The Third Reel

by S J Naudé

  A Sunday evening. Bermondsey Street. Just the two of them. Axel is heating water on the Dover, filling up the tin tub. He makes Etienne sit in the steaming water, washes him from head to toe. Axel pours another kettle of boiling water into the bath. He slips in behind Etienne. Etienne’s jaws slacken.

  At night the wind blows through cracks in the windows. In bed Etienne examines Axel’s back: muscle and sinews like bark and knots. He seeks out Axel’s wrist under the blankets. Axel, insistent and half-asleep, reaches for Etienne’s knuckles, then lets go. Etienne dreams of child ghosts. Slave boys. They have returned to the dank workhouse in the attic, where they used to tan hides until their hands were raw, and used to thread and stitch until they were almost blind. Not the kind of children whose lifeless bodies would ever have been posed for post-mortem photos. They are circling Axel’s glass case. Their fingers, despite the half-moons of soot under the nails, leave no marks.

  Etienne wakes up, lays a palm on his chest. His heart is beating erratically, emitting Morse code. The ghost boys are still slipping from behind peeling wallpaper, through cracks in the plaster. They are following the heat signals being exchanged by Etienne’s and Axel’s bodies, like insects that can see in the dark. Etienne switches on his camera, aims it at the ghosts. They don’t respond to the shutter’s whirring. Are they feeling it too? he wonders: the sorrow in this room that is so deep, one would drown in it if it were water.

  Etienne gets up early. A long day of film-school classes lies ahead. He gets up, goes up to the attic and takes a photo off the wall. A seated mother. Her son is standing next to her, his hand on her shoulder. Good work by the photographer: nothing betrays the fact that he is dead. Until, that is, you look at his feet and see the base of something akin to a hatstand, propping him up. Etienne switches on his camera, zooms in on the mother. He swivels, takes a long shot of the teaspoon behind glass. Shortly Axel will come and fill it with freshly harvested semen, warm and fragrant in the morning glow.

  If Axel could lay his hands on the ghost boys, he would incorporate them in his installation, Etienne thinks. When Etienne later develops the film he took of them, there is nothing on it.

  Chapter 9

  Etienne has been in London for almost six months. Twin letters from his mother arrive every week, one of them usually a day or so after the other. The postmarks show they are posted simultaneously in different places. Why does every letter need a false counterpart? Is she just soothing herself? he still wonders.

  It is troubling him, these cracks through which South Africa remains visible. He stops opening any of the envelopes.

  In their editing classes Etienne and his fellow students learn how to select and arrange shots. And the art of timing. ‘The editor,’ the instructor droned in the first class, ‘recreates rather than reproduces the filmed event, so that the cumulative effect exceeds the sum of the actions in the individual scenes.’ It sounded as if he was repeating it for the thousandth time. A failed director? Etienne wondered. ‘Editing of images,’ he continued, and a flame momentarily sprang up in his eye, ‘is the only art that is unique to filmmaking. The best auteurs – artists like Kurosawa – always edit their own work.’

  Today the editor’s eyes are glazed over. He explains in monotone that editing is mainly about the optimisation of dramatic possibilities, but that prosaic on-set editing is also required to correct continuity faults and other camera errors. Etienne pricks up his ears. He likes the idea that gaps and faults can be transformed into something beautiful.

  The instructor’s voice is becoming even more subdued, his eyes even glassier. He explains the stages of commercial editing. The editor’s cut that is refined to the director’s cut, which is then polished further to become the final cut. He uses phrases like ‘the codification of film grammar’. He rattles off the names of older directors. Kuleshov and Eisenstein, Buñuel. He talks about the jump cuts of the French Nouvelle Vague, and non-narrative films from the ’60s.

  Etienne’s thoughts start wandering. He thinks of Axel, his silent throat, his cheekbones. Of his long fingers, the cloudiness behind his pupils. Of his dark gullet.

