Kino (2 page)

Get better quick. Call me.

I love you,

Mina

Chapter 3

The man from the film museum, Dr. Hanno, walked into the hotel lobby at precisely five p.m. Seventeen o'clock, he had called it on the phone. He was younger than Mina had expected, handsome, barely thirty. He had short blond hair, wore rimless glasses, and carried a leather backpack over one shoulder. His last name was Broddenbuck, and when he said it he eyed Mina conspicuously as if he expected her to make a joke. She didn't know what was funny and just looked back at him blankly.

Mina was wearing a cotton skirt, T-shirt and a denim jacket, and right away, she went into a monologue to explain her unseasonable outfit–the aborted honeymoon, the dengue fever, her cluttered apartment, the reels, and the suitcase, the stupid suitcase she didn't think to repack.

“Until I can shop for warmer clothes,” she said, suddenly worried that she was speaking too fast for the German. His expression was blank. “Is it okay if we stay here? If this lobby's no good, we could go up to my room?”

Dr. Hanno lowered his eyes and fidgeted with the car keys in his hands. He was flustered.

“Oh, I am sorry,” Mina said. “No funny business–I'm happily married.” She wiggled the fingers of her newly-ringed left hand at him, but that only made matters worse.

“Frau Koblitz,” he said with a stilted German accent. “I made reservations at a restaurant. We were going to have dinner and talk about your grandfather, no?”

Mina sighed. Flexible this guy wasn't. There was a cool draft and she was getting impatient. In fact, she was freezing cold standing in the damn hotel lobby. Outside, Germany seemed impossibly cold and gray. She didn't know what she was doing here, when she was supposed to be with Sam. “Isn't there anything we can order in? If you come upstairs, you can take a look at the movie.”

Dr. Hanno's confidence returned at the mention of the movie. “Yes,” he said. “With pleasure. Do you like Turkish food? I could pick up something and return?” Mina grinned her best grin. She could take control of the situation.

“Meet me upstairs,” she said and gave him the room number.

He came knocking on her door with food, two fat triangular sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil that reeked of garlic.

“I've never eaten one of these before.” Mina sat on the edge of her double bed, unmade and still warm from her jetlagged afternoon nap. Dr. Hanno sat in the narrow chair by the coffee table next to the window. Mina was hungry. The shredded lamb was delicious.

“My mother doesn't approve, but I live on
Döner
,” he said, watching her eat. She had not waited for him. “Don't you have Turks in New York?”

“I grew up in Connecticut.”

Dr. Hanno gave her a blank look. He cleared his throat. “So you brought…”
Döner
in hand, he eyed the room. On the floor by the bed, next to the opened suitcase spilling T-shirts, beach towels, and a pair of flip-flops, sat the two metal containers. “Ah!” he said. “
Jawoll!
May I?”

Mina nodded, wiping a smear of yogurt sauce from her face. Dr. Hanno, who was already hoisting the cans onto the table, amused her. With quick, familiar movements, he unlatched them and removed the first reel. He threaded the celluloid through his fingers with studied precision and held it up against the light.

Mina had no patience. “Is it real?”

Without taking his eyes off the film, Dr. Hanno slowly nodded. “Naturally, we'd have to run some tests in the lab, but just from looking at it, I can tell you that film in this format hasn't been produced in over sixty years. It's a nitrate print that shows clear signs of advanced age. We won't be able to know about wear and tear, possible damage, missing parts, and so on, until we've looked at it more thoroughly. From what I can tell, it's astoundingly well-preserved. Dirt, dust, scratches, and tears seem to be minimal, and it doesn't look like there has been much shrinkage or fade.”

Now he took his eyes off the film to look at her. “Do you understand what this means? The value is incalculable.”

“I like the sound of that,” Mina said. “I've got staggering student loans to pay off.” The truth was she thought that she'd exaggerated the worth of the movie in her email to Sam. How many people were really buying DVDs of seventy-five-year-old silent films? Sam had a high-paying job as a game designer and insisted that he didn't mind paying off her debt–but she felt like an idiot for ever starting law school in the first place. She had been trying, she figured out only after dropping out, to please her father.

