The tale had all the hallmarks of a baroque Paul Bowles short story, set among the remaindered possessions of Bowles himself: a film director gets a call from a stranger, who says he has stumbled across an original print of the filmmaker’s long-lost first film in a windowless Tangier apartment, coated in dust and insect powder. The director, Sara Driver, at first thought the call might be a joke, but for reasons almost as strange as fiction, she kept listening.
In the late 1970s she had fallen in love with a haunting 1948 Bowles story called
“You Are Not I,” about a young woman who escapes from an asylum, and decided she wanted to make a film of it. With no money for the rights and the thinnest of shoestrings to make the movie itself — a $12,000 budget, some of it supplied by her small salary at a copy shop — she forged ahead anyway. And before its well-received premiere at the
Public Theater in 1983, she shipped a print of the 48-minute black-and-white film, the first screen adaptation of one of Bowles’s stories, to his apartment in Tangier, Morocco, praying simply not to be sued.
“To my great relief, he liked it,” Ms. Driver recalled recently. “And not only that, but he wrote me back with a long, detailed critique of the film, saying, among other things, that he thought one woman overacted — which he was right about.”
Bowles’s agent granted the rights to Ms. Driver, and the movie — shot in six days near her parents’ house in western New Jersey, with an unlikely cast that included two friends, the writer
Luc Sante, little known at the time, and an equally unknown photographer, Nan Goldin — developed a following. The film was named one of the best movies of the 1980s by a critic in Cahiers du Cinéma.
But almost as quickly as it built a cult reputation, the film fell from view, the victim of a leak in a New Jersey warehouse that destroyed Ms. Driver’s negative. That left her with only one film-festival print so battered that it would barely run through a projector. When museums and art house theaters called over the years asking to show it, she would turn them down, not wanting the film to be seen in such bad shape.
“Every time I’d get back to someone and tell them, my heart would just sink,” said Ms. Driver, now 54 and the director of three other films.
The film’s story might have ended there, but two years ago a film librarian from the
University of Delaware, one of the most important repositories of Bowles’s papers, traveled to Morocco to speak at a conference. While in Tangier, the librarian, Francis Poole, who knew Bowles well during the last years of his life, was contacted by Abdelouahed Boulaich, Bowles’s longtime butler and his heir, who after Bowles’s death in 1999 had helped to secure many of his papers. Mr. Boulaich told Mr. Poole that he still had a few of the writer’s things and asked if he wanted to see them. The two took a taxi from Mr. Poole’s hotel to an empty house owned by Mr. Boulaich, who unlocked a door to a small ground-floor salon that smelled as if it had been closed for years.
With a small flashlight and a digital camera, Mr. Poole set about documenting the room’s contents, which included piles of letters and books and two manual Olympic typewriters, one long used by Paul Bowles and the other by his wife, Jane. Below them on a bookcase sat a film box with two reels inside; the label was faded except for a New York return address visible beneath the dust and insecticide.
“For a second I felt like I was in one of the bug powder scenes from
David Cronenberg’s film of William Burroughs’s novel ‘Naked Lunch,’ ” Mr. Poole said. “There were even letters from Burroughs to Paul Bowles scattered around. And some of those had insecticide on them.”
The University of Delaware acquired the contents of the room from Mr. Boulaich, and Mr. Poole and Tim Murray, who oversees the special collections of the university’s library, returned in 2008 and 2009 to box them all up. Mr. Poole still had no idea what was on the film reels, and he acknowledged that he almost decided to leave them. But he put the film box in his carry-on bag and took it to Delaware, where he watched the 16-millimeter reels for the first time — grimy but miraculously, given the humid storage conditions, in good shape — and realized what he had found.
“It was like stumbling upon some kind of treasure in an archaeological dig,” he said. “I wasn’t there thinking I was going to find a lost film. I must say it’s been a once-in-a-lifetime bizarre experience for me.”
For Ms. Driver, the film’s rediscovery has been like opening a time capsule of the No Wave independent-film scene, which flourished in New York in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It included directors like
Jim Jarmusch (Ms. Driver’s longtime romantic partner and the cinematographer and co-writer for “You Are Not I”), Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, Bette Gordon,
Susan Seidelman (
“Desperately Seeking Susan”) and even
Kathryn Bigelow, of
“The Hurt Locker” fame, who made her first short in New York in 1978 (featuring the odd pairing of Gary Busey and the French semiotician Sylvère Lotringer).
It was a tiny film world where favors and friendships often stood in for the money no one had. Mr. Sante recalled that his role in “You Are Not I” required him to be able to drive, which he could not.
“I just needed to go across a parking lot in one scene, and I thought, ‘O.K., I can handle this,’ ” he said. “And I managed to run into a garbage can, which was the only other thing in the parking lot.” (A volunteer body double was recruited.)
The unearthed print of the film, which will remain in the University of Delaware collection, has been completely cleaned and restored. A digital copy has been created, which was used to screen “You Are Not I” for the first time in almost 20 years, at the Reykjavik International Film Festival in Iceland in September and last month at the Portuguese Cinémathèque in Lisbon, where the film first played during its initial run in the early 1980s. Ms. Driver is now applying for grants to help her produce a corrected negative and additional prints.
She said she had been overjoyed to have an important part of her past back, though she pointed out that, technically, “You Are Not I” was not her first film. “I made a little student short before it that was about Troilus and Cressida, and all the dialogue in it was in Middle English,” she said, adding, “That one I don’t think anyone’s ever going to see again.”