  For the second hour of the class, they go to an editing room for practical instruction, to enable them to complete production work on their own 16 mm films. It is a lesson in basic techniques: how to synchronise image and sound, how to cut and splice film. The students stand in a half-circle around the instructor, who is sitting in front of the editing machine. He is demonstrating and explaining. Sound and image rolls are loaded onto the motorised plates. Everyone tries to keep an eye on the tiny screen, but the room is too crowded. Expertly, and with bored movements, the instructor feeds the rolls through the cogs. He feeds, cuts and joins, feeds, cuts and joins.

  Etienne has had the material for his film developed, and spends his evenings editing at the film school in Covent Garden. He is clumsy with the machine, struggling with the visualisation and arrangement. He tries to recall the demonstration. A few times he cuts the film in the wrong place, once or twice he tears the perforated film edges with the cogs’ teeth. He swears out loud, gets up and swings the window open. Cobblestones are gleaming in the street, polished by feet over centuries. A group of drunkards loudly leave a pub. It is after eleven. He forces himself back, gritting his teeth. Gradually he cobbles something together from the frames and scenes. He had something other in mind than what is taking shape. Directors like Kenneth Anger or Bruce LaBruce are his inspiration. But each image follows the preceding one too swiftly; there is too little variety in camera angles and light conditions. A storyline isn’t necessary. But there is something else that just won’t fall into place. Patterns are evading him. Deeper structure.

  At least he has a title now: Waking up in Axel’s World.

  The seminar about lost films grips Etienne from the outset. He has to start acknowledging that he feels more at home with the history and philosophy of film than with the camera or editing machine.

  ‘Lost films,’ the lecturer started in the first seminar, pausing for effect. ‘Ghost films. Images that have become nebulous shadows. Or films of which only fragments remain. Silver nitrate that has bubbled away to black powder, or been sucked up into firestorms as toxic fumes.

  ‘Before the 1950s,’ he continued, ‘few people thought films were worthy of preservation. They were viewed as short-lived entertainment. Prints were made of negatives and distributed to cinemas. Cinemas didn’t have storage facilities. And after being shown, the prints were destroyed.’ The lecturer took a round steel case in his hand, took out a film reel. The vinegary smell tickled Etienne’s sinuses. He sat forward, dizzy, nostrils flaring. ‘And on top of that,’ the lecturer continued, ‘silver nitrate is highly unstable and very flammable. At production studios – which did have storage facilities – entire warehouses often went up in flames.’ Light reflected on the lecturer’s glasses, making him seem blind. ‘Films that were stored at high temperatures often combusted spontaneously. Or simply disintegrated.

  ‘Or sometimes, when a fire had to be filmed, the studios would stoke it with stacks of old film reels.’ The lecturer looked straight at Etienne. ‘Think of those thousands of images, withering and seeping into the atmosphere. The filming of the destruction of film . . .’ He lowered the reel. ‘Many films were destroyed in the war, of course. Of the tens of thousands of shorts and feature films made before 1950, at least half are forever lost. Of the pre-1930s silent films, around ninety per cent have been lost. Even of the most popular films, so many copies were printed that the negatives often wore away and faded.’ He slipped the reel back into its steel sheath, fastened the catch; his eyes darkened.

  ‘These films only exist in descriptions, posters and stills. Occasionally, copies are still found. In attics. Old cinema storerooms. Archives in the Eastern Bloc. Often only fragments, though. There is an entire movement here in the uk to find such films. The British Film Institute has a long list.’


  For the next seminar a projector was set up. While the lecturer was threading the film through the cogwheels, he explained: ‘This work dates from 1920. Only in 1970 was a copy found again. In a Moscow archive. A Weimar-era work, made by Bertolt Brecht.’ Etienne didn’t want to ask stupid questions; he would do some reading about Weimar and Brecht afterwards. It was a short film in which a barber shaves someone’s hair to look like a traditional Chinese man, and in the process accidentally cuts off another client’s head. The barber’s assistant reattaches the latter’s head with a needle and thread. There is a sword fight and two characters kissing at the end. What a magnificent piece of flickering nonsense, Etienne thought.

  In subsequent sessions, the lecturer shows them film posters. Also stills, originally used for promotional purposes. They watch fragments on the projector. Worn, bleached prints from the ’30s. Films that are drifting away, dissolving.

