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Nice neighborhood. Konkowsky
died in it.
Strandvägen, in the film
director’s Stockholm suburb of North Djurgården, was not a tree-lined street, but a
house-lined forest. Nothing is more natural in a forest than a forest fire,
and last year’s Great Fire of Stockholm got its start only a few doors
away.
I say “doors,”
but here no doors remain: no doors, no ceilings, no walls. Even windows
melted away like sheets of ice. There are only brick stairs to nowhere,
birdbaths, and chimneys that rise like exclamation points from the sentence
fragments beneath them.
It was a fire that swung
from the trees like a great ape. It was a fire that
alighted on seven thousand rooftops. It was a fire that cost the life of a
sixty-twoyear- old film director who stood five-foot-three in his boots and
weighed one hundred and eighty pounds without them.
Konkowsky had always labored
under the weight of a paranoia that his films would be altered. The release
of the colorized Battleship
Potemkin was, for him, the last straw, and he boarded an SAS
red-eye flight to Los
Angeles
to stage a protest at the premiere. Beneath the shafts of searchlights
dueling in the smog-milky night air, before the winking orientalia of
Mann’s Chinese Theatre, beside the tongue of red carpet licking up
celebrities from limousines arriving at the curb of Hollywood Boulevard, the
squat, bearded, wild-eyed, un-plastic-surgered director planted one boot in
Hedy Lamarr’s right footprint and his other in Myrna Loy’s left.
There Konkowsky tore his contract with Svenskfilmindustri into very small
pieces and announced to a flabbergasted press corps that he would never work
again.
When several of its most
influential directors threatened to follow suit, the
Swedish film organization relented: if Konkowsky paid to double the insurance
on his films and to construct a modern storage facility, Svenskfilmindustri
would turn over to his custody every negative and every print of each of his
films. So it was that the Fichet Lock Company came to North Djurgården and installed in the basement of
Konkowsky’s home a bank vault with nine-inch-thick insulated walls and
a 2½-ton door — a fortress guaranteed steadfast to the improbable level
of twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
But Konkowsky hadn’t
reckoned on anything like the Great Fire of Stockholm — and
temperatures that reached two thousand degrees. When the director perished,
his films — Music,
Death, Malmö, Infra-Red; all his films,
all copies of them — perished with him.
There is a skeleton in
Konkowsky’s closet, and it is Konkowsky. Or was
Konkowsky. Or was presumably Konkowsky. We know only that the ashes found in
Konkowsky’s basement vault are the remains of an adult male Homo
sapiens who died with a garden shovel in his hands.
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