Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (14)

Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (14)

Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926). The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator by Luigi Pirandello. Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff

BOOK III

3

I go in through the entrance hall on the left, and come out upon the gravelled path from the gate, shut in by the buildings of the second department, the ‘Photographic’ or ‘Positive’.

In my capacity as operator I have the privilege of keeping one foot in this, and the other in the ‘Art’, or ‘Negative Department’. And all the marvels of the industrial and so-called artistic maze are familiar to me.

Here the work of the machines is mysteriously completed.

All the life that the machines have devoured with the voracity of animals gnawed by a tapeworm, is turned out here, in the large underground rooms, their darkness barely broken by dim red lamps, which strike a sinister blood-red gleam from the enormous dishes prepared for the developing bath.

The life swallowed by the machines is there, in those tapeworms, I mean in the films, now coiled on their reels.

We have to fix this life, which has ceased to be life, so that anothermachine may restore to it the movement here suspended in a series of instantaneous sections.

We are as it were in a womb, in which is developing and taking shape a monstrous mechanical birth.

And how many hands are at work there in the dark! There is a whole army of men and women employed here: operators, technicians, watchmen, men employed on the dynamos and on the other machinery, drying, soaking, winding, colouring, perforating the films and joining up the pieces.

I have only to enter here, in this darkness foul with the breath of the machines, with the exhalations of chemical substances, for all my ‘superfluity’ to evaporate.

Hands, I see nothing but hands, in these dark rooms; hands busily hovering over the dishes; hands to which the murky light of the red lamps gives a spectral appearance. I reflect that these hands belong to men who are men no longer; who are condemned here to be hands only: these hands, instruments. Have they a heart? Of what use is it? It is of no use here. Only as an instrument, it too, of a machine, to serve, to move these hands. And so with the head: only to think of what

these hands may need. And gradually I am filled with all the horror of the necessity that impels me to become a hand myself also, and nothing more.

I go to the store-keeper to provide myself with a stock of fresh film, and I prepare my machine for its meal.

I at once assume, with it in my hand, my mask of impassivity. Or rather I cease to exist. It walks, now, upon my legs. From head to foot, I belong to it: I form part of its equipment. My head is here, inside the machine, and I carry it in my hand.

Outside, in the daylight, throughout the vast enclosure, is the gay animation of an undertaking that prospers and pays punctually and handsomely for every service rendered, that easy run of work in the confidence that there will be no complications, and that every difficulty, with the abundance of means at our disposal, will be neatly overcome; indeed a feverish desire to introduce, as though by way of challenge, the strangest and most unusual difficulties, without a thought of the cost, with the certainty that the money, spent now without reckoning, will before long return multiplied an hundredfold.

Scenario writers, stage hands, scene painters, carpenters, builders and plasterers, electricians, tailors and dressmakers, milliners, florists, countless other workers employed as shoemakers, hatters, armourers, in the store-rooms of antique and modern furniture, in the wardrobe, are all kept busy, but are not seriously busy, nor are they playing a game.

Only children have the divine gift of taking their play seriously. The wonder is in themselves; they impart it to the things with which they are playing, and let themselves be deceived by them. It is no longer a game; it is a wonderful reality.

Here it is just the opposite.

We do not play at our work, for no one has any desire to play. But how are we to take seriously a work that has no other object than to deceive, not ourselves, but other people? And to deceive them by putting together the most idiotic fictions, to which the machine is responsible for giving a wonderful reality!

There results from this, of necessity, and with no possibility of deception, a hybrid game. Hybrid, because in it the stupidity of the fiction is all the more revealed and obvious inasmuch as one sees it to be placed on record by the method that least lends itself to deception: namely, Photography. It ought to be understood that the fantastic cannot acquire reality except by means of art, and that the reality which a machine is capable of giving it kills it, for the very

reason that it is given it by a machine, that is to say by a method which discovers and exposes the fiction, simply by giving it and presenting it as real. If it is mechanical, how can it be life, how can it be art? It is almost like entering one of those galleries of living statuary, waxworks, clothed and tinted. We feel nothing but surprise (which may even amount to disgust) at their movements, in which there is no possible illusion of a material reality.

And no one seriously believes that he can create this illusion. At the most, he tries to provide ‘something to take’ for the machine, here in the workshops, there in the four studios or on the stage. The public, like the machine, takes it all. They make stacks of money, and can cheerfully spend thousands and thousands of lire on the construction of a scene which on the screen will not last for more than a couple of minutes.

Scene painters, stage hands, actors all give themselves the air of deceiving the machine, which will give an appearance of reality to all their fictions.

“What am I to them, I who with the utmost seriousness stand by impassive, turning the handle, at that stupid game of theirs!”

Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (14)

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