Read Online The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes - Free Book Online
Authors: Nicholas Rombes
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like thunder. The West hears it now, too late. The girl with the pink palms to his left says something behind his back toCleopatra-cut, but she just keeps staring out the open door and her face seems to vibrate like an engine throttled up far too high.
“The film switches to a different scene and we learn how Sollors, assassin of insurgents, arrived here, in this lonely bar. The flashback begins as the camera slowly tracks forward to the doorway that leads from the bar into the open desert. He was sent first to the small village of Garoua, Chad. His memory sloshes from one side of his head to the other. From Garoua Sollors is driven through impossible shifting sand (sand that never stays still) north to Mokolo. Then further north, for weeks, deeper into shallow, blinding light. There is dissent in the caravan. Men with yellow teeth bark orders at other men with yellow teeth. There is a fight over the safest route. A sparkplug is stolen during the night and they languish for days, drinking brown water from the rusty radiator, before arriving here.
“It is Schneid who has sent Sollors. Schneid is the theorist of the movement to exterminate the insurgents. He is interested in typology and time. When new revolutionary thought blossoms he murders the thinkers. His job is to keep order by disordering the ideas of the radical thinkers, and he does this by killing them. He hires people who imagine themselves as artists , people who think of themselves as poets , and sends them across North Africa to do this and then he has them murdered, too, as Sollors is about to be. There are other units, in other continents. Schneid speaks of Black Easter and cosmic dread and speculative annihilation. He sends his agents/artists white papers on the psychological archaeology of repulsion. His favorite weapon is a flare gun, used up close and in the face.
“ Aitswal Beach cuts from the flashback to the cafe again. Even sitting at the bar Sollors can hear the ocean waves in the distance. There is a two shot of the girl with the Cleopatra haircut and the pink-palmed girl that reveals a soulless, vacant space between them. One of them (I can’t remember which) reaches out of the frame and brings back a book, whose title is obscured, andhands it to the other one and that moment on the screen seems to hold the fragile world in balance for just the right length of time, and if any of these stories I, Roberto Laing, have been telling you (you, who have been sent by the poisonous editors of film journal X ) mean anything at all then it must be this: had I not burned that movie in the garbage barrel behind the library I would go back to trace every frame of that brief shot, that fleeting moment when the book belonged to neither of them. So the exchange happens, and then what? Does the Lynch film end (if it even is a Lynch film) as it should? Not at all. In fact, the scene (the shot) is repeated, but this time with a difference: it is not a book that is passed between Cleopatra and the pink-palmed girl, but rather a map, a map which indicates the fate of all involved in this story: the death of Sollors, the sad triumph of Schneid, the butchery in the taxi of Cleopatra. These parts aren’t in the short film, but are revealed nonetheless in non-synchronized sound, the sound of screams and of flesh-cutting.
“Now the television above the bar shows what appears to be news footage of a military execution. It seems to be from Vietnam. For the usual reasons Sollors and the others pretend not to watch it. The three men from Aitswal Beach are there, too, the ones who will murder Sollors. They are sitting in the back in plastic chairs. They are wearing loose white shirts now. One of them is smoking. These are the men that Schneid has sent to rid himself of Sollors, who has identified more than his share of insurgents. They are butchers of men, and Sollors is just a poet. He can see their small axes beneath the table. It’s unclear whether Sollors understands
“The film switches to a different scene and we learn how Sollors, assassin of insurgents, arrived here, in this lonely bar. The flashback begins as the camera slowly tracks forward to the doorway that leads from the bar into the open desert. He was sent first to the small village of Garoua, Chad. His memory sloshes from one side of his head to the other. From Garoua Sollors is driven through impossible shifting sand (sand that never stays still) north to Mokolo. Then further north, for weeks, deeper into shallow, blinding light. There is dissent in the caravan. Men with yellow teeth bark orders at other men with yellow teeth. There is a fight over the safest route. A sparkplug is stolen during the night and they languish for days, drinking brown water from the rusty radiator, before arriving here.
“It is Schneid who has sent Sollors. Schneid is the theorist of the movement to exterminate the insurgents. He is interested in typology and time. When new revolutionary thought blossoms he murders the thinkers. His job is to keep order by disordering the ideas of the radical thinkers, and he does this by killing them. He hires people who imagine themselves as artists , people who think of themselves as poets , and sends them across North Africa to do this and then he has them murdered, too, as Sollors is about to be. There are other units, in other continents. Schneid speaks of Black Easter and cosmic dread and speculative annihilation. He sends his agents/artists white papers on the psychological archaeology of repulsion. His favorite weapon is a flare gun, used up close and in the face.
“ Aitswal Beach cuts from the flashback to the cafe again. Even sitting at the bar Sollors can hear the ocean waves in the distance. There is a two shot of the girl with the Cleopatra haircut and the pink-palmed girl that reveals a soulless, vacant space between them. One of them (I can’t remember which) reaches out of the frame and brings back a book, whose title is obscured, andhands it to the other one and that moment on the screen seems to hold the fragile world in balance for just the right length of time, and if any of these stories I, Roberto Laing, have been telling you (you, who have been sent by the poisonous editors of film journal X ) mean anything at all then it must be this: had I not burned that movie in the garbage barrel behind the library I would go back to trace every frame of that brief shot, that fleeting moment when the book belonged to neither of them. So the exchange happens, and then what? Does the Lynch film end (if it even is a Lynch film) as it should? Not at all. In fact, the scene (the shot) is repeated, but this time with a difference: it is not a book that is passed between Cleopatra and the pink-palmed girl, but rather a map, a map which indicates the fate of all involved in this story: the death of Sollors, the sad triumph of Schneid, the butchery in the taxi of Cleopatra. These parts aren’t in the short film, but are revealed nonetheless in non-synchronized sound, the sound of screams and of flesh-cutting.
“Now the television above the bar shows what appears to be news footage of a military execution. It seems to be from Vietnam. For the usual reasons Sollors and the others pretend not to watch it. The three men from Aitswal Beach are there, too, the ones who will murder Sollors. They are sitting in the back in plastic chairs. They are wearing loose white shirts now. One of them is smoking. These are the men that Schneid has sent to rid himself of Sollors, who has identified more than his share of insurgents. They are butchers of men, and Sollors is just a poet. He can see their small axes beneath the table. It’s unclear whether Sollors understands
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