Experimental Film

And now you’re probably thinking: That’s an amazing amount of coincidence. Which is true, I guess, but history thrives on coincidence, as does archaeology. Sometimes all it takes is being in the right place for the wrong reasons, then moving just a little only to find you’re standing on top of something you weren’t even looking for, something you never would have found otherwise. The theory of parallel development is a useful one to keep in mind, too. That’s how Edison and Tesla could be working on electrical current at the same time. How Eadweard Muybridge could be using his “camera-gun” to capture and reconstruct movement through sequential photographs in British Columbia at exactly the moment that Étienne-Jules Marey was doing so in France, with only slightly different results. Or how it was only the fact of Louis-Aimé Augustin Le Prince’s own still-unsolved disappearance—off a moving train, freakishly enough—which prevented him from “inventing” the motion picture camera five years before the Lumière brothers did.

So many individuals in different places, all with the same good idea. All, in their own ways, attempting to use light on a wall to open a window into another world. And how odd is it that the two guys who made the first viable motion picture happened to have a surname that means “light”? Still just coincidence?

More like synchronicity.

Enough of that, however, and people almost inevitably start talking about magic.

It doesn’t take long to watch a bunch of amateur silent films, even five of them, given that George Méliès’s ground-breaking A Trip to the Moon (the world’s first science fiction film) only lasts fourteen minutes. The ones Mattheuis found in his tree were all less than twenty, definitely meant either as second features for whatever they might have been programmed to accompany, or simply to fulfill their mysterious director-producer’s own purposes. Better yet, they were all just slightly different versions of the same damn story, though each became progressively more ambitious, less narratively integrated, and (say it with me now) more experimental in execution: field, apparition, weapon. A visitation at noon, a warning ignored, followed by violence—always off-screen, implied not shown, played out in mime and shadows—and horrified reaction. “Lady Midday,” in the proverbial nutshell.

Wrob appeared to have pulled his clips from the first film in the batch, the one with the mirror-veil, the painted backdrop and real sheaves, the mediaeval-dressed children. In the second film, the veiled figure wore an additional papier-mâché mask overtop its head, stylized and severe, features so reduced as to be hieroglyphics; in the third film, that same mask had also been set with mirror pieces, catching the light from every angle, a blazing blur. In the fourth film, the veiled figure was the only human player, with all other character represented by puppets—a weird sort of mishmash of traditions, their limbs manipulated from below on sticks like Balinese shadow dancers, heads worked from above like marionettes. The final film, meanwhile, was all stop-motion, a combination of ink-on-glass drawings that assembled themselves between each shutter click and paper silhouette animation, like Lotte Reiniger’s legendary The Adventures of Prince Achmed, though necessarily cruder. It must have taken ages to put together, so the idea that whoever made it—Mrs. Whitcomb?—was so unsatisfied with the result that they apparently tried to throw it down a hole afterwards made me vaguely ill.

The light-wrapped central figure’s weapons changed as well, one for each iteration: sword, sickle, scythe, and something even more hooked, like a pike, or Billy Bob Thornton’s famous sling blade. By the animated version, it had become a generalized ray, bright and razor-sharp, which emerged from the figure’s hidden sleeve as though replacing her hand, five fingers fusing to form a cutting implement that probably cauterized on contact. It was like watching somebody anticipate thirty years of Japanese magical girl anime in one brief shot.

“Why would anybody try to destroy these?” I couldn’t quite keep myself from blurting out.

Mattheuis laughed. “Good question! I can only assume that no matter how impressive we find them, they simply weren’t delivering exactly what their creator was going for.”

“No one who made something like this would ever stop exploring artistically, though. You’d agree with me on that point.”

“Oh, absolutely, but people do switch disciplines; sometimes they move out of their comfort zones, play around for a while, then stop and move back again, take whatever they started with back up. They might have been a painter—those flats and curtains look hand-made, for example, and the animation’s definitely in the same style. That said, I can’t think they were well-known, or we’d have run across them elsewhere. Maybe a gifted amateur.”

