MOVIES SPECIAL Early Days at the Movies Fanzine Real Women in the Movies Just Kidding The Seventh Art's Seventh Heaven So What Happened Next? POETRY AND PROSE Aperçus Répérés Choses Vues Zastrugis |
EARLY
DAYS AT THE MOVIES
The
Apparition
In the He
conducted
with His shoulders, shrugging, sloping and sidling. God played so loud
there
was no room for any other sound. But
the
words mouthed appeared on the screen, received in
lettering of gold,
just like the ship and His spectacles. The
lights came
up, and God, half-turning, waved as His ship descended. Mine Eyes Have
Seen. As
He disappeared, the sun going down below the horizon, a tracer of light
revealed two angels with trays around their necks, loaded with the
gifts of
God, ice cream and popcorn. I tasted the summer in the ice and the
autumn in
the corn. I forget the film. I
saw God.
Some years later God descending fell
into the pit. Rumour said He was drunk. This was particularly
blasphemous as it
was an afternoon show. He merely changed a glass or two of water into
wine. A
week later He was back again, rising with His golden ship. Mine Eyes
Have Seen.
A reformed character, someone said. The Glory of the Lord puts up with
a lot.
The film was Miracle on 34th Street. Maureen
O’Hara. God’s name was Fred
or Ted. My
childhood
was in black and white with occasional outbursts of panavision. How I Went to The Movies In
my last year in school I
spend most afternoons at the Lee, the shilling cinema. At five
o’clock I had
either a violin lesson or rugby practice, and as movies ran to
half-five, I
rarely saw one to the end. I’ve seen more unfinished movies
than even the most
irresponsible film critic. It allowed me to construct an ending while
climbing
up to the playing fields or doggedly sawing through an Adam Carse
study. I made
it a point of honour not to find it out from Kitty the Maid, who went
to
everything. I
must have seen
over two hundred movies that year. I’ve been catching up with
them all my life.
Arthouse cinemas were my best bet up to the nineties. Now
it’s late night
television. The endings rarely take me by surprise. I
liked to
imagine a choice of endings, the logical and the acceptable one. I now
know
that some movies, like Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941),
shot several. The troops
abroad got the morale boosting one in the end. Barbara Stanwyck
suddenly
changing into a weepy woman pleading on her knees, ‘We can
start all over
again. You and me’, and blabbering on about ‘the
first John Doe two thousand
years ago’. If Barbara Stanwyck was her usual hard bitch
self, she’d have
barked ‘Jump’. Gary Cooper always jumps from the
City Hall on Christmas Eve for
me. (Capra got his way with James Stewart’s suicide in It’s
a Wonderful Life (1948) by soft focusing it and bringing on
the angels. A cop out. In my
version, Donna Read could not stand his moping anymore and strangled
him.) As I
left John Doe early, I remember the jamboree
‘to celebrate all the John
Does of the world’ was in full swing, and a scatter of
pensioners and mitching
schoolchildren were hooting in disbelief at the rousing anthem
‘God save our
gracious Queen’ (in Aaron Copland’s arrangement). I
similarly
boggled as Michel Simon in Les Chiennes (1932)
warbled what sounded like
‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ when his
wife’s first husband came back from a
faked death, freeing Michel Simon to make a fool of himself. In Michel
Simon had
hummed it earlier when his wife, Madeleine Bernbet, had rejected his
drunken
advances after the office party. It had been sung in his honour for
serving
thirty years' service as a cashier. ‘Don’t touch
me,
I’m a married woman’, she
battleaxed. ‘A widow, you mean’, Michel Simon said,
for he was the despised
second husband, and got on with what he really loved, painting a
self-portrait.
The ugly mug looking back at him winked, and he embezzled office funds
to
support a high-class tart in the twilight of her career. She made his
painting
famous under her own name and he was happy to end up as a clochard,
and
the tramp in Boudu Saved from Drowning later that
year. The ending was a
wave to Les Chiennes. The tramp who won the lottery
and is about to be
married jumps back into the river and floats away on it like a comic
Ophelia,
water lilies and all. The drowning he had saved himself from was a
bourgeois
marriage. I didn’t wait for the credits, and missed him
scrambling on to the
bank to exchange his waterlogged wedding suit for a
scarecrow’s. Home and dry
and back on the road. Sounding out
Movie Pictures and The Lee Marvins
The
coming of
sound into moving pictures meant that you could no longer hear the
bells that
Lon Chaney rang in The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1923). The cinema lost
forever its eavesdrop on infinity (‘Ce sourd
entendant l’infini’, says
Victor Hugo). I regret that I was born too late for the age of the
Silver
Screen. The silence would have suited me.
Not to be deaf to the world. On the contrary.
