The Parallelists

The noted film auteur Ramm Shea, when his creative life was more or less over, had the standard critical look at his oeuvre. They make it feel warm and innocuous, and are so successful that few directors, upon reaching that age when their films get rereleased on classics labels, and people daily expect their obit, are prepared for how harsh it can be. In the interest of lightly appraising each work of a large corpus, each one gets a brief blurb from every interested writer and critic. The brevity of these, combined with the number of them written every day, and the mutation by plagiarism, means that often they contain the most incisive statements. They are things that people had thought about the films for years, but had never bubbled to the surface.

Ramm Shea was horrified a few times but made it past this assessment okay. The consensus was he was an important filmmaker for the history of the art and a number of his films—not all of them, but a substantial kernel—were the true thing.

He had the joke on all of them. The true work of his life was buried within the wormy little things he produced for commercial studios. Certain scenes from each of his films, when edited together, composed a fairly short film that was nevertheless epic in scope. It would be a very powerful film, the full exposition and development of the themes which, under the studios’ incessant thumbs, had always been flattened, pressed, and slid to the side. It would be his life’s work. His secret title for it, written in only two places, was The Parallelists. The first place it was written was as an oblique mention on two sheets of paper, an edit decision list, kept folded up as a bookmark in an edition of Lyons’s book Samarkand, on which were the editing directions required to reconstitute the film. The second place, quite accidentally, was in a letter to his brother Soter, in passing, to complete a pun which wasn’t that funny.

When discovered, a new issue cropped up. But mysteries were solved. It was widely known that Shea could be quite capricious when taking orders about scenes from upstream. Some lengths of film he would be very obliging in cutting away, almost overeager. On the other hand, there were scenes in nearly every film which the studio suggested he cut, some of them clearly unworkable in the film he was shooting, seemingly out of place in tone, tempo, and mood, which he would resolutely refuse to banish, and would set himself up in mini-hunger strikes and bar the editing suite doors and pull in all sorts of favors which he would exhaust and have to hope to regain at the box office again.

Also, the way he took Con Edwards’s sudden death, which affected nearly everyone in the industry who knew him, but seemed to send Shea into a creative funk even, and a period of filmic abstinence which spawned no small number of rumors.

Lastly, the last two films Shea made were unexpected, coming after his putative retirement one after the other, and in hindsight containing scenes quite similar to some in movies he’d made twenty years earlier, although the movies were quite different.

The issues were, was The Parallelists really discovered? and how do you reassess the work of a man already thought to be great, when what was thought to be great was nothing but the pretext for something which, honestly, many critics didn’t like all that much?

On the first question, the standard mathematical philosophical conundrum. There was some controversy about whether those editing notes were actually in Shea’s hand, and an underground was convinced and tried to convince for many years that The Parallelists was the remix of some clever cineaste who found something moving in the opera of Ramm Shea and forged his name to the EDL.

On the second question, it’s true many who had adored Ramm Shea were disappointed with The Parallelists. It’s difficult also to say whether those who were intrigued by the metafilm and came around to admiring Ramm Shea outnumbered those who abandoned the auteur’s cause as a result of it.