Free The Last Magician by Janette Turner Hospital Page A

have been self-deprecating and a little flippant, almost offhand, but would have hinted at bemusement too, as though he found his own magic puzzling. People are always telling me they see themselves in my work, he would shrug. People I know nothing about, people I’ve never even met, insist I’ve got their lives in my lens.
    Must be my negative perspective, he’d joke. Or my overdeveloped angle of view.
    At any rate, Charlie’s Inferno is part of the body of work which has now made him a cult figure in New York, and even, belatedly, in the Australian art world as well, in certain enclaves of the avant garde. Chang is a byword in some quarters. (This was after the hidden ideogram signatures were discovered on photographs, and reassessments were made. Looking through a different glass, the critics solemnly pronounced that the Chang eye was not at all a common expatriate eye, nor was it just one more migrant eye or ethnic eye. Not at all. The Chang eye sees us in its own authentically foreign light, the critics said. The Chang eye has visited and dwelt among us and has seen what it has seen. The Chang eye has integrity. The Chang eye makes us all seem wilfully blind. The Chang eye is valid in a unique and remarkable way.)
    Particularly since its disappearance, the Chang eye’s validity has grown.
    (Bull’s eye! Charlie would laugh. Chang-eyed and shanghaied , I’ve got them both ways.
    The Chang eye sees a congregation of vapours, he would say, a jostle of hot-air balloons.)
    Making an effort to be suitably detached, I will say only that the particular short feature to which I refer — I once held it in my hand in videotape form — is an early example of a Chang-eye technique to which the critics, as critics will, have attached a label. “Mutational collage” is what they call it.
    In the undersized overheated cinema (London or Sydney? Both, it seems to me now), some pompous doctoral candidate from Film Studies explains this to us. Of the five postmodern film-makers whose work we are privileged to experience in this festival, he says, blah blah blah …
    And then it is running.
    There is no soundtrack at first, and the blurred arrangement of black and grey is deliberate, I have no doubt. Oh Charlie, how typical. You and bloody Gabriel: riddles, games, puzzles, conundrums, the world as Rubik’s cube.
    Charlie’s face, a finger to his lips, appears hazily on screen. Be patient, his finger says. Wait.
    â€œNow,” his voice murmurs, and my body lurches and spins.
    â€œNote how the shifting pattern of blackness is transgressed,” he says. (His voice is eerily disembodied, an off-stage whisper, distorted, fed through synthesisers, but it is Charlie’s voice. It is unmistakably Charlie’s voice. It reaches me from outside of time, it echoes, it causes vertigo and pain.) “Note,” he says, “how a thin line of light reaches down from the top of the screen like Gods bony finger.”
    (Charlie , I plead. Charlie!
    Am I sobbing?
    I will him to step out from his screen.)
    But he falls silent.
    There is no voice now, only electronic music, and I note how radiance leaks out into the image until I can distinguish rocks and water and trees, the soft murk of Cedar Creek Falls. I note how colour bleeds into the black and white. The lens catches the braided water where it twists into a whorl around two boulders. I am looking into the eye of the whirlpool, two seconds, five, ten, the effect is hypnotic. Freeze. The water goes suddenly still. It moves again. Now, as though swaying or drunk, I seem to lose my footing and perspective, painlessly, languidly, and I seem to slide down the outside of the whorl and see the translucent funnel in profile.
    (How did you do that, Charlie? At what dangerous angle, on slippery rock, did you and your camera lie to get that shot? What magnification was used? Did you get drenched? Did you slide on the moss?)
    The image goes