Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

“Lee,” he says as she leaves the room. “Do the film.”

“All right,” she says again. Of course she’s going to do the film; she’s already decided. But what is the harm in letting him think he is a part of her decision?

Outside the darkroom Lee looks down at the contact sheet he has on the table. “What are you printing?” she calls to him.

“Pictures of you,” he says. “What else?”

Lee picks up the loupe. The contact sheet has nine images on it with hardly any variation, as if Man just released the shutter again and again as fast as he could. In the images Lee lies in their bed, sleeping. She has one arm flung above her head, the other wrapped around her torso. She is under the sheets, but it’s clear from the folds in the fabric that her legs are spread wide, and the angle at which Man shot the pictures makes the shadows in the sheets point like an arrow toward the center of her. Lee has no memory of him taking these—it could have been yesterday or months ago. Man has taken pictures of her while she is sleeping before; it’s never bothered her. But now, as she looks at her sleeping self, tripled in every row, she doesn’t like the pictures. Not because it makes her uncomfortable to think of Man watching her while she sleeps, the voyeuristic aspect of them. No, what she doesn’t like is the implicit trust in them, what it reveals about their relationship. The vulnerability she sees in herself.

Lee wonders if this is what Man means by asking for a commitment. If what he wants from her is total surrender.

Later they go home together. Man seems satisfied by their conversation. He holds her hand while they walk to the apartment, gently moves her out of the way of a pothole in the road. When they get inside, he runs a bath for her, and when she has dried off and gotten into her dressing gown, she finds him in their small kitchen, where he has scrambled her an egg. It sits steaming on a plate on the counter, and Man spreads butter on a slice of toast and adds it to the plate. Lee is famished, eats the egg and then another. She feels warm from the food in her stomach and warm from the bath and from the robe she has knotted at her waist. She and Man barely speak, but there is comfort in their silence. If this is not love, then what is?

If Lee uses a wide angle and takes in the landscape, getting the tidy lawns of the nearby village in the shot, she can show how close the trains were to civilians, how they knew, how they must have known—

If she frames the shot through the open train car door, foregrounds the dead man’s skull, his cheekbones almost slicing through what’s left of his skin—

If she takes a photo of one of the rabbits they raised in the camp, its clean white fur, its plump rolls of well-fed fat. Bred to be a muff for an overfed Frau to push her fists into. A prisoner feeding the rabbit grain out of his dirt-blackened hand—

If she takes a photograph of someone else seeing what she sees. Prisoners, their eyes haunted, starving, looking on as bodies are tossed in a pit. An SS guard, jaw broken, watching blood spurt from another guard’s punched nose—

If she tries different angles, gets in close. The empty tin bowl, the number on a wrist, the man’s foot half gone when he takes off his boot—

If she takes photos of the ones in charge. A German official, vomiting next to a stacked pile of dead. Another of a suicide, his tongue a black worm pushing out of his mouth—

Sometimes Lee puts her camera to her face just so she can close her eyes. Sometimes she takes the photos blind.

If they knew—they had to know—there is no way they didn’t know—

If she—the smell. She will write of it to Audrey.

One by one members of the press corps leave. Lee stays. She must bear witness. The film canisters fill her pockets, grenades to send out for publication.

Jean has picked up cast and crew members all over Europe. They are a ragtag group, but as soon as Lee shows up on the second day, resolute and motivated, she becomes a part of it. Most of them don’t even speak the same language, but when they are together it doesn’t matter: they crack jokes and talk in long looping soliloquies about everything, and somehow enough of it makes sense to create a fellow feeling. A woman named Anush is a palm reader, and one night everyone on the set gets their fortune read, which makes them reveal things they otherwise would never mention. Another evening they drink brandy and empty a metal trash can and have a fire right there on the stage. After only a few days Lee thinks she could count these people as her friends.

