The Lost Film Stigmata
by Jeffrey Greene
| Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
“It begins with a magnified close-up of the word ‘stigmata’ on the page of a dictionary. From a soft blur, the camera focuses just long enough for us to read the word and its definition and then blurs and dissolves to a formica table. The camera dwells on an ashtray filled with butts, two empty gin bottles, a glassful of gin on the rocks, a cassette tape recorder, and an automatic pistol. It might be day or night; the dark, grainy texture of the black-and-white film casts the scene in ominous shadow.
“A hairy hand reaches out and stabs the cassette’s ‘play’ button, and we hear a drunken, breathless voice filled with self-pity, disgust, and a fear-edged tension that the liquor can’t submerge. He doesn’t identify himself by name and assures us from the start that he isn’t a director, a documentary filmmaker, ‘or anything else implying respectability.’ In fact, he’s nothing more than a ‘professional voyeur, paid to travel around the world with a film crew leering at anything that sells tickets.’ He proceeds to give a partial list of his œuvre: porn flicks, a documentary of executions around the world, unusual sex practices in the Far East, a globe-trotting ‘tribute’ to freak shows, etc.
“A lamentable cinematic device is already in evidence here: that of a fleeting visual analog to every verbal image. We hear ‘torture’ and glimpse a few frames of a naked body convulsing from an electric current, or ‘executions’ and see bits of old newsreel footage of beheadings in China and firing squads in Africa. The brevity of the images is almost subliminal, but a pattern of ugliness is set early on.
“The story is heard on the tape recorder and seen in flashback. ‘Trouble with being a voyeur,’ continues the narrator, ‘is that sooner or later you see something you’re not supposed to see. You cross over, become a witness, and then somebody has to kill you. You who watch this, will you know when you have seen too much and stop looking?’
“A promising beginning, but what follows is one of the strangest messes I’ve ever seen. It seems to have been pieced together from sequences shot by different people years apart. Sections in garish color alternate with jerky black-and-white clips apparently shot from a hand-held camera. Some of the scenes are narrated by the taped voice, others by a forgotten star of ’50s B-westerns whose name escapes me. ‘We were working on a cheapie called ‘Mountains of the Mind,’ slurs the taped voice and, with the sense of being jerked backwards by the collar, we are fast-cut into a rapid montage of fire walkers, snake cultists, cheek-skewering dervishes, possessed carnival dancers and healing miracles at Lourdes, while the old cowboy ham intones the lines from G. M. Hopkins’s poem:
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall,
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.
“The taped voice tells us that this project was to be his last. He alludes to a failed marriage, a drinking problem resulting from the separation and too much travel and a suffocating horror of hotel rooms that is destroying his sleep. There are really two movies vying for our attention: the lurid color clips of fire walkers and snake cultists that are the finished products of the world-weary narrator, and his own account of how he came to be holed up in the room where we find him. The stories eventually converge but, until they do, the viewer’s attention is continually diverted by the documentary sequences.
“The narrator’s story can be summarized as follows, which I’m telling you only because I’m fairly sure it won’t be coming to a theater near you: he and his four-man film crew fly to Mexico, then drive a rented car to — and here there was a blank spot in the soundtrack, as if the town or city had been deleted — in order to film a seventeen-year old girl who has been bleeding from the palms and feet for several weeks prior to Easter.
“Upon arriving, they are told that the girl has been taken to a neurology clinic in the mountains to be treated for epilepsy. The doctor in charge, a German named Jan Staupitz, has agreed to treat her without charge in exchange for the right to conduct certain tests on her. They decide to make the five-hour drive to the clinic, even though the girl’s mother has only a vague idea where it is.
“When they reach the mountain town that is supposedly within a few miles of the clinic, they start asking directions, only to find that no one has heard of it. Frustrated, they check in at a hotel, where again, everyone professes complete ignorance. Their first break comes that evening in the hotel restaurant, where they meet a seedy character named Adrian Fisher, who claims to be an EEG technician at the clinic. He tells them that the townspeople have been stonewalling them out of fear. It seems the clinic is not a clinic at all, but a privately-funded research center with an international staff, located in a nearly inaccessible region of the mountains.
“Fisher doesn’t know who is funding the center, only that they are paying huge sums to the Mexican government for the privilege of working in unobstructed isolation. Most of the patients are ‘religious savants,’ people who demonstrate physical or psychological evidence of extreme faith. The doctors study rather than treat these patients, who are culled from asylums, hospitals and, in the case of the stigmatic girl, from newspaper stories.
“The head of research, Dr. Staupitz, believes that there is a specific ‘biochemistry of faith,’ and is obsessed with creating a neuro-chemical profile of those rare individuals born with a special talent or predisposition for the level of religious devotion that sometimes qualifies for what the Catholic Church calls sainthood. The doctor thinks this chemical signature is as distinctive as schizophrenia and can be isolated and synthesized.
