Broken Heart (14 page)

The room came kitted out with a DVD player, so I removed
Ursula
from its case and dropped it into the tray, flicking through
Dia de los Muertos
while it loaded up. In the section on Hosterlitz’s years as Bob Hozer, there was a page examining his shot composition. One section in particular caught my attention:

Most critics agree that Hosterlitz was never the same film-maker once he was forced to flee the US in 1954, even when making his comeback as a writer-director in 1967 for big-budget western
The Ghost of the Plains
. But, in truth, even when you examine his horror films, beyond the shambolic nature of the acting, his loss of confidence as a writer, the illness, addiction and depression that skewed and neutered his talents, Hosterlitz was still showing flashes of that same innate brilliance during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s: in the beauty of his shot composition, in the way the camera lingers and reveals, in the minute expressions he captures in trademark close-up, or in the scenes he watches from a distance.

That description of his shot composition all rang true based on what I’d seen of his noirs the previous night, and while the second
Ursula
film proved to be an absolute mess – violent and tedious, ramshackle, full of gratuitous nudity and toneless acting – once you set your mind to it, it was easy to start locating those same Hosterlitz trademarks, even while they were more infrequent. The difference was, in his noirs, the observation of the scene, of the characters and their stories, was supported by actors like Veronica Lake and Glen Cramer. By the time he made
Ursula
, Hosterlitz’s gift for dialogue was gone, ground out of him during his decline, and he no longer had the actors for it, anyway.

I sat through countless shots of women showering, a couple of prolonged sex scenes, a disembowelling, a man being stretched on a torture rack, and then decided to fast-forward through the rest, only stopping when a moment arose that I recognized as truly belonging to Hosterlitz. The more I watched, the easier they became to spot, flourishes that were like ghosts from another time.

When I was done with
Ursula
, I grabbed the copy of
Axe Maniac
and set it running. It was easily as terrible, maybe even a little worse. Korin’s performance turned out to be the best of an awful bunch, but again there were glimpses of Hosterlitz’s identifying style among all the chaos: individual scenes – flawless, coherent – that stood out a mile. The moment I spotted them, I paused the action and watched them properly, and then hit Fast-Forward once they were over.

Gradually, something started to dawn on me.

There was a pattern, a connection between all the moments that I chose to pause on: it was that the best scenes, the ones where the genius of the man rose above the artlessness of the films, were always the ones featuring exactly the same person.

Lynda Korin.

In
Ursula
, and even more in
Axe Maniac
where she just had a supporting role, any time Korin was onscreen by herself – alone, or away from the rest of the cast – Hosterlitz got his act together. He treated her scenes with a reverence and care that he never bothered to apply to any other part of the movie. She was lit perfectly, he reduced the dialogue she had – so she wouldn’t be shown up as a mediocre actress – and he simply watched her.

When he filmed her from a distance, he’d use wide shots and little in the way of music or sound effects, concentrating on her, on things like her humming to herself, or the sound of her footsteps as she wandered around the rooms of a house. Or he’d do the complete opposite and come in tight to her and listen to the rhythm of her breathing, repeatedly using a device where her eyes acted as a mirror, reflecting back other people in the same scene – as if she were the
window to the whole movie. But anything else in the film, any time the other actors were involved, it changed. The rest of it was subordinate to whatever he did with Korin. He’d whip through reams of dialogue, even if other actors were mumbling or delivering lines with zero expression, and scenes without Korin were never lit as well, or framed as exactly as hers. Yet the minute Korin had a scene where she was alone, there was a complete reversal of quality.
That
was when you caught a glimpse of the man Hosterlitz had been; the director whose film had won seven Oscars.

Pausing the action on a close-up of Korin, I shuffled forward on the bed. Her profile was frozen onscreen, the vague hint of the film’s deranged killer in the background, the contrast between the dark of his silhouette and the flawless, snow-white of her skin so stark and beautiful it could have been a still from one of the noirs. The more I looked at the perfect composition of the shot, the more I wondered whether Hosterlitz’s approach in these scenes simply came down to nepotism, to a husband favouring the contributions of his wife, or whether it was something even more deliberate.

When I allowed the scene to snap into life again, something Korin had said in the interview with Collinsky came back to me:
Do you know what he called me the first time he met me?
she’d asked.
He said to me, ‘You are an angel … You’re a work of art.’
The more I thought about that, the more I started to recall about the rest of her interview:
He wanted to see me through the lens. Sometimes he used to spend hours setting up shots that I was in, even unimportant scenes, trying to frame them just right.

This wasn’t an obsession
, she’d said to Collinsky.

Except now, in this moment, it felt like that was
exactly
what it was. It was eerie and slightly discomfiting knowing
how he’d felt about her, and seeing the results playing out. As the camera lingered on her, it was almost like a soundless conversation between them; between the stillness and lure of Korin’s beauty and the constancy of Hosterlitz’s camera. I felt like an uninvited stranger standing at the window of a house, straying into the privacy of someone else’s life.

I continued to watch, the film rolling towards its conclusion. The axe maniac of the title had noisily butchered eight people at a dinner party and was now pursuing Korin’s character and her onscreen boyfriend, the hero of the movie, through the rooms of a house. The film had regressed again now that other characters had become involved, a mess of confused camerawork, bad editing and worse acting.

But then, as the hero sacrificed himself for his girlfriend, as Korin finished off the killer with his own axe and stood there, breathless, bloodied and alone, it all started to change again. The music dropped out. The camera started to move.

And something weird began to happen.

