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USA, 1982

From American Cinematographer Magazine, the article I Am A Camera: The Life and Work of John Board by Wayne Dowel:

In his waning years, Board was befriended (one assumes reluctantly on Board’s part) by a gregarious if sensitive neighbor, one Allan Faucet. Board would screen recordings of some of his films for the much younger Faucet, and share anecdotes on the making of classics such as The Public Enemy (camera hit with grapefruit juice) and Cab Driver (camera hit with artificial blood).

One would be tempted to say that an aging, addled Board may have been emulating the title character in the latter film (his personal favorite, according to Faucet) when in 1945—annual legal killings still being in effect—Board shot to death his neighbor Warren Knob and Knob’s wife and children, apparently as a result of an escalating feud that resulted in Board sustaining injuries that would plague him for his remaining years. Faucet speculated that Board may have later felt remorse over the killings, though when he suggested this to Board on one occasion, Board told him, “The guilt I feel is that I don’t feel guilty.” Whatever the case, he seemed to dwell on the murders morbidly, his feelings at not being punished for them perhaps feeding some strange ideas he expressed to Faucet regarding the Guests. According to Faucet, Board claimed that he had been experiencing visions or epiphanies in his dreams, from which he concluded that there never had been any Guests—that is to say, that the Guests were not an alien race in another plane. Board’s own theory was that the Guests were a future version of ourselves, our own collective unconscious from a time yet to come, influencing the past so that we would evolve and progress in the direction that was preordained or destined for us.

Whether Board harbored such paranoid suspicions in his working years remains unknown, though it is easy to believe he may have, when one watches Travis Bickle’s eyes reflected in his rearview mirror, his cab slithering through the dark and haunted labyrinth of city streets. In movies like Bringing Up Baby, Board was the clear-headed professional, connecting slot A into slot B. In films like Cab Driver, with its murky colors and blood-splashed walls, and The Elephant Man, with its glowing and glistening, radiant black and white, John Board was free to paint from a palette, to capture on the canvas of screen the anxieties, fears, anger and alienation of modern man and man eternal.

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From Lulu in Boneland by Louise Brooks, 1982, Lacuna Press:

Bogey wasn’t the only friend I lost in 1957, though by the time I learned of this other friend’s demise it was too late for me to attend his funeral, and too late for me to tell him how important he had been to me in my youth, and always.

John Board was the cinematographer on two of my early films, The Street of Forgotten Men, replacing Hal Rosson when Hal became too sick during the filming to continue, and The American Venus shortly thereafter, in 1926, when I was a worldly two decades old. J. B., as I called him, immediately appealed to me and we hit it off right away. Before you knew it, we were romantically involved. I have to admit, I had to give the guy a push; there was a sweet shyness about him. I was charmed by his awkwardness with me, because he seemed both guilty for being with a woman less than half his age, and breathless with how lucky he felt.

John had a background as a crime photographer for the Metacarpus, Pennsylvania police force, and I think this solemn experience lent a melancholy beauty to his later movies like The Elephant Man and Cab Driver. Without use of a viewfinder, as with inorganic cameras, John Board had to imagine what his camera was seeing. Through trial and error, he knew how and where to position his living cameras, but besides that, he seemed able to get inside the hybrids’ heads. I think this empathy he felt translated to the screen, and made the audience empathize as well.

Our work took us in different directions, and new romances did as well; later in 1926 I married director Eddie Sutherland. We managed a scanty correspondence but I gravely regret having fully lost contact with J. B. by the late 30's. When I read about his death, one article mentioned my relationship with him and pointed out that recordings of some of my movies were found in his home, and that he also owned a copy of Image 5, containing the first published article I wrote, Mr. Pabst, which appeared the year before J. B.’s death. I was moved that he had still been thinking of me, and became all the guiltier for not having contacted him for so long.

Reading about the manner in which J. B. died crushed me. Like some ghastly photograph, even now I can’t expunge the image he conjures to my mind. I can’t say I understand that J. B. would commit suicide, particularly in such a horrible manner (though he owned a gun, he strangled himself to death with a scrap of bed sheet wound around his neck and secured around a post in his headboard, this cruel garotte made tight by inserting and twisting a lever he fashioned from a mop handle). But I can’t say I don’t understand it, either.

We were unlikely lovers. I was seen, in my screen years, as the unrepentant hedonist. J. B. was serious, intense, and troubled. Maybe we sought to balance each other out in some way that just wasn’t possible.

Though I’m certain that J. B. did find gratification in his film work—and not to belittle the field that gave me my own employment—sometimes I think that he missed his true calling. I can visualize J. B. as an explorer of humanity like Diane Arbus, a wartime photojournalist like Carl Mydans. But then, I think this would have also brought J. B. too much pain. Sometimes I believe he was trying to escape into work that was more frivolous. Other times I think he was just trying to pay the bills any way he could, and that dictated his choices more than anything else. But whether he chose to be or not, John Board was a professional witness. A chronicler of our culture, and our crimes.

The most ironic thing about J. B. was that I knew he hated the Guests, though he wasn’t one to say it flat out like that. While I’m sure that, had the Guests never involved themselves in our world, J. B. would still have been a successful cameraman, there’s no doubt that the Guests provided his livelihood, were his bread and butter. It was a symbiotic relationship, like a shark with a remora, though which would be the shark and which the remora is a matter of perspective.

J. B. did not live to see the mysterious decline of the Guests in the mid-to-late 60's, the unexplained wisping away of their influence, until not even the Mediums could “hear” them anymore…until the Mediums carried only mute, decomposing animals inside their heads. He didn’t see the hybrid buildings stop responding to commands, and their subsequent break down and rot. He didn’t see the huge insects we’d raised for food turn and eat their butchers. Didn’t witness the telephone lines stop conveying signals…televisions stop broadcasting, opening their wings in crazed attempts to fly away, to liberate themselves from their enslavement, instead. For hadn’t the insects been the slaves, where we had not? We had never rebelled against the Guests. We had welcomed them.

J. B. didn’t see us scrambling to adapt and translate these technologies into mechanics, electronics. He wasn’t here to observe, with the piercing lens of his gaze, when we were abandoned to our own devices…as if God had slipped into a coma and then death when we weren’t paying attention. But I’m sure J. B. would have been pleased, even in those dark years when we had to regain the steps we had lost.

And yet, whether he would be proud of where we are at this moment, I can’t truly guess. Because things are really not any different, and I’m sure he’d be the first to note that. Of course, there is no longer a ration of legal killings. There are no longer cameras watching us from corners, rooftops, telephone poles. But murders go on. Wars break out.

Cameras still record them.

The Guests are gone. The Hosts remain.