Rushes
1
2
From spool to empty spool, the images clattered, a baggy ribbon of blurred flickers that you paused, lifted the hood, and lined the strip with china marker. You pulled the film out of the gate towards you like two elastic arms and settled it on the metal cutting block. You spliced and taped and fed the scene back, a minute shorter. You numbered the end, fastened it to a bull-clip and hung it on a hook on the wall, or slid it into a suspended cloth bag for trims. Then you clicked down the hood and made the movie move again.
3
You’d sit at the edge of your seat. You couldn’t hear anything else when you were editing. The images were sound that needed an exact rhythm, a melody only you could detect. You knew to cut just before it seemed to need it, your attention fastidious. Thelma Schoonmaker sat at your right shoulder. When we watched La Regle du Jeu I didn’t flinch as the dozen rabbits and birds were shot. You’d taught me to go inside the cuts – 102 in 4 minutes – counting Renoir’s rhythm, defined by Marguerite Houlet, his editor and lover at the time.
4
We’d flirted at a feminist film group. I’d noticed your walk – a loping swagger on long legs in tight jeans. The static between us made me giggle so much I had to leave the room. You didn’t want a relationship. I made you have one. We met in unadorned rooms in Soho, in basements, or at the end of a grey corridor where daylight never arrived. The sun burnt a bar of gold on the ceiling or the wall where the blackout curtain didn’t quite close. In these dark and smoky places, you showed me what made you, making sense of every film I’d ever liked, teaching me why, giving my passion a possible world. We never once had sex there. You were paying by the hour.
5
Film buffs were men. With beards and BO. We were cinema fiends. There were no videos or DVDs. There was the ceremony of cinema. A von Trotta Double Bill at the Academy; a Bergman Triple at the Electric; midnight cults at the Scala; Monday nights at the Everyman. We travelled, stayed awake, skived off work because there were films to be seen. I’d smuggle in a bowl of finely chopped, dressed salad, fresh bagels and two forks, and we’d sit in silence nourishing ourselves for hours. You never stood up until the last credit, as if by reading each name, honouring each member of the crew, you could absorb their skill, their magic.
6
You were in love with many women, always. You appreciated them like a connoisseur of fine liquers with a longing roll of the eyes and a small gasp: Gena Rowlands in Woman Under the Influence, Bernadette Lafont in La FiancĂ© du Pirate, Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria, Sophia Loren and Catherine Deneuve in anything. You were a big flirt and a big fan and I didn’t realise then how much humility and forgiveness that required.
You forgave Deneuve her bad plots and her love affairs with ugly, much older men; you forgave me my younger women. You were capable of devotion. You knew the difference a 25th of a second could make to a glance across a crowded bar.
7
You were a celluloid master. I bowed at your feet. Once you rescued a bored porn star from another bad movie, devising a way she could cut herself free from the film strip and escape on the back of your motorbike. No one believed it would work. Or the 16mm feature you made of the threesome you were living in, in a flat in Warren Street in the early 80s. You ate only toast and tepid tea. But women always fed you more.
8
You gave me a Super 8 to take to Russia, showed me how to use it. I carried it like a baby. I shot blossoms falling in a Moscow park, a gigantic mural on the dull outskirts, a sudden heap of tomatoes for sale on the roadside. I couldn’t film people. The camera was a gun I couldn’t point. I couldn’t see a whole from parts, came home with short unfinished poems. I don’t know where that footage is. In a grey can somewhere, held closed with white tape with my name on it, on a shelf in some dusty cutting room.
For Jacqui Duckworth, director of “An Invitation to Marilyn C”, Home-Made Melodrama, “A Prayer Before Birth”, and “A Short Film About Melons”.
poetrymagazines' note: 'Rushes' is published in Cherry Smyth's third collection, released on May 23rd 2012, Test, Orange from Pindrop Press.
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