Page 129 - Titanic: Forbidden Stories Hollywood Forgot

Titanic! 115

The audience shifted and whispered in their seats. They
expected from him something new, avant garde, pos-
sibly weird, maybe shocking, and hopefully wonderful.
Somewhere an undergraduate girl giggled nervously.
“The silents,” he began to speak into his lavaliere
mike, “were never silent. Prosperous theatres featured
orchestras. Small theatres had pianos and the clack of the
projectors. Ethnic theatres hired monologuists to trans-
late the written English titles for the neighborhood. The
spielers, as they were called, freely ad-libbed, very freely
ad-libbed, many a dull title and plot into gracious wit and
good humor. They added dimension to the flat screen.”
Only the shadow cast by his body on the screen
helped differentiate him among the fast flash of images
from Edison, Lumiere, Melies, Lange, Von Sternberg, and
Riefenstahl to Brakhage, Anger, Deren, Warhol, Lean,
Wilder, Hitchcock, and Bergman.
“In sixty minutes of film,” his voice boomed through
the theatre, “you actually watch twenty-seven minutes
of total darkness. But the mind chooses to see only the
remaining thirty-three minutes of light. I want to know
what is between those frames, what is in that twenty-
seven-minute darkness, what secret of life lies just out
of reach in the flickers between those frames.”
He began to pelt the audience with data.
“The very form of cinema is absurd. No picture moves.
Still frame connects to still frame. The eye cancels the
darkness, cancels the stasis. The brain aches for motion.
The body aches for life.”
He no longer heard the doors of the theatre audito-
rium opening and closing.
“The first movie audiences in Paris screamed and

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