I had a formal problem right from the start. How to make a nonvisual story visual? I tried to find a way to make hearing — not seeing — the dominant sense of the film. To make the viewer listen, somehow. But by the end of the film, the power of the visual again overtakes us. The ending silent very long take of Nicole, for instance. This is Cesare Zavattini’s idea of remaining in a scene for the longest and truest duration
Carrie put it down without finishing. God! Meadow could be so pretentious sometimes. Carrie felt bad as soon as she thought that. And it wasn’t even accurate, was it? Meadow was not pretending, that wasn’t the right word. She was self-conscious and ambitious; she took herself very seriously and sometimes Carrie found it exhausting. Shouldn’t the work speak for itself? And yet there were lots of great filmmakers with manifestos. Essays and polemics. Why not Meadow? Why was Carrie so harsh on her?
The lights dimmed. So many times, in the dark waiting, and then the feeling when the music and the credits come up. This film, Meadow’s film, stayed dark after it began. A woman’s voice only, a beautiful woman’s voice and a black screen. My name is Amy, but I am also known as Jelly and Nicole.
The voice continues to tell her story and the screen stays dark. Carrie thought it looked very close, maybe too close, to the black-screen section of Meadow’s Kent State film. Why make a film if you are not using a visual? Why would Meadow want to cut off the most important sense element of cinema? But of course a black screen is a visual, isn’t it? As the woman’s voice explains phone phreaking, Meadow adds things: graphics of old phones and a series of tonal sounds. “I loved the phone. I mean, I could be myself on the phone, the self I really was, or ought to have been. I never thought of it as lying. Oz wanted the tones, the machine. I was always happy to reach an inward operator.” Then it returns to a black screen.
“What is that?” Meadow’s voice.
“People who can connect you to wherever you want to go; they are deep in the machine and essentially superoperators. I wanted to reach them because they were voices, humans, somewhere in the big wide world. Remember I was nearly sightless at the time. They talked to me from somewhere. I could be anyone and they could be anyone. A voice on the phone.
“After Oz and I broke up, after I was finished with phreaking, I moved into this small apartment by myself, where I have lived ever since 1973.”
Meadow kept withholding the image of the woman in the movie, “Nicole,” and yet Carrie still found it gripping. An occasional illuminated word from Nicole’s monologue interrupts the black screen and then fades like a firework, leaving a faint trail of itself. She talks about her life, her childhood, and how she lost her sight for a time. Still the film doesn’t show Nicole. A cityscape in black and white, Syracuse, presumably, with all its faded November bleakness.
“After the breakup, I recovered most of my sight, which was great. My pastime has always been watching movies. Even when I was mostly blind, I would try to watch movies — that’s how much I loved them.”
Now the film screen contains another film screen, like a movie theater, but the image is blurry, just moving shapes and colors.
“I listened and watched the blurs. Sometimes it felt like a hallucination, trying to fill in what I couldn’t see.”
A bright circle obscures the center of the same blurry image.
“Maybe it is like how the brain fills in our imperceptible blind spot, the part of all our eyes that actually has no photoreceptors. I looked at certain parts of the screen and imagined what else was there. It tricks you into thinking you see more than you do.”
The blurry film is slowed down until the images become stills and frame lines appear. Meadow’s voice speaks over the images. “All films are a kind of hallucination — the way we see twenty-four static images a minute as movement. The speed tricks the eye, and the eye fills in what is missing. The form constant delusion.” The images speed up and slowly come into focus. They are from Francis Coppola’s film The Conversation. Gene Hackman is destroying his apartment, looking for a microphone. Nicole’s voice is heard as Hackman methodically peels his wallpaper down.
“After Oz left, I went to the Cineplex all the time. I went through the TV Guide and I circled films I had to watch. I would stay up all night sometimes.” Now the images are of another film, black and white, what is it? Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7. “My other pastime was to call men and have conversations with them. More than a pastime. My vocation was calling men. You know that word, vocation, means a calling? Calling was my calling.”
“Strangers?”
“Yes, I had learned cold-calling from my sales job, but I did this for no real reason. Not money, anyway.” Her voice trails off. A close-up of stacks of cards by a phone. Then a close shot of a woman’s hand dialing, a little animation of phone lines across America. “One day an opportunity came up for me to combine my pastimes.”
Meadow’s camera moves slowly toward an artfully lit Rolodex. No shots of this woman. Soon, Carrie thought, she will have to show her.
The film cuts to the talking heads of the men. Three middle-aged guys, all successful in the entertainment business. All talking about this girl who called them, Nicole. Each one describes his phone connection in sequence, showing how Nicole used a kind of formula on the men. Through the manipulating of the men and the repetition of her technique, Nicole starts to emerge as a con artist.
The three of them talk about wondering what she looked like, even though they sensed an issue there. A black screen returns but with an intertitle: After weeks of being interviewed off camera, Nicole finally agreed to be filmed. Then a cut to the first full view of Nicole. She walks down the street with a small dog on a leash. She looks older than her voice and has a lumpy white body that wears its years heavily. Her blouse is a little too tight, with slight gaps where her body strains between the buttons. Watching Nicole walk made Carrie feel weary. She could see where this was going. A clean cut to Nicole on her couch in a blue kimono, a more flattering view. She isn’t ugly at all, Carrie thought, and Meadow has lit her nicely. Her blond hair frames her face in fragile wisps, but the hair is styled, smooth. Her made-up face is round and clear, her eyes and her mouth are pretty in a puffy, tender way. She is a somewhat attractive, large-bodied fiftyish woman. But she is far from beautiful. As she talks, she becomes more lovely, her voice smooth and just on the edge of throaty. She laughs, and it is a delicate, soulful-sounding laugh.
“Jack was different for me, the last person I had a call”—she paused, looked around for a word, smiled—“thing with.”
Meadow’s voice from off camera. “What happened, why was Jack different?”
Another long pause. It was great the way Meadow let people pause, let them say nothing. And that she included her question in the film. Carrie hated when the pauses got cut out. “I really fell in love with Jack”—an L cut to Jack in his kitchen while Nicole talks—“and I think he fell in love with me. I mean, I know he did.” He is making some coffee with a French press. While he waits for the coffee, he lights a cigarette. The sound is now no longer Nicole’s voice. It is Jack lighting up. And having a coughing fit. He is also older, easily sixty. He has a full head of gray hair and wears a black sweater. He looks attractive in a dissipated way. Lots of wrinkles from smoking, a jawline weakened by age. He laughs at his coughing fit, then he talks about Nicole. He says it was a long time ago, but you can see he is still upset as he describes his attachment to her. He says he persuaded her to meet him. Meadow cuts to Nicole, who talks about how she sent a photo of her friend, which meant she could never meet Jack.