Silent Movie This is the storyCatherine and Andrew Brighton
The extraordinary film that shook them, and whose layers of meaning they would grasp only years later, happened in a subterranean cinema the Academy, Oxford Street, London, sometime before the weight of byt bore down upon them. London, after college. They would go together to watch French films. On this particular day, the couple whose story we are telling were bound to remember the black and white still images and the voice in the darkness. Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. Later on they do claim remembrance when they show their epiphanies. That film they had seen was to be one of the few films, that fed into the future. Had they really seen it? Or had they invented that moment to prop up the wasteland to come? Above ground, London, as most of the world, was habitable grinding common sense. Hollywood stood guard over an empire of banality. The couple were subjected to experiments, cinema without the tedium of thought glossed by the hubris of theory. This was the aim of the experiments: to send emissaries back to cinemas where great films had been shown and wipe out all reflection. But the human mind balked at the idea. Laughter and grief resist. To wake up in central London as the couple they used to be. The shock would be too great. If they were able to conceive visual worlds, perhaps they could find their way back. The couple do not die, nor do they go mad. They suffer. Sometimes they recapture a day of happiness, though different. Real children. Real graves. On the tenth day, images begin to ooze, like confessions. Her books, words and images. His Blasphemies Ecstasies Cries, words and images. On the sixteenth day they are in Oxford Street. Empty. The cinema now a retailing opportunity. Underwear and sandwiches. Other images appear, merge, in that shop, which is perhaps that of their memory. Around them, only fabulous materials: glass, plastic, terry cloth. When they recover from their trance, Marks and Spencer has gone. The experimenters tighten their control. They send them back out on the trail. Time rolls back again, the moment returns. They are without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painlessly round them. Their only landmarks are moments they are living and the markings on the walls. After more, painful tries, they eventually caught some waves of the past. They were returned to Oxford Street. They knew their jailers would not spare them. They had been tools in their hands, Marks & Spencer had been used as bait, they had lived up to their expectations, they had played their part. Now they only waited to be liquidated with, somewhere inside them, the memory of a film. A film strong enough to put imagination back into motion Once again on the crowded pavement of Oxford Street, in the middle of the Sixties, they could see that they were the couple queuing outside the cinema that used to be there. They bought their tickets and went inside. And when they recognised the man who took their tickets as the man who had interrogated them, they understood That the moment they had been granted thirty five years ago, which had never ceased to obsess them, was the moment they first saw La Jettee. (Byt the habitual, conventional and rituals of everyday routine life, embourgeoisement. Mayakovsky in a last poem: This ship of love has shattered against the rock of everyday life.) |
