Yesterday I was hobbling about the Promenade, spending time at book stores and Starbucks, sitting in the sun, checking out the incredibly beautiful women Southern California is heir to. I was on my way home, passing one of the three cineplexes that dot this festive area, when an incredibly beautiful young Southern Californian woman approached me, smiled, and asked if I would like a free ticket to a screening that was starting in ten minutes.

Being retired leaves one free to pursue otherwise time-wasting ventures. I accepted the ticket, and, ever the philanderer, asked if she would care to join me. She actually blushed before declining. I was tempted to remind her of the saying: “Once you’ve gone old, you’re sold!” but didn’t. I entered the theater and took my seat. An usher appeared before the curtain and told the almost full auditorium that we were about to see a new film directed by and starring Sean Penn. Without further ado, the lights dimmed.

Mr. Penn not only directs and stars as the title character in Keller, he also wrote and produced it. This is the story, of course, of Helen Keller (1880-1968), the famous deaf blind person who inspired the award winning television, stage, and film adaptations of her autobiography, The Story of My Life, aka The Miracle Worker. The film follows Helen from her birth in Alabama to her death in Connecticut eighty-seven years later.

Keller is a sweeping, inspiring epic. Clearly no expense or time (the film runs four hours and fifty-two minutes in its present incarnation) was spared in bringing this story to life. Sean Penn is amazing in the title role, and subsequent research on the film included rumors than Mr. Penn underwent questionable temporary sexual reassignment surgery in the Switzerland District of Rodeo Drive. He also apparently wore opaque contact lenses and sound deadening ear plugs during all of his scenes so that he was actually blind and deaf! These efforts pay off in spades: you truly believe you are seeing the actual Helen Keller.

Ms. Keller had a full and fascinating life. She was the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree (Radcliffe – 1904). Her lifelong friend, teacher, and mentor Annie Sullivan is played to perfection by the luminous Anne Heche. After college, Helen entered the political arena. She was a suffragist, a pacifist, a Wilson supporter, a radical Socialist, and helped found the ACLU in 1920. Although this rich history would be fodder for a straightforward biopic, Penn, the writer, chooses to focus on the less told stories of Helen’s various relationships with often famous personalities. Taking what might be cinematic liberties, Penn uses Keller’s friendship with Charlie Chaplin (played stunningly by Cate Blanchett) to posit the theory they had an intense romantic relationship. When Helen finger-spells the words “Take Me!” on Charlie’s palm, the moment is both tender and wrenching. The love scenes between them are photographed in dark, muted tones.

Helen also was friends with Mark Twain (Boy George), Alexander Graham Bell (Tim Allen), and met every U.S. President from Grover Cleveland (Rush Limbaugh?) to Lyndon B. Johnson (Brett Favre). She was a birth control advocate and, according to this screenplay, an early supporter of Gay Rights. Penn’s performance could have been over the top, but he imbues his character with a subtle edginess, a dark side if you will, especially noticeable in the “Helen attends a Stag Film” sequence. The score consists solely of songs by the amply hyphenated Country-Metal-Rap group “Lilly White Ditch.” Stiltenheim Glakosky, the famous astigmatic cinematographer, lensed the picture and is sure not to be overlooked come Oscar time.

At 292 minutes, Keller may need some trimming. Overall, though, this was an unexpected glimpse into the dark-eyed soul of a truly dedicated film maker.

Nelson Despaire

This is how I discovered the rarest of diamonds amidst the privations of T.E. Lawrence’s desert sands and Yuri Zhivago’s Soviet snowdrifts. I found the “Holy Grail” of cinematic rarity, Let Me Count the Ways. It is harder, because, though it was apparently utterly lost, it has become known to me that it is not extinct, it is just unfound; and it seems to me that we need, at the very least, to exert the effort of setting up a radio-telescopic complex to find this cinematic needle in the haystack of our earthly backyard.

Consider David Lean in 1962. The reigning God of the Cinematic World. The director of Lawrence of Arabia, a film of such undeniable excellence that even Hollywood cannot find some way to snub it. The studios give Lean leave to “walk on water” as it were. He is given carte blanche, a nearly open budget, yet again. And great films follow.

We get into the early seventies. Lean has had several triumphs, but nothing like Lawrence. Fickle now become the studios with their largesse. A river of money still runs to David Lean, but it is finite and it is spent. There is Doctor Zhivago, a success by any measure, and yet the river of gold is running dry. And then of course Michael’s Day becomes Ryan’s Daughter, the greatest disaster movie ever made, though not in the normal sense.

