ON, the light came back again. It's me. The fuckin' self. I was upside-down, my body was numb above me, mangled in some crazy way like I'd become part of a collapsed machine. My head--or the place I thought of as HERE--was putting out a mechanical ringing jitter noise--and a thing about sixteen yards out in front of the pain and noise was my face, which was frozen, and crushed against a window. On the other side of the window was white packed snow. When there's All White, you're blind. It was white--but one ray of light beamed at the very top left corner--a dark beard around a mouth. I knew I wasn't thinking straight. That beard was a ray of light, but I was mixed-up. I thought the beard was a negative sound, a backward roar like silence. A long time later I heard, thought, The great god of Force-and-Motion is dead beside me. I was the god of What-It-Means. There was a job I was supposed to do, and a thing in the way, preventing me doing. I couldn't see the thing, it was in the way of itself too. I knew, by knowing, that there were also smaller gods: of Sound, of Light, Appearances, Connection-Between-Minutes, Structure, Speech, all around me, all dead, behind and above me.

Every idea now shone out of the one remaining word, the word that was in the way. I tried to focus on that. Instantly it threw off thick clouds of pictures: MINCE PIES. A high purple-black cliff of silk underwear. PERFUME BOTTLES. A street of retail stores melted like chocolate. It was--SUCKINGS OF COCK--it was right here, I felt it all, it was all mine, the word: extravagant Hate, and anger expanded me out and out away to total indifference. I did not care who I was. I didn't want to remember. The fucking world was a fucking bunch of things; facing a thing of white, I refused to look at the beard, beard made me sick, it was the chaos and death of What-It-Means, it had caused this. I thought of ICE. Outer space filled with ICE, planets stuck in white flowing rock, sun and all the suns and stars chunks of black ash inside big white glacial nothing. Everything was a single thing. No clutter and crap, no noise. If ice is all there is say no more, ice is legitimate. Words, bodies, pieces of brain with heroism written in them, all freeze up, go crystal, shatter. Needles of ice puncture and destroy whatever used to be, bleed it white, and what used to be is rescued, it doesn't have to be itself any more.

I closed my eyes, feeling kind of better.

The nurse came and went.

The planet of ice drifted, drifted, past thick Victorian drapes and some gee-gaws on an ugly end table. And it stopped. It stopped like the flickerer flicked off, the ball went hollow--back on, full ice--off--on. The white pain, and the lonely blackness, combined. Together, averaged out, they made one steady anguish. It was all right. You could live with it. But I still wanted inside the ball.

The towering grey naked woman flickered forward and kicked the planet. Then it happened again--I don't mean she kicked it a second time, I mean the same kick happened over. On her face: hysterical glee! Ball bounced past the drapery, boom, cut. She popped back four feet and approached again--it's not glee at all, but tension, crazy grinning fear focused on this white ball,

her terror as she awkwardly stepped forward to kick was knowing she'd have to do it again forever, she can never kick it away.

I tested it out. I kept running it. Elmore James started singing "Shake Your Money-Maker." You know, I come from a family of scientists. "Hey baby, lookit." She popped back, ready to kick, guitar grinding. "Say honey." Kick, cut, reset. "Yo bitch, right here." Nothing. She can't step out of character; gray programmed legs that never get dressed again. She's this thing. Things accept whatever happens. But dead lady, I know you can escape, I found out how. You leave in the dark, in between frames. That's where we're OK. Here in the flicker there's always a way out.

So I smiled and said cut. But it wasn't escape. I was still spinning--but it'd all gone black. Like a rifle had crushed the back of my skull. Black spun. I whimpered and tried it again, I yelled cut.

Inside a tomb. Cold white marble. White lit-up dead boys' faces in rows. "Cut!"

A world without me, a street of strolling couples, a city, without me. I didn't know what else to do. I was scared of the long shot underneath it all--the window with the snow and my face mangled, frozen beard, where it all hurt the most. That shot goes on forever. But I didn't dare cut farther away from myself either. This was the "City Back East" in old Westerns, generic "old" props being dragged through the special Hollywood zoneclean, lit-up, nothing means anything, it's tense and alert. The extras strolled on at precision intervals, thinly making a bustling town. Hats, horses, parasols. You never saw faces.

Somebody yelling Let me out.

Music over: solemn violins, dozens of violins, bleak fugue: Metamorphosen. Slow death. The noise of the city gets horribly magnified for a couple of seconds, a hissing and clattering old soundtrack. When the austere music comes back it's a relief.

