Cover
! e l t i st i h t f ls o o o k t e e e h t p h t k i a w e t u n ) . s o n y a e a l e r y e c h o s t j r e n u g o E an m of y h c n a o c t t u o o b (Y top or at the “Post-modern noir at its best: beautiful and nightmarish by turns. I read it late into the night and couldn’t put it down.” Elizabeth Hand
The
Absolution of
Roberto Acestes Laing A novel by nicholas rombes
Cover “Post-modern noir at its best: beautiful and nightmarish by turns. I read it late into the night and couldn’t put it down.” Elizabeth Hand
The
Absolution of
Roberto Acestes Laing A novel by nicholas rombes
Advance Praise
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Advance Praise
“Like a cross between Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions and Janice Lee’s Damnation, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is at once smart and slyly unsettling. It is expert at creating a quietly building sense of dread while claiming to do something as straightforward as describe lost films—like those conversations you have in which you realize only too late that what you actually talking about and what you think you are talking about are not the same thing at all.” —Brian Evenson “Suffused with the best elements and obscure conspiracies of Bolaño, Ligotti and speculative fiction, Rombes’ work gnaws away at the limits of what a novel looks like. Through the writing of films that never existed, it finds a space at once eerily familiar and entirely of its own.” —Evan Calder Williams “This hallucinatory and terrifying secret history of film is so meticulously researched and gorgeously written that I wonder if, in fact, Nicholas Rombes has uncovered a lost trove of works by David Lynch, Orson Welles, Antonioni and Jodorowsky somewhere in the California desert. The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is post-modern noir at its best: beautiful and nightmarish by turns. I read it late into the night and couldn’t put it down.” —Elizabeth Hand
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
S.G.I.P.
Title page
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
The
Absolution of
Roberto Acestes Laing A novel by nicholas rombes
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
Copyright
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
TWO DOLLAR RADIO is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry. We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.
Copyright Š 2014 by Nicholas Rombes All rights reserved ISBN: 978-1-937512-23-1 Library of Congress Control Number available upon request. Cover design by Two Dollar Radio Author photograph: Auxilio Lacouture Page 59: Museum of the City of New York, Empire Film Co. Printed in the United States of America. No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced, with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews, without the written permission of the publisher.
TwoDollarRadio.com twodollar@twodollarradio.com
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
Prologue
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
“So, montage is conflict.” —Sergei Eisenstein
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
Contents
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
CONTENTS Film Titles and Dates
Chapter 1
Destroyer (1969) Black Star (mid-1980s) The Blood Order (1948) Hutton (1951)
Chapter 2
Aitswal Beach (1969 or ’70) AXXON N. (1980) The Murderous King Addresses the Horizon (1910) The Story of A. (Laing’s digression) Blinding Forward (1990)
Chapter 3
The Insurgent (a film treatment, 1968) Gutman (2001)
Epilogue
The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
“On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.” —Julia Kristeva, from Powers of Horror “Thou hast removed my soul far off from peace.” —Lamentations 3:17 “Excuse Emily and her atoms.” — fragment from an Emily Dickinson “envelope” poem, circa October 1882
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
The
Absolution of
Roberto Acestes Laing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
Chapter 1
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
Chapter 1
Destroyer (1969) Black Star (mid-1980s) The Blood Order (1948) Hutton (1951)
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
AS FOR R. LAING, WHO CAN BLAME HIM? There’s going to be a person named Katy, you understand. These were the first words he spoke to me. I kept waiting for Katy. Once, during our conversations, he told me he’d “had people hurt in absentia.” I pondered this, the semantics of this. I interviewed him over a three-day period during a locustinfested summer in a cramped, hot motel room where, to judge from the morbid condition of things—the rotting brown carpeting, the dresser warped and distended as if it had been waterlogged and then dried out, the heaving, peeling sky-blue wallpaper that suggested infestation—he had paid someone in dubious currency to be left alone. He was wearing something like a scarf. Bright red, I remember that, a scarf that brought to mind the sort of clarity that only happens through the ironwilled exertion of power. Did I see a photograph once of Augusto Pinochet wearing a scarf, as well, and a cracked smile that suggested the terror of pure reason? Laing’s dark skin, reddish hair, large hands, and a pale or cream-colored blazer reminded me of the tropics somehow, and in the weary way that he greeted me it seemed as if he had dragged along with him all the time zones he had passed through to get here, and was existing—at this very moment—in each of them simultaneously. A man in his mid-60s but who looks much younger, as if his exterior aging has stalled while his interior aging continued. He has a shock of white hair and an open face. But, for some reason, when he opened that motel room door the first thing I COPYRIGHTED MATERIALNicholas Rombes
/ 5
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL noticed wasn’t Laing at all but a chair in the corner of the room, a chair that couldn’t possibly have been from the motel. It was situated not on the floor itself, but on an unstable foundation of old books (phonebooks, or so I thought) and newspapers. It looked as if it had been reupholstered recently in blue velvet, but done in such a poor way that the fabric was stretched too tightly in some spots and was bunched up or loose in others. And on the chair—which struck me more as a throne or a throne disguised as a chair—there were several neat stacks of uncased VHS tapes, tapes which I assumed were dubs of the films that I’d been sent here to interview Laing about. Not that he acted courtly. He welcomed me man to man. He called me by a name that only my grandmother used, as if we had shared some secret history that I had forgotten, and at other times called me “A.” which turned out to be the name (or the initial of the name) of a very dangerous person he fell in with during his librarian/graduate school days. He showed me around the place, as it were. A small room, #228, that smelled of scalded milk and had the feeling of a dungeon to it, not that I’ve ever been in one. A door that opened out onto a narrow cement landing looked down across a vast, gullied parking lot, as if built for a motel ten times larger than this one. A bed stripped of its sheets and covers. The throne-chair in one corner. The motel room TV set, its flat screen spray-painted red, in another corner. A small round table where the interviews took place. Who among us has the authority, the power, to bind and loose? I had been sent there on assignment, as they say, but also out of curiosity, my own, as it were, eagerness to come close to the source of a myth. On the surface I was simply here to interview Laing for a short-lived cinema journal dedicated to the preservation of lost films that had been awarded a grant to investigate and report on neglected films. And whose chief editor Edison (that’s what we called him, after Herman Casler, an early 6 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL film pioneer whose ideas Edison stole, and we called him that because he was a thief himself, but a generous one) I had persuaded, in a rare, belligerent show of confidence, to sign over a large chunk of to fund my excursion by borrowed van from central Pennsylvania into Wisconsin (near