Flicker by Theodore Roszak

end of my first year with Clare, my intellectual course was set. I’d scrapped prelaw and, with a certain sense of pompous self-importance, declared myself a film-studies major specializing in history and criticism. Clare encouraged the choice, or rather demanded it—not entirely because of my aptitude, which was yet to put in an appearance. In me, she saw her chance to relive the education that had been denied to her. I went along unresistingly. Naive I may have been, but not too obtuse to overlook a golden opportunity when it presented itself. Clare was offering me a ready-made academic career. I grasped it. She, as a student during the war years, had been ahead of her time. Now, a decade and a half later, the universities were opening up eagerly to the study of film; at UCLA the subject was booming. If Clare had been willing to return to school—but she’d never have considered it—she would have had all the intellectual leverage she needed against the literary fuddy-duddies. I returned in her place, equipped with all her tastes and insights. But where she had been a pushy young woman in the stuffy male world of the academy, I arrived as a tactful young man, a good (meaning docile) student who had a positive knack for charming his teachers. Clare never could help raising hackles; it was her nature. Nevertheless, shereveled in my progress as she watched me move among the scholars with a smooth and soothing ease. I was her hand-groomed agent infiltrating the hostile citadel of the university, armed with her once-despised critical views, many of which I wasn’t ashamed to take over like lessons learned by rote. Convinced of my teacher’s brilliance—and all too aware of my own strictly second-rate talents—I was prepared to be the perfect conduit.
    Over a three-year period together, Clare and I screened nearly the entire repertoire of film classics or at least as much as could be rented on the market. We arranged pioneering festivals and retrospectives both heavy (Fritz Lang, Von Stemberg, Renoir) and light (Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire, Harold Lloyd). Sometimes, when The Classic was running a special series, movies arrived four and five at a time, small towers of battered metal canisters that filled our tiny projection booth to the limit. Then I’d cut classes to sit with Clare through film after film, a veritable cinematic orgy. We brought in our meals—great, sopping corned-beef sandwiches from Moishe’s—and didn’t emerge again until after the evening program ended and we’d locked the doors. I came to think of the dark grotto of The Classic as a salt mine tunneling down into the bowels of the earth. Working through films with Clare, as she compiled her notes, was true intellectual labor: stop the movie, talk, run it again, talk some more, then run it again. If she judged we needed a closer reading, she could be a sure hand on the inching knob, expertly clicking the film along, exposing each delicate celluloid square to its ordeal by fire in the perilous film gate … eight seconds, nine, ten, and then on its way in just that last split second before it showed signs of melting. Her touch was the gift of instinct. On one occasion, we saw
Intolerance
through four times with Clare dissecting Griffith shot by shot, cut by cut, for my benefit. On another, she spent sixteen analytical hours on
Triumph of the Will,
teaching me Leni Riefenstahl’s diabolical skills as a film propagandist, every angle of the camera, every least nuance of lighting. “The single most gifted woman filmmaker,” Clare commented sourly, “and she had to be a fink.”
    What a joy it was exploring this phantasmagoria of the mind called movies! And what a privilege to have Clarissa Swann for my personal guide. Eventually there would be those who regarded her as a highly conservative critic, a remnant of the old school no longer in touch with the hot new ideas. But when I was