Cinema verité

I’d been meaning to do a little write-up on French movie-houses for some time. But with so many things to write about (The cinemas themselves – so numerous and clean! The seats – so comfortable! The popcorn – so not available! The screens – so tiny!) I could not choose but one.

Until I learned about the Star Killer.

The Star Cinema is one of the smaller theaters in town. We don’t go to it too often - it seems to get the less prestigious and/or popular releases of the smaller cinemas on the island.

It is distinguished, however, by it's key role in one of Strasbourg’s most infamous crimes.

Roland Moog was a projectionist in the theatre in 1995. He was dating (or married to) Carole Prin, a cashier at the same theatre. Carole was 8 months pregnant with Roland’s child in May. One night, she called him at work – the baby was coming now. Roland told her to call a cab and go to the maternity hospital, and he would rush there to be by her side. Within minutes, he was at the hospital – but Carole was not. She never showed up.

A massive search was launched, but Carole had disappeared. Given her condition, no one believed that she had simply run away, and suspicion turned to Roland. Though Carole’s body had not been found, he was incarcerated in 1998.

It was not until 1999, when Roland’s twin brother, cleaning out his brother’s garage, came across an old trunk. Opening it, he found Carole’s corpse, together with that of her unborn child.

Brought up for a new trial, Roland tried to claim the death was an accident. Carole had not believed her beau was taking the responsibility that would come with their new child seriously. To prove his seriousness, the projectionist began to devote himself to restoring an old armoire in the basement of the Star Cinema where they both worked. Carole, he explained, misunderstood his project, and threatened to destroy the antique during an argument in the basement. During the struggle, she was killed.

Roland disarticulated her body, wrapped it in garbage bags, and locked it in the self-same trunk, hiding it in the basement of the theatre.

In a film noire twist, Strasbourgeois cinemaphiles blithely enjoyed such contemporary films as I Know What You Did Last Summer, Most Wanted, and Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag, for three years, never knowing that the man sweating in the booth behind them had hidden a terrible secret under their very feet. With the police closing in, he eventually moved Carole’s body his home where it was eventually discovered.

He was sentenced to 25 years in a maximum security prison, Today, he runs the Cinema Appreciation Club for his fellow inmates.

Rock walk

_{Misty mountains}

Boy, my blog production really has slowed down of late, hasn’t? Well, this marks my 200th post. Significantly, it also marks my third wedding anniversary*. Coincidence? I think think so.

In any case, I’ve been more than a little swamped in the last few days. Sadly, this has not been of the traveling-Europe-having-zany-adventures kind of swamped, but more of the why-is-it-all-my-freelance-clients-give-me-assignments-at-the-same-time-it-must-be-a-conspiracy kind of swamped. So why am I writing here about this, instead of, say, nuclear physics? Because I love you, that’s why.**

I did manage to escape my office and increasingly wonky laptop long enough to take a hike this past Sunday. Now that Sami the Finn has returned to the land of Frozen Monosyllabic Angst-sters in the North, Amynah and I find ourselves hiking with, unexpectedly, Amynah’s boss Brigitte***, and her husband Alain.


_{Amynah and Brigitte, on one of the less perilous sections}

They chose a hike in the southern Vosges that translates roughly as “The Trail of the Rocks.” Having seen photos of the trail on-line, I had assumed that this name referred to the views it affords hikers of the bare granite cliffs that loom over the Munster valley.

I was wrong.

Turns out that when the French call a trail “The Trail of Rocks” they really mean that the trail is made up of rocks. Lots of them, all sharp, and crazed angles and covered in wet, slippery leaves.

Alain explained that the trail was built in 1915. With my razor sharp grasp of history, I asked if the folks in the neighbourhood didn’t have more pressing things to do at the time than hacking trails out of cliffsides.


_{See that cliff? We had to climb that.}

“Ah, it was made by contrabandieres” explained Alain – men running illicit merchandise back and forth over the border between what was then the Kaiser’s Germany and wartime France. Given how much trouble I was having navigating the steep, rough ups and downs of the trail, I had to give those smugglers of yore, traversing this route while burdened with backpacks of blackmarket cheese or what-have-you, a tip of my hat. Or would have, had my hands not been otherwise occupied holding on for dear life.


_{Smugglers made this? I guess they have a more industrious breed of criminal around here}

*_{The leather anniversary, apparently. You do not want to contemplate my underpants right now, trust me.}

** _{In that needy, craving approval, writer-reader way.}

***_{Who, amusingly, complained all day that she was fatiguée from a dinner that had gone until 1AM the previous night. I'd have called her on it, had only I known the French word for hangover.}

More velocipedic villainy - and heroism!

I do not have good bicycle luck in France. Within three months of arriving in this country, I broke my arm, falling off my bike. Three months after that, said bike was stolen outright from my apartment building.

Earlier this year, my seat was stolen. And yesterday, I returned from picking up some quail's eggs for dinner, only to discover that my front wheel had been stolen. Replacing it will cost 50 Euros.

Attached to my front tire was a little magnet, without which the fancy odometer/speedometer thing my sister bought me last year cannot function. Even if I replace the wheel, I will still need that part. Not knowing where I could find one, I emailed the company,
VDO Cycle Computing in Germany, asking for information. Within an hour they had responded, promising to put one in the mail for me today - for free!

So, in return, I'm giving them a free ad - if you ever find yourself in need of a bike computer, VDO Cycle Computing is the way to go. I love mine: it's a basic model, yet still keeps track of trip distances, total distances, average speed, and time of journey. It's very easy to use, wonderful for motivation, and their customer service is great. In Canada, you can get them at Mountain Equipment Co-op.

Attica! Attica! Attica!

One of Strasbourg’s many attractions is the bewildering number of theatres they have here. There are four on the island alone and a megaplex twenty minutes away. The joy of this is that there is almost always something playing, either a new release or something older in one of the two repertory cinemas (two! Montreal, with ten times the population only had two that I was aware of).

Anyway, the other night Amynah and I went out to see Dog Day Afternoon, a classic from 1975 with Al Pacino. It was based on a true story of a New York bank robbery that went wrong, turning into a hostage situation.

What struck me, (and I’m sure I’m not the only person to make this observation) was the near total lack of music. Were this movie made today, every scene would have music cues telling the audience when to be tense, when to be uplifted, when to be amused.

Here, the suspense was kept up only by the actors and the audience’s understanding of the inevitable: you know they can’t get away with it, you know they know they can’t get away with it. The actors are sweaty, stumbling over their words, never say anything tough or witty sounding or Hollywood. Jangling, overloud telephones, long shots of chattering helicopters, blaring sirens and megaphones – those are the only sound cues, and it works.

* Amynah’s observation as we left the theatre: “People don’t really rob banks anymore, do they? Where are the Bonnie and Clydes today? It shows a lack of entrepreneurial spirit in the criminal class.”