Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  “Oh, Lois, you were already in the clinic, for God’s sake. Why wouldn’t you?”

  I sighed. “’Cause I was mainly concerned about the thing with my eyes, ’cause every professional thing I do is kind of contingent on me being able to see? Besides which, you know he doesn’t like it when you ask about two things at once—”

  I could almost see Mom’s gesture, shrugging this off as though flicking away flies. “Pssh! I don’t care what that man likes; this is his job, and he’d better damn well do it, if he knows what’s good for him. You’ve got Clark to look after—can’t be running on five hours or less all the time. You need to get this solved.”

  “I know I do.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, Mom, Christ. You think I want things this way, tired all the fucking time? Think if there was a switch I could turn to reset my own clock I wouldn’t?”

  “You know, you’re impossible to talk to when you get like this.”

  “So you’ve told me,” I said, and hung up. Adding in my head: Too many times to count, in actual fact, and most especially when I’m—

  Could you really call it “working,” though, if nobody was actually paying you to do it? This was the wall Mom and I kept slamming up against, weirdly and contradictorily from my angle, considering she’d been freelance longer than I’d been alive. But acting was—is—an art form, and artists keep odd hours, routinely giving to get back, treating their careers as a type of infinitely extended gamble; journalism just isn’t. Film criticism isn’t. Except for how, these days, it really is.

  What I was doing right now I saw as being like applying for a grant—studying the body in question’s internal jargon, its lingo, before finding the most socially acceptable way of saying what I needed the money for. The primary person I’d have to apply to would be Jan Mattheius, of course, and I didn’t want to go in there empty-handed. I wanted to go in armed to the teeth, my thesis unshakable, all guns blazing; till I could, I’d just have to keep on researching. And that struck me as far more important than whether or not my sleep cycle remained screwed up, considering how long I’d already had to live with that particular reality.

  But you have a child, Mom would have said, had I ever been stupid enough to voice any of the above to her. A child with special needs, who needs you, his mother. How can you be so selfish, so careless with your own health, your own time, your own life? How can you justify it?

  Well: when you put it that way, I suppose I couldn’t, so I didn’t. Because I’d already learned a long time ago how the way other people thought about whatever I was doing at any given time was always the most important thing, and that when it came to my own desires—my own needs—there was no contest, none at all; they came last, always, not first. She’d done it for me, after all, so now she got to police me as I did it for somebody else—i.e. Clark. And that was just called being a parent.

  What you need to understand about my mom and I is that for a long time, we were everything to each other—all either of us had, often quite literally. She met my dad—Gareth Cairns—at theatre school, at the age of seventeen; he was seven years older, here from Australia to escape the draft, rightly reckoning that Canada was about as far away as you could get from Vietnam. She married him by the time she was twenty-two, had me at twenty-four. It took them seven more years to divorce, and she was the one who initiated it. “Only good thing ever came out of us being together was you,” she used to say sometimes, back in her drinking days, when she’d finish off a six-pack alone and demand I sit up with her, having long conversations she couldn’t remember afterwards. How could I disagree, exactly? If she’d never been with him, I wouldn’t exist, no more than Clark would if I’d never met Simon. No matter the relative heartbreak both births may have caused, therefore, I can’t say I’m ever inclined to favour either of those scenarios.

  Sometimes she wanted me to sing to her, stuff like Juice Newton’s “I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can,” or Linda Ronstadt’s cover of James Taylor’s “You Can Close Your Eyes,” and we’d both cry, hugging each other. But it didn’t really mean anything; nothing got any better or worse because of what I did or didn’t do, not until she finally wanted it to. Much like my own later flirtations with addictive behaviour, that part of her life probably lasted exactly as long as was needed, and while the mere fact of my existence might have had some theoretical bearing on her eventual decision to clean up, none of my direct actions seemed to make a single bit of difference. In retrospect, the most useful piece of advice I ever picked up concerning other people’s problems was from one of the books Mom read while she was in recovery, a self-help text called (I shit you not) If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!, which pointed out how you can’t really change anything for anyone else, no matter how much you love them. All you can ever do is make yourself available in terms of emotional support, while they do the majority of the heavy lifting themselves.

