by Hugh Hood
“You see what it is? The motion casts the film for you. It writes your script and makes Landy the villain, and he was a nice fellow, I’m told, and it makes Bannister the hero and for all I know he’s just a decent British doctor, which is what he is. But the motion gives you a script and a cast and an action. Oh, I’m going to do something about this film; it can’t be allowed to moulder away in a library.”
“It had to be a single sequence because we broke the other camera,” said Wallace, laughing.
“Is that what happened, truly?”
“You know how these athletic meets are, they have officials milling around all over, more officials than runners. And one of these guys — I never knew his name but he had a badge of some kind — got his foot caught in our cable just as the race started and disconnected Camera Two. Then while he was apologizing, he and the cameraman knocked the damned thing over. I swear to God that’s what happened, so I couldn’t use it at all. I’d had a shooting schedule, just a little bit of a thing on the back of an envelope, and my zoom lens was on Two. It shouldn’t have been. It should have been on One, but I just didn’t know how to shoot a footrace.”
Sanderson smote his brow. “And you got this great thing by accident? If you’d had the other camera working, you’d have messed it up zooming in and out. Oh, Wilfrid, Wilfrid, you lucky bloody bastard!”
“That’s life for you. I had to shoot it on One. There was nothing else to do.”
“You see,” Sanderson said with real bitterness and without humour, “he gets by accident what I’ve racked my brain for twenty years to figure out.”
“It’s a remarkable piece of work,” said his cutter obsequiously, “it’s purely cinematic.”
Sanderson stared at him coldly. “Kitcheff,” he said, “I know that you are fresh from the University Film Society and I can make certain allowances, but would you really mind not using phrases like ‘purely cinematic,’ I mean, really?”
Kitcheff was wounded and showed it; that was one thing about Sanderson, he didn’t mind your letting him see what you felt. “How else would you say it?” demanded Kitcheff rebelliously.
“Say it some way that means something. Who knows what ‘cinematic’ is? Nobody knows. You don’t have to talk like that.”
“All I mean is what you said yourself,” said Kitcheff, “it’s the art form of timed movement in space, and it dictates the shape of the given piece of work.”
“This is a sterile discussion,” said the editor, sanctimoniously.
Sanderson reversed his field, rounding on the editor and defending Kitcheff. “We’ve got to try to say these things some way, otherwise how will we know what we’re doing?”
“Leave it to the critics,” said the editor, who hoped one day to be a producer himself in a secure situation where he wouldn’t have to listen to Sanderson who, genius though he might be, was feckless, undependable in argument, apt to change his mind at any point, and full of crazy ideas.
“Timed movement in space,” he was saying just now, weighing it, “it’s a nice phrase, Kitcheff boy, but I don’t know what it means.”
“Don’t you tell him, Kitcheff,” said the editor hastily, “don’t try to tell him or we’ll be here all afternoon. Are we going to run it again?”
“We are,” said Sanderson, taking up his lecture where he’d dropped it, “and I want you to notice precisely when we feel like pounding the arms of the chairs, and when we actually begin to do it.”
“I can tell you that,” said Wilfrid Wallace, “it’s just where —”
“Shut up for God’s sake,” said Sanderson, “I want them to find out for themselves. This proves an important point and it’s going to make A Walk Home from School great documentary, something we’ve never done before. Purely cinematic, huh!” He walked back to the booth and told the projectionist to run the film again. As the lights dimmed he drew a stop-watch from his pocket and concentrated on the screen with enormous intensity. Kitcheff and the editor, Vasko, glared at him with mutinous envy. He had really extraordinary powers of concentration and could remember every detail of every shot, cut, sequence, angle, from every one of the thousands of movies he’d seen and made. It caused them trouble all the time.
“They used that in Une Fille pour L’Eté,” he would say, and then they had to spend hours figuring another way to do it. In the dark they heard him fiddling with the stopwatch, clucking and mumbling to himself.
