Scenario

In 1936 Anaïs Nin published House of Incest, the dream-prose poem she had been distilling from the diary for years. Scenario is Miller's response, and the text says so itself: the piece opens with a printed note crediting Nin's book by name. What follows is his interpretation of her imaginative territory, refashioned into his own idiom — a 'film with sound' that exists only as prose.

The form is a script that ignores every practicality of filming. It opens at night in a tropical garden, where an enormous glass bowl of goldfish stands over a pond and the face of a woman named Alraune hovers above the paths like a mask. She is joined by a second woman, Mandra, and the two study each other through the glass of the bowl before the scenes begin to metamorphose: a dance intercut with waves breaking on a beach, a montage of steel girders and collapsing skyscrapers, fortune-telling cards spread on a bed, a mirror in which one woman sees the other's face. Where Nin's book is chiseled and interior, Miller's is aggressively visual, a projector aimed at the page.

Obelisk issued it in 1937 in 200 copies, each carrying a loose drawing by Abraham Rattner, the American painter of Miller's Paris circle. It was reprinted in Max and the White Phagocytes the following year and then in The Cosmological Eye, which is where readers find it now; the pamphlet itself is one of the scarcest Miller items. This account is from a reading of the text in the Internet Archive scan of that collection.

A single image-sequence, thirty-one pages long, with no dialogue and no plot. Alraune and Mandra move from the goldfish garden to a Moorish-furnished house, where Alraune paces in a sheath gown while Mandra sits a throne-like chair; the film cuts between her strides and the sea breaking on a beach, then into flashes of temple dancers, armored men, and the skeletons of skyscrapers buckling to earth. In a stained-glass bedroom the two women spread fortune-telling cards, and a hand mirror gives Alraune back Mandra's face instead of her own.

The later pages darken. The women flee a chanting mob through a door shaped like a skull, visit an astrologer built like a clockwork automaton — he sits oiling the mechanism in his own chest — and the piece closes in a cheap hotel room, where a second Mandra with Alraune's face rises from the body of the first, asleep beside an opium pipe, before a city of coral climbs out of the goldfish bowl. The images are the whole event; nothing is explained, and nothing needs to be.