The Making of
The Making of the Illusion of Gravity
Originally appeared in
Boulevard, Fall 1994 |
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The movie screen, like any screen on
which bright light is played, is white.
It darkens, but only very slightly: the first image in The Making of the Illusion of Gravity
is of the Los Angeles City Hall Plaza carpeted in nineteen inches of new freak
snow.
“Qanuk,”
says the narrator’s voice-over, slowly and distinctly, in a language that you
probably don’t recognize:
“Utvak. Navcaq. Nevluk. Kanevcir.
Muruaneq.”
City
Hall dissolves slowly to the deserted Venice Beach Boardwalk, lined by palm
trees whose fronds sag under a layer of snow (“Qanisqineq,” says the narrator,
the syllables tolling in slow regular strokes like a church bell); to Rodeo
Drive (“Qengaruk,” the narrator continues); to Disneyland’s Matterhorn (“Qanikcaq”);
and finally back to City Hall (“Qerretrar”), all wrapped in an eerie white
winter coat.
“Snow,”
the same voice tells you, as if you didn’t know what you were seeing. “The Yup’ik Eskimos of Central Alaska
have eighteen words for it.”
Now
the snow begins slowly to vanish from the Los Angeles City Hall, from City Hall
Plaza and from the cars parked there — not melt,
vanish, as if it is falling upward — and then it
does the same from Rodeo Drive, from the Venice Boardwalk, from the Matterhorn,
until they reveal themselves and Los Angeles as they normally are, awash in sun
and smog. It’s time-lapse
photography played backward. The
film stock isn’t matched; the Rodeo Drive sequences are even on videotape. Such are the exigencies of shooting a
feature film on twenty-four-hours’ notice.
The
title comes across the bottom of the bleached landscape in black block letters — the making of the
illusion of gravity — and rises to the top of the screen, as if to mark the entry
into a world in which gravity has no sway.
“Hello? Hello?” says the voice-over.
If
you’ve seen an English-language version of a Konkowsky film — Death, for example, or Infra-Red or Malmö;
any of them except the silent Music — you’ve heard
this bland unaccented American male tenor, and probably wondered where
Konkowsky dug it up.
“Hello?”
the narrator goes on in his after-shave voice, “Am I on? Is this a live mike? Testing one two three four. Phtt phtt” — now he’s actually tapping the microphone — “Testing one two three, testing.”
a
fILm bY kOnKOwsKy, reads the screen, and yes, it is as odd to write this
way as it is to include the narrator’s sound check in the movie. In previous films the director
misspelled flamboyantly, inserted quotation marks around subtitled lines of
dialogue, piled mountains of stately images on banal commercial slogans (“Taste
the Pleasure!”), and generally amused himself by mangling and masticating
language. Apparently Konkowsky’s
grown tired of it too, for the corrections soon appear onscreen:
a
fILm bY kOnKOwsKy
And
finally the corrected version:
A
film by Konkowsky
"
American
audiences remember the weird snowfall last Christmas in Los Angeles: how the
meteorologists predicted one to two feet, how TV weathermen donned Santa Claus
suits to read the forecast.
Snow
in Los Angeles. You can imagine
the expression on Konkowsky’s face when he heard about it. You can imagine it, but you don’t have
to: an extreme close-up of that
face, coming sideways across the screen, is the first thing following the credits
of The Making of the Illusion of Gravity.
“Eh? Snow?”
Or
maybe Konkowsky says “snyek” or “yuki” or “snö” or a mixture of all three; as a
Russian émigré making Japanese films in the Swedish language, Konkowsky often
gets a little confused. Russians,
Swedes and Japanese also have trouble understanding him.
Snow
in Los Angeles. The news spreads
across Konkowsky’s face, a face that spreads across the screen, a face made for
easy reading, like a large-print book:
fat purplish lips, a squat dumpling of a nose, and oversized and
slightly protruding eyes, mutant eyes that seem to perceive more than the
visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are eyes that might indeed see infra-red, see heat, see
sound, even see the past of an object in its present form. Konkowsky long ago muffled the
cartoonish vividness of his features in a beard and long hair, both of which
have gone white in the years. Age,
too, has framed the perpetual ecstasy of those popping blue eyes in a network
of fine softening wrinkles. It
must be admitted that Konkowsky has himself come to resemble a diminutive St.
Nick. And his features arrange
themselves, successively, in surprise and enterprise, and say:
“Eh? Snow? In Los Angeles?”
