Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  How much do you know about silver nitrate film?”

  I pushed back the urge to say It’s Ms., not Mrs.; evidently, he’d seen my wedding ring and made up his own mind. “It explodes?”

  “Somewhat volatile, yes, which explains why it’s no longer in use. Because, amongst other things, the nitrocellulose stock would occasionally ignite when run through the gate of a projector. The silver in the emulsion would act as an accelerant, continuing to burn until the film was entirely consumed, and leaving very little trace behind. Doesn’t require oxygen to stay alight, either; it’ll keep burning completely underwater, at over three hundred degrees, and it produces toxic gases. It was a nitrate film fire that caused the Dromcollogher Burning in Ireland in ’26—forty-eight people killed outright, many more injured. Burned the entire building to the ground.”

  “That still doesn’t explain what happened to Mrs. Whitcomb,” I said.

  “No, it obviously doesn’t. But at the time, people genuinely thought that silver nitrate fires were so hot they could consume a human being entirely—somewhat like spontaneous human combustion, to cite another, equally foolish superstition.” He settled back in his armchair. “Interesting you asked about her little hobby, however; far more people making ‘flickers’ at home than you might think, especially if they could afford the equipment. But that was something else they made me take out—wasn’t relevant, they said.” He snorted.

  I came close to spilling it all then, betrayed by that excited delight you feel when you realize, yes, somebody else knows about something you thought only you had stumbled across, that you’ve finally met somebody who’ll understand. But at the last second, I chose not to—clinging, still, to the dark ambition at the core of that excitement.

  It was my name on the line, here. Balcarras had had his day.

  “They’ve recently recovered a few fragments of stuff they think she might have produced,” I said at last, which was not technically untrue. “From 1914 to 1917, by preliminary dating.”

  Balcarras nodded, unsurprised. “Hadn’t heard about films, per se, but I do know she shot footage at Kate-Mary des Esseintes’s performances, her ‘Thanatoscopeonic Resonance Gatherings’—documentary records, to prove these things she and her group got up to were real.”

  (As mentioned in Balcarras’s piece above, des Esseintes was a North Ontario spirit medium, fairly famous at the time, somebody who’d followed the Fox Sisters’ lead and combined Spiritualist beliefs with public demonstrations, though she mainly did cabinet work and ectoplasmic materialization rather than simple table-rapping. She formed the community centrepoint for many contemporary Spiritualist “seekers,” with Mrs. Whitcomb one of her most fervent supporters, financially and otherwise.)

  “Of course, by that time, Mrs. Whitcomb was also enmeshed with Kate-Mary’s little protégé, the one she adopted, later on . . . Vasek Sidlo. Fifteen years old at the time and sightless since birth, supposedly. Kate-Mary called him an imagist—spirit photography, all that. He was going to be her link with the new generation of Spiritualists, their very own Edgar Cayce, or what have you. And Mrs. Whitcomb was quite besotted with him too, though in a different way, of course.”

  “Are you saying they were—involved?”

  “Oh, no no no!” He waved his hands. “Not on her side, at least; she had a very maternal interest in young Vasek, probably because he’d been brought up in the orphanage her mother had founded. And just like with Kate-Mary, she thought he might be able to get her closer to solving the mystery of what had happened to poor Hyatt. . . .”

  “But on Sidlo’s side?”

  “Well, she was beautiful, everyone agrees on that. It’s too bad no one ever took pictures, before the veil.”

  “He was blind, though.”

  “Supposedly. And even so—blind, not dead.”

  At the time, I thought Balcarras had gone off on a tangent, obsessing on gossip so old it was almost mummified. However, as with so much about this story, I’d eventually find out otherwise . . . but not until much later.

  “What do you think happened?” I asked, flipping open the last page of my notebook.

  “With Mrs. Whitcomb? Might’ve been a multitude of things, some more likely than others. But I’m inclined to think she took the easy way out—just stepped out of the wreck of her life, doffed her famous veil, and left by the doors, along with everybody else. Without the veil, no one would ever have recognized her. She’d have been free.”

