Even now, as I look back, walking down the endless corridors, those halls, those galleries, I cannot say with certainty how it happened, much less exactly why. If I state it succinctly, boldly, shout it out like a histrionic radio talk-show caller, then maybe I’ll be emancipated from my otherwise-perpetual ruminations, freed from this labyrinth of the mind.

LAST YEAR I WAS BANNED FROM MONDO VIDEO.

I’m feeling better already.

*****

Let me explain. Mondo Video is my pseudonym for a particular New York City video store, a bohemian outpost famous for its amply endowed collection of foreign and cult films on VHS and DVD, precisely the mixture of high and low art essential to the cultural literacy of the postmodern consumer. Especially noteworthy is the store’s collection of hard-to-find, exploitation shockumentaries — “Banned in 36 countries!” — known among the illuminati as “Mondo” films. Films with titles like Mondo Cane, Mondo Freudo, Mondo Nudo, Mondo Topless, and Mondo New York, which purport to expose persons both primitive and modern participating in bizarre and shocking rituals ranging from cat fighting to castration to cannibalism. The Mondo films, in turn, spawned a host of ever-more extreme series culminating in the snuff-inspired Faces of Death, which features footage of alleged human and animal deaths narrated by an individual identified as Dr. Frances B. Gross. Nowadays, with mainstream media having gone Mondo, broadcasting violent atrocities on primetime television, perhaps the Mondo films have become passé. At Mondo Video, however, we prefer our violence the old-fashioned, B-movie way.

Thus it was that last year, while my girlfriend was away visiting her family in Mexico City, I appointed myself host of my own exploitation film festival, to be held in the privacy of my living room, and returned to the dingy, musty corridors of Mondo Video, filled from floor to ceiling with racks of VHS and DVD display boxes, all categorized in gory detail. Like a bibliophile lost among the millions of books in the majestic Beaux Arts reading room of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, I stood with my handwritten list of must-see films culled from a variety of eminent B-movie guides. After forty-five minutes, I made my final selections and went to the counter. It was manned, if you will, by what appeared to be a woman with a shaved head, wearing red, cat-eye contact lenses.

“Can I have, in DVD of course, Make Them Die Slowly, um, Faces of Death, Part IV — I loathe the other parts — and The Curious Dr. Hummp?”

She bore down at me suspiciously with those demonic feline eyes, as if telepathically receiving a message from my girlfriend in Mexico, and uttered, “You look familiar.” My body shrank ten inches as I became certain that I was standing before a female, albeit one who resembled Marilyn Manson, and I felt like the archetypal fourteen-year-old who asks the sweet old lady at an Amish country store for a copy of Hustler magazine. To camouflage my regression, I blurted out, “And, uh, Last Year at Marienbad,” hoping that the addition to my list of an art film would elevate my status above that of twitching psychopath.

“That’s dead on!” she shouted. “We were supposed to see that together. Years ago.”

After a moment’s hesitation, we simultaneously pointed to each other and, like winners at bingo, shouted in unison, “PERSONA!” From some cobwebbed corner of my own shaved skull, I vaguely recalled a blind date some years ago with a Columbia University performance studies student — let us call her “A” — at the Bleecker Street Cinema for a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.

“What did we do after Persona?” she now asked.

“Afterwards? We had a great time.”

“Did we?”

“NC-17.”

“Cool.”

She disappeared among the shelves of black boxes behind the counter to retrieve my DVDs. Actually, I had little recollection of our date or what transpired thereafter. I only remembered two things. The first was being completely befuddled — no, tortured — by Persona. The film’s premise seemed simple enough. An accomplished stage actress (Liv Ullmann) stops speaking and retreats to a seaside town with her nurse (Bibi Andersson). Although the film was beautifully photographed in black and white by the brilliant Sven Nykvist, what irritated me to the verge of a nervous breakdown were those damnable white subtitles. Whenever the background became flooded in white — wide shots of the sky or the sand beach, closeups of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson’s lovely faces, THOSE WHITE FACES — the subtitles, the words translated from Swedish into English, would vanish.

It was at this point in my life that I swore off subtitles permanently. Granted, it was a bad print of Persona I saw that night at the Bleecker Street Cinema, but subtitles are, at best, a necessary evil. Not only are they generally illegible and often grammatically incorrect, but they split one’s consciousness into two distinct components: the purely visual and the verbal. When I sit in a dark theater, I don’t want my attention divided between reading the screenplay and watching the images projected on a screen, especially when there’s nudity involved.

Don’t misunderstand me. I enjoy watching films from Spain and Latin America, because I understand Spanish and, therefore, I DON’T READ THE SUBTITLES. If I want to experience a foreign film in a language I don’t speak, I prefer that it be dubbed. Filmgoers in the United States are biased against movies that are dubbed, associating the process with badly synched and easily parodied films from Italy and Asian Kung Fu flicks. But dubbing can be an art form. Many countries have a long tradition of dubbing foreign movies into their native language. In Germany, an entire industry specializes in synchronization, or dubbing, feature films, and a number of German actors specialize in, and are known for, dubbing the parts of stars in American movies. For that matter, even the great Federico Fellini sometimes dubbed his own Italian actors’ voices with eloquent, poetic dialogue while the performers themselves counted from one to ten. Fortunately, DVDs offer viewers the choice to play a film in its dubbed version. In fact, I recently rented the DVD version of Persona, and could appreciate its subtle storytelling (as well as its montage of Mondo-like images such as the Buddhist monk setting himself on fire, the sacrificed lamb, and the impaled hand) without the need to scroll down optically for the subtitles.

