Hal on Himself's audience films — "they’d figure the tri-lensed Bolex H32…"
they’d figure the tri-lensed Bolex H32 cameras—one held by a tall stooped old guy and one complexly mounted on the huge head of the oddly forward-listing boy with what looked like a steel spike coming out of his thorax—the big cameras down by the red-lit EXITS on either side of the screen, the patrons figured, were there for like an ad or an anti-ad or a behind-the-scenes metafilmic documentary or something. That is, until the lights went down and the film started up and what was on the wide public screen was just a wide-angled binoculated shot of this very art-film theater’s audience filing in with espressos and finding seats and sitting down and looking around and getting adjusted and saying knowledgeable little pre-movie things to their thick-lensed dates about what the Don’t-Pay-To-See-This ad and Bolex cameras probably signified, artistically, and settling in as the lights dimmed and facing the screen (i.e. now themselves, it turns out) with the coolly excited smiles of highbrow-entertainment expectation […]
Context
The Joke: the movie screen turned into a mirror by camera, lens and mirror collapsed into one instrument — the cleanest fusion of the theme's two cores. JOI and Mario are the visible two-man crew, described through strangers' eyes ("a tall stooped old guy," the head-mounted boy whose police lock reads as "a steel spike coming out of his thorax" — the rig from 071 sighted in the wild). The marquee's mandatory anti-ad warning echoes the anti-ad logic of 060, and even the dates are "thick-lensed." Mario head-mounted with an H32 during Himself's lifetime interacts with 071's willed-H64 chronology (see Flags).