the western edge of the Chequamegaon-Nicolet National Forest) to interview Laing, whose obscurity had made him fashionable of late, as if nostalgia for the analog had somehow become nostalgia for Laing and his dirty, mistakist, unrepentant ways. I’m certain others had tracked him down but came to believe that what he told them about the films was unreliable. And yet isn’t unreliability its own form of certainty? Who was Laing, really? (I can say that the disorienting feeling of depth around him had nothing to do with deep thought, but rather was more akin to the extreme depth-of-field in films like Citizen Kane, that make you feel you might fall into the deep background of the film itself, the background that exists in the space behind the characters.) A librarian specializing not in that category of films we call experimental or avant garde, but rather in films that smuggle these strategies and techniques into films that appear, on their surface, to be more conventional. During one of our conversations he said something to the effect that it was more difficult to make a movie with an experimental and bold vision that many might see rather than a self-proclaimed, willfully obscure avant-garde film. He was rumored to have come from a family whose immense wealth was exceeded only by its internal hatreds, and that he had insinuated himself in the margins of academia so as to have access to a campus office and, more importantly, the institutional letterhead that would allow him to correspond with a false authority to the cinephiles who operated the black markets of film ephemera. Others said he’d had a hand in writing the infamous “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” CIA manual which had been distributed to South Vietnamese military officers in the 1960s and which contains COPYRIGHTED MATERIALNicholas Rombes
/ 7
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL references to a “weaponized cinema.” I, however, understood him to be a man who staved off disorder and chaos by sorting, by documenting, by naming. First at a small college in the rolling hills of southern Ohio (an area that’s really a secret part of the Deep South) from around 1965 to 1980, and then, until 2003, at a much larger one in Pennsylvania, where, despite its size, you could hear the lowing of the cows in the summer coming through the open dorm room windows on the breeze, and where he earned a reputation as carefully unbalanced by recommending—against the most conservative impulses of the times—films of the most startling, transgressive, truthful sort, salvaged from auctions and purchased with dubious currency from collectors for whom the shock of the new meant unloading the old. But more than that. Laing received, in his library office, canisters of film from the likes of David Lynch, Michelangelo Antonioni, Aimee Deren (granddaughter of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren), Agnès Varda, Andrzej Żuławski, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and anonymous others through connections that seemed to involve, I could swear, some dark pact he had made in his youth. Laing had watched, in the privacy of his office—so it was rumored—dozens of short films by these directors and others, films of such simple beauty and implied violence. The sort of films that poisoned you if you saw them at the wrong (or right) age. He had seen these films and then, just as interest began to grow in the so-called lost films of certain contemporary directors, destroyed them, the best of them. Burned them, so it was said, in a simple metal barrel behind the library loading dock. This would have been sometime in the early 2000s and was documented by an analog film group on campus called Radiant Union, one of whose members ended up serving as the editor of the journal that was responsible for sending me to see Laing in the first place. Radiant Union was, as far as I know (which is to say as far as anything can be known about anything) a group of 8 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL cinephile graduate students who, having become disenchanted with theory, attempted to break free from what they called flying signifiers, which turned out to be the name of their pathetic little fanzine, mimeographed and stapled in the old “analog” way and distributed mostly amongst themselves. And it is in the poorly designed (which may have been, now that I’m committing these thoughts to the screen, deliberate, as a way to disguise the revolutionary nature of the ideas) pages of flying signifiers that information about Roberto Acestes Laing’s stupefying “film dispreservation” (the euphemistic term for “film destruction” used by the journal’s editors) are documented. In the pages of issues one through seven of that fanzine (for that’s all they managed to produce) who knows where fact ended and myth began? As for me, all I can say with certainty is that Edison—whom I knew from my own failed days as a post-graduate and… poor Edison! whose magnificent lisp, which he had decided to embrace rather than suppress, was always subverting his cause rather than aiding it—gave me his copies of flying signifiers, copies that he had acquired through an elaborate, off-line bartering system and that provided first-hand details regarding Laing’s destruction by fire of the most valuable films in his collection. In truth, Laing had existed at the frayed edges of my imagination for a long time. First as a rumor or ghost—like that fleeting something you see, that moth-like smudge, out of the corner of your eye—and then gradually as a more substantial shape as if the thought of him had transformed into a tiny sliver that had lodged itself in my brain. It was in the credits where I spotted him first, the credits of a crazy, anarchist midnight movie about skiing, and I mean anarchist in the discombobulation of the film itself, its assembly or editing, which was all mixed up. In fact, it wasn’t really clear whether it was a documentary or a narrative film, because some of the sequences showing dangerously fast downhill skiing were voiced over in a very hushed, downbeat, formal way, almost as if it was a golf telecast. And COPYRIGHTED MATERIALNicholas Rombes
/ 9
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL then other parts would treat the characters not as if they were in a documentary, but rather in a fictional film, simply playing the parts of skiers. I watched it in the winter in a theater where you had to wear gloves to stay warm. They served beer, which made things better and worse. The other thing I remember was this: the sound of crickets. Coming, impossibly, from the snowcovered trees and brush of the film. This was around three years before Edison sent me to interview Laing about the destroyed films, and the ski movie was called either Aspen or else it was set in Aspen, or some combination of both, and it was near the end of that interminable film, as I recall, that I was first introduced to Roberto Acestes Laing, or a character named Roberto Acestes Laing. It was a throwaway scene (as were most of the scenes in the film) that involved a roll call of the ski lift operators who, lined up in bright red and orange snow suits, stepped forward and took their assignment packets (I’m assuming) for that day. That was the first time I heard his name, as a bit-part character (you couldn’t even see his face, obscured by a parka and snow goggles) who was called forward to take a sheet of paper in a heavy plastic envelope: Roberto Acestes (pronounced in the film “Egestes” rather than “Ah-ses-teez,” as Roberto himself pronounced it) Laing. Then, a few months later, I was watching a re-run of a funny but unworkable short-lived 1970s late-night talk show (the one where the host sits, wearing a tan leisure suit, on a couch with a TV tray in front of him rather than a desk) and in the middle of the monologue one of the big stage lights, off-camera, blew out with a pop. Things went dim. The audience laughed in ways that either suggested a secret conspiracy or fear. The host blinked, put the palms of his hands together in front of his face, shook his head, and said, “Oh, Acestes.” And then one other time, on the radio, during an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, around