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

CHAPTER THREE

In the summer of 37 E’has IX, a combination of record-breaking rains and an outbreak of enteric fever left the Cairad’revethora Kinoi, or Cairado Filmgrave, unattended for three entire days. At dawn of the fourth day, the CRK sank into the Istand’athamareise delta. Over three quarters of the interred film negatives were damaged, their images warped by sea water.

Modern film scholars often liken the loss of the CRK to the burning of the Library of Urvekh’ in the reign of Auleta’var: the films within were, after all, one of a kind, and it appears no attempt was made to salvage them. All negatives, even those spared of water damage, were immediately burned and the ashes attended to in accordance with the rites of the appropriate sect, interred either alongside or in waiting for their subjects.¹ Hundreds of early Dakhenbarizheise films were lost. Yet among contemporary accounts of the flood, the nearest thing to grief comes from cartographer Min Loreian Rozhanharad’s letter to Merrem Eiru Aratharan, a scholar of history at the University of Cetho: “We must admit to mixed feelings about the whole affair. Surely it is best for the filmed that the works have all been laid to rest—we do not mean to claim otherwise—but that so much visual documentation of the streets of our city over these past years has been lost in the process is a small tragedy of its own.”

Min Rozhanharad had, for the past several years, been putting together what she called a ‘photographic map’, an enormous art piece with tiny photographs of storefronts and other landmarks pasted together to create a snapshot of the city of Cairado as it never existed, images of new construction beside tenement blocks torn down decades earlier. Those earlier images had all been developed from the negatives housed within the CRK, carefully absented of any living forms. After the flood, Rozhanharad was forced to rely on much older unfaced cinematography and modern images to finish her masterwork, leaving a gap in the visual record of much of Edrehasivar IX’s reign for the neighborhoods which remained.

Despite their names, revethorai kinoi are not real cemeteries attended to by clerics or prelates of Ulis; rather, making use of a legal loophole intended to protect well-meaning but untrained rural folk who have performed burials without the guidance of a prelate, should a ghoul later rise from the grave they have dug, the CRK and other establishments of its kind are the film industry’s effort to keep the prelacy out of their business.

Tended to by a rotating cast of poorly paid teenagers, often as an entry-level position for those seeking work behind the kamera, shifts at the Cairad’revethora Kinoi were performed by a single individual, lasted for six to twelve hours at a time, and mostly involved sitting at a desk in the antechamber. One did not seek to make a career out of attending a filmgrave, but it was surely preferable to manufactory work. As the name suggests, the Cairad’revethora Kinoi was a graveyard of sorts: it had been hallowed by prayer with the intention to inter the non-living vessel of a soul (sam’acoïphaïs) beneath a layer of earth, the site of the burial marked with the full and true name—to the best of one’s knowledge—of that soul engraved, carved, or etched upon a surface that would not decay. This is the first of several stages in the processing of elven dead, called reveth’osrel.

The funerary practices of the elves are many and varied across a multitude of sects under the banner of the Dachenmeire and prelacy, but they are always a complicated, multi-step endeavor which seeks to satisfy an assortment of religious and practical concerns. Dead elves rest uneasily: in the Elflands, stillborn infants drain the lives of their mothers, monstrously transformed corpses called ghouls rise from the grave to devour living flesh, and a ritual can bind the soul of a suicide to a space to stand guard forever. It should come as no surprise, then, when Ulis is the god not only of death and dreams but also mirrors, that the kamera, which (in perhaps oversimplified terms) preserves its inner mirror’s ephemeral gaze in a legion of unchanging, undying stills, occupies a fraught position in the cultural landscape of the Dakhenbarizheise Commonwealth.

It is a common belief among the elves that the reflection of a person on a photo-plate or a strip of film traps a piece of their soul, which can in turn become a haunting much like that of a stillbirth. Liveäda revethmireän, usually called ‘photograph syndrome’ in Pencharn and the Veriarol (though its literal meaning is closer to ‘imprisoned death syndrome’), is thought to be a sort of wasting disease, and continues to be diagnosed even today in the Elflands by medical doctors and Csaiveise clerics alike.

To an outsider, this may seem a strange belief, but it is worth remembering that elves of all three of the traditionally-recognized races are perfectly colorless in all but their eyes, which have barely visible whites. A Pencharneise individual will not see a perfect recreation of herself in a black-and-white photograph such as the earliest kameras were capable of taking, but rather an imperfect rendering, more like a translation. Elves, by contrast, were met with their own faces exactly, except where eyes of blue, green, red, or so on ought to be.

