labeled Aérobus de I’ingénieur Maboul.
“Hello, is this Frances L. Baum?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Jack Kews of Omnibus Film Archives, London. I’m calling about a film entitled The Dreyfus Affair, which I believe your company is working on.”
“What did you say your name was?” He had said it quickly, as if sneezing one word run together, and he repeated his name just as fast.
“What do you want to know about the film?” I had just gotten to work and was surprised to get a call this early in the morning. I hadn’t yet shut the blinds in my studio or even visited the Mr. Coffee machine. A half-eaten orange lay beside the unused Steenbeck; I hadn’t looked at a newspaper or spoken to anyone in the office.
“I’m in New York, and I’d like to take a look at the footage in your possession.”
“I’ve never heard of Omnibus Film Archives, London.” If this place really existed, I would have known about it.
He rattled off an address that meant nothing to me. His voice sounded youngish, but the Cary Grant mid-Atlantic accent and the politesse of a stranger asking for a favor frayed, and the voice betrayed its American roots. “While Méliès was shooting The Affair, the man who played Dreyfus disappeared, maybe was killed, and I think there are some answers as to how and why in that footage.”
“Whatever you’re going to discover, it’s old information, and you’re talking about a thirteen-minute silent film in terrible condition. It’s not going to tell you much.” Taking off my shoe I rubbed loops into the carpet pile with my left toe. “Anyone alive in 1899 would be dead now anyway, and whoever murdered him would be long gone as well.”
He paused for a long time as if deciding what to answer, then I heard a long, drawn-out yes.
“Look, I know about you and I know about your work, Frances. A film sputters into life; it’s silent, black and white. The figures move in the choppy, disjointed fashion customary to films made in 1899. They wobble and jerk from the rue du Bac, past shop windows crowded with mannequins: half men in high-collared shirts and headless women in long dresses like fluted columns. The crowd turns down a street filled with cheap theaters, garish posters cover the walls with images of acrobats, huge, gaping, laughing mouths, freaks, and so on. Entrance tickets are only a few centimes, and there are a fair number of choices. Which one does the crowd pick?”
“You’re giving me a lot of detail for early cinema.”
“Stay with me, Frances. The crowd descends on one theater in particular. Guess what? Méliès’s The Dreyfus Affair is playing. Because we’re not in real time, but in collapsed film time, the mob is swept in and out of the theater in seconds, but they’ve seen the film, you can assume that. Now they realize Méliès thinks Dreyfus is innocent, and so the mob is enraged. No, he’s guilty! Even the subtitles appear in the jagged lightning-line typeface that indicates urgency and wrath, but maybe even terror, too. Faces are angry, screaming, distorted from grimacing. The jerky figures are yelling, throwing rocks. Angry at the film and the man who made it, they’re rioting: smashing windows, breaking into fisticuffs. When the crowd disperses a man lies murdered on the street, apparently trampled to death, but as the camera closes in you notice a neat wound that would indicate he’s been stabbed.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” Half-afraid he would hang up, I held the receiver close to my ear so I could be sure to hear his answer.
“I made up the film I just described, but after the 1899 screening of The Dreyfus Affair there were riots in the streets; people were trampled to death. The film was banned in France until 1950, and no film could be made about the trial until 1974. The death I just described to you, however, was deliberate, not a random thing, not simply a man who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I believe that after the riots Méliès filmed a second ending that revealed what actually happened to that man and disclosed the identity of his assailant.”
“And you believe these scenes were tacked on to the reel in my possession?”
“Yes.”
I knew something of the story behind The Dreyfus Affair but didn’t really understand how this subject could turn what had previously been a form of cheap popular entertainment into something so incendiary. It was as if an invention associated with gum balls, pinballs, barkers, and shills had traveled to the province of cluster bombs and Molotov cocktails, and did so in little more than a wink. I was skeptical.
“The owners of Looney Tunes were curators of the remains of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, not of Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused, or the real spy, Esterhazy. They made films in which ducks and cats fall off cliffs, are smashed against doors, and bounce back completely. Looney Tunes was as far removed from the intrigues of a nineteenth-century espionage trial as possible. They wouldn’t have been interested.” I imagined cans of film stored in a safe, next to diamonds wrapped in flannel sleeves, securities and bonds, the deed to the house, and a will tucked into a manila envelope, accumulating dust and controversy.
“Just because they owned it doesn’t mean they watched it. It’s in bad shape and can’t be threaded up on any old projector. Even if it were to be screened you have to know what you’re looking for.” He had a point. It was unlikely Schlesinger or anyone else had looked at the film after 1899.
“I can’t just spool to the end. The film is so fragile I have to examine the whole thing first, and I have others I’m supposed to work on before I get to it.” I had opened the can and seen the condition of The Affair. It was possible the end had deteriorated beyond repair. “Give me your number and I’ll call you when I get to it.”
He then hung up on me.
How can you know what’s at the end of a film if you’ve never seen it? I said into the dead phone like some Dagwood Bumstead jabbering into a busted old rotary. I felt oddly numb, as when a relative or friend puts the receiver down, terminating the call with no warning or polite good-bye and you’re left wondering what kind of toes you inadvertently stepped on. Who was this Jack with a husky voice who knew my name and what I did? I imagined a man in a T-shirt with holes around the neck, tanned arms, leaning in a doorway and pinging rubber bands into a wastebasket across the room as he spoke.
I pushed the Dreyfus can aside as if it contained a long dormant explosive that could be sparked again at any unpredictable moment, tried to forget about the call, and went back to work on Train-Eating Sun Blinded by Eclipse.
A lewdly winking sun is about to swallow a locomotive when gradually an eclipse with a female face overshadows eyes, nose, and mouth. I began to think about what men did or had done to them in these films, and who or what was assigned a female identity. Comets, selenites, keys, houris, and musical notes were female. An advertisement for Parisian, Love on Credit came to life and the figure of a sinuous woman chased a few men around the set. Devils, astronauts, deep-sea divers, scientists, and planets were usually male, as well as travelers and most of the main characters. Men had things done to them, women were the agency of vexation. Women were more mutable than men, more susceptible to transformations that appeared painless, unlike the men whose bodies split or whose heads exploded. Men were tricked over and over with nothing left to do but raise their hats in order to scratch their heads. There were exceptions to this theory, but on the whole I would say roles were divided along those lines. Whether the stories were driven by the travels of a central character or by plot, the victims and travelers alike were generally men.
