Broken Heart (16 page)

#87 | Posted by CollarMeBaddUK on 06/15/14 | Member since 2000

You tell him, MelissaA! Yeah, it seems unlikely. As I understand it, re the six ‘lost’ films, it was a combination of a lot of the distribution prints not being returned, and then the production company going up in smoke in ’86.

#88 | Posted by Microscope on 06/15/14 | Member since 2014

Believe whatever you want to believe.

#89 | Posted by CollarMeBaddUK on 06/15/14 | Member since 2000

Why would he repeat the same scene in all of his movies, Microscope? That makes about as much sense as an episode of ‘Geordie Shore’. I think people might have noticed if a scene had been repeated 11 times.

#90 | Posted by Microscope on 06/15/14 | Member since 2014

People have noticed. Ask Bill Martinez at CinemaTechniques.com. The problem is, me, Bill, and the six or seven people that have been posting on this thread for the last six years make up the 00000000.1% of the Earth’s population who actually still give a shit about what Hosterlitz did after ‘The Ghost of the Plains’ bombed. So if none of you noticed, how was the rest of the world supposed to?

#91 | Posted by MarcCollinskyCine on 06/15/14 | Member since 2014

Hey Microscope! Is there some way we can talk on email? Marc C.

#92 | Posted by Microscope on 06/15/14 | Member since 2014

No. I’m not emailing you, DMing or anything else. Just ask Korin this: why did Hosterlitz repeat the same scene 11 times? See what she says.

#93 | Posted by MarcCollinskyCine on 06/15/14 | Member since 2014

And what do you think she’ll say?

#94 | Posted by Microscope on 06/15/14 | Member since 2014

I don’t know. But she knows more about Hosterlitz than the rest of us can ever hope to learn. Those films have the same ending. Same soundtrack. Same voice-over. Are we seriously suggesting she didn’t notice?

Same ending. Same soundtrack. Same voice-over.

What voice-over?

No one really picked up on the comment about the VO. It got lost among a discussion about the repeated scene, about Korin, about Hosterlitz as a director. I looked at my
TV, where
Death Island
was paused on the credits, picked up the remote control and rewound it. I stopped it just before the beginning of the end sequence, where the ninety-second dolly began. Pulling a chair in close to the TV, I plugged my headphones in and pressed Play. I wanted to cancel out as much peripheral noise as possible – from the hotel room, from the people passing in the corridor, from the traffic rumbling past outside. All I wanted to hear was the film.

The sequence began.

I listened hard as the sound of the heartbeat and Korin’s breathing began to get louder. That was all I’d heard on the soundtrack up until now, and it was all I could hear again. There was no voice-over. The heartbeat and breathing reached a crescendo about halfway between the camera’s starting point and where Korin was positioned, and then it began to drop off a little as the camera finally reached Korin and manoeuvred past her towards the TV set.

I rewound it for what felt like the hundredth time and played everything over again. This time I didn’t watch the sequence, I just ducked my head away from the TV so the images wouldn’t distract me, pressed my headphones deeper into my ears and listened. I heard the familiar sound of her breathing fading in, her heartbeat. I tried to will myself to hear beyond them both.

Then, vaguely, I caught the tail end of something.

Like a whisper.

It was the first time I’d heard it. It was so soft I wasn’t sure if I’d even heard it at all. I hit Rewind on the remote and spun the film back ten seconds. This time, as the camera drew level with Korin and began heading towards the TV set, I turned the volume right the way up.

My head thumped in protest.

But this time the whisper was even clearer. It was the softest of voices, half hidden within the breathing and the heartbeat, like the glimpse of a silhouette. I couldn’t quite pick up what was being said, so I rewound it again. On the next play, I realized it was a man, but his voice was so delicate, so deliberately gentle, it was almost feminine.

I rewound it yet again, playing it through, and this time I picked up the hint of an accent in the man’s voice.

He was saying, ‘You don’t know who you are.’