Dr. Hanno looked at her as if she were speaking a language he didn't understand. “I wasn't talking about money. I am talking about cinema. Preservation, the cultural heritage of the tenth art! I am not talking about money. I am talking about Kino!”

Dr. Hanno kept surprising Mina. She understood he loved movies, but this sudden fervor was intimidating. Clearly, he was a man who wouldn't have hesitated for a second before leaving a feverish lover behind in a hospital room in order to watch a movie. What was her excuse?

“Kino,” Mina repeated.

Dr. Hanno smiled. “It was your grandfather's nickname, before the war. The
Wunderkind
of Neubabelsberg. Everybody called him Kino
.”

“Oh. It means the movies, right?”

“Yes, from
Kinematographie
. You didn't know?”

Mina felt herself getting defensive. “My father doesn't talk about him.”

“You know about his suicide, and that he made films for the Nazis, and about his leg, yes?” He had cooled down again and carefully rewound the reel and closed the can's latches.

“His what?”

Dr. Hanno held his head sideways. “His peg leg. He was missing a leg, below the knee. A childhood accident. Surely you must know this?”

Mina thought of photographs she'd seen, but she couldn't remember any of them showing her grandfather below the belt. Was it possible? What else didn't she know? Mina felt something like vertigo.

“Please, tell me,” Dr. Hanno asked, “What
do
you know?”

Mina shrugged. “It's not like he was really famous. He made a pirate movie in Hollywood and it flopped. All his old movies were lost. He killed himself before I was born. My father thinks he's an embarrassment.”

“Well,” Dr. Hanno said. “In film histories, he is usually considered a ‘minor émigré filmmaker,' but he was a real
auteur, avant le mot
. An encyclopedia entry will tell you that he was born in Königstein near Frankfurt in 1903 as the son of an industrialist, and that his 1927 debut
Tulpendiebe
made him the youngest writer and director in the history of Ufa studios. Marriage the same year, eight more movies in Germany, five of them during the Third Reich.”

“So he really did work for the Nazis.”

“Well,” Dr. Hanno said. “Ufa was brought under the control of the propaganda ministry–technically, he was still working for the studio, not the party. There really wasn't a choice if you were going to make films. Unless you left.”

“Which he did.”

“Right, but he didn't emigrate until 1943, which brought significant problems entering the US He settled in Santa Monica and worked as a screenwriter. Bouts with depression, public drunkenness, run-ins with the law, drug addiction. Throughout the 1950s, occasional work in television commercials. He made one last movie in 1963,
The Pirates of Mulberry Island,
his only American film. It opened on September 10, 1963. The next morning, he was found dead ‘by self-inflicted gunshot wound.' Survived by his wife Penny and son Detlef.”

“My father.”

“Yes, of course.” Dr. Hanno was watching her. “And what about your grandmother?”

Mina shrugged. “You know more about my family than I do. She's batty. Father can't stand her. We went to visit her once for Christmas, and it was a nightmare. She threw things at me. I was frightened.”

Dr. Hanno studied Mina carefully. She wiped a smear of garlic sauce from her chin.

“None of Kino's German work survived. No screenplays, no work prints, no set design sketches, nothing. All we have are contemporary sources–newspaper notices, advertising, press releases, and reviews–to give us an idea of what his movies were like. Even from the scant evidence, it is clear that your grandfather was a polarizing figure. The reviews of his early films, especially
Tulpendiebe,
were either terrible or over-the-moon raves. Later, this changed.” He pointed to his backpack. “I brought a few–maybe I can translate for you?”

“Of course.”

Dr. Hanno pulled out a folder and rifled through a stack of papers. “From what we know,
Tulpendiebe
is a love story set during the tulipomania, in the seventeenth century.”

“The what?”