You
can stop worrying about the language he’s speaking: there are subtitles that say, in English: “Snow? In Los Angeles?
Is this some trick of the American film industry? Is this one of their diabolical special
effects? Do they now seed the very
clouds? Will they not be satisfied
until they force nature herself to behave as idiotically as the characters in
their movies? Straighten all
noses! Enhance all breasts! Print a T-shirt! Make a doll! Only 1421 shopping days till the turn of the century! Toyotathon!”
“Nyet,”
says a voice from offscreen, but it is unclear which question it is answering.
“Snow
in Los Angeles,” Konkowsky repeats.
“Imagine the light! Imagine
the opportunities!” He brings his
fists to the sides of his face; they burst into ten shivering fingers as he
ecstatically declares: “Open
City!”
A
blizzard in Los Angeles presents for Konkowsky the same kind of filmmaker’s
paradise that postwar Rome did for Roberto Rossellini. If Rossellini could go to Rome and
shoot in eight days the film that founded Neorealism and launched the director
and his star, Anna Magnani, to international prominence, can Konkowsky do
less? Those
Santa-Claus-in-the-bughouse eyes leave no room for doubt: Konkowsky must go to Los Angeles, there
to do as the Romans did.
The
camera pulls back: Konkowsky, a
tangle-haired gnome of ambiguous national descent, is in the workshop where he
and his assistants create his props, knife in hand and cells of Styrofoam
flecking his coarse linen sculpting smock. Konkowsky’s been working in Styrofoam lately, carving up
that ersatz stuff into primitive elongated faces twenty and thirty feet high,
reminiscent of the ancient heads of the Easter Islands. There must be flecks in Konkowsky’s
beard too, but there is no way of telling: the beard is as white as snow or Styrofoam.
The
giant face rests on the parquet floor of Konkowsky’s workshop, and many others
are around it, all surfaced to resemble black stone. Konkowsky himself ... well, Konkowsky is sticking to
the white wall like a fly.
The
entire image begins, sickeningly, to turn clockwise, until you can see that
Konkowsky is not clinging to the wall like a fly, but standing on the floor
like any other human. The floor is
whitewashed like a wall; the parquet floor in the background is actually a wall
parqueted like a floor. It’s a
version of the effect Astaire used in Royal Wedding to make it seem he
was dancing on the walls and ceiling.
In Royal Wedding, however, the camera and the room itself rotated
together, at the same speed; here it is only the camera that turns. Konkowsky likes to roll up his sleeves
and let the tricks of his trade clatter to the floor.
"
Another
Styrofoam face fills the screen, engraved in an expression of permanent fright,
terrified, perhaps, of the enormous flesh fingers gripping it.
Those
are Konkowsky’s fingers and this face is a miniature. The director paces the aisles of a 747, babbling in many
languages. Men and women in seats
17F, 10A, 12B and 12C hold up cameras and open flight bags full of film and
lenses. The aircraft’s public
address system gives three electronic dings, and passengers rebuckle their
belts. Konkowsky, however, is not
to be stopped by such a timid little peep. He is counting heads, cameras, reels of film; taking
inventory of the resources available for The Making of the Illusion of
Gravity.
Like
Konkowsky’s other titles, this one is deceptive: his film is not only about the making of the “illusion” of
gravity, but also about the creation of the film itself. By rights it ought to be called The
Making of the Making of the Illusion of Gravity, and a story about the
creation of the film should, in turn, be called “The Making of The Making of
the Making of the Illusion of Gravity.” But there can be too much of a good thing.
A
stewardess puts a hand on Konkowsky’s shoulder — which comes up only to her chest — and tells him, in English, “Please return to your seat, sir.”
The
director throws back his head and roars, “Open City!” It has become his rallying cry.
"
Stock footage
of workmen decorating Wilshire Boulevard for Christmas: black-and-white video from a news
broadcast at least twenty years ago.
Los
Angeles looks hopeful and ludicrous in its holiday regalia: outsized fake candy canes wrapped
around streetlight standards, giant plastic snowflakes strung up in
intersections, their tinsel tendrils moving in the artificial breezes caused by
traffic. But Christmas never comes
to Southern California. Festooning
Los Angeles in this fashion is like setting plastic flamingoes on the Siberian
snow in the hope that palm trees will grow up around them.
A
jet screams across the sky. Zoom
in on the zooming jet.
