They watch as the next morning a young private is assigned to clean up the night’s excesses. He takes the coffee can to bury in the old graveyard behind the cathedral while bells chime through an intermittent hiss of wind and mewing of gulls. His shovel bites dirt and he breathes louder with every scoopful he flings over his shoulder into the blurred eye of climbing sun. He sweats, his breath becomes panting, then gagging, and suddenly he’s doubled over retching into the hole, mumbling the Lord’s Prayer in between spasms. Still heaving, he rises, kicks the can in, frantically raking over loose dirt, smacking it down with the flat of the shovel, raining down blows as if he were killing a snake.
The sound track cuts off.
The whump of the shovel is the last sound, though on screen the soldier continues to beat the earth.
Now the screen seems even more unrelievedly black and white — no more background strumming of guitars, no mountain flutes, birdcalls, wind, distant thunder of gunfire. Not even the unavoidable drone of a jet overhead on its way to another country. A world of action suddenly mute as Griffith’s galloping Klan, as Méliès blasting off for the moon, as Chaplin twirling a cane. There is only the faint, nearly subliminal metronome of ticking sprockets audible from the projection booth in the now-silent theater. But as the silence continues, the steady clack seems increasingly obtrusive, and the suspicion begins to arise that the racket of sprockets is the sound track. There’s something too rickety about its clatter — a sound that evokes, perhaps by design, evenings long ago, when after the supper dishes were cleared, a father, who served as director, would set up a projector with tinny spools while children removed pictures from a wall to transform it into a screen, and then the lights would be extinguished and home movies would beam into unsteady focus — silent, unedited, the mugging face of each family member plainer than memory, appearing as they once were, startlingly young, innocent of time.
Subtitles begin to appear. Too fast to read. Partially telegraphed messages. Single words or parts of words flashed on screen: AWE DIS KER.
Static as the words, a progression of freeze-frames, the bled tones of tabloid photos dissolve one into another: peasants on their way to market, slum children, children with rickets, a beggar with yaws, fruit loaders sweating at an outdoor market of gutted fish, piled monkey skulls, tourists.
In churches and universities, on corners beneath bug-clouded lights, people are opening their mouths to speak, but everywhere it appears the mouths are black, gaping holes. There is only continual silence, intercut dissolves, subtitles flashing on and off, sometimes like fading neon signs, sometimes like a collage, commenting on the action (WHERE THERE IS NO FREEDOM WORDS FILL THE MOUTH WITH BLOOD).
The footage continues running faster, almost blurred, as if a documentary were being filmed from a speeding train — assassinations, bombed motorcades, bombed restaurants, bombed schools, strikes, soldiers firing into a crowd, smoldering bodies, mothers in mourning, black coffins, black flags, the revolt of students, the revolt of the army, newspaper offices ransacked by Blackshirts, presses smashed, mobs, fires, men hauled out into the street and lynched from lampposts before the shattered windows of the capitol, streets littered with books from the gutted library, and all the while a sound rising from underground as if the clatter of sprockets has become a subway train roaring down a tunnel, its brake shoe scraping metal from track, metal on metal whining into a siren-pitched screech (EVEN THE HANGED HAVE NO TONGUES TO PROTRUDE!).
The house lights flick on. The audience, many of them North Americans, is stunned. Some talk as if making sure they still can. Some weep. Others leave the theater cursing — what? The film? The oppressors? It isn’t clear. Someone in the balcony shouts, “Bravo!” And another in front, “Long live the revolution!” People are up from their seats and applauding as if it were a live presentation.
“The ultimate praise for a film,” one critic is heard to remark on his way to the lobby, “is to treat it as if it were a play deserving curtain calls, to confuse celluloid images with flesh and blood, to transcend the isolated private dream state of the movie theater by merging with the mass in simple applause.”
Tomorrow the Arts sections will carry rave reviews: “a new and daring fusion of avant-garde technique with documentary sensibility…”
A journalist for the Voice will write: “Uncompromisingly powerful, it demands to be seen, though a film like this might be better kept secret, protected from the corrupting influence of the Hollywood glamour and promotion machine, the invidious American penchant for reducing substance to marketable style.”
While another reviewer, writing for a more conservative publication will comment: “This looks like the year for Terrorist Cinema. Another fad pretending to usher in a change of consciousness but lacking the moral imperative of the civil rights movement and peace marches that launched the 6os.”
The audience files out through the mirrored lobby, backs turned on the posters of stars, out under the winking marquee, squinting at the pink smolder of dusk. Behind them, on the silver screen in the houselit theater, a final frame hovers like the ghost image phenomena sometimes haunting TV screens, a blown-up image that could only have been shot by a camera implanted in a mouth, of an indigo tongue working at a husk of popcorn stuck in a gold-capped molar.
And across this image a delayed rolling of credits begins: the names of actors, writers, cameramen, assistant director, director, producer, editors, sound, music, makeup, gaffers, soldiers, officers, generals, politicians — a cast of thousands — workers, students, peasants, the audience, the victims, the maimed, the maddened, the myriad names of the dead.
Strays
Her hands were always scratched from sparring with cats.
I used to watch her out walking some mutt she said she’d found the same way she’d found men.
For years she’d open her house to whatever stray showed up. She never caged them, let them wander in and out of her life — dogs, cats, rabbits, birds….
It seemed she was constantly nursing some kind of bird. Convalescent pigeons would return, roosting and cooing in the eaves above the doorstep where she sprinkled hard corn.
“The starlings never live,” she said, “you can’t cure a starling.”
There would be saucers everywhere, some stained with milk, others brimming with dirty rainwater. She believed in the curative powers of rain.
“I never give any of them names. We don’t know an animal’s name. A name’s what we use instead of smelling.”
Nighthawks
Silhouettes
The alley became a river in the rain — a river with currents of clattering cans and a floe of cardboard. The boy would wake to the headlights of lightning spraying the walls of his small room, and lie listening to the single note of drops pinging the metal hood of a blue bulb that glowed above a garage door. Finally, he’d go to the window and look down.
The blue bulb gave the rain a bluish gleam. Rotted drainpipes gushed like dislocated fountains. Flooded tar roofs seemed to tilt, spilling waterfalls through sluices of fire escapes.
At the mouth of the alley, a streetlight swirled, slowly disappearing down the whirlpool of a sewer. And beyond the aura of the streetlight, on a street whose name and numbers had been washed away, shadows moved aimlessly through rain. Tonight, they had their collars raised. He could catch glimpses of them passing by the mouth of the alley. Even when he couldn’t see them, he could sense their presence: shapes that he’d named silhouettes, shadows that threw shadows, that inhabited the hourless times of night stolen from dreams when it seemed to the boy as if he’d been summoned awake only to lie there wondering for what reason he’d been summoned. He couldn’t remember when he’d become aware of their presence, or when he first thought of them as silhouettes. He had never thought of them as anything else — not ghosts, or spirits. Silhouettes were enough to haunt him.