The Rooms

On the day before Thanksgiving in 2008 I arrived in New York and would stay there for the next three months. I came there to finish a film, a collaboration with my friend, Paul Rowley, which we had shot earlier that year. This film still holds a very dear place in my heart, and remains to this day the hardest thing I have ever worked on.

It is not an easy film for many reasons, but it is a strange, lovely and sad movie. It is a film about architecture, about history, about cinema and the way we have seen things over time. it is about archives and it is about quantum physics. It is titled, The Rooms.

Footage for this film was gathered in almost every format. There is hand processed 16mm, super-8 and high definition digital. The film contains a slide show and movies within the movie. There are slow, static scenes and parts where the image is cut to each individual syllable of a human voice.

Into this film Paul and I put our love of Modernism and its Utopian insistence on creating the world it wanted to inhabit. We poured our outrage at oppression and genocide into it and tried to make a portrait  of a world without people, where the buildings were haunted by what had been done in and around them.

The Rooms is a homage to film makers like Hollis Frampton, and Tarkovsky, and to individual films like Don't Look Now. We tried to make a movie so contemporary to 2008 that it would look dated the way Kubrick's films look now, or like the way Wong Kar Wai's delirious love stories from the 1990s seem now.

The Rooms was filmed across Europe, in north America and in Korea. It only showed in a few places. I think the first place was in Berlin. Then it showed in Spain and France, and lastly in Ireland. I would love to see it again on the big screen, watching the images pray to their ancestors.

We invented stories printed here below, then removed everything but the residue of them, making the film a ghost story of a dead humanity.

  

The Actor

A technician who worked for his entire career at a mid-19^th century theater had so loved the building and its machinery that he had an encyclodedic memory of every production; the stage sets to the lighting and on into the content of the pieces produced. He recalls how just before the war a play was to be performed with a controversial actor. This actor had spoken out on the rights of a certain minority who were at the time being scapegoated into blame for the country’s deteriorating condition. A week before the play was to be premiered, the lead actor had vanished. Some say he was deported, others that he was killed, or that he had fled the country.

  The technician, who had so much pride in his work, saw this production as the one time he and the machinery had failed, even though the play had gone on after an understudy had replaced the actor. He saw this as a failure because the play had been significantly de-politicized by the director and the producer, and had even be refashioned into a sort of propaganda for the ruling regime. It was in his opinion that the magic of representation of human endeavor should inspire and uplift. He saw this “de-politicization” as in fact a repoliticization in a politics of shame and fear, and with this in his head and heart, it was his opinion that the machinery of both man and building should have stopped.

The Apartment

Looking at the apartment now it was impossible to imagine the elation felt so many years ago when last he saw it empty. He and his young wife had loved it when they saw it and the landlord agreed to let it to them right away. The years had slowly filled it with objects and memories that though now gone, somehow were still there. Nothing stood between him and the balcony where so many times he and his wife had taken their breakfast in the morning Mediterranean sun. He was tempted to walk out on it one last time before he thought twice. It was still daylight and though the neighborhood was populated by nothing more than packs of dogs long abandoned, there was a chance of being seen by another person such as himself, wandering his own memories, or worse, some member of a militia who could easily follow him home after he left the building.

He tried to trace the position of everything the way it was. Here the sofa, there the shelves filled with books, a photo of his wife and son, the umbrella stand…This he did in each room, taking a mental inventory of as many objects as he could in hopes that in his sleep that night these objects would whisper to him their story of the love so long lived in that apartment. He stood facing the wall where the books had been and tried to remember the way they were last organized. A running joke between him and his wife was every year one of them or the other would reorder them to a new system the other would then have to figure out; political left to right, sexiest authors, normalcy in the center surrounded by fringe thinking. He smiled remembering this game as he walked to their son’s room.
 

Their son had been born the year things began to fall apart, but for three more years they lived on that street that had been so full of life once. Both of them had been journalists, she for a radio station, he for a critical journal of social science. In those three years things disintegrated rapidly. Shops had begun to stay open only for short hours, long enough for the shopkeepers to make enough money to meet their own needs, and not risking being victim to the epidemic of armed robbery. Both of them lost their jobs as the government shut down anything critical.  

They began to sell things off on the black market, or barter for things they needed. He always suspected it was selling off the volumes of books that led to his wife’s disappearance. People who could afford a luxury such as a book in those times was more likely than not somehow connected to the interim government. He had warned her about taking some of their more valuable books to the outdoor book traders, but she insisted she might be able to get enough money from a few selected volumes to get them out of the city at last. He came home with his son in his arms to find the front door open, his wife gone and one volume by Juan Goytisolo lay on the floor.