“It’s the empty space they’re running around,” they heard him say, “that’s what gives you the effect, you want to get in there beside the runners.” Nobody answered him.
“Of course I’m not a psychologist,” he said to nobody in particular, “a psychologist would likely tell you differently.” And then they all began to beat on the arms of their seats again and only Kitcheff wondered if this was because Sanderson was willing them to do it, and the race was over, the tape breasted, Bannister home and cooled out, lights on. Vasko and Kitcheff smiled happily at Sanderson, and he pumped Wilfrid Wallace’s hand with the disinterested pleasure he always took in really good work, his own or another’s.
“I’m so glad you could get down to talk to us,” he said, “I had the hell of a job worming the piece out of the CBC Library, and the boys had to see it. They’re giving me a very bad time just now.” He stared expressionlessly at Vasko and Kitcheff, making them fidget. He wasn’t vindictive but he would say anything, absolutely anything, with terrifying candour, and they never knew what to expect. “Can you have dinner with Margery and me?” He was leaving them out of the invitation quite openly, but he had meals with them all the time, meals which they never remembered eating, though the food stains were on their clothes and they didn’t feel hungry. They had been arguing over A Walk Home from School for three weeks now, and their office was full of coffee containers that nobody would admit ordering.
“I’m catching the five o’clock out of the Windsor Station,” said Wallace, “I’ve got to do a football game tomorrow.”
“What can you do with a football game?” said Sanderson interestedly.
“Not a hell of a lot. CBS pretty well established the conventions ten years ago.”
“I’d like to do one,” said Sanderson, “or fool around with the tape.”
The others guffawed. “The audience would love it,” said Wallace, “but they wouldn’t know the score.”
Vasko and Kitcheff were hilarious and Sanderson looked innocent. “I have no idea what you mean,” he said and then he laughed and put his arm around Wallace’s shoulder, walking him out of the projection room and making pleasant chat.
“Do you mean Margery Endicott?” said Wallace as they went out. “I’m in love with Margery Endicott, always have been, always will be. She played Juliet at Hart House my first year in college. I guess she was in fourth year then, but she really looked fourteen, only Juliet I’ve ever seen who looked fourteen, ka-bong, ka-bong.”
Vasko and Kitcheff sat looking at each other as their chief left the room. “She’s thirty-four now,” they heard him say, “and it’s no secret, she tells everybody. You never saw such a thirty-four year old in your life. Did you know we were married for a while?” His voice passed out of hearing.
“He is crazy,” said Vasko, “it can’t be done, nobody will watch it. It’s a waste of the taxpayer’s money.”
Kitcheff chuckled around his pipe-stem; he was an insecure young man who doubted that he could carry off a pipe and tweeds, so he settled for the pipe without the tweeds and even at that was afraid. “Who gives a shit about the taxpayers?” he said.
“I know, it’s just an expression. But I tell you, Ted, if he shoots a film that runs to one fifteen-minute sequence — and I don’t care about the angles, anybody can figure out impossible angles — for one thing we’ll be out of a job, figuratively speaking, I mean, if you don’t mean to cut and edit the film, where does that leave us?”
“The Film Board never fires anybody,” said Kitcheff equably.
“Oh, I’m not worried about my job. They aren’t all like him, thank God, none of the other producers think that way.”
“None of them are as good.”
“Oh, he’s good all right, up to a certain point, I’ll grant you that, but lately, I don’t know, lately I’ve been wondering about him, some people are great artists and some are just plain crazy, and it’s hard to tell the difference. Maybe he’s a fraud.”
“That has nothing to do with you — you just follow instructions, you’re not a policy-maker. And as for me, I’m just a little guy fresh from the University Film Society. We don’t have to worry, we aren’t responsible, and anyway the world won’t stop revolving just because one fifteen-minute documentary is a flop. What difference does it make?”
