His profession is a hush.
But someday the story will be a legend: how he was discovered, just an ordinary kid off the streets, watching a factory burn down. It was the theater manager who spotted him in that nearly faceless crowd of gapers that disasters assemble. It was the theater manager who later explained to him that out of all the spectators he was the only one with the haloed profile of a pyromaniac, that in a black-and-white night the flames had played technicolor on his face.
He didn’t mention it to the theater manager then, but he wasn’t used to people speaking to him quite so dramatically.
“I think you got that something special, kid. Come down to the theater tomorrow, 11:00 a.m. sharp. You’ll start the matinee.”
That was it. It was that simple.
“You like Bugs Bunny, kid?”
“Yeah, I like Bugs.”
“Bugs, huh, first-name basis, huh? I like your brass, kid. You’re gonna do just fine.”
They gave him a flashlight that glowed like an electric rose. Opened the usher’s wardrobe to him, where the maroon uniform hung: an epauleted jacket with gold braid like something Brando might wear as Mr. Christian. So he became first mate in the navy of night. Him, the kid who watched fires as if he set them, whose other costumes had been altar boy, newspaper boy, and all-American boy as Mickey Rooney might have played it.
They taught him to tread softly on popcorn, to become a shadow as transparent as soundtrack music so that his corporeal body never eclipsed the projectionist’s beam.
They taught him how to slide among lovers, taught him the swan dive — a daredevil merger of Fred Astaire and Tarzan — from the balcony over the audience of dreamers dreaming their one dream, taught him to glide above their trance searching for an empty seat.
So he became nocturnal, a member of a secret society that knew itself exiled from the screen, but like outtakes remained part of the movie.
Bijou
The film that rumor has made the dernier cri of this year’s festival is finally screened.
It begins without credits, challenging the audience from its opening frame. Not only has it been shot in black and white, but the black and white do not occur in usual relationships to one another. There is little gray. Ordinary light has become exotic as zebras.
Perhaps in the film’s native country they are not familiar with abstract reductions such as black and white. There, even vanilla ice cream is robin’s-egg blue, and licorice almost amethyst when held to the sun. No matter what oppressive regime, each day vibrates with the anima of primitive paintings — continual fiesta! As ambulances siren, they flash through color changes with the rapidity of chameleons. In the modern hospital, set like a glass mural against the sea, ceiling fans oscillate like impaled wings of flamingos above the crisp rhythm of nurses.
Black and white are not native to these latitudes. And gray requires the opaque atmosphere of Antwerp or Newcastle, Pittsburgh or Vladivostok, requires the industrial revolution, laissez-faire, imperialism, Seven Year Plan, Great Leap Forward, pollution, cold war, fallout, PCB, alienation….
Nor does the film appear to be alluding to the classic black-and-white films of Fritz Lang, King Vidor, Orson Welles. Nor to the social realism of the forties or neo-realism of the fifties. In fact, the only acknowledged influence is an indirect one, that of an obscure poem by Victor Guzman, the late surrealist dentist of Chilpancingo.
Trees, for example, are blinding white, rather than the darknesses so often etched against a dying sky.
Shade is white.
Fruit is white.
Asphalt roads are white.
It is the windowpanes through which one sees them that are black. Smoked with kerosene or smeared with shoe polish for secrecy or air-raid blackouts, who can determine?
It is true that at times the film closely resembles a negative — the moon a sooty zero in a silver nitrate night. But the gimmick of shooting in negative is used with restraint. It’s obvious that the filmmakers are after something beyond the simple reversal of the values of light.
Take the clouds — plumed, milky black in an albino, noon sky. But are they clouds? Or the smoke from a burning village, bombs, an erupting volcano?
In another sequence, an execution, there is a close-up of bullets being x’d to make the heads dumdum. The lead is white. And later, when the flour sack hoods are removed from the prisoners, the wounds are white. The camera pans along the riddled convent wall. In the distance, mountains rise tipped with anthracite. To put it another way, black is not meant to define white, nor vice versa.
The first color goes almost unnoticed.
The pink washrag of a cat’s tongue as it grooms in the bleached shadow of the jail.
Almost unnoticed — but a subconscious shock registers through the theater.
Gradually, it becomes apparent that tongues, only tongues, are assuming color: dogs panting in the dust of traffic, snakes and geckos flicking from drainpipes, color licking and poking from a thousand tiny caves.
Even tongues ordinarily colorless take on brilliance: the black lash of the butterfly uncoils azure at the flower; the cow masticating its cud lolls a tongue suddenly crimson as black jeeps siren past down the alabaster highway to the interior.
There, the guerrillas have been ambushed, surrounded, betrayed. A chopper flattens palms as it drops in CIA advisers. The camera pans the faces of the rebels in macro lens close-ups as if a boil or a louse swelling among beads of sweat might reveal a man’s character; or as if white hairs sprouting from a mole, or a childhood scar beneath a stubble beard might tell his past.
And it is here that the tongues begin to obsess the camera, that the realistic soundtrack of bird caws, gunshots, shouting, machinery, is intercut with the whispered litany of Guzman’s lines from Laughing Gas: gold-dust tongues, ocher tongues eating earth, walking tongue, candy tongue, milky tongue, sleeper’s tongue, passion’s tongues, cankered tongues, tongues tinctured yellow, flaming tongue, hovering tongues of epiphany…
The screen is nearly technicolor with tongues.
Canisters of nerve gas explode.
Then, in a sequence more excruciating than any since The Battle of Algiers, the guerrillas are captured. Scene follows scene documenting torture in the modern military state. Cattle prods are used for confessions, electrodes taped to eyelids, tongues, genitals.
At night, out by the black fire, the guards have begun to drink. Soon they cannot tolerate the refined torments of electricity. Fists, truncheons, empty bottles, boots pummel bone.
The prisoners refuse to talk.
Near dawn, in a drunken rage, the guards take them one by one and mock their silence by tearing out their tongues with wire snips. They are forced to kneel, mouths wedged open with a wooden stake, and tongues forceped out in a scream and dark gush of blood — blue, green, yellow, orange, violet, red tongues. The tongues are collected in a coffee can the way ears are sometimes collected, and stored on the colonel’s desk. Each new victim stares at the can as he is questioned for the final time. The tongues brim over and flop to the floor and the guards pass out from drunkenness, their own tongues gaping from snoring jaws.
“Raspberry tongues,” Guzman wrote, “the entrails of a clown.”
The audience stares in silence. Some have turned away; there have been gasps. But, on the whole, they have been conditioned to accept, almost to expect, this violence on screen. They have watched blood spurt and limbs dismembered in Peckinpah’s choreographed slow motion, brains sprayed across a wall, bodies explode, monks topple in flaming gasoline, eyes gouged, chain saws buzzing through bone, decapitations in 3-D. They are not at the festival to censor but to discern: where is violence statement and where merely further exploitation? When does Art become carnography? Is this perhaps the Cinema of Cruelty?