He was saying it over and over. ‘You don’t know who you are. You don’t know who you are. You don’t know who you are.’ He was repeating it constantly behind the noise of the heartbeat and the breathing. ‘You don’t know who you are
.
’ He did it all in the same, soft timbre, and it didn’t stop until the credits rolled.

You don’t know who you are
.

The voice belonged to Robert Hosterlitz.

21

After a restless night’s sleep, I woke up after seven, showered, and headed down to breakfast. The restaurant stank of fried food, the buffet loaded with trays of oily bacon, eggs and hash browns. I stuck to cereal, fruit and coffee, then took my laptop to a table in the far corner of the room.

At just gone eight, I tried Marc Collinsky.

He was in Berlin, but I hoped by calling early I’d catch him before he headed out to whatever event he was there to cover. It worked. He said he was about to board a train, so I got right to the point and gave him an overview of what I’d discovered the previous night – including the voice-over.

‘Voice-over?’ Collinsky said.

‘You didn’t know about that?’

‘I remember that person on the forum – Microscope – they said something about a voice-over, but I never really followed it up because they were just so weird and unhelpful. You said you think the VO is actually Hosterlitz himself?’

‘It sounds exactly like him. I watched a documentary about him that was floating around on YouTube. He speaks in an American accent but it’s got that slight Germanic tone. He keeps saying, “You don’t know who you are” over the film’s ending. Does that mean anything to you? Is it related to any of his movies?’

‘No. Well, not that I can think of. When I interviewed Korin that first time, I’d only managed to see
Axe Maniac
, so
I had nothing much to go on – in terms of the stuff about the repeated scenes – other than a weird theory some stranger online was pushing my way. But, in between the first interview and the second, I got in touch with a journalist in our Spanish office and she managed to track down a copy of
Hell Trip
, through a collector.’

‘That was when you realized the same scene was repeated?’

‘Right. Near identical in both movies.’

‘Did you bring it up with Korin in that second interview?’

‘Not
during
the interview, but I did afterwards,’ he said, which explained why I hadn’t heard him pose the question on either of the audio files he’d sent over. ‘She said she just went along with whatever Hosterlitz asked. She wasn’t an actress, she was a model, so she never questioned the direction she was given.’

‘Did you believe her?’

‘Yeah, I think she was being honest. She was always the first person to tell you that her acting abilities were limited. She just did what Hosterlitz asked her.’

‘But being asked to do the same scene eleven times?’

‘Maybe she just never thought that hard about it, or maybe she figured it was some kind of calling card for Hosterlitz. You know, something he included to identify the film as one of his – like a Saul Bass title sequence, or the Kubrick Stare.’ He stopped, sighed a little. ‘But I don’t know. Maybe she
was
lying to me. I just never got that sense from her. I really didn’t. I honestly believe that she respected Hosterlitz’s artistic vision.’

‘Okay,’ I said. He didn’t feel like she was lying and maybe she wasn’t – but something was going on. I changed direction. ‘So what do you think they mean?’

‘Mean?’

‘Those scenes. The films I watched last night, they’re terrible. They’re full of sloppy editing, shrieking music, there’s no subtlety or craft to them – apart from those scenes with Korin when she’s alone. Those moments feel completely different.’

A tannoy started up in the background of the call. When it was over, Collinsky said, ‘I don’t think there’s any doubt that their inclusion was completely intentional. He must have been aware that he could get away with putting them in, because no critics were reviewing his work, and punters at the time didn’t care about the story because they were too busy getting their fill of blood and boobs. And then, almost as soon as those films were out, they were forgotten again, and Hosterlitz was prepping his next, terrible horror movie. He wasn’t as prolific as some of the European horror directors like Franco or Fulci, but he was making them fast enough that they came and went in the blink of an eye.’

He stopped, but I could tell he wasn’t finished. ‘I need to get the train in a minute, but if you want my opinion, I think those scenes are some kind of allegory, probably for the way he was treated by Hollywood. The dolly into her represents the path of his career. The blood on Korin symbolizes the way he was stabbed in the back by the HUAC hearings, the way Hollywood fed him to the wolves. It’s a statement on the death of his career, and probably – given the lurid red of the blood – some sort of comment on him being labelled a communist as well. Did you listen to the interviews I sent you?’

