by David Malouf
We have begun to attract attention. Through a tiny window in the wall above the fire, a woman in black looks out. She has a cheesy unlined face but is very old. Her head is in a black scarf. She looks alarmed. What are we doing? She calls someone in the room behind, and a man in braces comes down. He is astonished to find Bob, the I.R.A. gunman, kneeling in his doorway as if worshipping the little fire, with this huge machine in his hands.
‘It’s good,’ Bob shouts, ignoring the man. ‘Let’s try a walk-through.’
I begin to walk, self-consciously aware that faces have begun to appear now at other windows, over to my left.
‘No, right on,’ Richard directs, ‘and round the corner. That’s enough – you’re out of the frame.’
‘It’s good,’ Bob shouts. ‘Now we go.’
I get back to my mark, the camera begins to whirr. Richard gives me my call. I walk on down the street and am shot through heat-waves and little flames.
Bob struggles to his feet. ‘That was great,’ he says, grinning. ‘I got a woman looking out of a grate.’
We go on, and at the bottom of the street come upon two small boys, one six or seven, the other a little older, dragging the kind of yellow plastic sacks that peat moss comes in. They are climbing the steep little street to a place where they can start a slide. They wear red woollen caps, red sweaters, blue track-suits. Brothers.
Richard is enormously excited.
‘Hey, you kids,’ he yells, forgetting for a moment that they are Italian, ‘you want to be in our film? Ask them,’ he tells Adriano. ‘Tell them they can be in the film.’
The boys stand there in the snow, trailing their yellow sacks.
What we are about to set up is complicated. The younger boy is to go up a bank to the left, where he will be out of sight behind the remains of a ruined tower, and slide in, on cue, over a low stone wall. He will drop almost at my feet as I come uphill. (I am now, of course, moving around the village in a contrary direction, but that is neither here nor there. We are creating our own topography. The real village is dissolving, becoming imaginary, as my walk goes deeper into the world of fiction.) At the same time, the older boy will start sliding down the street itself, and pass me a moment later on my right.
Adriano asks the boys their names. The younger one is Michele, the older Fabio. We position ourselves for a walk-through as Bob sets up his shot. I go out of sight round the corner below. Michele climbs his bank. Fabio is flat on his stomach about ten metres up the road. Adriano calls the cues. ‘Pronto? – Michele! David! Fabio!’
Michele misses his cue. He is dreaming, or perhaps he is too far off round his corner to hear.
‘Michele,’ Adriano shouts as if he had known this kid all his life. ‘What are you doing? When I shout Michele you go.’
The boy stands holding his yellow sack, solemn, crestfallen. Adriano explains once again the order of the shot. We try it and carry the whole action through; but this time Michele comes too soon. Perhaps he is too young for all this.
‘Let’s do the take,’ Bob says. ‘Tell him again.’
‘Listen, Michele,’ Adriano warns the boy, ‘you better watch out. You get it right this time, eh, or you’re out of the film.’
The boy climbs the bank again, looking determined. We all take our positions – go, go, go – and this time it’s perfect. Michele comes rushing over the wall to my right, in a flurry of fresh snow, utterly surprising me. I barely have time to recover before Fabio is speeding down the street so fast that I have to step out of his path. I look back laughing as I trudge uphill.
‘Cut!’
The boys are eager to know if they did well. Adriano assures them that he can get them both a contract at Cinecittà, but makes the conditions sound so much like hard work that they decide they’d rather stick to real life.
It is freezing now. We have been out for over an hour. This is the dark side of the village, away from the sun, though Bob assures us the light is just beautiful. The temperature is eight or nine degrees below and falling. We do not know it yet but this is to be the coldest day of the century. My feet are dead, and I have a sharp pain between the shoulder-blades from holding my neck so stiff. We go on down to the main square. (No sign of Alex, my double in the world of sound, the Eskimo space-walker.) Bob sets up to take a shot of me walking up the ramp towards the castle, mostly because at this moment the light is so good; is falling so nicely on the snow-covered railings of the ramp, but especially on two wordless traffic signs, one red, the other a brilliant blue.
