The Merry Month of May

by James Jones

  “What is it, Jerry?” Harry said at once. “Bad?”

  “It’s pretty thin shit,” the man said. He was an American.

  “Have you projected some of it?”

  “I don’t have to,” the man said. “I strip-read the frames. It’s enough.”

  “Shit,” Harry said. “I was afraid of that.” Then he smiled. “Well, let’s have a look.”

  “Go on in,” the man said, indicating the projection room. “It’s dry enough. I’ll run it for you myself. I’m sorry about it, you know. I like those kids.”

  “So do I. Why do you think I’m doing this?” Harry said. “But liking them and wishing is no excuse or help for amateurishness.”

  “You’re so right,” Jerry said. “Well, go on in.”

  In the projection room when we were seated and Harry had lit a cigar, the lights went out and the screen lit up.

  Well, it was awful. It was worse than the technician Jerry had said. Most of the film that had been shot in daylight was very over-exposed. Of course, all the night film was under-exposed. But the over-exposed daylight film was also marred by marks, dust and pieces of lint that had gotten on the lens. But it was not only the technical part, it was also the approach. There were long, long minutes of a shot, all of it taken from the same angle, of an approaching march or parade, with students holding large banners out there in the distance, faceless, unreal, approaching the camera. In the one or two scenes where police figured, and could be seen running to attack the scurrying students, everything was too far away to have any reality for a viewer. I could see all that myself.

  Even to me it was clear that it was hardly worth looking at the rest of the students’ cans that they had fought so hard for, and had guarded so preciously.

  By his chair Harry pushed a button. “That’s enough, Jerry!” he called. “It’s worthless,” he said to me, bitterly. “I was afraid it would be. Even if we processed it, we’d only get about six good minutes out of the whole lot.” He called again, “Now show us some of my stuff!”

  By contrast, Harry’s material was superb, much more professional and interesting. All of it was properly exposed, except for those night scenes when he had deliberately partially under-exposed, to create an effect. His two characters, his “principals”, Terri and Anne-Marie, were good in their close-ups, sweet and beautiful in their love scenes against the backdrop of the violence. They came through as people, real people, with whom and with whose misery one could associate. And the few violence shots he had been able to get added to the poignancy of the young student lovers.

  We did not see it all. After five minutes of his stuff Harry had seen enough of it to be satisfied. He pushed the button again and called out to the technician. Instantly, before he could even finish, the screen went dark and the lights in the projection room came on.

  “Okay, Jerry. I’ve seen enough. It’s okay. It’s adequate. I wish theirs was! Can it all for me, will you? Mark my stuff with red tape and theirs with blue.” Then he sat smoking his cigar pensively.

  “What are you going to do?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said, after a moment. “I don’t know. If the caliber of the stuff they lost in Rome is the same as this shit it doesn’t much matter whether they lost it or not. Most of it’s absolutely unusable.

  “You know, Hill shot a good deal of this stuff,” he added, and paused. “I didn’t know he was that bad.”

  “They were shooting under pretty difficult conditions most of the time,” I said. “They had a lot of handicaps imposed on them.”

  “A cameraman takes care of his lenses, and keeps them clean,” Harry said. “All you need is a brush and a sheaf of lens papers. And a lens cap. There’s no excuse for daylight over-exposure if you got a light meter.”

  “Do you think you can squeeze enough out of it to squeak through?”

  “No,” he said bluntly.

  “I suppose that their emotion kept carrying them away all the time,” I said tentatively.

  “The camera unfortunately is not subject to the emotion of the holder,” Harry said. “That’s the first rule. —I mean, that’s the first rule after the elementary ones, like keeping your lens clean.” He got up and he looked suddenly tired, beat. “I guess I got to hold some elementary gradeschool classes up there in that damned sweatbox. We might just be able to shoot enough riot stuff to fill it out. If there are enough riots between now and the end. Come on. Let’s go. I’ve got to show this stuff to those kids. I wonder what they’ll say about it.”

  We walked out through the bleak, empty studios.

  The student showing had been arranged for at four o’clock at the Censier, an ugly collection of cheaply made modern-French buildings built as an adjunct to the overflowing Sorbonne. I guess nothing is quite so ugly as modern-French building because they don’t understand concrete like we do and try to save money by not putting in enough cement for a rich mix, and a year later the whole thing begins to crack out. That was the Censier. But, it had a large amphitheater with a screen and projection equipment often used by the Cinema students to show things, back before the Revolution. Incongruously the Censier was set into a maze of skinny little medieval streets, beautiful streets, that ran below rue Monge down the hill. We drove there from the studios in Boulogne in about three-quarters of an hour and arrived a little early.

  The previously arranged, police-permitted student march which I mentioned earlier—from Montparnasse to the Gare d’Austerlitz— passed not far from rue Censier and in fact was in full swing, indeed was nearly over, as we drove back in. We listened to the reporting of it on the car radio. Young Dany Cohn-Bendit, who had returned from Germany the Tuesday before with false papers and his red hair dyed black, had left his sanctuary of the occupied Sorbonne to lead it. The police had threatened, had promised, that if he ever left the Sorbonne they would get him and deport him. But today he was closely surrounded by a horde of student security forces, the commentator said, and the police though they stood all along the route of march did not try to go for him. There was apparently little or no confrontation between the police and marching students.