Same guy who was yelling now moans: I see.

    white    screen
    black    room
    white    sphere
    black    mind
    white    flame
    black    tomb

present:

The John Symmes Story

Produced and Directed by

(found object)

Post-production and special effects

(the dead)

Title roll:

"1815, Washington D.C. Only Hollywood is strong enough to jam the breath of all the dead people ever photographed into each pair of living lungs on earth, and force the two frames to overlap."

A wild-eyed comedian in a top hat running down a street pushing a perambulator.

The wide river is frozen over, seeming killed, complete ice that never moves again. Music over, a dirge, "Happy Birthday to You" by a string quartet. The shot seems endless.

Voiceover: "This is the story of my great-great-grandfather. Show everything, and in the proper order. The honored visionary and film pioneer who valiantly" something, there's a long blast of rock-and-roll guitar so you don't hear the rest.

Closeup on a fish frozen under the surface of the ice.

Young Don Ameche in black-and-white, perfectly well-lit and pleasant, sitting against a bivouac hut, his nose in a book while the rest of the American army runs yelling around him, getting ready for action. Don Ameche's brilliantined hair, gleaming, a slab of beauty. "Pseudo-science," says the narrator; "I love this man. Mathematics" Ameche in a tuxedo, standing in a room crowded with men in tuxedos, suddenly faints dead away, "and narcolepsy." A still shot of a tuxedo front, from neck to waist. Slowly the white of the shirt glows into overexposure, burning-out the black jacket, whiter and whiter into all-white. The sound is a roomful of people laughing.

A room of solemn fat men in chairs. The silver pitcher hits the lip of the glass four times as the water pours. With his shaky hand Ameche gulps down half the glass. He's white with anger; a strand of hair falls down in his face. Then he goes back to his text, and as he starts talking we see closeups of the hands of the audience doing fidgety things: pulling out a pocketwatch, folding up a program, drumming fat fingers on fat thighs. "I declare therefore, that the earth is hollow." A Charles Ives-sounding brass band is playing way far off. "The earth is hollow. Habitable within! Containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other. And that it is open at the poles. " A kid on the floor is playing with a set of little boxes. "I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am prepared to explore the hollow if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking!"

Silence. The kid looks up scared; cut to black. Then Ameche, not moving, glaring out at them all like a wildeyed parrot.

A white marble crypt in moonlight. Large, blank white; narrow-sculpted fir trees run along it in a row. The trees look like jail bars in the night. "Well Clover, my dear," says an man's voice quietly, "I declare the earth to be exactly the same as this fig. There are thousands of tiny seeds, which are eggs of the Great Tortoise. If I press down with my spoon--observe the lava action..." A rocket hits the top edge of the marble crypt and explodes orange and white. White smoke billows out in the dark, lit by fire. "Of course the fellow has worked out every detail. Primordial whirling forms the concentric spheres within spheres. Sufficient light travels through the huge holes at the North and South Poles to allow life to take hold in the inner surfaces. Oh, it's tropical in there, what with volcanic warmth. This all explains where fish and birds go during the seasons we can't find them, they've migrated through the holes. You see. And all Symmes wants is a few ships to go south to `The Verge' and explore the innards. He wants to go up inside."

The flames sputter and suddenly quit, like sulphur burning itself out; yellowish smoke slides off to the right. The top of the crypt is a long shattered black hole. Between two trees there's a dead black horse with a burning yellow chunk imbedded in its ribs. Faintly, muskets rattle, the shouting of commands: deep chiming bell.

In the room of tuxedo men, Symmes faints again. "Mr. Symmes," says a fluting male voice, "I believe in your work."

The room again; Symmes falling. "Scott," the same fluting voice, "you need a manager. You're totally incapable of selling your work. And what are you, without an audience?"

The kid on the floor.

The TV set's saying something that makes absolutely no sense.

