Camera Phone. Brooke Biaz

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СКАЧАТЬ rubbish about . . . rock-n-roll road trips. She says he was one of first people she met at Southport. That Helena introduced him to her. She says that, if she hadn’t needed the money, she would never have met him at all, never have acted in one of his stupid films, though I’ve never seen this film, and she’s never offered to show it to me . . . Certainly, though she says she loves film no less now than she did when we met, I think this new anti-film attitude of hers is an issue building up between us.

      These things considered, I decide to wait until we’re alone in our flat. Then I’ll press her about Milos Forman.

      Instead, I stand on the balcony of the Griffith Building, with the leaded glass windows of the professors’ rooms behind me, and I phone film the whole undergraduate body swarming onto the front lawn like a sea. I film them like I’m Cecil B. DeMille. I sweep across them from what must be 100 feet in the air.

      “Like a sea,” I say to myself, and I think of that sequence in the Peter Weir drama for Silver Screen Partners IV/Touchstone, Dead Poets Society, when church bells ring, the sun shreds the sky in oranges and pinks, a flock of birds (which I notice are mostly plovers or something) rises in a parabolic arc from a lake which is back lit, and the boys come down the wooden school stairs while Mr. Pitts, first name Gerald, played by James Waterstone, comes up the stairs telling them to slow down. And the whole sequence (8 minutes 23 seconds) summarizes the film in . . . in 8 minutes and 23 seconds. Though Weir, to my mind, fails in a number of important areas. For instance: it is well known that masturbation is rife amongst boys of that age, and Weir knows of it. I would also have thought Dead Actors Society was a more appropriate title in that for the most part it’s nothing to do with poetry and everything to do with acting.

      I wait outside Dr Milroy’s office and phone shoot Karen, two doors down, sitting on a steel chair outside Krotow’s room, looking accusingly in my direction, willing me not to go into Milroy’s room, but to follow her. The shot I use is a low, shallow focus, knee shot. The corridor recedes with her on the right so that the shot favors her side and runs out of frame. She is the first to go in, so I do decide to follow behind her, holding my phone at shoulder height, hoping to God the battery will last, and keeping the angle level to give the effect of an ever filling, unbalanced three-shot.

      Krotow says: “What’s this?” as we’re entering; but Karen, who is so very nervous as to be showing an eye tooth on the left side which is clamping down firmly on her bottom lip, where it’s leaving a red mark like a cold sore, is quick to reply:

      “Professor Krotow . . .” she says.

      Julian Krotow, who is obviously not just a Joan of Arc specialist but also a Blues Brothers fan; he is obviously a Blues and ’60s freak, loves the The Doors for example according to the poster on the wall (Jim Morrison, left) and Jefferson Airplane (who knows? right), pulls his wiry terrier hair back into a knot. His face covered in what is a clipped white growth and his lips are fleshy like they belong to John Belushi. Like Belushi didn’t die via speed ball, leaving Dan Aykroyd to screw up the sequel, also starring John Goodman, with Aretha Franklin returning from the original. And Krotow—who I don’t know personally because my last university was Roeford and here in Southport I don’t know anyone except Karen who is also a Roeford graduate—I close up on.

      Though he isn’t saying it in so many words, I personally can hear him say to my phone: “Don’t take any notice of all these old books, I’d rather be listening to ‘My Baby Must be something something’ by, uh, Puff Adder.’”

      I hear him say, I’m sure: “I’d rather be smoking something stronger than Marlboro Lights, off the record, and listening to . . .” who? “. . .”Rod Stewart!”

      “Well, as long as it doesn’t turn into a circus,” he says aloud.

      “No sir,” I say, propping in the corner beside some sort of ancient lance and his red academic gown with white fur collar hung on a hat stand. “No. It’s a film. Director’s rules! Definitely.”

      He slumps down into his chair. It is strangely low backed and wooden. There is, I now notice, something said to be “A Fragment of the Thigh Bone of Jacopo di Ronc” in a silver framed glass case on his desk. There is a statuette on the window sill of a naked guy, draped partly in what looks like a toga and labeled Vesailus. There is a collection of brown plastic half cups from the Cafe-bar. There are exam papers in pink piles on the floor around the room. There’s the smell of wet wool, an open packet of Anadine on the floor, a briefcase with its clasp twisted and a sticker worn across it with a picture of a screaming child, looking like Kenny in South Park, in a red crossed circle like something out of Ghostbusters. Being very anti-noise, anti-child or anti-child-abuse; I can’t work out which.

      “Geez,” I say, involuntarily.

      He adjusts his tie, which is blue paisley to his jacket’s bleached grey, and asks Karen to explain what it is that she wants to do.

      “To the camera,” he says, “if you want.” And I notice his lips when he smiles are cracked and pale and that his teeth are bone white behind them, but unevenly collapsed onto each other, and the highpoints of his cheeks, which are pinkish, are positively glowing.

      Using the light from the window as backlight, which is fairly atmospheric, I catch the left side of Krotow, and Karen full frontal. I turn Krotow into a silhouette and Karen’s nervousness, which has spread into her fingers which now barumbas across the synopsis she has brought with her, I tilt myself towards.

      I keep saying to myself that basic rule: “Form follows function. Form follows function . . .”

      I film the two of them like it’s Basic Instinct (in which the cinematography of Jan De Bont is truly a treat, I might add), while Karen reads from the synopsis she’s prepared on two sheets of legal paper she typed up last night, by the bay window in the pale moon light (this, of course, only being suggested).

      I think to myself: “There are things you can do in a situation like this to increase the tension. Scorsese says: ‘Don’t split the screen.’ He says: ‘Don’t go flying with the Rolling Stones.’ ‘Don’t crash cut. Never.’” But then again Scorsese also made Kundun, so what would he know?

      Now I’m catching bits of conversation.

      Karen is saying, somewhat tonguingly, I think: “What was that stuff again about Joan of Arc and the butterflies?” (something like that).

      To which Krotow comments: “Oh, Karen! Babe you are Madonna, you know. You are that famous singer whose name is Madonna.”

      Okay, so maybe I don’t hear this at all; but the battery warning symbol is showing and I have other things to worry about. Namely: is the battery running out before I get back to our flat for a new one? Like: I am supposed to be a professional here and this shouldn’t happen. Like: I bet this never happened to Rodriguez, ever. The light flickers red, indicating my time is nearly up.

      I notice, suddenly in my panic, a Roxy Cinema flyer for the Festival of the Waters Film Festival, pinned up right on the wall behind Krotow.

      9

      Goethe once wrote (and Professor Alton of the USP Department of Languages, Cultures and Civilizations quoted it, photocopied)—that’s Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the famous poet, novelist, playwright, natural philosopher and diplomat, author of The Sorrows of Young Werther—Goethe once wrote:

      What a man notices and feels about himself seems to me the least part of him. He is more inclined to see what he lacks than what he has, to remark what worries than what delights him and enlarges his mind. Soul and body forget about СКАЧАТЬ