“I went absolutely to the place they told me: I saw him, and said to him absolutely: What, you, absolutely…”
Have patience! Nobody yet calls you Mr. Absolutely… Serafino Gubbio (Shoot!) has been less fortunate. Without my noticing it, I may have happened once or twice, or several times in succession, to repeat, after the producer, the sacramental word: “Shoot!” I must have repeated it with my face composed in that expression which is proper to me, of professional impassivity, and this was enough to make everyone here, at Fantappi��‘s suggestion, address me now as Shoot.
Every town in Italy knows Fantappi��, the comedian of the Kosmograph, who has specialised in travesties of military life: Fantappi��, C. B. and Fantappi�� on the range; Fantappi�� on manoeuvres and Fantappi�� steers the airship; Fantappi�� on guard and Fantappi�� in the Colonies.
[Footnote: Fantappi��, or fante a piede, is equivalent to the English footslogger. C. K. S. M.]
He stuck it on himself, this nickname; a nickname that goes well with his special form of art. In private life he is called Roberto Chismic��.
“You aren’t angry with me, laddie, for calling you Shoot?” he asked me, some time ago.
“No, my dear fellow,” I answered him with a smile. “You have stamped me.”
“I’ve stamped myself too, if it comes to that!”
All of us stamped, yes. And most, of all, those of us who are least aware of it, my dear Fantappi��.
3
I go in through the entrance hall on the left, and come out upon the gravelled path from the gate, shut in by the buildings of the second department, the Photographic or Positive.
In my capacity as operator I have the privilege of keeping one foot in this, and the other in the Art, or Negative Department. And all the marvels of the industrial and so-called artistic maze are familiar to me.
Here the work of the machines is mysteriously completed.
All the life that the machines have devoured with the voracity of animals gnawed by a tapeworm, is turned out here, in the large underground rooms, their darkness barely broken by dim red lamps, which strike a sinister blood-red gleam from the enormous dishes prepared for the developing bath.
The life swallowed by the machines is there, in those tapeworms, I mean in the films, now coiled on their reels.
We have to fix this life, which has ceased to be life, so that another machine may restore to it the movement here suspended in a series of instantaneous sections.
We are as it were in a womb, in which is developing and taking shape a monstrous mechanical birth.
And how many hands are at work there in the dark! There is a whole army of men and women employed here: operators, technicians, watchmen, men employed on the dynamos and on the other machinery, drying, soaking, winding, colouring, perforating the films and joining up the pieces.
I have only to enter here, in this darkness foul with the breath of the machines, with the exhalations of chemical substances, for all my superfluity to evaporate.
Hands, I see nothing but hands, in these dark rooms; hands busily hovering over the dishes; hands to which the murky light of the red lamps gives a spectral appearance. I reflect that these hands belong to men who are men no longer; who are condemned here to be hands only: these hands, instruments. Have they a heart? Of what use is it? It is of no use here. Only as an instrument, it too, of a machine, to serve, to move these hands. And so with the head: only to think of what these hands may need. And gradually I am filled with all the horror of the necessity that impels me to become a hand myself also, and nothing more.
I go to the store-keeper to provide myself with a stock of fresh film, and I prepare my machine for its meal.
I at once assume, with it in my hand, my mask of impassivity. Or rather I cease to exist. It walks, now, upon my legs. From head to foot, I belong to it: I form part of its equipment. My head is here, inside the machine, and I carry it in my hand.
Outside, in the daylight, throughout the vast enclosure, is the gay animation of an undertaking that prospers and pays punctually and handsomely for every service rendered, that easy run of work in the confidence that there will be no complications, and that every difficulty, with the abundance of means at our disposal, will be neatly overcome; indeed a feverish desire to introduce, as though by way of challenge, the strangest and most unusual difficulties, without a thought of the cost, with the certainty that the money, spent now without reckoning, will before long return multiplied an hundredfold.
Scenario writers, stage hands, scene painters, carpenters, builders and plasterers, electricians, tailors and dressmakers, milliners, florists, countless other workers employed as shoemakers, hatters, armourers, in the store-rooms of antique and modern furniture, in the wardrobe, are all kept busy, but are not seriously busy, nor are they playing a game.
Only children have the divine gift of taking their play seriously. The wonder is in themselves; they impart it to the things with which they are playing, and let themselves be deceived by them. It is no longer a game; it is a wonderful reality.
Here it is just the opposite.
We do not play at our work, for no one has any desire to play. But how are we to take seriously a work that has no other object than to deceive, not ourselves, but other people? And to deceive them by putting together the most idiotic fictions, to which the machine is responsible for giving a wonderful reality!
There results from this, of necessity, and with no possibility of deception, a hybrid game. Hybrid, because in it the stupidity of the fiction is all the more revealed and obvious inasmuch as one sees it to be placed on record by the method that least lends itself to deception: namely, Photography. It ought to be understood that the fantastic cannot acquire reality except by means of art, and that the reality which a machine is capable of giving it kills it, for the very reason that it is given it by a machine, that is to say by a method which discovers and exposes the fiction, simply by giving it and presenting it as real. If it is mechanical, how can it be life, how can it be art? It is almost like entering one of those galleries of living statuary, waxworks, clothed and tinted. We feel nothing but surprise (which may even amount to disgust) at their movements, in which there is no possible illusion of a material reality.