Why is this important? Well, after Lawrence, Lean worked on his pet project, Let Me Count The Ways. He eventually employed much of the cast of Zhivago, but the cash had withered – to the extent that there was only one copy struck of Let Me Count the Ways.

In the early 1970s Lean arranged for two gala showings of the film, first in London, then shortly afterwards in Dublin. Well, gala it turned out not to be; the movie was shown at the obscurest hole-in-the-wall in London, but I happened across it there, most fortuitously, with a hundred or so people in the small theater. Fortunately, Lean insisted upon and got a first rate sound system. I then followed the print to Dublin, where the theater was larger, but the audience rowdier. The greatest misfortune, however, was that the projectionist more than shared in the groundling-like rowdiness of the Dublin-suburban audience: he drank, he fell asleep, the projector caught fire, the theater caught fire, and the reputedly unique movie burned.

The feverish notes I made in my journal those two nights follow.

* * *

Portsmouth, 1899. Ian Culpepper (Tom Courtenay) is supervising kite flying boys on the esplanade. There are towering clouds in the sky, the winds are brisk, there are whitecaps on the grey surf, and ships and boats everywhere. In the next scene he enters a waterfront hotel; there is a display of model ships in the lobby, one of which is of a seven-masted frigate. (A small plaque identifies it as the work of Prof. Ian Culpepper, Uxbridge). He then enters a spacious tearoom, generously fenestrated towards the waterfront, and sits down with a Clara Westcott (Geraldine Chaplin). She is enthusiastic about some conic sections she is analyzing on papers which are spread out before her amidst teapot, teacups, biscuits, and teacakes. She tells Ian that she has a great deal of interest in the way that triangles intersect, to which Ian answers that he is still engaged to Cacilie Fuerstenried of Munich but things may change when he goes there to visit in the summer. The exposition is helped along by the entrance of Lord Stride (Dirk Bogarde), a pretentious nobleman who is the uncle and guardian of Miss Westcott. Clara introduces Ian as a Professor of German at a public (very private) boys’ school in Uxbridge. She also tells Lord Stride that Ian is responsible for the wonderful ship models in the lobby, to which Lord Stride answers, “Perhaps, we may call you ‘Mr. Ships.’” Ian is not amused, but I was.

Lord Stride, boor though he is, is justly proud, and just as protective, of Clara. He calls her the Princess of the Parallelograms. It is obvious that she is an amateur mathematician in the mold of Ada Lovelace-Byron who was the helper of Charles Babbage as a precursor of the modern computer. It is also apparent that Lord Stride fancies himself a kind of Lord Byron. Unfortunately it would have been a Byron who outlived any of his genius.

It is a very long movie, but in it there are many settings and many seasons. The soundtrack is by Maurice Jarre at his most luxuriant, and he has an unprecedented three main themes for this film, rather than his usual, just one. There is a lot of period music too: Elgar, Delius, Wagner, Mahler, and all of the Strausses.

The central part of the film is in Central Europe, Munich to be exact. A lot of it takes place around the Odeonsplatz and the Hofgarten, just like in the beginning of T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland.” Ian is sitting at an outdoor table with Cacilie (pronounced Ka-seal-ia) Fuerstenried (Maria Schell) and her friend Katia Pringsheim (Rita Tushingham). Dear Clara, as beguiling as she was back in England, has completely faded from the consciousness of Ian, who has rededicated himself to Cacilie.

Meanwhile in the Englischer Garten, near the “Pagoda” on the Kleinhesseloher See, Siegfried Wagner (Oskar Werner) is flirting with Thomas Mann (Omar Sharif). Cosima Wagner (Margaret Rutherford), travelling incognito, leads Siegfried away by the table: “It’s back to Bayreuth with you, young man!” Chastened and actually quite relieved, Mann returns to the Hofgarten where he joins Ian, Clara, and Katia, who is his fiancée. He pulls out a big manuscript from his briefcase and begins reading, to the delight of everyone. The leaves are falling and Munich is at its zenith.

