The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Advance Praise

  Title page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Two Dollar Radio

  Advance Praise

  “Like a cross between Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions and Janice Lee’s Damnation, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is at once smart and slyly unsettling. It is expert at creating a quietly building sense of dread while claiming to do something as straightforward as describe lost films—like those conversations you have in which you realize only too late that what you actually talking about and what you think you are talking about are not the same thing at all.”

  —BRIAN EVENSON

  “Suffused with the best elements and obscure conspiracies of Bolaño, Ligotti and speculative fiction, Rombes’ work gnaws away at the limits of what a novel looks like. Through the writing of films that never existed, it finds a space at once eerily familiar and entirely of its own.”

  —EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS

  “This hallucinatory and terrifying secret history of film is so meticulously researched and gorgeously written that I wonder if, in fact, Nicholas Rombes has uncovered a lost trove of works by David Lynch, Orson Welles, Antonioni and Jodorowsky somewhere in the California desert. The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is post-modern noir at its best: beautiful and nightmarish by turns. I read it late into the night and couldn’t put it down.”

  —ELIZABETH HAND

  TWO DOLLAR RADIO is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry.

  We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.

  Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Rombes

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-937512-24-8

  Library of Congress Control Number available upon request.

  Cover design by Two Dollar Radio

  Author photograph: Auxilio Lacouture

  Page 59: Museum of the City of New York, Empire Film Co.

  No portion of this book may be copied or reproduced, with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews, without the written permission of the publisher.

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  “So, montage is conflict.”

  —Sergei Eisenstein

  CONTENTS

  Film Titles and Dates

  CHAPTER 1

  Destroyer (1969)

  Black Star (mid-1980s)

  The Blood Order (1948)

  Hutton (1951)

  CHAPTER 2

  Aitswal Beach (1969 or ’70)

  AXXON N. (1980)

  The Murderous King Addresses the Horizon (1910)

  The Story of A. (Laing’s digression)

  Blinding Forward (1990)

  CHAPTER 3

  The Insurgent (a film treatment, 1968)

  Gutman (2001)

  EPILOGUE

  The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

  “On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.”

  —Julia Kristeva, from Powers of Horror

  “Thou hast removed my soul far off from peace.”

  —Lamentations 3:17

  “Excuse Emily and her atoms.”

  —fragment from an Emily Dickinson “envelope” poem, circa October 1882

  CHAPTER 1

  Destroyer (1969)

  Black Star (mid-1980s)

  The Blood Order (1948)

  Hutton (1951)

  AS FOR R. LAING, WHO CAN BLAME HIM?

  There’s going to be a person named Katy, you understand. These were the first words he spoke to me. I kept waiting for Katy. Once, during our conversations, he told me he’d “had people hurt in absentia.” I pondered this, the semantics of this.

  I interviewed him over a three-day period during a locust-infested summer in a cramped, hot motel room where, to judge from the morbid condition of things—the rotting brown carpeting, the dresser warped and distended as if it had been waterlogged and then dried out, the heaving, peeling sky-blue wallpaper that suggested infestation—he had paid someone in dubious currency to be left alone. He was wearing something like a scarf. Bright red, I remember that, a scarf that brought to mind the sort of clarity that only happens through the iron-willed exertion of power. Did I see a photograph once of Augusto Pinochet wearing a scarf, as well, and a cracked smile that suggested the terror of pure reason? Laing’s dark skin, reddish hair, large hands, and a pale or cream-colored blazer reminded me of the tropics somehow, and in the weary way that he greeted me it seemed as if he had dragged along with him all the time zones he had passed through to get here, and was existing—at this very moment—in each of them simultaneously. A man in his mid-60s but who looks much younger, as if his exterior aging has stalled while his interior aging continued. He has a shock of white hair and an open face. But, for some reason, when he opened that motel room door the first thing I noticed wasn’t Laing at all but a chair in the corner of the room, a chair that couldn’t possibly have been from the motel. It was situated not on the floor itself, but on an unstable foundation of old books (phonebooks, or so I thought) and newspapers. It looked as if it had been reupholstered recently in blue velvet, but done in such a poor way that the fabric was stretched too tightly in some spots and was bunched up or loose in others. And on the chair—which struck me more as a throne or a throne disguised as a chair—there were several neat stacks of uncased VHS tapes, tapes which I assumed were dubs of the films that I’d been sent here to interview Laing about.

  Not that he acted courtly. He welcomed me man to man. He called me by a name that only my grandmother used, as if we had shared some secret history that I had forgotten, and at other times called me “A.” which turned out to be the name (or the initial of the name) of a very dangerous person he fell in with during his librarian/graduate school days. He showed me around the place, as it were. A small room, #228, that smelled of scalded milk and had the feeling of a dungeon to it, not that I’ve ever been in one. A door that opened out onto a narrow cement landing looked down across a vast, gullied parking lot, as if built for a motel ten times larger than this one. A bed stripped of its sheets and covers. The throne-chair in one corner. The motel room TV set, its flat screen spray-painted red, in another corner. A small round table where the interviews took place.