"
An
outlandishly, audaciously phony establishing shot: the 747, plainly a model, waggles and jerks through
fish-tank storm clouds like the toy it is. Fake lightning stabs its wing.
On
the 747, the stewardess still hasn’t got Konkowsky into his seat. “Nyet nyet nyet,” the director murmurs,
wagging a stubby little index finger back and forth.
Konkowsky’s
interpreter, a tall lean Japanese woman with black-rimmed glasses and hair
gathered into a severe ponytail, tells the stewardesses: “He says ‘no.’”
Now
the captain makes an appearance in the cabin, his epauletted shoulders
swiveling peremptorily down the aisle.
“What seems to be the problem?” he asks.
Konkowsky
says a few words, beaming at the captain.
Among the stern-faced adults towering over him, he seems a mischievous
child.
“In
the widest sense, the problem is gravity ... ” the Japanese interpreter begins,
appearing as puzzled as the captain.
“Da!”
Konkowsky ejaculates. He rattles
on until the interpreter raises her hand.
“He
says gravity is God’s law,” she tells the captain, “but this plane has exposed
gravity itself to be only a cheap illusion, for which he offers you his deepest
congratulations.”
Konkowsky
bows low and comes up grinning.
“Mazel tov!”
“He
says further,” recites the interpreter, “that although ordinarily he might
listen to orders from God, today, on this aeroplane, even God’s law of gravity
has been suspended. Thus, even if
he were ejected in mid-air, he might rise through the air rather than fall to
the ground. So he is quite deaf to
the laws of man.”
“Nyet,”
says Konkowsky, nodding emphatically.
“Open City!”
The
captain addresses the interpreter.
“It’s just that we’re heading into a storm, so we’re expecting a bit of
turbulence — ”
“Turbulence?”
Konkowsky interrupts in horror, all the anarchy and philosophy draining from
his face. Tamed, he takes his sear
and buckles his belt.
A
prefab airline dinner is waiting for Konkowsky, mummified behind steamy plastic
wrap, looking vaguely fowl.
Konkowsky poises his miniature tiki at its edge, where it regards the
dinner and turns its face of frozen fright back to the director.
Konkowsky
leans forward to whisper into the tiki’s earless face. “You eat it,” reads the
subtitle.
"
Crane shot of
the baggage pickup room at Northwest Airlines: Konkowsky’s minions scamper in fast-motion over the
black-and-white checkerboard linoleum, unloading suitcases from the carousel,
opening and closing them. It is
like speed chess played with too many pieces.
The
camera returns to eye level and the film to normal speed: Konkowsky’s crew stands in ranks in
front of the baggage carousel, rigid and saluting. Konkowsky marches down the rows, coming to a halt at a large
map of Los Angeles sitting on an aluminum easel.
“We
will board this city like an enemy ship!” says the director, or the subtitles
say he says. “Take no prisoners — take only footage!
Shoot before you see the whites of their frames! Shoot first — ask questions later!
When in doubt, shoot! When
not in doubt, shoot! At all other
times, shoot!”
Actually
Konkowsky hasn’t said a word in any language; but that’s the way it is with
subtitles: you have to trust
them. They are the pilot of your
airplane.
"
Konkowsky and
cinematographer Yosei Mura barrel toward the gates of Universal City Studios in
a golf cart with a fringed fabric roof.
Spikes
jut out of the pavement near the guard kiosk at a man-eating-shark angle. severe
tire damage, warns a sign.
A uniformed black man steps out and asks them what they think they’re
doing here.
For
answer Yosei Mura points his camera at the guard. The guard is seen in blurry close-up, horrified and incredulous,
his face widened at the edges by the lens’ distortion, as he yells: “You can’t film here!”
“Either
you shoot us or we shoot you,” Konkowsky tells him. “Open City!”
The golf cart lumps over the spikes, goring itself, and goes on, tires
flattened.
The
cart is riding on its rims, its roof fringes jouncing gaily in the air. The world as seen by the camera of
Yosei Mura has become a jolting, bumpy place. Konkowsky, offscreen, cackles wildly as they ride through a
50’s Anytown, USA; a Renaissance courtyard; a Western frontier town: card-house facades that look as if the
first good breeze will send them tumbling down.
The
movie sets are hibernating, silent and deserted, beneath their heavy blanket of
snow. Everything between the
cloud-knotted sky and the cart’s asphalt tire tracks is white. Today Konkowsky is the only one
shooting here.
