The Notch

by André Bazin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Monsieur Rabouin came down to the boatyard on a Thursday in October, when the school was closed, and he stood in the doorway of the shed for some time before Firmin Tessier looked up from the plank he was planing.

The shed at Béhuard is open on the river side. From the doorway a visitor sees, all at once and without having to choose: the long belly of a toue upturned on its trestles, half of its bottom new and pale, half of it old and black with pitch; the man bent over the bench in the middle distance, his cap pushed back; and beyond him, through the open end, the grey Loire in its autumn width, the sandbank showing, a heron standing on the sandbank as if it had been driven into it like a stake. The schoolmaster looked at all of this. Firmin went on planing. The curls of oak dropped onto his boots. It is a thing about the Loire men that they finish the stroke they have begun.

"You have a film," Rabouin said at last. "Madame Bréheret told me. Of your wife."

Firmin set the plane down on its side, the way one sets down a plane, so as not to dull the iron.

"Nine and a half millimetres," he said. "Pathé. My brother-in-law had the camera. Summer of 'thirty-seven."

"How long?"

"One cartridge."

Rabouin nodded as though this were the answer he had hoped for. He came into the shed and took off his hat, which he did not need to do, and turned it in his hands. He was a man of thirty or so, thin, with the cough that half the teachers in the Maine-et-Loire seemed to have brought back from somewhere, and since the spring he had run a ciné-club in the salle des fêtes on Saturday evenings, with a borrowed projector and films that came from Angers by the autocar in tin boxes. He had shown Farrebique. He had shown Le Jour se lève, and old Bréheret had walked out of it because it was sad. Now he had an idea, and the idea was this: an evening of films from the commune itself. Whatever people had in their drawers. Weddings, a communion, the high water, if anybody had filmed it, children on the levee. He had collected seven reels already. He wanted an eighth.

He did not say all of this at once. He said it in pieces, between looking at the boat and looking at the river, and Firmin let him, and took up a rag and wiped the oak dust from the bench, which took a minute, and then folded the rag in four.

"I would take great care of it," Rabouin said. "And — if you allowed — I could improve it a little."

"Improve it."

"These old Pathé reels, you know the projector stops on a notch. For the titles. You cut a little nick in the edge of the film, here" — he showed the margin of his own thumbnail — "and when it passes the gate, the machine holds the frame for three seconds. They did it to save film. One frame of title instead of fifty. I have a punch for it. If there is a moment where she is looking at the camera — smiling, say — I could put a notch there. She would stay. Three seconds. And then, it is only an idea, the end could be trimmed so that it finishes on her face. People like a film that ends on a face. I have a record of Reynaldo Hahn I would put on the gramophone."

The heron on the sandbank lifted one foot and did not put it down.

"I'll think about it," Firmin said.

---

That night he set the projector up on the kitchen table.

It was a Pathé-Baby of the first kind, brown, with a handle on the side that one turned, and a little lamp that made the cast-iron housing warm and gave off a smell of hot dust, like a stove lit for the first time in autumn. He had not had it out of the cupboard since Easter. He pinned a sheet to the wall above the dresser, moving the calendar from the Crédit Agricole to do so, and he put out the paraffin lamp, and in the dark he threaded the film by feel, because his fingers knew the path even if his eyes no longer did: down past the gate, the central perforation onto the claw, the loop below. The little reel took up the slack. He turned the handle.

What follows lasted, by the clock on the dresser, one minute and fourteen seconds. It is set down here at the pace it ran.

At first there is only white, and a flicker, and a hair in the gate that trembles at the left of the frame and will tremble there throughout. Then the image comes, grey and silver and a little too bright at the top, where the sky is: a meadow behind a house, with a washing line running from a post on the left to a hook on the wall of the house on the right. Sheets on the line, three of them, and a man's shirt hanging by its tails. The wind is coming off the river and the sheets fill and fall, fill and fall, not together. Under the line, a woman in a pale dress and a dark apron, with a basket on her hip and a clothes-peg in her mouth. Odile was twenty-six. She is taking down the sheets, not putting them up; one can see this because the basket is half full and the folded linen in it is square.