Once again the geography of my walk puzzles me. But not to worry. The traffic signs have intervened to point directions. So I walk slowly up the ramp, then back again; then up, then back; while men come out of the bars on opposite sides of the square to watch. At last, when all is ready and Adriano has applied his light-meter to every significant object along the way, I set out under thirty or forty pairs of eyes, past the frost-covered rails and the door of the Tabacchi, and am quickly out of frame.
Noon. While Bob and Adriano, at the highest point of the village, take long-shots of chimneys across tiled roofs, Richard and I run back to the square to buy fish from the travelling fishmonger, who has somehow made it up from the coast. We have heard him shouting his wares through a megaphone – squid, prawns, three kinds of fish – and find his wagon drawn up under Alma’s bare wistaria. We buy a kilo of squid and a kilo of crustaceans that look like big centipedes but are called ‘cicadas’. The fishmonger explains that he usually gets them here alive, but today they are deep-frozen. (This is a joke?) He shows me the icicles hanging from the wooden trays that are stacked three deep in the back of his van.
It is twelve thirty by the time we find Alex and make our way to Alma’s bar. We are all frozen, famished and in need of warming drinks.
We have been out for more than three hours. In that time, in my film life, I have walked thirty feet.
Over our hasty meal of dry bread and good Tuscan salami, we discuss our next moves. Bob would like to shoot my feet passing an iron wheel he has discovered, half-buried in the snow. Richard considers shooting me in the post office, or at Trento’s, to create a reason for my walk. Meanwhile we are joined by the resident simpleton at Alma’s, who wants us to shoot him, or his house, where the snow he assures us is wonderful.
He is called Bernardo. No more than five feet high, cross-eyed and always half-pissed, he wears a fur cap, a zipped-up blouson, and from now on will follow us all over the village, not speaking but reminding us with his presence, and the aggrieved look of a sulky child, that we are rejecting him.
We go out to find Bob’s wheel. It’s no go. The light has changed.
Things are changing fast now. A big yellow snow-plough has appeared and has already cleared the lower end of the village, leaving the streets there a dirty grey wash. Richard decides on a nice shot into a traffic mirror, in which the camera sees my reflection approaching with the snow-plough behind, then slips down to catch the real me in another perspective, climbing the slope towards the square. It takes Bob a little time to set this up. We do a quick walk-through then shoot it, and try another complicated shot beginning with a poster in bright colours advertising a tractor, then showing the snow-plough in motion as I pass it. We have to repeat the sequence several times before we get it right, and each time, on cue, though in fact it is engaged on its own business, the snow-plough backs and covers the same piece of street, as if obeying Richard’s call of ‘Again!’, ‘Cut!’, ‘Again!’ And all the time Bernardo, the aggrieved child, stands sulking, just out of frame.
We make our way back towards the house. So my walk is circular after all, I do get home.
Sunlight now is flooding the archway that supports one half of my house, throwing all the rough paving-stones into relief and picking out all the rungs of the two olive-ladders that rest in swings under the tunnelled roof. I go into the little courtyards at the back, and we begin a sequence in which I collect three or four short logs from the woodpile, pass Bob on the l
eft, and he follows me down through the archway, under the ladders, into light. Bernardo has got tired of all this for the moment and gone back to the bar, but he reappears when we start shooting what will be, I imagine, the beginning of my walk, a short sequence in which I appear out of the door of the house, bang it and go dancing down the sunlit steps.
Richard is disappointed with me. The first time we shoot it I bang the door too hard, the key comes flying out, and instead of picking it up and going on – as in real life – I stop, waiting for him to call ‘Cut’, and we have to shoot the whole sequence again. Richard makes notes. Since we are still shooting silent, I will have to repeat this, later, while Alex records and then synchronises the sound.
Three thirty. Bob is worried about the light. It is changing again, beginning to be pink as the sun falls now over the snowy fields. We want all this part of the film to be shot in the same light, even if we are shooting it backwards from morning to afternoon. So I go upstairs, and we shoot the opening of the film, which Richard, looking up at the front of the house, has just decided on.