And no one seriously believes that he can create this illusion. At the most, he tries to provide something to take for the machine, here in the workshops, there in the four studios or on the stage. The public, like the machine, takes it all. They make stacks of money, and can cheerfully spend thousands and thousands of lire on the construction of a scene which on the screen will not last for more than a couple of minutes.
Scene painters, stage hands, actors all give themselves the air of deceiving the machine, which will give an appearance of reality to all their fictions.
“What am I to them, I who with the utmost seriousness stand by impassive, turning the handle, at that stupid game of theirs!”
4
Excuse me for a moment. I am going to pay a visit to the tiger. I shall talk, I shall go on talking, I shall pick up the thread of my discourse later on, never fear. At present, I must go and see the tiger.
Ever since they bought her, I have gone every day to pay her a visit, before starting my work. On two days only have I not been able to go, because they did not give me time.
We have had other animals here that were wild, although greatly subdued by melancholy: a couple of polar bears which used to spend the whole day standing on their hind legs beating their breasts, like Trinitarians doing penance: three shivering lion cubs, always huddled in a corner of the cage, one on top of another; other animals as well, that were not exactly wild: a poor ostrich, terrified at every sound, like a chicken, and always uncertain where to set its feet: a number of mischievous monkeys. The Kosmograph is provided with everything, including a menagerie, albeit its inmates remain there but a short time.
No animal has ever talked to me, like this tiger.
Wh
en we first secured her, she had but recently arrived, a gift from some illustrious foreign personage, at the Zoological Gardens in Rome. At the Zoological Gardens they were unable to keep her, because she was absolutely incapable of learning, I do not say to blow her nose with a handkerchief, but even to respect the most elementary rules of social intercourse. Three or four times she threatened to jump the ditch, or rather attempted to jump it, to hurl herself upon the visitors to the gardens who stood quietly gazing at her from a distance.
But what other thought could arise more spontaneously in the mind of a tiger (if you object to the word mind, let us say the paws) than that the ditch in question was put there on purpose so that she might try to jump it, and that those ladies and gentlemen stopped there in front of her in order that she might devour them if she succeeded in jumping it?
It is certainly an advantage to be able to stand a joke; but we know that not everyone possesses this advantage. Many people cannot even endure the thought that some one else thinks he is at liberty to joke at their expense. I speak of men, who, nevertheless, in the abstract, are all capable of realising that at times a joke is permissible.
The tiger, you say, is not placed on show in a zoological garden for a joke. I agree. But does it not seem a joke to you to think that she can suppose that you keep her there on show to give the public a “living idea” of natural history!
Here we are back at our starting-point. This, inasmuch as we are not tigers, but men, is rhetoric.
We may feel compassion for a man who is unable to stand a joke; we ought not to feel any for a beast; especially if the joke for which we have placed it on show, I mean the “living idea,” may have fatal consequences: that is to say, for the visitors to the Zoological Gardens, a too practical illustration of its ferocity.
This tiger was, therefore, wisely condemned to death. The Kosmograph Company managed to hear of it in time, and bought her. Now she is here, in a cage in our menagerie. Since she has been here, her behaviour has been exemplary. How are we to explain this? Our treatment, no doubt, seems to her far more logical. Here she is not at liberty to attempt to jump any ditch, has no illusion of local colour, as in the Zoological Gardens. Here she has in front of her the bars of her cage, which say to her continually: “You cannot escape; you are a prisoner”; and she lies on the ground there almost all day long, resigned to her fate, gazing out through the bars, quietly, wonderingly waiting.
Alas, poor beast, she does not know that here there is something far more serious in store for her, than that joke of the “living idea”!
The scenario is already completed, an Indian subject, in which she is destined to represent one of the principal parts. A spectacular scenario, upon which several hundred thousand lire will be spent; but the stupidest and most vulgar that could be imagined. I need only give the title: The Lady and the Tiger. The usual lady, more tigerish than the tiger. I seem to have heard that she is to be an English Miss travelling in the Indies with a train of admirers.
India will be a sham, the jungle will be a sham, the travels will be a sham, with a sham Miss and sham admirers: only the death of this poor beast will not be a sham. Do you follow me? And does it not make you writhe in anger?
To kill her in self-defence, or to save the life of another person, well and good. Albeit not of her own accord, for her own pleasure, has the beast come here to place herself on show among a lot of men, but men themselves, for their pleasure, have gone out to hunt her, to drag her from her savage lair. But to kill her like this, in a sham forest, in a sham hunt, for a stupid make-believe, is a real iniquity and is going too far. One of the admirers, at a certain stage, will fire point-blank at a rival. You will see this rival fall to the ground, dead. Yes, my friends. But when the scene is finished, there he is getting up again, brushing the dust of the stage off his clothes. But this poor beast will never get up again, after they have shot her. The scene shifters will carry off the sham forest, and at the same time clear the stage of her carcase. In the midst of a universal sham, her death alone will be genuine.
