Free Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta Page A

drank wine, and watched a movie projected on a sheet Deke had hung on the warehouse wall. Meadow ran the projector. Meadow used their old teacher, Jay Hosney, to help her rent movies from MoMA and the New Yorker Theater and other film libraries. They watched a 16 mm print of Antonioni’s Red Desert. Meadow rented it for a week, and she had already seen it five times.
    Carrie watched Monica Vitti framed against the vast rusted hullof a ship. A good film to see if you are making films in the midst of industrial ruin, like a leather tannery or a glove factory.
    And then Meadow showed Carrie her train film. Train films , rather. She had made a dozen of these short, odd documents. As Carrie looked at some very impressive and distorted close-to-the-tracks shots, Carrie wondered: what had it been like up here this past spring, with Meadow in a frenzy, in an obsession with something? Manic, possessed, as if she were enacting some cliché of an artist? All these repetitions and her relentless revisions of one idea were interesting, but what for? Who could even say what they were?
    In high school, when Meadow decided films were her thing (and it was like that, a big decision, an announcement, as if her biography were already being written, as if the biopic were being filmed, bold-print supertitles appearing over her head), she began to obsess over old cinema artifacts: viewers, lenses, projectors, film stocks. She built a Mutoscope by hand. She bought old spectrographs, Kinetoscopes, and zoetropes and rebuilt them. She played with them. It was as if she had to go through the discovery of film step by step, all on her own. She had to invent it all for herself. Carrie often felt perplexed by Meadow’s extremes. Making a film was already hard enough. Why not just step in and go from here? Why be so difficult and take the long way to everything?
    After months of making Carrie watch silent films, Meadow moved on to specific filmmakers: John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks. Then it was the European New Wave, then she discovered Japanese filmmakers, then the American filmmakers of the ’70s. Then the cinéma vérité documentaries, direct cinema, and kino-pravda. She had a passion for comprehensiveness that wasn’t really possible. The dishonest part of it was the way she seemed to embrace things by rejecting what she had previouslyembraced. John Ford had to be seen as vastly inferior to Howard Hawks. It was Godard vs. Truffaut. As if engaging art became a conversion experience. Which felt juvenile and, well, reductive to Carrie. Carrie enjoyed a film even as she could see its flaws. She didn’t need to be obsessed or disillusioned. That exhausted her. She consciously sought out films made by women. She didn’t care if they were nakedly commercial productions or hardly seen lost films. She liked to think about Ida Lupino or Lina Wertmüller as well as Penelope Spheeris or Amy Heckerling. She liked the idea of taking a genre—say the high school film—and doing a really interesting version of it. Not breaking the form, but pushing it in subtle ways. You would get an audience, right? And there could be room for unexpected things. Even subversive things.
    It was unclear, at the end of the night, where Carrie would sleep. Meadow hadn’t thought about it, apparently. They went back to the apartment Meadow rented near the warehouse and Carrie slept on the couch under a sheet and with a throw pillow under her head. She heard murmurs from Meadow’s room. She tried not to listen, and then she put her headphones on and listened to Maria Callas sing.

THE ARRIVAL OF THE TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT STATION
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    Meadow showed Carrie the train movies even though Meadow knew Carrie wouldn’t appreciate what had gone into them. All spring Meadow had risen at five every day, not for any practical reason but for the feeling of immersion. She needed to feel the pain of her devotion. She