Film, Faith, Filth: The Photographic Taboo in the Elflands

INTRODUCTION

Enet Lacarezh was, by all accounts, a decent man. Born in Choharo, a town in present-day Dakhenbarizhan, he had six sisters and twenty nieces and nephews, and became his family’s primary breadwinner at the age of fifteen, when sessiva, a viral epidemic, killed his father and severely disabled his mother and two of his sisters. All who knew the man, a photographer and travel writer, described him as kind and even-tempered. None of his sisters or their children, whom he made an effort to support even once they married out of the Lacarezhada and his obligation, ever accused him of abuse or any sort of mistreatment. It came as a great shock to the family when, in the thirty-ninth year of the reign of Varenechibel IV Lacarezh was remanded to the Nevennamire, a prison of the Elflands’s Untheileneise Court, and ultimately beheaded for acts of gross indecency.

What did Lacarezh do? For decades, no one knew. His trial—if we can call his appearance before Varenechibel IV a trial, given that it lasted under a minute and if Lacarezh so much as spoke, it was not recorded by the imperial secretaries—brought forth no evidence and did not elucidate the allegations. His execution was quickly followed by a ban on photography in Thu-Cethor and the Imperial Court, but Lacarezh did not invent the medium, nor was he the first to turn a profit on the sale of photographs. The answer—or the path to it—laid, unexpectedly, in the diaries of Csethiro Drazharan, published posthumously some ninety years later. Csethiro Drazharan was the wife of Edrehasivar VII, the so-called ‘goblin emperor’.¹

But we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. Enet Lacarezh’s primary source of income was selling prints of pastoral scenes from the rural Ethuveraz to middle class families in the increasingly heavily industrialized cities. The truly wealthy had hunting lodges in the west or winter homes in the south, their own little pieces of idyllic countryside, propped up by servants and in no way reliant on the incomes of their vineyards or rice paddies to survive. The middle class, if they tried to ape their betters, would have quickly discovered that the reality of rural life was far removed from that carefully cultivated fantasy so popular in Ethuverazhin novels of the time. The middle class could not afford a dozen servants to make a rural holiday tolerable, but the view out their windows remained ugly tenement blocks and smokestacks. This was where the early landscape photographers came in: daguerreotypes were more realistic than paintings, and ‘elektrei’, copper reproductions of the original, unique, daguerreotypes, were significantly less expensive. Travelling photographers could make a tidy profit if they had the eye—and the boots—for the pastoral scenes their city-dwelling clients were drawn to.

Lacarezh had an eye for composition, a sturdy pair of boots, a love of travel (and of adventure—a prerequisite for travelling in Dakhenbarizhan in those days, for highwaymen haunted the roads), and a kindly disposition which allowed him to make friends wherever he went. All this made him a successful photographer, but perhaps what served him best of all was a sense for recognizing what his clients did not themselves realize they wanted until it was in front of them. Other photographers prioritized stunning landscapes and majestic animals, nature perfectly unadulterated, as if seeking to adorn a shrine to Chevarimai (an elven wilderness god whose cult was stamped out thanks to persistent lobbying by the logging companies and commercial plantations). Lacarezh did not avoid these subjects, but he saw an untapped market in candid—or seemingly-candid—photographs of elves in these rural agricultural communities at work or play.

There is an impression today that Dakhenbarizhan is a relic of some bygone era, with antiquated technology and even more antiquated mores, but it bears remembering that many of the modern world’s great technological leaps were first made in the Elflands. The first sewing machines and automated spindles, the first assembly lines, the first steam engines and kameras and airships. During the reign of Varenechibel IV (that is, the early-to-mid 35th century, well ahead of the modernization of Pencharn and Estelveriär), more and more elven cities became industrial powerhouses², and more than simply longing for a prettier view out the window, middle class elves also longed for the supposed simplicity of their own past generations. The rural poor stand in for the city elf’s grandparents and great-grandparents in Lacarezh’s idealized tableaus, where the abject poverty of his subjects is positioned as more noble—and thus more desirable—than that of their urban fellows: the hunter detangling a rabbit from his trap, the eldest daughter scrubbing laundry with her younger siblings tugging at her braids, the elderly widow in drab mourning sitting across from her husband’s un-drunk cup of tea.

