a turban, or a Muslim beard, or shifty Oriental eyes. It’s the ideal opportunity for the filmmaker to identify and feed off a common threat to the audience, but it refuses to do so; even in its monsters, Byzantine cinema remains stubbornly domestic.
Many eyewitnesses recorded the siege of Constantinople for posterity, and the most celebrated is George Sphrantzes. Sphrantzes recounts the conflict from a mostly militaristic perspective, and pays depressingly little heed to the day-to-day to and fro of the thriving visual arts scene. Nevertheless, he does record in his diary how, one evening, shortly after the siege had been raised, he was ushered into a big hall alongside some other hundreds of citizens. There he took a seat, and the windows were covered with sacks, and the room was cast into darkness. He describes an expectation in the audience, something apprehensive, like fear, but more pleasurable than fear. And then, at the end of the room, facing them all, a large piece of white cloth was illuminated. He writes: “At first I thought there was a stain upon it, and then the stain enlarged, as if by magick.” It was no stain; it was the image of a horse and cart, and its approach toward the camera. George Sphrantzes describes the awe and wonder as the “moving painting” flickered upon the makeshift screen—and then the rising panic as it became clear that the horse and cart were coming directly at them. People rose from their seats; they stumbled toward the exit; they fell over in the darkness—if they didn’t escape, within minutes the cart would reach them and there might be an irritating bump. Sphrantzes records how the authorities arrested the man in charge of the exhibition for disturbing the peace.
No name of any actor has survived the fall of Constantinople. But the name of that man has survived, and he must be regarded as the first maverick genius of cinema. His name was Matthew Tozer.
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It is all too easy to be seduced by images of the Byzantine Empire as a thing of great glory. That was true at its zenith, but its zenith was centuries past. By the time the Ottoman Turks lay siege to Constantinople, the empire had shrunk to little more than a city state, and the population within were a random ragtag of different nationalities from different backgrounds. Matthew Tozer (or Toza, or Tusa) was probably a Greek Cypriot, but his name is peculiar and no one can say for sure. There is no physical description of the man. There is no record of his beliefs, or anything he stood for—save his obvious love for the cinematic medium.
It is not even clear what Tozer’s part in the craze was, merely that he was at the very centre of it. Had he invented the principle of moving photography himself? Was he instead the director of the films, exploiting someone else’s discoveries? It is possible that he merely ran the cinema in which the movies were shown. Scientist, artist, entrepreneur—scholars argue which of them he may have been. Maybe there is no single Matthew Tozer. This essay does not purport to take any great interest in specious biography. For simplicity’s sake we shall assume Tozer is all three rolled into one: not so much a man, but a personification of a new art form. We can never know Tozer the individual; let us instead study Tozer the wave of revolution.
The earliest account we have of Tozer is what we now refer to as the “Horse and Cart Debacle.” Punishment in the middle ages was typically severe, especially in times of military crisis. But within days Tozer has been freed, and moreover, is showing new films, we can only suppose with the blessing of the authorities. Sphrantzes writes again, after a turgid account of a day setting up the city’s defences, and his concerns of a maritime engagement with the Turkish fleet: “And, in the evening, to the picture house, there to see a comedic play about three men and a mule. Silly stuff. Amiable.”
Sphrantzes might dismiss it as silly stuff, but it is clear that Tozer was doing something right. He set up a cinema just a stone’s throw from the Hagia Sofia, and there he’d show the latest movie releases—and the people of Constantinople began to flock to them in droves. It is important to remember what siege conditions were like in the fifteenth century. They were frightening, yes, and they were desperate, and they were hungry, but mostly they were very boring. With the Ottoman Turks on one side, and a naval blockade upon the other, there was really very little for the Byzantine folk to go and do in the evenings. However silly the movies on offer may have been, the distractions they provided were hugely popular, and tickets became highly prized; one anonymous commentator writes that to get in to see one particular blockbuster, a family bartered a week’s supply of precious bread. Tozer was forced to put on more and more screenings, sometimes letting his cinema run all night until dawn. He employed janissary bands to accompany the films with the music of harp, lyre, and zither; he employed young girls to serve sweet snacks in the intervals.
And what Tozer was accomplishing was not merely artistic, but also sociological. Because if these citizens of a dying empire were merely desperate stragglers with no real identity, here, at least, they could find something that unified them. They could sit in the dark together and laugh and cry as one collective. Is it too much to hope that at last they discovered that they had more in common with their fellow man than they had realized—that the same stunts thrilled them, the same custard pie fights kept them amused? Is this the irony of the end of the Byzantines, that only in their final days they became a proper people?