I’ve always wanted to hear
a pin drop. Sound
has brought more sound to drown out its echoes. Waves build up into a
barrage,
a wall of it. You cannot hear yourself. The low point of my youth was
when the
Sound Barrier was broken by a test pilot called Chuck - BOUM - whisssh.
I was
mutated into the jet age where everything is up in the air. It broke my
voice.
Menarche initiated me into the ‘one ball gang of
two’ for budding ‘Lee Marvins
of the Mind’, as the leader Shocker dubbed them. The noise
the Lee Marvins were
sworn to make in the world was supposed to be beyond or below human
ears. ‘I
was born under a…’ But why Lee Marvin? Well, he
had spikely outplayed Brando in The Wild One (1953)
and made Spencer Tracy seem a fool in Bad Day at
Black Rock (1954). I felt I could not forgive him for
throwing scalding
coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face in The Big Heat
(1953), but Shocker said
he was only acting. I still think it destroyed her life. ‘Time
is where you are. Adjust your watches’, said Pathe News,
simplifying Einstein.
But Shocker scoffed, ‘Then local time is meaningless. If time
is relative, it’s
a waste of space. Once you start playing with standard time, in no time
you’re
in no time’. I was several steps behind him. But because his
father had been a
war pilot, I was only too happy to listen to him. ‘Space
is not merely where you are and what you fill’, Shocker said.
‘It’s the soul of
the universe.’ All
I could say was, ‘Did you know Einstein shaved in soap and
water?’ The
silence of infinite spaces that terrified Pascal silenced me. Whatever
about
time, space was beyond me. I knew that The
Lee Marvins of the Mind wanted absolutes (relatives were
‘what you could not
stand’). ‘If
two bodies can only relate to one another by accident, where does that
leave
the affections?’ said I. ‘If
the existence of time and space are only relative, where and when are
we at?’
added Shocker. We
did not object to energy and matter being interchangeable. It could
account for
love’s ‘mingling of the sweet emotions’,
though Einstein used it to explain the
atomic bomb (Shelley had a better idea). ‘Reclaiming
Time’ became our slogan.
We were against a no-time world, one where everybody had their own, and
for the
communistic sharing of a universal mean standard. Throw away your
clocks. What
we need is an hourglass that measures the constant sands. Or a sundial
that reflects
the one true sun. Our rhetoric was stronger than our logic and our
knowledge
weaker than our stubbornness. Young Lee Marvins brook no objections. I
have my
doubts about Nietzsche’s ‘It’s certitude
not doubt that drives one mad’. It’s
what keeps you going. Justifying
time as an absolute was easy. Music without it is not music, we said.
Time is
the baton that sounds it out, keeps the ensemble together. It tells the
ear
when to listen. Even rubato is less a time-out than a rest from the
metronome.
All the better to jump in, like Lester Young when the moment comes. And
it also
reminds you how wishy-washy music is when the beat is lost (crooners
taking
over from bebop). The visual world needs time even more than music.
Shocker
claimed his father was tone deaf from breaking the Sound Barrier
inadvertently,
and reported that he said, ‘Images outside time are
dead’. ‘He
was probably thinking of when his radar went blank and a crash landing
seemed
inevitable.’ Shocker
nodded. ‘Moving ones in particular. Without the tick-tock
they’re all over the
place. Dangerous as meteorites.’ ‘Or
movies out of focus.’ I’d seen one at the Ritz
cinema - where the manager took
tickets, sold popcorn, ushered, did the projection - Battleship
Potemkin
(1925). The rowdy students rioted. It was better than a movie. ‘Yes,
timing in the Silent Era was everything’, Captain Shocker was
believed to have
said. ‘Sound has put an end to that.’ Shocker
was unfaithful to our silent protest when he got himself a girlfriend.
He took
to bopping and gave up ideas. Real revolutionaries must be monks. I
retreated
into reading Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. When
amplification came to Tin
Pan Alley I stopped listening to Radio Luxembourg, sealing my cell off
with
imaginary cork so I could read Proust’s Recherche
du Temps Perdu, smoke
a pipe, hear the tap drip and the music of the spheres (my room had a
mansard).
I missed the restoration of beat that came with rhythm and blues, and
its
apotheosis, rock and roll. That is, until amplification. My voluntary
silence
was broken by pop blaring from Ronnie Payne’s bedroom next
door. Blocking out
the world was a losing battle. I had no control over sonic disturbance.
I can’t
say I was wholly sorry. It’s lonely when you’re the
last bastion of peace and
quiet and only sixteen. A
decade later the original echo that inspired the Lees came back and I
turned up
the sound.
If
I’d known I would not have come, said the puzzled boy at the
end of The
Battle of the Buttons
(1966). Si
j’aurais su, je n’aurais pas venu. |