He sat on the floor where he sat then so many years ago, waiting for her. He slept for some hours, awaking after nightfall. He could feel sorrow rising in him and did not take a last look at the empty rooms as he made his way to return to his son in their hiding place. 

The Projectionist

It was one of Elke’s duties as a projectionist to edit the films that arrived from other States according to the criteria set by hers before screening them publicly. This she did well and had never been paid a visit by the authorities from a single complaint. She loved film, and dreamed of the day when she would splice all the scenes she was obliged to remove into one, lovely film of desire. It was generally desire that she was required to excise from these films. What was left should only show satisfaction, or be a pragmatic record of how to obtain satisfaction. Desire left one wanting more and more for unseen and unknown treasures in life. Because her heart had always wanted more, Elke was a friend with desire.

She had thankfully saved all the scraps of curling and shiny celluloid and placed them under a loose floorboard, each labeled with director, actors, year and country of production, and once in a while took them out and looked at the transparent images, trying to find a way to connect them into a new film.

During the war the cinema had been commissioned by the army to be used as a temporary hospital. She had hoped that her scraps of scenes would not be found, and for the rest of the war took a job selling newspapers that were just as carefully edited as her films were. After the war she returned to her job as projectionist, but the crowds thinned more and more with people seeming to have lost desire and satisfaction both. Most of the films in her archive had been carted off by soldiers, and the new government seldom sent any new prints. Soon the town was left by a few people at a time until Elke alone remained on the cold and dark seaside town that had never been completely finished because of the war. She spent her time sawing pieces of flooring to use as fuel for fire, and taking long walks on the windy beach where she arranged mentally over and over again each fragment and scrap of film she had by now memorized. In the quiet evenings by the fire in the cinema room she would glue them together one by one, looking at them through the light of flames before falling asleep in dreamed desire.

The Janitor
                  
 Juan had so much he wanted to tell her. He sat back in his chair listening to the gathering crowd in the reception hall, thinking of just what coming to America had meant for him and his family. In their homeland they had the risks of being caught between the junta and the rebels in the constant taking and retaking of the beautiful mountain villages. But there was family and friends. Not much by way of work, but also not a lot of needs that made poverty seem so much more degrading here. And here was violence. Just one week earlier the liquor store across the street had been robbed at gunpoint while he and his family listened after turning down the television and lights. Juan had begun to feel as if he traded the quiet joy of friends for the gruff company of fellow workers and invisibility in the eyes of the people who day after day, he cleaned up after at the museum.

The next morning was inventory. It would be hours and hours of listing and counting every belonging in the marble rooms of the building. He wondered why there was this making of lists, of categorizing, of opening boxes only on this day, noting the object had not changed since last inventory and placing it back into its categorized room. This made him wonder where he belonged. Into which category he was counted, and who counted him. Juan began counting things to himself. His children’s ages, the things he missed from home, how many times a day he was embarrassed.

He wanted to tell her as he looked at the list of things he had to do the next day just how much he missed her, and that he wished he could give her more than himself. Not in terms of belongings, but by way of all the ephemeral things and small things that together can make life so huge. Belonging, he thought. What a nice word when it is.

                                      A City

The letters first dislodged themselves from the word. Later, even they became fragmented. In a frantic attempt at understanding just what had been lost, the letters arranged and rearranged themselves in imitation of a long forgotten language. This then, is the primal desire for understanding and belonging; a language in search of a people. 

                                                                                                    Work

It came to the attention of the railroad company in the course of transitioning to a computer based archive system that a certain secretary had for years been falsifying reports of injuries suffered by rail workers due to her personal likes or dislikes of the injured workers. The falsifying of the reports was done with the knowledge of her direct supervisor, who she appears was trying to impress, though it is not clear whether or not they were romantically involved. The altering of the reports, it seems, had saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars that would have been rightly paid to the injured parties.

The extent of the falsification has yet to be determined, but many instances of moderate or even severe harm done to the workers had been reclassified into a lesser legal category, or the facts had been changed on the reports to make the worker appear to be at fault. If a certain worker had been perceived as hostile to management in any way, the report was made to put the worker at fault.

The Poet

A poet whose work involves the twin themes of revolution and homosexuality leaves him vilified by both the paramilitary right wing coup, and the Muslim minority being exterminated, to which he belongs. The poems identify key members of the resistance by following the classical rules of Arabic poetry, and praise the virtues of the beloved; the youth, beauty, courage and valor of certain young men.

The poems were left in a hotel room which was hastily fled, and of which the wall facing the street was blown out by mortar. If the poems were found several key figures of the resistance would be identified and killed.

A tourist who is stuck in this unfortunate country is traveling with a heavy heart, he has a problem that he has fled from. He was approached by a member of the resistance to retrieve the poems from the hotel, because it is thought his European background would allow him greater access and flexibility in travel.