"
A Mexican boy
in a ski cap pulled down too low is shoveling a snowdrift from an East L.A.
sidewalk. His excavations reveal a
pile of yellowing newspapers, a corroded car engine, and a boxlike brown shape.
The
boy turns up the brim of his hat to mop his brow. Music is coming through the box’s muffler of snow.
As
the boy digs down, a television screen becomes visible — Bing Crosby is crooning — and when the
boy bares the speaker, the lyrics ring out clearly: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas ... ”
Bing
Crosby freezes, turns black-and-white, turns into a chalk drawing on a
blackboard, but his singing continues:
“ ... just like the ones I used to know ... ”
"
The camera
pulls back: Konkowsky slumps,
asleep, in a director’s chair, and the chalk drawing of Bing Crosby floats
above him on a blackboard. The
director is dreaming; and dreaming, he reaches up and wipes the slate clean.
"
A new
dream-drawing, this one in color, appears on the blackboard, and the camera
zooms in. Konkowsky has put a
comic strip in the middle of this movie.
It’s in color, with word bubbles in Swedish, and it’s called detektif. Naturally he’s made himself the central character. One by one, the comic’s panels silently
fill the screen.
First
panel: Konkowsky the cartoon, in
trenchcoat and deerstalker cap, peers out through a magnifying glass that
grossly enlarges his left eye. The
subtitle reads: “52 murders in 4
days? A killer who smuggles his
victims’ remains into meat processing plants in the dead of night? Millions of innocent Swedes unknowingly
eating human flesh? Hmm. Yes, I am interested in taking the
case.”
The
second panel is as terse as the first was verbose: “ ... Very interested!” says Konkowsky, bent over in hot-on-the-trail position, his
magnifying glass inches from the ground.
In
the third panel clues are collected in a box. “You see, Lieutenant?” Konkowsky’s word bubble says. “An English penny, 1863, condition
extra fine. A cigar butt. Two hairs from a mature female Ornithorynchus
anatinus. But most revealing,
the culprit leaves behind traces of a very unusual substance!”
The
police lieutenant asks Konkowsky in the fourth panel, “What substance is that,
Detektif?”
“Quicksilver,”
Konkowsky replies. “All of which
leads, of course, to 194A La Cienega Boulevard, where, if I am correct, we
will find ... ”
In
the fifth panel the Lieutenant and Konkowsky kick in a door. “As I suspected ... ” Konkowsky says in
a jagged-edged word bubble, “Weather instruments!” Barometers,
thermometers, meteorographs, anemometers lie scattered around the floor.
The
last panel is exactly like the first:
Konkowsky in trenchcoat and deerstalker, magnifying glass upraised. Only the words are different. “For who is truly more criminal,”
Konkowsky asks, “than he who predicts the future?”
"
A man kneels
on the corner of Hollywood and Vine.
He is flocking Christmas trees with fluffy white artificial snow from an
aerosal can.
The
snow appears not only on the spindly pine trees, but on the man’s head and
shoulders and all around the sidewalk.
It is real snow, falling from the sky.
Oblivious,
the man continues to spray fake snow onto his little severed saplings.
"
A factory
assembly line cranks molded plastic snowflakes toward the camera. They are gold, two feet high, just like
those the workmen were stringing up in Wilshire Boulevard in the
black-and-white video footage seen earlier.
A
man wearing blue coveralls and a badge that says inspector no. 299 throws a lever and the assembly line
screeches to a halt.
“Oh
my God!” he shrieks. “These
snowflakes are all exactly alike!”
"
Beach
scene. A volleyball floats through
the screen, back-spinning in slow motion.
VOIT, it says, upside down.
Just
as the ball is about to hit the sand, a man throws his arms beneath it and
lofts it with a perfect dig. His
teammate hits an overhand set, and the first player leaps into the air and
spikes the volleyball.
The
two men across the net jump up in unison to block the spike, arms outstretched,
smoothed by slow motion into a pas de deux. The ball sails out of bounds. All four players are blond and tanned and clad in skintight
bathing briefs.
The
spiker tosses up the ball for a serve.
“Pushkin to Cortazar, Proust point.”
“Proust
point?” shouts one of the opposing players. “No way!”
“Buńuel
to Ophuls, then,” says the server, throwing the ball up again.
“Hold
on!” his teammate interrupts. “The
score is apples to oranges.”
“Apples
to oranges?” asks the server. “How
can you compare apples and oranges?”
