Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Dagger has shot the Gulf of Ajaccio and, nearer in, a small beacon on the low extension of the breakwater that’s like a rampart. Then to the left he caught lines of white-hulled powerboats parked from the inner smallcraft dock by the cafés out toward us along the jetty to the breakwater. Gold letters on mahogany sterns tell my sharp sight that the girl who might be Claire basking above a bowsprit has come from Cannes, and the man in shorts pouring tea amidships for the man in jeans has probably sailed like our car ferry from Marseilles, and there’s Nice and scandalous St.-Tropez, Genoa and Palma de Mallorca, even Malmö, Sweden, and of course Algiers whence seventeen thousand pieds-noirs came to Corsica after the ’62 liberation. I see also a yacht from Cagliari and from the look of its striped awning aft and the gilt flash of its brass it could care less if Corsicans look down on Sardinians, for don’t mainland French of whom Dagger’s wife Alba is one look down on les Corses?

Corsica is a département of France.

This film is for the masses, murmurs Dagger.

I mention only what we film. And now the crowd.

The engines are turning us away from the crowd behind its barricade. My eyes have changed since May because of our camera. A middle-aged woman offers her beautiful profile, she is not looking our way, but off toward the smallcraft dock; the tip of her tongue is thinking, and her hair is gathered behind into a single plait and this is what I see even if, having never done Jenny’s hair when she was a child, I don’t know if it takes two strands or three.

Dagger doesn’t switch off.

I say to him, That’s enough, isn’t it?

His American friend wrote that he would take the bus into downtown Ajaccio from the école and drive back with us. Dagger sometimes seems to use a camera like a spyglass to see what he can’t see with his own eyes.

Any familiar faces?

Dagger lays a hand on my shoulder. On the far side of the pier is a small van with something plonger on it, the local scuba man. Dagger says, Never know where you’ll run into an old contact from Berkeley.

We go below for the car.

Dagger has used a hundred feet of Anscochrome approaching Ajaccio.

Calvi is said to be prettier.

I will tape some Corsican French tomorrow. It has an Italian sound, but since the war you watch what you say about that.

Dagger’s purpose, which in my view those hundred feet of approach shots won’t advance, is to parlay his entrée here, mix shots of Bastille Day observances three days hence and tourists lounging around Bonaparte’s birthplace plus the American, French, and English students reconnoitering Corsican ecology — our expenses paid by Claire’s boss. Family life is not a millstone round Dagger’s neck; but he sees Alba’s baby coming week by week and he is a forty-four-year-old male with quite a history and he is going to be a father, and a bit of distance just now gives a man a certain perspective he needs on the internal effects of such an event. Pudovkin said montage was linkage, Eisenstein collision.

In the école garden Dagger shoots rich pink rhododendron blossoms and the heavy oval dark green leaves; he shoots the black iron fence down the slope and through the fence the street whose bright traffic he gives the same focus for a moment that he gave the rhododendrons, then adjusts so the blur of shine and color turns clear and exact and leaves the black iron fence softened at the edges as if instead of adjusting the focus Dagger has zoomed, and that’s something on the agenda, for we know — or he knows — a man who will lend us an Angenieux 12–120. Long shot of the street traffic through the école fence; I slip behind Dagger, who tracks right and through a pattern of leaves on our side of the fence to catch across the street a column of sea and sky between the pastel buildings at the foot of one of which is a greengrocer.

Dagger cuts to the space of dirt and grass in front of the main four-story institutional edifice that houses dorm, dining room, and kitchen; there is a game of bowls in progress played with a small steel target ball and several larger ones, a Marseillaise game I learn and the traditional taunts and protest and boasting precede and follow the arcing toss and the thud of the ball onto the dust and its hushed roll too strong or weak, too much right or left. I will find out the name of the target ball. This footage is silent but I make a note to tape for it some of those shrill, hard, anguished songs you hear about, a rhythm I might pulse into phase and out with the flight and fall of those shotput-like tosses, the red tile roof high behind.

The peace in the blue of the sky and the chalky hues of the pier crowd over the water comes again, a peace beyond Dagger’s prodigality with the Anscochrome (a minute still left), comes again in the blossoms, the green, a girl’s miniskirt, a maroon Renault broadside through the arcade hung with vines and blooms like New England wistaria mingled with tiny whites and yellows more like buds, the maroon of the car now sliding out of view leaving on the far side of the driveway a stone wall, but Dagger has switched off. Here comes his American friend with a tall woman. She is vivid, she has auburn hair and speaks with a Scots clip. I tell her I have a friend who goes up there all the time to visit a clan chieftain.

The peace is in the color, and in the hope of something beautiful in the growth between authentic black and white and the color living in that strongest thing of all, surface. One of the American boys here — the one with the Sony recorder — will back us up against the wall before supper saying we’re crazy to mix color with black and white.

Cut to morning. Next footage, b & w.

Sublime morning, the sun has a smell, or compounds the sweet bark-burn of coffee and the thick breath of hot milk from the kitchen, last night’s wine bottles fish bread bougainvillaea Gauloises, exhaust fumes and sea two blocks away, it is not garbage, or even drains, but it is an unsieved odor of natural use — I can’t imagine Dagger caring to convey it.

I mean to include here only what we film.

We are in black and white, and side by side we shoot thirty seconds next door upstairs. An American girl, hair in rollers under a pink kerchief, bangs “Rhapsody in Blue” on an upright at the back of the classroom; there is on each desk a headphone-with-mike and a metal switch box; the simultaneous interpreter who is taking a six-week break from NATO is reading yesterday’s Ajaccio paper — how the students can listen to a lecture here with island sun glimmering through the upper branches of the école trees and white boats winking in the gulf and the beachboys hanging around last night’s café is beyond me, and bare legs morning-cool upon a metal and educational chair — the interpreter puts away his paper and with a wave at us spreads his headset, it’s hooked into the room’s system, and anything of him we pick up only through the omnidirectional I’ve placed on an empty front-row desk. The last students have wandered in after breakfast, they put on their headsets and switch on their boxes, the professor from the Sorbonne has appeared in shorts, the girl in curlers relents and leaves her ringing piano. The class is depleted by a field trip. Dagger ignores the professor sitting at the desk on the podium and gets a close shot of a French girl and the American boy Dagger happened to know through Hampstead friends and spent a while with last night in our beach café down the street — I explain too much — while a group of us left our tables and swam out into the night.

We swam far out, each stroke directly into darkness, though out ahead the lights across the bay seemed close; the phosphorescent life all round vanished to the touch, but I felt them holding me up, loafing, treading a hundred yards off the beach, girls’ shoulders slick under moonlight.