  Almost as soon as we reached the Censier and went inside, gangs of students began to arrive back from the march all flushed and laughing and glowing with a sense of triumph and with their adrenalin up high. The showing had apparently been well advertised among them. I sat and watched them as they trooped into the amphitheater hooting and calling and waving bottles of red wine, baguettes of bread and long sausages. Harry was checking out the two student operators in the projection booth. When Harry came back, we sat and watched them together.

  “I wonder what they’ll think of this,” Harry said to me in English.

  “They probably won’t even know,” I said.

  “I’m afraid the Cinema Committee won’t know, either,” he said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  It turned out we were both exactly right. The Cinema Committee kids began coming in from the march soon after, and most of them sat near us. Terri and Bernard and Daniel the Chairman and young Raymond my erstwhile guide all sat down near Harry and me, along with some of the others. Then a little while later Anne-Marie “the Commissar” came in. She was white-faced, and had her left arm in a plaster cast and a sling.

  “What happened to you?” Harry said in French.

  “The flics,” she said contemptuously from between tight lips. “What else?”

  “I thought there wasn’t any violence today,” he said. “According to the radio.”

  “There never is any violence according to the radio of the capitalistic imperialists,” Anne-Marie said, true to form.

  “But we were listening to Europe Number One and Radio Luxembourg,” Harry said.

  “It’s still the same,” she said.

  “They beat you up?”

  She waved her cast up and down contemptuously.

  “What else?”

  “Is it broken?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The e
lbow. But not too badly, they said.”

  “They caught a bunch of us,” Daniel the Chairman explained. “After we had cut off from the march and were starting back.”

  “Was anybody else hurt?” Harry said.

  “Two boys had their heads cracked,” Daniel said. “But they were not of the Committee.”

  “Were you there?”

  “No, I was with another group.” Suddenly he grinned wolfishly behind his steel-rims. “But you see what can happen to anybody. I have been caught, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Anne-Marie.

  “Thank you,” she said, with great contempt. “But I care nothing for them. What can you expect? when the hireling killers of the—”

  “—capitalistic imperialists are present,” Harry finished for her.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “Come on, you guys. Shall I tell them to start?” Harry said. He went to the booth.

  He showed them every bit of the student film that had been developed. He did not show them any of his, which in fact he had left locked up in the car. It took about an hour and a half. The students in the crowded amphitheater all loved it. They hooted and cheered themselves, groaned or booed at the few shots where policemen figured, passed red wine bottles and sausages back and forth along the aisles. But, as Harry had figured, the Cinema Committee kids seemed to like it, too. They chuckled, laughed, poked each other with elbows, reminisced in whispers about shots they had worked on. All of them seemed to love it. Even Anne-Marie apparently thought it was fine. It began with a long long shot, badly over-exposed, of a student march in some totally unrecognizable street, with students holding a huge unreadable banner and moving interminably toward the camera. Minute after minute. The screen was marred by crooked dark lines and dark spots which were the lint and dust Harry had referred to. There was very noticeable jiggling of the hand-held camera as the holder breathed or moved his hands or arms. And none of the rest of it was very much better than that first bad shot. The night shots were almost unrecognizable as anything at all, all black with occasional splashes of light that momentarily lit up an indistinct face or two. And yet the kids, including the Cinema Committee, seemed to love it all. Only little Raymond seemed to feel it might not be marvelous. He slipped over into the empty seat beside me and whispered in French, “It is pretty bad, no?”

  I nodded.

  “Is any of it usable?”

  “He says six minutes, maybe.”

  “Damn. God. I was afraid of that,” said Raymond disconsolately.

  When the lights finally went up, and the bottle-wielding, sausage-wielding, ordinary students began to file out in happy groups, Harry turned to the members of the Committee who were still sitting all around us.

  “Did you like it?” he said to all of them, then signaled out the girl. “Anne-Marie?”

  “Yes. I thought much of it was very moving, very touching. It is perhaps a little too long.”

  “Daniel?”

  “Very much. I think it shows our Revolution exactly as it is, was.”

  “Terri?” Harry said.

  “Bernard?”

  “François?”

  “Georges?”

  Without exception they all liked it.

  “Well, you’re all wrong,” Harry said. “It is plain shit,” he said. “Just plain shit.”

  There was no arguing with the bitterness in his voice, and nobody tried to.

  “Nobody in the world,” Harry said. “Nobody in the world would sit through an hour of this. Or even a half hour.”

  Nobody answered him.

  “I’m shocked that you could think it was any good at all, any of you,” Harry said. “You’re letting yourselves be carried away by your own participation, by your own subjectivity, as opposed to objectivity.

  “Now, look. Somebody pick up the film cans and bring them back to the Odéon. I’ll meet you there. I guess I’m going to have to give you all a lecture. Can we get the use of that little movie theater at Odéon?”