“If
that’s true,” says one of the opponents, crossing beneath the net, “how can you
compare sand to snow?”
“Snow?”
repeats the server, looking down and lifting each of his bare feet from deep
footprints. “If this is snow,” he
says slowly, “why are we playing volleyball?”
Murmuring
assent, the other three players walk off the court. At courtside the server sets the volleyball on two huge
balls of snow piled one on top of the other. The volleyball thus becomes the head of a snowman.
A
snowman holding a 35-millimeter movie camera.
The
snowman breaks apart, quakes apart, and Konkowsky, dressed in a loincloth,
emerges from it. The only sound is
the rush of the ocean. The
director positions the camera in the snowman’s ruins, tilted up at himself.
Konkowsky
brushes the snow off his chest, bends down, makes a snowball, and throws it at
the camera.
"
As the
snowball explodes onto the lens, slides down the lens, the scene wipes away to
another kind of beach: sand where
snow was, sun where snowball. The
beach and Los Angeles are as they were before the blizzard.
Konkowsky
is where Konkowsky was, still in his loincloth. He walks toward the sea. At water’s edge he begins tugging and shaping strands of
seaweed and other ocean flotsam into a pattern known only to him.
"
Konkowsky
wipes the sand from his hands and regards the finished arrangement. It is dark. He rubs his arms.
Teeth chattering, the director continues along the seaside to a coat
rack of winter clothes standing in the smooth dark sand that marks high
tide. He dons a Russian black fur
hat, a woolen overcoat, mittens, and an extravagantly colorful scarf, leaving
the coat rack bare, like a tree in winter. Konkowsky goes on his way, muttering a string of obscenities
that you will not fully understand unless you speak Russian, Japanese, Swedish,
and perhaps Eskimo.
Konkowsky
produces a box of wooden matches and strikes one. “Nyet,” he says, according to the subtitle, “better to curse
the darkness than light a single match.”
He
tosses the match backward over his shoulder. The camera swoops in and follows the end-over-end flight of the
matchstick in slow motion and extreme close-up. There is no sound at all.
Just
as the match is about to touch some large black object, the image freezes;
freezes and recedes, and recedes again.
The match becomes the size of a match and Konkowsky becomes the size of
Konkowsky. The black object is one
of the giant Easter Island heads from Konkowsky’s workshop.
With
a great rush — the soundtrack is back — the thirty-foot tiki catches fire, flames up spectacularly, and
burns in the way only Styrofoam can burn.
Konkowsky
goes on, turning up his collar, seemingly unaware of what is taking place
behind him, the back of his white head gleaming in the reflected light of
destruction. As he passes between
two rows of his pseudo-stone sculptures, the great heads leap into flame in
succession, as if ignited by mere proximity to Konkowsky. Finally he pauses between two giant
masks that face each other, the respective hollows of their mouths turned
upward and downward.
“Comedy
and Tragedy,” remarks Konkowsky. “Let us see how they differ.”
The
two enormous theatrical masks flame up and Konkowsky stands placidly between
them, his face demonic in the firelight.
The masks contort, go red, warp, go black, seem to inhale themselves
into themselves. Finally both ruined
cavernous mouths droop in pained grimaces. Konkowsky shrugs, and trudges on.
The
camera does not follow him: the
burning, melting, writhing, oozing, shrinking masks remain in the foreground as
Konkowsky continues slowly on his way.
One of the faces collapses, revealing embers that glow like wood, but
cool quickly.
When
the director is a receding speck, white letters rise up from the bottom to the
middle of the screen, line by line, growing larger as if coming toward
you. The narrator’s voice-over
suavely reads along:
eleven years ago my mother died
as i am old, she was very old
she always
used to play the soundtrack album from fiddler on the roof
this was the kind of music my mother
liked
she would hum
“sunrise, sunset” until i had to take a walk to get away from it
our tastes in music were not the same.
one day not long ago that same tune
came on the radio
along with it i heard my mother’s voice
faintly humming the melody
yes yes, i am quite sure about this.
i turned down the volume on the radio
until only my mother’s voice remained
thus i know:
the illusion of life continues after
death
or the illusion of death continues
after life.
if the film is looped, how can
we escape from this movie?
"
It is sunrise on
the beach. The huge faces are
huddled black clumps of melted plastic.
Konkowsky is gone, but his handiwork of the evening before is still
intact: the camera pans across the
giant letters formed by seaweed, shells and driftwood:
( i s i t e v e r ) t h e e n d ?