Bryan Ferry – Another Time, Another Place (1974)

The last film was shot and I put my camera and flash in my bag. One last cigarette before I would head home, and I watched the buzz around me that got slowly muted by the upcoming dawn.

The waiters started picking up glasses and shards around the pool; carefree beauties swimming and kissing between floating champagne bottles. It was a mild, quiet night, interrupted by tired talk amplified through cotton, mingling with shrill laughter that rebeled against the end of the party. In the villa, shadowy contours moved coquettishly and made the curtains dance.

Wandering back into the night, my eyes caught a figure standing at the hill and looking down to the illuminated city of angels with a drink in his hands. Why didn’t I see this man all night, I thought I had photographed everybody. And why did he look so blurry, as if someone had gone over him with an eraser? I pressed my eyes together, but I could not focus on his contours next to the perfectly sharp pink bougainvilleas.

Without turning around or having a last look at the party scene, the man started to walk to the driveway, and I followed him secretly with an illicit excitement. His chauffeur held up the door to the glossy black Cadillac where a panther sat bolt upright in the backseat. But the mysterious man did not sit down, not yet.

“Do you know this Technicolor dream?” he said into the night. “Full of nostalgia for a time that never existed. As we drive past the giant billboards with the Cadillac, we see the bars and struts that hold everything together when turning around.”

He jumped in the car and disappeared into the night.

“My name is Bryan Ferry.”

by Saliha Enzenauer