Flicker by Theodore Roszak Page A

her star pupil, she was among the few in America who were fully conversant with the latest Europeantheories. Within the next few years, she would catch the crest of New Wave enthusiasm in America and ride it to a success she’d all but stopped hoping for. For whatever Clare did to make my mind the mirror of her own during that entrancing interval of my life, I can only be grateful. Because, for all her quirky angles and bitter antagonisms, she was a staunchly humanistic spirit. Though she could talk cinematic technique with the best of them, she never allowed the medium to outweigh the meaning of the film. She insisted that movies were something more than a bag of optical illusions; they were literature for the eye, potentially as great as anything ever written for the page. From her I learned always to listen for the statement, watch for the vision. Or at least that’s how I looked at movies until Max Castle ushered me into a darker science of the cinema. At which point I discovered that as vast and well-furnished as Clare’s intellectual universe might be, there was a trapdoor within it that opened into the uncharted depths.
    One day while The Classic was featuring a Howard Hawks series, I arrived at the theater in the early afternoon hoping to sit through another of Clare’s illustrated lectures on one of her favorite directors. But when I entered the darkened auditorium, there was already a movie on the screen—and it wasn’t Howard Hawks. It was a dim, yellowing print with a blurry sound track, so crudely spliced and so bereft of sprockets that it lurched spastically through the projector, garbling the dialogue and chopping the images into near incoherence. The scene was a morose Gothic interior: vast halls, shadowy stairways, mullioned windows glowing with spooky moonlight. Buxom ladies wearing Regency gowns and carrying guttering candles wandered along eerie corridors in the dead of night; ghoulish servants lurked in the corners. I could recognize none of the actors. What I managed to catch of the mangled script was a compendium of clichés. “I thought I heard a scream in the night,” one of the lusty beauties remarks. “I’m sure it was only the wind, milady,” the cadaverous butler answers with a furtive roll of his eyes.
    Now this, I felt absolutely certain, was a very bad movie. Still, if Clare was watching it … and not just watching it—devouring it. When I entered the projection booth where she was stationed at the little window, she was deeply immersed in the film, too absorbed to register my arrival with more than a quick, cool glance. Slipping up behind her, I offered the greeting she most appreciated: a kiss in the hollow of her neck, my hands, searching out the flesh of her belly,gliding gently upward. It was the way Jean-Claude Brialy embraces Juliette Mayniel in
Les Cousins.
(Were Juliette’s breasts, like Clare’s, also bare beneath her sweater?) Clare usually melted a bit when I did that. But this time she gave an annoyed start and pulled away.
    â€œWhat’s this?” I asked as I settled in beside her at the window.
    â€œA bit of a lark,” she answered impatiently. “It’s called
Feast of the Undead.”
    I didn’t immediately place the title. Wanting to be sure of my ground, I waited a few minutes more, then ventured to comment, “It looks pretty … bad.”
    It’s crap.
    â€œOh.” After a pause, I asked, “Why are we watching it?”
    â€œ
We
aren’t.
I
am. You don’t have to.”
    â€œWell, why are
you
watching it?”
    â€œIt may be the only Max Castle movie in captivity. At least it’s the only one I’ve been able to get hold of.”
    Ah yes. Castle. The vampire guy. The one the French couple had mentioned at Moishe’s that night. Since then, Clare had brought him up two or three times more. I recalled hearing her on the phone making inquiries with