Video Scenes

The movie will be organized around a series of explorations, each with a guide. Here's an early version of the first two and a half minutes of the first exploration, where Young John meets his first guide, Enoja. There are still some tweaks I want to make to the animation, and changes in the sound—I really need to find someone who can do the women's voices—but this excerpt will show you what I've been working on for the last few weeks....

The First Exploration

"Would you like to live in a nightmare?" An experiment with voice synchronization.

The Wraiths

John arrives at the cages

Hotel del Tiempo: an earlier video that combined live with virtual actors.

 

Text Excerpts

From Chapter Two:

JOHN MET HIS WIFE IN A CAFE. The year was 1954. The café was on Rundle Street, in Adelaide, South Australia. It was on the second floor and had a large window looking down onto the street. The cars that rumbled past were Wolseleys and Humbers, Vauxhalls and Morgans, most of them black, all with running boards and large rounded fenders. The café was owned by a Greek immigrant, a rotund little fellow with thin hair combed over a balding pate.... In the café the Greek had provided the usual tables and chairs, but had also tossed big pillows into the corners. People reclined there; sometimes girls reclined there. In 1954 women commonly wore dresses, skirts, stockings, high heels, and to recline wearing such baroque splendor was revelatory: silken legs carefully arranged, a brazen bit of stocking welt on view, even an occasional flash of white thigh. In those days John was writing his first novel and he would sit for hours at one of the tables sipping cup after cup of espresso, an exotic brew virtually unknown in Australia at that time. He usually sat by the window: being above the passing pedestrians and vehicles seemed to stimulate his imagination. It was on this particular day, looking down from the window, that he saw his wife. She was crossing the street, her arm hooked into the arm of an older man. She was thin, very thin, and wore a tight black skirt and a white blouse. Because of the angle he could not see her face clearly. Soon however he heard the click of her heels as she came up the wooden stairs. The doorway to the café was glass. She stopped there a moment, just outside, removed her arm from the man, and took a moment to tug and push at her clothes. Clearly she saw herself reflected in the glass. Then she squared her shoulders, did a little wiggle with her hips, and pushed the door open....

SHE HAD SHORT, DARK HAIR, RATHER CURLY. Her eyes were large. The lids were painted the hue of ash. Her only color was her lips: scarlet in her pale face. You must use color, she would tell us later, to control the viewer’s eye. One splash of color was ideal, especially when it was on the lips: “Our mouths are so suggestive, aren’t they?” In the café she sat so that everyone in the room could see her scarlet mouth. Almost immediately she crossed one leg over the other. This too was a carefully studied movement. The leg, she explained, must lift quickly. This startles the viewer into attention. As the shoe leaves the floor, you point the toe down, which lengthens the leg, creating the odd illusion that the leg is stretching, extending itself. After a pause at the apex the leg must then descend slowly. It descends exactly parallel to the other leg, and in fact slides along the other leg. If you listen closely you will hear one nylon surface sussurating against the other. It sounds like a wind moving through a forest, or perhaps like a wave sliding back into the sea. At his distance John could not hear this sound, but he imagined it. She sat there with what we call today her invisible smile. There was no expression, that is, on her face, her lips did not move, her eyes were calm, but there somehow gathered around her an aura of amusement. This too, we are sure, was a studied effect. Perhaps she practiced in front of mirrors. In any case everything about her was slightly disquieting. This disquiet affected everyone in the café: the Greek seemed stunned, and a young couple in the corner who had been holding hands across their table now sat back, the girl angry, the man confused. John felt this disquiet too, but for him it was elating: he had spent the morning over his novel thinking precisely of disquiet. Art, he had decided, must create unease. The viewer who is not disquieted is seeing nothing. Art must disturb. It must send unexpected ripples through one’s brain. Thus, looking at this oddly disquieting girl, he saw art: she was herself a work of art. And he realized, staring at her, that he was looking, in truth, at his novel. His novel was about a man exploring a mysterious world. He could immediately see that this woman was a mysterious world. In his novel the man was a version of John himself: young authors are always using themselves as narrators, as subjects, they are self-centered creatures, the world exists as their private and personal playground, they watch and learn and interact as though it is all theirs. This girl, therefore, that he was looking at, and in whom he saw his world of mystery, was his. She belonged to him as precisely as his novel belonged to him. He watched her possessively. She was of course aware of this. It did not seem to bother her. She was not coy, she glanced at him, she did not smile, she was quite calm, she crossed one leg over the other in such a way that John—and only John—could see the top of one stocking and a bit of white thigh. Her stockings had seams, an old-fashioned style one occasionally still saw on older women and tarted up actresses. John watched her hand drift along her calf, then across her blouse where a small breast was hidden. She took from her black purse an ebony tube into which she inserted a white cigarette. The older man struck a match. She let the smoke slide up her face, her eyes shutting as she leaned back. The man’s hand trembled. He hunkered back into his chair as though he were frightened of her. She did not seem to care. Smoke drifted around her. The Greek brought them cups of cappuccino, bowed slightly, and left. After a few more minutes the older man wiped his hands on his trousers. He stood up, said something, which she ignored, and walked past John to the bathroom door at the far side of the café.
     John took his place.
     “My name is John,” he told her. “I’m writing a novel about you.”
     She stubbed out her cigarette.
     “How lovely,” she said.

