The shadows fit his cheekbones like a spider-
Web, cavernous, inken, craven like the furtive
Glint of sunlight sunken into the caverns of his skull.
Years will pass before that star�s light will be seen again.
He crawls from frame to frame like a sinister plant
Conspiring with the poison air to infect the mise-en-sc�ne,
And his voice, sepulchral and magisterial as a censor�s
In its pronouncements echoes the heartbeat of the stones,
Millennial in its systole, forever in its release:
And who knows what revelation he carts in his valise
Eternally beside him, as if its spring-locked hinges held
Some integral portion of his anatomy, or the
Long-ago freeze-dried mummies of his household?

In any respect he is sinister, he and his suitcase
And the camera almost unwillingly is drawn
By his snapping coat-tails and the whip-flicker of his whisker
As our villain, his casket familiar beside him, double-joints
His crooked path sidewise up the jagged aisles of that world.
The camera follows him in unrepentant apostasy
Forsaking the faith of the hero (admittedly, dull, callow;
Sun-dappled complexion fed from birth with the marrow
Scooped from the bone with silvery forks, and bathed
Daily with the milk of nine wet-nurses until the age of fourteen:
Hate him) and the juno-eyed heroine.  Cinema

Worships the incarnated, for spectacle is a glamour,
And anything that plays with light aims that light to deceive.
Especially film (for film�s determination�s tender,
It bends with all benders, it rolls with all rollers.  No
Backbone!): that ribbon of spirit, that celluloid ghost.
Morality in that penumbra is a half-light of half-moons,
A lunar abacus, a rosary of yes and no, that your finger forgets
But the ghost remembers.  Is it any wonder
That our world, compared to its film, seems less mysterious?