Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

  So many individuals in different places, all with the same good idea. All, in their own ways, attempting to use light on a wall to open a window into another world. And how odd is it that the two guys who made the first viable motion picture happened to have a surname that means “light”? Still just coincidence?

  More like synchronicity.

  Enough of that, however, and people almost inevitably start talking about magic.

  It doesn’t take long to watch a bunch of amateur silent films, even five of them, given that George Méliès’s ground-breaking A Trip to the Moon (the world’s first science fiction film) only lasts fourteen minutes. The ones Mattheuis found in his tree were all less than twenty, definitely meant either as second features for whatever they might have been programmed to accompany, or simply to fulfill their mysterious director-producer’s own purposes. Better yet, they were all just slightly different versions of the same damn story, though each became progressively more ambitious, less narratively integrated, and (say it with me now) more experimental in execution: field, apparition, weapon. A visitation at noon, a warning ignored, followed by violence—always off-screen, implied not shown, played out in mime and shadows—and horrified reaction. “Lady Midday,” in the proverbial nutshell.

  Wrob appeared to have pulled his clips from the first film in the batch, the one with the mirror-veil, the painted backdrop and real sheaves, the mediaeval-dressed children. In the second film, the veiled figure wore an additional papier-mâché mask overtop its head, stylized and severe, features so reduced as to be hieroglyphics; in the third film, that same mask had also been set with mirror pieces, catching the light from every angle, a blazing blur. In the fourth film, the veiled figure was the only human player, with all other character represented by puppets—a weird sort of mishmash of traditions, their limbs manipulated from below on sticks like Balinese shadow dancers, heads worked from above like marionettes. The final film, meanwhile, was all stop-motion, a combination of ink-on-glass drawings that assembled themselves between each shutter click and paper silhouette animation, like Lotte Reiniger’s legendary The Adventures of Prince Achmed, though necessarily cruder. It must have taken ages to put together, so the idea that whoever made it—Mrs. Whitcomb?—was so unsatisfied with the result that they apparently tried to throw it down a hole afterwards made me vaguely ill.

  The light-wrapped central figure’s weapons changed as well, one for each iteration: sword, sickle, scythe, and something even more hooked, like a pike, or Billy Bob Thornton’s famous sling blade. By the animated version, it had become a generalized ray, bright and razor-sharp, which emerged from the figure’s hidden sleeve as though replacing her hand, five fingers fusing to form a cutting implement that probably cauterized on contact. It was like watching somebody anticipate thirty years of Japanese magical girl anime in one brief shot.

  “Why would anybody try to destroy these?” I couldn’t quite keep myself from blurting out.

  Mattheuis laughed. “Good question! I can only assume that no matter how impressive we find them, they simply weren’t delivering exactly what their creator was going for.”

  “No one who made something like this would ever stop exploring artistically, though. You’d agree with me on that point.”

  “Oh, absolutely, but people do switch disciplines; sometimes they move out of their comfort zones, play around for a while, then stop and move back again, take whatever they started with back up. They might have been a painter—those flats and curtains look hand-made, for example, and the animation’s definitely in the same style. That said, I can’t think they were well-known, or we’d have run across them elsewhere. Maybe a gifted amateur.”

  “And you have no idea who that might have been.”

  “Like I said, Wrob claimed the Hell Hole films have certain elements in common with some of the Quarry Argent Museum cache, and I’d agree, to a point. But if they ever kept detailed records of exactly who made those original donations, they’re gone—a fire and two floods put paid to half their back-files, according to the woman who runs it.”

  “That’s too bad,” I replied, reaching into my bag. “Actually, can I show you something?”

  His laugh tapered off into a smile then, somewhat ironically. Inquiring, of the air: “And how did I somehow know you didn’t come here just to see me?”

  I took out my copy of Finding Your Voice, passed it over—the “Lady Midday” section clearly marked—and sat there waiting as he read through it. “Intriguing,” he allowed, setting it down again. “You and Wrob obviously think along much the same lines.”