  Restoration techniques are discussed. The students are sent to the archives to do some digging. Their assignment is to select a lost film from the list, research its history and put together all remaining material relating to it. To build a sort of puzzle around the film, with just one piece – the film itself – missing.

  ‘If you wish,’ the lecturer says, ‘you could even embark on a bit of a search. But don’t spend too much time on it. It isn’t every day that masterpieces are dragged from the shadow into the light.’

  Now that Etienne no longer reads his mother’s letters, he is visited by events – apparently meaningless moments – that he thought he had forgotten forever. It happens at night, just before he dozes off. In one such half-dream, he is five or six. They are travelling, he and his parents, somewhere in the Free State. They stop at a picnic spot with a little cement table and benches. Next to a tarred road, under some bluegum trees. A dusty side road disappears into the veld. Telephone wires are singing overhead. His father is wearing shorts and long socks. He is young; his body is loose, even careless, amid the cosmos flowers. Etienne is wearing a child’s safari suit. His mother hands him a hard-boiled egg. He walks some distance into the long grass; it closes up almost entirely above him. Then he freezes; his legs simply won’t go any further. He has the sense that he is stepping outside time. Slowly he lets go of the egg, drops his arms by his side. The egg keeps hanging in front of him, floating like an oval moon. There is nothing but him and the grass and the silence.

  The next moment his mother jumps out of the grass, scooping him up, laughing. The cotton of her dress is cool; she smells of orange juice. The memory never goes beyond that. Dreamless sleep arrives to claim him.

  Etienne is working on an essay about montage techniques in Soviet film art. Axel is lying next to him on the futon, shirtless. A video is playing a scene from Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin: people being shot and trampled by Cossack soldiers. Intermittently, Etienne pauses the image, approaches the screen to study the trembling frame from up close. The television is temperamental. It makes hissing sounds, smells of scorched rubber. Sometimes, when Etienne presses the pause button, the screen wavers and flickers as if subliminal images are being flashed in between, then continues obstinately. As if the video is refusing to disrupt the rhythm of the scene. It happens now, and Etienne throws down the remote, goes looking for his housemate who originally fixed the television. He is not in.

  When Etienne returns, Axel is standing with the remote control aimed at the television like a weapon. The image has finally frozen, stuck at the well-known frame of the old woman who has been wounded by Cossack soldiers. Her pince-nez sits askew over her nose, her bloody face contorted in a shout. When Axel gets up and slaps the television with his open palm, the image breaks up and disappears. Etienne throws his hands in the air. ‘Leave the fucking thing,’ Axel says. ‘I brought you something that will interest you far more. Something I’ve been meaning to give you for a while.’

  A few nights ago they’d been lying on the roof in Bermondsey Street, under clouds that were reflecting the city’s lights. Etienne told Axel about the thousands of missing film reels. Axel didn’t say anything. Even so, he was listening.

  ‘Here’s a film for you,’ he now says. He takes out a file from his backpack, offers it. The cover is made of light blue cardboard, woolly with age.

  Etienne frowns. ‘A file, it would seem, rather than a film.’

  ‘Have a look.’

  Etienne hesitantly takes it, opens it. On top of a stack of papers, bound into the file, is a set of rough pencil drawings. Etienne instantly knows: they are storyboards for a film scene. He flips through them. A boy lies in bed in the foreground, wrapped in blankets. A woman enters the room, bends over the hearth, pushes an apple into the flames. A close-up of the flames. There are arrows, dotted lines, notes in German. Etienne puts the drawings aside, starts rummaging through the rest of it. About eighty to a hundred pages of typescript. Occasionally there are more storyboards in between.

  He goes back to the first page, on which is typed:

  berliner chronik

  Director: Ariel Schnur

  Production Journal – Irmgard Fleischer

  1933

  He returns to the pages. They are brittle, like winter leaves. He only understands a few things here and there – his high-school German is rusty. He looks up at Axel. ‘What is this?’