the time of Texasville and grunge. Bogdanovich was asked about his influences. His voice sounded 10 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL weary, as if it was barely leaking out of my car stereo. I was driving and being followed too closely by a motorcycle, I remember that. Bogdanovich mentioned the familiar names—Orson Welles (which he pronounced “Orsṓn”), Billy Wilder—but then also “Laing,” or what sounded like Laing. Was I obsessed? If so, my obsession had more to do with the notion of Laing than with Laing himself. All our cryptic ones, our minor-key heroes, turn out to be disappointments in the end. I knew that. Just the idea that someone like him existed, someone who had attempted to destroy the regime of the image by going after its most potent artifacts, someone whose fleetingness in my imagination was closer to an improperly colorcorrected character out of a film than real life, that was the hook that had snagged my mind: an abstraction of Laing rather than Laing the person. But what sort of way is that to lead life, avoiding the things you love because you know they will disappoint you? I understood that meeting Laing would demythologize him. I’ve seen enough statues that were supposed to stand forever pulled down with ropes by crowds to know that at some point all thrones collapse. By the time I visited him I had learned that after he burned the films—which according to Edison had been done in a vaguely ritualistic way as if in accordance with some dark, obscure procedure—he fled into the night, leaving behind the fire as it still burned brightly. Whether or not he actually fled into the night (and all of this information is, according to Edison, from an issue of flying signifiers that he showed me prior to my journey to see Laing but refused to let me hold or read) and, for that matter, whether or not he said I love the smell of nitrate in the morning (which hardly makes sense because it was night) almost doesn’t matter. What matters is that after he burned the films he disappeared. The university eventually cleared out his space in the rare books room, removed his name from the door, integrated the films he left behind into the university’s film department (the portentously named Center for Nicholas Rombes COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
/ 11
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL the Study of Sound and the Moving Image), and enacted a 500 dollar application fee for student groups so that Radiant Union, no longer officially a part of campus life, was forced to hold its meetings and screen its movies in off-campus apartments in the summer, in some of the nearby abandoned steel foundries, whose leaky broken-windowed walls and oily concrete floors and hulking rusted machines must have lent a false air of danger to the screenings. By the time I visited Laing he had moved to Wisconsin (this would have been some time in the early 2000s, post Towers) and became, in the manner of our time, absent but always talked about. He had purchased (his word) a room in a barely functioning, largely unpeopled motel near the edge of federal land. Laing was a sort of rumor that was breathed on occasion through the obscure, little-traveled back pages of the interwebs. Mostly it’s just Laing talking. Holding forth with the microrecorder on the desk. I take notes, prompt him when he runs out of things to say, refill his Star Wars glass with bourbon. He takes off the scarf and puts it on a hanger as if it’s some important piece of clothing. Sometimes he talks off the top of his head. Other times he sorts through one of the cardboard boxes in the room to find his notes or drafts of descriptive essays he wrote concerning the films in question. Sometimes when he looks at me I feel a little sick, and maybe now, before all this begins, is the time to say that I think there was something radioactive about Laing, or if not radioactive then alien. For instance, my face seemed to grow hotter the longer he stared at me, which wasn’t often, but often enough, often enough to make me shake in private when I think about it now, years later, on the other side of the chaos. It’s the same feeling I get when I think about my perished daughter Emily. There was something about his eyes that seemed mechanical, as if there was another pair of eyes behind them, and perhaps even a third pair behind those, so that you weren’t sure what Laing was seeing when he looked at you. 12 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL “It seems to be a road movie. From the sixties. One of those.” (He talks in present tense throughout our conversations during the three days I interviewed him in Wisconsin, as if he’s watching the films right now, at this very moment.) I ask him if it’s okay to begin recording, and of course he says yes, and it’s then that I notice how large his hands are, like those of a basketball player. They’re resting palms down on the table and a crazy thought flashes into my head: Laing is receiving some signal, through his hands, which is why they’re resting there awkwardly, and I can imagine that this signal presents itself in the form of slight vibrations, and so I lay one of my hands on the table, too, casually, and then my idea doesn’t seem so crazy because I do feel something, or else I imagine that I do, the table vibrating ever so slightly, as if an electrical current were running through it. “It’s called Destroyer. This was the first one, the first film that had to be burned. I was still in Ohio then. A hippie, so-called, but the sort of hippie who was just biding time until punk came and laid waste to those false values. The open landscape splintering into shards and fragments that only further alienate the screen protagonists from the audience. Golden sunsets,” Laing says, “lens flare. Blood. Sand. I’m sitting in the velvet plush seats of a cavernous theater with Laura, a student who seems intent on getting me ejected for open displays of lust. There are people smoking six rows up. The light from the projector is blue and visible. Nothing much happens in the film for a good ten minutes. Then in the heated flash of a jump cut it comes to life. The New Wave pretense drains away. This was one of the few films I stole rather than bartered for or purchased outright, having persuaded Laura to distract the projectionist by lighting a wig on fire, clearing him from the booth long enough for me to scissor the film reels free from the projector. It was said to be the only film directed by Warren Oates, the year before he starred in The Wild Bunch. He’s credited as the director under the name Slate Oates, which only made sense to me years later, when I read an Nicholas Rombes COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
/ 13
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL interview with his wife Teddy who said that ‘Warren was heavyduty into slate, natural things, not carpet.’ “The fuck of denim. “Motorcycles on an American highway, the highway of serial killers, so they say. The engines sputter to life. Gasoline from one of the open overtopped motorcycle gas tanks splashes across the screen. Our napkins are soaked in butter grease. The girl’s thoughts are combustible. “Three motorcycles with black-leathered and blue-denimed helmet-less characters. Two men and a woman. You get the feeling that she sleeps with them both at the same time. Roaring across the desert. The first twenty minutes are like a mash-up of outtakes from Easy Rider. Jump cuts all over the place. The screen goes black for several seconds. When we see them next the three chopper riders are in a dingy roadside diner, their bikes parked outside the window. The name of the diner, we see from a menu insert shot, is Contina’s. The characters talk to each other over plates of pancakes and bacon and coffee in white ceramic cups, except that on the Woman’s plate it doesn’t look like pancakes at all, but rather a gob of red raw hamburger. Man #1 wears a red bandana. Man #2’s hands are tattooed in red and purple geometric shapes. The Woman is the one who commands the scene through her silence, picking at the bloody thing on her plate with her fingers. Only fragments of dialog are clear: “‘. . . still following us…’ “‘. . . came in and that he took that money…’ “‘. . . said she’s being watched all the time…’ “‘He’d destroy us if he could.’ “The level of disengagement from the audience is palpable. This isn’t a movie that wants to be loved. The waitress is radiation-sickness thin in her cornstalk yellow outfit. She clears the table. With her skeletal hand she casually drops what appears to be a folded note in the lap of the biker with tattooed hands. He slips it into the pocket of his denim shirt without looking at 14 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL it. The woman biker notices this. Her black hair is in what we used to call Indian braids. She murmurs something that’s not audible to us. Whatever she says infuriates the tattooed man. He slaps the table hard with his palm and leans forward as if challenging her. The skinny waitress in yellow looks agitated and says something to all of them, and for a few moments the sound cuts out in a way that suggests conspiracy, like the missing minutes in the Nixon Watergate tapes, a gap that Alexander Haig actually said was caused by a sinister force. But then the man with the red bandana says something to calm him down (‘let it go, for now, man…’) and puts his hand on the other biker’s shoulder in a way that can only be described as tender. “Finally a character we hadn’t noticed before, sitting alone at a table at the far right edge of the screen, gets up to pay. He has a terrible limp and is slope-shouldered. He’s wearing a black cowboy hat that somehow seems out of place. The tattooed man notices and tips his head to the others. Without speaking they leave their table, casually, and follow the limper out to the parking lot that’s so dusty and loose it feels like some of it has blown up onto the theater screen itself. The camera holds on the empty booth as if there’s still someone there who we can’t see and then something hits the window, hits it hard. It’s a large bird. The sound it makes when it hits the glass is the sound of death. The film cuts to a shot originating from across the road. The restaurant is framed in the middle of the screen like a lonely outpost. The wind has picked up and dust and tumbleweeds scatter in that delicate, gravity-defying way of theirs across the screen in the direction of time. The man in the cowboy hat limps up to a dusty yellow Datsun. There might be something finger-written in the dust that cakes the side of the car, but it’s hard to tell. The man wearing the black cowboy hat gets in the filthy Datsun and tries to start it but like so many bad cars from that era it just won’t turn over. He curses frantically and, with both hands grasping the steering wheel shakes his body back and forth like Nicholas Rombes COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
/ 15
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL he’s having a seizure or is trying to tear off the steering wheel. He finally gets it going and takes off in the direction of the blowing sand. The three motorcyclists talk excitedly and point in different directions. The woman tries and fails to light a cigarette in the wind. She finally throws the lighter to the ground. The tattooed man leans down to pick it up. The note falls out of his shirt pocket. It’s carried away by the wind. Then they get on their bikes and head out in the same direction as the Datsun.” Laing pauses for a second, as if he’s holding the entire movie in his head and the image is projected onto the side of an enormous soap bubble there in the motel room with us that might burst and disappear forever at any moment. I suddenly have no desire to be in the room with him. I’m overcome with the feeling (a feeling that made only a little sense then and only a little sense more now) that we are standing on the sea floor, and that the blue velvet chair, the bed, the table, were all sunken objects, somehow preserved by the icy water that Laing and I, as if by magic, could breathe under. And if Laing hadn’t started up again about Destroyer I may very well have walked out. “The next scene looks radically changed from what has come before as if a different director or cinematographer has taken over. It’s the familiar three bikers. They are in the same diner as earlier and yet everything is a little larger, cleaner, brighter. But the scene doesn’t begin that way. It begins in darkness. You can hear the sounds of the diner: scraps of conversation, the clattering of dishes, the cash register, maybe the scuffling of shoes on the floor. The light comes up slowly as if traveling through a frozen universe. After a few minutes the dim shapes assume their familiar forms. The bikers sit at the same table. But instead of leather and denim they wear uniforms of some sort, navy blue uniforms. This time the audio is clear. In the background, the window has a soft red smudge mark where the bird hit. “‘We should tell them that he’s still following us,’ the woman says, stirring her coffee. She pauses. ‘And that Mr. Cyclone or 16 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Mr. Destroyer or whatever the girl calls him came in and that he’s the one who took that money.’ “‘How can we?’ the tattooed biker asks. ‘Steadman already suspects. The girl’s on record as saying she’s being watched all the time, man. In every transcript I’ve fuckin’ read the girl refers to Mr. Cyclone or Mr. Destroyer as It. Not as him. What she says is: I have a feeling It’d destroy us if It could. If only to get at her. It, man. “‘I wonder if It knows we’re talking about it,’ the woman says, with venom, ‘and what if It is a beast and not a man, or a beast that was a man?’ “The scene cuts with no preparation or warning or musical cues to the Datsun as it pulls up beside another car, a black one, that’s stopped on the side of a desert road. It’s a crane shot, the camera stationary in the air as if attached to an invisible telephone pole. For a few minutes nothing seems to happen, at least nothing that can be seen. We hear the wind moving sand across the hot road and the watery waves of heat rippling off the tops of the cars seems CGI’d but that’s impossible in a film from 1969. Finally, the limping man with the black cowboy hat gets out of the Datsun and walks slowly around to the back of the car. He keys open the trunk and pulls something out, something that looks like a heavy iron rod. He holds it to his side and walks around the black car, looking in its windows. If there’s someone or something in there we can’t see it, not from this canted angle. When he taps on the passenger side window with the iron bar we hear it from within the car itself, as well as the soft sound of breathing. It’s as if there’s a split: we’re now hearing things from the inside of the car but seeing things from outside. The Datsun driver taps the window harder and there’s a shuffling noise from within the car, as if someone is searching for something in the glove box. Then suddenly he takes the bar in two hands, raises it over his head, and brings it down against the car window once, then does it again. He drops the bar and reaches in through the shattered window and there are screams, either from him or Nicholas Rombes COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
/ 17