The effect must have been alarming—and the reality is that, while there are perfectly mundane explanations for the rate at which many early photographers and kinemeisei fell ill (certainly the assortment of toxic chemicals those who worked with the film directly were in contact with did them no favors), the Dakhenbarizheise film industry was born to nations in a crisis of faith as much as identity, and the choice by the newly independent Thu-Athamar to scale back its monetary and logistical support of the prelacy—which Athmuranar I Zhas called “the rotten pith of our nation’s most backwards superstitions and our most shameless perjury”²—led within the decade to ravenous undead in the streets of cities whose cemeteries could no longer be adequately maintained. The elves have good reason to tread cautiously where the dead are concerned, and to many of them, to capture someone on film is to make corpse after corpse in silver nitrate.

 

In the penultimate year of Varenechibel IV’s reign, assistant seamstress Lenu Naradezho lost her husband, her sister, and all three of her children in a house fire. Naradezho and her family lived on the third floor of a four-story manor house, which they shared with three other families. After the second floor apartment’s coin-operated gas stove malfunctioned, remaining on well after its timer should have run its course, all it took was a single match to utterly destroy the entire building, as well as all within it. Had Naradezho not left early that morning to fetch the first fruit of the season from the grocer, she would have perished in the same event.

The ensuing legal battle did little to soothe Naradezho’s grief; the landlord was the youngest adult son of a very old, very influential house of Zhaö, and his connections to the district’s judicial court proved numerous. The Virvan’theileian, still supping on the fruits of the concurrently flourishing Varedeise dynasty, did not find fault in the landlord’s poor upkeep of the property, but instead in the inattentiveness of the tenants of the second floor apartment. By the time the case closed, Naradezho had nothing but the goodwill of her husband’s family to support her.

The extent of that goodwill amounted to little more than a bedsit deeper into the city and a mending job with a local pawnbroker. Naradezho struggled to make new connections outside her employer, often hiding in the back of the shop to avoid any requests that she handle customers. Instead of friends, she took comfort in the nearby municipal ulimeirei and became a regular parishioner to multiple prelates.

Her life continued in this fashion for several years with hardly any interruption: breakfast, work, visit a ulimeire, dinner, perhaps visit a second ulimeire, sleep, repeat. Then, nearly ten years after the incident of her loss, Naradezho underwent another tragedy.

On a bright, warm day in early autumn, Naradezho brought her work outside. Several new gowns had entered the shop, many of which had spent the last lifetime in a dusty attic and needed a good wash. The pawn shop was one of several buildings which shared a common, fenced-off alleyway. On nicer days, the alleyway was the preferable location for tasks that could involve spills. It was outdoors and it was private; in theory, the only way to access the alley was by exiting one of the attached establishments through a back door. Unfortunately, a skirmish between disorderly bargoers the night before had left one section of the fence battered, which allowed the third production unit of the Malazhar Screen Company to sneak through.

The name of the Malazhar Screen Company’s second film was kept private during the filming period. For reasons that will soon be apparent, this name was never revealed. Instead, those who worked on the production referred to the project as ‘MSC2’.

MSC1, more commonly known as Affect of Dusk (9 E’has VII), had been cobbled together in the excitement of Thu-Athamareise kameras and projektors first making it over the border. According to retrospective reviews, there was not necessarily a need for Affect to be any good; it was first, and that was enough.³

A year later, MSC2 carried no such privilege. Holiris and Sudaret Malazhar, the brothers who owned and operated the MSC, certainly felt the shift in expectations; rather than spending their profits from Affect straight away, they invested most of their earnings into new equipment, a new studio, and a quartet of six-man production units. Unfortunately, none of these were able to make up for the immense gap between Sudaret’s artistic vision and the reality of what could be accomplished with the technology of the day.

To make matters worse, locations had been left unscouted, actors’s schedules only cross-referenced after casting, and little consideration had been given to how the shift in seasons might affect either of those things. The brothers soon discovered it does not matter how many production units one hires, nor how competent they may be. Rain is rain, and the weather cares very little for shooting schedules.

Such was the case on the day when the third production unit found themselves slipping into a fenced-off yard at the heart of Zhaö. The previous day’s shoot had been interrupted by a rainstorm, and the brothers Malazhar had not thought to reserve a second day of filming rights on location. With their deadline growing closer and their actors more annoyed, an empty alleyway seemed a remarkable stroke of luck.