Vasko was looking around for his topcoat, not paying much attention. “Maybe it’s a question of artistic principle.”
Kitcheff said, “That’s Film Society talk. Sanderson would vomit if he heard you say that.”
“He can have principles, why can’t we?”
“We can’t afford them. Wait till you’re a producer, then you can have all the principles you want.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Let’s go over to the Seven Steps and check the talent.” They left the projection room, feeling glad that they didn’t have to go back upstairs, they were through for the day.
“How did Sanderson ever get into Margery Endicott? He’s twice her age,” said Vasko.
“Genius, Vasko boy, pure genius.”
“Huh!” said Vasko.
As he waited for the operator to locate Miss Endicott, through a bewildering tintamarre of crossed wires, clicks, half-heard confused voices, Sanderson let his thoughts run peaceably along without conscious control, letting his ear, a hot, sore ear pressed against a sweaty receiver, direct his associations. His life with Margery had been fed through a switchboard with a clumsy operator making a bad connection every time they tried to reach each other. It was an idea for a poem, the poet is trying to reach somebody, probably a girl, but he keeps getting “one moment, please” and at length hangs up. He hadn’t written a poem for fifteen years, preferring the visual medium; but you couldn’t put that idea on film. It wasn’t “purely cinematic,” there was nothing to it visually.
How do you express the imperfect tense on film?
I used to try and reach her. We used to go around together. We were going to the movies quite a lot in those days. The imperfect, despite its name, is the tense for the good old days back there. It’s a flashback, a montage, a long closeup, and a slow dissolve.
I’m being frivolous, he thought, and anyway that’s another man’s idea, not mine, but you could figure out the appropriate film technique for every tense, not excluding the plus-que-parfait and the conditionnel antérieure. The French, he thought, who worries about such notions but the French?
Movies have no tense, he decided, movies are all in the present just as you see them, even flashback gives us a present past. That’s my problem, he realized all at once, that’s my disease. I’m trying to seize the whole present, but literature keeps sneaking in and giving me history. I don’t want history, and I don’t want to think about Margery ten years ago.
Then the operator found her and she came on the line sounding irritated as all hell. “What are you trying to do to me, Phil? I’ve got work to do, I’m a busy girl and I’m menstruating like mad.”
She doesn’t waste any time, he thought. “Take a two-twenty-two,” he said and she laughed. Their medicine cabinet had been full of vials of two-twenty-twos, his and hers. “I just want to check about dinner, same time, same place?”
“Oh, sure, sure, poulet rôti, farci, garni, this is ‘Festival,’ you know, and it’s all balled-up. I don’t know why I do these things, except by now they know how to shoot me.”
“I’m the only one who knows how to shoot you,” he said. “because I’ve got first-hand experience of your best angles.” The operator click-click-clicked the line.
She chuckled. “I’m not that angular.”
“Margery, are you feeling all right? You’re not working too hard? You look so thin.”
“You should see me in the flesh,” she said, and added sententiously, “the camera adds ten pounds.”
“Chez Stien, Mackay Street, quarter to eight.”
“I’ve got to run, lover, they’re calling me. I’ll see you then.” Click-click-click the switchboard in the middle, he thought, it’s a good idea for a poem but you can’t get it on film, they tried it in Sorry, Wrong Number and it stank. He came out of the phone booth, looked at his watch and decided to go home and put on a necktie, formal wear, a necktie, and nipping out to the sidewalk he stole a cab from under an administrator’s nose.
In his apartment he was God Almighty, Montreal apartments for the upper-income brackets are all like that, always on the side of the mountain with a view of the river. His was way way up almost at the Lookout and all the kingdoms of the earth were spread at his feet. I’ve never offered them to anybody, he thought, they don’t belong to me. What am I doing wrong with A Walk Home from School? Is it built on a fundamentally wrong premise? He began to meditate seriously on his current assignment; he had nearly three hours to kill and Margery was notorious for her tardiness, always had been, always would be. I’ll have two drinks in the bar and then she’ll come, and I’ll be two drinks ahead all night, another bad connection.