Behind her the meadow slopes down to the levee, and on the levee a boy is pushing a bicycle that is too big for him, and he stops, and looks toward the camera, and goes on. Beyond the levee there is the river, and on the river the old ferry is halfway across on its cable, carrying a cart and a horse whose head is lowered. Beyond the river, the far bank and its poplars, very small, quite sharp. The brother-in-law's little camera had a short lens and a lot of sun that day, and everything from the washing line to the poplars on the other side of the Loire is in focus at once. Nobody chose this. It was July.

A dog comes into the frame from the bottom right, a brown dog with one white ear. It is Bijou, who was hit by a lorry in 1941. Bijou noses at the basket. Odile pushes him away with her knee without looking down, takes the peg out of her mouth, and unpegs the second sheet, and the wind takes the sheet and wraps it round her so that for a moment there is no woman in the image at all, only a sheet with the shape of arms in it. Then she comes out of it, laughing, her hair across her face. She looks at the camera. She says something. There is, of course, no sound, and Firmin had never been able to read the words; his brother-in-law, who had been holding the camera, said he had not heard them either, because of the wind. She smiles — fully, at whoever is there. This is the moment Rabouin meant, though he had not seen it. It lasts perhaps two seconds.

Then she turns her head to her left, away from the camera, toward something outside the frame. Not quickly. As one turns when one's name is called, or when one hears a sound that might be important and might be nothing. She holds her head like that, the folded sheet against her chest. The ferry has reached the far bank. The boy on the levee is gone. Bijou lies down. Odile goes on looking to the left at whatever it is, and the film runs out in the middle of her looking, white, a flash of the leader, the clack of the tail on the reel.

Firmin let the handle go. The lamp went on burning onto the white sheet on the wall. Then he turned the lamp off too.

He had seen the reel perhaps two hundred times. He knew that the film was reversal stock, that what had gone through the brother-in-law's camera was the very thing that went through the projector, that there was no negative anywhere, and that every time the claw pulled it through the gate it left something behind. At the beginning the scratches had been rare and fine, like rain seen from far off. Now in the sky above the washing line it rained steadily, and there was a long scratch running down the whole length of the reel, at the right, which passed through Odile's shoulder when she stood at the line, and through her cheek when she turned. There was a splice before the ferry, where the film had torn in 1949, and at the splice four frames were gone, so that the boy on the levee jumped.

He lit the paraffin lamp again. He unthreaded the film and, instead of rewinding it, ran a length of it slowly through his fingers in front of the lamp, holding each piece up to the glass.

Held up like that, it is not a film. It is a strip of very small photographs, each one the size of a postage stamp, stopped. He found the place where she came out of the sheet. Here her hair is across her face; here less; here she is looking at the camera; here the mouth begins to open; here the smile. He looked at the frame of the smile for a long time. The lamp hissed. In the frame of the smile Odile was perfectly still and very clear and somewhat strange, as faces in photographs are, with her eyes slightly narrowed against the sun in a way that, when she moved, one had never noticed. He looked at the next frame, and the next. Each was a little different. None was her.

He wound the film back onto its reel with the crank, carefully, holding it by the edges, and put it in its tin.

---

On Saturday the salle des fêtes smelled of the floor polish from the Thursday dance and of wet coats. Rabouin had set out the chairs in rows and put his borrowed projector on a trestle at the back and the old Pathé beside it, borrowed from someone in Rochefort, because his own machine would not take nine and a half. About forty people came. The Mayor came. The curé came for the communion film, and stayed. Madame Bréheret came in a hat. The baker, Joseph Moreau, came late with flour still in the creases of his knuckles and sat on the end of a row so that he could leave before the end.

Firmin gave the tin to Rabouin at the door.

Rabouin weighed it in his hand and looked at Firmin, and opened his mouth, and Firmin said: "As it is."

"No notch?"

"As it is. And the end stays."

Rabouin was a good teacher; he knew when a thing had been decided outside the room. He nodded, and went to the back, and put the Reynaldo Hahn record back in its paper sleeve.

The wedding film went first. Then the communion of 1952, in which the curé could be seen, younger and with more hair, and everybody laughed, and he laughed too. Then a reel of high water that turned out to be mostly sky. Firmin's was the fifth. Rabouin did not announce it. He said only, "Béhuard, July 1937," and turned off the lights and began to turn the handle.