  “Free to do—what?”

  “Oh, I’d like to believe she settled down, changed her name, had more children. Anything but the obvious.”

  “Which is?”

  “That train was going full speed, Mrs. Cairns. To get off mid-jaunt would have been suicide, literally. But then again, maybe that’s what she wanted, eh? To be with her boy again.”

  “Best-case scenario, sure. If he was even dead.”

  “Exactly. We don’t know—and odds are, we never will.” Balcarras shook his head, sighing. “Poor girl. Poor, foolish girl.”

  We sat there together a moment while I tried to think of anything else to ask. Then he leaned across the table, giving what he might have thought was a charming leer. “You’re very easy to talk to, my dear,” he told me. “Who was it you said you wrote for, again?”

  Lip Weekly I could have said, at one point; Deep Down Undertown, had I wanted to tell the truth. Instead, I found myself blurting out, before I could think better of it: “Oh, well . . . these days, myself, mainly. I guess.”

  “No publisher’s contract yet, eh? All this work done on spec, so to speak?”

  “Not really, no. And—yeah.”

  “Hmmm.” He patted my hand, as if in consolation. “Something to look forward to then.”

  I walked back from Balcarras’s Cabbagetown house with my mind racing, eyes full of stars from suddenly re-emerging into daylight from the dim, paper-parched atmosphere of the old man’s book-lined office. I was organizing words in my head, cutting and pasting, trying to figure out where to put what I’d learned. Chapter One, maybe? How long could I make people wait, trusting them to read along while I blathered toward some point, without even a hint of the mysteries to come?

  These narrative structures have to be thought out beforehand, you see—strategized, methodically, according to content. Because a story, in the main, dictates its own telling.

  In hindsight, it wasn’t my fault that I just didn’t know what kind of story I’d been dropped into, head first and kicking.

  That book I thought I was writing would’ve made my meandering parody of a career: as a former film critic and pseudo-film historian who’d somehow managed to stumble into teaching the subject for ten-plus years without the benefit of a film studies degree, or any other sort of qualification beyond an autodidact’s instincts allied with having already watched upwards of three thousand movies while taking notes upside-down. It would’ve been a triumphant tale of luck, anecdata disguised as objective fact, like almost every other Canadian cinematic text. The strange but true tale of how, while reviewing a program of experimental films shown in downtown Toronto, I had accidentally discovered that Mrs. Arthur Macalla Whitcomb had apparently made a series of early motion pictures employing special effects techniques similar to those of science fiction and fantasy film pioneer George Méliès—thus making her Canada’s first female filmmaker, and the Vinegar House (not only her home but her production studio) a site of great historical significance.

  Documentaries, awards, speaking engagements . . . everything, all the time. The impossible dream. That book would’ve been my legacy.

  Not this one, though. Not in the same way. Which is just how things work out sometimes—completely the opposite of how you thought they would. The chance comes, and then it’s gone; the moment turns and you don’t know why. Nothing’s ever the same.

  Still, it’s not like I’m not sort
of used to that happening by now.

  The night I saw one of Mrs. Whitcomb’s films for the first time, I’d already made my son cry twice. It was Friday, yet another goddamn P.D. Day—first of a three-day weekend—and as usual it hit me like an unpleasant surprise, because I hadn’t been paying attention. It’d been in his communication book, right there, written down in black and white: Friday off, no school. Make arrangements accordingly. But my mind had been elsewhere, on other things—I’d filtered it away, pretty much the same way he did all the time, with everything.

  “You should’ve asked,” my mom reminded me, as though I couldn’t possibly have connected those dots myself. “You’d’ve probably seen it if you checked the Toronto Catholic School Board website, too. They put notifications like that on page one.”

  “Yes, Mom. I know.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “Because I’m a fucking idiot?”

  “The problem is, Lois, that that just isn’t true.”

  Selfish then, rather than stupid. That we could certainly both agree on.