“And you have no idea who that might have been.”

“Like I said, Wrob claimed the Hell Hole films have certain elements in common with some of the Quarry Argent Museum cache, and I’d agree, to a point. But if they ever kept detailed records of exactly who made those original donations, they’re gone—a fire and two floods put paid to half their back-files, according to the woman who runs it.”

“That’s too bad,” I replied, reaching into my bag. “Actually, can I show you something?”

His laugh tapered off into a smile then, somewhat ironically. Inquiring, of the air: “And how did I somehow know you didn’t come here just to see me?”

I took out my copy of Finding Your Voice, passed it over—the “Lady Midday” section clearly marked—and sat there waiting as he read through it. “Intriguing,” he allowed, setting it down again. “You and Wrob obviously think along much the same lines.”

“Come again?”

And here he drew out the notebook in question, a half-filled pocket Moleskine whose leatherette cover had been collaged over in newspaper and magazine clippings, random words and phrases layered haphazardly in between Cronenbergian chimerae cobbled together from National Geographic photo spreads and glue-stick glitter. Inside, Wrob’s handwriting was indeed just as bad as advertised, as Mattheuis demonstrated by flipping to the second-last page, where he seemed to have been making a list of potential candidates for the tree cache’s mysterious filmmaker. Halfway down, underlined several times and legible only if you squinted hard, was the name M[smear] A. M. W[it]tc[u]mb.

“Wrob once told me he had a syndrome called uncontrollable hypographic pornocentrism,” Mattheuis remarked, dryly, while I bogged at the spelling. “Which I suppose I can understand in terms of stuff he just jots down, but I think he’s reprogrammed the spell-check on his email, too, which can get kind of . . . unsafe for work.”

“God, that’s so wrong.”

“In all senses of the phrase.” Mattheuis was still flipping through Finding Your Voice, eyebrows faintly drawn. “Though as a half-educated guess, tapping Mrs. Whitcomb’s not bad: highly unlikely that smear stands for Mister, since Arthur was mainly a patron of the arts rather than a practitioner, and that only on his wife’s behalf. The museum has a whole room of her paintings, though I must admit I didn’t pay much attention to it while I was there. Did find an interesting little sidebar, though, when I went looking for references to her—a canvas by Gustave Knauff, one of Odilon Redon’s favourite fellow Decadents, who set himself on fire in Bruges in 1909, the year after she and Arthur passed through on their honeymoon and arranged to pay their respects to him at the Café Brumaire, his usual haunt. I’ll send you a link to it tonight, if you want.”

“She did have a camera, though. And she did make movies.”

He shrugged. “Shot documentary footage at séances, if you can call it that. There’s no proof she ever did anything this elaborate.”

“Okay, but what about the similarities between these films and ‘Lady Midday’?”

A sigh; Mattheuis closed the book, marking his place with a finger. “Look, I’d love for it to be that easy, Lois. We’re talking about the very start of moviemaking in North America, so in theory anyone could just start turning these things out at home—and did, if they could afford the equipment and stock. And yes, I’m far more likely to think the Hell Hole films were made by someone like Iris Whitcomb than by the sort of person who could get a distribution contract with a studio like Japery, no matter for how brief a time. Though I suppose that’s not impossible either, not entirely. . . .”

“Hugo Balcarras also has a theory about Mrs. Whitcomb’s disappearance, which relates directly to her supposed filmmaking forays.”

“That she was watching a homemade silver nitrate reel in transit on her portable projector and what, combusted spontaneously? Please.”

I smiled as though I agreed, then continued on anyhow, ignoring his growing look of annoyance. “Gotta say, though, I can count the number of times I’ve seen a thematic resemblance like that mean absolutely nothing on one hand, especially in cinema. You?”

He sighed. “Well, I didn’t want to point this out, but . . . would you say that for these films to be both the work of

Mrs. Iris Whitcomb and based on this Wendish fairy tale of hers, the fairy tale would probably have to pre-date the films themselves? Her version of it, anyhow?”