A Note From the Archivist continued
Several years passed, and I assumed that Bak had passed away or finally resigned himself to the dismal failure of his life's work when only a few weeks ago, I received another anonymous package in the post. Inside there was no film stock, only a meagre envelope containing a faded set of colour photographs, each stamped on the reverse with a logo from Boots laboratories Oxford street. I estimated that the photographs originated from sometime in the late 1990's just before digital cameras had begun to take over. It was clear that Bak had long ago run out of enough income to purchase film stock and his inspiration was now scraping by on one last corner-shop roll of 200ASA holiday snapshot Fujifilm.
Amongst the major scenes that remained unfilmed from the script were the erotic seductions of the Duchess of Amalfi by Potocki during the interlude of the Peninsular war. It was painfully obvious from the enclosed photographs that Bak had paid a pair of jobbing actors or some other London lowlife nonentities to fuck for him in his sordid tenement rooms while he recorded the action on a dilapidated communist-era SLR.
In the script the scenes were intimate, unchaperoned, set in the heavy velvet-clad claustrophobic atmosphere of an 18th century boudoir. It was the climactic love scene and for over forty years he had waited to film it. I could see how the photographs tried to convey the heightened atmosphere of anticipation, where the whole environment was libidinized and partook of the eroticism. But looking beyond each spasmodic clinch, it was also because it was so obviously photographed in a wretched garret in Camden Town that it also perversely emphasised the ironic abandon with which a duchess would give herself to a wandering count.
Bak had become self-referential and self-mocking, almost post-modern in his stylings, but he was still utterly precise in his choice of shots. I could relate each of their movements exactly to the script, it was all marked out, leaving it to the imagination to provide the interlinking tracking shots, close-ups and reverse angles. Then finally it seemed that he had run out of enough money even to buy a roll of film. The climactic love-making had been shot on the last frame with a long exposure of five, or even ten minutes maybe, the actors' nude tracks making a beast with many backs, a swirling elegy of copulation in abstract tones.
I edited copies of the photographs into the rough cut as a montage, with explanatory subtitles taken from the original script. The film was 99 percent complete. I was in the process of filing it away and recompiling the archive entry when yesterday a final unexpected package arrived. It was hand-delivered and wrapped in layers of old soiled newspaper. Inside these mummy wrappings was a ragged sketch book from a bargain-basement pound shop. As I carefully lifted it out, the leaves fluttered loose from the binding like a flock of paper sparrows and spread themselves over my desk.
Each page had been covered in pencilled artwork. In lieu of film, Bak had sketched in intricate almost photorealistic detail those remaining shots that required mattes and special effects. It was all utterly complete, and composed with the same masterly eye as the Technicolor rushes of fifty years before.
I turned over each page and placed it mentally into the sequence of the shooting script: a reverse angle from the first minute of the film where the Count in his balloon surveys the city below him - a shot of the Sphinx buried to its neck in the sands of Gizah during the Napoleonic war - the ancient citadel of Saragossa in flames.
The content of every shot was drawn with fanatical accuracy. Those minor scenes requiring animal wranglers were also included: twittering birds in a palace garden, an aside where the Duchess's dog careers down an empty corridor. A few incidental yet iconic cutaways were precisely illustrated: a still life with flowers - a close-up of the Count's impassive eyes as he faces execution by the Bedouin in the Siwa oasis - the delicate knob of the sugar bowl as he offers tea to his mother.
There was now only one scene which was left unrepresented: the Count's suicide. In a final perversity it was the only scene which Bak had left to be filmed in its natural sequence in the script. I waited expectantly at my desk in the archives, but there were no more packages. Now that Bak was old and penniless and out of materials, it would seem that he had faced up to the bitter fact that he had ultimately failed to realise his vision for the film, that the solemn judgement of the encyclopaedia entry still encompassed all his futile efforts at completion.
I contemplated the remnants in front of me and for the first time I allowed an element of personal emotion to colour my archival decisions. Perhaps there was some way in which I could help him. Perhaps I could use the rough cut as part of a retrospective series at the archives - surely something could be done.
I looked again at the seduction scene photographs. Through the grime-encrusted window behind the lovers I could decipher the upper part of a store sign for Our Price records. I knew that this bargain music chain had entered administration in January 2004, so maybe there was a chance that he could still be living in the same location given his straightened circumstances. From the archives at Companies House I found the addresses of all twenty stores in the Greater London area at that time and sought them out each in turn.