A trash basket on fire at night on the street. The camera's hand-held, right close to the fire, looking straight at the fire while the homeless men trying to keep warm move in and out of the shot. Occasionally the holder of the camera is jostled, and lurches. The holder maintains the stare, as if this burning trash and wood were the real point. A whining voice in the distance, "Attention must be paid--" suddenly drowned by (you hear it for the first time) loud crackling flames, mixed up with radio static. "Fuck your ass," says a homeless man's voice. A woman talking: "Every time I see another man's hands, I look down at my own." No, it's not a woman's voice, it's a high-pitched man's. "I was overfond of science. It's the cause of my never marrying; I still find myself in the dark as regards people. If there could but be a science of the minds of men." Wood slowly going by, dark boards, it could be the deck of an old ship sliding past, or the floor of a smokehouse. No, a chandelier's sideways: it's a ceiling. The red candles in the chandelier blur and rise away, letting heavy red drapes flow sideways. And the narrator, again with the noise of fire: "After he died, Symmes' retinas were removed, and set on a marble plinth, under a little bell jar. The audience filed past for three days. `Under that glass,' said a newspaper, `is a reverse world of sex and honor the like of which may not be seen in Washington again.' He wanted to arrive by ship like a mirror image of himself, like a hero, and declare Symzonia. All green pastels and indirect lighting. And the natives fall to the ground. They award him their mirror-Pocahontas.

"The night Washington burned, John Symmes saw me. Why weren't you with your regiment, John? I accuse you of magic thinking. You'd lost everyone in the dark in the forest. Admit it was on purpose. This was your own war. Where were the Brits? Did those buildings burn themselves, huh? A line of negro's eyes glittered around the flames, it kept you from retreating. Everybody knew the United States was over. You ran between the burnings. War hero. Where'd you throw away your rifle? How'd you cut the hamstring on your horse? You fell in the mud, and thought of comets' orbits. The Capitol dome glared like the top half of a planet, fire roaring up out of the Pole. You ran straight at it because you'd understood something theoretical. When the explosion from the Navy Yard knocked you down, the left side of your face hit a marble step. It said do, and blew into thousands of worlds. To do, and overdo, and jam your idea up into fire, was your version of war. It wrecked you for the world of men. Ever since you saw into the future, you've been unable to tell a cool lie. Afraid the God of Math will laugh again. With a crack of marble he named you Bearer of Fire, you felt his sharp laugh as vaporizing light. The sphere of light shot everywhere. But it couldn't have been a laugh...not a laugh. If Math thought speaking to you was a joke, that must be a parable. A parable's just an equation. Solve it. Here is a round Chinese box. There's hidden springs to open it up. The round boxes inside are each an alternate life, better lives than yours, what you should've been: now you can be. And your finger the finger of the appointed conqueror, woops no, `discoverer, scientist.'

"Usurper god. When the blacks tried to carry you away from the flames, you were out, you were dreaming way past your capacity to dream, yet you started screaming No, you screamed for more light." The camera at the burning basket staggers a last time, and goes black.

Eve Arden, secretary at her desk. A buzzer sounds; she picks up the intercom and a phone voice tells her "Take a letter to John Symmes. Dear Captain, regarding your proposal to conquer hidden worlds. You may be interested to learn that our company manufactures a new device which will enable you to reach your goal without the use of brutality. This simple apparatus for interfering with spells and the web of forces is called `The Movies.' Paragraph."

A still shot of the gray surfaces of midtown New York in the 1940's. "Now, you might feel that the old methods are good enough for you, and why not? After all, look at all we've done: killed the Mayans, put up the World Trade Center, ripped through Panama. But times change. Men aren't men anymore, for one thing. We like to throw power away forcefully. The new rapist cuts off his own cock; that is `fucked.' Do you understand these expressions?

"Paragraph." Bulldozers clearing a tract of land; occasional German subtitles flash past. "Of course, no new technology comes cheap. A film enactment can be as expensive as war, though without most of the deaths. Would you want it any other way? As General Sherman put it, Addition is my least worry. By which he meant dollars plus dollars. Never subtract, just pour it on, burn Atlanta. Concern yourself with multiplication. When the flames spread logarithmically there'll be all-light. Total holocaust will not be a historical fact, it'll be the squared circle. We play with texture to try to prevent it, but we really want it to just blow, because we understand drama above all. If we can film the structure we're planning to explode, then we can strengthen it. X must be overlaid with Y, not placed in opposition. This way the act of destruction becomes more perfect. You might say, more sincere. The movie that's already there (HISTORY) will get overlaid by the new movie we make. Where the old film's black between frames, this new will put light. In turn, get blackened. That's an example of what we call THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE. It's one of our big selling points here at the Godard Research Center."

More Charles Ives, a violin/piano roustabout battle of eccentrics, while we look closely at the Life Magazine photo of the bodies in the ditch at My Lai. When the camera pans up, away from the corpses to the surrounding jungle, Billy Graham's voice comes up over the music, and talks on as we gaze at the lush green nature photograph: "Perhaps it is a good time for each of us to re-evaluate our life. We have all had our My Lais in one way or another, perhaps not with guns, but we have hurt others with a thoughtless word, an arrogant act or a selfish deed..."