  “Come again?”

  And here he drew out the notebook in question, a half-filled pocket Moleskine whose leatherette cover had been collaged over in newspaper and magazine clippings, random words and phrases layered haphazardly in between Cronenbergian chimerae cobbled together from National Geographic photo spreads and glue-stick glitter. Inside, Wrob’s handwriting was indeed just as bad as advertised, as Mattheuis demonstrated by flipping to the second-last page, where he seemed to have been making a list of potential candidates for the tree cache’s mysterious filmmaker. Halfway down, underlined several times and legible only if you squinted hard, was the name M[smear] A. M. W[it]tc[u]mb.

  “Wrob once told me he had a syndrome called uncontrollable hypographic pornocentrism,” Mattheuis remarked, dryly, while I bogged at the spelling. “Which I suppose I can understand in terms of stuff he just jots down, but I think he’s reprogrammed the spell-check on his email, too, which can get kind of . . . unsafe for work.”

  “God, that’s so wrong.”

  “In all senses of the phrase.” Mattheuis was still flipping through Finding Your Voice, eyebrows faintly drawn. “Though as a half-educated guess, tapping Mrs. Whitcomb’s not bad: highly unlikely that smear stands for Mister, since Arthur was mainly a patron of the arts rather than a practitioner, and that only on his wife’s behalf. The museum has a whole room of her paintings, though I must admit I didn’t pay much attention to it while I was there. Did find an interesting little sidebar, though, when I went looking for references to her—a canvas by Gustave Knauff, one of Odilon Redon’s favourite fellow Decadents, who set himself on fire in Bruges in 1909, the year after she and Arthur passed through on their honeymoon and arranged to pay their respects to him at the Café Brumaire, his usual haunt. I’ll send you a link to it tonight, if you want.”

  “She did have a camera, though. And she did make movies.”

  He shrugged. “Shot documentary footage at séances, if you can call it that. There’s no proof she ever did anything this elaborate.”

  “Okay, but what about the similarities between these films and ‘Lady Midday’?”

  A sigh; Mattheuis closed the book, marking his place with a finger. “Look, I’d love for it to be that easy, Lois. We’re talking about the very start of moviemaking in North America, so in theory anyone could just start turning these things out at home—and did, if they could afford the equipment and stock. And yes, I’m far more likely to think the Hell Hole films were made by someone like Iris Whitcomb than by the sort of person who could get a distribution contract with a studio like Japery, no matter for how brief a time. Though I suppose that’s not impossible either, not entirely. . . .”

  “Hugo Balcarras also has a theory about Mrs. Whitcomb’s disappearance, which relates directly to her supposed filmmaking forays.”

  “That she was watching a homemade silver nitrate reel in transit on her portable projector and what, combusted spontaneously? Please.”

  I smiled as though I agreed, then continued on anyhow, ignoring his growing look of annoyance. “Gotta say, though, I can count the number of times I’ve seen a thematic resemblance like that mean absolutely nothing on one hand, especially in cinema. You?”

  He sighed. “Well, I didn’t want to point this out, but . . . would you say that for these films to be both the work of
Mrs. Iris Whitcomb and based on this Wendish fairy tale of hers, the fairy tale would probably have to pre-date the films themselves? Her version of it, anyhow?”

  “Probably, yes.”

  “Then look at the copyrights index. The ‘previously published’ information.”

  He handed the book back to me, two fingers already slipped between the relevant pages. And there it was, right under his index: The Snake-Queen’s Daughter: Wendish Legends & Folklore, privately published . . . 1925. The same year Mrs. Whitcomb was finally declared dead.

  The shock—the disappointment, both in this revelation and in myself, for provoking it—was so intense that it really did take me a moment to recover. “I’d still like to see those other films for myself, if I could, later on,” I told him, at last. “The Japery ones, from the museum.”