As for Tozer, he appears to have worked tirelessly. With almost superhuman energy he released several new movies a week, filming them during the day and presenting the results on screen once the sun went down. To satisfy the appetite of a citizenry starved of entertainment, he produced an oeuvre that makes Steven Spielberg look like some dilettante hobbyist. And with the introduction of a new art form, inevitably the people are inspired; they are no longer content to be mere spectators, they want to take part in the art form too. Sphrantzes complains, but when does Sphrantzes not complain? He writes that the most pressing concern the Byzantine population faced was the Muslim hordes outside the gates, and that work should be done repairing those gates, building new walls, training all able bodied men to fight. Instead everybody wanted to be an actor, to star in the movies, to see themselves flicker on the white cloth screens, to be famous, to be adored.
The greatest tragedy of the fall of Constantinople is that not one frame of Matthew Tozer’s masterpiece, The Ten Commandments, survives. A true epic, it ran for nearly six hours, and used over a thousand extras. It was a gamble on Tozer’s part; to find time to make it he had to close the cinema for three full days, and there was civil unrest and small-scale rioting whilst the people were left starved of their fix. But the gamble paid off. It is a testament not only to Tozer’s vaulting ambition but to his commercial canniness—even if you weren’t in the movie yourself you knew someone who was, and if you saw only one movie that season it had to be The Ten Commandments! The sets, by all reports, were sumptuous. The cast were on peak form. And the special effects were remarkable: to achieve the parting of the Red Sea, Tozer had used up a half of the besieged city’s water supply.
It was Tozer’s greatest achievement. Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos took time off being the champion of the Orthodox Church to attend the premiere, and had even taken a cameo role as a burning bush. Could Tozer have suspected that it was all downhill from here? And that all that ambit
ion would prove his undoing?
iv
On 29th May 1453, the Ottoman Turks broke through the walls of Constantinople. Their troops numbered some one hundred thousand to the Byzantines’ seven thousand. The Turkish flag was flown from the battlements, and many of the Christian defenders lost heart. Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos himself declared, “The city is fallen and I am still alive,” and he tore off his purple cloak of majesty, and entered the fray as a common soldier. His body was never found. The Byzantine people fought bravely, but with a certain dispassion perhaps, a certain defeatism.
The talkie movies had not been a success.
Matthew Tozer had been experimenting with sound for a little while now. He would have the orchestra time their drum beats to the exact moment an explosion appeared on screen, to give the impression that the bang had come from the movie itself. It was witty, but it was a gimmick, and the audience enjoyed it as a gimmick. When at the end of May Tozer announced the premiere of the first proper talking picture, with full dialogue and a pre-recorded score, the people were incredulous, then doubtful, then baffled.
Some extracts survive. As film historians it is impossible not to appreciate what Tozer is attempting. But in practice, as casual viewers, we would have to judge it doesn’t work. Tozer has not found a way to make the sound sync accurately to the image; it is rarely more than a second or two out, but that jarring second makes everything seem imprecise and unreal, even eerie. And the voices of the actors are not what we might expect. We see the tramp again. In the silent movies he demonstrates a charm that is both winning and humane. In the sound rushes, he reveals he has a high-pitched voice like a strangled dolphin. The charm is gone. So, too, is the illusion.
As the Turks invade, so Tozer’s picture house is burned to the ground. It is not clear whether the Turks or the Byzantines are to blame.
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Matthew Tozer’s fate is unknown. Many people fled the city, and there is every chance that he too might have escaped. But if he did, there is no record of his attempting to make any more films. Either Tozer becomes like Emperor Constantine, one of those anonymous casualties who were lost in the battle—or he survives, in exile, disillusioned, thinking himself a failure and his art form a failure, rejecting his talents and never returning to them for as long as he lives.
Is it wrong to hope that he was butchered by Turks? Is it wrong to wish for him that one little mercy?
Historical opinion has turned against Tozer in recent years. The argument is that without his interference the population would not have been distracted, and would have been better prepared to repel the Ottoman conquest. Professor Kettering has even published his theories that Tozer was a Turkish spy, deliberately undermining the morale of the Byzantines from within with his dreadful movies; it is a theory that I find at once both absurd and heinous, though nothing Kettering says anymore should surprise me.
What is harder to dispute is Tozer’s legacy. Sadly, it is negligible. The footage of Tozer’s movies was only discovered in a basement in Ankara in the 1920s. By the time Tozer’s advances came to light, the motion picture industry was already in full swing. The great filmmakers of the 1890s, Lumière, Michon, Méliès, all reinvented cinema without ever realizing Matthew Tozer had been there first. Mack Sennett produced his movies without Tozer’s influence; David O. Selznick, head of production at RKO Pictures, famously viewed the recovered prints of Tozer’s films, shrugged, and asked what all the fuss was about: “It’s already been done.”
And yet surely we cannot write off Matthew Tozer as a failure. We must not.
When we see the history of the world put before us, it’s easy to think it’s just a catalogue of wars and genocidal atrocities. Of peoples conquering peoples, and then getting conquered in turn. That the development of Mankind has been nothing more than an exercise in studying new acts of brutality to be turned against still larger sizes of population. That, in effect, all Mankind’s inspirations are directed toward evil.
