The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  The Lumières, he felt sure, had underestimated their own invention and he wanted to show them what was possible. Louis Lumière had told him to surprise them, after all. The camera could be placed low to the ground in the street so that an omnibus appeared to be careening toward it. Or it could look down from a height, widening out the landscape and miniaturizing horses and people. And what if it could film indoors, with the right lighting coming from outside the frame? During his second weekend with the device, he filmed a view from a tethered hot-air balloon, the Seine like a slate-gray ribbon. And he captured the otherworldly stares of the monstrous sea creatures at the Trocadéro aquarium, the dreadnought grace of a shark that loomed and then vanished into the underwater shadows.

  * * *

  At first, he’d bristled at the idea of putting the cinématographe to scientific use, but then he found himself re-creating one of Marey’s famous experiments that depicted a falling cat righting itself in midair. One night he flooded Albert Londe’s photographic studio with medical arc lamps and paid a nurse to drop one of the cats that perennially slept in the courtyard from a height of six feet onto a mattress on the floor. He filmed a dozen descents and sure-footed landings. And when Londe asked him to photograph an old hysteric after she’d undergone hydrotherapy, he positioned the cinématographe next to the regular plate camera. Under the direction of a neurology nurse, the woman removed her gown and walked back and forth along a Persian rug. Claude made the still images for Londe before repeating the exercise for the Lumières.

  * * *

  When he told Odette of his mounting collection of views she added her own images to the list: a basket of writhing fish at the market, a Sunday picnic where a child flies a kite above the trees and then lets it blow free into the upper drafts. He wanted to capture the images dredged from his dying sister’s consumptive dreams, but it was the end of winter. There were no kites in the air, no fish in the open-air markets. Her lips had turned blue-white and she frequently called out from the undertow of her fevered sleep. She called out their mother’s name, the names of long-deceased family pets, questions about Paris street names and train schedules. One time, she startled awake, whispered to Claude that the rabbit was out of its hutch, and promptly fell back asleep. While she slept, he held her hand and sang one of their mother’s Austrian folk songs, something about a nightingale winging its way through a valley.

  * * *

  Then one wintry night Claude arrived from a day of filming around the city to find a somber doctor posted outside Odette’s room. He gave a downcast nod that Claude felt in his bones and gestured to the open doorway with a face mask in one hand. Claude told the doctor to fetch the priest, that his father would want that. He set his camera and tripod down, strapped the mask in place, and stepped across the threshold with his equipment to see his sister in her final delirium. Her blankets were thrown back and she lay under a thin cotton sheet. A cloth was pressed to her forehead, and the window had been flung wide so that the cold air flowed over her. She had been sick for years, a slow winnowing, but nothing prepared Claude for her tubercular end, the soughing breath and the ragged sound of a thousand drownings from within.

  * * *

  For a long moment, he stood motionless six feet from her bed, paralyzed by this desolate, violent act of nature. He rested his equipment on the floor and came closer, felt the chill air on his hands and forehead and neck. He found himself removing his coat to cover Odette, even as her chest barreled up and she writhed with the fever. The coat dropped to the floor, but she kept grabbing at her chest with her flushed hands to remove a terrible weight that was pressing down on her. La table, she murmured, lis le. He turned to see that on the nightstand, resting on the bible full of pressed wildflowers, was a folded note with his name on it and another for their father. He opened his letter to find a few sentences written in trembling cursive: Beloved brother, take me with you when you travel the world. In your heart and memories, but also in that little box of dusk you carry around. The first human death captured on film—that is something the Lyonnais brothers and their audiences could never ignore. Remind them how transient we all are. Always yours, Odette.

  * * *

  Claude wanted to bellow out the open window, wanted to lie down on the narrow bed beside Odette and hold her until the shaking subsided. But he knew she wanted to offer up this gift, to be granulized into a medium she would never see. Here is my own transience, she might think in her final moments, captured forever. He wiped the tears away, kissed her on the forehead through his face mask, and placed the cinématographe onto the tripod.