And if it were only a sham that could by its beauty and nobility compensate in a measure for the sacrifice of this beast. But no. It is utterly stupid. The actor who is to kill her will not even know, perhaps, why he has killed her. The scene will last for a minute or two at most, when projected upon the screen, and will pass without leaving any permanent impression in the minds of the spectators, who will come away from the theatre yawning:
“Oh Lord, what rubbish!”
This, you beautiful wild creature, is what awaits you. You do not know it, and gaze through the bars of your cage with those terror-stricken eyes in which the slit pupils contract and dilate by turns. I see your wild nature as it were steaming from your whole body, like the vapour of a blazing coal; I see marked on the black stripes of your coat the elastic force of your irrepressible spring. Whoever studies you closely is glad of the cage that imprisons you and checks in him also the savage instinct which the sight of you stirs irresistibly in his blood.
You cannot remain here on any other terms. Either you must be imprisoned like this, or you must be killed; because your ferocity—we quite understand—is innocent; nature has implanted it in you, and you, in employing it, are obeying nature and cannot feel any remorse. We cannot endure that you, after a gory feast, should be able to sleep calmly. Your very innocence makes us innocent of your death, when we inflict it in self-defence. We can kill you, and then, like you, sleep calmly. But out there, in the savage lands, where you do not allow any stranger to pass; not here, not here, where you have not come of your own accord, for your own pleasure. The beautiful, ingenuous innocence of your ferocity makes the iniquity of ours seem disgusting here. We seek to defend ourselves against you, after bringing you here, for our pleasure, and we keep you in prison: this is no longer your kind of ferocity; it is a treacherous ferocity! But we know, you may be sure, we know how to go even farther, to do better still: we shall kill you for amusement, stupidly. A sham hunter, in a sham forest, among sham trees…. We shall be worthy in every respect, truly, of the concocted plot. Tigers, more tigerish than a tiger. And to think that the sentiment which this film, now in preparation, is intended to arouse in the spectators is contempt for human ferocity! It will be part of o’ur day’s work, this ferocity practised for amusement, and we count moreover upon making a handsome profit out of it, should the film prove successful.
You stare. At what do you stare, you beautiful, innocent creature! That is just how things stand. You are here for no other purpose. And I who love and admire you, when they kill you, shall be impassively turning the handle of this pretty machine here, do you see? They have invented it. It has to act; it has to eat. It eats everything, whatever stupidity they may set before it. It will eat you too; it eats everything, I tell you! And I am its servant. I shall come and plant it closer to you, when you, mortally wounded, are writhing in your last agony. Ah, do not fear, it will extract the utmost penny of profit from your death! It does not have the luck to taste such a dinner every day. You can have that consolation. And, if you like, another as well.
There comes every day, like myself, in front of your cage here, a lady intent on studying how you move, how you turn your head, how you look out of your eyes. The Nestoroff. Is that nothing to you? She has chosen you to be her teacher. Luck such as this does not come the way of every tiger.
As usual, she is taking her part seriously. But I have heard it said that the part of the Miss, “more tigerish than the tiger,” will not be assigned to her. Perhaps she does not yet know this; she thinks that the part is hers; and she comes here to study.
People have told me this, and laughed at it. But I myself, the other day, took her by surprise, on one of her visits here, and remained talking to her for some time.
5
It is no mere waste of time, you will understand, to spend half an hour in watching and considering a tiger, seeing in it a manifestation of Earth, guileless, beyond good and evil, incomparably b
eautiful and innocent in its savage power. Before we can come down from this “aboriginality” and reach the stage of being able to see before us a man or woman of our own time, and to recognise and consider him or her as an inhabitant of the same earth, we require—I do, at least; I cannot answer for you—a wide stretch of imagination.
And so I remained for a while looking at Signora Nestoroff before I was able to understand what she was saying to me.
But the fault, as a matter of fact, was not only mine and the tiger’s. The fact of her addressing me at all was unusual; and it is quite natural, when anyone addresses us suddenly with whom we have not been on speaking terms, that we should find it hard at first to take in the meaning, sometimes even the sound of the most ordinary words, and should ask:
“Excuse me, what was it you said?”
In a little more than eight months, since I came here, between her and myself, apart from formal greetings, barely a score of words have passed.
Then she—yes, this happened too—coming up to me, began to speak to me with great volubility, as we do when we wish to distract the attention of some one who has caught us in some action or thought which we are anxious to keep secret. (The Nestoroff speaks our language with marvellous ease and with a perfect accent, as though she had lived for many years in Italy: but she at once breaks into French whenever, if only for a moment, she changes her tone or grows excited.) She wished to find out from me whether I believed that the actor’s profession was such that any animal whatsoever (not necessarily in a metaphorical sense) could regard itself as qualified, without preliminary training, to practise it.
“Where?” I asked her.
She did not understand my question.
“Well,” I explained to her; “if you mean, practise it here, where there is no need of speech, perhaps even an animal—why not!—may be capable of succeeding.”
I saw her face cloud over.
Shoot Page 6