The second and last thing I remember from that previous encounter with Redeye A was that we had arranged to see together, in her Muhammad Ali-inflected words, “THE GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIMES.” Nothing about her face, her body, or whether there was a healthy exchange of bodily fluids, do I remember. No, only that we had agreed to see Last Year at Marienbad. And that fearing a violent and embarrassing seizure brought on by vanishing subtitles, I previewed the film on my own beforehand. If the subtitles of Persona were unreadable, Last Year at Marienbad’s were the mother of all disappearing white subtitles. With a voice-over narration by the protagonist that droned endlessly — “I walk, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries...” — and actors doing their best to imitate statues, mad movement occurred at the bottom of the screen: subtitle lines disappeared, letters dropped out, lines ran offscreen. After twenty minutes, I ran out of the cinema laughing hysterically, as if I had been subjected to a Dadaist joke. And so I terminated, perhaps foolishly, a return engagement with A. And all I remembered of Last Year at Marienbad was that incoherent initial monologue, etched on my brain like the hieroglyphs of a secret language. Now, here I was at Mondo Video, eager to obtain a DVD copy of that very film, which had coincidentally made it onto my must-see list at the urging of a film buff who knew of my interest in fabricated memory and nonlinear narrative.

Within moments, A returned with a handful of DVDs.

“We have everything except Last Year at Marienbad. It’s checked out.”

“How disappointing.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you check with me later. I’ll be manning the counter all week.”

Not wanting to encourage A, I avoided returning at once to Mondo Video; well, maybe it was 36 hours, but who’s counting? During that brief time span, I had become obsessed with locating a DVD copy of Last Year at Marienbad and began calling local video stores for a copy. Surprisingly, every store’s copy seemed to be checked out. Perhaps some performance or film studies professor longhair had assigned it to his students, I thought. When the time — 36 hours — had arrived to return my exploitation DVDs to Mondo Video, I once again encountered A and asked her if Last Year at Marienbad had been returned. Fingers dancing provocatively on the keyboard, she checked her computer screen.

“Strange. That DVD’s been checked out by the same person for over three months.”

“Three months? Why don’t you just charge his credit card?” I suggested.

“The DVD’s out of print. We want it back.”

I contemplated purchasing a copy and went online at Amazon.com. The DVD was, indeed, out of print. Worse, used copies were selling for over $100. I then logged on to eBay and noticed that someone with the screen name Monsieur M was auctioning off six used copies of Last Year at Marienbad. On a whim, I emailed Monsieur M, saying only, “I know who you are and where you got those copies from.” A short while later, I received an email back from M with the cryptic message, “Hello, X.” I tried to email M back, but subsequent emails were blocked.

Calling Mondo Video repeatedly to inquire about the missing DVD, I was placed endlessly on hold until one of us would hang up. I don’t know what possessed me then. But on what would turn out to be my final visit to Mondo Video, I marched up to the counter, irritated, and confronted A, who was with a male coworker who identified himself as the manager.

“I’ve been calling repeatedly about the availability of Last Year at Marienbad.”

“We’re aware of that,” said the manager.

“Are you aware that a Monsieur M on eBay is auctioning off copies of the DVD?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“DON’T YOU GET IT? YOU’RE BEING HELD HOSTAGE BY M!”

The manager and A carefully reviewed something on their computer screen, conferred privately between themselves, and then looked up at me.

“I’m sorry. You’ll have to leave,” said the manager.

“I’m not some X client. I’m a valued patron of Mondo Video.”

“We’re sorry but we’re closing your account. You’re no longer welcome here.”

And with a keystroke on their computer, my account at Mondo Video was locked out.

*****

I’m not someone who’s partial to conspiracy theories. But you may be aware that Last Year at Marienbad involves a man “X” who meets a woman “A” at a resort in the town of Bohemia. A appears to be married to M. X tries to convince A that they met the previous year when she had promised to elope with him in one year’s time. In the film, past, present, and future blend as figures in rented formal wear move cryptically, resembling chess pieces, in the labyrinthian sculpture gardens of the palatial hotel: an abstract exercise in memory and time. As I look back, a year later, at the projection screen in my mind, trying to make sense of my Mondo-like experience, my memory fragments drift then vanish, until I Once ag in, wl k d wn th se corr dors, th se halls, hose gall ies, e dless co rid rs, sil nt co r dors... Eject me from this digital treadmill, this 35mm Möbius strip, this shifting labyrinth.

What’s that you say? These ruminations, these incidents, this story are the fabrications of a celluloid mind? Speak carefully, Monsieur M. The fact remains: Last year I was banned at Mondo Video.