Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

I looked at the logo, shook my head. “That’s the same font Fudgetongue used to use, but other than that, couldn’t tell you.”

  “Fudgetongue? Jesus. They’re the guys with the moog that sounds like a kazoo, right?”

  “I think that’s Fudge Tunnel.”

  “Well, one way or the other, we probably should get this over with quick.” He raised his hands, semaphore-ing the waiter. “Yo, Lloyd! Two more beers!”

  “Not for me, thanks, I’m wheat-sensitive.”

  “Make that one beer, and whatever your best girly drink is!”

  Wasn’t often anybody called me girly, parts aside, so I decided to take that as a compliment. “Mind if I record this?” I asked, sliding in beside him. “Alexander does a podcast sometimes, but don’t worry, if I can’t clean the sound-file up enough for hosting standards I’ll go transcript instead—I always back my interviews up with notes.”

  Wrob leered. “Oh, not a problem! Makes me feel infamous.”

  I threw in for the next round, then the next, and let him talk. Wasn’t hard. He was his own favourite subject, after all.

  Leonard Warsame, Wrob’s then-partner and assistant, once told me that Wrob “had this thing he used to do, whenever he was interviewed—he’d take it as a license to tell these outrageous . . . not sure if I’d call them lies, since I think they usually contained at least some element of the truth, but fibs, let’s say, about his childhood and adolescence, growing up queer and arty in rural Ontario. Called them ‘True Tales of Dourvale.’ I figure he must’ve gotten the idea from Guy Maddin. Back when I first met him, I thought they were true, because I didn’t know that much about Canada to begin with—I moved here from Somalia when I was fifteen, never really left Toronto until I was twenty. But I did some asking around and found out that not only did he not grow up in Dourvale . . . he actually grew up in this other town ten miles away called Overdeere, I think. Dourvale doesn’t even exist.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, taken aback.

  “Well, it exists, I guess—physically—but nobody actually lives there. It’s a ghost town. Which is just classic Wrob.”

  Afterwards, I went through the Dragon Dictation app recording of the interview, cross-checking it with my notes for anything that seemed like it needed to be corrected. The conversation ended up looking a lot like this:

  WROB: So, read your review. You really liked Untitled 13, huh?

  ME: Best thing you’ve done so far. Better than Untitled 1 through 12, by a long shot.

  WROB: Yeah, yeah . . . don’t oversell it, okay? I know you think I’m a parasite, a tapeworm dug deep in the bowels of CanCon, or whatever—

  ME: What? No, I don’t think that.

  WROB: Suuuurrre you don’t. But fine, let’s lay that by—I still know what you’re really here to ask about. You want to know about the inserts, right?

  ME: They were . . . very powerful. Almost looked like you did them on silver nitrate.

  WROB: Uh huh.

  ME: But that’s not really possible, right? I mean—

  WROB: What makes you think I couldn’t get my hands on some unexposed silver nitrate film, Lois? I’m rich, after all. Could even pay somebody to make some, if I really wanted to. Of course, it probably wouldn’t have that same kinda flaky quality, like it’s starting to come off a bit. Like it’s step-printed on a fire hazard. (Pause) No, you’re right, of course. The clips come from something I sampled, before the NFA bounced my sorry ass.

  ME: What was it?

  WROB: Long story. Longish. Definitely calls for another drink.

  By the end of his NFA tenure, Wrob told me, he’d been working “very closely” with Jan Mattheuis, head of the Ontario Film Recovery Project. Mattheuis had started as an academic, teaching Film Studies out of Brock University, where he’d written a couple of surveys of early Canadian film that brought him to the attention of Piers Handling, Director and CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival. Handling brought Mattheuis in to curate a couple of programmes and the rest is history—he became attached to the NFA, where he developed the OFRP from the ground up, with the help of a network of volunteers and fundraisers. Their mandate was reclamation, categorization, and digitization of found footage dating anywhere from the late 1800s to the early 1920s. Wrob claimed to have bought his way in at the bottom through a hefty donation, then set his cap for Mattheuis, even though he was “not really my type, per se—waaay too old,” dazzling him with his double knowledge of digitization technology and potential recovery sites, especially in Lake of the North region.