It is early morning. The green shutters of my study are still closed in their patch of sunlit wall. The opening chords of a Beethoven adagio sound, and as the lovely this-otherworldly theme begins to unfold, I open the shutters – Ah snow! – and closing the inner windows again, stand there for a moment behind the glass, sipping coffee from a big white cup. As I move away the Beethoven fades and my work-day is to begin.
‘Cut!’
But our own work-day now is almost over. Disaster is about to strike.
We are out again on the cold side of the village, high up near the castle, where the snow is still untrodden. Richard wants to shoot a short sequence with sound. I stand in a nice patch of snow about a foot deep, my back to a wall with an iron grill, behind me a view of cold, snow-covered hills broken by lines of scrub. The temperature is twelve below. As well as the camera set-up, we have to worry now about sound. Wire is threaded down my right trouser-leg and I am hitched up to Alex’s sound-box. His tennis ball, at the end of its rod, hangs just in front of me, out of frame. I am to talk.
‘What do you want me to say?’ I ask Richard. He makes suggestions.
I am eager to begin because I have been standing in this position now for nearly ten minutes. All sensation has gone from my left foot. If we don’t start soon my teeth will chatter.
‘OK, I know what to say,’ I insist. ‘Let’s try it.’
We begin. It goes well. I am just getting into my stride when a kind of high squealing sound makes itself heard. It is as if some small creature were being tormented beyond endurance and was setting up an animal protest. I suspect my left foot, but it can’t be that. It is the camera. Do these machines have an endurance point beyond which they can’t be pushed?
‘It may be just the cold,’ Bob explains. He hugs the thing. I lift my left foot.
‘If not?’ Richard wonders anxiously.
‘Ball-bearing. I’ll have to take a look.’
So here is Bob now, in the relative warmth of my upstairs study, in intense communication with his ‘instrument’.
With Adriano at hand he has taken the camera to pieces; the parts are laid out before him and Bob studies them. Richard calls me in to watch.
Richard, who loves machines, is fascinated to see the anatomy of the thing exposed like this and the loving skill and inward understanding with which Adriano and Bob regard it. This is a love affair. Then too there is Richard’s feeling for Bob. He admires him enormously, but his feeling for Bob’s patience and dedication, his commitment to the camera, has something to do as well with what men share who are for the moment a team; a kind of affection we have no name for – it is unique. And then beyond all that, something more.
All the pieces of the camera are disconnected now, but Bob still sees them as a unit, a working unit, and it is this double view of the thing that he is working with. This, I see, is how the film itself must exist for Richard. In showing me Bob and the camera he is showing me something of himself. Perhaps he is afraid that I have missed, this morning, the director’s part in what we have been doing. I haven’t, in fact, but it is true: the dedication of the technicians to their instruments, their adjustments and readjustments, their fine skill and patience, are visible in a way the director’s are not.
But the camera is not just cold. It has given up. The day’s shooting is over. Tonight we will make sound recordings; Richard will interview me. At five tomorrow, Alex and Adriano will drive to Rome and get another camera while Bob sets up his lights. We put Jimi Hendrix on the record-player and Richard prepares the squid, Japanese style, with cloves and red wine, while I stoke my stove against the freeze.
Friday, January 11
Early afternoon. After a morning spent recording ‘wild sound’, we are out in the village again. Adriano and Alex are back from Rome and we have a new camera. Bob wants to make some tidying-up shots of the piazza before we move indoors.
Since the streets have been cleared of snow and are now grey slush we can shoot only from knee-level. Bob sets up on the ramp leading up to the castle and will take a long shot of me entering the square by the fountain and going to the door of Trento’s bar. The shot will start high up on the windows of Agatina’s sitting-room, where the shutters are open showing pretty crocheted curtains, peacocks, and will then pan left to take in the sign of the Bar Hawaii and down to find me entering from the left. It will then pan right again as I move to the door.