Now the same minute and fourteen seconds took place again, in another room, on another sheet, before forty people; and it is worth saying what happened in the room, because it was not what happened in the kitchen.

The washing line came up, and the wind, and Odile with the peg in her mouth. Someone in the third row said her name, quietly, as one says the name of a person crossing the square. When the boy on the levee stopped with his bicycle and looked toward the camera, Joseph Moreau, on the end of his row, stood half up from his chair and said, "But that's me," and then, louder, because the whole room had turned round to him in the dark: "That's my uncle's bicycle. That's me." He sat down. He did not leave before the end. When the boy jumped at the splice, Moreau made a small noise, as if he himself had been jolted.

Old Bréheret, who had walked out of Le Jour se lève, leaned forward when the ferry crossed and said to his wife, not quietly enough, "That's Coutant's ferry. That's Coutant on the cable. Look at him. He always pulled with his left." Two or three people looked at Coutant, whom the sheet showed as a dark shape the size of a fingernail. The curé was looking at the poplars. A girl of eight or nine in the front row, who had never known anyone in the film, was looking only at the dog, and when Bijou nosed at the basket and was pushed away by the knee, she laughed aloud, and her mother hushed her, and she laughed again, into her hand.

Then the sheet on the line wrapped round Odile and there was no one there, and the room was silent; and she came out of it laughing and looked at the camera and said what she said; and the smile; and nobody in the room did anything at all.

And then she turned her head to the left.

Rabouin, at the back, had his hand on the crank, and Firmin, who was standing against the wall by the door because he had not wanted a chair, saw the hand slow, very slightly, as if it wanted to stop there; and then keep its pace.

She held the sheet against her chest and looked away to the left, out of the frame, and the film went on, and the ferry reached the far bank, and the room waited with her. Madame Bréheret said under her breath, "She's looking at the house." Somebody behind her said, "No — the road. Somebody's coming down the road." "She's looking for Firmin," said a third voice, a woman's, and there was a little murmur, because everybody knew that Firmin was not behind the camera — it was the brother-in-law, it was always the brother-in-law who had the camera — so Firmin might have been anywhere: on the road, in the house, at the river, coming up from the boat. Firmin by the door said nothing. He had been in the shed that afternoon, he thought; but it was eighteen years ago, and he could not have sworn to it, and she had never said.

The film ran out in the middle of her looking. White on the sheet. The tail clacked on the reel. Rabouin let it clack three or four times before he stopped the handle, and in the white light the people in the front row were lit from behind, the girl and her mother, the backs of their heads.

When the lights came up the Mayor clapped, and then the others, unevenly, the way people clap when they are not sure that clapping is what is wanted.

---

Afterwards, when the chairs were being stacked, Rabouin brought the tin back to Firmin himself. He had rewound the reel on the Rochefort projector, slowly, by hand.

"I saw the scratch," he said. "On the right. Through her face."

"Yes."

"Every time it runs, it — you know this."

"I know."

"There is a laboratory near Paris that makes duplicates from nine and a half. A contretype. It would not be as good, the grain is coarser. But then you could show the copy and keep this one in the drawer. I could write to them. It would cost something — two thousand francs, three. I don't know."

Firmin turned the tin over in his hands. Joseph Moreau the baker went past them carrying four chairs and stopped and said to Firmin, without any preamble, "I'd forgotten that bicycle. It was green," and went on with the chairs.

"Write to them," Firmin said.

"And next year — "

"Write to them first."

He walked home along the top of the levee. There was a moon, not full, and the river below on his left was louder than in the day, as it is at night. He came past the place where the ferry cable had been anchored before the war, a block of stone with an iron ring, and past the back of his own meadow, where the post for the washing line still stood, though the line had been taken down in 1945 and the hook in the wall of the house had rusted through. He went down off the levee into the meadow, the wet grass soaking his trouser-legs to the shin, and stood beside the post with the tin under his coat.

The wind came off the river, and there was nothing on the post to fill or fall. He stood there facing the house, then turned his head to the left, toward the road, and stayed so; and the length of time he stood there was about the length of the reel, a little over a minute, which is not long, and is long. Then he went in, and put the tin in the drawer of the dresser, under the tablecloths, and shut the drawer.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Andreā Bazinō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

André Bazin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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