He is followed by a sniper, and because of the constant gunfire into the very room, he cannot leave. He spends a weekend with no food or water, crouched behind a wall, reading these incredible poems.

The Pool

A woman grows up in a small country run by a dictatorship in its last years. The mental framework that is constructed to cope with the eternal distrust, fear and suspicion is such that only very strong personalities can flourish. She is not such a person, and the day to day activities only bring her further reclusion and alienation.

As a dancer, and because of her talent, she finds a little more relief than the average citizen, with just the slightest bit of freedom which she does not know how to use. In one production she meets and falls in love with a choreographer. It is the first time she has felt trust and love, but even this cannot bring her much relief. She can only be herself when alone with him, and in the company of others he speaks for her. He is her shield and confidant. He protects her, advises her, even shops and cooks when she is too depressed to leave the house.

One afternoon she is on her bike when she is struck by a car. In the months that followed her accident, he helps her recover. In her pain and helplessness she begins to regret her years of being afraid, and that regret is the seed of her strength and new will to enter the world. He senses this new strength in her, and it is in the daily physical therapy sessions in the pool, that by close and tender working with their bodies that their relationship is rekindled. In these waters their bodies work together again, and in the day they brought her back to health and in the evenings they found time and joy again in love.

He died the year the country fell. In a new culture, country and way of living she was once again lost and alienated not only by the return of her solitude, but also by ways of life organized by the new regime. In her death she seeks him now, again at the pool where she once found joy in living, which was now abandoned and decayed.

                                                                                       The Embassy

A cinematographer failed lands a job for a documentary on the construction of a new embassy. Before he was a cinematographer he had the hobby of photographing buildings. He researched their stories and attempted to capture this “dramaturgy” through this photography. It is this work that landed him the job of cinematographer. He sees the opportunity as a way to further his research on the sociology of architecture in that an embassy could give him a perspective on how society uses architecture.

The project was doomed as the country that the embassy was for evaporated due to a revolution, coup, or war. Only certain elements remained of the documentary; shots, sound, narration, notes…it was an incomplete film. The cinematorapher saw this as an opportunity for him to at last build a structure. The film will be a structure that reflects a total society.

Where the documentary is lacking he begins to fill in the gaps. These “rooms” extend from his years of research, and of the stories attached to different spaces; a room of worship, a cell, transitional spaces…The rooms begin to inhabit the film as he tries to complete it, and a haunting takes place. Who completes this structure? The rooms themselves or him?

he Fire

The Fire

Their time together was spent at the modest, two room house used by the keeper of the cemetery high up above the town in the parched and stunted forest. Hamsi was referred to the Keeper by an older tourist he had once slept with as a person who for a small fee would let their kind use the house for such purposes while he, the Keeper would show pilgrims to the tombs of saints.


Hamsi had met Mamoud when his father had hired him to do repairs on the small hotel the family owned in the city. In fact, Hamsi’s family owned several business in town, and it was his job to do the daily rounds to collect the money and to see if the employees needed anything by way of repairs or supplies. So it was in this initial capacity that their first meetings took place.

Mamoud was a few years older than Hamsi, and from a poor family he was never able to finish his studies, but he always read according to his interests, and had studied the masters of philosophy in Arabic, which was the field Hamsi was to soon get his degree in. Soon hamsi made the hotel his final stop of the day, and he and Mamoud would talk excitedly about Al Arabi, Avecinna, Omar Kayam and others, and of the days hundreds of years ago when Islam flourished in many forms from southern Europe, Africa and into Persia. It was an Islam which flowered in literature, philosophy, mathematics, art and architecture, and was a time when then what was described as beautiful had by now long been maligned by fundamentalism, or simply forgotten.

One evening when the two of them had stayed up most of the night in conversation as usual. But this evening each word was part of one long path that lead to the terrain of their bodies. After this night it was clear that Mamoud would have to find work elsewhere if they were to follow this path any longer.

It was for some time that they met at the Keeper’s house, time they used reading, cooking, drinking tea and making love. It was because of Hamsi’s new lack of a daily routine in work that lead his sister to begin asking questions as to his possible whereabouts, and without much effort she found out the truth. This she confided to her younger brother, and it was decided that in the name of the family’s honor that Hamsi and Mamoud should pay in death. This the brother would do with a gun, but in his fear, pride and rage he was only able to seriously wound Hamsi through the Keeper’s window. Watching his brother’s lover weep in panic over a dying Hamsi, the younger brother fled in fear after setting fire to the house.

