screen: a dirt path by the side of a road sped past, presumably shot through the window of a moving vehicle. There were trees and people walking along the tamped red earth, women in sweaters and flowered dresses with plastic bags swinging from their hands; a man in a suit came close then vanished; a flock of goats or sheep skittered from the road into the comfort of a ditch; a barefoot boy trudged behind a wooden wheelbarrow; voices outside brayed and were whipped away like flags while voices from within the car mumbled and fluttered. The footage felt real because it was raw.
This is our first full day, Juliet said. We’re on our way to the circus compound. Where they rehearse? We saw them perform the first night we arrived, in a field outside the Italian embassy, but you’ve seen them perform so I decided not to show you that.
A donkey trotted along, skinny poles of wood lashed to its sides; a gas station appeared on the right as the car made a sharp turn to the left and scrunched to a stop on dirt and stones. Whoever was holding the camera climbed from the car, footsteps crunching as the view lurched across more scrubby trees and the dusty yellow planes of the car, before rising up the length of a wooden pole at the top of which the cut-out wooden figure of a boy balanced on his hands, legs in the air. His unitard was painted pink, his body red-brown, a splash of black hair daubed atop his head.
Did you get hold of your assistant? Sara asked.
Juliet muted the sound as the car and its passengers jolted up a steep hill, stones projecting from the craterous red dirt, a scrim of trees bouncing outside the car window.
Justin was totally shocked. He spent more time hanging out with the performers than I did, the older ones. But they didn’t speak much English and mostly they were goofing around or trying to teach him to juggle or playing soccer. He said he didn’t notice anything. They didn’t seem upset. They didn’t talk to him about Raymond.
On the screen, at the top of the hillside, where the land levelled into a flat parking area, a white pickup truck, coated in a skin of red dirt, was parked alongside a couple of older, smaller cars. Light glinted off the windshields. Across a hummocky expanse of dirt and grass rose two yellowish single-storey buildings, a fringe of trees beyond them, and on the ground, in front of the buildings, moved a clump of human figures, all of them small, maquette-sized.
Everything felt compressed and intense and mostly we were going crazy trying to make the film, Juliet said.
Something Sara had seen previously, in a photograph, sprang to life: older boys in pink leotards with ribbons dangling from them tossed juggling pins and wandered around the perimeter of a brown square of tarpaulin spread on the ground. A scrim of blue canvas was mounted behind them. A lean, olive-complexioned man in a khaki vest stepped back from a tripod-mounted camera as a human pyramid of girls in white outfits dismantled itself; the girl at the top, whose feet had waved alongside her ears, unwound first one leg then the other in a graceful arc, her feet resting briefly on the torso of the girl beneath her before she jumped free. So at ease in her body, seemingly at ease, even languid. And so extraordinarily flexible. Raymond Renaud, red ball cap on his head, sunglasses shielding his eyes, turned, separated himself from the children and the photographer, and waved.
The photographer’s name is Paolo Sabatini, Italian but shooting for a Dutch magazine, Juliet said, and he was only there for a couple of days. There was an Italian sociologist studying the circus, but he didn’t really interact with anyone, just sat around taking notes, so I don’t know how much use he’d be. There were always people around, always people observing him. Apart from when we interviewed him and once when we went out to dinner, I don’t think I ever saw him alone. And he let me film what I wanted, where and when I wanted.
Can
This is our first full day, Juliet said. We’re on our way to the circus compound. Where they rehearse? We saw them perform the first night we arrived, in a field outside the Italian embassy, but you’ve seen them perform so I decided not to show you that.
A donkey trotted along, skinny poles of wood lashed to its sides; a gas station appeared on the right as the car made a sharp turn to the left and scrunched to a stop on dirt and stones. Whoever was holding the camera climbed from the car, footsteps crunching as the view lurched across more scrubby trees and the dusty yellow planes of the car, before rising up the length of a wooden pole at the top of which the cut-out wooden figure of a boy balanced on his hands, legs in the air. His unitard was painted pink, his body red-brown, a splash of black hair daubed atop his head.
Did you get hold of your assistant? Sara asked.
Juliet muted the sound as the car and its passengers jolted up a steep hill, stones projecting from the craterous red dirt, a scrim of trees bouncing outside the car window.
Justin was totally shocked. He spent more time hanging out with the performers than I did, the older ones. But they didn’t speak much English and mostly they were goofing around or trying to teach him to juggle or playing soccer. He said he didn’t notice anything. They didn’t seem upset. They didn’t talk to him about Raymond.
On the screen, at the top of the hillside, where the land levelled into a flat parking area, a white pickup truck, coated in a skin of red dirt, was parked alongside a couple of older, smaller cars. Light glinted off the windshields. Across a hummocky expanse of dirt and grass rose two yellowish single-storey buildings, a fringe of trees beyond them, and on the ground, in front of the buildings, moved a clump of human figures, all of them small, maquette-sized.
Everything felt compressed and intense and mostly we were going crazy trying to make the film, Juliet said.
Something Sara had seen previously, in a photograph, sprang to life: older boys in pink leotards with ribbons dangling from them tossed juggling pins and wandered around the perimeter of a brown square of tarpaulin spread on the ground. A scrim of blue canvas was mounted behind them. A lean, olive-complexioned man in a khaki vest stepped back from a tripod-mounted camera as a human pyramid of girls in white outfits dismantled itself; the girl at the top, whose feet had waved alongside her ears, unwound first one leg then the other in a graceful arc, her feet resting briefly on the torso of the girl beneath her before she jumped free. So at ease in her body, seemingly at ease, even languid. And so extraordinarily flexible. Raymond Renaud, red ball cap on his head, sunglasses shielding his eyes, turned, separated himself from the children and the photographer, and waved.
The photographer’s name is Paolo Sabatini, Italian but shooting for a Dutch magazine, Juliet said, and he was only there for a couple of days. There was an Italian sociologist studying the circus, but he didn’t really interact with anyone, just sat around taking notes, so I don’t know how much use he’d be. There were always people around, always people observing him. Apart from when we interviewed him and once when we went out to dinner, I don’t think I ever saw him alone. And he let me film what I wanted, where and when I wanted.
Can
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