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL from whomever’s in the car, and then suddenly it’s clear that he’s trying to pull away, that whatever’s in the black car has got a hold of him and is trying to pull him in, and he’s struggling to get free. The screams are louder now, high-pitched and terrible, and his body is half in the car, his legs kicking in the air, the camera just holding the shot like a one-eyed torturer, watching as, finally, the man goes limp, half his body in the black car and half out. “The next scene is back at the diner,” Laing continues. His demeanor, sitting there at that table with his large hands folded in front of him, suggests that he doesn’t show the slightest interest in me. And yet I feel that he’s observing me with intensity even as he pretends to be lost in the movies he describes. “A red line appears in the center of the screen, from top to bottom. It’s about the width of a pencil at first. It vibrates ever so slightly as if etched on the film itself. The line slowly widens, splitting the screen in two. And if that isn’t remarkable enough, this: the characters—now divided by the red line—try to reach each other but can’t. The line is real for them. When the woman reaches across the table she jerks her hand back when it approaches the red line. She shakes her fingers to cool them. She tries again, and the same thing happens. “The red line widens. It takes up the middle third of the screen. It bubbles slowly like lava. Shimmering waves of heat push out toward the edges of the screen. The characters—the two biker-men on the left and the woman on the right—back away from the center. They splay their hands in front of their faces, palms out, to shield themselves from the heat. Eventually they retreat off the screen, to the left and to the right. Presumably into the implied story space of the film itself. “As the line expands it destroys everything. The screen itself is eradicated and replaced with molten red. It leaks out of the frame. It hisses when it hits the theater floor. Laura and I want to leave but it’s hard not to watch. It’s hard to think. Something 18 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL else is being destroyed here. Not just theater seats and empty popcorn buckets. “Something more. “We want something more. “We want something more to be destroyed.” * Laing is not so good at transitions. As soon as he finishes describing Destroyer he starts in on another film, Black Star. At the time I chalked this up to his age, but even then I knew there was something else at work, and that Laing’s rough transitions between films—his inability or unwillingness to provide connective tissue—was really the equivalent of the rough jump cuts in the films he loved, the films he loved so much he had to destroy, and that my own desire to fill the void of her loss (a void that had nonetheless given my life its shape) was the very reason I had come out here to find Laing as if somehow he could replace the blank and final fact of Emily’s death with something else, some mystery, the mystery that her life was or would have been had she lived. The earth is stuffed with the dead. This I understand. In a perverse way, I suppose, I had refused to be sentimental about the death of my daughter. I had been deep into Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette during that time, and there was a line that was so powerful that for many years it extinguished all other belief: “A new creed became mine—a belief in happiness.” Lucy Snowe writes this as she is falling in love with someone she knows she cannot love and I can say this now, after exiting the dangerous orbit of Laing: I had not loved my daughter fully in order to protect myself from what I feared most: her loss. “Black Star,” Laing says, “was simply too close to the truth. It had to be destroyed. The film was shot and is set in the ’80s but it used 16 mm Eastman Kodak stock from the ’40s. While the magenta and yellow dyes that form the image fade in other stocks, the Kodak stock from that era is persistent, so the film Nicholas Rombes COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
/ 19
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL has a weird vibrancy to it, so strong and intentional, if that’s the right word, that it’s almost like it’s the film that’s watching you, rather than the other way around.” There’s a sadness or a false sadness as he says this, a lilt in his voice, and while at the time it seemed to be rehearsed I’ve come now to believe that describing the movies to me involved a genuine loss on Laing’s part. I’d go so far as to say that it was a slow method of suicide. The knife-shaped sliver of sunlight coming through Laing’s motel room window is there on the floor moving and slowly elongating (though he and I can’t see this happening) like a weapon made from light. I remembered something that had happened after I first arrived in Wisconsin, a week prior to meeting Laing. I had gone to a small tavern across the river from my motel. The waitress—thinking back on it now—resembled an older version of the waitress Laing described from the Destroyer film, wearing the yellow server’s outfit and looking so ravaged and thin as if in her mind there was a continuously running blast furnace. Of course it wasn’t the actual waitress from the film because I hadn’t seen Destroyer, and yet because I hadn’t seen it I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t her, as if somehow she, or the phantom possibility of her, had leaked into my life just prior to Laing’s recollection of a movie that featured her as a bit character. No matter, there I found myself at the tavern where a version of the Destroyer waitress brought me my drinks in a ritual that was absurdly formal, as if I couldn’t fetch them from the bar myself, or as if I needed a new white napkin with each glass of beer and in fact it was this last detail—about the napkins—that led to our brief and cryptic conversation, one that I won’t repeat here except to say that it touched on the local children who had disappeared and who had been the subject of the news reports and flyers stapled to telephone poles and even one small billboard along the road that pictured a heavily pixillated face of a young girl with the words FIND ME next to it. The waitress said that she understood like only a mother can (but what about a father? I wondered) the void 20 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL of losing a child like that and the terror of not being able to shut off the part of your brain that speculates on the details and that my journey to and from Laing’s motel was going to be much more complicated and treacherous than it appeared. “Black Star begins with a color-saturated Polaroid that fills the screen,” Laing says at last, and with a sort of stupid authority that I would come to understand as a form of concealment. “It’s Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most coherent film, as if he had decided to make a movie whose style went against his every instinct as a director, or as if he had split into two men, one who directed the incoherent elephants-battling-elephants sequence in Tusk (1980) and another who directed Black Star which, despite its madness, is grounded in reality. Which is to say that it’s absurd, but absurd in a way that’s familiar. The Polaroid is of someone crouched next to what appears to be an archeological dig, pointing into a shallow pit and smiling, as if he had just unearthed an artifact. He looks to be of college age, or maybe a little older. He’s in a desert, and the light is yellow. His dark hair is windblown. The Polaroid is accompanied by this voiceover: ‘Diego was into the distribution of goods, and the acquisition of labor. In this way he acquired slaves, used them to produce distributable goods, and acquired more slaves.’ “It’s voiced by a woman—Diego’s girlfriend or wife?—who has a slight Southern accent. You picture her telling this story sitting on the back stoop of some remote cabin, smoking a cigarette, as an owl watches her from the woods. The way she says slaves, it sounds like slayves, the ay coming from the very back of her throat. Then the screen goes black for a few seconds before the Polaroid appears again, this time blown up so that what Diego’s pointing toward is at the center of the screen. What he’s pointing at doesn’t matter though because it’s his finger that draws our attention, bent at a weird angle, an impossible and painful angle, as if broken. And tattooed on the back of his hand is what appears to be a small black star. Nicholas Rombes COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
/ 21