  That morning, Clark’s brain was full of static. He jumped and ran and laugh-screamed up and down our tiny apartment, caught in a perfect storm of reference and imitation, sliding from Kesha to Star Trek to Frozen to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to various random TV commercials “OH DEAR!” he yelled, as I tried to simultaneously shoehorn him into a pair of pants and force him to eat his bacon. “OH NO! DO YOU WANT TO BUILD A SNOWMAN? SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER! BRUSH MY TEETH WITH A BOTTLE OF JACK! SEXUALLY BASED CRIMES ARE CONSIDERED PARTICULARLY HEINOUS! CEE ESS EYYYYE NEW YORRRRK!”

  I’m aware that it looks pretty funny, written down like that. Sort of like how he always looks cute while doing it, thank Christ.

  Songs and stories, rhymes and repetition—that’s what my son has, instead of a vocabulary. He speaks mainly in echolalia; haphazardly grafting great chunks of memorized dialogue from movies, cartoons, commercials, and songs together to get a point across. Sometimes he succumbs to what I’ve come to call “jazz speech,” imitating the rhythm, pitch, and intonation of a phrase so expertly that meaning completely disappears, treating it like a phrase of music, or lyrics in another language.

  Clark is a lovely child, his teachers write on every alternative report card he’s ever received. Always singing, polite and happy, kind. Clark is a joy to have around.

  To which I can only think, well—in small doses, I’m sure he is. But that “politeness” is mainly imitation, that “kindness” is him choosing to not interact with you, and isn’t it nice that you get to give him back at the end of the day, when his exhaustion and anxiety reach their fever-pitch and he loses every shred of language, however hard-won? When all he wants to do is stamp in a circle and babble, jump up and down in front of the TV, then fall on the floor and scream till we put him in bed?

  And I have help, for which I’m duly grateful. And he’s so much better than he used to be. Better all the time. But every step forward brings new traumas, new difficulties; as his understanding of the world widens, his ability to deal with it fluctuates wildly. He cares what we think, and that’s wonderful, but he also worries, and we have no way to soothe him. He loves us and he shows it, and that’s precious—unbelievably so, considering the women I’ve sat next to in various waiting rooms, unable to tell if their sons even know they’re present, if they can tell the difference between their mother and a nurse, or their mother and a lamp—but he also gets angry when we ask him to do anything more than whatever it is he wants to do at that exact moment, yelling, kicking, weeping. Heartbroken by his own inability to be other than he is, especially when levelled against the world’s inability to do the same.

  And I know how he feels, but it really doesn’t help. Nothing does.

  Nothing ever will.

  “Hey,” I said, tapping his cheek. “Hey! Look at me.”

  “DON’T LOOK AT ME!”

  “I’m going to have to go, bunny. I need—”

  “YOU’RE NOT GONNA HAVE TO GO! DON’T NEED!”

  “Well, wouldn’t it be nice, but I am, and I need you to be—hey! Look at me, Clark. I need you to be good for Daddy, while I’m gone. I need—”

  “DON’T BE GOOD FOR DADDY!”

  “Look at me, and do be good, do you understand? DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

  Which is, and always has been, the question.

  I still remember the day Clark was diagnosed, when the nurse practitioner watched him climb single-mindedly up onto a chair next to the bookcase on top of which she’d stuck the only one of his toys he’d shown any interest in—a talking Thomas the Tank Engine, predictably because little boys with autism love Thomas; it’s the huge faces, the dichotomous freeze-frame mobility of the features, the way you can always tell what they’re thinking. He stood there teetering dangerously, making grabby hands. He knew three adults in the room, all of whom loved him equally, and it never even occurred to him to ask any of us for help, or even “mand” us . . . grunt, point to what he wanted, pull us toward it. He might as well have been alone.