But what then of Matthew Tozer? What then of that spark to create, to produce art for art’s sake, if only because it wasn’t in existence before? To take a population and want not to decimate it or enslave it, but instead crowd it together, into one room, into the dark, and make it laugh? And maybe with Matthew Tozer the spark didn’t die. Maybe the spark lasted out the centuries, just waiting for the right conditions in which to take fire. Maybe, in spite of all, Matthew Tozer and the better impulse will win out.
We can speculate. And, oh, we can speculate, we can imagine, we can dream. Sometimes I think that’s the true gift Matthew Tozer left us.
YOUR LONG, LOVING ARMS
In the end it was the afternoons that were killing him. The evenings were fine. The evenings he could cope with. He wasn’t working in the evenings, it was true, but that was okay, lots of people didn’t work in the evenings. He’d play with Ben a bit, like a normal dad, might read him a bedside story if Ben fancied it. Like a normal dad, and in a normal family too, he’d cuddle up with Cheryl on the sofa and they’d watch a spot of telly, and at last Cheryl would say that she’d best get to bed, she had to be up early in the morning. And he’d go with her, though he didn’t have to be up early, not anymore. And mornings were okay. He could ignore the mornings. At quarter past seven the alarm would wake them both, and Cheryl would kiss him on the head, and tell him she loved him, and get up to rouse Ben. At first he’d get up when she did, but she said there was no need—Steve, she’d say, why not lie in? Steve, you may as well lie in. And so he’d lie in, and shortly after eight he’d hear Cheryl and Ben leave the house and close the front door behind them. For the first few weeks he’d doze until nine-ish, then nine thirty. Recently though he’d crossed the line; as he lay buried in the darkness he’d tell himself that so long as he was up by noon it’d be all right, that’d still mean he wasn’t sleeping the entire morning. He wouldn’t need to feel guilty, he’d still be normal. But now he was finding he wasn’t opening the curtains ’til as late as twelve fifteen, even twelve twenty once. And as he’d blink out into the sunlight, he’d see that the world outside hadn’t ended, the world had continued without him, and he was now firmly stuck in the afternoon, and it weighed down his very soul.
Yeah, in the end, it was the afternoons that did it for him. That and the conversation he’d had after dinner one evening. Steve had asked Ben what he’d been up to at school that day, and he enjoyed doing that, Ben was always full of stories of new games he’d learned and new friends he’d made. But Ben just looked at him curiously and said, “What did you do today, Daddy?” And he didn’t have to justify himself to Ben, and Ben didn’t even want to be justified to, he didn’t really care, an hour before bed on the Xbox his grandparents had bought him would keep him happy. But Cheryl had just said, “Yes, Ben, ask your Daddy what he’s been up to today.” And there was nothing accusing in it, it was as calm as you like, he couldn’t even see Cheryl’s face, her back was turned as she did the washing up. Steve hadn’t answered, and there was an awkward silence—well, awkward to Steve, Ben didn’t seem bothered, and Cheryl, Cheryl was still giving fierce attention to the dinner plates. Then Cheryl said something else, it didn’t matter what, and it was just as neutral, and the subject was changed. They didn’t mention it again; he didn’t apologize for being out of work, and she didn’t apologize for making him feel bad about it; they cuddled on the sofa, watched TV, then went to bed when Cheryl said it was time.
That weekend he went for a drink with Ray. Ray had been laid off the same time he was. He hadn’t seen Ray for a while; at first they’d meet for a pint every few days, and they both took some comfort from that, in shared anecdotes and shared recriminations. But that was back when his unemployment had seemed like a temporary inconvenience, when deep down Steve believed the management would phone him up one day to say sorry and offer him his job back. “Why not give Ray a call, see if he’s up for the pub?” Cheryl would say sometimes, and she’d take a tenner
from her purse and hold it out for him. And he knew it was his money too, really, some of that was his dole, but it felt like pocket money. Besides, he found Ray hard to face these days. He feared Ray was coping better with his redundancy than he was. But that weekend Cheryl had pressed him, maybe she felt bad about the dinner incident, “Go on,” she said, “have a treat,” and waved the tenner in front of him. So he phoned Ray. Ray got in the first round, and he told Ray what he’d been planning. “You must be joking,” said Ray. “We’re skilled labourers. We’re engineers. You wouldn’t catch me working in a fucking garden.” And Steve didn’t dare tell Ray that garden shifts came later if you were lucky, they started you off in public parks and forests. During the second pint, Ray said, “What you’re forgetting is. That it’s not our fault we were let go. It’s not our fault.” During the third pint, Ray asked how much the Tree Scheme would bring in, and then said, “Christ, we’ll get more than that staying on the dole.” And Steve said that it wasn’t about the money, it wasn’t about fault, it was the afternoons, the afternoons were just getting longer, didn’t Ray find the afternoons were getting longer and longer and there was no end to them? And Ray finished his pint, and said he’d go along to the training with him. You know, just to see what it was like.