Syndrome E

10

The film restorer Claude Poignet lived on Rue Léon-Gambetta, a mishmash of unrelated businesses and brightly colored shops. At one end, the street opened onto the Wazemmes covered market, with its intermingling of ethnicities, and at the other it plunged into the students’ quarter, bordering Rue de Solférino and Boulevard Vauban. In his diminutive dwelling, crushed between a Chinese restaurant and a smoke shop, the septuagenarian didn’t look like much. Bifocals in cordovan frames, ratty burgundy wool V-neck sweater, wrinkled checked shirt: was he a restorer of old films or an old film restorer?

“I’d say an old restorer of old films. I quit about twenty years ago, because of my eyes. Light doesn’t get through as well as it used to. And cinema is first and foremost about light, you know? No light, no cinema.”

Lucie penetrated farther into one of those old buildings from northern France, with living room tiles cemented in place, high walls, and visible pipes. A kettle was heating on the gas stove, giving off an acrid stink of burned coffee. When Claude filled the two cups, Lucie thought he was pouring liquid coal. Though normally she took hers without sugar, she plunked in two cubes before even tasting.

“So? Were you able to autopsy our short?”

Poignet smiled. His teeth were like the décor: one hundred percent rustic. Still, behind his wrinkles he still bore traces of a man who must have been a real charmer, like a young Redford.

“That’s a real policeman’s term, ‘autopsy.’ How did a beautiful young woman like you end up chasing down criminals?”

“Probably something to do with thrills. You get yours from looking at films, me from looking at streets. When you get down to it, we’re both trying to fix something that doesn’t work.”

She forced herself to swallow her coffee—truly vile, even revolting, even with all the sugar in the world. An Angora cat came to purr between her legs, and she petted it gently.

“Have you known Ludovic a long time?”

“His father and I were in the army together. I gave Ludovic his first projector, more than twenty years ago—a 9.5 mm from Pathé that I was getting rid of for lack of space. Already back then, he used to hold screenings on the walls of his father’s house. It’s really a shame what’s happened to him. His mother died of an illness before he was nine. He’s a good boy, you know?”

“I know, and I’m here because I want to help him. Can you tell me about the film?”

“Come with me.”

They walked up narrow, creaking stairs that clearly showed the age of the house. Portraits by the dozens hung on the walls. Not of movie stars, but of an unknown woman, whose delicately made-up face caught the light magnificently. Clearly the traces of an obsession, a love lost much too soon. Once upstairs, they walked down a dimly lit hall with worn floorboards.

“To the left is the lab where I develop. I still occasionally film with an old 16 mm, just for kicks. I’ll exit this world with a roll of film in my hands, believe you me.”

He opened the darkroom, revealing movie cameras, reels of film stock, and jugs of chemicals, and gently pushed back the door.

“We’re going in back.”

The last room opened onto a veritable laboratory devoted to the world of cinema. An editing table, viewer, loupes, the latest computer equipment, and a film scanner. There were also a number of more archaic instruments: scissors, glue, splicer, adhesive tape, rulers. Lucie had been right to use the word “autopsy.” He must have sliced up celluloid here the way they dissected bodies. There were even the delicate white gloves, which the restorer put on.

“Soon, none of this will exist anymore. Fully digital HD cameras will do away with good old 35 mm. The magic of movies is being lost, I can tell you that. Is a film that doesn’t skip still a film?”

The reel in question was mounted on a vertical rotating axis, on the left side of the viewing monitor. About three feet of film stretched from there into a central housing that served as both magnifier and screen, then exited toward a take-up reel. The only light in the room was from a neon tube.

“Let’s begin at the beginning. Come closer, dear miss. Permit me to say that you’re quite lovely.”

He wasn’t exactly tongue-tied, this one. Lucie smiled and went to stand beside him, facing the viewer.

“How should we do this?” he asked. “Simple or complicated?”

“Feel free to go into detail—I’m new at this, even though I love movies. When you were giving Ludovic the projector, I was watching my first horror film, alone in the house at eleven at night. It was The Exorcist. My best and worst memory.”