Eve Arden's face, concerned, alarmed...she'd better warn somebody...she's picking up the phone...slowly, and flickers slower, her eyelids are coming down in a blink, she's stopped. Her eyes are closed, the hand with the phone is hovering. A black scratch runs through her head, from top to bottom of the frame. "Is she dead?" says a girl softly. "I can never remember. It seems like she should be." She fades slowly to black.

Something's just hit the water, the moonlight flickers concentric circles ringing outward.

Something's just disappeared, the gray sky is empty.

Did a bird fly out of the shot? We missed it. The sky stands there.

Daffy Duck's flat on his black stomach on a tiny island, starving, staring at Elmer Fudd who's dying too, his mind's eye turning Elmer into hot roast suckling pig with a red apple in the mouth...Elmer then sees Daffy as duck l'orange on a platter. Their eyes go huge and ruthless, their teeth ravening. The music is cannibal drums; a voice says "Could you help a Vietnam vet get a meal please? I was in the Navy. God bless you." Woodcut of a skeleton, with the legend "Bones of Edgar Allen Poe. " Aboard a ship, Captain Fudd is at the wheel, saying bitterly "Strawberries--I can prove it to you--" till he's distracted by Bugs in drag with lipstick and a blonde wig, swiveling his tail as he walks past. Fudd zooms off, reappears in a tuxedo offering little red posies. "Why, what a dahling little man you are," pipes Bugs, and as Fudd blushes, a boom glides past, taking Bugs' wig with it. Fudd sees rabbit ears, blushes darker, madder red. Bugs grabs him, gives him a big kiss on the mouth. And Fudd wobbles, staggers, smiling, in love anyhow. Photograph of Poe; a 30's-movie tough-guy-sidekick says "What are ya, a couple of flits?" "Am I in heaven?" says a girl's voice. "Well," says Daffy Duck, "it ain't the Donner Pass!"

Quickly, a color still of a naked woman looking down at a plate of raw meat, both sets of elegant fingertips to her mouth in dismay.

Then Poe again. "My intellect," starts the reader, "for some period prior to this, had been in a condition nearly bordering on idiocy." The camera pulls back from the still of Poe, showing that it's a postcard stuck to a white plaster wall.

Slow, slow dolly to the right; another Poe postcard: written in red ink on the wall below it is "HORRIBLE SUFFERINGS FROM FAMINE."

The reader reads: "Having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet and head, throwing them together with the entrails, into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body, piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth of the month."

The camera, which has panned past another of the postcards, beneath which is written "DEATH BY WATER," then past another, "UNITY," comes to a halt on a third, "EUREKA."

Here it starts panning back to the left. "The whole of the savages were admitted on board in this manner, twenty at a time. We could not get them to approach several very harmless objects--such as the schooner's sails, an egg, an open book, or a pan of flour." The first Poe's been written over in white paint with "The Disintegrative Vibration" The second one's become a black rectangle on the wall, titled "The Narrative of John Cleves Symmes." Then a small print of Muybridge's woman kicking the ball in sixteen stamp-sized frames. Finally a card labelled "IDEAL": an old German porno card of two young Aryan men manipulating each other's bodies like machinery, same ecstatic grin stuck on both faces. We keep panning past, to stop on blank white wall.

"It was very probable, I considered, that some words were written upon that side of the paper which had not been examined--but which side was that?"

Pause. White wall.

"Having rubbed in the phosphorus, a brilliancy ensued as before--but this time several lines of MS. in a large hand, and apparently in red ink, became distinctly visible."

The wall's hit with white light, flickering with the old circle-numbers countdown, 4, 3, 2-- "Blood--"

The wall goes dead black. T.S. Eliot reads:

--Something which we knew must be a dawn--
A different darkness, flowed above the clouds,
And dead ahead we saw, where sea and sky should meet,
A line, a white line, a long white line,
A wall, a barrier, towards which we drove.
My God man there's bears on it.

Paul Muni's face shows, fades back into the dark, and it's dark again.

Sounds of a bar. A guy says "What's your name?" and another replies "What's the difference?" The first says nervously "Well...OK. What do you do?" Loud ice dropping into a tumbler. Then distinct chewing of food, smacking mouth noises. "Tch," goes the first voice coyly: "I steal. "

A New York street at night.