Franck Thilliez - Syndrome E

“Did you ever make collages in school? It’s the same idea. He first shot the scenes of the nude actress on another roll. Then he took the frames he wanted from roll A and spliced them into roll B, simple cut and paste. When it’s all done, you dup the film, and you end up with what we’ve got here. A ton of famous directors used this process to heighten the impact of certain scenes. Hitchcock in Psycho , Fincher in Fight Club , and a lot of horror movies as well. But all that was later. At the time, absolutely no one would have suspected the presence of these images.”

“And what about the other subliminal images in this film? What are they like?”

“Salacious, pornographic, sticky with sweat and sex. There are also some rather nauseating and risqué lovemaking scenes, with men in masks. And toward the end, you come across some murders.”

“Murders?”

Lucie felt a sudden tension in her muscles. She’d already heard about snuff movies. Murders captured on film, tapes passed around hand to hand in alternative circles. Could she be dealing with one of those—a snuff film more than half a century old?

Claude slowly cranked the handle. The time counters clicked forward. The restorer paused at each hidden image. Certain nude scenes were especially daring, not very appealing, approaching morbid. No question that at a time when a woman could scarcely show herself in a bathing suit, this would have been shocking.

“The bloodier sequences come more toward the end. The scene with the girl and the bull is crammed full of them. Excuse me, I need to turn this for a few seconds—my automatic rewind broke. This film lasts a good thirteen minutes, or more than three hundred feet of film. Tell me, did you and Ludovic use to go out? He’s always been attracted to your type of woman.”

“What type is that?”

“Kind of like Jodie Foster.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It is.”

“Uh… About the scene where the bull stops dead in front of the girl—how did they do that? Special effects?”

Lucie clasped her hands behind her back. It was strange, but very few films had left so strong an impression on her. She felt she could describe every scene of this one in detail, as if they were etched in her gray matter.

“Probably. But the animal actually was slaughtered at one point. As for the kid facing down the bull, I’ll have to analyze the images frame by frame. He might have shot the bull by itself, rewound the stock without exposing it, then shot the girl by herself, using superimposition. But that seems highly complicated, and if so, he did a damn good job for the time, given that computers didn’t even exist yet and the equipment was still pretty rudimentary.”

“And did you see how dilated the girl’s pupils were? Could they have drugged her?”

“You don’t drug actresses. There are special products for movies and special effects that can do that perfectly well. They already had them in the fifties.”

He wound more slowly. Lucie saw images succeed each other on the viewer, the movement starting up and varying depending on the speed of the rotation. They got to the image of the pasture surrounded by its fence. Claude wound the film more slowly still, then stopped on a shocking image. Grass, the naked actress blatantly spread-eagled on the ground, her hair flowing around her like biblical serpents. A blackish, circular wound gaped from her belly like a well. Lucie’s hand flew to her mouth.

“Oh, Jesus!”

“You said it.”

Claude moved aside, picked up the filmstrip, and held it up to the neon light.

“Look… It’s really well done, because, just like the pornographic frames, the subliminal image is in the same tones as the other images. The same dominant tints, the same contrasts, the same light. The pasture is different, but not flagrantly so. When the film ran at normal speed, there was no break in tone, so you noticed absolutely nothing. The brain, on the other hand, got the full impact.”

Lucie leaned in as close as she could to the film. To think those images had crossed through her sight without her knowing it. A few feet later, on the translucent strip, she saw the same woman positioned like a corpse. Then again and again after that, as Claude unspooled the film between his fingers.

“At each of the actress’s appearances, roughly every two hundred frames, there’s an additional wound, spreading from the black circle on her stomach. As if in temporal continuity. Until it forms…”

He started cranking the handle again, halted on the unbelievable scene in which the bull stood facing the girl. The following image was completely different.

“…an eye.”

Lucie had trouble understanding what she’d got hold of. Little by little, someone had lacerated the woman in every direction, radiating from her navel like a sun of gashes. Open wounds on her white body frozen on the thick grass. In appearance, the slits formed a pupil with its iris. A hidden, malevolent eye that observed you, transfixed you, made you want to turn away. To not see anymore. Lucie felt as if she were looking at crime scene photos: the victim of a twisted, sadistic killer.

“That can’t be trick photography,” she stated. “It’s so… real.”

Claude removed his glasses and wiped them with a chamois. Without the magnifying lenses, his face regained its balance, its features refined despite the deep wrinkles.

“That’s the very definition of trick photography when it’s done well. I have no doubt it’s the case here.”

The black and white amplified the violence of the image, dissociated the mutilated body from its environment. Lucie still couldn’t get over it.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because we’re dealing with the movies, dear miss, not with reality. The seventh art is an art of magic, subterfuge, optical illusion. The woman could very well be a model. In able hands, some makeup and a few staging effects would do perfectly well. Nothing is real. One thing for certain, our director seems to be obsessed with eyes and the effect of images on the mind. A precursor, as you said, when today we see to what extent images inhabit our lives and flood it with violence. Our children confront more than three hundred thousand images a day—do you have any idea what that means? And do you know how many of them are related to violence, death, and war?”

The eyes of the woman Lucie privately called “the victim” stared up at the sky, devoid of any sign of life. A bit shaken, the cop turned back to face Claude.

“Do you think this film was ever shown in a theater?”

“I doubt it. The condition of the sprocket holes, especially near the beginning of the film, is impeccable. This copy, at least, was never shown on a large scale.”

“So why the subliminal images, then? Why all that staging?”

“Private projections, perhaps? A film that the director showed to a few select individuals? Who knows. A personal fantasy? You know, subliminals can be incredibly strong. They’re a direct line between the image and the subconscious, unmediated by any form of censorship. They take an image and jam it straight into your brain— bam! An ideal way to convey violence, sex, and perversity by alternate routes. These days, that all happens online, in visual and audio. Bands that pass subliminal messages in their songs, for instance. Perhaps our director enjoyed that kind of wild idea? When I think that it was only 1955… You’ve got to hand it to him—the guy’s no lightweight.”

Claude switched off the screen. Lucie couldn’t take her eyes off the reel. Thousands of images one after the other, imprinting life or death. She imagined a gleaming, magnificent river that churned up in its depths a host of invisible, deadly parasites.