“They’re never done, Jakob.”
Jakob shakes his head.
“I swear to you, Mr. Schick, my father doesn’t even know I’ve written a film.”
“Jakob, relax, please, Hermann is my banker now. If he wants us to make your movie, I’m sure we can find—”
“My father,” Jakob yells, “doesn’t know I wrote a movie.”
Hugo is taken back. He sits down on the stage between the break in the gold railing and lets his legs hang toward the floor.
“All right, calm now,” he says. “There’s no need to be angry.”
“I do not need nor want,” Jakob says, “my father’s help to make my film.”
“This is good, Jakob. This is wonderful. You surprise and delight me. Upon this rock, eh son? You have the talent and you have the passion. And now I know you have the anger. No one realizes how much anger you need to make a picture. You treasure that anger, my boy. You nourish it until you can channel it into the camera.”
Jakob doesn’t want to hear any more. He steps into the aisle and Hugo says, “Sit down, boy.”
Jakob freezes.
“You still work for me. Now sit down.”
There’s no threat to Hugo’s voice, but a palpable seriousness. Jakob slides back into the seat.
“Now, you tell Schick, who is it you emulate?”
Jakob looks up, confused.
“Who is it you want to be? Tell me. Is it Lang? You mentioned Lang, yes? Kurosawa? Bergman? Reifenstahl, perhaps?”
“I don’t—”
“No, of course not. You love the Americans. It’s obvious. It’s how you learned the language, as you say. Yes, it’s got to be Joseph H. Lewis? Or F. E. Feist? Maybe Phil Karlson? Tony Mann? Sam Fuller? Fuller was a local boy, you know.”
“Stop,” Jakob says. “I don’t want to be any of them.”
“Who am I missing?” Hugo asks.
“I want to be Kinsky. I want to be an original.”
Hugo takes a long and deep breath and manages to suppress the laughter.
“An original, is that right?” he says. “And what does this original want to do?”
Jakob knows he’s shown too much of his hand. He can’t believe he’s done this. It’s always been so easy to keep the film-talk inside. He must have inhaled some of the amyl nitrite floating through the studio. He must still be punchdrunk with the sight of Leni Pauline taking an endless shower with Coco Bing and Herbie Warm.
“I want,” Jakob says slowly, “to give them the primal image.”
“Ah,” says Hugo, closing his eyes and nodding, “of course, the primal image.”
Jakob isn’t sure if he’s being mocked.
“And how will you go about that?” Hugo asks.
“If I knew, do you think I’d tell you?”
“Very good, son, I’d certainly steal the technique immediately.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Hush, Jakob. Keep still and listen to an old man for just a moment. Indulge me, yes?”
“I’m sorry, I just—”
Hugo brings a finger up to his lips, lets out a long shush that in the hollow of the theatre takes on a life of its own. Then, after a testing moment of quiet, Hugo says, “It is not that your primal image doesn’t exist. It very much does. I suspect it has since the dawn of consciousness. But hear me now, please Jakob, because I can save you decades of futile and agonizing work. I can save you public failure and a very personal, lingering humiliation. The primal image you want to badly to capture, it is different for every set of eyes. Image is ambiguous. We invest it with all its power. We determine whether it will bring us the greater truth or the more shielding lie.”
Jakob shifts in his seat.
“Film,” Hugo says, “is a collaborative art. No matter what anyone will tell you, son, film is always a collaboration. Beyond this, and I’m sorry, Jakob, I know this is the last thing you wish to hear today, but film is a business. It is a product. It is a commodity to be marketed wisely and often.”
Jakob lets loose a condescending sniffle that Hugo ignores.
“The primal image is unique to every eyeball on this planet, Jakob. You can’t get around that. It’s like knowing about our own death. Facing that fact is part of becoming an adult. And for the filmmaker, facing that fact and continuing to work, that is about becoming an artist.”
They stare at each other.
“Let us make this a mutual confession, my boy. Let me tell you what I strive for, what I would hope to realize before the end of this lifetime of work. I tell you this knowing that it will never happen, that my time grows more limited each day, each film.”
Jakob is suddenly intrigued.
“Someday it may be possible. We see the first steps already — the morphing, the computer modeling. Someday, the cinema as we know it will be as obsolete as the printed page. A historical curiosity. Eventually, I’m sure there’ll be no need for the human actor, not as we know them today. We’ll store hundreds of millions of sequences of their movements and mold them together as is necessary. But this hocus-pocus, this nonsense really, isn’t what possesses me.”
A deep breath, making the boy wait.
“I want the day, the method, the impossible ability to throw each individual’s unique movie, their own primal image, as you say, up on the screen. I want the very synapses of the human brain to be accessible as my own editing board, the ultimate Moviola. I want a way of establishing a pool of sorts, a floating and infinite library of every imagistic instant ever exposed to light. More images, faster images, all the time. I want a way of tapping into each memory that each nanosecond of celluloid they’ve ever opened their eyes to. And finally, I want a way of editing any and all of this goulash together — life image, dream image, movie image — and all the cutting choices are mine. What stays and what goes and in what sequence it unravels.
“From the start, reality has had its way with us. Reality has constantly raped us. Attacked us daily and molested us mercilessly. But soon, Jakob, we will rape reality. We will fuck with reality in ways too monstrous to imagine. Won’t it be wonderful?”
Another aborted laugh.
“I would call it a Hyperflix of the mind. Hyperflix. Incorporated.”
Jakob stands up and walks to the stage, his eyes almost parallel with Schick’s dangling knees.
“And they have the nerve,” Hugo says, “to say I have a psychotic ego. It goes so far beyond ego. You do see that, don’t you, Jakob?”
The boy smiles and nods in the darkness.
“Clear as can be, Mr. Schick.”
23
Outside, they meet on the remains of the stairway that leads to the station’s main entrance. Propp is walking, holding the camera in front of him and twisting the rewind crank, spooling all the exposed film back into its metal canister. Over his shoulder, he’s carrying a canvas satchel, an old, scarred-up duffel embroidered with a line drawing of what looks like some deformed version of Diane Arbus’s face.
Sylvia is sitting hunched over, hugging her knees and looking out at the Bishop Square rotary where a body is lying facedown. She’s watching for signs of movement, any kind of drunken twitch or shake. But so far there haven’t been any.
Propp comes to a stop next to her and when she shifts her focus to his face, he pops open the back of the camera, tosses the roll of film into his palm and pockets it, then places the camera on the ground between them.
“The film was mine,” Sylvia says.
Propp lowers himself down next to her, mimics her posture, cracks his knuckles elaborately and says, “But the image is mine.”
For a number of reasons, she’s galled by the remark.