The Death and Birth of Film

Palms up, back and forth, you found your temples sweating slightly - it was the strength of the cocktails, the garters and stockings rubbing up against you, as you formerly went from being an over zealous guest of the night club to being a proper dancing girl.  Like a red indian tribe on fire, in come the gods, our clothes too much shrouding our primitive selves, elegant in our delivery as always...the swings.  Who would think that a child's swing could  bring a full grown woman, in amongst men who drooled and held dominion over their trumpets, so much joy...to stand up or sit back and ride your tasseled lair around the heavens, catching mist in the ceiling of the ornate, egyptian style pillars.  Even if one knocked you out, they'd still pour liquor down your throat, give you a good going over, re-apply your red lipstick for you and send you into the morning, properly come out the other side.

If you were lucky, it would have been caught on the film camera.  Yellow, grain like the best hooch, dressed up and down in vertical, scratchy lines searing you like a flank steak, serving you and your history up and filling in every dull gap that life could not fill in itself, with noise, visual, striking noise, in texture and colour, and chemical paint.  The ultimate art of liberty.  What would your grandchildren say when they might see you in your hips shaking, smile stretched out across your face, your flask tipping out of your special garter, fucking the coat room man again, up against the back wall, behind the theatre, where the best of the follies played.  They wouldn't hear you, not over that music, but if there was a novice photographer around, looking to play with his new handheld life stealer, re-animator, well, would the thick and viscous apparitions caught on the film bring you new found innocence in your idle late night goings on?  A whole half bottle of champagne in its wayward water ballet in your belly, as he came up inside of you?  Would they look upon their grandma in the same way? Their tired, repressed eyes, having missed all the good times...poor souls.  So disconnected from all the feelings that life is meant to engage you to it with.  Didn't that coat check man make films of his own with one of those cameras too?  Nothing grand, no Battleship Potemkin, or European art films for him, but the film spliced all the same.

You used to visit him in that little room he edited from within.  He'd take a bottle of something or other that you'd order from the telephone number written down on that little piece of folded paper that made its way to you.  Easy findings when you swing and dance and drink and shake your ass for a living.  Men looked so beautiful all lined up in their tuxedos.  Even when they were piss drunk, or fighting or trying to get on you when you didn't want them to (you may have been a looser of the flapper set, but loyal you always were), they looked...just...regal, black and white and gloves and hair set back.  Like kings of their own debauchery.  He used to take films of them too, but it was you and dancing friends he liked to look at most, in the privacy of his darkened editing room.  That machinery he had there -- it looked positively like it could find you in your bed and cut your throat at its will.  It served him.  That you knew...but then again, so did you.  He showed you once, deep into the second bottle, how to cut the pieces of amber and black film strips.  Like constructing a child's drawing with pieces of coloured paper.  He cut himself pretty badly on his fingertip that afternoon - after that, he found he only popped open bottles afterwards.  Blood all over the machinery.  The modern age, they call it.  Still, though you didn't know much (then) about its workings, you loved that film.  Preserved forever were your greatest and latest evenings in the middle of the stage.  Top hats and ankle turns, you were alive- really Alive, Forever.  The smell of it was better than the best opium in town, you'd imagined it tasted like a vim and delicious cocktail, its shuttering sounds finding their ways into your long stemmed glass.  Reflecting off the crystal like god in a pond, smiling back at you from its properly hemmed in place in the final product.

Even the leftover blood from his mishap didn't scare you away from that room.  Didn't you even lie back in front of it and let him have at you, while the films of your best nights played behind you.  This, you thought, in between your moans and breaths, and legs wrapping round him, was the start of something - like living twice.  The pictures of you, moving and dead, living in frozen time behind you, as you lived, in your back room gimmicks, right then and there - your double life, without another bead of sweat necessary...it was twice, but was it as much, was it really better in any way? You found everytime you danced after that, or had him again, or experienced any exhilaration that used to have you in the rafters, bounding around the world in your one moment - after those films came into existence in your mind, you were never really There - like you were before.  Abandon became a second shadow in the back of your head, knowing you were being captured and would have to live the vibrant thing from afar, or from the eyes of others.  Those who watched.  Grandchildren, you and he in your deviant minds, people who moved in that place after you were both long gone - whomever it was, they've been watching you ever since.  Each generation one layer removed from living. Their moment one more world away from themselves, from memory, both real and imagined.

Still, that wall up in the coat room behind the stage would never forget you.  It took a vow of silence to its grave.

~ M. Lucia