Flicker (44 page)

“But why doesn't it show more clearly throughout?”

“Ah, that is the trick. The effect must be carefully balanced with the studio lighting—just dim enough to wash out in the glare. We have not yet worked out these ratios. Incidentally, it is a use of the medium that is restricted to orthochromatic film. One needs the sharp contrast of blacks and whites to distract from the gray.”

It was difficult for me to restrain my amazement. “This filter of yours,” I hastened to tell him, “I've seen one before.”

“Oh? Where?”

“Castle's old cameraman Zip Lipsky had one. He treated it as a great secret. He called it a stripper, because it strips the film down to its underlying imagery. He said Castle invented it.”

“I am not surprised,” Saint-Cyr replied. “He must have used something of the kind to help with his effects.”

“And what you call gray light,” I added, “I'm sure it's what Castle referred to as split lighting.”

“So you know about these things.” Saint-Cyr seemed a bit deflated.

“No, not really. I had no idea how the effects were produced. I didn't even know what kind of lenses were used in the stripper. These are remarkable discoveries. They could revolutionize filmmaking.”

Saint-Cyr shrugged off my admiration. “Admittedly they make for a diverting study. But they are of no ideological consequence. You see, they are used here for nothing more than psychological effect. As you have learned from your own preliminary analysis, Castle employs a repertoire of such images to link sex and violence, sex and death. All perfectly banal. This does not get us beyond the level of Wagnerian opera. Here, for example, he plays with the motif of the cannibal vagina.” Saint-Cyr smirked contemptuously. “Shocking? Hardly. The bourgeois psyche has long since adjusted to this once-sensational Freudian symbology. It becomes merely a collection of pranks. The significance of film is that it passes beyond the psychological. It penetrates to the neurological: the material foundations of consciousness. Here, Professor Gates, is the
true
substance of Max Castle.”

He switched on the projector again, but this time he blurred the focus so that the image that reached the screen was a smudge of moving shadows. For several moments I stared stupidly at the illegible square of light. What was I supposed to see? Saint-Cyr studied
my perplexity with malicious delight. Was he putting me on? I felt certain he wasn't. Mocking as his tone might be, there was an intensity about all he said that was clearly sincere. Moreover, the faces of everyone in the room revealed no trace of ridicule, but rather high seriousness.

“But … this is
nothing
, “I finally said, opening myself deliberately to whatever he would now say to score off my ignorance.

“Nothing?”
Saint-Cyr retorted. “It is
light,
Professor. Moving light. Is this not the essence of cinema? Now, if we slow the projection, so …” and he did, “what do we have?”

As anyone would expect, the blurred square on the wall began to lose continuity and flicker as the film dipped below its fusion frequency. Finally, when he had slowed the projector to its maximum, the shutter was visibly chopping through the beam of light in steady, staccato intervals, like a flashlight being switched on and off.
It flickered.

“On-off, on-off,” Saint-Cyr said, observing the obvious.
“Les flicks.
The objective message of the medium. Always there, even when the eye does not perceive its presence.”

He paused to see if I'd taken the idea in. “But what kind of message is that?” I asked. “It's just flickering light.”

“Yes. A pulsation. On-off. Light-dark. On against off. Light against dark.
Dialectical structure,
Professor Gates. A message simple enough to penetrate even the lizard brain we carry from the primordial past. Or rather which carries us. The material basis of the dialectic is the cerebral nervous system. With this, the mechanism of projection interfaces objectively.
Here
the machine,
there
the retinal cortex. Technology, anatomy. The rest is nonessential. We run the film forward, backward. Nonessential.” He paused again, this time leaning close to study my face. “The light, it fatigues you, does it not?”

In fact, the constant flashing was getting on my nerves. “Yes,” I said. “It's really very annoying.”

“That is because you are struggling
not
to be hypnotized. The pulse is too obvious; you guard against it. But now … ” He speeded the film up, refocused, brought the movie back from its blurred condition. The figures in another of Castle's film episodes reappeared, this time a girl shimmying her way through a slow striptease. This piece of film was in even worse condition, blurred almost to the point of being undecipherable, but I was certain I was watching Louise Brooks do
the dance that had helped get the film banned. I could see why. Saint-Cyr, noting my concentration, continued, “Now you do not struggle. You watch
the movie.
This is very easy to do, very pleasant. What do we have? A sexy lady doing a sexy dance. Your guard comes down, you take the bait. But the pulse is
still
there. It enters the consciousness, shall we say through a secret door?”

The reel of film ran out, its loose end whipping noisily until Saint-Cyr switched off the projector. Another moment and the lights came on. I turned to ask him a question, many questions … they crowded into my mind.

Clearly delighted with the state of mystification in which he had dumped me, Saint-Cyr waved me to silence. “We will talk more,” he said and withdrew into the company of his admiring students. He didn't get back to me for another two hours; even then I still couldn't find a question I dared to ask. Whatever came to mind seemed too naively stupid. But Saint-Cyr was in a mood to hold forth and needed no questions from me. After a long evening of wine and adulation from his camp followers, he seemed willing to unbend with the imbecile American in his midst. Toward 3:00
A.M
., two of his prize students were still on hand; Jeanette drew herself up receptively on the floor beside her teacher as he slumped in his leather easy chair.

“Study hypnosis, Professor,” he advised me. “This is the next great problem in film, as it is in politics.”

“You believe movies are a form of hypnosis?”

“The highest form of hypnosis. But this is obvious, a neurophysiological fact. No one disputes it. Let us ask, however, what is the
sociography
of this hypnosis? This has yet to be specified.” He gestured toward one of his students in whose company I'd earlier seen him examining a yards-long computer printout. “Julien has made this his special field.” As if he were giving his regal permission to speak, he nodded in Julien's direction. He was a bushy-haired, tautly nerved young man who smoked incessantly while he spoke and never once raised his eyes to look at me.