It is February, 1900. Clara and Lord Stride have just returned from St. Petersburg where they did a lot of troika riding. She goes up to Uxbridge and is furious to learn that Ian has not broken off his engagement with Clara. Through her uncle she has Ian brought up on charges of espionage. There is a closed hearing before the admiralty, presided over by Lord Hammersmith (Alec Guiness). Clara arranged for Ian’s ship models to be subpoenaed for evidence of naval espionage; at the same time, Clara presents mathematically derived information that a British heir to the throne will be assassinated in 1910 and that war with Austria will be the result. It becomes obvious to all that Clara is deeply disturbed, and Ian is acquitted, but nevertheless loses his job.

Some years later, the daughter of Clara comes to visit the son of Cacilie and Ian in a beautiful mountain and lake setting in the Eastern Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ian is still hurt by the way he was treated in London, but eventually becomes charmed by the girl who has a letter of apology from her mother. There is peace all around. It is spring, 1914, in Sarajevo.

* * *

As I made my escape from the conflagration in the Dublin theater, I opened the glass case outside, by the ticket booth, with the intention of saving the sole poster advertising the movie. To my surprise, I found it was not a poster, but a painting. Not long afterwards, I sat in a Dublin pub, with none other than the great Lion Lean licking his wounds nearby. He confided in a fellow named Robert that there was one other copy of Let Me Count the Ways, but it soon became impossible for me to discern any more over the rudely indifferent chatter of the other patrons. The knowledge that the film has survived is both the lodestone and bane of my existence.

Gert Ködel

* * *

Dear Montag, Gert, and Nelson,

After finishing the illustrations for Sleepers Awake! I started to have a funny feeling that I had heard the name T. Simm before, a very long time ago. Try as I might, I just couldn’t remember where or when.  But a phrase uttered by one of the characters in the film Pumbel Brythegg kept turning over in my mind, trying to rise to conscious awareness.

The phrase was “freaks of nature,” and the old man in the hut used it to describe the perfectly round alabaster pond from which the white horse was drinking.  And there was something else, too.  The talking stone woman’s head – or stone woman’s talking head, or whatever – kept beating at the back of my brain (ultimately leaving me with a hole I didn’t need).

After a day spent trying to recollect how I knew the name T. Simm, I poured myself a cold beer and sat down to watch one of my favorite Ealing Studios movies, The Man in the White Suit, starring Alec Guinness.  In the film, Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, a scientist who invents an indestructible fabric which repels dirt and dye – making it a bright white – and which glows in the dark, due to some of its elements being radioactive.  Somewhere towards the end of the film, I dozed off.  Typical.  But not before I saw Stratton being chased through the night by the union managers and employees of the textile factory.  They had all realized that since the fabric can’t wear out, once everyone buys something made from it, there would be no need to make any more, and the workers would all be out of jobs!  Anyway, due to a formula miscalculation, as Stratton is escaping from the union mob, his glowing suit begins to fall apart, and the union mob finishes the job by unraveling it, leaving Stratton in his underwear.

I had fallen into an uneasy sleep, and images of a glowing Alec Guinness riding a glowing white horse, and holding a talking stone woman’s head (or the other way round) who kept repeating, “I am the eighth wonder of the world!” jumbled around as I began to dream.  Guinness told the head “Nuts!  Put a sock in it!  Chew coke!”  I entered the dream and asked the trio where they were going.  The horse said, “To Hell!  To the Land of Mist!”  Guinness kicked the horse into a gallop and they all sped towards the perfectly round alabaster pond.  I watched in horror as they jumped in!  As they went over the edge the talking head cried, “I’ll split the atom!  I am the fifth dimension!  I am a freak of nature!”

“That’s it!” I said (to the empty beer glass which I had knocked into my lap) as it all came back to me and I awoke from the dream.  The “freak of nature” –  I knew where I’d heard that before!

My great uncle was named Richard S. Lambert.  I never met him, and I don’t know very much about him except that he worked in broadcasting, I think in the BBC, and was a member of the British Film Institute.  His first wife, my great aunt, was Kate Elinor Lambert.  I called her Ellie.  I remember more about her, because she was an artist like me.  She used to illustrate a publication that she and Richard put out.  (The Stanton Press, I think she said.)  I met Aunt Ellie after she and Richard had divorced (they had moved to Canada at the start of WWII) and Ellie came to stay with her sister, my grandmother.  She was pretty old by then, but when she visited my mother and me, she showed me how to use the pencil and paper that my mother gave me.  I owe Ellie a lot.

