“Perhaps you should moan,” Vikar suggests to Cooper Léon’s papa during filming. For a “soundstage,” the set is remarkably absent of any kind of sound equipment — perhaps, Vikar believes, because it’s the style of European filmmaking to dub in the sound later. Nonetheless Vikar also believes Cooper Léon’s papa should moan even if no one can hear it; the camera will hear it. These directions are translated to Cooper Léon’s papa and he moans. I don’t believe it’s a very good moan, Vikar thinks. But perhaps this is the way they moan in Spain when they’re dying. “Perhaps,” Vikar says to the translator, reconsidering, “he should not moan,” and Cooper Léon’s papa stops moaning.
156.
Two weeks pass. Cutting Viking Man’s movie by day and the movie for the Soldiers of Viridiana by night, Vikar feels not only his eyes going but whatever distinctions onto which he’s been able to hold. In Cooper Léon’s movie, Vikar intercuts footage of Cooper Léon’s papa in bed with the old documentary footage of the Generalissimo and left-over shards of Viking Man’s movie, to show the Generalissimo flooded by memories and strange dreams as he dies. Bits of the sequence in Viking Man’s movie where the Berber chieftain chops off the thief’s head become a dream in which the Generalissimo as a child has his own head chopped off by his father, dressed in the black robes of death.
Vikar believes perhaps the movie doesn’t look so much like Buñuel. He’s also not certain how Viking Man would feel about some of his movie making its way into a movie by the Soldiers of Viridiana. Cooper Léon insists that a bit of the French movie with the naked Dutch actress should be included, preferably some stray moment from the film’s “most superb scene” where the young bride is raped in an opium den. At the same time, Cooper Léon doesn’t want his print of the French movie too violated; Vikar decides to surgically remove a single frame from the opium den scene and drop it into the Generalissimo movie. He feels a bit like God doing this, sending a clandestine message to anyone who sees the movie. “But no one will see only a single frame,” Cooper Léon protests.
“They will not see it but they will,” says Vikar.
Cooper Léon’s eyes narrow. “They will not see it but they will,” he repeats slowly, then again, “they will not see it but they will! It is like a secret weapon, then, that explodes in the imagination of the viewer!”
“Yes.”
Cooper Léon looks at Vikar and his eyes glisten. “You are a man of vision,” he declares quietly.
“Uh.”
“Spain is fortunate you were sent in this trying hour.”
157.
Editing the death of the Generalissimo, Vikar notices that in scenes shot from one side Cooper Léon’s papa is not ominous in the least, but that in scenes shot from the other side, a menace presents itself that was unseen either on the stage or in the camera’s lens. It’s as though one profile of the old man is possessed in a way that only film captures. He uses all the footage from the menacing profile and rejects the rest.
158.
One night, after sleepless nights and days of Vikar working on both movies, the car that always waits for him isn’t there.
Vikar gets a taxi back to his hotel. The next morning at the hotel, the car still isn’t there, nor that night, nor the next morning and night. It never appears again. The driver never returns, and no one brings Vikar lunch.
Sitting at the window of his hotel room one night, Vikar notes out of the corner of his eye the mirror over the bathroom sink, and in it his reflection.
159.
Looking at his reflection in the mirror, Vikar thinks about the scenes of Cooper Léon’s papa and how by cutting to someone’s right or left profile in the editing, he can expose something. He can expose the side of the person that’s true and the side that’s false. He can expose the side that’s good and the side that’s evil.
160.
He can — he’s still thinking to himself a week later, on the plane home — expose the side that punishes and the side that receives, the side that dominates and the side that submits. It’s different with each person and each profile: what’s represented by one actor’s right might be represented by another’s left. George Stevens understood this in A Place in the Sun; Vikar remembers what Dotty said about the close-ups of Taylor and Clift on the terrace, how Stevens had no regard for continuity in cutting from one profile to the other. As Vikar begins to decipher which profile is which — although he can’t articulate it to himself let alone anyone else — a new visual vocabulary of meaning becomes available to him.
161.
Variety, January 5, 1976: “LOS ANGELES — Long-time motion-picture veteran Dorothy Langer is leaving the studio after more than 25 years as editor and vice president, effective immediately, it was announced today by Paramount Pictures. Neither Ms. Langer nor a spokesman for the studio could be reached for comment.”
162.
Back in Los Angeles, Vikar goes by Dotty’s office on the chance she’s still there. He tries phoning her once, to no answer.
Over the coming weeks and months, he walks out to the Paramount Gate looking for Soledad against the fountain, arms folded. He searches everywhere and asks anyone who might know her; he calls information over and over for her number, but there never is one.
163.
Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well. Penn’s Night Moves. Warhol’s Heat. Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King. Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales. Meyer’s Up! Sarre’s The Death of Marat. Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. In The Story of Adele H, the daughter of a famous nineteenth-century author falls in love with a soldier. She follows the soldier from France to Nova Scotia and haunts the streets of Halifax looking for him; everything she believes or has believed has collapsed into his form. She is Joan of Arc but without a god; she becomes so pure in her crusade that, by the end of the movie, the soldier himself means nothing to her and is unrecognizable to her. She’s beyond love, beyond the pettiness of her own heart; she’s beyond God. By the end of the movie, she’s gone somewhere God can’t reach her.
164.
Later he’ll tell himself it’s for Dotty, but he doesn’t really believe that. Deep in the bowels of the Paramount archives one afternoon he sees it, there on a shelf like this week’s disposable magazine: place in the sun / stevens scrawled on the edge of the canister; and he stands looking at it a long time as if deciding whether to steal it rather than how. But really he’s deciding how.
If they hadn’t fired Dotty, I wouldn’t, but he knows he would and feels no guilt. He also knows he cherishes this movie more than its owners ever could. Finally he simply carries the cans out of the building under his arm in broad daylight, making no attempt to hide them; when no one stops or questions him, the theft is only validated. Back in his apartment on Pauline Boulevard, he makes a shrine for it.
165.
Dietrich and Von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman is next. As the pirated movie collection grows, the shrine grows; soon it’s filled a wall. I’m going to need more walls.
166.
He goes to the Fox Venice one night to see an Antonioni double bill. In the first film, a group of vacationers visits an island where one of them vanishes; the woman is never found, and by the end of the movie she is all but forgotten. In the second film, the private eye from Chinatown has become a foreign correspondent who changes places with a dead man, leaving in his wake a successful career and an estranged wife. So really the second half of the double bill solves the mystery of the first, and of the vanished woman on the island, who clearly also has exchanged places with someone. Vikar knows she has become Soledad Palladin, who was originally supposed to play the part. By the end of the double bill the foreign correspondent has assumed not only the dead man’s itinerary but his destiny, and a growing hush falls over not just these movies but all movies — the hush of looming cataclysm, the slow pan of the camera across an empty town square outside a hotel room, where a body lies.