  “I have permission to use it whenever I want,” Daniel the Chairman said, in a subdued voice. “Nobody else ever uses it.”

  “All right. I’ll meet you all there,” Harry said getting up. “Can we get a projectionist?”

  “I can get one,” Daniel said positively.

  “Okay. I’ll meet you there. We’ll go over this stuff, or part of it. Some of it.”

  When we got into the car outside, he was cursing savagely.

  Back at the Odéon he did indeed give them a lecture. He was as tough on them as a Marine first sergeant on a platoon of recruits. “There’s no point in showing all of this over. I don’t even know if I could stand to see it all through another time. You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves. And you ought to be doubly ashamed of yourselves for liking it.”

  In the beautiful little gray-and-black movie theater of the Odéon with its modern black swivel chairs for seats, which back before the Revolution had been used to show special films occasionally to very select avant-garde audiences, he ran several sections of their film over and over, reversing it and then running it again, pointing out to them all the mistakes they had made, which were manifold. At one point he blew up a little.

  “Jesus Christ! I didn’t think I’d ever be in the position where I’d have to tell advanced Cinema students of the University of the Sorbonne that they should keep their God damned lenses clean! Don’t any of you know how to use a God damned light meter properly?”

  But then he cooled down. After the actual demonstration was over he got up in front of them, for all the world like a harassed professor before a class.

  “As I’ve said, almost all this stuff is worthless. Unusable. That leaves us with the following logical problem, and question. Are we going to go ahead and try to make a film, or are we not? Is it even possible to attempt to shoot enough riot stuff in the next two or three weeks to make up what we now lack? I am not sure we can, myself. But I’m willing to try. A lot depends upon how much more rioting there will be. I am sure there will be some. But will we be able to get there and photograph it? We all know that the General has won. It is only a matter of time now before the so-called Revolution,” he grinned at them, “the almost Revolution, is a dead duck, finished. The point is, can we get the stuff we need to fill out the film you want to make in the amount of time left? This is a problem and a question you will have to decide.”

  Before anyone could answer, Harry held up his hand. “I can tell you that I am reasonably certain that if I shoot again tonight, with my two ‘principals’ here,” he grinned at Anne-Marie and Terri, “I can pretty well finish up the personal story I’ve been wanting to get. As a matter of fact, Anne-Marie’s broken arm ought to be a big aid to us. I never would have thought of faking that. I just wouldn’t have thought of it. In fact, if we had faked it it might have come out sentimental and have hurt us rather than helped us. But since it did happen, we can use it in all honesty.

  “Now, I am not going to show you any of my film today. I’ll show it to you when it’s all finished. I’ll want to edit it a little. I may let a few of you help a little with the editing, if you want to learn it. I’ll bring a good cutter. A good cutter is vital to film editing. But for the moment I don’t want to show it to you, largely because it is so noticeably better than what you people have shot that I’m afraid you might all go off and commit suicide. Even the little bit of what you’ve shot that I may be able to save is going to look so different, so noticeably amateurish, that I may not be able to use it anyway.

  “However, none of this solves the problem and the question about all the earlier material we are lacking. Without it, we won’t have any film. That’s for sure. It is up to you people to decide whether we want to go ahead and try or not.” He folded his arms across his chest.

  At the back Daniel the Chairman rose to his feet. “Regarding that, I think I can speak for all of us to say that we want to go ahead. I don’t think we even have to debate it and vote on it. If there
are any disagreements, will they please say so and enter their dissensions?”

  Daniel waited, but the small room was entirely still. Nobody moved or uttered a word.

  “Then I think I can safely say we are in agreement with your suggestion, M. Gallagher,” Daniel said. “Whether we can succeed in getting the material we need is another problem. But we want to try. We put ourselves at your disposal. If we don’t succeed, we don’t. But there is a chance we might. If we don’t try we might as well dissolve this Cinema Committee of the Sorbonne and Odéon for the Cultural Revolution, and forget it. I do not want to dissolve the Committee. So I guess we have to try.” He sat down.

  Harry unfolded his arms. He did not grin, or even smile. “Okay. If that’s the way you want it. Now, I have something I have to do now, this afternoon. I will meet the two crews and the actors here about nine o’clock tonight. I’ll be wanting to shoot a few outdoor shots, in which we may have to fake a little rioting, and I’ll be wanting to shoot some indoor shots here at the Odéon—in the hallways, the hospital, and in the offices themselves upstairs. Okay? See you then. Come on, Jack.”

  He was outside the door almost before I could follow him. “Fucking dumb pricks,” he said, as we went down the hall.

  “What is it you have to do, Harry?” I said. “And where is it you are going?”

  “Where do you think, dumbass?” he grinned.

  When we were outside the Odéon and down the steps into the Place, he stopped and turned to me.

  “Do you want a ride back to the Island? That’s where I’m heading.”

  I hesitated. “No. I think I’ll wander around a while, and then walk on back,” I said.

  “See you, then,” he grinned. “Will you be here tonight?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”