Free The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes Page B

me, the concept of the director was alien in early cinema, and more than likely it was the cameramen who dictated the composition of space within the shots and all sort of other decisions we now associate with the role of the director. In fact—and for some reasons he seems adamant on this point—early filmmaking was an intensely collaborative enterprise with interchangeable roles, so that there was no clear distinction between who did what at the various stages of production. What Laing calls the “assembly line” mode of Hollywood production, perfected during the studio era, didn’t exist yet and it was no surprise, Laing insists, that Hollywood’s method of production followed so closely and emerged at nearly the same historical moment as Henry Ford’s assembly line: film and automobile as imagined as a grouping of interchangeable parts assembled by a series of workers trained to do one or two jobs expertly and therefore alienated from the overall process of the entire project. But this, this early frame comes from a time before that, when filmmaking was still an organic enterprise and when films were createdby small groups (“collectives” is the word Laing uses) of people working together to create a shared object.
    Laing begins to spin out the narrative, the “secret history” of this particular fragment, the sole surviving ghost image of a film that someone had taken the time to transfer to a paper print and register at the Library of Congress.
    “It’s a story about the woman, taking notes, at a wooden desk in a wide-planked, bright office in a film from 1910, her hair done up in the style of the day in the years before the ‘war to end all wars’ which, beginning just four years after this film frame, will claim millions. There is a man—stately, king-like—across the room from her, watching. With murderous intent, as I recall. He wears some sort of uniform. I’d swear it involves a Nazi arm band, blinking in blood red, but that’s impossible, of course, in 1910.
    “There are so many details in the film frame, but which ones are important? Neither of them are looking directly at each other. He might be dictating; she might be taking notes. Or perhaps she is simply recording information, tallies that indicate some dark, bloody statistic. There is in fact—if you examine the frame closely, which I happened to do during the dead-time of my life then, after Marlene had accused me (falsely) of ‘unpardonable actions’ and subsequently exiled herself from me—nothing written at all on her pad of paper. There is the carved face on the wall above her head. There is his seat cushion. There is the overexposed window behind him, which is open. There are many objects on her desk whose meaning can only be guessed at. It’s not fair that we don’t know.”
    Laing gets up from the table, goes into the motel room, and comes back with a yellowed folder, removes a stack of typed pages, and shuffles through them with the blank intensity of a person teleported back and forth through time so often that his very self becomes stretched into something that exists both then and now. The pages contain Laing’s theories about whathappens after the frame, in the way that we sometimes wonder what happens in the moments right after the instant captured in a photograph and I’m struck for the first time by the degraded sadness of the whole enterprise. Laing and I talking about these destroyed films as if they mattered any more, or as if they ever mattered, and to make things worse, the black night accumulating around us with greater and greater force, as if leaking in from parts of the universe that carry with them a special kind of evil, the kind that we can’t even imagine, the kind that you can’t find in Blake or Milton or with telescopes trained at the cosmos or in particle colliders or in Indian mounds or even in the terrible things that one person will do to another person alone in a dungeon. There’s a