The film is already crumbling to dust when it goes into the projector, it is already burning and it is already filling the small theater and all its stuffing-picked mismatched seats with the tell-tale acrid scent of incinerating machine sex, and Christian Nell, editor-extraordinaire, is already aroused. It is burning because he has re-assembled it in a blind hazeāindeed, one so blind that even now as the white flash burns he is unaware he is aroused or high on cocaine or anythingāwith whatever he could get his hands on, tack and pest control glue and, at the bitter end, his own spit.
On comes the horrible white flash burn at the beginning of the film which makes Nell very nearly think: O GOD WHAT AM I DOING HERE THIS IS SICK HES GONE. Then itās over and he receives his ill-gotten goods in the beautiful, freshly-dead face of Uwe Ahrends.
OO-veh, he drinks down both syllables, that which would turn to mush if he ever tried it out loud and which always had been mush. Like if a sound alone could be too sumptuous and drawn-over-silk for the American palette, same like the man (unknown), the films (banned), his proclivities (prosecuted, ostracized, chemically castrated). Here is the nose unbroken, the eyes unblackened, the narrow girlish chest unrent by blunt nails or teethā¦ only the face which made this impressionable expat shout love all the way to the post office. DEAREST MOTHER STOP I AM NEVER LEAVING BERLIN STOP, not even if a pair of socks costs ten million marks or if the proverbial pendulum hooks hard right, and why should it? Outside the night is young, the girls are laughing, their soft breaths sick with fruit wine, and in a dingy Kreuzberg basement Christian Nell has just snipped the final snip on the newest in an endless line of sure-to-be-gold-certified Uwe Ahrends Motion Pictures. Letās get out the Schnapps and watch one right now.
The film is already burning up the only copy of Eine Kindertragƶdie, the copy Nell threw out and then dug up out of the dumpster and then threw out again and then dug up for little more thanks than a bad sunburn. See in America they toss all your films when youāre found dead in the alley behind the gay bar, but here it isnāt quite so cut-and-dry. That sunburn is peeling now, the skin underneath is red and raw and wet to the touch but Nell isnāt touching it and will not ever again. Like the red-raw-wet cuts on his fingers, it is inconsequential.
Inconsequential as the name of this film Nell knows only by cognates and the lovely-flickering-burning face of Uwe Ahrends, schoolboy-chic. Arms and legs, skin, nitrate pale. SIX-TWO, Nell thinks, the secret knowledge. Up here more like sixteen-twenty, smothering, blocking thought and airway. Damen und Herren, weāve done it, by God, come closer, Uweāshow us that pretty face.
He obliges Nell like he oh-so-frequently does, here he is, the plush lips painted black, the eyes lined gaunter in the gauntness of a skull that would make a Shakespearian propmaster flush with envy. The lips part and here are the white teeth, here is the TONGUE, a sickly gray muscle Nell can still taste. He is giving his lines with such silent avidity, invisible syllablesāsomething something suicide, Nell canāt REMEMBER, well, he had snipped this one up with one hand. And anyway no intertitles yet, somebody elseās job, gone is language, that pesky thing which had kept him from unzipping the back of Uweās head and crawling inside. Du sprichst Deutschāyou speak German, Nell knew that oneāals ob einen Schluck hast, Uwe had said once at a wrap party and made the actresses titter around mugs of cheap beer. A Schluck, what the fuck was that other than the most erotic collection of consonants Nell thought heād ever heard or seen slide from a mouth that was looking at him back. A sip, maybe, a mouthful? A mouthful of what? Didnāt our stupid American boy find out soon enough, and didnāt he learn some vocabulary he could never get from his stern-cut-always-on-time tutor. Bitte, Christianā¦ bitte.
Each new frame burns to nitrate ash as it passes, gone forever. Uwe looks to his right side, then to his left side, then to his right side again. Nitrate ash. Besser ist besser, Nell thinks, suddenly, rare clarity as he seems to recall what it is heās looking at; better is better, or and better, thatās an easy one. Uwe takes a neatly folded letter from the pocket of his delightful TIGHT schoolboy shorts and he strikes a match and he lights it, and the letter burns away, and the film does. Das Leben ist Geschmacksacheā¦
More pretty scraps of Uwe into the great nitrate vault-fire. He looks to his right side and dies, then to his left side, dies, looks forward, andā
ā
ā
ā
ā
He STICKS.
