Readings

Documentarian of the Dead

The provenance of this text deserves special mention. I was drawn by a passing mention of the Vocational School to an online forum dedicated to that particular form of one-upmanship engaged in by film buffs that consists of the laudatory mention of ever more obscure films. Someone had met someone who had heard of someone who had abandoned work on a documentary about a very early filmmaker (name of Moe Decker or something like that) but was still sitting on some rare footage shot at the Vocational School or environs. There was alleged to be a script. But it was no use asking to see it, the guy was a crank, not Moe Decker but the other one, had never made a film, did not know the first thing about film, except the films of Moe Decker, on whom he was the world’s leading expert, in fact the world’s only expert, having bought sight unseen and at a sucker’s price a mess of decaying film reels that proved unbeknownst to the seller to contain the only copies extant of Decker’s masterpieces. Well, I tracked him down and persuaded him that he owed his insights to scholarship. The following text appears first here. —Ed.

“I came to the Sybil Joines Vocational School with one object,” wrote Aaron Moedeker in his abandoned memoirs, “to gain access to sights that, if they proved susceptible to capturing on film, would surely be the strangest and most wonderful ever to be impressed on celluloid.”

In October 1915, with the aid of the school’s experienced necrotechs, an ambitious young amateur filmmaker from California began making exploratory trips beyond the veil with a hand-cranked motion picture camera. After every visit to the land of the dead he would take detailed notes from memory, play and replay the footage (if any), and modify his equipment accordingly. The first trip from which he returned with exposed film took place around August 1916; before then, though the camera was running, the film remained blank. The first footage to present such fluctuations of light and dark as to suggest an image—in which, however, only the vaguest hints of figuration can be made out—was filmed in September 1916, almost a year after his earliest experiments. Oddly enough, it was recorded from within a sealed film canister that remained in Moedeker’s backpack for the duration of the trip.

Encouraged by this accidental success, Moedeker broadened the scope of his experimentation. To this period belongs the series of increasingly unusual motion picture cameras at which so much fun has been unjustly poked—the wax camera, the ice camera, the camera with no crank or lens, the diagram of a camera on a sheet of onionskin paper, the word camera scrawled on a calling card, the description of a camera read aloud. He even attempted to make a camera out of his own body, holding a strip of film in his mouth, which was exposed to light when he spoke. However, it was on an ordinary film camera that the first footage was shot in which anything resembling a landscape could be made out, though it undergoes peculiar convulsions.¹⁷

It turned out that to function beyond the veil, cameras required certain modifications. These seem to add up to a sort of animal disguise: a thick layer of goose fat, a carrying case of pigskin, a lens cover woven from horse or human hair. The film suffered less distortion if it had been breathed on. A small sack of ants tucked into the camera bag seemed to help.

Other modifications were made by death itself. Moedeker took careful notes of alterations to his equipment discovered on return. Unfortunately in most cases the equipment itself has not survived. We know, however, that his lenses took on a great many fantastic forms. Some sprouted an array of subsidiary lenses, connected to no eyepiece, whose pertinence to the putative footage seemed nil. Extra reels of varying sizes imposed intricate divagations in the path of the scrolling film. Several cameras were lost when they grew pseudopods and ran away. One melted, one burned, one was eaten in a moment of distraction by Moedeker himself, with no ill effects recorded. One divided itself into five hundred tiny cameras with working parts, some of which have been subsequently recovered from dollhouse collectors. One of these was still loaded with miniature strips of film; scholars are still arguing whether the evocative but enigmatic footage recovered from it was shot in the land of the dead, or was the work of some little girl, and the face that some claim to be able to make out, through the pale flicker of celluloid decomposition, merely that of one of her dolls.

The film and its emulsion also changed, making it hard to determine which visual phenomena were the effects of what we shall resign ourselves to calling “light” (though necronauts say that it no more resembles the light of our world than it does a stomachache or the sound of fingernails clawing at rough deal boards) and which were properties of the film itself—whether Moedeker was creating a record of actual sights, or merely of transformations of the film—or whether it even made any sense to assert a difference between those things. Nor was it clear whether such films should be played on ordinary projectors, or at ordinary speeds—with ordinary light! Or even whether to play the film was actually what one ought to do with it rather than, say, plant it, or boil it in brine, or wrap it around one’s neck and pull, pull hard . . .

One film grew like a vine, dividing, subdividing, and extending runners; after a late night, Moedeker fell asleep at his desk, and upon waking found that the film had coiled itself around his wrist and a table leg, effectively binding him in place. He was not found until the next day, by which point the film had seized his other wrist and sent an exploratory tendril into his mouth. This film was reportedly destroyed, though a rumor persists that Moedeker could not in the end bear to “kill” it, but hid it in a remote corner of the school basement, where it continued to grow and occasionally claimed a victim in a curious child drawn to such out-of-the-way places.

One film was transformed into a strip of paper on which a single phrase was printed over and over in capital letters: “THERE IS LAPE,” or possibly, “THERE I SLAPE” (the final word here has been interpreted by some as a nonstandard past tense of sleep). There is lape! The phrase has the ring of revelation. It has even entered popular usage, where it has come to mean something like the give in the grid, the stretch in the hanging rope, the pigeonhole’s back door.