The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes

I had gone to a small tavern across the black river. I remembered something that had happened after I first arrived in Wisconsin at my own hotel not far from here a week prior to meeting Laing. The knife-shaped sliver of sunlight coming through Laing’s motel room window is there on the floor moving and slowly elongating (though he and I can’t see this happening) like a weapon made from light. I’d go so far as to say that it was a slow method of suicide. ” There’s a sadness or a false sadness as he says this, a lilt in his voice, and while at the time it seemed to be rehearsed I’ve come now to believe that describing the movies to me involved a genuine loss on Laing’s part. While the magenta and yellow dyes that form the image fade in other stocks, the Kodak stock from that era is persistent, so the film has a weird vibrancy to it, so strong and intentional, if that’s the right word, that it’s almost like it’s the film that’s watching you, rather than the other way around. The film was shot and is set in the ‘80s but it used 16 mm Eastman Kodak stock from the ‘40s.

“ Black Star,” Laing says, “was simply too close to the truth. I had been deep into Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette during that time, and there was a line that was so powerful that for many years it extinguished all other belief: “A new creed became mine - a belief in happiness.” Lucy Snowe writes this as she is falling in love with someone she knows she cannot love and I can say this now, after exiting the dangerous orbit of Laing: I had not loved my daughter fully in order to protect myself from what I feared most: her loss. In a perverse way, I suppose, I had refused to be sentimental about the death of my daughter. At the time I chalked this up to his age, but even then I knew there was something else at work, and that Laing’s rough transitions between films - his inability or unwillingness to provide connective tissue - was really the equivalent of the rough jump cuts in the films he loved, the films he loved so much he had to destroy, and that my own desire to fill the void of her loss (a void that had nonetheless given my life its shape) was the very reason I had come out here to find Laing as if somehow he could replace the blank and final fact of her death with something else, some mystery, the mystery that her life was or would have been had she lived. As soon as he finishes describing Destroyer he starts in on another film, Black Star. Be sure to check out our interview with Rombes as well. - The Editors It is reprinted with the author’s permission. The following is an excerpt from the novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes.