Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  “It’s just sound work tomorrow, Mom, don’t worry; looping, voice-over, room tone. Safie already took care of editing the clips that go with it, like she already digitized all Mrs. Whitcomb’s films. I don’t even have to look at the screen.”

  “So . . . no visual component at all.”

  “That’s the clear implication.”

  That note in her voice, like: Are you lying to me, Lois? And the answering one in mine: Would I be likely to tell you if I was?

  “I still think you need to slow down,” she said, as though I couldn’t have figured that out for myself.

  “Christ, Mom, I’ve been slow, believe me! I’m off the drugs, eating well, sleeping . . . eight whole hours last night.”

  “A whole eight, huh? Lois.”

  “Look, this is bigger than me, than either of us. This is important. This is real.”

  “You’re real, too.”

  (Am I? Can you prove it?)

  “Well, be that as it may, I’m not gonna get any less real for giving this project the due diligence it deserves,” I replied. “And now I have to go to bed, all right? Got an early start tomorrow, so thanks for your concern, I appreciate it. I’ll be okay.”

  I could tell she wasn’t persuaded, but on the other hand, reassuring her wasn’t my job; this was my job, for now. Thank Christ.

  “Look after yourself,” was the last thing she said to me, before I clicked off. I’m somewhat ashamed to say I’d already disengaged so much from the conversation that I barely noticed.

  Needless to say, instead of going to sleep, I sat up again and set about sifting through the files once more, hoping Mr. Whitcomb might’ve saved some of his darling Iris’s ghost-busting materials. But halfway down the rest of the stack I found something else entirely, shoved vertical: a sheaf of paper folded in half and stitched up the centre to make a rough sort of notebook. The weave was heavy, the consistency fragile, tea-stained and spotted. I could see where the faded ink intersected with its surface, half-absorbed but half not, rendering part of every word a mere whisper, the shadow left behind when all its thicker parts had rotted away.

  Were I able to scribe this in Wendish, I should, to save it from poor Art’s prying, the first page began, yet I cannot; my skills are in speaking and understanding that language only, with nothing written down. This too was taken from me, when he—my father—took my family.

  “Holy shit,” I said, out loud.

  When we came to that place at last, in the field’s heart, I turned and saw a whirling dust cloud form above the rye, those nodding stalks. I saw it sweep in to engulf the procession, though the women marched on through it, impassive, and without pause. They were used to such things, I suppose. Perhaps the same phenomenon occurs each year, whether a stranger accompanies them on their journey or not.

  She can appear as an old woman or a child, the Lady, I recalled my grandmother telling me—and how odd that she should have done so, for me to recall it, walking as I was between a Kantorka so ancient she could barely move on my left-hand side, and her nimble little apprentice on my right, twelve years of age at the very most. She can be a flash on the horizon, or the sun up above at noon. She can be a cloud moving through the harvest crops like God upon the waters, before this world was even made, only thought of.

  Can the Lady be so old? I asked her then, or think I did, for I have a strong memory of seeing her nod, lips set, as though she were afraid to speak further. As though the Poludnice were powerful as God Himself—or more so, my father’s vision of Him. I could believe that then.

  I fear I can believe it now, as well.

  “What did you find?” Simon called from the other room.

  “Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb,” I replied.

  Next morning, Safie was waiting for me as I walked toward Earworm Audio, a coffee in either hand. “You look . . . upright,” she commented, taking hers; I just shrugged.

  Inside, she introduced me to her friend Malin Riegert, whom I vaguely recognized as another Toronto Film Faculty alumnus—the Fac had once been primarily about music production before adding in film and video; they’d maintained a separate stream for that up till the end, allowing Audio students to gain extra credit by working on third-semester projects so they wouldn’t have to set up a competing suite of sound studios. Malin had met Safie, logically enough, by working on Seven Angels But No Devil, cleaning up the final mix before Safie sent it out as a festival submission. Since graduating, she’d gone specifically into digital reconstruction and analysis. “A lot of my income stream comes from packaging up CCTV footage for news broadcasts,” she explained. “I put subtitles on stuff with muddy sound, or boost it back into audible range, sometimes both.”

  “Cool,” I said, shaking Malin’s hand. I took a long swig of caffeine before sitting down, orienting myself toward the monitors. “I brought a script for the intro,” I told Safie. “Just the basics, but I can probably go off-the-cuff, for linkage.”

  “Good, great. I have a couple of sequences cut together already—clips versus stills, some of the stuff from the museum, Mrs. Whitcomb’s art, plus the Vinegar House interiors. Turn out there were photos in the box, or what?”

  “One, so far.” I brought out my sheaf of Mr. Whitcomb’s correspondence and showed her the wedding group portrait, pointing out all the major players. “We can always go back and get shots of the original, I guess, if the resolution isn’t good enough.”

  She studied it. “No, I think that’s fine. A little pixellation’s good, right? Makes it look old.”

  “That was what I thought.” I bent to rummage in my bag, brought the notebook out with a flourish. “Check this out, though.”

  “Holy shit,” she blurted.

  I laughed.

  “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

  While Malin got everything cued up, Safie shot footage of our main character’s spiky, spidery brown handwriting, the pages blotchy as old skin. She thought we could double-expose it, use it as backing here and there, and I agreed; it would look amazing. The idea of people straining to read Mrs. Whitcomb’s own words as they unspooled was an intoxicating one. Here and there, I could already catch phrases divorced from context as they skittered by, each more tempting than the last—

  The Kantorka says, when a small child wanders the rows, it is known She has taken it for her own. It is pointless to set a black tracker on its trail, therefore, for her evil eye has rendered it entirely unsalvageable. . . . Her attention is known to cause freckles, and those under her gaze sleep with mouths open, allowing their souls to escape and come join her revels in the fields. . . . There is a story which tells how a woman seen sleeping this way was carefully turned over by her husband, only to be found dead in the morning—because she suffocated, Art suggests, being entirely unwilling to keep such opinions to himself.

  Laying in the narration went more quickly than I’d initially expected, though that dissonance I’ve talked about was there in spades—the sheer weirdness of watching yourself play through actions you frankly can’t remember, even though various other background details might tweak your sense of déjà-to-jamais vu. It was like one of those old slide projection systems, except jiggered so part of one image was laid over part of another—half Kodak carousel, half vaudeville-hall magic lantern phantasmagoria. Here and there I saw orbs floating onscreen, like dark spots in vitreous humour, slight corneal flaws—an occasional shimmer just beyond my visual range, too, the migraine sparkler writ tiny.

  “You okay?” Safie asked. I looked up and realized she must’ve been watching me closely, checking for signs of another impending episode. I bit down hard, restraining myself from snapping back.

  I replied, “Fine, thanks.” To Malin: “You get all that?”

  She nodded. “Levels look good.”

  “Excellent.”

  While Malin made sure the tracks synched okay and started laying in roo
m tone, I filled Safie in on how Mrs. Whitcomb’s notes linked up with Mr. Whitcomb’s testimony about their honeymoon, Hyatt’s birth, et cetera. At first she seemed to be mostly humouring me, but soon enough she was hooked, the story’s inherent pull turning her big eyes starry. “Jesus,” she said, finally. “I mean, wow. This is . . .”

  “I know, right?”

  “It’s fucking gold, is what it is, Miss Cairns.”

  “Uh huh,” I agreed, and we grinned at each other.

  Beneath my thumb, more words, spooling out unbroken. I read them out loud, as Malin and Safie worked: Women near their time must beware being caught short in the fields, for the Lady is known to take unbaptized babies as her tithe, swapping them for changelings with goggling heads, thin limbs, and swollen bellies, forever crying. These must be taken back and buried alive where they dropped, to keep the crops fertile. . . .

  “Pretty big into burying people in fields in Dzéngast, huh?” Safie commented, clicking her mouse around. “Guess her dad wanted to import the custom.”

  I shook my head. “Daddy Wròbl was a Christian fanatic, remember? This is pagan stuff, held over from prehistory. Earlier than that by a long time.”

  “How much, exactly?”

  “Well . . . they found this headless stone fertility statue in a Cyprian cave that was made around 3500 BCE, I seem to recall—unearthed it in 1878. The Woman from Lemb, they call her, or the Goddess of Death, ’cause bad stuff supposedly happens to everyone who touches her.” I flipped the page. “Then there’s the Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel, carbon-dated to forty thousand years old, probably one of the first anthropomorphic images ever made. They’re both what your Dédé would’ve called little gods, cult-objects . . . worshipped in their time, just like Lady Midday.”

  “‘Those old heathens.’ The ones with the pots.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mmm.” She clicked something, dragged it somewhere, saved. Beside her, Malin was nodding along to the almost-subliminal sound of my recorded voice through her heavy headphones, recognizable from where I sat by tone if not exact words. “How is it you know all this shit, anyhow, Miss Cairns?”

  I thought about that for a moment. “I’ve always been interested in mythology, archaeology . . . history,” I said, finally. “This is all three. An obsessional convergence. That must be why it seems so familiar.”

  “But you—my turn to ask this, I guess—you don’t believe any of it, right?”

  “I don’t have to believe it myself to assume Mrs. Whitcomb must’ve.” I turned another page. “Hell, even Mr. Whitcomb did, by the end. Enough that he wound up leaving her to it.”

  “Only after Hyatt disappeared.”

  I nodded. “That’s true, too.”

  It was She I saw, in that field, in my fever, Mrs. Whitcomb wrote, just as before—Her voice I knew at once, when She spoke to me. The only difference this time being that I looked instead of hiding my eyes, and She looked back.

  “This is weird,” Malin observed, suddenly. She waved us over; Safie simply shifted her chair, while I rose and stood next to them as Malin indicated something onscreen. “There,” she said. “In the mix, at the bottom—you see that?”

  I didn’t see anything, but was well aware that didn’t mean much. Safie narrowed her eyes. “Yeah. What . . . is that part of the original track?”

  “I fed in a bunch of different stuff to create a kind of generalized room tone—that place was noisy, man. Almost like it was outside, not inside.”

  “Might as well have been,” Safie agreed. “So . . . which file did you take this part from?”

  “Um, gimme a sec.” She checked the log. “That’d be ten-fifteen, point two.”

  “Ten-fifteen was from your iPhone,” Safie told me. “You know, what you were shooting right before—that thing happened.”

  “You can say ‘seizure.’”

  “Thought you said they weren’t sure.”

  “They’re not, it’s just . . .” I sighed, “. . . easier than calling it anything else, I guess. Can I see that clip?”

  “Sure,” said Malin, who’d been listening in with interest—maybe Safie hadn’t told her about that part, though I suppose there was no real reason why she should have. She found the clip in question without any trouble, opened it in a new window, started playing. And: Fade to grey, I could hear myself muttering through the speakers, as Val Moraine nattered on about cleaning up, tourist-proofing the glass house, making sure it was all nice and safe. Grey with white highlights, she’s working out her palette, that’s really OW, oh. Ow, oh shit, fuck meeee . . .

  “Huh,” Malin said, pausing it. “Right there. You hear that?”

  Safie frowned. “You mean me, or—?”

  “Either of you.”

  I shook my head, still staring at the screen, my own blurred face caught mid-grab, motion-smeary. “I don’t hear anything,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean much; I’ve been blasting music straight into my eardrums since I was fourteen. What’s it sound like?”

  “Well . . .” Malin pulled up some sort of further breakdown, fast-forwarded till something caught her eye, stopped. Under the window showing the footage, the sound mix drew multiple jagged, oscillating vector lines across a black field, each in its own colour. Malin pointed to one almost flat line at the bottom edge of the field, then another, wavering in and out of visibility, right at the top. “Here; this, these. There’s—something, up and down, just around the outer edges of what the mic would be picking up. Between the range and the volume, it makes sense you wouldn’t have heard it. But I’ve got pretty good ears.”