‘Yeah, a few times.’

‘Then you would have heard Korin talking about how Hosterlitz called her an “angel”. A lot of people say he was
obsessed with her, and I think they’re probably right, but I don’t think it was in a scary, stalkerish way. Why would she marry him if he was some psycho? I think he was obsessed with her
beauty
, the way she looked. And so he used her as a sort of canvas to paint everything on, because she was a part of his life too, like the HUAC. Maybe the major part. After all, when everyone else turned their backs on him, Korin didn’t.’

Some of that felt like a stretch, but what Collinsky had said about Korin, about Hosterlitz being obsessed with her, resonated with me. I’d thought the same thing the night before.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘So what about the television?’

‘The one that plays that footage being shot from inside a car?’

‘Yeah. What do you think that’s about?’

‘Absolutely no idea.’

‘No theory about what street it’s showing?’

‘Sorry.’ Collinsky paused. I could hear him moving, the squeal of train brakes, the hum of people’s voices. ‘But there might be someone who does.’

‘Microscope,’ I said.

‘Right. I just don’t know how the hell you find him.’

I called Louis Grant at AKI and asked him the same questions I’d asked Collinsky, but he was similarly unsure, so I returned to my room to get my things together, then sat down in front of my laptop again. Going to the forum I’d looked at the night before, I found the Hosterlitz thread and the posts from Microscope, and clicked on the name. It took me to a public profile. When users signed up to the forum, they had to provide some personal information – but it
amounted to very little, and there was nothing to stop them from lying about who they were. Age, sex, location – it could all have been faked.

I studied Microscope’s profile.

Male. Forty-five. He’d listed his location as London W1. That was it. A man in his mid forties from central London. There was no way to tell if that was true. I had no idea if he had posted from an apartment he was renting, a house, a place of work, or if he had just been passing by – he could have posted from a hotel room, or a coffee shop. He could have posted from another city, or country.

It was a dead end for now; another loose thread.

I gathered my things together and headed to the car.

22

Once I was out of Bristol, the traffic started to melt away and the grey of the city became the green of the country. It was hot again, the sky an immaculate blue.

Veronica Mae, the actress that Korin had mentioned in her interview with Marc Collinsky, and also the woman who’d taken the Polaroid of Hosterlitz and Korin in Madrid in 1983, lived about a mile south of the village of Litton, right on the edges of the Mendips. I planned to call in on her before heading to Korin’s place, a few miles down the road. In truth, I didn’t know what I expected to get from Mae – or even if she would be home – but it felt like it was worth a journey.

I followed the A37 south through a succession of villages, until it became the A39 and cut across a high sweep of sun-drenched pasture, divided up by drystone walls and criss-crossed by telephone poles. A few minutes later, in a cleft a couple of villages on, I found Mae’s cottage. I parked up, got out and rang the bell.

After the call with Collinsky over breakfast, I’d done a little more digging on Mae and had managed to find some other pictures of her from the early 1980s. Her career had broadly mirrored Korin’s: she’d made low-budget dross – mostly horror films – and her fame, such as it was, had been built on the notoriety, and minor cult status, of one project in particular. For Korin, it had been the
Ursula
trilogy. For Mae, it was a 1984 horror film called
Mr Crow
, about a
scarecrow that comes to life and starts murdering people with a corn scythe.

The front door opened.

The second she appeared, I knew it was her. She was fifty-five, a little plump, her hair short and bleached an ash colour – but it was her. I recognized the beauty spot to the left of her nose, but mostly it was those green eyes, as perfect now as they had been three decades ago. She wore a pair of unflattering, baggy tracksuit trousers and a vest which accentuated every crease of flesh at her waist, but as her eyes caught the fringes of the sun moving over from the back of the house, their colour like a sheet of emerald glass, it became easy to see the visual potential Hosterlitz had glimpsed in the younger version of her.