William Boyd - The New Confessions

I forgave Doon, with guilty magnanimity, when she apologized for not telling me about Mavrocordato. She was not ashamed, she said, using arguments identical to those I myself employed to ease my conscience about Monika. And she was going to appear in his film. Somehow that did not bother me so much now. But she was sweet to me while I convalesced for a week. She looked after me with merry, genuine care.

Eddie Simmonette came for the last days’ filming. He seemed strangely subdued. He did not join in the great cheer that went up from the entire crew when I said for the last time, “Cut! Print it!” My own elation was brief. I was exhausted from almost two years of creative struggle, yet was fully aware that the entire project was only one-third complete.

We were jolly enough in the Hôtel de France that night. Garrulous mutually admiring speeches were made, tokens were exchanged, much champagne was drunk. When the singing started, Eddie came over and asked if he could have a word with me outside.

We went out and strolled along the banks of the river Leysse towards the jardin public . It was a calm, balmy night with a clear sky. We talked inconsequentially about this or that. Eddie asked how my broken arm and ribs were. Eventually, I said, “What’s wrong, Eddie? Money problems?”

He chuckled. “There are always money problems.”

“What is it then?”

He paused under a streetlamp. Across the river I could see the gravel paths of the public gardens and the knobbled leprous boughs of the pollarded limes, grotesque in the darkness.

“Whatever happens, John,” he began slowly, “I want you to know that I will never be as proud of anything as I am of The Confessions . It’s a masterpiece. A wonderful film.”

“Thank you, Eddie.” I felt my heart clog with affection for this neat dark man. “But what do you mean, ‘whatever happens’?”

He looked at me. I could not swear to it — his voice gave nothing away — but I think his eyes were luminous with tears. He took a folded newspaper from his pocket. It was a trade paper, Kino-Magazin . Large-type headlines dominated the front page:

END OF PATENTS WAR!!!

TOBIS-KLANGFILM SYNDICATE TRIUMPHS!!!

I had drunk too much. I was weary.

“What’s it all about?” I asked.

“I think we’re too late,” he said softly, desperately. “ The Confessions , it’s too late.”

“Late? Too late for what?”

“For sound.”

VILLA LUXE, June 24, 1972

Sound. Sound.… I had never worried about sound. I knew about it but it seemed to me then to be a fad. Moreover, it was a device that would take film back to its theatrical and literary origins, which it had managed to shake off. I regarded it rather as a painter might take note of new developments in drypoint engraving. It seemed to have nothing to do with the purity of moving pictures. I, who despised captions so much, who had even invented the superimposed caption so that the screen never had to resemble a blackboard, what did I want — what did any film artist want — with dialogue, with the “talkies”? How could words play any part in a purely visual medium?

Well, history proved me wrong. But we have lost as much as we gained. With sound it is too easy to explain , too easy to be precise. That dangerous edge of ambiguity has gone forever. The potent, multifarious suggestions of the visual image were subjugated to prattle. Articulate reasoning took over from the freedom the image had to operate below the level of conscious thought.… I can go on. Technology stifled an art in 1927—or whenever it was that ghastly quacking blacked-up singer first articulated on film — and today, decades later, we are still fighting to regain that marvelous subversive quality of the mature silent film.

Anyway, I rehearse all these old arguments with Ulrike one evening at her parents’ villa. She is a good audience — she agrees with every word I say.

Herr Günther is tall and ruddy. He has red cheeks, as if he’s spent the day striding through a chill gusty countryside. He looks like an English farmer. His entire family is gathered on the pool terrace and there are numerous other guests — strangers to me — from the new villas being erected around our bay. Most of the adults have forsaken the pool but the children still scream and shout in and around it. Ulrike has asked me if I want to swim, but I declined, saying I am not feeling too well. In fact I’m reluctant to display my old man’s body among all this tanned youth and concupiscence. My flesh is slack and folded now. My flat chest has transformed itself into two soft dropping breasts. The virile furze that covered my body has grown long and mysteriously silky. My legs are thin, my buttocks half-deflated. All the usual signs. I might have swum with two or three present but not this loud, vital assembly.

Ulrike tells me her boyfriend is arriving tomorrow and that he’s greatly looking forward to meeting me. She says he has requests from one or two film magazines to do interviews. Do I have any objections?

“No photographs,” I say quickly, thinking of the man on the bus. “And he mustn’t publish my address.”

“Of course not.”

We talk on. She is a keen student of film and I find I enjoy airing my views.

“But what about color, Mr. Todd? You can’t object to that.”

“Oh yes, I do, but not as strongly as sound.”

I tell her that color makes the cinema film banal. It becomes exactly the same as seeing. We view the world in color; black and white makes film quite different, an essential veil of artifice, like the two dimensions of an artist’s canvas pretending to be three. With moving pictures — the great art form of the twentieth century — the addition of sound and the arrival of color robbed them of their uniqueness.

“And besides,” I go on, warming up — Anneliese has arrived—“color is modern, so black and white becomes the past, the color of history. Think of the Great War. You only know it in black and white. There are no color photographs of the Great War, yet I can assure you it was a very colorful event. Imagine it in color — you’d have an entirely different impression of it. When I see newsreels I hardly recognize it — all that monochrome!”

Herr Günther approaches and starts asking me about my First War experiences. I tell him something of them. People gather round, fascinated by an old man’s memories. The sun dips below the crocodile headland and the first bats begin to dart between the pines.

It was some time between Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and the Reichstag fire that Doon told me she was moving to Paris. Her arguments were cogent. Eight of her colleagues in the Artists’ Association had been killed in the last year. The association itself was outlawed. She doubted if she would ever be able to work in a German film again. The country, she said, was ruined, she had no desire to live in it, and so on.

I encouraged her to go and said I would join her as soon as I finished work on the new sound version of The Confessions . Indeed by then, early 1933, half the German film industry seemed to be living abroad. I went with her to Lehrter Station to see her off. She had hardly any luggage. We kissed, we declared our love for each other and she left.

I walked gloomily out of the station. The unpleasantly bright flags — red, white and black — flew everywhere. Men in uniform hawked newspapers in loud confident voices. I hailed a taxi and thought about going to the Metropol for a symbolic drink but decided against it. I knew it would only make me more depressed and I had enough trouble on my hands as it was.