  “And we’d love to show them to you. Just call and set it up.” I nodded, gathering my stuff, while he sighed again, striking a sympathetic pose. “Sorry to end on such a down note. I really wish things could have lined up the way you wanted them to, but sometimes it simply doesn’t work out that way; you’ve done your share of research, after all. You know.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You did get a fair deal of background on the Untitled 13 clips, though, yes? So that’s useful.”

  “Mmm. And something’s always better than nothing, right?”

  “A very good way to think about it, I’ve always found.”

  I just nodded again—smiling back, shaking his hand, striking a pose of my own. Thinking, as I did: sure you have. You sanctimonious prick.

  That night, Clark sang and sang as he twiddled a clothespin with a piece of wicker stuck in its jaws in front of his eyes, danced up and down while flipping his head back and forth to simulate the world around him being fast-forwarded. He clicked and hooted and made noises like a computer resetting itself over and over and over. He sang “Accidents Will Happen,” from Thomas the Tank Engine. He sang the “Rescue Pack” song from Go, Diego, Go! He sang the title theme from Play With Me Sesame, until I frankly wanted to dig Jim Henson’s corpse up and punch it in the face. It didn’t help that something horrifying was going on with my stomach and bowels at the same time, cramping me as though my guts were trying to shed their lining. Finally, after a half hour on the toilet, I retreated into our bedroom, dry-swallowed a palmful of Robaxacet to numb myself, and cranked my earphones up as high as they’d go, blasting Jocelyn Pook directly into my brain. I spent the bulk of the evening transcribing and collating notes while Clark jigged at the periphery of my vision, desperately trying to get my attention—because much like a cat, my son never wants to be near you when you want him to, but the minute you don’t want him interacting with you it’s all “Come back for Mommy! Mooooommmmy! Mommy, can you dance? Mommy, you have to kiss him!”

  Simon dealt with it, mainly, the way he always does when things get really bad. He got Clark out of his clothes and into a bath, fed him Nut-Thins and bacon, and sat on the toilet replaying the same damn scene from Disney’s The Princess and the Frog while Clark laughed like a maniac: Dr. Facilier’s downfall, his patented Friends from the Other Side coming to collect after Tiana breaks their precious blood talisman, triumphantly pointing out that what she’s covered in isn’t slime, it’s mucus. While I sat in front of a screen, refreshing my Tumblr over and over with my eyes starting to cross and my nerve-damaged shoulder humming—I separated it early, in elementary school, then developed a degenerating disc in my neck by the end of college, for which I take anti-inflammatories that cyclically accelerate my digestive ailments—and brooded yet again over just how unqualified I was to be anybody’s mother, let alone this little boy’s. Just how little I obviously had to offer anybody, myself very much included.

  Jesus Christ, I thought. You’d think these fucking films were mine, any of them, the way I’m obsessing over this shit.

  But they weren’t, of course—no more than they’d been Wrob’s—and equally “of course,” that was the entire goddamn point. Because unlike Wrob, I didn’t even have the chutzpah to “sample” a few bits and pieces, stick some shit of my own around them and claim I’d made something new, let alone the balls . . . or wasn’t that what I’d been trying to do, really, in my own sad way? What Mattheuis had seen, and laughed at, if only to himself?

  This basic white girl’s urge to stick a random pin in a map, make up a name, and claim I’d “found” something that’d always existed—to sail someplace and tell the people who’d always lived there that I owned it now, so get the fuck out. Nothing more sad than some bitch who can’t even find something real worth writing about, in a whole world full of forgotten wonders, I thought, grimly, as I finally drifted off next to Simon, knowing my jaw would ache the next morning from grinding my teeth all night.

  No dreams that night, thankfully, and when I woke, my eyes looked clearer. I took it as a sign, which, in hindsight, it might well have been . . .

  . . . though probably not the kind I thought it was at the time.