  WROB: Jan was particularly interested in locating any lost or hidden caches of silver nitrate footage, because given its chemical composition alone, there just doesn’t tend to be much of it left. So he really perked up when I told him about the studio in Sulfa. You might remember this one too, or maybe you don’t—the Japery? Opened up in 1918?

  ME: Sure. One of the bandwagon-jumpers, after Canadian National Features of Toronto started supplying shorts and second-reel features for the Allen Brothers theatre chain.

  WROB: That’s right. An intense but sadly fleeting period of success in the industry. Jay and Jule Allen went straight from owning a store-front nickelodeon into an exclusive Canadian distribution license for all those glamorous, proto-Hollywood Goldwyn and Famous Players-Lasky films, and their success then gave birth to a whole bunch of envious imitators leaping up like mushrooms across Ontario, Quebec, the West . . . till they ran afoul of Adolph Zukor, that is, the Famous Players magnate.

  ME: I know the history, Wrob.

  WROB: ’Course you do—the part that’s public record, anyhow. Zukor refused to renegotiate the distribution deal unless the Allens took him on as a partner, but they refused, naturally enough, and that tolled the bell on their entire business model. The Trenton studio was gone by 1920, and it took them four years to recoup even a fraction of their losses by selling out to the Ontario government. All its progeny soon followed likewise . . . except the Japery, which met a very different fate.

  ME: Uh huh. Which was?

  WROB: It burned to the ground. And the fire that gutted it? Began in its own little warehouse of completed movies, which just so happened to be located—un-strategically, in hindsight—in the facility where its silver nitrate reels were processed.

  ME: Jesus, place must’ve gone off like a bomb. Anybody die?

  WROB: Oh, it happened at night, well after hours. By that time, they’d mainly switched over from making their own films to copying other people’s, cobbling work-prints and sending them down along the store-front and church basement circuit, all up and down Lake of the North. Actually, there was a rumour maybe the Allens might’ve paid to have them torched, in order to limit competition—or Zukor, even, you want to get all conspiracy theory. But frankly? I think both sides of that struggle had bigger fish to fry.

  ME: And Mattheuis thought he could find, what? Some leftovers?

  WROB: No, we both knew how unlikely that was, given the way that shit burns. What he thought—well, what I suggested to him—was that if Japery was still delivering prints right up until the end, then maybe there’d be some point to checking the stops along what used to be their old supply route.

  ME: Which turned out to be a profitable idea, I take it.

  WROB: We ran across four different caches following that protocol, all silver nitrate—maybe four and a half if you count some stuff Jan bought from the Quarry Argent Folk Museum, donated from various private collections: one under a hockey rink in Chaste, when they knocked down what used to be Gersholme’s nickelodeon; one in somebody’s attic, out by Your Ear; one in God’s Lips, inside a meeting-house wall; and one . . . well, Jan should probably tell you about that one himself. It’s a funny story.

  ME: So, the clips for Untitled 13—you stole them from Mattheuis’s stash?

  WROB: Please, Lois: sampled. You know my methods. During catalog
uing, before restoration. I basically filmed it off a monitor with my Super 16, put a mosquito-netting drape over it and moved it back and forth while I did it, deformed the subtextual. Sick effect, right?

  ME: And what’d Mattheuis think of that?