Many of these photographs are self-admittedly staged, their subjects dressed up or dressed down to meet the needs of the scene, their expressions carefully cultivated. “Went thru 7 plates before we found the right mood,” Lacarezh writes in one instance. “Mm. V struggled to smile earnestly on command, and the kamera unsettled her.”

This Merrem V was far from the only one of his photographed subjects who seemed to mislike the kamera. It was still too new a technology for the prelacy to have come to a formal decision on its theological implications (a complex topic we shall tackle in later chapters), much less for that decision to have filtered down to every backwater village in the mountains and marshes, but something about the sight of themselves reproduced in utter stillness on mirror-polished silver greatly unsettled many elves. Why, then, did they submit to be photographed? Because Lacarezh paid them for the privilege, and for many families, the thirty muranai he offered in exchange for a photography session—around a week’s wages for unskilled labor—was the difference between eating well or going hungry, or the price of a journey to the nearest town with a cleric of Csaivo, the elven goddess of healing. They simply could not afford to say no.

Lacarezh quickly discovered that his best-selling photographs by far were those of children. A modern, foreign viewer would struggle to connect his work to the concept of child pornography—indeed, given that he sold his photographs at greenmarkets for years without issue, it would seem even his contemporaries did not find issue with them, or, if they did (very few records exist in this area, and we cannot prove a negative) then their personal discomfort with the photographs did not make the subject matter actionable. A cache of Lacarezh elektrei were found in the so-called Cal’archive Ponichadeise in 57 E’has. 9, and compared to the other photographs in that collection, it is easy to see how someone without a prurient interest could look at them and find them perfectly innocent. Most of the children in his photographs are clothed, and those who aren’t are swimming in a lake or engaged in some other activity where nude or barely-dressed children were not an unusual sight. It is entirely reasonable to suppose Lacarezh himself did not consider his photographs untoward, and he might not have been fully aware of the nature of the audience he had accrued.

On the other hand, it is difficult to reserve judgement, for while in their own rural farming villages children might have run about barefoot in their fathers’s rolled up shirtsleeves, these were not candid shots. Lacarezh was dressing up his child subjects like dolls, posing them and photographing them for a handful of muranai in their parents’s hands and an intended audience who at best looked upon these images with a fond bemusement at the innocent impropriety of these ‘backwards’ folk, and at worst with lust.

Early in the summer of 37 V’nech. 4, Enet Lacarezh toured the Edonara, a rural marshland in northwestern Thu-Evresar. There, he photographed cranberry farmers with spiders clinging to the backs of their hands; young women popping fresh rice in huge rounded steel pans to be dried and packed up in a caravan to the heart of the nation; barefoot children cutting down tangrishi from net-traps hanging from the branches of willow trees; a boy wading in a creek with a basket of crayfish on his hip. That last image, thought lost until a much-degraded elektris was discovered in the Cal’archive Ponichadeise, is the photograph which sent Lacarezh to his death.

The boy in the photograph has vezhekhbariz coloring apart from startling silver eyes which make him seem to have been captured alive on the plate. In a puddle by the shore are his clothes, ratty trousers and shirtsleeves in what must be shades of blue, for the orthokhromatic film of the kamera renders them bright white. This is the earliest confirmed use of blue by a photographer to suggest the imperial palette (a tactic later much-beloved of the kal’operaneisei)—the boy is a nine-year-old Maia Drazhar, Varenechibel IV’s youngest son, who was relegated to the countryside in infancy for the crime of inheriting his mother’s dark skin. We know from the accounts of the imperial estate of Edonomee that his guardian, Setheris Nelar (a maternal cousin of Varenechibel IV’s who had previously been stripped of his noble titles and incarcerated for an unknown crime) accepted a payment of ninety muranei for the privilege of photographing him, thrice Lacarezh’s usual offer.

