Camera Phone - Brooke Biaz

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plastic half cups from the Cafe-bar. There are exam papers in pink piles on the floor around the room. There’s the smell of wet wool, an open packet of Anadine on the floor, a briefcase with its clasp twisted and a sticker worn across it with a picture of a screaming child, looking like Kenny in South Park, in a red crossed circle like something out of Ghostbusters. Being very anti-noise, anti-child or anti-child-abuse; I can’t work out which.

      “Geez,” I say, involuntarily.

      He adjusts his tie, which is blue paisley to his jacket’s bleached grey, and asks Karen to explain what it is that she wants to do.

      “To the camera,” he says, “if you want.” And I notice his lips when he smiles are cracked and pale and that his teeth are bone white behind them, but unevenly collapsed onto each other, and the highpoints of his cheeks, which are pinkish, are positively glowing.

      Using the light from the window as backlight, which is fairly atmospheric, I catch the left side of Krotow, and Karen full frontal. I turn Krotow into a silhouette and Karen’s nervousness, which has spread into her fingers which now barumbas across the synopsis she has brought with her, I tilt myself towards.

      I keep saying to myself that basic rule: “Form follows function. Form follows function . . .”

      I film the two of them like it’s Basic Instinct (in which the cinematography of Jan De Bont is truly a treat, I might add), while Karen reads from the synopsis she’s prepared on two sheets of legal paper she typed up last night, by the bay window in the pale moon light (this, of course, only being suggested).

      I think to myself: “There are things you can do in a situation like this to increase the tension. Scorsese says: ‘Don’t split the screen.’ He says: ‘Don’t go flying with the Rolling Stones.’ ‘Don’t crash cut. Never.’” But then again Scorsese also made Kundun, so what would he know?

      Now I’m catching bits of conversation.

      Karen is saying, somewhat tonguingly, I think: “What was that stuff again about Joan of Arc and the butterflies?” (something like that).

      To which Krotow comments: “Oh, Karen! Babe you are Madonna, you know. You are that famous singer whose name is Madonna.”

      Okay, so maybe I don’t hear this at all; but the battery warning symbol is showing and I have other things to worry about. Namely: is the battery running out before I get back to our flat for a new one? Like: I am supposed to be a professional here and this shouldn’t happen. Like: I bet this never happened to Rodriguez, ever. The light flickers red, indicating my time is nearly up.

      I notice, suddenly in my panic, a Roxy Cinema flyer for the Festival of the Waters Film Festival, pinned up right on the wall behind Krotow.

      9

      Goethe once wrote (and Professor Alton of the USP Department of Languages, Cultures and Civilizations quoted it, photocopied)—that’s Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the famous poet, novelist, playwright, natural philosopher and diplomat, author of The Sorrows of Young Werther—Goethe once wrote:

      What a man notices and feels about himself seems to me the least part of him. He is more inclined to see what he lacks than what he has, to remark what worries than what delights him and enlarges his mind. Soul and body forget about themselves when things are pleasant and happy, and they are only reminded of themselves again by something unpleasant. A man writing of himself and his past will therefore mostly note what is cramping and painful.

      (Library Shelf: Short Loan: Lecture Notes—A. P. Alton “An Introduction to European Philosophy”)

      10

      As we leave Krotow’s office, me tracking back, Karen is happier than she’s been all day. She says she doesn’t want to wait around while I ruin my life. She says this quite brightly, I think. She says if I want to get hooked up with Milroy, and won’t listen to her, then she just can’t wait around to watch it happen. She says:

      “You know, you’re wrong about Julian Krotow. I happen to know he’s treasurer of the Film Festival Committee. So he’s hardly ‘anti-film,’ Ciaran, or whatever you say. If that’s what you’re thinking.”

      “Whatever,” I say.

      But then she says she wants to go to the library to meet Colleen and then to the Student Union where they’ll plan Satanic rituals and choose the people they want to sacrifice.

      Of course, I don’t actually catch all of this, but my camera phone is capable of picking up undercurrents, sub-surface things that would otherwise go unnoticed, and I tell Karen I’ll see her in the bar at two, and if she wants to bring Colleen then that’s her business, but to my mind she is no more than an extra and should probably get on with her own life.

      I stop at Steve Milroy’s door (on which I note, a little ominously I admit, there is a poster of Gérard Depardieu), and I knock loudly.

      When behind the door a voice seems to say “Hi! Hi!” I think I’ll just forget the whole thing and go out onto the front lawn where a band is now playing “Solved” by Unbelievable Truth, though it’s not Unbelievable Truth only a band that wants to sound like them. But, figuring this is just being spooked by Karen’s increasingly anti-film, anti-life, anti-us attitude, I don’t go.

      Instead, I turn around so my phone is catching the corridor receding behind me and I go into the office. Backwards.

      The effect (though I’ll have to check this in the rushes) is that the whole film seems to be disappearing into a new scene, a new low key, without cutting at all. And I think:

      “I should have thought of doing this earlier!”

      The corridor becomes bright and hard. Keeping it in focus, I catch the edge of the door with my left shoe, and push. The door sweeps across the frame from right to left. And slaps closed. The venetians are half open. The shot looks dark over all, with a few highlight areas (see: Michael Ribager: On Directing).

      “Dr Milroy?” I ask.

      I’m continuing to phone film the back of the door, which is quite grainy actually, and on which there is a dimly lit cute calendar from Pete’s Pets featuring a muppet (name unknown), a rainbow colored scarf that hangs down to the floor, a peeling sticker for Classic Coke, a poster of Jean Harlow.

      I pan slowly to the right. A half turn. Then left. The bookshelves provide a rapid line of composition, leaving behind the door in the direction of the window and passing such absolute winners as An Introduction to Communication by Gerhl and Wesserman, past Radical Underworld by Iain McCalman, then his Festival of the Waters Special Film Award, shaped as it is like a bronze wave, then several novels by John Updike, Modern Myth in the Films of Jesús Franco. Light reading, right? until I’m meeting the glow through the venetians straight on, which is splitting the frame into seven identical widths, and I can make out Milroy.

      There’s an obvious flaw in all this which I cannot immediately pinpoint. I think perhaps I have done something wrong. The linearity of the thing. The way the action rises. The sense of thematic purpose. But for the moment there’s Dr Steven Milroy: his head thrown right back as he lies collapsed in his chair, his head in a clear plastic bag, his neck in some kind noose hung from the curtain rail, and completely buck naked.

      two

      Beauty and the Beast

      1991, 84m, Color

      Animated/Musical/Romance, G/U

      Walt Disney Productions/Silver Screen Partners IV (U.S.)

      1

      Phone facts, some interesting differences of opinion:

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