Anyway, back to Richard Lambert.  You see, Ellie used to tell me stories about the time he worked for the BFI and arranged screenings of, yes, the films of none other than Teodor Simm – T. Simm!  But there was one film, or film project, that Ellie herself was involved in, along with Richard, and she especially loved to tell me about it.

It turns out that great uncle Rex, as he was known, had a hobby, the supernatural.  He even wrote two books on his investigations.  One was something like Exploring the Supernatural, and the other was the book he wanted T. Simm to turn into a movie: The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap.  The story concerned a man, Jim Irving, his wife Margaret, and their daughter Voirrey.  They lived in near isolation in a house (Cashen’s Gap) on a hill on the Isle of Man.  As the story goes, one night in the early 1930s, the Irvings had a visitor.  But this was no ordinary visitor.

It was… a talking mongoose!  Who called himself Gef!  (Pronounced “Jeff,” by the way.)  According to the Irvings, Gef made himself at home, taking up quarters in Voirrey’s room.  He spoke in a high, squeaky voice and said things like: “I am not a spirit.  I am an extra, extra clever mongoose,” and “I am a ghost in the form of a weasel, and I shall haunt you with weird noises and clanking chains,” and “I am a freak of nature!”

Whenever Ellie used to come to this part of the story, she would always crack up.  “Imagine,” she would say, “a talking mongoose who said it was a freak of nature!  Of course it was!  Whatever else could it be?  Certainly not normal, mind you.”

Great uncle Richard had actually visited the Irvings, and thought the story of Gef the Talking Mongoose would be the film that would vindicate him and his studies on the supernatural, and give the lie to all his accusers.  I think he had already filed a lawsuit against someone who called him a fraud.  Richard had actually persuaded T. Simm to make the movie, and I believe that together they had secured an advance from none other than Ealing Studios.  (See how it all comes together?)  But when Simm delivered the finished script titled Doarlish Cashen, which he and Richard had adapted from Richard’s book and which Aunt Ellie had illustrated, Ealing balked.  In fact, the studio backed right out of their promise.  The idea of a film about a talking (and possibly singing mongoose) was just too bizarre for them.  Although, a few years later, a movie about a glow-in-the-dark suit that lasts forever wasn’t…  In any case, Ealing ended their association with Timm and the Lamberts.

Richard was able to keep the advance, which I think Ellie got as part of the divorce settlement, but their relationship with Timm was over.

Now that I think about it, when Aunt Ellie used to tell me that story, she always had a book in her hand.  It was softbound with brads holding the pages together.  And it had pictures.

When Ellie died, she left a trunk of her belongings to her sister, my grandmother.  It stayed in her attic, unopened.  When my grandmother died, my mother cleared out that attic.  And when my mother died, she left that trunk to me.

Excuse me, gentlemen, while I search the basement.

Best,

Ivy

Food, that great leveller of the estates of men, has arranged for me several encounters with fame.  Of the more noteworthy: while stopping in Sedona in 1984, I was seated near the table of Orson Welles, who was jovial in an Olympian sort of way.  (When he became saturnine, it was only acting.)  He made sporadic, flirting conversation with his waitress but dined alone, which for a mortal would have been equivalent to dining with three others.  (I speak both gastronomically and intellectually.)  Many years later, during a visit with Nelson in Santa Monica, a bearded, bespectacled cherub entered the restaurant where we were dining; the creature brandished a copy of its latest book as if to confirm suspicion of its identity: Leonard Maltin.  This last month, I happened to spot the filmmaker Serban Ra at Chez Guevara, an establishment that fuses, or at least conglomerates, two cuisines; I leave it to you to decipher which.  Of course, the probability of my running into someone like Ra was higher than normal, as I was attending the annual — Film Festival.

Ra was there to promote his short Exeunt Omnes, about a dying actor portraying a general of the American Civil War.  (I shall write about this in a later article.)  I noticed Ra several tables over in the generously uncrowded restaurant.  He saw the adhesive nametag (HELLO!  MY NAME IS… Montag) that I had forgotten to remove.  His cheerful, nonchalant salesman act was quite good.  It began with an unsolicited handshake and his staking himself at my table.  To grease the gears, as it were, I mentioned that I had been impressed by Exeunt Omnes.  “Oh, really?”  That film never came up again.  Instead, Ra pitched his next endeavor to me.  It is titled Dandelion and is an extended meditation on the titular form.