“If schizophrenia can be managed by drugs, could not apathy and doubt also be controlled or even suppressed? Dr. Staupitz and his backers envision a pill to erase agnosticism, a ‘non-denominational anodyne’ to the post-modern world. Fisher, however, thinks that the stated goals of the clinic are propaganda to insure the loyalty of its staff, and the real purpose is to create the means to chemically induce ‘instant, fanatic devotion to a leader or cause.’
“All these revelations occur during a tequila-drinking session in the hotel room. As if inviting our skepticism, the camera rarely deviates from the unprepossessing Adrian Fisher. He is apparently in his mid-thirties and wears a lab coat spotted with food and coffee stains. He has a chinless, rodent face with small eyes that light up with crafty fervor when he’s speaking, then lapse into an expression of blank surprise when he falls silent. The narrator mistrusts him, but nevertheless asks his help in getting into the clinic to film the girl. Impossible, Fisher tells him. Mexican soldiers guard the gates twenty-four hours a day, and the very last thing Dr. Staupitz would want at his clinic is a film crew.
“They are all drunk by this time, and one of the crew jokingly suggests that they strap a super-8 camera under Fisher’s lab coat, hook it up so he can operate it from a switch in his pocket, and send him in to get the film. Fisher surprises them by agreeing to the scheme, but demands a fee of a thousand dollars. The narrator agrees to the price, but only upon receipt of the film. They rig up a harness that fits under his armpit, give him the camera and send him on his way after making plans to meet back in the restaurant the following evening.
“The narrator is more than half-convinced that they have just given away a camera to a con man who probably doesn’t even work at the clinic, and he is highly skeptical of Fisher’s paranoid theory. However, they gather in the restaurant the next evening as planned.
“Fisher doesn’t show up that night or the next day. At first, they’re convinced they’ve been had but, when they start asking around, they learn he has been killed in an auto accident while driving down the mountain. When we hear the word ‘killed’ there is a half-second glimpse of a corpse’s bloody, battered face, but it’s too brief to be recognizable as Fisher’s. They hastily check out of the hotel and, when they return the key, the desk clerk silently hands them a manila envelope. It contains a reel of eight-millimeter film.
“They drive all night to reach Tuxtla Gutierrez, where they charter a plane to Mexico City. The jet flight back to Los Angeles is without incident. A few days later, while the director is immersed in cutting and editing the film, his cameraman calls and tells him that the other three crew members have just been killed in a one-car accident on a canyon road. The voice tells him to wait right there, that he will be over shortly.
“The director waits for an hour, distraught and frightened, then calls the cameraman’s house. When the phone is picked up, he says ‘Hello?’ but there is no response. He slams down the phone, and we see through his eyes as hands gather up cans of film, clothes, and money and stuff them into a suitcase. The suitcase seems to close down on us and there is a fade to the motel room.
“The hand turns off the tape recorder. ‘I’m going to show you the film Fisher sent to the hotel,’ the unseen narrator tells us. ‘Then you’ll know as much as I do. They can’t kill all of us, can they?’ The hand moves to an eight-millimeter projector that has been off-camera until this moment and turns it on.
“The clip is in black and white and half out-of-focus for most of its three-minute length; it’s also silent. Worse, there is a shadow blotting out the picture much of the time, which I think we’re supposed to assume is the lapel of Fisher’s lab coat flapping in front of the lens.
“The first image we see is a white blur that resolves to a piece of notebook paper on which is written in block letters: PATIENT ‘ST. ANTHONY.’ KEPT IN ISOLATION. PERCEIVES OTHERS AS DEMONS. We see a door with a square window, and then the camera does a jerky, 360-degree turn, showing a long hallway, two blurred figures without heads, another long hallway, and then turns back to the door. Someone moves in front of the camera and opens the door. The next thing we see is a brief image of a syringe in someone’s hand, and then a chaos of movement impossible to make out.
“When the picture focuses again we see an emaciated man lying on a metal table, apparently unconscious. Three white-coated men are standing around the table observing the actions of another white-coated man with his back to the camera. He pulls back the sheet covering the patient. The camera moves in to show him pointing at a series of livid marks and striations on the arms, neck and torso that closely resemble the imprints of huge hands with elongated fingers.
“The man with his back to the camera turns partly around to make a comment to someone and, in doing so, reveals a curious stiffness to his neck, as if the vertebrae are fused. He motions the other men closer, then lifts the patient’s closed right hand. With difficulty, they pry open the fist and, after daubing the blood flowing from the palm, the doctor removes with a pair of tweezers a small crucifix embedded in the flesh. Holding aloft the blood-stained cross, he says something that evokes laughter from the three men in white coats, and we see his shoulders shake.
Copyright © 2026 by Jeffrey Greene
