A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

Is Ruth’s heart bound to this movie too? Sitting a few rows ahead, she seems to have forgotten him. But even without seeing her face, he knows that, like the rest of the audience, she is aware of the female power of her hand movements and burning eyes, beyond the quality of her acting.

Yes, it was the scriptwriter Trigano who added the muteness, which was original and brilliant, even if inspired by an unfortunate sister. But Moses is pleased in retrospect that he directed it without hesitation and to the best of his ability. A beautiful young woman, deaf and mute from birth, somewhere between disabled and strange, wants the express train to stop at her home village, even if this leads to disaster. She will succeed in persuading others to follow, for a satanic idea expressed in sign language that may or may not be understandable is not the same as a satanic idea explicitly worded. In the end, it is a floating idea, and it’s hard to pin down who thought of it and intended it and who just imagined it and imputed it to others, so it’s easy to deposit it on the doorstep of the stationmaster, who at this moment, after the express train has gone by, looks suspiciously at the young woman approaching him. Are her hands and fingers really demanding that tomorrow, when the terrible tempest comes to pass, no one should come out to shift the switches?

And so the film unfolds on the screen in a hall where during the Spanish Civil War officers were instructed not to have mercy on their countrymen. Artificial wind, generated by the blower next to the camera, accompanies a little yellow railcar, and out steps the chief railway inspector, recruited to assist the stationmaster who was asked to stop a fast train that never stopped here before. How hard it had been to convince the management of Israel Railways to allow the actor to drive, for only a hundred meters, the single small car designed to check the condition of the tracks. The chief inspector here is not an ordinary man but in effect a pagan god, an evil higher power who doesn’t need a maintenance worker to drive him. But the Israel Railways people stubbornly refused to allow someone unlicensed to operate a railcar belonging to the state. And especially because the actor recruited by Trigano, a distant relative of his, a wedding singer and comedian, a dwarfish man of sixty with a red, pockmarked face, seemed unreliable to Israel Railways before he ever uttered a word. There was no alternative but to wear out the maintenance worker assigned to the railcar. With an empty camera, they filmed him ferrying the actor over and over, and then persuaded him to take a rest for just one ride and let the actor drive the railcar himself. So the tiny god and wedding singer was able to zip around a curve on a drizzly day and hop from the railcar into the station house. Moses feels an urge to walk down a few rows to whisper in the priest’s ear, You see, Juan de Viola, though we were sworn secularists, we still tried to enlist divine intervention to prevent a needless disaster, but we didn’t succeed. We came to realize that God too lends a hand to absurdity.

But Moses stays in his seat and watches the chief inspector. The latter sits and seems indifferent to the obsequious conduct of the loyal stationmaster, who breaks into a stutter as he reveals the existence of a plot to sabotage the fast train. The little man listens, sips slowly from his teacup, sighs, yawns, and finally rests his heavy head on the table like a child and closes his eyes. The director can remember how he made sure the camera stood patiently still and drank deeply of the slumbering comedian, who was thrilled to play God, and kept asking, What should I say in his name? “Don’t say a word,” Trigano said, calming him. “In this film God is silent, he only sleeps. Close your eyes and doze off, snore a little and give a sigh, the camera will do the rest.”

The authority figure, giving no answer one way or another, confers by his silence the permission to execute the plot. And now, in place of the dumbfounded stationmaster, who closeted himself at sundown inside the tiny station, villagers stand by the rails, torches in hand, poised for their encounter with an arrogant train that will veer from its regular track. Since fewer extras than anticipated were available to the production, they had to hustle them down as agitated onlookers, and then transform them from local residents into passengers, after the crash, rip their clothes, smear them with grime, pour red liquids on them, to ensure their credibility as they screamed in agony. In the artificial lighting intended to improve on the moonlight and stars, Moses can see that he too was forced to abandon his post beside the camera and join the extras as a passenger writhing in pain. The camera closes in on his face as he lies among bushes in torn clothing, his face horribly gashed, waiting for the deaf girl to lavish mercy on his suffering. “As a living actor, you have no future,” joked the film editor when they looked at the scene on the editing table, “but as a dying one, you’re a big success, especially when a girl is stroking your head.”

Yes, the beauty of the deaf girl lights up the screen, and the stationmaster’s assistant does not wait long to exact his due for the wicked plan that came off well. Though in years to come the violent scenes in his films grew more and more audacious, one might still wonder about the license given here to the actor to express his lust. He wrests the girl savagely from the wreckage of the train, takes her up a dirt path, and drags her into the bushes, and though she knows that is the price of her exhilarating vision, she fights the arms that seize her, screams with her hands and fingers, and finally lets loose the wail of a wounded animal. Moses wonders if this brutal scene was simply to be faithful to the script or whether some strange desire was also a factor.

The lights in the hall come on. Moses scans the first few rows to locate the person who looked like Trigano. But if such a person had been there at all, he escaped before the lights went up.

At first the applause is stuttering and embarrassed, but gradually it becomes louder and rhythmic. As it continues, de Viola rises and invites Ruth to join him. He looks toward the rear to invite the director as well, but Moses is in no hurry to get up and gestures to the actress to go first. As she is led to the stage, the audience redoubles its applause, with scattered cries of Brava!

Ruth is nervous, and de Viola, to allow her time to compose herself, gives a lengthy introduction in Spanish. But when he cedes her the floor, her English is replete with Hebrew words in critical places. Then a man gets up — a Jew, or a former Israeli of the sort found everywhere and always — and offers his assistance in translation from Hebrew to Spanish.

There is relief as the Hebrew is freed from the filter of broken English. But even now, Ruth’s words are confused and almost childish, suggesting that not only as a character in a film but as a woman, she is defending her former lover’s notion that destruction and disaster improve and refine mankind. When the priest, smiling gently, tries to modify her remarks, she persists, her hands waving exuberantly, her eyes ablaze, as if at any moment she will revert to sign language. Now Moses raises his hand, to the relief of the moderator, who invites the director to the stage to restore order to the chaos created by the actress. And despite the temptation to continue in Hebrew, Moses prefers to speak in English, which allows him to digress more easily from moral dilemmas to tricks of the movie trade.

The hour is late. The aged farmers in the audience slip from the hall one by one, but the young people won’t let matters rest. They demand to know if the director subscribes to the views of the actress. Moses is wary of an imprecise answer, so he speaks compellingly of obligation and regret and atonement, and how these alone can yield true compassion, as opposed to the self-pity that masquerades as sympathy for others. And he promises the inquisitive young people further discussion. The retrospective, after all, continues tomorrow.