Edonomee’s accounts never again mention receiving payments from outside sources, and Lacarezh himself never returned to the Edonara, but Csethiro Drazharan’s diaries suggest this was only the beginning of the young Archduke’s exploitation. A look at Edonomee’s account-books shows significantly higher spending than the mean stipend provided by the imperial coffers can account for, until early in 39 V’nech. 4 came the Imperial Order to Ban the Practice of Photography and Distribution of All Photographs Within the Untheileneise Court and All Imperial Holdings. Two months later followed the summary execution of Enet Lacarezh: not for lèse-majesty, as offences against the dignity of members of the imperial family have traditionally been tried, but rather for nonspecific ‘acts of gross indecency’. It appears no other photographers or buyers were ever tried in the affair, either under Varenechibel IV or under his successor, the victim himself.

In 45 V’nech. 4, Varenechibel IV and his three eldest sons were assassinated by the Tethimada, a Thu-Athamareise noble house, according to the official stance of the Dakhenbarizhid Commonwealth, or tragically killed in an accidental airship fire which was later propagandized, as the government of Imperial Thu-Athamar maintains. The then eighteen-year-old Archduke Maia was crowned Edrehasivar VII three days later. Contemporaries held a rather mixed view of his reign, clear even under the strict censorship which characterized the Edrehasivariese Revival Period, but historians both within and without the Commonwealth have largely held favorable opinions. Edrehasivar was devoutly religious and scrupulously fair, deeply concerned with the plight of children, the working class, and the infirm, and held a utopian view of technological innovations such as interurban rail, the automated loom, and chemical lace. Though his hope these innovations would lead to sweeping social change and improved quality of life for the urban poor did not pan out, Edrehasivar VII cannot reasonably be said—as some film scholars see fit to characterize him—to be socially conservative and opposed to innovation. What he was was critical of the kamera and the newspaperman.

Dakhenbarizheise state censorship began when the nation was still the Ethuveraz. While it did indeed effectively criminalize any criticism of the actions of Zhas and Corazhas, and ultimately usher in an era of unprecedented suppression of political and artistic expression in the Elflands far beyond the scope of earlier lèse-majesty legislation, this was not the goal of Edrehasivar VII’s “Imperial Order to End News Propaganda in the Untheileneise Court” (1 E’has. 7), argues Bronelezhen.³

Citing not only imperial statements and Edrehasivar’s correspondence but also the correspondence of members of his Corazhas who were critical of Edrehasivar VII and his policies, Bronelezhen posits the evidence strongly suggests the newspaper ban was another misguided utopian effort, a direct response to widespread circulation of conspiracy theories, deliberate misinformation, and racist invective. Articles from the Cetho Sentinel in the first year of Edrehasivar’s reign included veiled allegations the assassination of his father and brothers was the work of his maternal grandfather, Barizhid Dakhenavar Maru Sevreseched (“LEAD JUDICIAL WITNESS INVESTIGATES SURPRISE CORRESPONDENCE FROM SOUTHERN BORDER; Former Assistant to Urvekh’ Mercantile Attaché Speaks on Airships, the Avar of Avarsin, and Where the Two May Not Mix”), sectarian fear-mongering which was later proven in court to have had a direct correlation to rising violence against minority religious groups⁴, and more. Two weeks after Edrehasivar VII took the throne, the Sentinel’s front page was devoted to alleging that the generally lower academic performance of marginalized races in Cetho—the first elven city which attempted to legislate a mandatory education—was not the fault of racist admissions policies in secondary schooling, the disparity in classroom hours between working and non-working children (vezhekhbariz children being statistically overrepresented among working children), and the absence of a Barizhin version of the standardized test this statistic derived from, but rather was ‘proof’ of physiological differences between the elven races long theorized by thubariz supremacist thinkers. Vezhekhbariz, alleged the Sentinel, were simply less intelligent.

