“Are you a cinephile?” I ask, suddenly impressed with this withered, white papery Jew (?) before me.

“If by cinephile you mean someone sexually excited by film or film stock, then yes.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant a lover of the art of film.”

“I am that as—”

“In the platonic sense, I mean.”

“Oh. I am that as well. Some films I love as friends, some in a deeper way.”

[...] Whom I am not repulsed by are the elderly genius directors amongst us. The Godards, the Melvilles, the Renaiseseses. Although I am not homosexual by inclination, I do feel a certain romantic interest in these men. Perhaps because I see them as father figures, as godlike, as paterfamiliases, if you will. Perhaps because I would like them to see me, to love me and admire me the way I love and admire them. How to achieve that? Well, certainly if I could write a monograph elucidating their work in ways never before elucidated in the history of film history that would help. Perhaps if I could even show them things about their work they themselves had never considered. But this has not happened, and as they have died off one by one, the possibility of it happening has diminished greatly. I have often thought it unfair that pulchritudinous young women can gain access to older, successful, brilliant male artists for no reason other than the artist’s wanting to fuck them. Whereas I have sweated and strained to understand their work, to shed light on it. I have, in my highly insightful way, adored them, and yet nothing. This is the height of sexism. Why can’t they love me? Why couldn’t my father love me just for being me? It was always about proving my worth to him. Never because I was cute or sexy. And as a child, I was both, I believe. Imagine a holy synthesis of Brandon Cruz from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and Mayim Bialik of Blossom fame and you’re imagining me as a boy. I was the epitome of pulchritudinous. I know it’s impolitic to celebrate Man-Boy love, but the Greeks, the greatest generation (with apologies to those of you who fought the Nazis), with the most geniuses per square foot in the history of the world, seemed to do all right with it. To be clear, I am not condoning such an uneven power dynamic in any relationship, and I fully believe children must be protected from predators. The only thing I am saying is that if Alain Resnais had taken an interest in me as a little boy, I would have been flattered. Obviously that ship sailed a long time ago.

I refocus on my previous train of thought: The old man is still old, however, and, let’s face it, no Alain Resnais. If I am to cozy up to an old man, he must be a certified genius, a poet, an artist. As I in my youth had hoped to be as an old man in my own future and still do in the future from now, but with less time to get there. But as of now, I am simply a celebrator of geniuses, an apologist for great men who are anti-Semites and racists, for brilliant artists who abuse women. These quirks of character must be forgiven in our geniuses is my unpopular opinion. Artists must have the freedom to express and explore the darkest regions of their psyches. As Persephone must spend half the year in the underworld, so must these men delve deep within themselves (and young women sometimes!) to bring us the fruit we so need for our sustenance. The pomegranate—symbol of life, of death, of royalty, of fecundity, of Jesus’s suffering, of virility, and so much more—is of course the fruit associated with Persephone. It chains her forever, albeit intermittently, to the underworld. Do we despise her for this? No, we celebrate her, because when she emerges, she brings us the spring. A field must lie fallow sometimes if we are to have any hope of an eventual renewal. A genius must sometimes be a racist if we are to hope for elucidation. History is generously peppered with geniuses who despised the Jews, who dismissed the blacks, who objectified women. Are we to bury their great works because of this? The answer is a resounding no, we are not to. We are, all of us, human. We are, all of us, imperfect. Prejudice is evolutionarily implanted in our genes. We need to know The Tiger is a dangerous animal. We need not know that all tigers are not. Identifying the personalities of individual tigers does not serve our need to survive. Granted, it might make us more enlightened individuals and friends with some tigers, and I am all for that. I applaud that, but one must recognize that there is a tribal instinct in humans and it is at its base an instinct for survival. So accept that, mourn it, decry it, rail against it, but recognize it is a very human trait and have patience with it. Have compassion. Thank you and good night. This is an impromptu speech I delivered to a great deal of heckling in the Bates College copier room when I was a visiting critic in their film department, where my job was to sit in the back during student film screenings, tap my pen impatiently against my notebook, and sigh.

Ingo doesn’t respond but simply limps to a notepad on the cluttered kitchen table and begins to write. I scan the room, hoping for elucidation. Boxes. Perhaps hundreds of them, maybe thousands, possibly millions—all marked: Automobiles, Firemen, Weather, Natives, Pastries, Trees (Palm, Spruce)…

Ingo returns with his list: Whole Milk, Whole Chicken, Whole Wheat Bread, Hole Puncher, Peach Halves (in syrup), Halvah, Half and Half, Anne Hathaway Havoc DVD, Black Thread, Black-eyed Peas, Ketchup, Mucilage, Carrots, Peanut Butter (chunkless), 150 packages of Ramen (assorted), 50 cans of Neelon’s Tuna Fish (improved texture), 80 cans of Nimby’s Chicken Noodle Soup, 10 pounds of Bolton’s Powdered Eggs, 5 pounds of Fripp’s Powdered Milk, 1 pound of Prochnow’s Powder (talcum), a thousand boxes (empty).