Naradezho did not realise that she was being filmed until far too late. Strange things often happened in the alleyway, even in full daylight. So long as they did not threaten her, or worse, interrupt her task, there was no reason to concern herself with the goings-on of strangers. She kept her eyes on her work and her hands in the washbasin. Were it not for the Assistant Director, who received a reminder from the Script Supervisor that it could be difficult to edit for continuity with an unscripted washerwoman in the background, Naradezho may not have ever known.

Upon learning that she had been filmed, Naradezho did not visibly panic. She simply cleaned up her work and walked off. Once inside, she stored the wet garments in the back room, informed her employer that she had fallen ill, and then began the half-hour long trek to her most-frequented ulimeire.

 

The initial complaint took three days to form. Naradezho struggled to assemble it on her own. In fact, she struggled to describe what had happened to her at all. At the suggestion of the head prelate, Othala Neret Csoronar, she did not return to her apartment by the pawn shop. Instead, she stayed the night at the ulimeire, where she took the junior prelates’s extra cot.

Having run the Flax Street ulimeire for the last seven years, Othala Csoronar knew well Merrem Naradezho wanted nothing more than to join the rest of her family with Ulis, and that she was only alive under duress. Her husband’s family, having inherited responsibility for her, had thus far kept her alive by threatening to cremate her body and throw her ashes in the Istandaärtha. If she wanted to be buried with her husband and daughters—and she did—she would have to let the course of time decide the circumstances of her death. But now she had been caught in the kamera’s eye, and she was not certain she could ever be with her family again.

The Malazhar Screen Company did not receive Naradezho’s complaint—penned with Othala Csoronar’s assistance—easily. The only solution to Merrem Naradezho’s troubles was to burn the footage and submit it to the appropriate rites. Irreligious and overspent on both money and time, the brothers Malazhar believed an entire day of reshoots would upset the project entirely. They rejected the request outright.

 

The preliminary business of the case was resolved with haste and efficiency. The MSC filed for an additional, more specific Witness for the third production unit, but could not prove that the case warranted the additional Witness. Upon arriving at the eshen’theileian that morning, both parties took their seats on decidedly opposite ends of the room: Othala Csoronar and Merrem Naradezho on the right, the brothers and their production unit on the left. At the very center of the room sat the esteemed Lord Justiciar Terena Chanovar, who prided himself on his history of nonpartisan rulings.

At the start of the day, the Witness for the Photographed was presented with a choice between opening the case or closing it. The Witness, Osmer Eschu Selinar, chose the latter. Mer Hana Chenekhar, the Witness for the MSC, apparently preferred this order as well.

He began with an impassioned account of the brothers’ circumstances: their determination to fortify the city’s economy with new industry, their refusal to concede to conditions beyond their direct control. Furthermore, he argued, the incident could have been avoided entirely, had Merrem Naradezho noticed the production unit sooner.

It was then time for Selinar’s account. Unlike Chenekhar, Selinar avoided leaning too heavily on expressions of Naradezho’s virtue. He kept his review of her circumstances—of the fire that took her entire family in a single morning, of how her husband’s relatives threatened to misplace her remains—short and simple. In truth, the events needed no embellishment to convey their horror.

This question provoked a period of quiet consideration from Lord Chanovar. Chenekhar broke the silence with a point of inquiry: what proof did Selinar have that the photographic capture of fully obstructed individuals was, in fact, in contempt of Ulis’ dominion over reflections? It was at this point that Lord Chanovar announced that business was done for the day. All were instructed to return in two days’ time.

In the Varedeise dynasty, such a question would have devastated a case that already relied so heavily on hypotheticals, especially in a city as southwards as Zhaö. Perhaps Chenekhar expected Selinar to return with various descriptions of photograph syndrome, which Chenekhar could then dismiss as a collection of unrelated ailments drawn into an excessively singular diagnosis. What Selinar brought instead was a collection of fabrics.

Some were thick and obfuscate. Others were more diaphanous. Each was large enough to reasonably cover an adult from view. Selinar began by draping the thinnest fabric over one of the Lord Judiciar’s secretaries.

Selinar then proceeded to switch through five more fabrics, the visibility of the figure decreasing with each new material. Though some raised their hands as early as the fourth, all hands were raised by the sixth.

Selinar provided the covered secretary with a small lamp. Even beneath the heavy draping, the secretary’s silhouette was clear enough.

The session concluded with no final judgment. Instead, the Lord Justiciar determined that it was at last time to assign a Witness for the Ulistheileian. Future debate would be paused until after Winternight, giving all Witnesses another two weeks with which to further familiarize themselves with their assignments.