  Who among us has the authority, the power, to bind and loose?

  I had been sent there on assignment, as they say, but also out of curiosity, my own, as it were, eagerness to come close to the source of a myth. On the surface I was simply here to interview Laing for a short-lived cinema journal dedicated to the preservation of lost films that had been awarded a grant to investigate and report on neglected films. And whose chief editor Edison (that’s what we called him, after Herman Casler, an early film pioneer whose ideas Edison stole, and we called him that because he was a thief himself, but a generous one) I had persuaded, in a rare, belligerent show of confidence, to sign over a large chunk of to fund my excursion by borrowed van from central Pennsylvania into Wisconsin (near the western edge of the Chequamegaon-Nicolet National Forest) to interview Laing, whose obscurity ha
d made him fashionable of late, as if nostalgia for the analog had somehow become nostalgia for Laing and his dirty, mistakist, unrepentant ways. I’m certain others had tracked him down but came to believe that what he told them about the films was unreliable. And yet isn’t unreliability its own form of certainty?

  Who was Laing, really? (I can say that the disorienting feeling of depth around him had nothing to do with deep thought, but rather was more akin to the extreme depth-of-field in films like Citizen Kane, that make you feel you might fall into the deep background of the film itself, the background that exists in the space behind the characters.) A librarian specializing not in that category of films we call experimental or avant garde, but rather in films that smuggle these strategies and techniques into films that appear, on their surface, to be more conventional. During one of our conversations he said something to the effect that it was more difficult to make a movie with an experimental and bold vision that many might see rather than a self-proclaimed, willfully obscure avant-garde film. He was rumored to have come from a family whose immense wealth was exceeded only by its internal hatreds, and that he had insinuated himself in the margins of academia so as to have access to a campus office and, more importantly, the institutional letterhead that would allow him to correspond with a false authority to the cinephiles who operated the black markets of film ephemera. Others said he’d had a hand in writing the infamous “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” CIA manual which had been distributed to South Vietnamese military officers in the 1960s and which contains references to a “weaponized cinema.” I, however, understood him to be a man who staved off disorder and chaos by sorting, by documenting, by naming. First at a small college in the rolling hills of southern Ohio (an area that’s really a secret part of the Deep South) from around 1965 to 1980, and then, until 2003, at a much larger one in Pennsylvania, where, despite its size, you could hear the lowing of the cows in the summer coming through the open dorm room windows on the breeze, and where he earned a reputation as carefully unbalanced by recommending—against the most conservative impulses of the times—films of the most startling, transgressive, truthful sort, salvaged from auctions and purchased with dubious currency from collectors for whom the shock of the new meant unloading the old. But more than that. Laing received, in his library office, canisters of film from the likes of David Lynch, Michelangelo Antonioni, Aimee Deren (granddaughter of avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren), Agnès Varda, Andrzej Żuławski, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and anonymous others through connections that seemed to involve, I could swear, some dark pact he had made in his youth. Laing had watched, in the privacy of his office—so it was rumored—dozens of short films by these directors and others, films of such simple beauty and implied violence. The sort of films that poisoned you if you saw them at the wrong (or right) age.

  He had seen these films and then, just as interest began to grow in the so-called lost films of certain contemporary directors, destroyed them, the best of them. Burned them, so it was said, in a simple metal barrel behind the library loading dock. This would have been sometime in the early 2000s and was documented by an analog film group on campus called Radiant Union, one of whose members ended up serving as the editor of the journal that was responsible for sending me to see Laing in the first place. Radiant Union was, as far as I know (which is to say as far as anything can be known about anything) a group of cinephile graduate students who, having become disenchanted with theory, attempted to break free from what they called flying signifiers, which turned out to be the name of their pathetic little fanzine, mimeographed and stapled in the old “analog” way and distributed mostly amongst themselves. And it is in the poorly designed (which may have been, now that I’m committing these thoughts to the screen, deliberate, as a way to disguise the revolutionary nature of the ideas) pages of flying signifiers that information about Roberto Acestes Laing’s stupefying “film dispreservation” (the euphemistic term for “film destruction” used by the journal’s editors) are documented. In the pages of issues one through seven of that fanzine (for that’s all they managed to produce) who knows where fact ended and myth began? As for me, all I can say with certainty is that Edison—whom I knew from my own failed days as a post-graduate and… poor Edison! whose magnificent lisp, which he had decided to embrace rather than suppress, was always subverting his cause rather than aiding it—gave me his copies of flying signifiers, copies that he had acquired through an elaborate, off-line bartering system and that provided first-hand details regarding Laing’s destruction by fire of the most valuable films in his collection.