  Writing up the interview with Wrob took an hour and a half, maybe two. I did it while sitting in my favourite coffee place, Balzac’s, down the side of the St. Lawrence Market; had to cut around the Mrs. Whitcomb angle entirely, obviously, given the way my conversation with Mattheuis had ended, though I did make sure to mention just how much Wrob owed the “unknown Canadian filmmaker” whose work lent Untitled 13 so much of its mysterious allure. “He won’t like that,” I remember muttering, under my breath—then thinking, almost immediately adding: Which probably makes it a good thing I don’t give all too much of a shit.

  Pressing PUBLISH, I closed out and accessed my email, compulsively checking to see if anybody had left new comments on my previous review. A tone told me I had mail, which proved to be from the NFA: that link Mattheuis had promised me, the one to Knauff’s painting. I clicked on it, revealing a gaudily odd-coloured interior (mainly blue and grey, rich navy for the shadows with details rendered in teal-touched argent) full of angular figures that was half Toulouse-Lautrec, half Jan Toorop—the famous Café Brumaire, I could only assume. Layered in shafts of light and darkness, its background characters reduced to mere smears and haphazard pixilation, the scene shared some of the same feeling as Belgian symbolist Jean Delville’s “occult” portraits, with their narrow, glowing features and ecstatically upturned eyes: a veiled woman in green sat just off-centre from the close-packet dance floor, playing solitaire at a rickety little table with one hand hidden inside a fur muff dyed the same shade, the other dealing out, its naked fingers tipped with delicately hooked black nails.

  In the bottom right, meanwhile, sat a couple I could only assume to be Mr. and Mrs. Whitcomb: he was tall, broad-shouldered, and slightly stooped, visibly older, arm thrown protectively across hers in the light from a single, slightly smoking oil-lamp; she was also tall, and stately, enough so that her shoulders and his sat almost level. She was dressed all in white, with an unfashionably modest lace snood or cap pinned over the coiled wealth of her heavy, honey-cream hair, a filmy shawl wrapped up high to mask the bottom of her face, and her narrowed eyes, too pale to hold any one particular shade, though her pupils stood out like pinpricks. She appeared to angle her head—seen in three-quarter profile—as though listening to some off-canvas conversationalist.

  What’s he telling you? I wondered. Something you want to hear? Or the exact opposite?

  Acknowledged as his most well-known work besides the infamous “Black Annunciation,” the few lines of text beneath the .jpg began, Knauff’s “Réunion de Nuit” recalls both the nighttime Impressionism of Manet and the thematic obscurity of Jean Delville. The May-December romance featured in the foreground may depict two Canadian admirers Knauff corresponded with briefly throughout 1908, while critics have attempted to draw a parallel between the striking “green lady” of the middle field and contemporary advertisements anthropomorphizing absinthe (Knauff’s drug of choice) as
a seductive yet toxic lover. As Henrique L’Hiverneux points out in her 1997 paper on Decadence in Bruges, however, an almost identical figure can be found in Degouve de Nuncques’s “Au Café Brumaire,” sitting next to a smearily rendered man sometimes identified as Knauff himself.

  Later, I picked Clark up and took him over to my mom’s, a process that took far longer than it should have, mainly because he kept stopping to twirl in the middle of the sidewalk every five steps. It’s not as though he was unhappy, or being deliberately obstreperous; he’d virtually bounced off the school bus, yelling “Bye, thank you for helping, see you next time!” to the bemused driver, and dived straight into the (in)convenience store at our building’s base, as is his wont, where I paused to get money out of the ATM only to hear him call: “Mommy! Do you want to kiss him?”

  “Yes I do,” I said, keying my PIN number. “Just a minute, bubba.”

  “Moooooommmmmy!”

  “Just a minute, bun.”

  But Clark likes what he likes, and he has a very specific schedule for post-school decompression: run upstairs, strip to his underwear, plop down in front of Daddy’s computer, put on his frog-face headphones, and surf YouTube till he’s so jacked up he can’t stop himself from laughing inanely and singing along, which sort of negates the whole headphones concept. At which point I’ll say: “Time to stop, log off, go do something else,” and he usually will, albeit under protest.