DISTURBING HISTORICAL DISTORTION/WHAT THEY DIDN’T MENTION/GHOSTS

by Cole Coonce

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

DISTURBING HISTORICAL DISTORTION (1933)

As the film continues rolling, children play with sheets and scare each other, apparently an eureka moment for the formation of the Klan. This historical distortion disturbs Rommel.

“This film is less than useless,” he barks. “This is not the history I expected at all. Is this not the story of the origins of the Ku Klux Klan? Where is the ‘Wizard of the Saddle?’”

From the stuttering turntable Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries pitch-shifts in full song. Onscreen, Ku Klux Klan vigilantes battle a hapless militia of black men.

After grunts of disapproval, Rommel rises suddenly and walks towards the film projector. A hyper-real superimposition of Klan footage on the Lieutenant, with two hooded horsemen galloping and holding a cross, make the staff officers scrinch their eyes.

“Turn it off!” Rommel fumes and whacks a rostrum with a pointer. The adjutants jump, reach for a light switch and fumble with the film projector.

“Enough of this buffoonery and propaganda. I am unconcerned with cartoonish portrayals of final solutions.”

WHAT THEY DIDN’T MENTION (2001)

The more I study the collectibles store, the more I realize the place is a shrine to Nathan Bedford Forrest. Despite interrupting their lunch hour, the husband-and-wife antebellum memorabilia merchants spend the better part of the afternoon discussing the myths and folklore of the object of their passion, Forrest.

The stories are legend. One tale after another of Forrest risking his own neck in some daring ill-advised personal assault on enemy positions while his inferior forces triumphed exquisitely over a legion of bamboozled Yankees, each battlefield assault punctuated with pithy, percipient yet cornpone punchlines such as “Get there firstest with the mostest” and “Never stand and take a charge… charge them too,” also “Get ‘em skeered and keep the skeer on ‘em.”

“This Forrest fellow was epic,” I tell my Cousin.

“Yes, he was,” he agrees, “but these fine folks didn’t tell you about all of his exploits.”

“Really? What did I miss?”

“What they didn’t mention was that Forrest was also the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.”

GHOSTS (1933)

“To know Forrest, I must go to the source,” Rommel cries. “To Brice’s Crossroads, the site of Forrest’s greatest triumph and the battlefield where he exercised his infamous pincer movement, movements to the detriment and annihilation of superior Northern forces. Find me a guide – a survivor… somebody who was there.”

“Herr Rommel,” Burgdorf reasons, “that was seventy years ago. Is there anybody there who is even still alive?”

“If not, we shall be guided by ghosts.” -30-

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-