The Seventh Reel

Three timelines. One question: what is the consciousness that looks out through human eyes - and what happens when three artist tries to show it?In 1176, a young Viennese scholar walks the Silk Road to its end and finds himself in a Buddhist monastery on Mount Koya, Japan. He has come seeking the source of creation itself - not ritual, not doctrine, not the abbot's carefully administered dogma, but the living awareness that dreams all of it into being. When words fail him he takes up a brush. What he paints onto the scroll is not symbol or scripture. It is vision itself - raw, direct, ungovernable. His abbot exiles him for it. The scroll survives them both.In 1926, Victor Hartmann flees Berlin with his cello and Einstein's quiet warning. In Hollywood he finds his way to Chaplin, unrolls the scroll on his desk, and encourages him to make a film. The seventh reel goes further than anything the studios will allow. The studio bury it and destroy the man. The seventh reel along with the scroll goes into a wall.In 1972, cinematographer Jack Mercer finds it there. What follows draws in a director, a screenwriter with an Oscar and no illusions, and finally Orson Welles - a man who has spent decades being suppressed by the same machinery - reading Oscar winning screenwriter Edward Anhalt's narration aloud at a restaurant on La Cienega, that exhilarating voice filling the room. A man destroyed for making art, narrated by another man destroyed for making art. There's a certain poetic justice in that.At the premiere, no one moved for many minutes.The Seventh Reel is a novel about what is transmitted when art refuses to look away - across centuries, from one searching human life to another. It does not explain awakening. It attempts to pass it forward. Read more