  * * *

  When Claude arrived in the hotel basement at noon on March 1, 1896, he found a secretary from the Lumière factory sitting at a small table taking down names, and a few dozen clerks, shopkeepers, and photographers lined up in a hallway, cinématographes clutched to their chests or resting in their laps. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to him that this was an audition, not a private screening for the brothers. Suddenly nervous, he gave his name and stood by himself with his own equipment. He had developed ten reels, each forty-five seconds long, and he found himself looping through them in his mind while he waited.

  * * *

  Eventually, the secretary called his name and he followed her into the big darkened room where the brothers sat under a canopy of cigar smoke. He shook hands with each man and Auguste complimented Claude’s clothes and shoes. The concession agents, Claude suddenly understood, were ambassadors for the Lumière name. Louis gestured to the wooden stand where he could mount his cinématographe. The lamphouse had been attached to electrical wires, and Claude wondered if this was a concession to Edison. The Frenchmen would take moving images but they would concede direct current to the American tycoon.

  * * *

  Claude began with his filmstrips of Paris—the rose seller, the lovers in doorways, a fog-draped view from Notre Dame. Louis stared up at the screen, expressionless, and Auguste shifted in his seat. Then Claude showed them the view from the tethered balloon, and Louis said that he never knew how many fishing boats were in the Seine. It was clear they’d already seen the novelties of boulevards and sight lines from previous applicants. Even the barreling omnibus failed to get the response Claude wanted. Auguste just nodded and said it was an interesting trick of perspective.

  —This next view is an adaptation of Marey’s The Falling Cat.

  Louis thinned his lips, brushed some lint from his trousers.

  —We all know the proverb that a cat always lands on its feet, Claude said. Well, here is living proof that our grandmothers were right.

  * * *

  Against a black background, a white cat drops from a height of six feet, its back briefly toward the floor. There’s a flashing, midair scramble, a twisting motion as the cat rights itself—the feet kicking and cantering, the tail swinging out like a boom. It lands on all fours, ears back, after a plummet of less than a second.

  —Within point-two-five meters it has already moved its legs to the downward position, Claude said.

  He liked that it sounded precise and definitive, as if he’d watched and filmed a hundred cats falling from a height.

  —Might we view that one again? Perhaps more slowly, said Louis.

  Claude cranked the footage again, this time at half speed. Louis tapped his bottom lip as the cat flipped in midair, now slowed to the calculus of the human eye.

  —Very nice, said Auguste, what’s next?

  Claude told them that the next view was part of Londe’s scientific study and they both leaned in, eager to glimpse a rival’s work.

  —At the hospital, we have a research laboratory for physiological experiments. I help photograph some of the studies so that we can better understand animal mechanics, for example. We also photograph certain autopsies. This shows the distorted gait of a hysteric …

  * * *

  A naked, silver-haired woman hobbles away from the camera under a skylight, elbows ju
tting, legs bowed, hips cocked. Her hair is tightly cropped, revealing the whiteness of her scalp and neck as she moves. The spine is knuckled and distended and her black leather shoes with pulled-up socks somehow exaggerate her off-kilter walk.

  —Londe says that women diagnosed with hysteria have a gait that refuses to be coordinated, that every step is excessive and exaggerated.

  The woman bird-toes down the length of a narrow Persian rug, toward a pale velvet curtain.

  —I suppose that crazed walk is part of her inner rebellion …

  It was Louis who said it, a little sarcastically, but his face was completely transfixed in the ricochet of projected light.

  The woman rights herself for a turn, her face in profile, and the filmstrip dissolves to black.

  —The hysteric’s family, Claude said, insisted we keep her face concealed in our studies.

  * * *

  Claude loaded the final strip, the scintillation he knew would force them to either offer him the job or show him the door. He took his time, adjusted the lamphouse, felt the blood beating in his chest. He swallowed, pretended to tinker with the cinématographe, pushed some air up behind his lips.

