Sketch: Dinner Party

I was at a dinner reception several years ago when I found myself next to a documentary videographer. A lifelong pacifist, he shot primarily industrial films, videos meant to prevent accidents when working around the gauges and digitized monitoring systems that represented the bulk of contemporary machinery. As the night went on, he told me about some of his earlier works, about his first forays in the industry, about the make-up effects he cut his teeth with, the false noses and prosthetics that dominated film, at least for a period. Soon enough we ended up talking about one film for which he had remembered a particularly bout of exhaustion, the exhaustion coming about for one scene which required the extras to eat human flesh. Although specifically he made sure to point out this was not a film about zombies, nor was it going to be real human flesh, but rather an early post-colonial work primarily shot in the rain forest, primarily focusing on the aborignals and the rampant beliefs both that cannibalism was widespread and that this type of savagery somehow alleviated the savagery of what was then international (he specified white, western) intervention. They had finally settled on cold cuts for the sequence, sliced roast beef and pre-cooked sausages for their visual look, and bathed each in a combination of dyed-red corn syrup and mustard powder for the color. But the extras, a good half of them, could not keep it down, so much so that on several of the rehearsal takes they would keep buckets to the side, so much was the overall simulation of the take that the extras had had a hard time keeping the prop down. He had worked and worked on the recipe, trying to figure out exactly how to make it the most palatable, or at least to remove the mental association of the fiction with the reality, even reminding the cast fruitlessly that most of the items had rather come from a catering truck, until at last they had devised a way to burn incense just off the screen, positioning it so that the smoke would not be caught on camera but still close enough so that the actors would have a floral association which in turn would help with to complete the dissociation. And it worked, the documentary videographer said. In fact, the incense was so important to the finishing of the production, that it had been given a credit in the final roll. Fascinated, I asked him if he could remember what the scent was. But he was at a loss for words: he couldn’t immediately recall.