  WROB: Not much, which is why I’m not working there anymore. Truth to tell, we were probably gonna break up soon anyways; he’s not a lot of fun after hours, or during hours, either. But it was worth it. I mean—you saw. (Pause) Look, from my point of view, I feel as though Canadian film belongs to everybody. And it repulses me that most Canadians don’t feel the same way, which is one of the reasons I got involved with the Archive in the first place, with Jan. And the reason I feel this way is that when I was a kid, back in Overdeere, I saw this bunch of dickheads stack maybe seventeen separate silver nitrate prints in a pit and set the whole thing on fire, let it burn till it was gone. They found ’em in an old church on the outskirts of town, where I guess they used to show films sometimes—the canisters were rusted shut, so they had to beat ’em with tire irons and shit just to pry them open, and when they did they found that half of ’em had turned to goo . . . God, that smelled awful, like pickled dead bodies or something. But the other half, they were fine. You could see it even from the sidelines, the safety perimeters they were keeping all us looky-loos back behind. One guy held up a reel so the light shone through it, and if you squinted you could almost see little tiny silver pictures on each frame, moving just a bit, like they were vibrating—that’s how it seemed to me, anyway. And I wanted to know why they’d just destroy something like that, something so old, so . . . beautiful, so important. Why they’d have to throw it away like garbage, burn it like a wasp’s nest. But the local fire chief told my dad it was too dangerous to even try and store, that it was a wonder it hadn’t gone up already: “This stuff spontaneously combusts! It gives off poisonous gases when it burns!” And my dad . . . he said he was right, stop your bitchin’, it’s nothing special anyhow. Think about it, Lois, ’cause I know you get what I’m saying: this was history, our history, and nobody cared enough to try to preserve any of it.

  Was it a put-on, an act? I couldn’t tell, even close up; Wrob was like that, I guess. He had genuine tears in his eyes, though God knows, that might’ve been the beer. Or the music.

  At any rate, dude wasn’t making a whole lot of sense, to the point where I actually stopped recording. But he just kept on talking about how he liked that particular film—that particular bunch of films—because they were all in such bad shape you kind of had to look at them at an angle, side-on, just to figure out what was happening. How if you looked at it straight on, it just hurt your eyes. Like there wasn’t anything there? I asked him, and he laughed. Said, oh, there was something there, all right, something the person who made it didn’t want you seeing. So you kind of had to sneak up on it, romance it a bit. Wait till it poked its head out when it thought you weren’t watching and trap it.

  Eventually, Leonard Warsame turned up, took one look at Wrob and rolled his eyes; he grabbed Wrob by the arm, told me he needed an early night, and that was that. So I called another cab and went home.

  “So what’s his angle?” Simon asked me later that night, as we got ready for bed. Clark had gone down comparatively easily, as he often did, with Daddy playing good cop; I was flossing over the kitchen sink as Simon brushed his teeth, since our bathroom wasn’t really large enough to accommodate two adults at the same time. I rinsed, spat, then replied—

  “Seems to me like he wants to present himself as some sort of activist, maybe seed the interview, get his side of the story on record as a counterpoint to something Mattheuis is building up to: a press release? That big a batch of silver nitrate, all digitized and catalogued, so it doesn’t ever have to be screened physically again . . . that’d be something. You could do an exhibition at the Lightbox, or even an installation at the AGO—big fundraising bucks, potentially. Great cultural cred. I can see why he’d want to get in on that, ’specially if he feels like Mattheuis shut him out.”

  “Sort of the same way you want to get in on proving Mrs. Whitcomb made that film,” Simon pointed out, gently.

  “Well, yeah,” I agreed. “Except how I’m not doing it mainly to piss off my ex-boyfriend—”

  “For which I’m very grateful.”

  “—and playing the victim, putting on a show for the media, if you can even call me ‘the media,’ these days. And I’m just not interested in helping him out with that sort of petty personal backstabbing, seriously.”

  “So you’re not going to talk to Mister, what’s his name, Matthias?”

  “Mattheuis—and oh no, I’m definitely gonna talk to Jan, if he’ll see me. ’Cause I need the other half of this, given it might help me build my case.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I snorted. “You know me so well.”

  “It’s almost like we’re married.”

