"Robert Charles Wilson - Julian- A Christmas Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

"There's always war."

"A new offensive."

"Well, what of it? Labrador's a million miles away."

"Obviously your sense of geography hasn't been much improved by Sam's classes. And we might be
physically a long distance from the front, but we're operationally far too close for comfort."

I didn't know what that meant, and so I dismissed it. "We can worry about that after the movie,
Julian."

He forced a grin and said, "Yes, I suppose so. As well after as before."

So we entered the Dominion Hall just as the lamps were being dimmed, and slouched into the last
row of crowded pews, and waited for the show to start.

There was a broad stage at the front of the Hall, from which all religious appurtenances had been
removed, and a square white screen had been erected in place of the usual pulpit or dais. On each side
of the screen was a kind of tent in which the two players sat, with their scripts and dramatic gear:
speaking-horns, bells, blocks, a drum, a pennywhistle, et alia. This was, Julian said, a stripped-down
edition of what one might find in a fashionable New York movie theater. In the city, the screen (and thus
the images projected on it) would be larger; the players would be more professional, since script-reading
and noise-making were considered fashionable arts, and the city players competed with one another for
roles; and there might be a third player stationed behind the screen for dramatic narration or additional
"sound effects." There might even be an orchestra, with thematic music written for each individual
production.

Movies were devised in such a way that two main characters, male and female, could be voiced by
the players, with the male actor photographed so that he appeared on the left during dialogue scenes, and
the female actor on the right. The players would observe the movie by a system of mirrors, and could
follow scripts illuminated by a kind of binnacle lamp (so as not to cast a distracting light), and they spoke
their lines as the photographed actors spoke, so that their voices seemed to emanate from the screen.
Likewise, their drumming and bell-ringing and such corresponded to events within the movie.[5]

"Of course, they did it better in the secular era," Julian whispered, and I prayed no one had overheard
this indelicate comment. By all reports, movies had indeed been spectacular during the Efflorescence of
OilтАФwith recorded sound, natural color rather than black-and-gray, etc. But they were also (by the
same reports) hideously impious, blasphemous to the extreme, and routinely pornographic. Fortunately
(or unfortunately, from Julian's point of view) no examples have survived; the media on which they were
recorded was ephemeral; the film stock has long since rotted, and "digital" copies are degraded and
wholly undecodable. These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuriesтАФthat
period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth's reserves of
perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful
dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.

Our truest and best American antiquity, as the Dominion History of the Union insisted, was the
nineteenth century, whose household virtues and modest industries we have been forced by circumstance
to imperfectly restore, whose skills were practical, and whose literature was often useful and improving.