Mamoud searched the burning house for the keys to Hamsi’s car, and by the time he had found them and moved Hamsi to the car, the house was engulfed and had spread into the canyon and surrounding forest. In tears Mamoud tried to negotiate the twisting roads in darkness and smoke. It was a family of frightened desert turtles crossing the road in the fire that caused Mamoud to veer sharply over the edge of the burning precipice.

Devil's Mountain

What had locally been known as Devil’s Mountain had originally been one of the few natural rises in the landscape before the war, most other hills or “mountains” were in fact immense heaps of brick that came from whole neighborhoods that had been bombed completely and totally and now were covered in woods, offering scenic vistas over this city of ghosts. Devil’s Mountain once had a secret training center deep in its bowels where young men became well versed in arts inhuman and cruel. When the war was over the invading army attempted to blow it up, but the bunker would not be destroyed, and instead they ended up filling it with debris.

In the next few years the city was divided by the two conquering armies and the mountain ended up as property of the world’s emerging new super-power. With vast resources at hand, this power built a huge station with state of the art security and equiptment meant to be a listening device from which to spy, compile, and archive any conversation, phone message, radio transmissions or broadcasts from the surrounding city.

The view from the office was beautiful, and most employees had a desk pointed out to a forest that they could watch change from season to season, the bold and strong yellows and oranges of autumn, through the white frozen clarity of winter and straight through to the deep lush greens of summer. The office had a pleasant feeling. Most people being from the occupying power, they were away from their homeland, and when here could exchange stories and anecdotes in their native tongues, whereas outside the Mountain life in the city was a rich stew of tongues from a myriad of countries that was difficult to navigate.

Two electric fences, a few large walls, bomb resistant glass, passwords, codes and soldiers gave them a sense of peace here, and over the years they all shared their experiences in life from marriages, children, divorces, illnesses and all the small things that are spoken of at the surface of things. Absent was any introspection or reflection on who they were and how they functioned as an occupying force and how this changed or did not change them.
This changed for Corinna when one day on her lunch break she saw him being driven to the interrogation building next to the office compound. She had in fact met him several times. He was Palestinian and kept a shop near her house where several times she bought olives imported from Iran. She was by nature curious about other cultures and peoples, and it was this curiosity that lead her to accept a job in this country. As it turned out, her high security job kept her as a prisoner of her own culture. All Employees were bound by secrecy that extended to their lives off Devil’s Mountain. She had enjoyed several conversations with him at the shop that was limited to things like foods and preparations for them, but this was also woven with the fabric and sweetness of mutual attraction. He had seen her as she sat in the spring sunshine eating her lunch. The shock and shame of recognition was also frought with sickness and fear. The car passed her and drove into the area reserved for Interrogations.

Some Time after she had seen him the shop’s windows were covered in paper for a few weeks before it was reopened as a flower shop run by another family. It was the last time she would see him, and he was the only welcoming link to her young wish to be one of those people who were in the world. When the city had been reunited it was to the fanfare of many in the world signaling perhaps a shift in power that could mean a more open, more free world. In fact it was the first sign of a global collapse and vacuum of power that would eventually result in many more wars and divisions.

Corrina hiked the wooded paths to her former workplace and found an easy place to climb the rusted wire fence. She first went into her former office. Every window now smashed and void of partitions and desks, with small trees beginning to split the concrete flooring. She recalled all the years of meaningless and dull small talk with small minds with a bit of sadness. She then went into the gutted interrogation building. Several fires had not managed to melt the thick glass of the entranceway, but the door had been long removed and she walked in with ease. She went through the long corridow noting the barred skylights and windows. At the end of the corridor was a heavy armored door to an empty room with a turned over desk and no windows. To the right was yet another heavy door to a smaller room with no windows or light. This must have been where he was perhaps beaten or tortured, for sure interrogated as she went back to her desk that day and concealed her fear and shame in small talk with her co-workers. Corinna then hiked up the Mountain to its highest point, the vast listening dome that was off limits to all but a few specialists and technicians. She climbed the ten flights of concrete steps surrounding the long disused elevator shaft that lead to the giant dome. As she looked far below from a small gap in the decaying dome she thought of the story in the bible where Satan tempted Jesus as they stood on a mountain by offering him a kingdom far below. Thousands of voices began to swirl around her, whispering the stuff of everyday life. In this soft din she strained to hear the voice of the Palestinian but he was somehow absent, or buried. She stood at the top of the kingdom she had inherited and realized that though the consequences of human evil are extreme and dire, the nature of it is banality and boredom as one makes horror something normal.

                                                             De-Excavation

The time came when the haunting ceased and the memories at last lay still, no longer subject to the scrutiny and judgment of history. Isolated notes of music hung in the air like a fog while vestiges of memory were at last free to dislodge themselves from the hard geometry of architecture.