  Then again, maybe I’m talking out my ass, as usual. One way or the other, I’ve never found anyone’s emotions as easy to process as my own—and considering how goddamn hard I find doing that, even at the best of times, that’s really sort of sad.

  That was the day I went to see Balcarras, after which I set up an interview with Jan Mattheuis because I definitely wanted to hear his version of that “funny story” Wrob Barney had alluded to. Much like old Hugo, Jan got back to me far quicker than I’d expected, which was excellent—and better yet, he set the time for ten the next morning, with Clark already safely off to school, thus giving me exactly as much time to quiz Mattheuis as he was willing to cooperate with.

  Located in an outwardly undistinguished office building two doors from the corner of Yonge Street and right where College turns into Carlton, the NFA is an astounding research resource that most Torontonians (predictably enough) remain unaware even exists. The Archive was founded in 1995, partially as a response to then-Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s virtual scuttling of the Ontario Film Development Corporation’s budget back in 1993—according to his so-called “Common Sense Revolution,” the making of Canadian films was a culturally protectionist luxury, unworthy of draining provincial funds during an economic downturn (though to be fair, he also slashed the amount of money made available for the Ontario Film Investment Project, our tax-rebate program, thus eating into runaway production profits as well). Since then, the NFA has managed to weather various governmental changeovers by keeping itself well-insulated within a cocoon of private monies, selling itself to private investors as a good donation recipient for both reputation-boosting and tax shelter purposes.

  I’m always amused by the fact that at no point along the curve, however, has any of this money gone into installing some sort of lobby-level sign indicating where exactly to go for people walking in off the street. Instead, they’re supposed to somehow pick up, via osmosis, that if they wander up a flight of stairs at the back of the elevator-bank waiting area, they’ll eventually reach a pair of glass doors flanked by cabinets full of classic CanCon props: on your right, the titular faux-Aztec face covering from Julian Roffman’s The Mask (1961, Canada’s first 3D movie); on your left, the cursed Catholic oil dispenser from Harvey Hart’s The Pyx (1973, with Christopher Plummer and Karen Black). It’s like a J.K. Rowling riddle: if you have to ask, you’ll never know; if you know, you don’t have to ask. And I already know.

  Upstairs, Chris Coulby was at the front desk, like usual. “Jan’s in his office,” he told me. “Coffee?”

  “Got some already,” I replied, raising my cup. “But thanks.”

  “Yeah, go ahead and make me feel useless, why don’t ya.”

  I rubbed thumb, index, and pointer together at him, as though playing the world’s tiniest violin. “The tears of men are tasty, boyo,” I remarked as I passed, to which he simply snorted, shooting me the double finger.

  Mattheuis was a smaller guy than you’d expect, given his reputation—smiley but broa
d, with heavy glasses and a greying, slightly furled goatee, sort of the Gimli of Canadian film studies. “You mind?” he asked, and then gave me a brief yet apparently sincere hug. “Lois Cairns! Been an age, hasn’t it? I used to turn to your pieces first, back when; Lip’s definitely suffered for your absence.”

  I smiled. “Must be why they’re The Centrist, now.”

  “No, I’d put that down to a classic case of Web versus Dead Tree, myself. But if we’re going to talk shop, let’s make it about a slightly more interesting subject. I hear you want to know about our silver nitrate initiative.”

  “Wrob Barney dropped a few hints about it during our interview, re: Untitled 13. Sounded intriguing.”

  “Oh yes, that’d be the way he’d phrase it, I’m sure. Given the amount of sheer intrigue he channelled into concentrating our attention on Lake of the North over the last few years.”

  “Turned out fairly well for you, though, didn’t it? In terms of—”

  “Sheer yield? Absolutely. Wrob’s almost as good at giving people what they think they want as he is at getting what he really wants. It’s practically his superpower.”

  I sat down, pulled out the tools of my trade, and got to it. “So,” I said, as he did much the same, “what you’re saying is, Wrob’s goal all along was copying the footage?”