  So he went to bed while I synched my iPhone to my laptop, got the sound-file all squared away, then stayed up transcribing my notes and listening to the soundtrack from Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain on infinite loop. My eyes were burning, probably from all that residual smoke. Around 3:00 A.M. I saved, shut down, and lay back on the couch for “a minute,” then almost immediately found myself deep in a dream: winter light, a light dusting of snow on the ground, yellow tape marking off a safe distance from the same pit Wrob had described to me—a jagged-sided, split-lipped mouth full of black soil and coiled, shimmery loops of film, gummed together by an iridescent, stinking muck of wept-off emulsion. Firemen in full drag stood by with sand-buckets, their faces obscured by respirator masks and helmets, as Ontario Provincial Police uniforms held the crowd back. Somewhere in there, I knew, was the boy Wrob Barney had once been, protesting this injustice to his father, but I couldn’t pick him out. Instead, my eyes went to a figure standing on the farthest outskirts, under the trees and black, overhanging branches, almost hidden by jostling spectators. A dim blur dressed all in white from top to toe, every part of it—her? But how could I know that?—equally shrouded as though enveloped in a massive bag, a beekeeper’s costume without the broad-brimmed hat, a bleached-out Afghan chadri complete with grille . . . a veil.

  Of course I know now who she must have been. Let me remind you, though—this was before I’d spoken to Hugo Balcarras, before I’d seen the only extant portrait of Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb, in her peculiar version of full mourning. Before any of that.

  Yet there she was, burnt on the inside of my eyelids, wavering at the very edge of my sight. Raising one fine, slim, white-gloved hand, to shape a gesture I found singularly hard to interpret, especially at a distance: was that her palm turned outward like a warning—halt, go back, this it not for you? Or was it the back, beckoning me closer—yes, come here, don’t be afraid, show yourself—and be shown. I know your face, Lois; I know you. There is . . .

  . . . something . . .

  . . . I want for you to see.

  One finger extending then curved and sharp as a twig, as a claw. Pointing downwards, toward my feet.

  And when I looked, helpless, unable to stop myself from following that finger’s angle, I saw that the fire inside the pit was already lit, the film cache already burning, bright as a hundred thousand candles. There was something else blooming in its centre, brighter still, so much you could hardly stand to look at it: a curled absence, a hole in the world’s hide, throwing off sparks. Something that shone solid, less an eye than a doorway through which a void could be glimpsed.

  Curled until it wasn’t. Until it spread and resolved, growing limbs. Until it reached out, four-legged, to grasp the pit’s sides, its unstable rim. Until what might have been its shoulders bunched, arms flexed and pulling. Until the part that must have been its head tipped back, assessing, reckoning how much force it would have to exert to free itself. Until, slowly, so horribly slowly—

  —it began to crawl,
carefully, up. And out.

  I woke in an instant, choking on my own spit, goosebumped all over; my temperature had fallen during sleep, the way it always does, chilling my sweat till it slicked me like ice. Turned on my side, foetal, and coughed so hard I felt like I was retching. When I finally recovered enough to make my way to the bathroom, my eyes were glued together with sleep so thick I had to scrub at them with a moistened facecloth—at which point I looked in the mirror and almost screamed, because my sclera were suffused with what looked like classic petechial haemorrhaging: no whites anymore, just creamy pink, inflamed every micro-millimetre or so with broken threads of pure red.

  As I sat in the doctor’s office the next morning, waiting to hear his diagnosis (“Looks like you’ve been crying too hard,” he remarked, with what I felt was a startling lack of sympathy. “They’ll go away eventually.”), I checked my phone only to discover a message that’d probably arrived just after I turned it off for the night and hooked it up to charge—one of those creepy ones that starts out as a text, then ends up a robot voice reading the text back to you on voicemail, like if Stephen Hawking did telemarketing. The thing itself is lost to time, since I deleted it automatically after hearing it, only later realizing that might not have been the best idea. However, I believe it said:

  jan can tlk bt I think I always hd more right to tht film than him

  not least cause he still dsnt even know what hes got

  like he even pt the wrong name on it.

  “Did you ask Dr. Goa about the migraines and the insomnia?” my mother wanted to know. “I did not,” I replied, still deeply engaged in Googling Hugo Balcarras’s contact information—a thankless fucking task from the get-go. The only thing listed was his publisher, Houslow, who hadn’t been active since the early 1990s. So I was eventually reduced to calling up a former colleague of mine who now wrote jokey celebrity commentary for the Toronto Star’s Saturday edition, and begged her to reverse-directory it; that got me his latest phone number, which got me the interview excerpted in Chapter One. But I wasn’t about to get into all that right then and there, not with Mom already on the metaphorical warpath.