“For each social class,” Julien began, rattling off what he had to say in French at a pace that frequently outdistanced me, “there is an optimum fixation ratio. This is a function of the attention span, which is the product of social conditioning… .” Julien generously proceeded to unroll his research over the next hour. It was a remarkable theory. He seemed to be saying that in capitalist society there is an inherent tendency for the attention span of each successive generation
to diminish as the experience of alienation increases, with the proletarian nervous system leading the way toward mental disintegration. Already this psychic mutilation was having its visible cultural effect. New film and musical forms were pulverizing all content into tinier, more purely sensational, fragments. Nothing with greater complexity than advertising copy could be understood even by privileged bourgeois youth. In movies intended for adolescent audiences, directors would soon be limiting each shot to a five-second duration at longest and then cutting back from there. The lyrics of songs were fast becoming inarticulate phrases repeated over and over, none more than three or four seconds long.

At the current rate of accelerating perceptual shrinkage, Julien predicted that the adolescent generation of the year 2000 would have no attention span whatever, hence no capacity to absorb any message longer than a single cinematic flash frame in duration. Even one-line gags and slapstick comedy would be incomprehensible to them. If, for example, they were to be shown a classic pie-throwing scene from the early silent films, they wouldn't be able to recall, when the pie hit the face, where it had come from.

At that point, language, including the semiological structure of film, would have lost the last traces of grammatical coherence, which was based upon the ability to maintain minimal attentiveness from the beginning to the end of a simple declarative sentence—approximately three and a half seconds. When this fateful devolutionary moment arrived, no command issued even on the highest authority could be supplemented by ideological rationalization. Hypnosis would no longer be possible; propaganda of the simplest kind would cease to have any effect. The mystification of the masses would come to an end. There would be fewer and fewer who could take orders any longer; the revolution would be at hand, powered by a worldwide mass of teenage cretins whose means of communication would be limited to simian grunts, snorts, crude gestures, with only occasionally recognizable words. This final capitalist generation would be making its way in the world largely by means of smell, feel, and raw mammalian instinct. At that point, the revolutionary vanguard (which would apparently consist of movie critics and film students who had preserved enough brain power to understand the historical dialectic) would take charge of these humanoid primates and salvage whatever higher-order neurological material might still be functioning in the world. It would be touch and go until a new socialist state was built
that could once again stretch the attention span and undertake what the Neurosemiologists called “the positive hypnotic reconstruction of consciousness.”

Saint-Cyr, slouching deep in his chair and watching me through wine-blurred eyes, was closely gauging my responses, which must have come across to him as a mixture of authentic fascination and barely contained incredulity. “This, you see, Professor Gates, is where Marx went wrong,” he explained when Julien had finished. “He was, after all, an economist, hence a man of abstractions. His great concept—the declining rate of profit—poof! it is a figment, a delusionary artifact. All this must now be reinterpreted. In Neurosemiological terms, it is the
declining span of attention
which is crucial. Materialism must become physicalism. The dialectic will have to be grounded in the nervous apparatus.”

“Yes, I see,” I answered, though I largely didn't. Above all, I didn't see how any of this connected with Castle. So I asked.

“But obviously, Professor Gates,” Saint-Cyr answered with a bored, now more than slightly drunken, air, “he more than all others elevates the dialectical fundament of film to the level of conscious manipulation.”

“You mean the flicker?”

“But of course. The opposition of light and darkness. The logic of history. The struggle of social forces. In the technology of film, class conflict becomes objective in the dominant expressive form of the industrial period. Castle knew this. He used this. He surrendered to it. Historically, this was the first step in liberating film from the imprisonment of art.”

There was an obvious point that needed to be addressed. “But is there any evidence that Castle was a Marxist?” I asked.

Saint-Cyr threw the question out of court. “This is of no consequence. Technology precedes ideology. We do not speak here of subjective preferences. In our view, Castle was an apolitical aesthetic technician, that is all. The essential point is that he grasped the autonomy of the medium. This we can extract from his work. The rest … it is so much historical detritus.”

“Do you know anything about Castle's subjective preferences?” I asked. “If he wasn't a Marxist, what was he?”

With a dismissive sneer, Saint-Cyr overrode the query. “Like most entertainers, he was prepared to be a bourgeois lackey. He produced
for the market. The man himself is without revolutionary significance.”

“But you do believe Castle's techniques can be used for Marxist purposes—if a filmmaker wished to do that?”

“For Marxist purposes and
only
for Marxist purposes. This is what the technology dictates. The more essentially filmic a work becomes, the more it becomes the servant of the historical dialectic. Personally, Castle might not have approved; but this is again of no consequence. We deal here with social forces that transcend personal intentions. Castle was prepared to accept the destiny of film for what it is. That is all that matters; it is our only interest in him.”

“Do you have any idea how Castle learned what he knew about film?” I asked.

“This has been a matter of passing curiosity with us. There may be a connection between Castle and Etienne Lefebvre. Lefebvre participated in setting up the German UFA. Possibly there was some contact at that point.”

“You don't know anything about his connection with a group of orphans?”

Saint-Cyr stared back blankly. “Orphans? No. Biography has no role to play in Neurosemiology. In fact, the less we know of the technician's personal history, the better.”

“You mentioned Lefebvre just now. And I believe you have an interest in LePrince. Have you studied their work?”

Saint-Cyr nodded toward his other student, whom he introduced as Alain. Alain's special field was the prehistory of cinema technology. “There is of course no work to study in the narrow aesthetic sense,” he informed me. “Lefebvre and LePrince were not filmmakers; they were inventors—like your Edison. Of interest here are the mechanisms they devised. The 'ardware.” He put the word in English.