Now the first angle will determine the whole film, just like Wilfrid’s footrace, the lucky bastard, the man came along and buggered up his shooting schedule by accident. I can’t have somebody come in and smash my lens when I’m not expecting it. How the hell do you get that gratuitous quality? When they made The Lady in the Lake they made a big stink about the camera as the eyes of the hero, and some schnook kept punching the camera. They got it all wrong. If I’m going to try something the same in A Walk Home From School I’d better figure out what went wrong with that movie. Where can I get a print? Making a mental note to research The Lady in the Lake, he went on to his own problems.
Vision is binocular. Maybe I should use two cameras and superimpose the results, would that do it? No. That just gives me a cheap 3D process effect. I wish I were a psychologist, that’s what I need to be at this point, how do we see? What makes the whole field of vision cohere and mean something, alive space, the trouble is I don’t know, I don’t even know if I can find out. Let me think, let’s try to pin the thing down. I remember twenty years ago Grierson used to say that film was the supreme medium for rendering reality because it imitated consciousness so perfectly. Was that a tautology?
Grierson. A cantankerous man, hard to deal with, opinionated, gifted, but I’m better than he was, he was too literal-minded. You can’t get life itself by copying it; you have to arrange it.
Consciousness is a single sequence, why can’t Kitcheff and Vasko understand that? There’s no technique to consciousness, we make our arrangements because of who we are; it’s a seventy-year sequence, and yet they claim a fifteen-minute sequence will drive people out of the theatre. I’ve wanted to do this film all my life, and it’s going to be my walk home from school, we’ll shoot it in Toronto and we’ll end up at 27 Cornish Road.
A softball slamming into a left-handed shortstop’s glove for the last out, the game is over, and we see the empty field with the players in the middle distance walking slowly away in all directions. We see a forgotten bat lying in the dust beside home plate, we get the sense of emptiness and then we pan around and dolly towards the steps, we climb the steps.…
… how am I going to get that last out, the ball coming into the glove? It was the only decent play I ever made in high-school, I was too young for the guys in my grade, and too small, and they didn’t like me because I was too goddamn smart. I couldn’t help that, but I’m going to get
that sense of desertion into the opening frames.…
… a left-handed shortstop, wouldn’t you know.…
… we’ll shoot it from below and get the sense of reaching up for the ball, if we could get the pitcher first, then the batter swinging, the flight of the ball, then the catch, no hand, no arm, just the dark mass of the big glove in the bottom picture, then the ball, then the merge with the ball, then where do we go?
I’m not certain how to get that shot, and in my case why am I trying to recreate my own recollections? The camera is for actuality, but perhaps I can get the actuality of the recollections, to hell with theory, I’m not Dr. Kracauer. I wonder if this idea is built on a false premise? I’ve been drifting around it for years, and if I don’t try it now, I might lose it and it’s the best script I ever had. I’ll just go to the location and shoot it, coming along Farnham Avenue, the trees, I used to bend my head back and look up into the trees and through the trees at the sky, that would be in May and I could see the clouds parading through the dark green, and behind them the blue, dark green on white on blue, heraldic, and all moving as I moved with my head back, except the background of blue, it never moved, it was the field of reference.
The sky is the condition of movement; that’s where the light comes from, white through blue.
And on past the stuccoed apartment houses to Yonge Street, to the left past the Packard showroom, now it’s a Volkswagen showroom. I wonder if I ought to ask them to put some Packards in the window? Where could we find Packards as of this date? We’d better stick to Volkswagens but in that case I falsify my recollection, and then the Dodge dealership, Mills and Hadwin, across the street. I never walked along the east side, I stayed on the west, past the Esso station, the two candy stores, the Rosehill Barber Shop, God, it’s all there in my head, I can see it as if I were there.