Arrival of a\u00a0Train\u00a0at La Ciotat<\/b><\/p>\n
Plato must have needed the flame of a candle,
\nand a concave mirror to project his images<\/p>\n
of trees and animals upon the cave wall.
\nThe projectionist moves his slides quickly, in<\/p>\n
and out of the lantern, palms polishing metal,
\nsummoning a vision: trees tremble in the wind,<\/p>\n
branches waver in a breeze, birds captured
\nin the sun\u2019s glare. Our eyes, some historians<\/p>\n
suggest, not accustomed to the phenomena
\nof cinema, found the representations life-like,<\/p>\n
their movements potent, their presence paralyzing.
\nYes, we were chained to the cave with wonder.<\/p>\n
The Headless Woman<\/b><\/p>\n
Nanny perched on a stool in a curtained
\nbooth, posing as the headless woman
\nin her little brother\u2019s circus show.
\nThe poster depicts her long slender arms,<\/p>\n
legs crossed, dressed in a skirt, high-heeled
\nshoes, her head absent from the<\/p>\n
frame. This was before the invention
\nof Photoshop. Our great uncle manipulated her<\/p>\n
appearance using a series of mirrors, so
\nthat when you approached the cabinet
\nand she sat before you, her face was obscured.<\/p>\n
Nanny was always the last to leave<\/p>\n
the dinner table, chewing each bite
\nwith deliberation, the third and fourth
\nhelpings of apple pie. When Michael
\nlived out his final days in a sanatorium<\/p>\n
for the mentally deranged, Nanny
\nrode the bus from Ottawa to Regina
\nto collect his ashes in a small box.
\nShe held it on her lap the whole trip<\/p>\n
home. When my parents told me this story
\nI imagined not the heat and the rabble
\nof the grey hound, but the rumble of a train,
\nits movement on the tracks, the rain against<\/p>\n
the window, the straightness of her back.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Schr\u00f6pfer\u2019s Ghost<\/b><\/p>\n
\nJohann Georg Schr\u00f6pfer sets up his magic
\nlantern in a coffee shop in Leipzig.
\nHe conjures devils and ghosts, makes
\nthe polis believe the apparitions stand
\nbefore them as real as their arms outstretched
\nin front of their faces. He holds s\u00e9ances
\nfor our loved ones, lost to sickness
\nand old age. And in those dark nights,
\nthe smoke pouring in from the walls,<\/p>\n
the scent of coffee beans seeping in
\nfrom the storeroom, the image of a little
\ngirl appears like an angel. His shows
\nso convincing, the magic begins to fool
\nSchr\u00f6pfer himself. He becomes terrified
\nthat even when the flame is extinguished,
\neven when the smoke wafts away and
\nthe exhausted patrons take themselves
\nhome to bed, its pleasant sleep or eerie<\/p>\n
dreams, that the outline of a daemon remains
\nprojected on the wall. Even when he throws
\nopen the drapes and lets the sunlight inside,
\nhe is unable to scratch the picture away. Like
\na shadow burned into the plasma of a flat
\nscreen television, he feels the devil burned
\ninto his eyes. One evening in 1774 he shoots
\nhimself in the face after telling his audience,
\nlike a rabbit from a hat, he would later reappear.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Phantasmagoria<\/b><\/p>\n
The photographer of the tsar, Prokudin-Gorsky,
\nmade famous for documenting the Russian empire
\nat the turn of the twentieth century. He captures
\nthe Kama river like glass before the horizon;<\/p>\n
bulbous onion domes; emirs with dark beards and
\nsilk costumes, their fingers adorned with gold rings
\nand fat purple jewels; young peasant girls with braided
\nhair posing in front of log cabins, aprons stained with dirt<\/p>\n
and grease; farmers lugging tall wicker baskets of potatoes;
\nstone fences and trodden paths winding like a labyrinth.
\nIt is all in colour: Three monochrome frames taken
\nseconds after one another. Nearly simultaneous,<\/p>\n
viewed through red, blue, and green filters, and spliced
\ntogether. A Technicolor image of the composite scene.
\nHow am I to believe that people today are the same?
\nIt is only their clothes that have changed. But photographs<\/p>\n
are only spells, little lulls of trickery. When the plates
\nof colour do not line up exactly\u2014a bump of an elbow
\na twitch of a limb\u2014 and instead of the lucid outlines
\nof figures, their clothing preserved, their postures straight,<\/p>\n
there will be a ghostly shadow of colour, some twinge that is
\nnever captured in reality. I would never find blue or red
\nshadows following me, but they are present in ghosts,
\nthe only hint that pictures are a make-believe game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arrival of a\u00a0Train\u00a0at La Ciotat Plato must have needed the flame of a candle, and a concave mirror to project his images of trees and animals upon the cave wall. The projectionist moves his slides quickly, in and out of the lantern, palms polishing metal, summoning a vision: trees tremble […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1360,"parent":229,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-995","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1451,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/995\/revisions\/1451"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}