One Hundred Years of Amagran Cinema

Amagra's films had always been of exceptional quality. The small country possessed an immense store of antique Soviet film stock, and its borders were open to all filmmakers from elsewhere who had broken the law either criminally, politically, or aesthetically. Thus Amagra produced films based on Proust and porters' strikes, put out bleak mysteries and sub-pornographic erotica, and screened long, quiet narratives that resembled nothing more than cracking window glass. The Amagran women were very beautiful, the men all handsome, except for a small percentage of wicked-looking crones, grotesquely fat people, and pop-eyed psychopaths suitable for character actors. It was altogether an ideal country for making movies.

In honor of Queen Sofia's Jubilee, the Amagran Film Council commissioned one hundred filmmakers to each produce a film exactly one year in length. Each was assigned a piece of the most famous Amagran novel, and when all the films were spliced together, it comprised a hundred-year-long movie of the rise and fall of three generations of a textile manufacturing family in the swamplands of Tirov. On the Queen's anniversary, the Film Society set the reels rolling, and all of Amagra crowded into the ancient, ornate Royal Theater to watch a gray sun rise over the mucky flatland. At night, the theatergoers drifted to sleep in their seats as the film turned dark and the speakers broadcast the whine of cicadas and the distant thud of the donkey engine dredging the swamp where the textile factory was soon to stand.

The film went on, showing the vile temper of the powerful father, who trampled the town fool at his eldest son's wedding. Years passed, and a little girl who had entered the theater at six years old now found herself seventeen, and in love with an older man who had a seat several rows in front of her. Likewise small boys who had dreamed of joining the army when they got older grew up and became instead ushers and sandwich vendors, or stayed scrunched in their seats, chewing their fingernails and gazing at the beauty of the millworkers in the movie, who worked in the summer with their blouses tied in a knot beneath their breasts. Couples married and babies were born, the midwives hunkering down on the sticky floor between the seats to ease the infants into the dim light. A chemist continued his research into sheep diseases, working with test tubes on his knees, while in the film the second son killed his brother's pet bear with an axe, and Natalia, the wife of the eldest, ran into the garden with her nightgown undone, to find the hunchbacked cousin who loved her swinging from a noose in the bathhouse. Old people died and were treated to elaborate funerals, their wicker caskets borne up and down the sloping aisles. The youngest son was bewitched by a prostitute at the Nizhny Fair; the yardman became an itinerant mystic. He had the murder of his child on his conscience.

Confectioners vended dozens of regional specialties in the lobby and in the orchestra pit. But by the time the movie was halfway over, the grandfather dead, the drought passed, the daughter disgraced with the apothecary's son, half the bakers had been killed in vendettas. The ones that survived formed a cartel, and raised their prices markedly. The water in the drinking fountains turned yellow, and many in the audience had their own hallucinated versions of the school years of Yakov and Ilia, the lingering death of the deaf stablehand, as they spent grueling months in the lavatory retching into the sink and fouling the toilet with diarrhea. The sound equipment suffered minor mechanical failures, so that whole segments in the film were mimed, long conversations conveyed only by glances and twitching cheeks. When the repairmen had thoroughly overhauled the machines, many in the audience insisted that the sound was still not as clear as it had been before. The actors too seemed stiff, they said, not as expressive as the heroes of the earlier parts of the epic. However, those who had grown up during the latter years of the film disagreed vehemently.

Outside the theater, only a few nomads moved over the rocky, sun-bitter soil. Trucks brought food from far away, though supply routes were interrupted by the war in Pakistan, which spread west and south until it abruptly ceased. Sometimes busloads of tourists from Berlin came to stay at the Amagran Hilton. They watched the movie for several days, making notes on pads with special lighted pens. A few came alone in summer. One became obsessed with a woman in the audience, a widow with an austere profile. Although they had much in common, she rejected him and fled to the very back row of the theater, where he could not sit behind her and observe her. The men in the back row were very rough, and gave her a lewd nickname for having slept with the foreigner. She protested that all she had done was lay her head on his shoulder.

At the end of a hundred years, the film closed at last on the rubble of the textile factory, burned in the Revolution. The camera studied the bleary face of the drunken grandson and the pinched cheeks of the orphaned, illegitimate heiress Constantina. The audience hobbled out into Amagra's dusty streets. Strangers peered at them from the tables of the caf� across from the theater. They were refugees who had settled in some time ago, bringing with them acrid buttered tea and peculiar red hats. They lived in all the houses now and ran all the shops. None of the Amagrans could remember how to manufacture so much as an umbrella or a chain link fence. They had forgotten how to set a table for dinner, and how to make up a bed. Moreover, the world looked small and wrinkled, even as it stretched to the horizon, unbounded by the edges of the screen. It had nothing to do with them. The light stung them. They looked around stupefied, even their own hands alien, the skin so pale, opaque, and meaningless. An old woman looked down at a Daddy-long-legs crawling along a crack in the cement. She studied its legs carrying the little spot of body along. But truly it was going nowhere, it symbolized nothing, it stood for no character or characteristic. It was not greed or guilt, wilderness or ambiguity. It was a spider. The Amagrans cried.