In Camden I found the exact match. The retail unit was now a Starbucks coffee bar, but by the ragged lines of brickwork and the regular punctuation of Sky dishes I recognised its photographic fingerprint. Opposite was an adult shop in front of which I had stopped to survey the façade. The photograph must have been taken from a window just above the spot where I was standing. Next to the blanked-out doorway to the adult shop, a graffitoed latrine of an entrance hall lead into a decayed flophouse populated by innumerable Polish bricklayers and Iraqi asylum-seekers, ten to every room, a smorgasbord of Dickensian squalor.
I found a old woman hanging washing in the yard behind. I asked for Mr Bak. She raised her hands in the air and started shouting at me. I retreated and followed the staircase up into the tenement. There was a commotion going on. A Special Constable was standing guard outside a flaking door to one of the rooms. "Are you the social worker?" he asked. I nodded, playing subterfuge in the interests of film conservation, "It seems old Mr Bak hasn't been seen for several days, his neighbours are concerned. I have the key here from his landlady."
"Let's go in." I said.
The room was squalid, a thick carpet of cigarette ash covered the floor, and empty vodka bottles were littered around the bed. The room smelt of bodily fluids. I recognised it instantly as the exact location of the scenes from the nineties photographs.
"What the fuck is that?" The Special Constable stopped to point out a feature on the wall opposite.
I looked-on in astonishment. Even after he had run out of money to buy paper, Bak had still found enough material to attempt to finish the storyboard. Scratched onto the peeling wallpaper like a Neanderthal cave painting was a chalk outline of the final scene of the Count's suicide. Solitary amongst his books, sitting at a Louis Quatorze escritoire, caught in the act of snapping his quill after he pens the final words of his masterpiece, resplendent in velvet and lace.
I surveyed the rest of the room. On the bedside table amongst the mass of fag ends, blood pressure tablets, Steradent residues and empty bottles of Old Spice I found a Woolworth's hacksaw and beside it a solid silver coffee-pot lid with the dull grain of the metal showing where the blunt blade had cut through the knob.
There was an envelope on the table. It was addressed simply "To The Archives'. I tore it open and read the terse message within: "Please set your video recorder." With a dull anticipation tickling at the pit of my stomach I switched on the old television in the corner of the room, angling the rabbit's ears to get a signal. The BBC news helicopter was hovering over the Wellington Arch monument near Hyde Park Corner. I turned up the volume to listen to the correspondent's inane commentary.
"It must be a protest against something - what it is we don't know yet, probably anti-war, or fathers' rights perhaps. He has been up on the monument for the past hour now."
An elderly man dressed in a 19th century costume was standing on top of the upper ledge of Wellington Arch walking back and forth on the balconies below the quadriga of Winged Victory. I later determined from a tourist guide that this imposing imperial arch was in fact, hollow and contained a museum run by English Heritage - no doubt Bak had gained ingress under false pretences and made his way onto the roof.
I rifled through the script which I had brought with me in my satchel and compared it with his impenetrable schizophrenic actions on the balcony ledge. Yes, it was line for line an exact replay of the dialogue, he was doing each scene twice even three-times over, making sure that the news cameras captured every nuance. He posed with a solemn grace and entered into his final soliloquy. Each gesture, each rhetorical flourish was outlined in silent Polish. Then he stopped and slowly raised an antique flintlock pistol to his forehead. The live feed cut abruptly and the ruffled presenter ushered in a piece on football results. I returned to the archives and edited the news report scenes into the final montage, they were grainy in parts but distinct enough to maintain continuity with the rest of the material.
There were still a few fleeting seconds of footage remaining unfilmed from the script, but I realised that Bak had foreseen every eventuality that I might face. Under the freedom of information act I obtained some CCTV footage from a police camera situated on Aspley house which stands opposite to the Arch, from which the whole event had been captured from a different angle. Further searching turned-up some mobile phone footage and videos from passing tourists which had been posted to the internet. These gave me some excellent close-ups of the final moments: the dramatic spurt of blood from the temple, the theatrical collapse - all perfect.
I assembled the final cut. The film was complete. Some extra dubbing in Polish where the soundtrack was missing and the requisite English subtitling was funded by the British Council and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. As I placed the materials into their climate-controlled storage boxes in the archive I gave a smug nod of satisfaction and felt that it had been one of my better efforts. The film of "The Life of Count Potocki" is now filed under the accession number BAK08-5678F at the archives and is available for consultation by researchers upon production of suitable accreditation.
FIN