Meanwhile, production for the unnamed film had stalled for so long that if it ever did resume, the entire project demanded recasting, reshooting, and possibly even rewriting. After months spent renegotiating Merrem Naradezho’s circumstances, the brothers Malazhar ultimately relented, and shortly after Winternight, Othala Csoronar performed a funeral for the developed negatives, as well as the few printings used to review the details of Naradezho’s case. The service, paid for directly from Malazhadeise household funds, took place about half an hour before sunset.

In the Elven judicial tradition, a case which has the potential to set a legal precedent is not permitted to de-escalate to a settlement. As such, when business returned to the eshen’theileian, the tone of the case had shifted remarkably. There was no acknowledgment of the conclusion reached by the original petitioners and respondent. In the eyes of the law, no conclusion had been reached. Instead, the room’s focus quickly centered on better defining the concept of what it meant to be ‘on kamera’.

Certain scenarios were understood for the sake of argument as obvious detriments to the soul: a photo of a person’s reflection in a mirror, for instance, or a photo taken of another photograph (though whether the effect was additive or multiplicative remained undetermined). Other matters, such as the inherent differences of a person’s silhouette as opposed to his shadow cast upon a wall, stole sessions at a time.

After several weeks of remarkably little progress, the Witness for the Ulistheileian broke the established order of response with the following:

True to her duty, Min Havrizhin did return a week later, a copy of a deposition in her hand. After some argument from Osmer Selinar, who took umbrage with the identity of the petitioned Witness for reasons that have since been redacted from the court record, Min Havrizhin was permitted to present the deposition as evidence.

A break was called immediately.

Such a bold claim required more than just the depositions of Min Havrizhin and her unnamed Witness. When business resumed three days later, the assembled were joined by one Dezhu Athmaza. The elderly maza had fostered his specialty in name-magic over the course of decades, and was considered to be one of five or fewer masters of the art who remained. During the break, the three Witnesses had all agreed upon this specific maza, as he was the likeliest candidate to get a truly accurate result.

Unlike the maza who had previously assisted Havrizhin, Dezhu Athmaza was told only the name of the missing man; he knew nothing of the case itself, nor even that the man in question was dead. Upon receiving the name, he marked it on a slip of ribbon, then placed that ribbon in a censer with a collection of herbs. He moved the censer in a circle until its contents ignited. The smoke led him across the room and to the very cabinet where Lord Chanovar had hidden the photograph.

The resulting debate spanned the final two weeks of the proceedings. Unbeknownst to the Witnesses, the Lord Justiciar had received notice that the emperor himself, Edrehasivar VII Zhas, was now aware of the case. Somewhere in the pews of the eshen’theileian, a carefully-planted agent of the Drazhada (most likely a courier; it was in Edrehasivar’s reign the courier fleet’s potential as a surveillance apparatus was fully realized⁶) was now taking detailed notes.

The fifteen-minute recess did allow Mer Chenekhar to regain himself. Before the end of business that day, all agreed to call for another Witness vel ama for the Dead.

Ulvera Ivranezh’s swift arrival marked the tail end of the trial. He arrived, touched the photograph, and confirmed that the soul of the deceased was present within it. It was Ivranezh’s belief, in fact, that the deceased was at least somewhat aware that he was trapped. Once more, Chanovar ended the day’s session and allowed all present to take some time at home.

Whether or not one believed that these Witnesses vel ama truly spoke to the dead, the elven judicial tradition accepted the statements of such Witnesses as valid evidence, and in any case, Dezhu Athmaza’s censer, whose arc did not need to be taken on faith, lent Osmer Selinar’s concerns some legitimacy even to the most skeptical. His proposed scenario of the family inside the photographed house now seemed a very dangerous one, for the soul and the future of film alike. The final test was obvious, and Chenekhar offered himself up as its subject.

Taking up a mourning veil—thought to protect those with close connections to the recently-dead from Ulis’ gaze—he submitted to be photographed in the eshen’theileian. This was the least one could do to protect oneself from the kamera’s eye; were Dezhu Athmaza able to find Chenekhar’s name in the photograph, they would then photograph him behind a screen, a panel of wood, a brick wall… Each would deal a wound to Chenekhar’s very soul, and the Ulineisei could not assure that the burning and burial of the negatives would be enough to heal the damage, or if it would only allow him to move on at all.

