John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

A tumbrel filled with filthy straw and doomed nobles, a long-faced curée intoning from his open Bible, the buxom Marie with her hair shorn, hands tied behind her back, kneeling with neck stretched out over the block, the sans culottes , faces distorted as they jeer from every side — there is a sudden skreek of metal and the heavy blade falls in its slot— CHOK! neatly separating the Queen from her head! There are screams and cries from the flesh-and-blood spectators and one young lady in lavender quite close to Harry swoons and is caught in the arms of a man who might be either her husband or her father.

“French degenerates,” mutters the man, legs bowing under the weight of his charge as he fans her with an orchestra program.

Harry hurries past the other gatherings — the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Moses parting the Red Sea, a rather grisly evocation of one of Jack the Ripper’s attacks — waxen, three-dimensional versions of a Kodak snap and in that way inferior, no matter what their subject, to the moving actualities he’s just seen in the variety halls. Harry is about to climb the stairs to the Concert Hall when he hears a familiar voice boom out through the open door of a workroom.

“If you don’t hurry with this I’m going to suffocate!”

Looking in, Harry sees a man seated on a workbench, his face completely obscured by plaster bandages, while another man painstakingly pries the cast away from the skin with a metal instrument coated with petroleum jelly.

“Mr. Teethadore?”

“Who’s that?” The voice, even somewhat muffled behind the appendage, is deep and resonant.

“We met in Wilmington. After a performance.”

“You find me at a disadvantage.”

Harry takes a step into the room. There are white wax heads, nearly featureless, lined up on a shelf, historical costumes hanging on a pipe and torsos made of wire. “Are you all right?”

“Having my mug reproduced. It seems that General Custer shall soon be hors de combat from his Last Stand exhibit and donating the better portion of himself — body, hands, flashing saber — to our noted Rough Rider.”

“It seems to be stuck somewhere,” says the other man, gently pulling on the mold.

“If I lose so much as a hair from an eyebrow,” says Teethadore, raising a finger, “there shall be dire consequences.”

“You said I should come see you,” ventures Harry with what he hopes is an ironic lilt in his drawl. “If I ever came to New York.”

“And you’ve followed me here?”

The recent disturbance in Wilmington seems too complicated, too tawdry to mention. “Actually I came for the views. This is something of a Mecca—”

“Foreign subjects. Very uplifting. Celluloid novelties for the carriage trade.”

“It’s really the camera that I—”

“Of course. I remember you now — waxing poetic over the mysteries of the projection device. Drat!”

“I’m sorry,” says the wax sculptor. “I told you to shave your moustache.”

In Wilmington the actor’s moustache had been applied with spirit gum. “No use dragging the character onto the street with me,” he’d said then. “It’s enough to portray the little runt on the boards.” But that had been before the San Juan Hill.

Harry watches uncomfortably as the sculptor wiggles the plaster this way and that, trying to loosen it.

“It was very nice to see you,” he says finally.

“You shall see me, my friend, when this moulage is removed from my face and not before. I suggest you go up and watch the other fellow suffer a bit. It’s quite a presentation.”

When Harry steps away the sculptor has taken up a hammer and chisel and seems about to do something drastic.

He slips quickly into the rear of the hall, a few patrons looking back with annoyance at the intrusion of light. The seats are all full. On the screen, Christ carries a huge wooden cross past idlers and loose women, a pair of spear-carrying Roman soldiers trailing behind Him. There is bright sunlight above and a backdrop painted with the stone buildings of Jerusalem, but this cannot be what they’ve advertised out front. The Oberammergau Passion, Harry knows, is staged once every ten years, and the equipment to photograph motion did not exist at the time of the last performance. Christ falters, catching himself with one hand. The soldiers snatch Simon of Cyrene from the crowd and force him to shoulder the cross for a moment. Finally, after much prodding with spear tips and flogging, Christ exits the right side of the screen, the rough wooden post dragging behind, the mob turning to jeer his passing. The moving image fades in brightness, immediately replaced by a lantern view, a hand-tinted diapositive of El Greco’s Christ Carrying the Cross . It is one of Harry’s favorites, angled as if the painter were on his knees when the Nazarene passed, his eyes fixed on the hill above, dark sky brooding behind him.

“Imagine the weight of it,” intones a white-haired gentleman wearing a pince-nez, his head barely peeking over the lectern set up beside the screen. “Imagine the rough stones underfoot, the scourge of the Roman whips, the raucous contempt of those who, only days before, had waved the palms of peace and cheered your entry into the city.”

Harry is aware of a man standing next to him in the darkness at the rear, a man nodding vigorously as the lecturer continues.

“Are these the souls He has come to save, these torturers, these blood-thirsty, mocking Jews and Philistines?”

The El Greco fades into a new still image, this the circular Bosch painting with the turbaned Pilate at the left, the soldier reaching to wrench Him away, the potato-faced onlookers. These men do look like German peasants, rough and primitive.

“ ‘ Ecce homo ,’ the Roman judge pronounces,” continues the lecturer. “See the man. Not the Messiah, not their Lord and Savior, but simply a man. This, we now understand, was the greatest degradation of all. Humble as He was, this was the only Son of God brought to His knees before the dregs of humanity, beaten and reviled, driven, at last, to Calvary.”

Harry can hear several women in the audience begin to weep as the Bosch is replaced by a moving view. Three crosses, three crucified men, low hills in the background, a tall palm to the right, the centurions crouched below, throwing dice upon the ground and laughing. The shadows of the crosses are visible on the backdrop sky, of course, and no breeze stirs the painted palm fronds, but there are gasps and outcries in the hall when one of the Romans thrusts his spear into Christ’s ribs, and then a sigh of wonder as He lifts His eyes one last time to Heaven before letting His head drop in death. A golden nimbus, some sort of dye-process, no doubt, spreads from His body and suddenly a choir, previously unseen, is lit on the other side of the screen, a dozen angelic voices singing When I Survey the Wondrous Cross and it is then that Harry has his revelation. What drives the picture forward, the vital armature, could at the same time drive some phonographic device in synchrony with the celluloid. Not only could this holy music be joined to the film strip, but His dying words, “Lord, hath Thou forsaken me?” audibly delivered by the actor portraying Christ as if he were in the room .

Or is this sacrilege?

The man who stands beside him has joined in the singing, a rich, full basso—

His dying crimson, like a robe

Spreads o’er His body on the tree

Then I am dead to all the globe

And all the globe is dead to me!

The moving view gives way to a lantern-slide of Rembrandt’s moody Descent from the Cross , Joseph of Arimathea hugging the Body as he descends the ladder, Mary swooning into sympathetic arms in her own golden patch of light. The choir finishes the song, softening their voices into mournful oohs and aahs as the professor intones once more.