  “Frankly? It’s hard to tell. I mean, I knew he had to have a hidden agenda of some sort, right from the moment he first offered me the possibility of finding Japery’s back-stock; the goodness of Wrob’s heart is an entirely negotiable concept, as I’m well aware. Which makes what happened my fault entirely, in that even when the warning bells were going off loud and clear, I simply ignored them.” A beat. “What he took . . . you’ve seen it, of course. The clips.”

  “Striking stuff.”

  “No one can claim Wrob doesn’t have an eye. Interestingly, I’d never worked hands-on with silver nitrate before—afraid to, really, given its reputation. But Wrob has a positive knack for it. His digitization is pristine.”

  According to Mattheuis, Wrob had already catalogued nine different complete, partial, and fragmentary one-reel films he believed to have been produced by the same filmmaker by the time he was caught “sampling” red-handed and fired. “But there was a scene when he left, typically, and after that we were reduced to working from his notes—he wouldn’t take my calls. The notes were handwritten, and that man has the worst chicken-scratch I’ve ever come across, outside of someone with an honest-to-God medical degree.”

  “Did he work with all four caches?”

  “Mainly the last one, actually. I suppose he’s told you about that.”

  “Not directly.”

  “Well.” Mattheuis hesitated then glanced away, as though gathering himself—like he expected his next words, whatever they might be, to cost him. “It’s an . . . interesting anecdote, I suppose. Especially so for me.”

  So I’ve been told, I thought, but didn’t say. Just waited for him to elucidate, which—eventually, in slightly halting fashion—he did.

  According to Mattheuis, he’d already bought up the Quarry Argent Folk Museum’s little back-stock of silver nitrate films and was planning to drive back to Overdeere, where he was staying—at Wrob Barney’s old family house, as it happened—when he somehow managed to get off-course and found himself hopelessly lost in the woods on what locals refer to as the “Dourvale shore” of the Lake of the North. “Now, I don’t know how much you’ve already heard about that area . . .”

  “Let’s assume nothing.”

  “Yes, me either. But apparently, it’s a bit of a legendary dead spot; cellphone service tends to go out, as does GPS, and—on occasion—cars just tend to, uh, stop. Like mine did.”

  Mattheuis thinks it was about 10:00 P.M. at this point, but has trouble narrowing things down further, since he doesn’t carry a watch, and after a few minutes fussing with his phone it simply went black. The sun had fallen, leaving only a few deep purple streaks near the horizon as the full dark of the country took hold: cicadas, crickets, a dense cacophony of buzzing, rustling, and vague animal noises. He didn’t even have a flashlight in the glovebox.

  “When I finally did get to Overdeere, most people informed me that if I’d been born in the area, I’d’ve known to just lock my doors, stay in the car, and wait for morning. But since I was a city boy, I wasn’t having any of that. I needed to take charge of the situation.”

  So Mattheuis got out and walked up and down the road a bit, “maybe thirty paces in either direction,” without much joy. He was about to give up when suddenly he thought he saw lights moving through the woods to his left—faint but distinct, a kind of “globular, dim, intermittent” brightness which waxed and waned as it travelled in and out of the trees. “I won’t say it looked like people, exactly, but what else could it have been? Like . . . hunters, maybe, or somebody from a cabin, a campsite, searching for the perfect place to use as a bathroom. So I made the decision—rather silly, in hindsight—to go after them.”

  Much like Little Red Riding Hood, therefore, Mattheuis stepped off the established path (or road, in this case) and into the brush, calling out that he was lost, in trouble, could anybody help him? The lights didn’t seem all too far away, so he forced himself onwards, making brisk progress, but to little effect. Soon, he found himself far enough from his point of entry that he could no longer tell which direction he’d originally come from—he was surrounded on all sides by thorn-bushes, gnarled trees, and uncertain footing. One way was choked with mud, the other with what he thought he recognized as poison oak, and the misty night was getting progressively colder.