  —Gentlemen, may I present the first human death captured on moving celluloid.

  * * *

  A hospital room gauzy with winter light. Under an open window, a young woman languishes on a metal cot, draped in nothing but a sheet, staring up at the ceiling. A priest by the bed with a bible and rosary beads, his lips soundlessly murmuring. Ten seconds of midwinter pall and quietude. Then a finch on the snowy windowsill, a hapless spectator. The patient raises a hand from below the sheet and holds it up to the priest. He takes it, their fingers draped in beads of threaded glass. Then the woman’s chest barrels up through a coughing fit, her face incredulous. The bed shakes, the bird flies away, and the camera continues to crank. Right before it goes to black she reaches toward the corner, toward the camera, her hand clenching an invisible rope.

  * * *

  Claude felt the chill through the open window of the hospital room as he watched. He felt his hot breath against the cloth mask, heard the terrible pneumatic sound of Odette’s final breath and the enormous calm that followed. In the darkened room, when the reel was over, he wiped his face with a handkerchief and tried to collect himself. There was a long, smoky pause before the brothers brought themselves back to the room and their cigars. Louis got up and slowly opened the curtains, flooding the space with daylight. Auguste—managerial and efficient—thanked Claude for his time and attention to detail. A letter would be sent with the results. They asked him to ensure he gave his current address to their secretary at the desk outside. Claude quietly packed up his equipment. He shook hands with the brothers and wrote his address in the secretary’s journal.

  * * *

  Then he was out in the Paris streets, the streets slick with runoff from the abattoirs and the tanneries, striations of offal and blood in the gutters. It was all too much to look at, so he removed his spectacles and panned the middle distances, the dead spot where faces floated in a fog. An enormous sorrow suddenly bruised up to the surface, lodged in the back of his throat. He huddled under a shop awning, glasses in hand, and shuddered into his grief.

  * * *

  When the letter came the next morning—hand-delivered and on Lumière stationery—he was heading out the door, on his way to the hospital. He kept it unopened in his breast pocket until he got inside the darkroom and read it under the amber bulb. It is our privilege to inform you that you have been chosen as an official concessionaire and operator for the Fraternité des Cinématographe. Over the next year or so, you will be assigned to a tour in America and Australia. He read the letter several times before putting it back in his pocket. All the women in his life had vanished, burned off like alcohol-blue flames, beset by fevers and pox. He felt ashamed for still being alive, for a year in Paris without a single friend to console him. But then he heard himself whispering in the darkness and he realized that he was praying, not to God, but to Odette. He heard himself say I promise to keep you forever spooling and therefore still alive.

  3

  A Magnificent Outburst

  The cinématographe made its New York debut four months later, on June 29, 1896, in a Union Square vaudeville theater. Years later, Claude would tell interviewers that this was not only the birth of cinema in America, but the night he fell in love with the French stage actress Sabine Montrose, who would later maul him like a tiger, and the night Hal Bender, a teenager whose family ran a struggling amusement parlor in Brooklyn, saw himself delivered like a penitent onto the nitrate shoals of cinematic projection. This is how we came together, Claude would say, the genesis of our troubled moviemaking family.

  * * *

  And it happened in two adjacent theaters divided by a common redbrick wall. On one side, in a cavernous auditorium that rose behind gothic archways and festooned columns, Sabine Montrose stood onstage as Hamlet on her fortieth birthday, determined to prove to the world—and Sarah Bernhardt—that she could channel a young, grief-addled Danish prince. On the other side, in what resembled an enormous vaudeville drawing room, with burnished nickel railings and allegorical figures on the drop curtain, Claude stood cranking the cinématographe, projecting onto a large silk screen the ten reels he’d perfected back in Paris. Hal Bender, future producer and impresario, sat in the front row of the balcony, dumbstruck in the hemisphere of silver-blue light.