The film opens, as seen above in a picture taken from the mock-up press kit that Ra pressed upon me, with an enormous, globular dandelion held against the setting sun.  A wind rustles, but does not detach, the parasol seeds.  Cut (match cut on form, for the 101 students) to a roiling, orange star in the depths of space.  There is no sound.  Pull back to reveal that this is a still plate being developed in a darkroom.  The astronomer responsible, Louis Miller, scrutinizes his work.  An uncaring colleague opens the door, ruining the plate.  The colleague is the “new guy” (film pitch shorthand) at the observatory.  His name is Barry Center.  Miller chastises him, which does not stop Barry from asking a large favor: could Miller take care of his daughter over the weekend?  You see, Barry’s wife is flying back on Friday from her “camp” in the Andes (we are meant to assume that she is a fellow scientist), and the kid would cramp his style.  More to avoid further conversation with Barry than to do him a good turn, Miller accepts.  Before Barry leaves, Miller asks him for the “gravitational microlensing” results.

At this point in our conversation, Ra began a tangential discourse on methods of extrasolar planet detection.  My gaze and practiced nods suggested intent listening, but I confess that a glaze set over my mind which reduced me to the level of a canine whose attention flits from master to passing butterfly and back again.  I gleaned a few terms from Ra’s lecture, however, such as “wobble” and “binary lens event.”

The pitch continued: Miller is at home, poring over reams of data.  It is night and it is raining.  Miller comes to the vocal conclusion (a scientific tradition since Archimedes’ Eureka!) that the distant star he is studying both has orbiting planets and is a likely candidate for a supernova.  A car pulls up outside.  Barry has arrived to drop off his eight-year-old daughter, Sally.  She is burdened with a garish backpack and a large stuffed animal, with which she makes Miller exchange one-sided pleasantries.  Miller then has a word with her father: Did Barry forget the conference that Miller has to attend?  Barry produces a plane ticket.  “What are government grants for?”

Sally proves precocious in oddly functional ways.  She wakes well before Miller, fixes breakfast for herself and her host, and, when there isn’t anything to do, leafs interestedly through Miller’s library of astronomical texts.  Every now and then she will ask a question, an extraordinarily intelligent one, about Miller’s supernova study.  He is sure that Barry and Mrs. Barry must have adopted her.

Miller and Sally sit beside each other on an airliner.  The inflight movie is Exodus.  Miller cycles through the computer slides for his approaching talk.  He pauses on the star, the imminent supernova.  Sally asks if anyone lives there.  “Maybe.”  She has several follow-up questions, which are rather profound but are phrased innocently.  (“Where will they move to?” &c.)  These play in voiceover during a montage of Miller and Sally walking through a bustling New York City to their hotel.  The atmosphere is a dusty orange; the sun is setting on Man’s metropolis.

That night, Miller dreams his supernova.  A roiling, orange star in the depths of space dominates the screen (will dominate, if Ra gets his budget).  Push in slowly to reveal countless gigantic porcelain-white spaceships that hover over this solar tempest.  They are patterned on parasols or, more aptly, dandelion seeds.  The star’s intensity grows; it expands rapidly.  Blinding white light.  Miller wakes up.

Cut to the following day, the day of Miller’s talk.  He wears a suit and tie and carries a briefcase – unusual accoutrements for him.  (And, like me, he probably wears an anonymity-piercing nametag.)  He has taken Sally to a park.  It is oppressively sunny.  (Ra’s description of the park was reminiscent of Portrait of Jennie, though in the wrong season, and I told him as much.  He said it is meant as an hommage, with Miller as Eben and Sally as the sprite Jennie, but I digress.)  Miller keeps looking at his watch as Sally plays with the other children.  They launch toy sailing boats into a gargantuan fountain.  A Father approaches Miller and asks if Sally is his daughter.  No, he’s just taking care of her.  The Father points vaguely at the children and says, “That’s mine right there.”  A silent moment passes, a “beat” in dramaturgical parlance.  The Father then says that Miller won’t be giving his talk; the conference is cancelled.  Miller is confused.  He asks the Father how he knows him, and why is the conference cancelled?  “Because it’s true.  Because you’re right, Mr. Miller.”  We learn what Miller is right about: There is life around the star that he’s been studying, and when the star goes supernova, the life will escape by riding the explosion like a wave to “…near luminal velocities.”  Will this life ever reach us?  The Father gestures to Sally, who plucks a large dandelion.  “Her great-grandchildren might meet them.”  And how did the Father know all of this?  He takes out a small tape-recorder and plays back Miller’s greeting to Sally’s stuffed animal.  Then who is Barry?  “Sally is adopted.”  She comes running, and the Father scoops her up in his arms.  She holds the dandelion aloft, against the sun, a near repetition of the opening shot.  The Father turns to leave.  Sally blows on the dandelion.  The globe of seeds explodes outward.  Fin.

