Camera Phone. Brooke Biaz

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СКАЧАТЬ of himself and his past will therefore mostly note what is cramping and painful.

      (Library Shelf: Short Loan: Lecture Notes—A. P. Alton “An Introduction to European Philosophy”)

      10

      As we leave Krotow’s office, me tracking back, Karen is happier than she’s been all day. She says she doesn’t want to wait around while I ruin my life. She says this quite brightly, I think. She says if I want to get hooked up with Milroy, and won’t listen to her, then she just can’t wait around to watch it happen. She says:

      “You know, you’re wrong about Julian Krotow. I happen to know he’s treasurer of the Film Festival Committee. So he’s hardly ‘anti-film,’ Ciaran, or whatever you say. If that’s what you’re thinking.”

      “Whatever,” I say.

      But then she says she wants to go to the library to meet Colleen and then to the Student Union where they’ll plan Satanic rituals and choose the people they want to sacrifice.

      Of course, I don’t actually catch all of this, but my camera phone is capable of picking up undercurrents, sub-surface things that would otherwise go unnoticed, and I tell Karen I’ll see her in the bar at two, and if she wants to bring Colleen then that’s her business, but to my mind she is no more than an extra and should probably get on with her own life.

      I stop at Steve Milroy’s door (on which I note, a little ominously I admit, there is a poster of Gérard Depardieu), and I knock loudly.

      When behind the door a voice seems to say “Hi! Hi!” I think I’ll just forget the whole thing and go out onto the front lawn where a band is now playing “Solved” by Unbelievable Truth, though it’s not Unbelievable Truth only a band that wants to sound like them. But, figuring this is just being spooked by Karen’s increasingly anti-film, anti-life, anti-us attitude, I don’t go.

      Instead, I turn around so my phone is catching the corridor receding behind me and I go into the office. Backwards.

      The effect (though I’ll have to check this in the rushes) is that the whole film seems to be disappearing into a new scene, a new low key, without cutting at all. And I think:

      “I should have thought of doing this earlier!”

      The corridor becomes bright and hard. Keeping it in focus, I catch the edge of the door with my left shoe, and push. The door sweeps across the frame from right to left. And slaps closed. The venetians are half open. The shot looks dark over all, with a few highlight areas (see: Michael Ribager: On Directing).

      “Dr Milroy?” I ask.

      I’m continuing to phone film the back of the door, which is quite grainy actually, and on which there is a dimly lit cute calendar from Pete’s Pets featuring a muppet (name unknown), a rainbow colored scarf that hangs down to the floor, a peeling sticker for Classic Coke, a poster of Jean Harlow.

      I pan slowly to the right. A half turn. Then left. The bookshelves provide a rapid line of composition, leaving behind the door in the direction of the window and passing such absolute winners as An Introduction to Communication by Gerhl and Wesserman, past Radical Underworld by Iain McCalman, then his Festival of the Waters Special Film Award, shaped as it is like a bronze wave, then several novels by John Updike, Modern Myth in the Films of Jesús Franco. Light reading, right? until I’m meeting the glow through the venetians straight on, which is splitting the frame into seven identical widths, and I can make out Milroy.

      There’s an obvious flaw in all this which I cannot immediately pinpoint. I think perhaps I have done something wrong. The linearity of the thing. The way the action rises. The sense of thematic purpose. But for the moment there’s Dr Steven Milroy: his head thrown right back as he lies collapsed in his chair, his head in a clear plastic bag, his neck in some kind noose hung from the curtain rail, and completely buck naked.

      two

      Beauty and the Beast

      1991, 84m, Color

      Animated/Musical/Romance, G/U

      Walt Disney Productions/Silver Screen Partners IV (U.S.)

      1

      Phone facts, some interesting differences of opinion:

      The rapid changes in cellular and wireless technology combined with the large number of phone available means it is more important than ever to review cell phone comparisons and ratings. The comparisons show differences in mobile phones, including information about different phones’ features and capabilities. With so many new features available, it is easier to observer the differences between various models when they are placed side by side in a chart.

      (http://www.cellphonefacts.com/ Last accessed: 25th December 2008)

      Alternatively:

      •An estimated 250 to 300 million cell phones are being used in the U.S.

      •The average American cell phone user owns three (3) or more expired cell phones.

      •The average US consumer only uses their current cell phone for 12 to 18 months.

      •Over 70% of Americans do not know that they can recycle their old cell phone.

      •In a recent survey, only 2.3% of Americans recycled their old cell phones and 7% threw them in the garbage.

      •Cell phones contain precious metals such as gold and silver.

      •A total of 500 million cell phones weighing an estimated 250,000 tons are currently stockpiled and awaiting disposal.

      •Cell phones contain numerous substances that need to be disposed of in a safe and efficient manner.

      (http://www.earthday.gatech.edu/Cell%20Phone%20FACTS.pdf, accessed: 1 January 2009)

      2

      I’m still thinking I can get to The Roxy before seven where they’re showing The Last House on the Left, which is probably my favorite Wes Craven picture and, to my mind, far better, structurally, than Deadly Blessing and certainly better than Scream (because it’s based, he says, on Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Ingemar Bergman, that is). I believe strongly in occasional stylization. How else can subjectivity be established?

      At the Roxy the experience is strictly of the old school. One “screen.” “Stalls.” “Dress Circle.” Screenings SE7EN ’til DAWN. But The Roxy! Hell, it’s like Notre Dame. Like Notre Dame in Paris. Like?

      I don’t know. Like the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Agrigento, Sicily (?). In the foyer (which has on the wall near the ticket office a brass plaque stating OFFICIALLY OPENED BY MRS W. B. DAVSON, WIDOW OF THE LATE WILLIAM DAVSON, SCREEN ACTOR, WHOSE PERFORMANCES IN FILMS SUCH AS MY LITTLE DARLING DELIGHTED THE WORLD, JULY 7TH 1947, which glitters as I close up on it and should, if I reshoot, be lensed with a polarizing filter) there is a bar which is long and made of genuine mahogany, with a real marble spill and brass railing. There is a chandelier the size of a double bed, made of eighteen hundred Viennese crystal drops, that turns the ceiling, filmed with me on my back on the mosaic floor spelling out the words LEGENDS OF STARS, into a night sky in which several galaxies have collided. On the wall are life-size photographs of everyone who ever was (Garbo, Flynn, Grant, Powell & СКАЧАТЬ