  * * *

  Sabine’s Hamlet was channeled from her days as a young runaway on the Paris streets. Her face pale, her blue-black hair pinned back, she played the prince as an impetuous street waif, a playful mimic one second and a brooding melancholic the next. There was a choked-up quality to her soliloquys, the suggestion of a mind ravaged by thought. She had just delivered the lines O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world! in the second scene of the first act when an uproar rose, seemingly from deep inside the lengthwise wall of the auditorium. It was not a scream, per se, but a collective gasp, a horde of the bewildered, of people loosed from their senses. It came to her, from somewhere inside the frail, transparent envelope of Hamlet’s character, that all three hundred theatergoers, women in pearls, bow-tied men with monocles and opera glasses, had snapped their heads to the north, a herd or pilgrimage startled by some otherworldly calamity nearby. Was it a fire? A patron plunging from a high balcony into the orchestra pit below?

  * * *

  The disruption opened out like a wound. She felt it as a knife blade running across a skein of delicate thoughts and emotions. Then she felt herself blanch and stammer under the floodlights. In all her years onstage, whether as Phaedra or Floria Tosca or Cleopatra, she had never flubbed a line, and she prided herself on seducing her audiences. She did not come to them; they came to her. She had sung arias and floated monologues through blackouts and coughing fits and mezzanine heart attacks, but this kind of interruption was unprecedented. Fleetingly, while she stumbled through Frailty, thy name is woman, she allowed herself to look at Pavel Rachenko, her acting coach and spiritual advisor sitting in the front row. Pavel had been instructing her in the latest approaches to naturalism, sat through her performances with a splayed notebook, pencil in hand, wearing an embroidered waistcoat hung with two gold fob watches, one set to local time and the other to Greenwich mean time. Without ever saying so, he seemed to imply that the prime meridian was a yardstick against which the world’s falsehoods and relativities could be measured, an anchor in the sands of illusion, but now he was gaping with the rest of them in the direction of the moaning.

  * * *

  On the vaudeville side of the wall, the audience was recovering from an omnibus bearing down on them from a spectral height. It seemed to descend from the Hellenic ceiling, tumbling out of a constellation of Greek gods and their consorts. Hal Bender, whose novelty parlor was full of Edison gramophones and kinetoscopes, had watched the entire thing through cupped hands, through h
is own improvised viewfinder. He couldn’t get his mind around the dappling scene loosed from the winding intestines of the projector, couldn’t fathom that the Lumière brothers and this tall, bespectacled Frenchman had worked out how to unfurl time itself onto a silk screen. For the next reel, he sat on his hands and let everything wash over him. The catlike concession agent tended the machine for a moment and began turning the hand crank again. The machine threw its silver palings of light, then it widened out until Hal was sitting at the bottom of a big blue river.

  * * *

  Swimmers running out of the ocean at dusk. A blonde girl trots up the sand, her face upturned, making a show of her chill, her freckled shoulders raised, her hands clenched. She grins at the camera, shivering and exhilarated, then takes off running. The waves ripple and spume as she runs along the beach …

  * * *

  Hal could feel the salt air cooling against her skin and smell the briny damp under the pier at Far Rockaway where his dead father used to take him to fish and play dice on summer afternoons. When he closed his eyes for a moment there was a second life burning behind his eyelids. The French had made all this conjuring look easy, like spreading a piece of toast with butter. He folded his arms and braced himself in the darkness for the next view. While he waited, he let his mind tick over with numbers. The audience for a peepshow was typically a workingman with time to spare and a few coins in his pocket. You kept the machines humming twelve hours a day, but it was a grain of sand compared to this beachhead—hundreds of people for ten reels, a thirty-minute show at twenty-five cents a ticket. He swallowed and wiped his hands down his trouser legs, a sinner who’d stumbled his way into the church of perpetual motion. The Lumière brothers, he was certain, had delivered him from the novelty parlor’s long slump.