Belatedly, Moedeker came to believe that all objects altered by exposure to the land of the dead were “footage” and to conceive of the land of the dead as itself a sort of recording. The living play it back, running the past through their mouths, one moveless moment after another. “The challenge is to teach the camera to listen,” Moedeker wrote.

Pursuing this program, Moedeker for a time confined himself to close-ups of the Headmistress, as she pronounces words we cannot hear. Most of this footage is about as interesting as one would expect, but one reel is different: Between the intermittently parted lips of the subject appear flashes of light that could initially be mistaken for blemishes in the film, but resolve into what seems to be a landscape with distant figures moving across it. Near the end of the footage a large dark shape appears to cross the opening; then one of the small forms in the background grows until it fills the aperture, which goes black. It is virtually impossible not to read this as a figure approaching the Headmistress—or her mouth—from behind, as it were, and presumably without her knowledge. Some viewers have found themselves pressing themselves back in their seats, as if to escape from whatever is coming, though all that does come is the end of the film.

Moedeker filmed the living as well as the dead, shooting many hours of footage of daily life at the Vocational School. But distinguishing these reels is curiously difficult. Are these a row of scuffed and battered shoes, solemnly queued outside a washroom, or the shadowed faces of the watchful dead, who have temporarily mistaken themselves for footwear? Is this unusually clear sequence only what it appears to be, a record of a group of students in school uniform, solemnly performing morning calisthenics in a barren field, their hair still dark and shining from their ablutions, while a couple of donkeys fornicate tremendously in the background, or is this illusory clarity an elaborate instance of pareidolia, the footage actually depicting, who knows, a map tattooed on the palm of a monstrous hand, or a hanging vine on each trembling leaf of which a tiny mouth is opening?

Once the possibility of an origin beyond the veil is broached, the most seemingly unexceptionable images take on an eerie cast. Early film footage is uncanny enough in its own right to give an audience the feeling that they are watching a crew of pallid revenants rehearse with stiff and unaccustomed movements the half-remembered rituals of their former lives. Even under the best conditions, footage of this vintage is often grainy and flickering, and the passage of time commits new depredations from which the Moedeker archive has hardly been exempt: emulsions cracking or blooming with mildew, the film stock itself shrinking, sprouting buboes, and at last disintegrating into a little heap of brown powder.

But is this decaying footage any less faithful to its subject? A disintegrating image might even capture the nature of death more precisely than a well-preserved one. We could liken film decay to the chemical changes effected by light in the photographic emulsion: the gradual registration of an image; what we lament as destruction might in fact be the culmination of the process, a perfect likeness. Likeness of what? Of death, of course. In which case we already have extensive documentation of our expiry, more than we could ever need.

Moedeker’s life’s work would then be superfluous, and this is exactly the conclusion to which Moedeker himself came. But far from casting him into a melancholy humor that would eventually drive him to self-murder, as some melodramatic chroniclers have suggested, it opened up new avenues of exploration. Moedeker seems to have experimented with speeding up the process of decay with heat and humidity, deliberately destroying thousands of feet of film. The thirty-nine envelopes and sachets of brown powder found among his papers, carefully dated and numbered, but notoriously dismissed without laboratory analysis by an early cataloguer as “possibly soil samples or medicaments,” were of course films in their own right. How Moedeker intended us to watch those films is not at all clear; however, we are free to use our imagination. Perhaps we are to take them like snuff, or sprinkle them on our porridge like a digestive powder, or throw them by the handful into a strong wind. Or simply weigh the packets in our hands, imagining that in them an articulated world of moving light and shadow has been rendered, like suet, into a substance that retains all its former beauty, truth, and testimonial power in a more essential form—one closer to “the first and final stuff of being,” as Moedeker once wrote.