Metaphysics,
Cinema
by Johnny Goodyear
Frederico Passolini
made an early silent movie called ‘The Appendix’ which
ran for about twelve minutes and consisted of a single
tracking shot across the ceiling of an operating theater
(the camera looking down of course).
All that can be seen
in this film is a man called Gaston Recherché,
strapped securely onto a marble slab, having his appendix
removed without the benefit of anesthesia. Gaston
was a fellow student of Mr. Passolini’s at the Sorbonne
in Paris, although he was studying Metaphysics, rather
than The Principles of Light: Fruit Production in
Nantes, the course in which Mr. Passolini was enrolled.
The idea for the film
had originally been Gaston’s and thus Frederico’s
subsequent career as an auteur should really be properly
so credited. However, at the time of its production,
Frederico had never actually seen a movie camera,
much less operated one, and there was thus a certain
amount of reading books and asking questions before
the event itself could take place.
Further complicating
what had initially been a simple, if somewhat unorthodox,
idea on Gaston’s part, was finding a surgical team
prepared to take part in the experiment. Both men
had to travel some distance into the Parisian suburbs,
before locating an abortionist, Andreas Kinword, who
announced that, for his usual fee, he would happily
remove any single organ of Mr. Recherché’s choosing,
although he did mention his preference for working
above the waist as far as men were concerned.
Gaston’s desire to
have his appendix removed, aside from his decision
to have such an operation performed without anesthetics,
has often been ill-reported. With this in mind, I
must confirm here that Gaston Recherché was
not the originator of the phrase, latterly much-used
by mountaineers, “Because it’s there”. To imagine
that Gaston Recherché had his appendix removed
simply because he had an appendix to remove, is to
do a grave disservice to the life and work of one
of the metaphysical community’s true giants (although
Gaston himself was a comparatively small man with
hands and feet that were remarkably dainty).
Gaston Recherché
was, and always remained, a keen student of pointlessness,
but not in the sense seized upon and much devalued
by the so-called existentialists. Gaston believed
that those few things found to be truly pointless,
be they an unfinished, atonal madrigal or perhaps
the vague idea of going to sleep which becomes forgotten
once the bed catches fire, hold a special place in
a modern world increasingly devoted to reason, motive
and design.
It was, Gaston suspected,
only in things utterly devoid of purpose that the
mind could find freedom enough to imagine those things
not yet previously considered and this concept, as
simple as it sounds, was the foundation of Gaston’s
unrivaled body of subsequently pointless work.
His decision to have
his appendix removed -one he later described in an
unpublished Paris Match interview as inevitable- was
based initially on the fact that he wanted to have
a good look at it, believing that such an unnecessary
organ, within the otherwise sensibly evolved and purposeful
human body, must have some greater, perhaps cosmic,
function.
He thought that man
in his unconscious conceit (a trait he memorably described
as ‘the almost willful intelligence of stupidity’)
always refused to accept that there were those things,
for the time being anyway, far beyond our understanding.
He was also sure that it would only be through pointless,
misguided meditation, by accident even, that we could
ever be in a position to receive messages from these
‘other places’ that existed within dimensions as yet
unknown.
It was precisely because
he considered the appendix as a possible and fleshy
transmitter of some type that he insisted on its removal
without anesthetics, a decision he later recalled
as being perhaps the most painful of his life, although
he also mentioned the night of his wedding to the
lovely Annette, who, it transpired, was actually an
SS officer called Klaus and Klaus was apparently quite
rough (this was much later and during the German occupation).
Gaston believed that
pain killers would deaden the transfer of any information
the appendix had to offer and that, possibly, such
transmittal itself might take place in the form of
what he shouted out during the operation as a result
of the intense pain, his rational mind being distracted
enough to allow the information space. He realized
that this was not a sure thing, but as a good scientist
certainly wished his results, whatever they might
be, to remain free from the occlusion of morphine
or other drugs.
It was thus, on Saturday
July 15th, 1921, and when Frederico Passolini, with
the assistance of two students from the School of
Cantileverage, had finally assembled his upside down
camera on tracks screwed into the ceiling, that Doctor
Kinword scrubbed the lower portion of Gaston’s belly
with methylated spirits and prepared to proceed.
The actual events
of that day are, unfortunately, still the subject
of much conjecture, and in fact a discipline of study
devolving around the ‘Appendix Incident’ fuels a steady
stream of academic publishing to this day.
Because, in one of
the great tragedies of science, Frederico had had
enough trouble learning how to make sure the camera
worked properly, he had not had the time (and many
would say the forethought) to realize that if transmittal
of any kind was going to take place, it would be the
recording of the same by sound, not sight, which might
prove most useful. Of course the addition of sound
to film was at that time in its infancy and also quite
expensive.
As a result, posterity
is left with the much examined footage commonly known
as the ‘Passolini Film’ which shows Gaston Recherché
flailing around on the operating table and opening
and shutting his mouth quite a lot.
Of the three men present
only Frederico was subsequently able to describe what
Gaston said, the reason for this being that Gaston
himself became so agitated during the procedure that
he has little memory of what he actually spoke of.
In addition, and alas, Andreas Kinword was stabbed
to death by a woman bitter because of her infertility
not three days after removing the appendix, a thing
he described in his medical notes as ‘Smallish. Mostly
red.’.
Passolini himself
maintains all Gaston shouted, repeatedly mind you,
was “Frederico Passolini will become one of the great
men of world cinema and also a lover of exquisite
talents who will pleasure untold numbers of fortunate
women around the globe. Oh, if I were only Frederico
Passolini!”
Lip-readers have of
course been brought in, and although their analysis
seems to contradict Mr. Passolini’s account, they
have been unable to come to firm agreement on anything
apart from one particularly haunting segment, when
the camera was directly above Gaston’s face and he
was apparently shouting: “Fuck! You fucking butcher!
Give me something for the fucking pain! Fuck!”
It was, as Gaston
Recherché often later remarked, a very pointless
exercise; “but also in some ways art, if not science.”
For many years, the
appendix itself (having first been thoroughly dried)
was kept in a little leather case that Gaston hooked
onto his belt as a “reminder of my search for the
meaningless truth.” At the time of his death it was
given to the Theosophist Society Museum where it is
now on permanent display (53rd & 3rd.
Tuesday through Friday. Ten to five-thirty).
It is certainly quite
small.