Montag Verglas

* * *

Dear Montag,

A friend connected with the ranch just brought over this DVD, Pumbel Brythegg. An Icosahedron Production, released through Janus Pictures.  Directed by T. Simm.  Soundtrack composed and performed on the harmonium by Fomalhaut Joad.  Seems to have been filmed in remarkable black and white (almost with a Carl Dreyerish quality), like on old silver nitrate from the silent era.  Near a hut there are three or four perfectly round ponds, kind of like alabaster bowls.  The elderly man who lives in the hut says to a man leading a white horse, that the bowls are “freaks of nature” and that you can “…lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”  But the horse is already drinking, with enthusiasm.  Later the man with the horse comes back alone to the ponds; there is a strong wind and blasted trees which look like Scottish knock-offs of Monterey cypresses resisting the wind.  The wind exposes a life-size statue of a woman’s head among the trees beside a short bluff.  The woman starts talking to the man.  He asks if she is an oracle.  She says she doesn’t know what that means.  She is a very pretty but somewhat ditzy oracle who speaks with a Scottish brogue.

The following day, the old man and some workmen come out to help the man “excavate” the stone woman’s head from where it is placed.   The man wants to take it to Glasgow.  Apparently nobody but the man with the horse knows that the woman can speak.  Ultimately a small wagon is brought for the statue, and the horse leaves.  One of the pools immediately empties of water as if a bathtub stopper had been removed.  The old man goes back to the hut to drink with his friends, one of whom has a guitar.  He starts “competing” with the film’s harmonium soundtrack.  Another man starts imbricating bagpipe music.  Whisky flows freely, and as the actors become drunker, they start losing their Scottish accents and revert to what sounds like London speech.

In a neighborhood of what is apparently Glasgow, a workman is “installing” the oracle statue above the door of an apartment below street level.  Later the “man with the horse” appears, though he no longer has the horse with him.  He runs up the stairs to the street level entrance to the apartment building, which brings him eyelevel with the statue if he bends over the railing a bit.  He enters into a flirtatious conversation with the oracle, who says that she “…always knew, that sometime she would wind up in Glasgow.”  There proceeds a strange montage, thematically and pictorially connecting the scene in Glasgow with the strange Northern country which we have just left: there are carriages, buses, trains, then carriages again, then the horse, then the hut, then the old man, then the pools, then the wind.  It is Cocteau without Cocteau.

Couldn’t find anything on IMDb, and the man who brought the film was neither interested in movies himself, nor did he even seem to know the provenance of this sleeper of sleepers.  Hope you’ll have better luck, Montag.

Yours,

Gert

* * *

Dear Gert,

How fortuitous that you have seen Pumbel Brythegg!  This means that between us we have experienced director T. (for Teodor, by the way) Simm’s “Welsh Diptych.”  The one I happened to catch was Pazel Hethig, which I believe is the second of the matched pair.  It was shot in extremely muted, almost Lumière-esque color with a pronounced grain.  (How much of this was intentional I cannot be sure, as the print I saw had probably had a rough life.)  In fine, it concerned a frowsy bar patron who, no matter which establishment, would habitually sidle up to a taxidermal, plaque-mounted beaver and extol the virtues of “very cold” gin and tonics, all the while without drinking them.  His encomium was, of course, in subtitled Welsh, and I later learned that the unsteady text had nothing at all to do with what he was saying (in fact, driving instructions from Cardiff to Abergele).  If I am able to track down a copy, I’ll be sure to send it your way.

Regards,

M.V.

* * *

Dear Montag,

Looking forward.  I did not catch Simm’s first name when I saw the film; I thought it might have been Taylor, but I knew it started with a “T.”  It is puzzling that the Scottish part of the Diptych had a more Welsh sounding name than the Welsh part of the Diptych.  I guess if any of my research is going to be effective, I will have to look for material on the director.  I am hoping that there is a Film Department at the University of —, and that they have a good library.

