The Illegible Sunday Intertitle: Holmy

A short comic “race film,” A BLACK SHERLOCK HOLMES is as interesting for its playful reworking of Conan Doyle’s sleuth in African-American terms as it is for having seemingly been filmed in an acid bath — nitrate decomposition and fungus have had their way with the celluloid, creating subaquatic rippling and shimmering in the image and dancing bubbles and gloop that boil across the liquefying scenery and actors. Bill Morrison could basically put his name in front of this and it’d be a Bill Morrison experimental film.

I actually find it hard to tell how racist the film is, because of this obscuring patina and equally obscuring “underfilm”, to use a Theodore Roszak term from his essential novel Flicker. The concept would seem to be playing with the joke that a Black Sherlock would be dopey and foolish — there are lots of silly Sherlock parodies in cinema, but using race to explain his silliness is extremely worrisome, and the film being made by R.G Phillips and Ebony Films Co. would make that tragic rather than purely hateful.

Couldn’t tell if all the weird hairstyles and moustaches were parodies of white folks’ goofy fashions, but I’ve seen other heroines with ironed hair in race films of the time…

But in fact, though all the actors are playing it clownish, the detective, “Knick Carter” (let’s parody all the fictional tecs while we’re at it) isn’t obviously stupid, thankfully. Or if he is, I couldn’t see it through the decalcomania*. The plot is a little opaque, because it’s a surprisingly epistolary film, driven forward by letters exchanged, which the characters react to wide-eyed but which we can read barely if at all. It’s a great simulation of macular degeneration, but without the occasional hallucinations. Or maybe with them — how could we tell? Somewhere in there I glimpse a business card, always a welcome moment in a silent film, here doubly so, as it reads “Baron Jazz, Minister Munitions, Hot Dog, Africa.” He should get together with Chaplin’s Baron DooBugle, the prime minister of Greenland.

Everybody in the film has a comedy name (the heroine is Sheeza Sneeze) but besides that I can’t tell if it was ever funny, maybe because I used The Rite of Spring as a soundtrack, which didn’t match the main action at all but seemed to accompany the frenzied molten underfilm perfectly.

*Decalcomania is a Max Ernst word for that nursery school activity where you smear paint on a page, fold it over, and peel it apart to create lovely splodgy patina where the colours cling to one another. Celluloid rolled in reels and melting into plasticky jam from old age does the same thing when it’s unspooled.

The Sunday Intertitle: Decasia Minor

Nitrate decomposition, as seen in Bill Morrison’s beautiful THE MESMERIST, which is composed of clips, in various stages of decay, from THE BELLS, starring Lionel Barrymore and Boris Karloff.

Here, it looks like the intertitle has been printed on a microscope slide, as if the text were a paramecium’s speech bubble.

Nitrate decomposition is much on  my mind, as we’re attempting to simulate it in my documentary, partly as a transitional device — we can have one shot melt into another — partly to blend together different kinds of footage (35mm from the teens, twenties, thirties and forties, digital video from the twenty-first century) — partly, if necessary, to censor some footage — so we have to look closely at what the footage is made of, in order to reconstruct it.

This particular film uses big white Rorschachian bubble-clusters quite a lot. When frozen, they sometimes have a crustacean shape to them, and their whiteness is that of the white whale, the colour of nature when everything else is stripped away.

Then there’s also the Jack Kirby anti-matter black frogspawn, which is pretty rare but always scary and exciting when it comes crawling into the frame, clustering on the actor’s faces as if to consume them like the neg-scratch monsters in THE FLESH EATERS. Some of this is a product of the decalcomania effect, Max Ernst’s name for what you get when you apply thick paint to a surface, squash it under another surface, then peel the two apart. The same thing happens to celluloid when the film loses its stability and the image turns to jam, squished together in a reel of film. Unreel the film and all these abstract patterns are created as the film peels away from itself.

The buckling and warping of the print causes mobile blurring of focus, since the film will wibble-wobble on its way through the projector, the distance between lamp and image changing irregularly. And then there’s the squash and stretch on the image itself, as it gets distorted, fun-house mirror fashion, by the shrinking and expansion of the film strip.

We’re less interested in fake scratches, which you see all the time in phony reconstructions, but we may deploy some awkward hot-splice jump cuts, with accompanying (but just out-of-synch) soundtrack glitches.

Nothing so beautiful happens when digital information decays, and in fact you very quickly get something that can’t be viewed at all. So it’s arguable that film is superior to digital, even when it goes wrong.

Moving Pictures

Bad Asta!

Image from THE WOMAN WITH A HUNDRED HEADS, Eric Duvivier’s film of Max Ernst’s collage-book, and the subject of this week’s edition of The Forgotten over at The Daily Notebook. Comment there, or here.

Eric is the nephew of Julien, and you could treat this as a wacky foretaste of JULIEN DUVIVIER WEEK, which I still insist is definitely happening here, I’m just not entirely sure when.