Still in space, The ? Motorist (as I knew it back in the nineties when I was making my rounds of the Museum Of the Moving Image, where it used to play on a loop) is a film about a car made when both inventions were in their infancy, and has the narrative pace and logic of a toddler playing with a new toy, but one can still enjoy with clarity over a century later the surprising precision and ingenuity gone into realising something this stupid on film: Sixty seconds in and we've already run over a policeman, driven up the side of a building, and landed on a cloud. It's only when we reach Handover Court that the pace starts to drag. It's an odd lacuna, that court scene. You start trying to read lips. Who's on trial? Why are their eyebrows so big? I pondered these questions so intently I completely missed the transformation into a horse-and-carriage. I met Gemma this evening, who's currently having to teach the Theatre of the Absurd. I realised she's one of the best teachers I know and among other things we talked about how, when playing someone simply doing a job, questions about motivation and even audibility don't actually have to apply. I suggested silent movies probably did us a favour by freeing drama from text, and showing how great an actor you could still be without an audience necessarily understanding what you were saying. The Handover Court scene in The ? Motorist is not a great an example of that.
Otherwise the film's a little masterpiece, and thanks to David Cairns for reminding me of it, and also for alerting me to its sequel which has a robot in it.
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