Brunel’s Clifton Bridge, for instance. We shot it on the way to Wales. Isambard Kingdom Brunei. And hands laying out TNT like a xylophone and then standing each stick up carefully, and fingers dismantling a kitchen timer. The times we live in.
Faces?
Some negative stills too. I was planning to splice them in, printed as negatives. People with black faces and white hair. Stills with voices. Ever think of the sound that goes with a snapshot?
Did you mean a movie sequence using stills?
A few. It’s destroyed.
That negative stuff is a cliché of course.
The black and white might have had a point.
Was this to be a picture of American life abroad?
That may have been Dagger’s idea, I said.
He was in charge of equipment, said Graf.
I was the one who wanted to use slit-scan screening.
I leave the hardware to the filmmaker, said Monty Graf. My thing is collaboration, sort of a mating of the aesthetic and the financial.
You might be of help, I said.
What about Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park? said Monty — he was being humorous. He sensed something wrong and knew it wasn’t the bleeding beets or glistening bluefish fast disappearing, or my distrust of him. His own task was too tricky for him to see the simple truth that my table of contents had depressed me. I thought of the death camps, of Belsen, of certain photographs — and knew that as an issue or concern in my heart all the dead Jews were cold — what was the matter with me?
What happened at Stonehenge?
Just before the Stonehenge scene, I said, we were going to cut in an elevator down a coal mine in Wales; shoot the sky from a hundred feet down. You have to cut in a shot of a pile of slag or a coal trolley underground, a miner with a headlamp, else that shot of sky could just as well be the end of the Severn Railway Tunnel.
Monty Graf had gotten the waiter to bring a third gin and milk. I imagined dripping a beet into his wide, pure glass. I hadn’t thought until now about the deserter’s reappearance in the unpleasant Stonehenge scene at the end of the film. He and his friend just seemed like the usual supernumerary acquaintances who turn up at Dagger’s parties; I’d noticed them and accepted them.
You said momentum, before, said Monty Graf — so where’s the momentum in the coal-mine shaft?
I don’t know, I said. You want too much consistency.
Just interested. It sounds different. I mean, you never know where you’re going to find the real thing. Always on the lookout. I had a piece of a Swedish film. I promote an annual exhibition at the Coliseum. I do a little real estate.
I’d finished my fish and Monty Graf wanted to know what footage we’d actually had developed. Maybe there was a point of departure there, he was saying; and I was on the point of asking if our friend with the steel-rims was still at the bar, when Monty Graf said, Seven minutes is a lot, you know, even unedited, possibly quite a substantial basis in terms of what you can show on film in terms of time.
He sipped, and I wasn’t sure if I would need him.
I was about to ask where he’d heard seven minutes, but he said, Look I really like the England mingled with America idea, I mean it’s got possibilities right now what with the war and the recession and as it were the decline of America.
I said, I didn’t say anything about seven minutes.
The top part of Monty Graf’s divided face seemed to command the rest to fade and though I was even less sure who he was I believed now that he was convinced the film was worth knowing about but that he knew no more than what Claire chose to tell.
I had an impression of New York, but it passed.
I did not say to Monty Graf, What’s Phil Aut to you?
Instead I said wearily, There were two films.
That I know, said Monty Graf.
Oh you know that, do you? Well do you know that also there are two films? The film and my recollection of it.
All right, you mean your diary, said Graf. But I’m afraid I meant two real films. That is, before yours got burnt.
What’s the other?
Don’t you really know?
I put a ten-dollar bill on the table and Monty Graf reached and pushed it into my lap and I took it and got up.
Let me see the print, Mr. Cartwright, I’m with you, he said.
I lifted my coat off the hook and walked between two tables toward the bar wondering what would happen and wishing I’d waited for a coffee. Monty Graf was right behind me.
The man who’d made me a cup of tea was still at the bar. I said hello and as Graf arrived I looked at the two of them, but Monty didn’t seem to know him. He wore a fringed pale buckskin jacket and a dark purple neckerchief and a dark denim shirt with pearl snaps.
He held out an envelope. Your diary, man, all two pages. I know it by heart.
A delicate rain settled down, and I spotted an Off-Duty cab light coming. Monty Graf said I seemed to get around, and would I at least sleep on the prospect of a proposition and phone him tomorrow.
I said I was sure Dagger would show him the print. Dagger could borrow a projector.
If you, said Monty Graf, gave me an introduction. When are you back in London?
But he’s Claire’s uncle, I said, and waited. He hadn’t known I connected him with her. Just tell Dagger you’re a friend of Claire’s.
All right, I know Claire, said Monty Graf. Then he said, You know you’re in trouble, you know that.
I put the envelope in his hand. Give these pages to Claire; I told her they were technical sentiment, but she might be interested.
I was getting into a cab pointed downtown when I wanted to go uptown. Inside the restaurant the man in glasses peered through the glass door and for a second in the amiable light behind him everyone seemed to be turning away toward the interior.
I wanted to ask about Jan Graf, but expected Monty to speak; but he didn’t. So I said, Do you know a painter named Jan Graf?
He smiled, to make me feel he knew something. He stuck out his hand. I bent up into the cab and through the opposite window saw two headless bike-riders flick past. I fell into the seat and reached and pulled the door.
I gave the driver Sub’s street.
Monty rapped on the glass. My God, he said, the sound, the sound! They didn’t get that! Where is the sound?
He may not have heard me say, Filmless.
Two films? Which two had he been talking about? Monty Graf was on the lookout for prospects that were started and had momentum so he could tune in on the energy.
Was the energy mine and Dagger’s? If so, was there something in my own film, my own diary, that I didn’t know about?
I didn’t want to talk to Sub I wanted to end the evening right there in the cab, and wake tomorrow with new thoughts.
But Sub was waiting.
Why not?
My eye looking at someone I’ve known since we were eight saw someone seated on a couch that could not change into a bed until he absented himself. I wasn’t tired, I just wanted either Sub’s place to myself or something new to happen.
Two films, Monty Graf said.
OK he didn’t mean two views, mine and Dagger’s, or camera versus words in a diary. He meant two films, unless he was in the dark and merely holding on.
So I was in trouble, was I.
The camera never wearies. But apart from its inserted film that comes and goes, a camera is unremembering. Granted it can break — which is memory of a kind; still, the lens is dumb.
I had in my head I felt sure why they destroyed our film. In my head or on paper. I could probably remember most of what I’d put down. Most of it Jenny had typed.