“The Exorcist… One of the most profitable productions in cinema history. William Friedkin, who directed the first one, had subjected his actors to abominable conditions. Sudden gunshots next to their ears, freezing cold rooms to get more out of them. These days, actors have to have their creature comforts.”

Lucie looked at him affectionately. He spoke with passion, just like her father when he talked lures and fishing rods. She’d been so small then.

“So, our film…”

“Right, our film. First of all, the format: 16 mm. It was shot entirely with a shoulder camera. Probably a Bolex. Light, portable, the mythic camera of the 1950s. Oddly enough, filmed at fifty frames a second, as the loss leader indicates, when the standard was twenty-four. But the Bolex allowed for this sort of whimsy, and so could satisfy all sorts of requirements.”

“Is this the original copy?”

“Oh, no, no. The original, what comes out of the camera, is exposed on film as a negative, just like a photograph. Here you’ve got the positive print, what the eye sees. You always work with positives, which also act as a backup copy. This way, you can cut them up and manipulate them without worrying.”

He advanced the film by cranking a handle. On the screen they saw, at the bottom of the strip, the word “S Å F E T Y.”

“This word written on the leader, ‘safety,’ indicates that the support of the emulsion is acetate, so no danger. Until the fifties, it was still mainly nitrate, which is flammable. You surely remember the scene where Philippe Noiret catches fire inside the projection booth in Cinema Paradiso, because he opens a canister containing a reel of nitrate film. Mythic.”

Lucie nodded, though she’d never seen that film. Italian classics weren’t really her style, unlike American thrillers of the 1950s, which she devoured with a passion.

“The black dot just above the A shows that the film stock was manufactured in Canada. It’s the international symbol used by Kodak.”

Canada… Ludovic had said he’d unearthed the reel in the attic of some Belgian collector. And today, that same reel turned up in France. These anonymous films must have had the same life as collectible stamps or coins, traveling from country to country. Lucie filed away in her mind that she should perhaps question the collector’s son, if it turned out to be worth it. She had to admit that this minor investigation, undertaken for personal reasons and off the books, was starting to excite her. Claude seemed to tap into her thoughts.

“These films travel and get lost. More than fifty percent of the productions from before World War II have disappeared. Can you imagine? And among them are some pure masterpieces that are now probably rotting in some attic. Films by Méliès, Chaplin, a ton of John Fords as well.”

“Do we know when this one is from?”

Claude Poignet turned the handle. When the very first image appeared, completely black with the white circle, he showed her the bottom of the strip. Lucie noticed the presence of two symbols, and , just above the sprocket holes, like numbers.

“Kodak used a code composed of geometric figures to date its filmstrips. They reused the same code every twenty years.”

He handed Lucie a laminated sheet, a kind of specifications chart.

“Look at this grid. The cross and the square show that the positive was printed either in 1935, 1955, or 1975. Given the condition of the film and the actress’s outfit in the opening scenes, this is definitely from the year 1955.” He jabbed his index finger at the screen. “This number, here, which shows up every twenty frames, is what we call the key code. It identifies the manufacturer—Kodak in this case—the type of film, the serial number of the roll, and a four-digit suffix that individualizes each frame. In short, one could know where and when this roll of film came out of the lab. However, I can guarantee you from the outset that you’ll get nowhere with these numbers—it goes back too far, and chances are, as things go, that the original lab no longer exists.”

He stared at Lucie with a satisfied look. His glasses considerably enlarged his eyeballs. Lucie smiled back at him.

“Shall we deal with the content?”

The man’s face darkened. He immediately lost his good humor.

“I should have said so at the start, but this film is the work of a genius and a psychopath. Both united in the same twisted mind.”

Lucie felt excitement grow within her; she couldn’t help it. In the middle of her vacation, she found herself in the rear corner of a workshop, tipping into the same sordid world that she encountered every day in the squad room.

“In other words?”

“There are images in here that are… disturbing, to say the least. You must have felt it deep within yourself, without really understanding why.”

“Yes. A feeling of unease. Especially the scene with the eye at the beginning, which gives you chills right from the get-go.”