From Chapter One:

JOHN ARRIVES AT THE EMPTY CITY in the evening, everything is dark, he parks his car so its headlights shine onto the buildings, the engine rattles and dies, we hear a door slam, he ventures forward, his shadow precedes him, etc., etc., we point this out to alleviate any doubts as to his intentions, we intend to be transparent in our clarity, the city is empty but it is populated by wraiths, or what we shall call wraiths, they lean against walls, loiter at windows, walk across open spaces, most of them female, often beautiful, rounded buttocks, the usual erotic accouterments, longish legs encased in hose, sleekness, yes, silkiness, a delicious smoothness created by the nylon sheathing, encorsetted waists, shoes with heels of an improbable height, their shadows with the sweep of headlights stretching and compacting along walls and passageways, John's arrival noted and then dismissed, clearly he will be of little interest to them, we cannot say just what they are doing here or what significance they will have in the story which follows, in any case John can scarcely see them, they are spectral beings and he is a young man beset with the distractions of youth and rather innocent, although he will remain neither young nor innocent, like all of us he will become decrepit, he will creak and groan, joints will become stiff, skin brittle, internal organs erratic, we ourselves speak from this pinnacle of achievement: we are ancient, primeval, as eroded as prehistory, archeological, fossilized, a reliquary of abandoned tombs and ossified bones: flesh, what flesh we have, lies haggard: blood, thickened, pushes through ropes of veins: in the context of this story our ages will be a constant counterpoint, there is a kind of harmony to this, a metronomic ticking. But enough: we speak of John: a young man of the usual carnality, a certain height, slimness, not ugly, not stupid, not many things, embryonic, a restless man with a certain fixity of purpose, we shall get to this fixity later, he stands in the headlights of his now quiet car, the empty city before him, caverns of streets, concrete, marble, lintels, windows, doorways, dark recesses, alleys, a city bereft of life, this is a dream of course, a nightscape of impulses firing electrically in his brain, we don’t wish to be deceptive here, he is dreaming, he will awaken and forget all of it—he will forget, we shall not—and resume his quotidian life beyond our purview and indeed beyond our interest.

THE YEAR, WE BELIEVE, WAS 1949, we are talking now of John’s youth, today he is an old man with broken and missing teeth. How this came to pass is not the subject of this book, nevertheless we must note: this morning the checker in the grocery store treated him like a doddering old fool, he was fumbling for his change, this is true, dimes, nickels, pennies, who can keep track of such things, he paid for his soy milk and his ibuprofen and returned home sullen and distraught. It is an ancient whine—a whine more ancient than we are—that the years have fled too rapidly, that time is a relentless enemy, that the world has become a strange and dishonest place. What was the world like in 1949? He met his wife that year, in a manner of speaking, a meeting of sorts, he was drifting, somewhat drunk, along a row of buildings where women commonly stood in doorways, their faces powdered white and their eyes like tiger eyes, a look which has always fascinated us, the tight skirts, the nylons bunched at their clasps, the lips as lurid as any nightmare. “Hey, soldier,” they murmured as John passed, he was not a soldier, we were not at war, but he was blond and blue-eyed and lean and muscular, a boy full of vigor, ready to piss against any wind, dreaming already of heroic adventures, of cities filled with soldiers, whores, beggars, innkeepers, the petit bourgeoisie of incipient capitalism, rich politicians and their concubines, drunken old men, lithesome women, the perfume of opium dreams drifting in the tropical air, aaah, he says, aaah, we say, a whole city to explore, in which to meander at our leisure….
     “Must you go on like this?”
     “I must.”
     We stand face to face. She understands this is our story. After a moment she laughs. We continue.

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