Some afternoons, when filming has wrapped for the day, they raid the dressing rooms, pulling out costumes. They cinch themselves into Edwardian gowns, men and women both, the corsets so tight their breath comes short and fast, or they don chain mail tunics and battle with dull-bladed swords. They act out skits and fall over one another laughing. When Jean is happy with how the day’s filming has gone, he acts as their ringleader, and the scenarios he invents for them to perform are crazy and wonderful.

Lee finds she loves acting. Freed from the constraints of the statue costume at the end of the day, she is loose and uninhibited. She’ll place Nefertiti’s crown on her head and feel her whole bearing change, growing languid and queenly, and her real identity will slip away. The other cast members are surprised she’s never acted before. She basks in their praise and finds herself working hard to impress them. The film inspires her photography too; there are similarities between her own process and what’s happening on set. She begins to understand photography as cinematic. When she takes a picture, she is laying claim to one moment out of a moving stream of a thousand potential moments, and the act of choosing it, of removing it from its context, is part of what makes it art.

Behind the cine camera, Jean is a master. Lee sees that now. His way of winding up the actors, angering them, even, is effective for getting what he wants. Enrique in particular. The two of them together engage in what she soon realizes is the same dynamic both on and off set: that they are lovers suffuses all their interactions. The relationship is a tempestuous one. They scream at each other in full view of the rest of the cast, and Lee even sees Enrique reach out to strike Jean at one point. Everyone studiously ignores them, and instead just comments on the range Enrique displays in the dailies. In the end, Lee thinks, their personal drama makes their art work, and she can’t help thinking of herself with Man, the way she can’t separate her feelings for him from the work they do together.

Even though she is glad to be on her own, Lee thinks of Man often while she’s on the set. The lightness inside her while she’s there, like a fountain bubbling over, fills her with guilt, and sometimes the thought of Man, alone at the studio, makes her wish she wasn’t having such a good time. She’s not sure she deserves to feel this way; being here without him should not make her this happy. But then in the next instant she finds herself laughing so hard she forgets to cover her teeth with her hand, and all Lee thinks is that she can’t wait to share all this with him, to let him in on all the fun.

One afternoon, after a long shoot of a bizarre scene in which the poet’s mouth separates from his body and reappears on his hand, Lee sits on a wobbly chair at the edge of the stage. They called her in for some of the crowd shots, and she loved being on film without all her makeup. Around her, other actors are talking and relaxing. Someone brings out a brandy bottle and passes it around. Another man rolls cigarettes on a barstool and hands them out, and soon the stage is hazy with smoke. It could be four in the afternoon or the middle of the night. Like the darkroom, the film set has a timeless quality, and Lee wants to linger. Her stomach is empty and the brandy settles in it like a hot-water bottle, all comfort and heat. After a while the bottle is empty and one by one everyone starts to get up to go home, gathering coats and hats and saying their goodbyes.

Soon Lee is one of the last people there. She picks up her coat and heads backstage for one last look around. The dark space smells of smoke and wet wool and some sort of herbal cleaner, and she breathes it in with pleasure. Only a few more days and they’ll be done filming. Lee doesn’t want to let it go.

Someone comes up behind her and puts his hand on her arm. She jumps, then sees that it’s Jean. “You scared me!”

“I am sorry.” He takes a deep breath. “You stay too—I’ve seen you. I never want to go home.”

“Me neither.” She turns to face him and he gives her an appraising look.

“I am headed to the ballet tonight—it is Lifar’s first production. Would you like to come?”

Lee smooths her hair and looks down at her wrinkled dress. “I look a fright.”

“You look a vision. Plus, we will sneak.” Jean makes a gesture with his hands like a little animal creeping, and she laughs.

They walk out of the studio together as the sun is setting. Masses of purple clouds gather, and through them the sun sends sharp rays of light.

“Oh, look,” Lee says, and they stop to stare until the sun shifts and the rays disappear. Then, companionably, Lee loops her arm through his.

“Enrique didn’t want to go?” she asks.