  In truth, Laing had existed at the frayed edges of my imagination for a long time. First as a rumor or ghost—like that fleeting something you see, that moth-like smudge, out of the corner of your eye—and then gradually as a more substantial shape as if the thought of him had transformed into a tiny sliver that had lodged itself in my brain. It was in the credits where I spotted him first, the credits of a crazy, anarchist midnight movie about skiing, and I mean anarchist in the discombobulation of the film itself, its assembly or editing, which was all mixed up. In fact, it wasn’t really clear whether it was a documentary or a narrative film, because some of the sequences showing dangerously fast downhill skiing were voiced over in a very hushed, downbeat, formal way, almost as if it was a golf telecast. And then other parts would treat the characters not as if they were in a documentary, but rather in a fictional film, simply playing the parts of skiers. I watched it in the winter in a theater where you had to wear gloves to stay warm. They served beer, which made things better and worse. The other thing I remember was this: the sound of crickets. Coming, impossibly, from the snow-covered trees and brush of the film. This was around three years before Edison sent me to interview Laing about the destroyed films, and the ski movie was called either Aspen or else it was set in Aspen, or some combination of both, and it was near the end of that interminable film, as I recall, that I was first introduced to Roberto Acestes Laing, or a character named Roberto Acestes Laing.

  It was a throwaway scene (as were most of the scenes in the film) that involved a roll call of the ski lift operators who, lined up in bright red and orange snow suits, stepped forward and took their assignment packets (I’m assuming) for that day. That was the first time I heard his name, as a bit-part character (you couldn’t even see his face, obscured by a parka and snow goggles) who was called forward to take a sheet of paper in a heavy plastic envelope: Roberto Acestes (pronounced in the film “Egestes” rather than “Ah-ses-teez,” as Roberto himself pronounced it) Laing. Then, a few months later, I was watching a re-run of a funny but unworkable short-lived 1970s late-night talk show (the one where the host sits, wearing a tan leisure suit, on a couch with a TV tray in front of him rather than a desk) and in the middle of the monologue one of the big stage lights, off-camera, blew out with a pop. Things went dim. The audience laughed in ways that either suggested a secret conspiracy or fear. The host blinked, put the palms of his hands together in front of his face, shook his head, and said, “Oh, Acestes.” And then one other time, on the radio, during an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, around the time of Texasville and grunge. Bogdanovich was asked about his influences. His voice sounded weary, as if it was barely leaking out of my car stereo. I was driving and being followed too closely by a motorcycle, I remember that. Bogdanovich mentioned the familiar names—Orson Welles (which he pronounced “”), Billy Wilder—but then also “Laing,” or what sounded like Laing.

  Was I obsessed? If so, my obsession had more to do with the notion of Laing than with Laing himself. All our cryptic ones, our minor-key heroes, turn out to be disappointments in the end. I knew that. Just the idea that someone like him existed, someone who had attempted to destroy the regime of the image by going after its most potent artifacts, someone whose fleetingness in my imagination was closer to an improperly color-corrected character out of a film than real life, that was the hook that had snagged my mind: an abstraction of Laing rather than La
ing the person. But what sort of way is that to lead life, avoiding the things you love because you know they will disappoint you? I understood that meeting Laing would demythologize him. I’ve seen enough statues that were supposed to stand forever pulled down with ropes by crowds to know that at some point all thrones collapse. By the time I visited him I had learned that after he burned the films—which according to Edison had been done in a vaguely ritualistic way as if in accordance with some dark, obscure procedure—he fled into the night, leaving behind the fire as it still burned brightly. Whether or not he actually fled into the night (and all of this information is, according to Edison, from an issue of flying signifiers that he showed me prior to my journey to see Laing but refused to let me hold or read) and, for that matter, whether or not he said I love the smell of nitrate in the morning (which hardly makes sense because it was night) almost doesn’t matter. What matters is that after he burned the films he disappeared. The university eventually cleared out his space in the rare books room, removed his name from the door, integrated the films he left behind into the university’s film department (the portentously named Center for the Study of Sound and the Moving Image), and enacted a 500 dollar application fee for student groups so that Radiant Union, no longer officially a part of campus life, was forced to hold its meetings and screen its movies in off-campus apartments in the summer, in some of the nearby abandoned steel foundries, whose leaky broken-windowed walls and oily concrete floors and hulking rusted machines must have lent a false air of danger to the screenings. By the time I visited Laing he had moved to Wisconsin (this would have been some time in the early 2000s, post Towers) and became, in the manner of our time, absent but always talked about. He had purchased (his word) a room in a barely functioning, largely unpeopled motel near the edge of federal land. Laing was a sort of rumor that was breathed on occasion through the obscure, little-traveled back pages of the interwebs.