18

It started with a wide shot, inside a living room, with Korin perched on the edge of an armchair, spattered in blood, and the killer lying on the floor at her feet.

Slowly, the camera began dollying in towards her, in profile, motionless on the edge of the chair, her eyes downcast. There was no music, no sound at all except Korin’s breathing, which got louder and louder the closer the camera got to her. Halfway between the camera’s starting position and Korin, the sound of her heartbeat began to fade in too, thumping in the spaces
between
breaths, like the distant pulse of tribal drums. I’d seen continuous evidence of Hosterlitz’s fascination with Korin throughout the movie, in
Ursula
too, but this was different: it was a truly incongruous moment, a much longer, slower, more intense movement in towards her – almost like we, as the audience, were creeping up on her, unseen. There were no other actors left to disturb her, no lines left to speak, no scenes to play out, nothing that could draw the camera’s attention away from her.

It was just her and us.

I expected the camera to come to a halt once it reached her – but it didn’t. Instead, it inched right past Korin, towards the corner of the room, where a walnut-cased television set was playing soundlessly. The TV was showing footage from the inside of a car as it drove slowly along a nondescript street. I could make out the upper windows in a series of three-storey buildings, the camera tilted so that only the
very tops of people’s heads were visible at the bottom of the shot. The footage ran for ten seconds and then ended.

The titles came up.

As the credits rolled, I sat there in the silence of the hotel room, unsure of what I’d just watched. Rewinding the film again, I played it from the moment after the killer was offed, when the movie seemed to switch tone, the camera began its slow dolly in towards her, and Korin’s breathing faded in, her heartbeat. Once it was past her and zeroing in on the television set in the corner, I inched closer, remote control in hand, ready to stop it. As soon as I had a clear view of the footage on the walnut-cased TV, I hit Pause.

Whoever had taken the footage seemed to be deliberately angling the lens upwards, only the heads of occasional pedestrians drifting into view. Nothing else at street level was visible, just the upper-floor windows on a road full of unrecognizable buildings.

I watched it again from beginning to end.

The whole scene lasted ninety seconds, the slow dolly in towards Korin
so
slow that it took two-thirds of that time before the camera actually passed Korin at all. A shot lasting a minute and a half was a long time when nothing was actually happening – no movement of people, no dialogue – and it seemed especially frivolous when it was tagged on to the end of a film whose total running time was a fraction above eighty minutes.

It was more than the weird dissonance of the footage too; it was the fact that it was so beautiful, elegant and composed.

I picked up the copy of
Dia de los Muertos
and skipped to the chapter on Hosterlitz, searching for anything related to the scene, any discussion of it at all. There was nothing; no mention of it. However, in the transcript of the panel that
Korin had done at Screenmageddon, something caught my eye.

MODERATOR
: Next question. Uh … the guy in the red shirt.

JOURNALIST
: Hey Lynda, how you doing? I’m Bill Martinez from CinemaTechniques.com in San Diego. Big horror fan, big fan of your work. Huge, huge fan of your late husband as well.

KORIN
: Oh, thank you. That’s really kind.

JOURNALIST
: You’re welcome. Anyway, uh … my question is about a film you did with Robert in 1982 called
Die Slowly
.

KORIN
: I remember it, yeah.

JOURNALIST
: Great. I managed to get hold of a dubbed version of
Die Slowly
at a market in Barcelona, on a trip out there in May. What I wanted to ask you about, if you can even remember it, was one of the scenes in that movie.

KORIN
: I’ll try my best.

JOURNALIST
: It’s right at the end of the film, after the monster is dead, when your character is looking out from the cabin at all the dead bodies scattered in the forest. Anyway, there’s this amazing shot where the camera starts at the back door of the cabin and moves in towards you at the front windows. You’re side-on to the audience – you know, in profile – and the camera keeps on dollying in towards you, and then goes right the way
past
you, and there’s no music any more, just your breathing.

I stopped for a second and returned to the start of the question, double-checking that this guy wasn’t talking about
Axe Maniac
, the film I’d just watched. He wasn’t. He was talking about
Die Slowly
, which had come out two years
after
the release of
Axe Maniac
. I had to reread the same section a third time, just to be certain I’d understood it correctly: Hosterlitz had included a virtually identical scene in two of his films, two years apart – both featuring Lynda Korin.

KORIN
: I think I remember that scene, yeah.

JOURNALIST
: It just felt so odd – in a good way! The rest of the film is so frenetic and bloody, and then you’ve got that scene, which feels like it’s been transported in from a Hosterlitz picture of old. You know, like
Connor O’Hare
or something.

MODERATOR
: So have you got a question for Lynda, sir?

JOURNALIST
: Sorry. I guess my question is … Why wasn’t
all
of the film shot like that? It seems like that scene was singled out for special treatment – I was just wondering why, basically.

KORIN
: I’m not sure.

JOURNALIST
: There was no special reason for it?

KORIN
: Not that I remember. It was a long time ago.

JOURNALIST
: Do you remember the bit with the TV?

I could hardly rip my eyes away from the page now.

KORIN
: The bit with the TV?

JOURNALIST
: Yeah. That was also quite weird.

KORIN
: No, I’m not sure I do.

JOURNALIST
: The camera passes you and moves right into the TV in the corner of the room, which is playing footage shot from inside a car – it looks like a residential street maybe.

KORIN
: Really? I don’t remember that.

JOURNALIST
: There’s a similar section at the end of another movie you did with Robert, in 1979 –
Hell Trip.
People tell me there’s one in
Axe Maniac
too, although I’ve never seen that.