“The tulip craze. In those days, Holland was a major economic power, and people were speculating on tulip bulbs. It was the original bubble, and your grandfather used it as the backdrop for a romantic love story. As a trend, expressionism had largely run its course by 1927, and there was a new taste for realism called ‘
neue Sachlichkeit
.' But from what we know,
Tulpendiebe
is more of a fable, shot entirely in the studio, and Kino was accused of relying on outmoded tricks.
Film-Welt
called it ‘worthless escapism.' ‘Cloudcocooland,' one headline said.
Filmkurier
attacked it for getting historical details completely wrong and even pointed out that the film was ‘questionable, botanically speaking.' Worse, in the politically charged atmosphere of the time, nobody agreed on what it meant. There seemed to be a message to it, but none of the extremists liked it: the Freikorps paper
Deutscher Sturm
noted that it was done in the ‘American style' and called it a ‘shameful call for class warfare.' The communist
Rote Fahne
said it was ‘bourgeois' and ‘likely to distract from the true struggle.' Moderates and socialists worried that it was reactionary and anti-democratic. Here's
Licht-Bild-Bühne
from August 6, 1927: ‘With his first cinematic feature
Tulpendiebe
, young director Klaus Koblitz has given us a cheerful fairy tale that is certain to please nobody but children, dimwits, and certain French Dadaists. The plot is hair-raisingly absurd and ludicrous. Next to the profound artistic works of talents such as Carl Meyer and Fritz Lang, it appears like an infantile prank.'”

“Ouch,” Mina said. It pleased her, though, to know that here was a scholar, this Dr. Hanno, who knew so much about her grandfather. What if, instead of the drunken loser her father made him out to be, her grandfather had been an important artist after all? Someone to be proud of? Dr. Hanno seemed to think so.

“We also know that the film was a success. ‘A poetic dream of a movie, lucid and full of meaning,'
Berliner Zeitung
wrote, and there were many more reviews like it. Later, people would call him a visionary and, briefly, here and there, a genius. The public liked it, too–
Tulpendiebe
did well enough financially, and your grandfather continued to make movies until he left the country.”

There was a pause. Their eyes met, and Mina knew they were both thinking the same thing: did the other films survive, too? Somebody had kept this one all these years–why not the others? Mina shook the idea off, exasperated. “Why was I sent this? Who wanted me to have it? What am I supposed to do with it?”

Dr. Hanno leaned forward and spread his hands over the cans like a magician casting a spell. “Have you told anyone else?”

Mina shook her head. “Just you, somebody at the film museum in New York, and a professor at UCLA film school. And of course Sam, my husband, but I don't think he really understood. His fever is so high. Too high.”

“So you'd say word got out?”

It hadn't occurred to Mina to keep the film a secret. She shrugged. She did not want to feel guilty for one more thing. “I suppose word got out.”

“Your husband is ill,” Dr. Hanno said. It wasn't a question. He was prompting Mina. She told him the name of the disease but he looked at her blankly.

“Our honeymoon was ruined. We should be on the beach right now.”

Mina was tired. She wondered why she was telling this stranger so much. She felt an overwhelming need to brush her teeth, wash the garlic taste from her mouth. She wanted this conversation to be over. Sam's fever wasn't any of Dr. Hanno's business. Though she had just told him about it, hadn't she? She needed to sleep.

“You came here to screen the movie without your sick husband,” Dr. Hanno said, explaining it to himself. He looked up at her. “Congratulations.”

Mina nodded, not sure what he was congratulating her for. Her marriage, or her dedication to Kino? All she wanted was for him to leave, but Dr. Hanno had one more thing on his mind.

“I have arranged a projectionist for tomorrow morning at the museum. Would it be okay if I watch with you? I would very much like to see the film.”

“Of course,” Mina said, irritated by his good manners. “Why do you think I called you?”

After Dr. Hanno left, Mina cleaned up the remains of the Döner dinner. She wanted to call Sam at the hospital, but wasn't it the middle of the night in New York? She took a small bottle of vodka from the minibar, poured it over ice into a plastic cup, and drank it quickly. She lay on her unmade hotel bed and missed Sam. He'd always been the one who had gotten sick, from the time they'd met in Mr. Domino's art history class. Sam was a digital artist, and she had already been skipping out of the law curriculum. Their first winter together, he spent weeks in bed with the flu, and when Mina came to visit they had sex between his damp sheets while he sniffled and blew his nose. It hadn't bothered Mina then.

But the dengue fever was the sickest she had ever seen anybody. It scared her, seeing Sam delirious, out of his mind with an overheated brain, and if she was honest with herself, she was glad she didn't have to be in that room with him anymore. In sickness and in health, those had been the words during the ceremony. Mina hadn't paid much attention at the time.