That single sound of the film eating itself vanishes from Nellās ears and leaves only silence, in which he is for a moment forced to hear the sad hoarse scream of his one lonely voice. The whirring returns inside now, the sound of a wasp ramming into the wall of his skull, enough to gag imagination, gag translation. Nell has never seen anything but the man and the imprint, he has never been On Set, so there was only life and that other thing, no magical in-between. There was only the love and a shuffling between basements and hours, an hour a minute. Cuts on hands and rubbing alcohol on cuts, semen on rubbing alcohol on cuts on hands, Uwe died.
Dead, he looks at Nell through the screen and STICKS. Some am schƶnsten perfect Schiller-Theater half a smile. For Nell? Why not? Why not, at this venture? Already Uwe is looking at him, the eyes almost alive enough for trickery. Oh the magic of Cinema.
And Uwe at once says (the lips move), in a perfectly clear voice, unaccented and subsequently hideous, āCHRISTIAN!ā he saysātwo syllables that crash into one another like two gas-guzzling trucks on a polluted American highway.
He springs forward.
Forward andā
ā
OUT!
From the screen a thousand feet tall and a thousand feet long, hovering, over Nell and casting him not in shadow but some sick white contrast of it as nitrate particles fall and burn. It HURTS. Burning away the schoolboy shirt and leaving the beautiful pale memory of his bare chest, a still snipped from the eight-millimeter of only Nellās pervert mind, he is springing OUTāhis arms outstretched, he is reaching towards Nell with such smothering, fantastic love, born again, and then the screen bisects him and he freezes as soon as he begins.
That lovely mouth hanging in the wicked O of what Nell will never have again.
Around the waist black sludge, the burnt-bad aftermath, the unusable THAT which Nell has spent irretrievable hours of his life scrubbing from his skin and which was under his fingernails the first time he touched Uwe. You have to understand this is never going to be anything more than a kind of compulsive self-violation, for Nell, like if he were peeling past his sunburn or taking a razor to his wrists and thighs again.
Oh, God, heās beautiful.
Nell stands without knowing he stands, his body only eyes, drinking Uwe up, choking on him, happily. Heās so close, so still, WAITING, waiting for Nell to touch him and love him and all the things heād gotten in pieces, the things heād had to share with other men, well, no more, if he can reach upā¦
Nell thinks he can reach up and touch him. Just once again, thatās all he needs, just one, innocent touchā
He reaches upā
The skin is there, burning, silver nitrate white and waiting and Nellās hand goes upāthe nails, blackened, try to scratch, not with anger, no, never that, with LOVEā
The image flickers.
It is, of course, an image. You take a photo and later the subject dies, but really he was dead when you took it and the image was a memory on conception, something that has been and is no longer, a person in past-tense. Whatās left is the body you identified.
The eight-millimeter runs and runs and runs and runs and snaps with a sensation almost like pain.
He falls to his knees somewhere under the flickering bellybutton of his dead-body-idol and he begins to mumble, begins to almost pray. He stammers freely between English and what little German he does knowā¦ ich liebe dich, ich muss dich habenā¦ he promises to learn his accusative and his dative and his genitiveā¦ he says he talked to the landlady and itāll only cost a hundred marks more rent to move into the big room upstairs, where they could live together, and sure it might be tight the first couple months but theyāll make it, because Eine Kindertragƶdie is going to be THE ONE! The greatest film this country, ANY country has ever seen, hold onto me, Oo-veh, just stay here with me, here where I need you, donāt go out tonight, I have this terrible feelingā¦
And at about quarter-past two in the morning Christian Nell has a massive cerebral incident and keels forward, breaking his nose under himself on the bad linoleum. The film burns and burns, and when it has nothing left to burn it moves onto the table and the walls and the theater, the plaster, the plywood. When they pull Nellās charred body from the ashes of the Kreuzberg Kino tomorrow morning, there is a great rictus of glee pressed into his shattered front teeth, no doubt because he isāin the words of an increasingly fascist local paperāfinally downstairs with the other one.
šļøš¦·