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL “At least that’s how I remember it,” Laing says, as if there’s anyone to question how he remembered it, or as if to distract me from the sliver of sun shaped as a knife which has now taken on an orange hue, a persistent orangeness that suggests a secret passageway beneath the motel to a furnace so enormous that it could only be understood in terms of Miltonic Hell. “I saw the film only once, on late-night cable, in a distant country where I didn’t speak the language. I had been sent by the university in Pennsylvania to Warsaw, of all places, to learn about the latest methods in humidity stabilization as it applied to microfiche and other silver-gelatin and vesicular film-based storage devices. This was in the spring of 1987, or the fall of 1988. It was the first English I had heard in days, and so I watched it straight through. The story was convoluted and hard to follow but just when it verged on the ridiculous some small dark moment kept the film frightening enough to keep watching. “It turns out that the kid in the Polaroid—Diego—has been sent to Mexico to live with an aunt after his parents were killed in an auto accident. The aunt, who attempts to seduce him, is a former model who goes around her apartment in a pink silk robe and with rollers in her hair and a cigarette whose ashes she taps into the clay flower pots scattered around the apartment. Diego runs away, working various jobs at the tourist hotels up and down the coast of Zihuatenejo, Mexico, and where he eventually befriends a rich childless couple from Germany whom he manages to con, after an elaborate weeks-long performance that begins innocently enough but that ends with an act of violence that leaves stains on the walls that, in another setting and another context, could be viewed as abstract art. The movie suggests that Diego discovers that the couple are Nazis, not neoNazis or Nazi sympathizers or far-right extremists but actual Nazis, which is impossible because it’s the mid-1980s, and yet when Diego discovers their Nazi uniforms in the hotel room closet on a rack hidden behind the main closet rack it’s clear the 22 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL uniforms aren’t antique or vintage but new, new but worn, so it’s not like they’re collectors. They actually wear these things. And this shot—as Diego parts with both hands the first set of hanging clothes to reveal, behind them in the closet, the Nazi uniforms with their bright red armbands and the black swastikas (which seem to be in motion, as if marching through history)— this shot, especially, looks as if it was filmed not just on film stock from the 1940s, but in the 1940s. Just how he escapes their hotel room with over one hundred thousand dollars isn’t exactly clear but I do remember that in the next scene he’s in disguise, or else time is supposed to have passed and he’s grown older. He’s gone deeper south yet into the remote mountains north of Tarija, Bolivia. “Years pass in the movie. Maybe a decade. The transitions don’t seem linear. It’s as if the movie was edited by people who have a mixed-up or perverse sense of time. Next thing you know, Diego is the owner of three indigenous Bolivians—two men and a woman—who look like their costumes (such as they are) were designed by someone with a poor memory of those anthropological photos of tribesmen and women from 1970s issues of National Geographic. We assume Diego has purchased them with the money filched from the Nazi couple. The movie uses English subtitles when the slaves talk in what sounds like a made-up, mixed-together language of Spanish, Quechua, and Tacana, but the subtitles are riddled with spelling errors, and Diego’s name is spelled at least three different ways. There is a quickly edited, heavy-handed sequence (really the only Jodorowsky-like part of the entire film) that I think is supposed to depict the slaves’ increasing love and devotion to Diego, although maybe it’s intended as a metaphor for hegemony itself: how the oppressed often internalize the very values of the oppressors thus becoming compliant in their own disastrous fates. In one shot, a naked slave smashes his iron ankle chains with a stolen hammer and instead of fleeing or using the hammer on the unarmed Diego, Nicholas Rombes COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
/ 23
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL he drops it and embraces Diego with tears in his eyes. ‘My master, mi padre,’ he says, sobbing. “One morning, Diego—who has grown a full beard and looks like you’d imagine a character might in a Robert Louis Stevenson novel—wakes up to find a letter pinned to his nightshirt. The letter—shown in close-up and read in voiceover by the same woman’s voice that first introduced us to the Polaroid of Diego—is, in effect, a ransom note for a kidnapped German priest who had been in Bolivia to establish an orphanage. Diego has no idea who delivered the letter and, worse yet, has never heard of the priest. He goes outside and there’s a terrible screech in the forest trees and Diego watches as an enormous bird attacks what appears to be a brown sloth which, after a struggle, tumbles crashing through the branches to the forest floor. Diego understands, we are made to see in a close-up of his troubled, sweaty face, that to use his slaves to rescue a priest would be the sort of culminating paradox that his life had tilted toward and the particulars of such a rescue-action would make his mark on history. The next morning, swatting away the flies, he inspects the base of the tree and finds the sloth’s body, already shredded and mostly devoured. “The movie switches gears yet again. We are shown, via flashback, the priest’s kidnapping a few months prior by the splintered remnants of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army which, the film suggests, probably amounted to no more than five or six delusional, authoritarian, ex-Bolivian soldiers, unshaven in the Che Guevara-Allen Ginsberg fashion, whose obsession with the Nico phrase ‘you’re number 37, have a look’ from that first Velvet Underground album was, in fact, a decoy. For in truth, the Tupac Katari Guerilla Army despised what they perceived as the weak, narcissistic indulgences of ‘the sixties’ and in fact saw The Velvet Underground as an extension of, rather than mocking rejoinder to, The Beatles. Diego understands that the ransom note pinned to his shirt has nothing to do with ransom. 24 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Instead, it’s the priest’s death sentence, delivered to Diego by the priest’s captors in order to entice Diego to stage a rescue operation (an assault, really) that will, of course, result in the death of the priest. That way, his captives won’t have to do the dirty work of killing him themselves, as they are Catholics, a splinter group of a splinter group of the Liberation Theology spectrum. “‘Kill them all, including the priest.’ That was the deal, as Diego understood it, ‘them all’ referring to the nameless others who had also been kidnapped so as to disguise the fact that the priest was the real target. And how to recognize the priest? The slaves would recognize him, the slaves in the aluminum canoe pulling across the river in strokes. The priest scarred by acne and humbled by one leg shorter than the other, from childhood polio, his pretext for a life defined by self-pity. “The movie switches back to the present and goes quiet as Diego and his three slaves navigate the wide, glassy, green river deeper into the hot jungle. The strong current pulling time itself downward into the river-bottom muck. The peeling bark on the shore. The fungal, persistent stench of decaying jungle. A grouping of sloths in a tree, a congress of fur and shiny brown marble eyes. The film turning into a nightmare, a real out-and-out nightmare. This is all shot from the point of view of the boat, and we see as the metal and twig cabin on the river bank comes into view where the priest and the others are held. There’s a smash cut and suddenly the assault on the cabin is underway. Images on the screen burst forth like explosions. The camera is in on the action, its movement as violent as what’s happening on the screen. The cabin, of course, is not well-guarded, as the whole point of the plan was for the kidnappers to allow the priest and the other hostages to be murdered during the so-called rescue.” Laing stops here. He stands up from the table, untucks his shirt, and takes a small red object that had been attached with white adhesive or hospital tape somewhere on his lower back. It’s about five inches long and is shaped like a cone, narrowing Nicholas Rombes COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
/ 25