  “Good thing, given your line of work.”

  “It’s useful, that’s for sure. Let me see what I can pull out.” Safie looked at me again; I nodded. “Okay, now . . . it probably won’t make much sense, ’cause I’m going to have to really push it to make it audible, and besides, it’s gappy as heck. . . .”

  “Go for it.”

  She did as asked, lip between her teeth, keyboard and mouse rapidly clicking. All the lines but the two she’d pointed out vanished, and those two then stretched out vertically, like scars straining over skin pulled tight. With a flourish, Malin pulled her headphone jack out and clicked PLAY, the white tracking cursor sliding smoothly from left to right. What came through the speakers sounded like something taken from deep underwater, all hiss and click and slosh. Plus a sort of—well, what sounded like a long, low, intermittent tone, echoing up through muddy fathoms.

  “Is that a bell?” I asked Safie, who shook her head, equally baffled.

  “That’s about as good as it’s going to get,” Malin told us. “Sorry.”

  “Still kind of obscure,” Safie agreed. “Could you convert it into something else, though? Data—an image, maybe?”

  Malin frowned. “What, like a graphic? I’d need something capable of extracting visuals from a sound-recording medium.”

  “Do you have a recorder? For cassette tapes, I mean.”

  “Yeah, sure, somewhere—the system’s computerized, but I can plug in pretty much any tech I want; you have to, when you’re doing reconstructive and transfer work.” She got up, went to the green metal shelving on one wall and began sliding white banker’s boxes out to look through them. “You want reel to reel, mini, what?”

  “Compact, magnetic tape, analog signal, C-30 or -60. An old-style mix-tape, basically.”

  “Why?”

  Safie opened her mouth, but right at that very moment I snapped my fingers, finally getting it.

  “PixelVision,” I said, out loud.

  You are under Her eye, the Kantorka told me, and thus whatever you make will be touched by Her likewise, always open to her looking and working through it, working Her will on this world; every thing you fashion will be both a mirror and a door, especially during Her hour.

  I thought I k
new what she spoke of; but how could I, when I did not yet know of Hyatt’s very existence? My poor boy, born between the minute and the hour, who felt Her burning hand on his head even inside my belly?

  It is always midday somewhere in the world, however, both day and night. And so the Lady’s limits truly have no limit.

  If I had never agreed to go to Dzéngast then we might have lived out our lives in peace, he and I and Arthur, too, for my sins. Arthur knew no better, after all, in begging me to go there, to make my peace, solve my riddle. To stare my father’s crime down and spend the rest of my days praying to Christ and his father, like a civilized woman, not staying forever some weak slave of those old, bloody gods in whose names I was first baptized. . . .

  He knew no better, my husband, and I know it; he loved me, as he loves me still. He wanted only my betterment, as he wants Hyatt’s, never willing to acknowledge him broken since before birth, let alone vowed to another Supreme Being entirely.

  Art knew no better, poor man. But I did, even then.

  I did.

  When Safie brought her PXL-2000 in from the car, Malin’s mouth fell open. “Holy shit, seriously? I haven’t seen one of those in . . . actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of those. You got a cassette already?”

  “Never leave home without it,” Safie told her. “I’ve been recording over this one for, like three years now, watching it degrade: sound to vision. All we have to do is put the sound on the tape, hook the camera to a monitor, FireWire in the computer, and we can burn the footage right off the screen.”

  “Handy,” Malin said, approvingly. “Okay, let’s set ’er up.”

  I went to the toilet while they assembled the machinery, leaning against the wall for a moment, forehead slick on cool tile. The static of the day was starting to mount in my head, and I could feel my pulse like a nervous tic in my temples; not painful yet, but uncomfortable, like I’d drunk too much coffee and was right on the edge of a caffeine headache. But even that was weirdly exciting.