[...] The earliest example: Heinrich Telemucher’s 1891 short feature Ich Habe Keine Augapfel, in which two eyeballs drop from a man’s face and roll around for a long while on the floor. The film is important for two reasons other than its significance to the timetable of the history of animation. Number one, it is the first film in which someone’s eyeballs fall out. And secondly, this device became a staple of both Romanian silent films and early Japanese talkies. Whereas Romanian cinema used the device as a metaphor for the 1918 union of Romania with Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, the Japanese used it for straightforward comic purposes, often having the newly eyeless character exclaim, “Now I can see the way two balls on the ground see!” or “I look much taller from down here!” It eventually became so commonplace in Japanese cinema that one Japanese film critic quipped pithily, “All those eyeballs falling out is enough to make one wish one’s own eyeballs would fall out so one would no longer have to watch even one more movie in which someone’s eyeballs fall out.” Granted, it is pithier in Japanese, in which the entire sentiment is conveyed in kanji with just one character.

“There are multitudes of Unseen,” he said.

“Unseen?”

“The ones not seen.”

“I see,” I said.

“In the movie.”

“They’re in the movie?”

“They’re unseen in the movie.”

“So then they’re not in the movie?”

“They’re in it. But the camera is facing away from them. As it is for most of us.”

“So it’s more or less a conceptual notion.”

“No. The puppets have been built. With as much care as the seen puppets. They have been posed movement by movement, just as have the seen puppets. They have lived their lives. But have not been witnessed by the camera. Only by me.”

“You animated them but didn’t film it.”

“It sextupled my workload. Had I not, I could have made the film in fifteen years. It was a necessary sacrifice.”

“But why?”

“Because the Unseen live, too. Because if I don’t see them live, who will?”

“But why not film them and allow them to be seen by the world?”

“Because they aren’t seen. And were one to see the Unseen, they would no longer be the Unseen.”

I settle on the Unsung one but add And Thus the Heart of the World Is Broken. Love, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. I hire a photographer to document the funeral. I know I’ll be alone there with the hired Baptist minister (Ingo must’ve been a Baptist!) and this will put me in good stead down the road, cementing our connection in the mind of the public. I am Brod now. I am Brod, my entire life mapped out: executor, biographer, analyst, confidant, emergency contact. Friend. I schedule the funeral for a day during which a torrential downpour is anticipated, the umbrellas and mud being highly cinematic, funereal, illustrative of profound grief, hardship, loneliness. In addition, it will not be difficult for me to appear grief-stricken on the day, not only because I will be, but tears do not always come for me, even though I have taken several acting for directors classes, two acting for critics classes, and one acting for audiences class. With the rain, my face will be wet and I don’t have to worry about verisimilitude. I rent a rain machine from a local film production supply house, just in case.

I rose above his arrogance. I would not play his game. He told me he was a filmmaker of sorts. It is all I could do to not laugh in his unformed face. I do not mean to brag but I can detect an artist on sight. It is my version of gaydar (which I also have). Artdar. This is not based on physical appearance. Both a Sam Shepard and a Charles Bukowski are equally conspicuous to me. It is in the eyes, or, in those rare instances where they have no eyes, it is in their fingertips. This is the case with blind filmmaker Kertes Onegin, who astonishingly acts as his own cinematographer (he does employ a focus puller, but she is also blind). His technique of “feeling the scene” as the actors perform (his films are all in extreme close-up and include his hand in every shot) creates an intimacy unlike any I have ever before seen in any film, and it has made him a target of the #MeToo movement (blind edition). Onegin’s movie снова нашел (Found Again), which explores a rekindled romance between two pensioners separated for forty years, is arguably the most erotic film ever made. That the bodies making love are old and that there is a fifth hand delicately describing the contours of these bodies adds in exponential measure to the experience of the filmgoer. I conducted extensive interviews with Onegin for my monograph Onegin’s Feelies. During our conversations, he required we sit within touching distance and would caress my face throughout, sometimes sticking his fingers in my mouth “to see how wet.” I remember thinking, this is the most true conversation I’ve ever had and also the least true and also again the most true. I will admit there was even an erotic component to it, and although I am not a homosexual by inclination, I did submit to this eyeless genius, this typhlotic Rembrandt late one evening after too much retsina. I do not regret this, for how can one regret true communion? Ingo had none of this to offer. Not in his soft, soggy eyes, like old grapes, not in his pruny, sausage-shaped fingers, like old plums. You are no Onegin! I screamed in my head. You are not my dear, dear Kertes! as I waited for that inevitable question:

THE BUS HAS been double-booked. Greyhound offers four dollars off any domestic bus trip for passengers willing to take the following bus, which is at 5:30 P.M. next Thursday or Friday; they’re not certain. No takers, so they implement their “Emergency Lap Plan.” All passengers are weighed and assigned a lap buddy. Since I have lost 47 pounds in the hospital and weigh in at 94 pounds soaking wet (they don’t explain why they needed to hose us down), I am paired with a tracksuited man named Levy who is 336 pounds. He shakes my hand and tells me to call him Grabby, that everyone calls him Grabby.

“Where’d you get such a nickname?” I ask, forced casual-like.

He hesitates for a moment, then tells me that when he was a little boy, he’d always grab an extra cookie from the cookie jar. I do not believe that explanation for a minute, but I am not staying at the bus station until next Thursday or Friday.

It’s not too bad, in truth. Levy has a soft, warm, comfortable lap and keeps his hands mostly to himself. We engage in a brief, awkward conversation in which we try to find common ground:

[...] And the truth is my heart is no longer in this type of education. For the new me, it is either barefooted hayseed children from the South or the whole world as my students. This is why I spend my off times scouring junk stores, yard sale bins, and garbage cans, searching for the films of the next Ingo Cutbirth. It’s not a scientific process, but mine is not a scientific field. One would not expect Joyce to write utilizing the statistical method.