Flicker
by Theodore Roszak
Bantam mass market pb
May 1993 1st edition
$5.99 cover price
575pp
The flicker in the title refers to movies, the fluttering light-and-dark going on behind the images as film moves through the camera at 24 frames per second. It also refers to any blur, scintillant gleam, shadow, or glare that shows in reflective surfaces being filmed. Turns out those are the best places to hide images.
Why hide images? Our brains grasp them, interpret them, and use them to give us thoughts and feelings that seem to arise from nowhere. It is a form of audience or viewer manipulation. It lets scenes become imbued with atmosphere, often dark or darkly sexual ones.
Suppose you film a happy event, a child’s birthday party. Now add to it images of holocaust victims, murder, rape, suicide, and other graphic death and dismemberment scenes. Instead of showing these appalling things openly, hide them in curved reflections in glass or metal, in ice cubes, in water glittering with light, even in the faces of the people smiling and enjoying their party. A tension is set up by contrasting the overt sights and sounds with the hidden, obscured, and twisted pictures. This tension sparks anxiety. That makes the scene fraught with potential emotion, and yet the audience is torn. Should it laugh or scream?
Flicker is a novel. It’s fiction rooted in and based firmly on the secret history of cinema. Roszak knew his subject intimately well. He makes endless references, asides, and in jokes. He is fascinating when discussing such matters as how surprisingly ancient movies are, how fragile, unstable, and dangerous nitrate film stock can be, or the origins and possible ramifications of the Maltese gear. He is compelling when delineating the plot featuring film student Jonathan Gates, personally tutored by Clarissa Clare Swann, who goes on to become one of the eminent film critics in the USA. She teaches him all about film — during sex. A novel way to learn things well, he discovers. He is soon hot on the trail of the ‘lost’ films of Max Castle, a mysterious German director whose career began with huge promise and ended in sordid grade-Z schlock horror. Seems there is a power to those movies that draws Gates deeper into what becomes a web of intrigue.
He learns about the Orphans of the Storm and their seemingly warped plans to edit hidden images into movies. He finds out about the sallyrand, a device that lets one see more clearly the hidden images in movies. He talks to aging actors whose images were used for the hidden messages.
This book is a hardcore original of the much lighter Night Film by Marisha Pessl, a recent best-seller that is also recommended; these two books play with the same basic material in somewhat similar ways.
What makes Flicker so outstanding a work is the genuine scholarship and intensity. Roszak cared about movies and shows us that their status as the premiere form of entertainment and possibly enlightenment was by no means assured as movies struggled to prove, then establish, then grow themselves.
Do not think this is a dry book. While it is a seriously literate book it is not academic in tone or execution. Think brainy thriller with confirmable details, of a sort Dan Brown would not be able even to dream of. Superb novel, great fun to read, wonderful to have read; it gives you insights into movies you simply cannot guess. As a hint, did you know movies go back possibly into the dark ages? Did you know projected images may be stone age?
Theodore Roszak was a professor emeritus of history at Cal State, East Bay, and wrote about the counter culture. This is likely his masterpiece, worthy of being read by anyone who enjoys literary thrillers and movies. You will never look at movies the same way again and you’ll set new standards for yourself when it comes to historical thrillers.
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