[SEVERIN clutches ERASMO’S arm. Her nails dig in. But she speaks to the camera.]
Do you want to know the truth about my mother? She was wonderful. She was kind. She never left me. She tucked me in at night and woke me in the morning. She played with me every day and she never missed a recital or a bedtime story.
Her name was Clara.
She could hold just under 150 metres of film at a time.
Oh, Those Scandalous Stars!
Limelight, 20th February 1933
Editor’s Note: The Iron Hand of Edison
A simple rule, enforced simply:
Movies don’t talk.
But whose rule is this? What Moses came down from the mount with such a thing engraved upon his personal stone?
Surely, our current state could not have been the shining future meant by those early masters of light and sound. It is Edison’s rule, enforced not by the Burning Bush but by Lawyers Burning for Their Fees. The name of Edison has become synonymous with the dastardliest of business practices, the most crushing arrogance. It stains the whole family, from Thomas Alva, who collected patents like baseball cards, to Our Present Edison, who continues such draconian strategies that he has, single-handedly, retarded the progress of motion picture technology by fifty years.
Your humble host has taken out editorials of this sort before. My readers must forbear. Given the upcoming Worlds’ Fair in the glorious metropolis of Guan Yu, overlooking the glittering shores of Yellowknife Bay on our dear sister planet of Mars, the very first to be hosted offworld, what better time can there be for Mr Franklin R. Edison (Freddy to his friends) to release his patents’ vice grip on reel, recording, and exhibition equipment and allow talking pictures to run wild and free? That is, after all, the natural state of technology. And so it was, once upon a time. Before the right to speak, the privilege of the voice, became the property of one man, to give and take away as he pleases.
Places, Everyone!, 14th April, 1933
Editor’s Note
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. That’s how the song goes. It does not go, In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with the Patent Office and the Word could only be afforded by God. In the early days, for a brief moment, the wealthiest of studios and directors—and of course, governments—could afford the exorbitant fees demanded by Edison and his descendants for the use and exhibition of films. For a dim, glimmering moment, the great epics of Worley and Dufresne crackled with orchestras and soliloquies. But it did not last.
One must praise the independents, who simply ignored Edison and continued to make beautiful silent movies, more advanced and complex and heartbreaking than any throwaway studio talkie stinking up the summertime. I remember it: how slowly, then less slowly, sound ebbed away. Sooner rather than later, for an actor to talk on-screen became the mark of the Sellout—someone with deep enough pockets to pay Edison’s blood price. No True Artist, no Work of Quality, no Real Film would be caught dead making that kind of obnoxious noise. And bit by bit, the Big Boys on the Moon copied the starving artists so that they could convince the public of their Authenticity, their Great Aesthetic Merit, so that they could butter their bread on both sides. We are the People’s Entertainment! Bang, Smash, Yell, Crescendo! No, wait! We are Radical, Envelope-Pushing Artists! Hush, Hush, Soft Now. Win awards, stuff cannons with cash, bask in acclaim—and, hell, it saves money not having to deal with the devil in a back room, dithering over the price of a microphone.
And thus we find ourselves in an upside-down land where the technology exists, works beautifully, has even advanced—for no Edison can keep his hands to himself for long—but no fashionable soul would be caught dead using it. Men stand astride our world and call out: STOP. The System Works. They ask that everything stay the same forever, for Sameness is Profitable. Our Man Freddy E still bleeds filmmakers for exhibition rights, and we may all look the other way while he rolls piggily in his piles of lucre. Time passes, and we become accustomed to the status quo. Theatre Speaks, Vaudeville Sings, Radio Yammers Away Nonstop, but the movie hall is quiet as a church. Time passes, and audiences drink in this Truth with their mother’s milk. I have seen with my own eyes the recoil of audiences when faced with some flickie that sliced up its producers’ hearts at Edison’s golden table for the right to let poor Hamlet ask his famous question instead of staring dumbly at a plaster skull and waiting for the title card to do his job for him. Today’s moviegoer will get up and leave, convinced he has been swindled, rather than listen to a human voice.
What could it cost Friend Freddy to, quite simply, let us speak?
And yet, and yet. There is beauty in silence. I do not believe a film like Saul Amsel’s Bring Me the Heart of Titan would have been made in a world where every film chattered on to its contentment. What of The Moon of Arden? The Last Cannoneer? If I were to turn back the clock and pluck Fred Edison from his ill-gotten celluloid throne, I should lose these reels which wrapped my heart three times round. He has bound us to Prometheus’s rock—but have we not made friends with the eagle? Have we not learned to love life without our livers?
The Worlds’ Fair is a time of brotherhood and goodwill. It is an expression of Progress and Marvels of Modernity.
Let me put it baldly: Mr Edison, get out of the way.
Halfrid H
Editor-in-Chief
I am not willing to relinquish the rare and rough magic of our silent movie halls. They are silent as a church, yes. Because they are churches. Yet I am no less willing to never hear the dreary Dane fail to decide his own fate. For him, the question will ever remain: To be or not to be? For us, it is: To speak or not to speak?
I myself can put nothing baldly, for I feel quite hirsute on the matter, tangled, knotted. But I will say: Mr Edison, you have exiled us to an uncanny country of the mind. We cannot love you for it.
Algernon B
Editor-in-Chief
Look Down
Look down.
Across the stage of your skin. The graceful proscenium of your clavicle, your shoulder, the long bones of your arms. The apron of your gentle belly. The skene of your skull, where all the gods and machines hide away, awaiting their cues, clanking away in their cases, puffing smoke and longing. Look down; something is happening on your navel, your omphalos, your knotted core of the world. You cannot feel the light playing over your skin, but you prickle with gooseflesh anyway. Light has no personal temperature. But your body knows instinctively that light is cold. The idea of light, the narrative of light. Light will chill you blue. The trickster hemispheres of your brain insist that the flickering images do have weight; they press on you like greyscale fingers, corpse fingers, angelic fingers, unworlded hands. The touch of images alters you—it must, it cannot help but. And more than touch you, these pictures, these maps of illumination enter you. Photons collide with flesh; most reflect, some penetrate. You carry them inside you. You carry them away and far.
You feel them, though they cannot be felt. You shiver, though there is no cold. You take them inside you, though they asked no permission.