 

When Dezhu Athmaza returned, his censer led him not to the photograph of Mer Chenekhar at the stand, but to the pew in the back of the room where Chenekhar himself sat in waiting.

Further argument was not deemed necessary; Lord Chanovar ruled that Merrem Naradezho had been done a grave violence, and that the brothers Malazhar would be subject to punishment. Both would face a prison sentence of two years, a moderate fine, and—for the sake of the souls of the actors—an order to burn every last bit of footage gathered for the doomed production of MSC2.

Additionally, Lord Chanovar would write a letter to the Prince of Thu-Cethor, revealing what was discovered in the trial and suggesting that immediate action be taken to protect the principality’s people. The diaries of Csethiro Zhasan reveal that a second, hand-written copy of the same letter arrived at Edrehasivar’s door, though she did not specify whether this was the work of a courier or of Lord Chanovar himself.

New laws passed within days. Nonconsensual photography was now banned in the principality of Thu-Cethor, requiring those who wished to be photographed or filmed to sign elaborate consent forms. Photography of children under the age of thirteen was banned altogether: while the age of majority was sixteen at the time, thirteen was the age at which elven children were traditionally considered competent to make oaths and be inducted into the prelacy as a novice. If a child was old enough to knowingly dedicate themself to a god, then, it was argued, they were old enough to knowingly consign themself away from one.

Additionally, the copying or distribution of all film and photography depicting a living soul, consensual or otherwise, was banned altogether. So long as the proper paperwork was done, a man and his wife could make and keep photographs of one another, and in theory a cinema studio could produce a unicum of a film for their exclusive performance, but the capacity to consent to filming necessitated the right to revoke that consent and have the negatives laid to rest—functionally tolling the revethahal of what we now call ‘faced cinema’.

These and similar laws which soon followed in other principalities remained in effect, unaltered, for the duration of Edrehasivar VII’s reign, the reign of his son, and the Csevaise Regency period, until an imperial edict of Edrehasivar IX decriminalized distribution at the federal level. At the time of writing, parents can be imprisoned for innocent photographs of their children, and consent forms remain a necessary part of a film’s production. In other parts of the world, actors and actresses are enviable: who wouldn’t want to be on screen? In the Elflands, however, the cinema-stage is home to the beautiful desperate, those we are willing to sacrifice for the kamera’s hungry gaze.

—

1 For an in-depth discussion of the obvious legal question which follows—namely, what is to be done with film depicting multiple individuals in a single frame—see “Harakhvhesin erevethor osrel sam’acoïphaïs ada kinemeise” in Cairado Legal Reader vol. 29, no. 3 (16 E’has VII).

2 This is no doubt an allusion to the Witness vel ama for the Dead Thara Celehar, whose testimony on behalf of the ghost of a dragon was instrumental in securing a guilty verdict from the Ethuverazhid Zhas in the case which ultimately led to the secession of Thu-Athamar.

3 For further insight into Zhaö’s four pre-ban films, including Affect of Dusk, see Ulera Levrethar’s Hidden Opinions, in which he has compiled a selection of reviews from the era’s underground news bulletins.

4 The term Khevetha Ulverazha, ‘Witness for the Dead’, is simple enough to translate (though some of the finer implications are inevitably lost), but ‘vel ama’ is significantly more difficult, and so it is typically left in the original Ethuverazhin. Very literally, it could be understood as ‘one who understands the voiceless’, or even ‘…the powerless’ (the word comes from the same root as maz, magic), but Witnesses vel ama may represent the dead, the land, the emperor, and more. While most are clerical Witnesses, some Witnesses vel ama devoted to Csetheio Caireizhasan, the goddess of wisdom and clear sight—including any would-be Witness for the Emperor—are members of the Judiciary.

5 Before Theris Solchenar’s famous photograph A Ghoul on General Shulivar Street (13 E’has VII) made its way across the border from Thu-Athamar—sparking a fascinating court case of its own, for a treatment of which one should see Palevezhen’s monograph of the same title—many people had come to think of ghouls as an old superstition or fairy-story.

6 While in the Varedeise period there were several cases of individual couriers bribed or blackmailed into ‘losing’ or secretly reading important correspondence, this was always in the context of some particular feud, and rarely took place with any evidence of direct imperial awareness, never mind approval. Under Edrehasivar VII, whose personal secretary Csevet Aisava began his career in the courier fleet, it became safe to assume that any missive sent by courier would have its contents reported directly to Mer Aisava—and so would any gossip the household servants passed along to their visitor.