Flicker: A Novel (Rediscovered Classics) by Roszak Theodore

Author:Roszak, Theodore [Roszak, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2005-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Which, roughly translated, I made out to mean something like:

I have more memories than had I lived a thousand years

I am a cemetery that the moon abhors

Where maggots creep like remorse

And feed upon the corpse of my best beloved.

And the other line chanted by Olga as the scene ends:

O Prince de l’exil, à qui l’on a fait tort

O Prince of exile, who has endured such wrong …

Short as it was, Olga’s sequence in the film brought one innovation with it. At the first viewing, I was annoyed to see a hair caught on the lens, jittering all the way through the scene, picking up bulk, becoming an ugly matted clot that hovered just above her face. The longer it twitched there, the more irritating it became. Finally, just as the reel ran out, it shook loose and scrabbled down the scene, merging with the closing darkness. I expected that would be the end of it; even so, before the second showing I asked Claus to be sure to wipe the lens.

“The lens was clean,” he told me. “The dust is on the film. I know this from last time.”

But how could that be? Why would Castle have permitted such an obvious flaw to survive on his finished print?

“It is deliberate,” Claus said. “If you look closely at the film you will see: it’s an animation. This is the innovation I told you about.”

Olga winked at me knowingly. “One of Max’s tricks. I complained also to him when I first saw it. He said, ‘Did you ever notice how it drives you crazy to see a piece of dirt like that on the lens? Well, maybe I want to drive the audience a little crazy here. Like Miss Muffet on the tuffet.’ You know what he meant?”

On second viewing I did. The ugly clot of dirt did have a nervous, spiderlike quality to it. It seemed to be reaching down, struggling to get hold of Olga, to snare her in its tangled web. At last it did. Viewing the film frame by frame, I could see the way the animation developed. The clotted dust spread into a web that thickened over Olga’s image, strand after strand, until the light was blocked out. The effect brought a note of unrelieved tension to the scene—like a high, screechy sound that will not go away. There was more to that piece of dust than met the eye, of that I was sure.

Though I realized that the excerpt from Heart of Darkness wouldn’t run more than two minutes, I found myself awaiting it with high anticipation. If I hadn’t already seen the first image that appeared on the screen, I would have been suitably startled. It was the hideous fence of severed heads that Castle and Zip had filmed in Mexico. The sequence developed as I remembered, with the camera being swallowed down the gullet of the last head in the series. But this time the ensuing darkness was striped by the flames of a leaping fire.

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