The gentleman who brought Pumbel Brythegg to the ranch was so inconspicuous as not to have made an impression on anyone.  I was a little disturbed that he insisted on taking his movie home with him before I was able to see if there was any supplementary material such as special features.  Was Pazel Hethig also released by Janus?  It is a fairly big distributor of just such outré cinematic material.  Where did you find out that both films were part of a Diptych?  Inquiring minds need to know.

I wonder if there are any films from Brittany in Breton, or films from Provence in Provençale.  For me the future of the world lies in the reassertion of microcultures and ministates.

Regards to all,

Gert

* * *

Dear Gert,

I must open this letter with another exclamation: How odd that you should mention Brittany, as it was in Rennes that I chanced to see Pazel Hethig.  As I may have mentioned, an obligatory mid-year conference for all of the — took place there; this would have been back in 2007.  We were all of us put up in the same hotel – with wonderful, sparkling bathrooms, I might add, such a rarity in supposedly belle France.  Anyway, I awoke late the morning of a trip to a local newspaper, so after a leisurely breakfast during which I had as companion the hotel parakeet, I wandered the cobbled streets.  Beam and plaster buildings of surprisingly recent construction lined them (the town has a long history with fires and refuses to admit defeat), which was why the projecting ship’s bow of a theater marquee caught my eye.  There was but one screen, used alternately to show a dour documentary about Breton activists, and Pazel Hethig.  (Put on the bill out of microcultural solidarity perhaps?)

I cannot recall how many or which distributors’ logos preceded the film proper, but bicephalous Janus may have been two of them.  After the last reel had flickered past, I knocked on the projectionist’s booth.  The door opened inward, and a formless creature retreated to allow me entrance.  Fermez la porte, it said.  I did so.  The booth was very dark; the only light came from the molten pinprick of the projector, which seemed to crowd the small space with its beastly heat.  The machine’s operator introduced himself as Monsieur Ossian Chiaro, presumably of Scotch-Italian descent.  I tried to shake his hand, but he was clutching a film reel to his chest and refused to proffer even one limb.  Our conversation played out in the same miserly fashion.  Eventually I learned the director’s forename (shortened to the familiar initial in the credits), and that Pazel Hethig was preceded by Pumbel Brythegg.  When I asked him if they would be showing that film as well he told me curtly to leave (finally removing one hand from the reel in order to indicate the door).  Confused, I quit the theater and returned to my hotel, where my colleagues had miraculously reappeared en masse just in time for dinner.

Regards,

M.V.

* * *

Dear Gert and Montag,

A friend who was doing some belated spring cleaning found an old video tape and gave it to me.  On an otherwise plain white cover, it had the words Pterhausen Stiekeneggs, directed by T. Simm.  I realized that I may have, with some serendipity, stumbled across the final part of what is now the Simm Triptych.

The print is bad; the primitive Technicolor is washed out, like a fading, hesitant rainbow.  It is scored by solo harmonica.  A young man walks down the hallway of an apartment building.  He comes to a door, knocks.  The door opens.  A regal, quite old cat is standing there, an open 7-UP bottle in its paw.  A pink flex straw grows from the mouth of the container.  The young man takes the bottle and moves on to another apartment door that is ajar.  He enters.  An ancient man, bent and misshapen, is hunched over a .50 caliber machine gun.  He speaks: “I never killed anyone!”  The young man sets the bottle beside him and leaves.  He approaches another apartment and, in so doing, passes a window which shows us a moment of scenery indicating that the building is a high-rise.  The ocean beyond stretches forever to the horizon.

The door of this apartment is different from the others.  The young man pushes a button.  The door slides open, parting in the middle.  Debussy’s The Girl With The Flaxen Hair is heard on the harmonica.  A beautiful young woman with long blond hair appears in the doorway.  As the door is hydraulic, a medium sized box above controls the opening and closing.  Suddenly the box falls from its perch and smashes into the girl’s head.  She falls.  The young man helps her up.  She seems all right, but is now thirty years older. A uniformed maintenance person walks by, observes the scene for a moment, and then moves on.

Now the young man, who looks suddenly older and seems to have developed a limp, moves up a street to a restaurant.  Inside, he silently orders food and is served a dish full of live shrimp on a bed of rocks.  The shrimp are vociferously eating popcorn.  The now old man looks out the window near his seat.  The sun is setting over the bright blue motion of the sunlit sea.

Fade Out.

Nelson