  That this is, in fact, the very definition of the term in question—autism, to be forever alone, either shunning interaction or unable to sustain it—is an irony that is by no means lost on me, or any other parent of a child on the spectrum. But it is what it is—that’s all you can ever say about it, and simply wishing it wasn’t will never make it so. If my aunt had nuts, she’d be my uncle; if things weren’t the same, they’d be different. You just have to deal with it, which I do—mostly. Inadequately, probably, a lot of the time.

  Around the same time we discovered exactly how Clark was, what schools now call “exceptional,” Asperger’s Syndrome—hitherto classified separately—was folded back into the black rainbow of autism spectrum disorders. Since then, people have increasingly lobbied to further extend that spectrum, embracing things like OCD, ADD, and the like, which I can understand, in theory; all of them share a certain amount of apparently infinitely recombinant symptomology, albeit with mysterious and baffling variations, giving rise to the truism “If you know one child with ASD, you know one child with ASD.”

  “We’re lucky,” Simon says, and I agree. Clark sleeps through the night, and always has. He thinks of eye contact as a hilarious game. He has emotional affect; he makes jokes, rudimentary and repetitious though they might be. He is, in the main, sweet-tempered: he doesn’t strike out at others; he isn’t self-injurious. He rarely has full-bore public meltdowns anymore, probably because we know what the danger signs are—crowds, echoing spaces, or having too many choices, or too much noise—and plan around them. Still, we can’t avoid everything. No one can.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if he could just snap out of it?” a supposed Educational Assistant once said to me, at the school just before the one he goes to now. She was an older Hungarian lady, used to babysitting “special” children of a very different variety, raised to the status of professional intervener because they had literally no one else to fill the position. And I remember how passionately angry that comment made me, even though on some level I recognize it’s something I’ve thought myself.

  Wouldn’t it be nice? But he won’t, and I know it. And sometimes it hits me, like a wrecking ball—the fact that my clever, charming boy can’t be fully evaluated in terms of intelligence, because he’s (currently) incapable of taking standardized tests. That at the same age he clings to picture books like Frog and Toad and Home for a Bunny is when I was reading at a Grade Thirteen level (back when there still was such a thing). Those are the times I look at him and wonder if he’ll ever hold a job, ever live even semi-independently, ever love or be loved by someone other than me and Simon.

  Superimposed overtop, I see a future vision of a tall, handsome man with bad teeth (because he won’t brush them unless you make him) and a full beard, wandering down the street singing Disney songs, while everyone around him laughs and p
oints. In the distance I see cops kept from tasing him only by the fact that he’s white. And next to him is myself, a grim little old lady, still leading him through life by the elbow.

  I expect to still be worrying about all this when I die. Which—after all these years of rote, existential dread—has actually begun to terrify me more than simply knowing I’m going to.

  Are my intentions good? I’d like to think they are. But I know myself well enough to know that intent doesn’t always matter, not the way it should. What matters is getting things done, walking the line between caring and micromanagement, the way you would for any other kid. Making them aware that the world is full of other people, all of whom have expectations and most of whom don’t love them, or even know they exist. So I struggle to shape myself for him, to keep all this in mind and work from cue to cue. Because I love him, because he’s part of me. But this is all so far away from what I find natural that, a lot of the time, I find it physically baffling to deal with—I want to reject it, to yell at him, to refuse to play along. And—

  —sometimes, I do. More than I should, no doubt. But sometimes, I just can’t help myself.

  It’s how I’m made.

  Because I was born fucked up, too, and I always knew it, though I guess in retrospect it never mattered quite as much as I thought it did. But my version of fucked up was never going to be enough like his to help us meet in the middle; I come from the other end of the spectrum. And I remember sitting next to my mom, going down the list of Asperger’s Syndrome diagnosis points one by one, showing her how much they reminded me of how I’d been as a child, an adolescent, before socialization kicked the worst of it out of me. “Little Professor Syndrome,” check. Rabid enthusiasms, check. Inability to converse without monologizing, check. Vocabulary far exceeding normal age standards, check. Frustration, check. Inability to form friendships, check. Violent tantrums, check. Self-harm, check. Check, check, check.