“Pure special effects, of course. The sliced eye is from an animal, maybe a dog. But that scene mainly shows that the eye, in itself, is just a common sponge that soaks up images, a smooth surface that doesn’t understand meanings. And that, in order to see better, you have to pierce that smooth surface. Go past it. Get inside the film…”

Claude Poignet turned the handle until he could show under the loupe the image of a completely naked woman. Well-endowed bust, provocative pose—it was the same actress from the beginning of the film, the one who had her eye slit. She was standing in a dark décor, with little contrast. On this still image, dozens of hands jutted out from behind to grope her curves and her sex. You couldn’t see the actors, who must have been dressed all in black, like the onstage accomplices of a magician. The restorer then nudged the film forward one frame by moving the handle. They returned immediately to the little girl, sitting on her swing. Her face was now in the exact place of the woman’s, to the centimeter.

“The twenty-fifth frame, as they say, though here it would be more like the fifty-first. The movie’s crammed full of them. It dates from 1955, even though the subliminal process was officially used for the first time in 1957, by James Vicary, an American publicist. I have to admit, it’s pretty impressive.”

Lucie knew the principle behind subliminal images. They flashed by so quickly that your eye didn’t have time to notice them, even though your brain had “seen” them. The cop recalled that François Mitterrand had used the technique in 1988. The face of the presidential candidate had appeared in the credits of the evening news, but not long enough for viewers to perceive it consciously.

“So the man who made this movie was a precursor?”

“Someone very gifted, in any case. The great Georges Méliès had invented everything by way of special effects and image manipulation, but not subliminals. And let’s not forget this was the fifties, when our knowledge of the brain and the impact of images on the mind was still fairly primitive. A friend of mine works in neuromarketing—I’ll give you his address. On top of which, I’m going to show him this film, if it’s all right with you. With the equipment he’s got, he might be able to find some interesting things that my eyes missed.”

“Absolutely, please do.”

Poignet rummaged through a basket filled with business cards.

“Here, this is his card, just in case. He can tell you about subliminal images better than I can—the brain, imagery, its impact on the mind. Do you realize how much they manipulate us today, without our even being aware of it? Do you have children?”

Lucie’s features softened.

“Yes. Twin girls, Clara and Juliette. They’re eight.”

“So you’ve probably already shown them Bernard and Bianca—The Rescuers.”

“Like every other mom.”

“That cartoon contains a subliminal image of a naked woman hiding in a window, at one point. A small personal quirk of the animator’s, no doubt. Don’t worry, it won’t have any effect on your children’s minds—the image is too tiny! The fact remains that no one ever saw it, in all the years that cartoon was being shown.”

The conversation was turning dubious. Lucie stared at the image of the nude starlet. Provocative, open. A pure scandal for the time.

“How did the director insert subliminal images in his film?”

“Did you ever make collages in school? It’s the same idea. He first shot the scenes of the nude actress on another roll. Then he took the frames he wanted from roll A and spliced them into roll B, simple cut and paste. When it’s all done, you dup the film, and you end up with what we’ve got here. A ton of famous directors used this process to heighten the impact of certain scenes. Hitchcock in Psycho, Fincher in Fight Club, and a lot of horror movies as well. But all that was later. At the time, absolutely no one would have suspected the presence of these images.”

“And what about the other subliminal images in this film? What are they like?”

“Salacious, pornographic, sticky with sweat and sex. There are also some rather nauseating and risqué lovemaking scenes, with men in masks. And toward the end, you come across some murders.”

“Murders?”

Lucie felt a sudden tension in her muscles. She’d already heard about snuff movies. Murders captured on film, tapes passed around hand to hand in alternative circles. Could she be dealing with one of those—a snuff film more than half a century old?

Claude slowly cranked the handle. The time counters clicked forward. The restorer paused at each hidden image. Certain nude scenes were especially daring, not very appealing, approaching morbid. No question that at a time when a woman could scarcely show herself in a bathing suit, this would have been shocking.

“The bloodier sequences come more toward the end. The scene with the girl and the bull is crammed full of them. Excuse me, I need to turn this for a few seconds—my automatic rewind broke. This film lasts a good thirteen minutes, or more than three hundred feet of film. Tell me, did you and Ludovic use to go out? He’s always been attracted to your type of woman.”

“What type is that?”

