Moonstone by Sjón
"The projectionist at the Old Cinema is as punctual as the sun."
Moonstone by Sjón, translated by Victoria Cribb (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2016)
You know that story of the early French cinemagoers? The ones who stampeded when they saw a train coming towards them, apparently in fear that they were all going to get squashed. Always irritated me, and I was immensely gratified when I first heard that it was almost certainly not true.
No rails. No sound. No juddering rumble of the train getting closer. No heat from the steam, no smell of oil, no whirl of the wind as a great catastrophe of physics comes clattering close. Ineluctable snobbery of the intellectual: hon hon hon, see the great unwashed scattering! Before a simple moving image! Les buffoons.
And besides, it always seemed to me to miss the point of cinema. That is, instead of an engagement with something ‘real’, to watch a film is to respond to something clearly and (hopefully) interestingly not real. All cinema is a known hallucination. That, perhaps, would be a good reason to start screaming: because something very not real is happening for the very first time.
Which isn’t to say that hallucinations, even when known as such, can’t mess you up completely. To quote Moonstone’s blurb, Máni Steinn, our 16-year-old protagonist, “is queer in a society where the idea of homosexuality is beyond the furthest extreme. He is a young man on the fringes of a society that is itself on the fringes of the world” — that is, Reykjavík, 1918, shortly before Icelandic independence, just as the Spanish flu arrives, and all while the volcano Katla is painting the skies a lurid red.
And he watches a lot of films. A lot. Reykjavík has two cinemas, the Old and the New, each showing one or two films a day, then three on Sundays. “The boy watches all the films that are imported to Iceland. As a rule, he goes to both cinemas on the same and sees most films as often as he can.” He pays for this by turning tricks in what passes for Reykjavik’s cruising scene - a furtive, improvised and ultimately dangerous career.
And now the boy lives in the movies. When not spooling them into himself through his eyes, he is replaying them in his mind.
Sleeping, he dreams variations on the films, in which the web of incident is interwoven with strands from his own life.
And reading, we see the cinema breaking into his reality: an epistemic disruption. He spends much of the book following (or stalking) a woman he knows as Sóla G—, because at one moment during a screening of The Vampires she stood up and her features merged perfectly with those of Musidora as Irma Vep. Later in the book, as they work together to locate Reykjavík’s dead and dying, he retreats in haste lest one of his former clients recognise him.
Sóla G— follows him into the passage.
There in the gloom, Máni Steinn watches as the girl places a bracing hand on his shoulder.
The cinema has made him a voyeur - he people watches “with an acuity honed by watching some five hundred films … all mankind’s behaviour is an open book to him” - and now, at a moment of crisis, here he is watching himself from outside himself. His own known hallucination.
As the Spanish flu rips through tiny, close, unprepared Reykjavík, the cinemas themselves are held accountable. In a book filled with striking set pieces, perhaps the most affecting is a showing at the Old Cinema. Already the plague has taken the musicians, and now silent films are shown in silence: that is, shown against a backdrop of coughing and fidgeting and murmuring, “the growling of the motor that powers the projector and the whispering of the film as it unwinds”.
Eventually, all present realise that this simply does not work. Without music the actors look ridiculous and the film is oddly paced. Before long “the screening has turned into a public meeting at which stories are swapped about the nature of the epidemic.” And then, the lights come up, and “every other face is chalk-white; lips are blue, foreheads glazed with sweat, nostrils red, eyes sunken and wet.”
The boy had left “some time before.” Later, with Sóla G—, he returns, and they fumigate the cinemas with chlorine gas. The war has just ended, but the “greenish-yellow gas that had lately felled young men on the battlefields of Europe now drifts and rolls through the picture houses of Reykjavík.” They are both dressed head to toe in black - both Irma Vep now - and as they reenact the war they reenact the film. Hallucination layered on hallucination.