For all the negative consequences of the legislation, there is little wonder why eighteen-year-old Edrehasivar hoped to keep journalism—a field at the time practically absent of ethical standards—out of the hands of his government’s officials.

Meanwhile, though Edrehasivar VII shoulders the blame for the photography ban, it is worth remembering that it was his father Varenechibel IV who first banned photography in the Untheileneise Court, and local governments which criminalized the medium in the principalities during Edrehasivar’s reign. Of course, Edrehasivar VII made no secret of his disdain for photography and photographers, which surely influenced the legislation of lower courts which sought to curry imperial favor. So too was the resurgence of religious devotion a factor, and it was the emperor who brought faith back into fashion in the north. But it is noteworthy that the Untheileneise Court did not compel the passage of such laws in any jurisdiction, and Edrehasivar VII never once passed an imperial order on the matter of photography or film.

In fact—apparently aware of his own inability to rule impartially on such a personally fraught matter—Edrehasivar seemed as a rule to avoid judging matters involving photography. His wife wrote:

The Thu-Athamareise photography scandal⁵ has M[aia] shaken. I wish C[elehar] had not spoken of it, though I know it is unfair to blame him for what he does not know. M[aia] can do nothing for those girls but feel the anger he will not permit himself to carry on his own behalf, and even so it is directionless: he fears bitterness will make him cruel and unfair.

For my part, I’d have Osm[er] N[elar] dead, and if I could not have that, then I would have him in the Esthorameire with naught but a mirror for company. When M[aia] sees his reflection in a mirror, he freezes. My husband looks upon any image of himself and shrinks from the profanity, and I can only pretend I have not seen.⁶

It would be easier, no doubt, to rest the blame for the Dakhenbarizheise antipathy towards film upon Edrehasivar VII’s slim shoulders alone: a single autocrat abusing his power to do away with an artform he held in particular contempt. But the fact of the matter is that a great many factors influenced what we know of as kino Barizheisei today, from millennia-old religious traditions to an association between the kamera and the brothel which developed in the earliest days of the medium and proved impossible to fully shake off, all of which was codified into increasingly labyrinthine legislation varying at the municipal, principal, and national levels—legislation which we cannot hope to come to a satisfactory understanding of Barizheise cinema without examining. Where does censorship-dodging end and artistic choice begin? How did the law shape the medium, and—as Edrecsenelar II reopens peace talks with Thu-Athamar—what form might film come to take in a free Dakhenbarizhan?

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1 The word ‘goblin’ or ‘hobgoblin’—literally, ‘child of Hobgoba’, the wicked father-god dethroned by the Five-Fold Harmony—is a dated and severely offensive term for the vezhekhbariz.

2 It is not difficult to imagine an alternate path upon which, had they only a more stable government, the Elflands might have risen to become one of the greatest economic powers in the world.

3 Maro Bronelezhen, “Propaganda and the End of the Newsroom in the Edrehasivareise Revival Period,” in Cairado Legal Reader, vol. 174 no. 1 (22 E’csen. 1).

4 In class action lawsuit Iphenezh v. Cetho Sentinel, the Sentinel and two newspapermen were ordered to pay damages in connection to the arson attack on a Brachaleise chapel.

5 In 1 E’has. VII, the emperor’s affine and close associate Thara Celehar uncovered a pornographic photography ring in Amalo, Thu-Athamar, where the girl inmates of a foundling school had been victimized with the consent of the headmistress for her own monetary gain. See chapter 2 of this work for an overview of the scandal and its aftermath, or Csenular’s The Cemchelarna Horror for a more detailed treatment.

6 Csethiro Drazharan Zhasan, Diaries, vol 2 (1 E’has. VII): 26-27.