“Kind of like Jodie Foster.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It is.”

“Uh… About the scene where the bull stops dead in front of the girl—how did they do that? Special effects?”

Lucie clasped her hands behind her back. It was strange, but very few films had left so strong an impression on her. She felt she could describe every scene of this one in detail, as if they were etched in her gray matter.

“Probably. But the animal actually was slaughtered at one point. As for the kid facing down the bull, I’ll have to analyze the images frame by frame. He might have shot the bull by itself, rewound the stock without exposing it, then shot the girl by herself, using superimposition. But that seems highly complicated, and if so, he did a damn good job for the time, given that computers didn’t even exist yet and the equipment was still pretty rudimentary.”

“And did you see how dilated the girl’s pupils were? Could they have drugged her?”

“You don’t drug actresses. There are special products for movies and special effects that can do that perfectly well. They already had them in the fifties.”

He wound more slowly. Lucie saw images succeed each other on the viewer, the movement starting up and varying depending on the speed of the rotation. They got to the image of the pasture surrounded by its fence. Claude wound the film more slowly still, then stopped on a shocking image. Grass, the naked actress blatantly spread-eagled on the ground, her hair flowing around her like biblical serpents. A blackish, circular wound gaped from her belly like a well. Lucie’s hand flew to her mouth.

“Oh, Jesus!”

“You said it.”

Claude moved aside, picked up the filmstrip, and held it up to the neon light.

“Look… It’s really well done, because, just like the pornographic frames, the subliminal image is in the same tones as the other images. The same dominant tints, the same contrasts, the same light. The pasture is different, but not flagrantly so. When the film ran at normal speed, there was no break in tone, so you noticed absolutely nothing. The brain, on the other hand, got the full impact.”

Lucie leaned in as close as she could to the film. To think those images had crossed through her sight without her knowing it. A few feet later, on the translucent strip, she saw the same woman positioned like a corpse. Then again and again after that, as Claude unspooled the film between his fingers.

“At each of the actress’s appearances, roughly every two hundred frames, there’s an additional wound, spreading from the black circle on her stomach. As if in temporal continuity. Until it forms…”

He started cranking the handle again, halted on the unbelievable scene in which the bull stood facing the girl. The following image was completely different.

“…an eye.”

Lucie had trouble understanding what she’d got hold of. Little by little, someone had lacerated the woman in every direction, radiating from her navel like a sun of gashes. Open wounds on her white body frozen on the thick grass. In appearance, the slits formed a pupil with its iris. A hidden, malevolent eye that observed you, transfixed you, made you want to turn away. To not see anymore. Lucie felt as if she were looking at crime scene photos: the victim of a twisted, sadistic killer.

“That can’t be trick photography,” she stated. “It’s so… real.”

Claude removed his glasses and wiped them with a chamois. Without the magnifying lenses, his face regained its balance, its features refined despite the deep wrinkles.

“That’s the very definition of trick photography when it’s done well. I have no doubt it’s the case here.”

The black and white amplified the violence of the image, dissociated the mutilated body from its environment. Lucie still couldn’t get over it.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because we’re dealing with the movies, dear miss, not with reality. The seventh art is an art of magic, subterfuge, optical illusion. The woman could very well be a model. In able hands, some makeup and a few staging effects would do perfectly well. Nothing is real. One thing for certain, our director seems to be obsessed with eyes and the effect of images on the mind. A precursor, as you said, when today we see to what extent images inhabit our lives and flood it with violence. Our children confront more than three hundred thousand images a day—do you have any idea what that means? And do you know how many of them are related to violence, death, and war?”

The eyes of the woman Lucie privately called “the victim” stared up at the sky, devoid of any sign of life. A bit shaken, the cop turned back to face Claude.

“Do you think this film was ever shown in a theater?”

“I doubt it. The condition of the sprocket holes, especially near the beginning of the film, is impeccable. This copy, at least, was never shown on a large scale.”

“So why the subliminal images, then? Why all that staging?”

