THE AIR STINGS OF CELLULOID (1933)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 4: THE AIR STINGS OF CELLULOID (1933)

In a strobing smoke-filled classroom at the Potsdam War Academy, a silhouetted quartet of uniformed men puff cigarettes and fidget and watch a screening of D.W. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation. The air stings of crackling celluloid, and of the soot of history slowly melting from the heat of a movie projector’s lamp. As the film strip burnishes from age and friction, emulsions decay and nitrates metastasize, mixing with hot balls of dust that float through the tobacco haze like dirty satellites in space. It burns the nostrils and the singes the eyelashes.

In lieu of an orchestra or a proper pipe organ, the soundtrack to the silent film is a perpetual whir of the projector’s motor, a clattering grind of mechanical teeth champing on 16mm sprockets interrupted by a smattering of coughs from the assembled military staff.

A plump adjutant fiddle-fucks around with a flakey phonograph machine. A pair of staff officers, Burgdorf and Maisel, befuddled by the movie they have been forced to watch – an American film which purports to explain the necessity of the Ku Klux Klan in the Age of Reconstruction – squirm from boredom. A fourth viewer, Lieutenant Erwin Rommel, equally impatient with the movie’s plodding plot and maudlin histrionics, taps his creased thighs with his leather field gloves. “If Goebbels made such shit he would be shot,” the Lieutenant quips, and the rest of men chortle. The screening is Rommel’s idea; he commissioned a print because of his interest in Nathan Bedford Forrest, the savage and savvy Confederate General who, after the Civil War, became the Klan’s inaugural Imperial Wizard.

“Schneider! The needle!” Rommel urges, his frustration with the film compounded by the gnawing silences of the malfunctioning phonograph. The portly adjutant prods the phonograph, and strains of Wagner’s Die Walküre jump starts to life.

On the screen, former friends — and now adversarial soldiers — shoot at each other with primitive rifles and then a Title Card reads: “On the battlefield. War claims its bitter, useless sacrifice. True to their promise, the chums meet again.”

The scene cuts, and Griffith’s portrayal of hand-to-hand combat in the American Civil War resumes. A Confederate soldier is shot and drops to terra firma. His “chum” from the North attacks with a fixed bayonet, and just before the inevitable skewering, recognizes his fallen Southern pal, smiles and puts his weapon down.

“Why doesn’t he kill him with the blade?” Maisel asks, his lanky frame bent in a ball of confusion.

“His enemy must be his brother or his cousin, I think,” Burgdorf responds.

Their discourse is interrupted by Rommel. “In war, there is no room for sentimentality,” he argues. “Americans lack the cruel instinct necessary for pure, complete domination.”

Birth Of A Nation continues in background; as strings swell, the compassionate boy is shot and falls over his dead friend. Dying, he caresses his chum’s lifeless body. “The American’s last great conquest was maybe manifest destiny,” Burgdorf says. “Then they got soft.”

“Yes,” Maisel nods. “Maybe nothing was left so they turned on each other.” -30-