  ‘You’re working on this kind of thing, aren’t you? Ghost films.’ Axel widens his eyes, his tone ghostly. From the community garden, voices are rising up.

  Etienne turns the pages. Although he can understand little of it, it is patently the records or diary of the production of a film entitled Berliner Chronik. There are lists of equipment. Names. Addresses and telephone numbers. His heart starts pounding. ‘Where is this film?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Etienne searches Axel’s eyes. He wants to follow the optical nerves into the folds of the brain. ‘1933,’ Etienne says distractedly. He keeps flicking the pages. Names with question marks draw his attention. Other names are circled, or ticked. ‘These?’

  Axel leans over, reads. ‘Actors who are to audition. And technical people.’ Axel presses his finger on a list. ‘Potential cameramen.’ He turns the page. ‘Lighting people.’ Below them, in the community garden, bongo drums are being played.

  Etienne scans the pages in a frenzy, lingering arbitrarily on some of them. He asks Axel to translate fragments of text. There are minutes of production planning meetings, meetings with potential financiers. Above each set of minutes is written secret. There are timetables for filming, technical detail about cameras. Etienne takes out more loose storyboards as he thumbs through the pages. One shows a boy looking into the courtyard of a block of flats. Opposite him, the outline of a Christmas tree is visible in a window. Another board shows the same boy with a butterfly net, amid tall grass. Etienne keeps going through the file. Nearer the end, the pages look different – filled with long, dense paragraphs. Ultimately the dates disappear. At the very back, a bunch of blank pages have been bound into the file.

  Etienne lowers the file onto his knees. ‘Where on God’s earth did you get this?’

  Axel flicks back to the first page, points at Irmgard Fleischer. ‘My grand­mother. My mother was her only child.’ Axel reaches over his shoulder, scratches vigorously. A vein is pulsating in his neck. From his armpit emanates the fragrance of leather and hot iron. ‘Irmgard was a film production secretary. Or something like that. This file is all I have of her.’ Axel takes out a storyboard, holds it up. ‘The irony is that she would never have been able to see any of this herself.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because of her blindness.’ In the community garden a man has started singing in a scratchy voice.

  Etienne wonders, but doesn’t ask, why a blind woman would be involved in film production. After a while, he says: ‘Is she still alive, your grandmother?’

  Axel has fallen silent; his eyes are cool. Etie
nne is concentrating on the file again, trying to make sense of the yellowed pages. A few more hollow-sounding voices are joining the drums in the community garden. After a few notes, the little choir falls into dissonance. The drumming stops; people start sniggering. Their giggling becomes louder, increasingly hysterical. As if they had inhaled laughing gas.

  Etienne looks at Axel, thinking of how casually he announced that he had been wanting to hand over the file for a while. Why hadn’t he? What else is being withheld, what else does Axel have up his sleeve? Then the file claims Etienne’s attention again.

  Tonight they are back in Bermondsey Street. While Axel is washing himself in the tin bath, Etienne thumbs though the file in the attic. He is struggling with the German, and remains dependent on Axel to decipher most of it. The file is suddenly making him curious about what else he might find up here. He pricks his ears: Axel’s long body is rolling and splashing down in the kitchen. Etienne puts the file down on the floor, gets up and opens a crate. Materials: paintbrushes, cardboard, seeds, a bucket full of glass shards. He moves on to the next crate. He finds an a4 envelope containing some photographs. Children with tattoos – some of them babies. One child has a tattoo on his back of two children who are simultaneously tattooing each other’s skins. Or are they drawing each other – giving birth to each other – with the needles? He squirms, puts the photos back.

  He takes out a box, peeks inside. The remains, apparently, of a previous project. He unpacks it, and then another three boxes. He roughly sets it up: a little village of miniature houses, roofs ripped off, as if a wild storm has torn through the place. There are pigeons in the houses, going about their daily tasks like people: at the dinner table, in bed, sitting at a desk. But some calamity or other has struck the pigeon community; something has scorched away the roofs. Pigeon families’ heads are turned skywards, beaks open, eyes and feathers burnt. Everything black and melted, under a layer of ash. Did Axel use a blowtorch?