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL to a sharp point at one end. He sets it on the table. This doesn’t come across as a threatening gesture, as you might expect, but rather a protective one. I’m somehow grateful and relieved to see the object there before us even as the first word that fills my head when I see it is annihilation. Laing sits back down and continues his description of Black Star. “Everything seems to be going as planned with the rescueaction assault. Inside the cabin, the priest and several others are tied to chairs. But the hostage-takers from the Tupac Katari Guerilla Army aren’t anywhere in sight. In fact, not a shot has been fired. Diego stands in front of the priest, holding a gun, and next to Diego stands his most devoted slave. ‘If you murder me,’ the priest says, ‘they will kill you, and say they did it trying to stop you from killing me.’ “‘Who is they?’ asks Diego. “‘The ones who sent you,’ says the priest. ‘The ones watching you out there.’ “‘There’s no one out there. There’s no one here to protect you, priest.’ “‘If they wanted you to see them, you’d see them,’ he says. And then, as if addressing an unseen force, he says: ‘It is a faithful saying: For if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him.’ “By this time the movie has slowed down to a Henry James pace and you get the feeling that what’s being talked about isn’t really what’s being talked about. Everything’s at a standstill, but time is still flowing. In fact, you can almost see it moving across the screen from left to right and for second after second and maybe even minute after minute no one in the film says a word. “Then, in a spasm of violence, there’s a sharp noise outside, like a gunshot, and Diego shoots the priest in the head, as if these had always been his instructions.” Laing pauses. “Does that bother you?” he asks me. “The part about the priest?” 26 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL I want to answer with a quip but I hesitate. There is something about the red object on the table that worries me, as if Laing’s question (and my answer) was intended not for Laing or myself, but for the cone. When I don’t answer, Laing continues. “There is no dialog or screaming or swelling music, just the sound of the gunshot. Almost at the same time, the slave who had embraced Diego turns to face him and, with a rough and worn hand axe that he must have been holding all along at his side but that we didn’t see or refused to see, strikes the unsuspecting Diego with one heavy blow to the side of the head. Diego falls where he stands, and the slave kneels down and strikes him again and again until he is up to his elbow in blood. “There is the distant but approaching sound of a helicopter. The remaining two slaves untie the other hostages and the camera (there is a fleck of blood or mud or brain matter on the lens) follows them out and back into the jungle as someone barks instructions or warnings from a speaker on the helicopter. The jungle trees blow and shake violently as the slaves and hostages disappear into them. “Then the screen is filled with that same Polaroid from the beginning and it’s clear that the film is about to end. This time, however, there’s no voiceover. The camera slowly pulls back and it’s revealed gradually that the Polaroid of Diego at the archeological dig is taped to a wall along with other, many other, Polaroids. As the camera keeps pulling out it becomes clear that we are in something like a police station, or a room where detectives are at work. They crisscross in front of the camera, in white shirts with sleeves rolled up, some of them wearing their gun holsters, a few of them even smoking like in the old days. There must be six or seven of them, in this large room with wooden desks and file cabinets and the wall of Polaroids, so indistinct now that Diego’s face is no longer discernible. “The movie ends just like that, though I’ve often wondered if it was edited for TV. Is there a different ending, one that at Nicholas Rombes COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
/ 27
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL least tries to explain what has just happened? Is Diego’s picture on the police wall because he’s a victim, or a suspect? And why, as the camera pulls back and away from the room, does it linger, for just a moment, over some official documents on a detective’s desk, one of which has embossed, on its letterhead, a black star, the very same black star tattooed on the back of Diego’s hand?” I make a move as if to say it’s time to break but Laing gets up and walks over to the blue velvet throne-chair and comes back to the table with one of the VHS tapes, unmarked. For the first time I think of Laing in relation to that other Lang, Fritz, whose Metropolis had transformed everyone who saw it into detectives of film, and who Edison had referred to either as the German Lang or the American Lang, depending on whether the films in question were made before or after he fled Germany in 1934. Lang, for whom in M and the Mabuse films there was no such thing as truth, only illusions, pitiful illusions, his characters pretending to be one thing when they are in fact another, a duplicity which lasts only so long, until the character betrays himself. Laing brings one of the tapes back to the table. “In those days,” he says, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms across his chest as if the red cone-like object has somehow renewed in him the stupid, blind confidence of youth, or as if the sun—which is directly overhead now, sending its rays or whatever they are down through the Wisconsin sky—was actually like the sun we had imagined as children. “In those days,” he repeats, “the only way to see David Lynch’s early short films was to start or join a film club, pool resources, and rent them from someplace like Facets in Chicago. It must have been around 1978, or maybe earlier, when they finally arrived, in brown metal canisters stamped—into the metal itself with all the finality of a tombstone—with the words PROJEKTOR CORP. They were the usual suspect early Lynch films: The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970). 16 mm prints, threaded through the projector by the president of Radiant Union. Because shipping was 28 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL free, we had also ordered a third film, from 1948, called The Blood Order. It didn’t star anyone famous. It turned out that after the Lynch films screened, everyone wanted to go outside to talk about them, so I stayed behind and was the only one—no, there was other person who watched it with me, although we never spoke, a girl who should never have been there—who watched The Blood Order. “It’s in black and white, except for the flashbacks, which are in color. Maybe colorized. An American pilot has crash-landed in a wet field outside a French village and is taken in by a family whose daughter, the pilot comes to suspect, is a Nazi collaborator. She’s beautiful, and not in a movie actress way, but rather in a way that draws attention to the dark circles beneath her eyes and a severe scar that cuts a channel across her chin, and I remember thinking that maybe this was an Italian neorealist film, but it doesn’t make sense that it was set in France and that the dialog was in English. There is a dog with a limp, I remember, that’s poisoned and that dies terribly and melodramatically, clawing at its own stomach and churning up foam, and that’s when the pilot begins to suspect that the daughter is on the Nazi side, and that she has murdered the dog—her own dog from childhood—to prove her allegiance to the Reich somehow. “There’s a factory that looks like a castle, or a castle that looks like a factory, I think, not far from the farmhouse that shelters the American pilot, and that’s where he and the girl go to have long philosophical conversations (the French girl speaking English in a beautiful, broken, menacing way that suggested she knew English better than she was leading on), conversations about being and time that inevitably turn into Production Codeera love-making scenes that are interrupted by machine-gun fire or the breaking of dawn. The pilot and the young woman fall into deep discussions that touch on the war, of course, but also methods of torture (the girl says her uncle was tortured by the Germans who broke his kneecaps with a hammer that he himself Nicholas Rombes COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
