Cinema Muto

Goodnight Silents

74 Goodnight Silents The man beside me is happy to be asleep in his seat. In the front row, you can stretch out your legs— the piano rolls in, the lights dim & in five minutes, you are dreaming your own silent movie. But first, there is the red velvet plush of your seat to enjoy, & the moviegoer will sleep here until dawn. He has already finished his furtive dinner, a pannini & warm beer from the worn briefcase beneath his seat. A few feet away, the screen rises from the stage: this close, it is hard to see, it’s that big. At this hour, it’s fuzzy even in my eyes. Later, the projectionist, too, will fiddle & fiddle, trying to fix fatigue with focus. The moviegoer, beneath it, stretches further into sleep. In his dreams, the silence is total, all films have the delicate hand tinting of early cinema: blue for moonlight, gold for lamplight, red for the flames of Mount Vesuvius burning a model Pompeii to the ashen ground. Shortly, the house lights will come on. Painful & electric. One after another, we will stumble into the street, trying to wake our sleeping feet long enough to reach our hotels, our waiting, hard Italian pillows, while the moviegoer sleeps, dreams on. Then— in just a few hours—we will be back up again. At that time in the morning, the moviegoer, too, is just waking. No one has moved him, but he wakes no stiffer than we horizontal sleepers. He is heading for the cafe near the Teatro Zancanaro where he takes his morning coffee. 75 It is a pleasure to walk to the theater this early, past the moviegoer standing in his cafe, talking to the young waitress, past the stalls of the weekly market with their carpet slippers & artichokes equally well-displayed. Past the grandmothers in from the country who all smell more strongly of life & the sweat it takes to keep on living than any of us sedentary, silent film scholars, who are freshly showered, though all we did the day before was sit in our plush chairs & watch life flicker on the screen before us. Life as lived in the days of these grandmothers’ mothers. Before there were cars pushing, honking through the market. Cars to carry their husbands to Pordenone & bring them back with thinner wallets. Cars to take their sons off to meet the strange women who live in even further, distant cities. Still, in exchange for their sons, at the end of this year’s film festival—or will it be the next?— they will gain the moviegoer, the one too poor to bother with hotel rooms, the one who will never finish his dissertation on D’Ambra’s Two Dreams with Eyes Wide Open because his never are, the one who prefers the cafe just past the theater to all others: in the end he’ll marry that cafe & the sweet waitress who comes with it & he’ll work from dawn to midnight, on his feet the whole day, but he’ll drink cool beer from his own tap & leave this life of decaying celluloid behind. 76 Cars pass during the night, too, but more quietly, so quietly that, though the cleaners threw the doors of the theater wide open, the moviegoer hasn’t woken. At night the beams of the headlights, as they round the curve, reveal the screen, blank white, waiting for the next day’s movies. Near dawn, they glide cautiously along, you can’t hear a thing except maybe the river & at the edge of town they disappear into the valley, sinking in blue shadow—blue for night, green for nightmares, red for The End of silent film. ...