We try a walk-through, and just as I get to the double-glass door, Signorina Natalina, all dressed up for a fashionable day on the Riviera, with paint an inch thick, a cigarette in her dirty hand with its chipped red nails, and a bit of ratty yellow fur at her neck, steps out as on to a stage, all brilliant smiles: she thinks we have filmed her. Two or three lounging youths snigger, ironically applaud, and call out: ‘Hey, take Natalina! Get a film of Natalina.’ She growls at them, makes a stabbing motion with her cigarette, then smiles again, apologises for their crudeness, and asks if her entrance was all right.
Natalina is a squat, powerful, ugly woman of seventy. She changes costume two or three times a day, appearing in extraordinary creations of white or cream silk with all the accessories in emerald green or brown or scarlet, and goes from one heated place in the village to another – bank to post-office to bar – buttonholing people, usually young men, clutching at their forearms and beginning a conversation that circles crazily back on itself and consists, you soon discover, of half a dozen formulas endlessly repeated. She is mercilessly teased by all the males of the village from six to eighty-six, ignored by the women, and is always blowing her lips out in a grand huff.
There is a story, of course. Natalina is the only daughter of rich but respectable parents. During the war she went with a German officer, who was married and deserted her, and the village women as soon as the Germans left shaved her head. She has, since then, spent fifty years here, her story being repeated openly to each generation and to each new arrival astonished (as anyone must be) by the apparition, among the austere women of this village, of a bearded blonde truckdriver in the gilded finery of a brave defiance or the loopy fancy-dress of an increasingly pathetic fantasy. Natalina is one of the village clowns.
Anyway, she steps out now, all smiles, into the square, and I have to explain to her that it was just a walk-through. If she wants actually to appear she must go back inside and do it all over again. On signal.
Grumpy but eager to please, she agrees; but hasn’t enough wit to grasp what is required of her. She keeps putting her head out of the door, calling ‘When?’, then stepping back to check her makeup, then stamping impatiently as she peers through the glass. Finally, after poking her head out for the seventh time, she loses interest – or perhaps she thinks we are simply teasing her.
She goes stamping off, but comes to a halt in front of the bank, about ten metres on, watching across her shoulder while we film the sequence. Bianca from the hardware store, and her fat da
ughter and grandchild, all in snow boots, have come along at just the right moment and go into the bar before me. Natalina is furious. She fumes off in her fashionable high heels, twitching her bit of fur.
Bob has now to take a still shot of the fountain, a cast-iron affair, bluish-grey, with a lion’s head on each of its four faces and a ball and spike on top, the spout bearded today with coils of ice but beginning to drip. The shot will take a little time to set up because the road slopes steeply downward. The camera must be propped. Richard and I use the break to slip upstairs and see Agatina.
She has heard about the film, of course, and will have been watching from one of her windows. She offers us whisky, lays out biscuits, and then shows Richard her trick with the cats. Setting one of them down at her feet, she leans forward with her arms joined and urges it to jump. The cat, the deaf white one, looks distracted. She stamps her foot and urges again. Almost absently, but with marvellous ease, the cat leaves the ground, flies, clears Agatina’s encircling arms, comes soundlessly to the kitchen floor and trots quickly away.
We are led off now on a tour of the house. We see beds with lacquered headpieces inlaid with mother-of-pearl, eighteenth-century commodes, cushion-covers, doilies, the long hand-made pieces, all delicate lace, that hang between the curtains in public rooms. Agatina’s parlour is full of old farmhouse copper-pots, kettles, ornamental moulds, together with trivets, three-legged footstools. It takes time to do justice to these things, and when we get downstairs the others are nowhere to be seen.
We find them in the bar. Bob now has the shot he has been eager for all along and which I, out of embarrassment, have tried to dissuade him from: Trento’s in full action. Everyone is there, including Natalina and even Bernardo (who has got into the film at last). The tables are crowded. Trento, all proprietorial pride, stands moonfaced at the espresso machine. The windows at the back are open and flooded with light, giving the smoky space and its figures a ghostly look, as men slap down cards, old fellows grin and shake their walking-sticks at the camera, everyone steams and shouts.