/ 29
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL was forced to provide), the indifference of God, Hollywood movies, the persistent and insane theory that Vladimir Lenin and Sigmund Freud are brothers, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and whether evil is a constant or only something that flowers (they kept using that word, I remember) when conditions are right. These passages of the film are shot in long takes, the camera quietly, almost undetectably, passing through the same space that they share in the factory. They sleep, and the film actually shows them sleeping. It’s remarkable. At dawn, as the factory engines began to ramp up for the day (it was a secret factory where bullets were manufactured for the French Resistance, although I can’t remember how the film conveyed this), the flashbacks begin. In the first flashback, The Blood Order switches suddenly to color, and it isn’t a nostalgic flashback like you’d expect, but a bloody one that shows the slow, methodical slaughter of a pig by two men whose faces are obscured on a farm from what appears to be the American pilot’s childhood memory, although why his dreams are presented in color in the film is never clear. One suspected that the filmmakers were secret experimentalists or avant-gardists subverting the war-movie genre from within. “Then the screen goes black and we’re brought into the second flashback in full color,” Laing continues. “The film’s aspect ratio shifts and I remember feeling sick and light headed. An open meadow bathed in orange sun, a blue sky, the meadowgrass and wildflowers moving in the wind, and a man on a black horse slowly crossing the meadow from screen left to right, the camera stationary. One thing that’s always bothered me about that scene: it was silent except for what appeared to be a gunshot. At least that’s what I remember from that night, watching the film that no one else wanted to see because it wasn’t by David Lynch. The gunshot. But no corresponding action in the scene. Neither the horse nor the horseman react to the sound, as if it was meant only for the audience, some sort of secret signal from the filmmakers to us. 30 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL “After this, the film falls back into the expected patterns: the American pilot, on the mend, begins to suspect with more confidence that the young French woman is a Nazi sympathizer, or even worse an out-and-out collaborator; he lies and tells her that he’s Jewish in hopes of catching a reaction from her, and that his presence at the farm endangers her family; the girl goes out for a walk in the woods in the middle of night, unaware that the pilot watches her from the window of his room. Just then a shot rings out in the forest and, although the pilot’s first thought is that it’s a trap, and that perhaps the girl has indeed seen him watching from the window, he pulls on his wool coat and dashes out into the cool night. For the next several minutes, the film goes black. Instead of images, there is nothing except the sound of the pilot running blind through the night, his labored breathing, his footsteps across the field, the call of an owl. Twice the pilot calls out the girl’s name breathlessly as he runs, until another shot rings out, and the moon clears from behind the clouds. There at his feet is a young man in a torn soldier’s uniform that appears to be German, although it’s hard to tell in the dark, and the uniform from what I could remember wasn’t even World War II era. The soldier grasps his throat, obviously dying from gunshot wounds. In the moonlight, the pilot leans down to listen to the man’s dying words. “‘She can’t…’ says the German soldier before breathing his last in a gurgling whisper. Before the meaning of this settles in, the screen grows brighter, in flickers, and the pilot looks back over his shoulder to see—in a point-of-view shot—a fire in the distance. He takes off running back to the farm, and within a few seconds it becomes clear that all is lost. By the time he arrives the farmhouse is engulfed in flames and the pilot falls to his knees and slumps forward. Then something very strange happens: the film switches to color again, but not because it’s a dream or flashback. Bathed in the yellow light of the fire, the pilot remains hunched forward in sorrow and despair as a Nicholas Rombes COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
/ 31
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL shadow—the shadow of a human being—emerges from frame right. “It’s the girl, in color, wearing a bright red beret. For the first time you can see that her eyes are blue. She kneels down beside the pilot and puts her hand beneath his chin and gently lifts his face toward hers. By this time the color has become almost psychedelically saturated, with both the girl and the pilot bathed in the hellish red light and black leaping shadows from the fire. The camera slowly pans down, revealing her clenched fist, which she slowly opens, palm up. In her hand she holds a small silver swastika, which gleams in the light. It seems to move imprecisely in the palm of her hand, as if animated. As the film switches again back to black and white, the familiar Hollywood music begins, signaling the end. The camera slowly pans up to the pilot’s face, which wears an expression of agony or ecstasy. After holding there for a moment, the camera continues panning up to the sky, revealing the moon, partially obscured by the black smoke from the smoldering farmhouse. “At the time, I thought the ending was clear: the girl had torn the swastika from the uniform of the German soldier she had shot in the woods. She was a double agent, working for the Resistance, and murdered the German before he had a chance to sneak into the farmhouse to murder the pilot. But later, as I thought more about the film (which I only watched that once) I wondered if the swastika might have been the girl’s confession, an affirmation of what the pilot had suspected: that she was a Nazi and worse yet, a Nazi out of choice, not coercion. There was also the fact of the burning farmhouse, which seemed to me symbolic of the irrational terror of total war. But back then we found symbols in everything. The truth is the ending of the film was too terrible, too truthful, to ever really talk about, involving a technique that used multiple split screens, a technique I’d never seen before that literally split the screen into not two but four or five panels of action, each one divided by a vertical red line.” 32 / The A bsolution of Roberto Acestes L aing
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
Back Cover “Like a cross between Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions and Janice Lee’s Damnation, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is at once smart and slyly unsettling. It is expert at creating a quietly building sense of dread while claiming to do something as straightforward as describe lost films—like those conversations you have in which you realize only too late that what you’re actually talking about and what you think you are talking about are not the same thing at all.” Brian Evenson
In the mid-’90s, a rare-film librarian mysteriously burned a stockpile of film canisters and disappeared. Roberto Acestes Laing was highly regarded by acclaimed directors around the globe for his keen eye, appreciation for eccentricity, and creativity in interpretation. Unsure at first whether Laing is a pseudonym or some sort of Hollywood boogeyman, a journalist manages to track the forgotten man down to a motel on the fringe of the Wisconsin wilds. Laing agrees to speak with the journalist, but only through the lens of the cinema. What ensues is an atmospheric, cryptic extrapolation of movies and how they intertwine with life, and the forgotten films that curse the lost librarian still.
Nicholas Rombes teaches in Detroit, Michigan. He is author of Ramones from the 33 1/3 series and the book 10/40/70. His writing has appeared in The Believer, Filmmaker Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and The Rumpus. $15.95 ISBN 978-1-937512-23-1
51595>
9 781937 512231
applies to text only
All books
25% off!