  “Eventually,” he continued, “I ended up at the edge of what seemed like a swamp or a sump—there’s a lot of that around Lake of the North, very alkaline, very unreliable. I didn’t want to risk my shoes any more than I already had, so I leaned back against this tree and just stayed there, stock-still, almost frozen. The lights were gone. I don’t know how long that lasted; might’ve fallen asleep a couple of times, I guess. Finally, around five or six in the morning, the sun came back up, and everything got grey. Which is when I turned around and realized that all this time, I’d been right next to one of the famous Hell Holes, those limestone shafts that open up suddenly underfoot and seem to go down forever. Like, close enough to step right into it if I’d gone just a few more inches.”

  The tree Mattheuis had been leaning against grew up out of the Hell Hole, its roots clinging to its interior, and it was “not healthy, by a long shot—I mean, I’m no tree surgeon, but this thing looked diseased. Had a big, open, rotten gap in the trunk, far down enough I hadn’t been able to feel it. But as I recoiled, I went far enough I wasn’t blocking the sun anymore, and I saw something glint: dull, but obvious. Metal. Rusty, old . . . really old.”

  He looked at me then, as though daring me to interrupt; for emphasis, the way some people do. Like calls to like, they say—he and Wrob Barney were definitely the same sort of drama queen. But then again, so was I. So I just waited.

  “I don’t know why, even now,” he continued, finally, “but I put my hand in, felt around. It was all soft in there, like fungus. Mushy. Wet. And then I closed my fingers on something that felt like an edge and grasped hard. I pulled it out.”

  It was a canister, obviously—film. Silver nitrate stock.

  With the sun up, the path back to the road became obvious. Acting on instinct, Mattheuis kicked open the hole in the tree further, exposing what would turn out to be five separate reels, and wrapped them in his coat, using it as a makeshift sling. He then humped this bundle through weeds and stickers, deadfalls of browned-out milkweed and Queen Anne’s lace, a poisonous harvest of deadly nightshade berries bursting underfoot. Dropping it in the back seat, he turned the key in the ignition and heard the car turn over, catching perfectly; though his phone had also turned back on, he didn’t even need to call CAA—he simply drove ba
ck to Overdeere, calling Wrob to tell him he had potentially exciting news.

  “What did they say happened?” I asked. “I’m assuming you had it checked out, afterwards.”

  He nodded then shrugged. “No idea. Like I said, apparently it just goes like that, sometimes. Shore don’t want us, that was the mechanic’s diagnosis. Car’s iron-made, and they don’t like that. Whatever the hell that means.”

  “‘Iron-made’?”

  “You got me. That car was a Prius, steel from one end to the other. Metaphorical iron, at best.”

  The canisters did indeed turn out to contain the fabled fourth cache of silver nitrate film. “Five reels, like I said, and according to Wrob—if he can be believed—they matched up with four of the Quarry Argent Museum films, in terms of content, methodology, and what he calls ‘signature.’ Basically, they shared the same sort of intertitle cards, which appear to have been hand-lettered. The museum films all had Japery’s mark, as though they were copies struck through Japery and sent out along the circuit, which made a sort of sense; the community apparently used to show them for free to area kids on Victoria and Dominion Day, right up until the 1960s when somebody finally went ‘gee, maybe that’s not the very best idea, given they might explode if they get too hot.’ The films I found in the woods, however, have no mark at all—they’re originals, not copies. And I can see why Japery probably didn’t want them, because they are . . . odd, to put it mildly. Not exactly blockbuster material.”

  “How so?”

  Again, Mattheuis hesitated. “I’d probably have to show you,” he said, finally.

  And now you’re probably thinking: That’s an amazing amount of coincidence. Which is true, I guess, but history thrives on coincidence, as does archaeology. Sometimes all it takes is being in the right place for the wrong reasons, then moving just a little only to find you’re standing on top of something you weren’t even looking for, something you never would have found otherwise. The theory of parallel development is a useful one to keep in mind, too. That’s how Edison and Tesla could be working on electrical current at the same time. How Eadweard Muybridge could be using his “camera-gun” to capture and reconstruct movement through sequential photographs in British Columbia at exactly the moment that Étienne-Jules Marey was doing so in France, with only slightly different results. Or how it was only the fact of Louis-Aimé Augustin Le Prince’s own still-unsolved disappearance—off a moving train, freakishly enough—which prevented him from “inventing” the motion picture camera five years before the Lumière brothers did.