“Private projections, perhaps? A film that the director showed to a few select individuals? Who knows. A personal fantasy? You know, subliminals can be incredibly strong. They’re a direct line between the image and the subconscious, unmediated by any form of censorship. They take an image and jam it straight into your brain—bam! An ideal way to convey violence, sex, and perversity by alternate routes. These days, that all happens online, in visual and audio. Bands that pass subliminal messages in their songs, for instance. Perhaps our director enjoyed that kind of wild idea? When I think that it was only 1955… You’ve got to hand it to him—the guy’s no lightweight.”

Claude switched off the screen. Lucie couldn’t take her eyes off the reel. Thousands of images one after the other, imprinting life or death. She imagined a gleaming, magnificent river that churned up in its depths a host of invisible, deadly parasites.

“Is that all we can get out of this film?”

Claude hesitated. “No. I think it’s a vehicle for something else. For starters, why fifty frames a second? And what’s the point of that white circle in the upper right? It’s present on every frame. On top of which”—he shook his head, lips pinched—“there are those areas of fog, parts of the screen that are very dark, that omnipresent dullness, like a kind of film over the lens. The cameraman seems to be playing with contrast, light, things unsaid. I felt the same anxiety as you when I watched this. The porno images, or even the ones of the woman being tortured, aren’t enough to create such a powerful unease. And besides, let’s not forget that Ludovic is in a psychiatric ward because of this film. There must be something I’ve missed. I have to look at it all again very carefully. Every frame, every bit of every image. But that could take days…”

Lucie couldn’t manage to shake the vision of that maimed woman. A fat, black eye, like a gaping wound on her abdomen. She might have been holding the proof of a murder. Even if the case was more than fifty years old, she wanted to get to the bottom of it. Or at least understand.

“How could we find that woman?”

Claude didn’t appear surprised by the question. After all the films he’d handled, most of them lost or anonymous, he must have been used to this kind of request.

“I think you’d have to look in France. She’s wearing a Chanel suit, the 1954 model, in other words one year before the film was developed. My mother had the same one.”

Shot in France, developed in Canada? Or else, had the actress moved there—assuming she even was an actress? And why? How had someone convinced her to appear in this sick film? One more oddity to add to the pile, in any case.

“Large bust, pear-shaped hips… this is smack dab in the Bardot era, when filmmakers finally dared show women. Her face doesn’t ring any bells, but I can contact a film historian who specializes in the fifties. He’s in touch with all the film archives and revival houses in the country. The porno and erotica milieu was very closed off and censored at the time, but there was a circuit even so. If this woman ever appeared in any other films, my friend will find her.”

“Can you make me photocopies of the subliminal images off the film?”

“I can do you one better—I’ll digitize the whole thing for you. My 16-mil scanner can churn through two thousand frames an hour in low res. Don’t worry, the quality will be excellent, as long as you don’t try to show it on a movie screen. When I’m done, I’ll put it on a server, and you can download it from your computer.”

Lucie thanked her host warmly and dropped her business card in the basket.

“Call me as soon as you find out anything.”

Claude nodded and squeezed her hand between both of his.

“I’m doing this for Ludovic. It was thanks to his parents that I met my wife. Her name was Marilyn, like the other one…” He sighed, a sigh full of nostalgia. “I’d really like to know why this damn film drove him blind.”

Once outside, Lucie glanced at her watch. Almost noon. Her meeting with Claude Poignet had made her feel sick. She thought about those subliminal images, inside her now against her will. She felt them vibrating somewhere inside her, without knowing precisely where. The scene of the sliced eyeball had shocked her, but at least she’d been aware of seeing it. But the others… Just perverted filth that had been lodged in her brain, without any possible defense.

Who had seen this insanity? Why had it been made? Like Claude Poignet, she sensed that the cursed filmstrip still harbored sinister secrets.

Her head full of questions, she went to retrieve her car at the République parking garage. Behind the wheel, before turning the ignition, she took out young Szpilman’s want ad, which Ludovic had given her: “For sale: old films, 16 mm, 35 mm, silent and sound. All genres, short and full length, 1930s and after. 800+ reels, including 500 spy thrillers. Make offer on site.” The son might know something. It might be worth making the trip to Liège. But first, she was going back to the hospital to have lunch with her mother and Juliette—though calling that hospital food “lunch” was a stretch.

She was already missing her little daughter something fierce.