07
Aug11
Letters
Reflections On A Completed Segment
Of The Ergodic Cinema Project
Since making a pitch about my segment for The Ergodic Cinema Project seven months ago, entitled Letters, I recently finally completed it. Letters is the first film I have ever made based on a script, and that follows a narrative. My objective when I joined The Ergodic Cinema Project and decided to take the leap from the kind of films I usually make, which are abstract and poetic and never follow a storyline, was to see first, whether I could successfully tell a story through film. Secondly, whether I could mesh my particular style with such a story. That is to say, combine some images that rely less on logic and more on emotion, with a story which has a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Letters contains a sense of mystery within its story which leaves something to the viewer’s imagination. It certainly is not all spelled out. My task was to relate my story in some way to the preceding script Missing, the first story in The Ergodic Cinema Project, written by Dandara. Missing is about the search for a political prisoner during a turbulent time in Brazil’s history, the 1970’s. The main character in Missing seems to come to some sort of resolution about the fate of the missing person in her life through a dream- like sequence, but by the end we are not really sure if there was in fact, a resolution. At the end of the segment, the main character is seen exiting the cemetery, well-groomed, now white-haired, seemingly at peace. Has she forgotten? Did the dream we observed her experience really put her at peace, calm her anguish? The mystery of the missing person remains, and the mystery of how the woman looking for that missing person resolved her pain and loss remains.
When I read Dandara’s script, I tried to think of a contemporary situation where mystery is almost a kind of currency. What jumped into my mind were the relationships we have with people on the internet, with whom we have never met in real life, who appear and disappear on public forums, with whom we trade emails revealing personal things, when suddenly, for reasons unknown to us, all correspondence ceases. Suddenly, the person with whom we formed this strangely intimate and fragile bond with evaporates, is never heard from again. Letters explores the idea, although the correspondence does not take place in the environment of the internet, of that piece of personality revealed in these kinds of cyber-space friendships which may, or may not, have anything to do with truth.
In Letters, more than one character appears to assume an identity and is purposefully misleading, not unlike the kind of confusion that surrounds political intrigue and spying. There is the declaration of death by a third party (Chambord) for the character (Chartreuse) who goes in search of a woman ("Anisette") with whom he has been corresponding, relating to the search of the female lead in Missing for her loved one in a graveyard. As in Missing, it is unclear whether in fact Chartreuse, who is declared by Chambord to be dead is for sure, dead. The game that the woman "Anisette" initiated with Chartreuse when she stole a letter from a woman whom she did not know, and then proceeded to impersonate her through writing, comes back to haunt her in the form of a letter from a new man who seems to be impersonating her supposedly dead former correspondent -- the new "Chartreuse," who no longer writes his letters by hand. There is danger in playing games. There is danger in getting emotionally involved. And some mysteries may never get solved.
I made Letters piece by piece from the minimalist script I created for the purpose. When I put the pieces together, I was surprised and pleased that despite the fact that they had been created spaced apart by time, there were elements that tied all the pieces together. One of them is flowers, another is water. These elements were not at all planned, but as I was creating each "chapter" of my script, certainly they must have been in the back of my mind, as bridges from one filmed piece of script to the next.
In Letters, more than one character appears to assume an identity and is purposefully misleading, not unlike the kind of confusion that surrounds political intrigue and spying. There is the declaration of death by a third party (Chambord) for the character (Chartreuse) who goes in search of a woman ("Anisette") with whom he has been corresponding, relating to the search of the female lead in Missing for her loved one in a graveyard. As in Missing, it is unclear whether in fact Chartreuse, who is declared by Chambord to be dead is for sure, dead. The game that the woman "Anisette" initiated with Chartreuse when she stole a letter from a woman whom she did not know, and then proceeded to impersonate her through writing, comes back to haunt her in the form of a letter from a new man who seems to be impersonating her supposedly dead former correspondent -- the new "Chartreuse," who no longer writes his letters by hand. There is danger in playing games. There is danger in getting emotionally involved. And some mysteries may never get solved.
I made Letters piece by piece from the minimalist script I created for the purpose. When I put the pieces together, I was surprised and pleased that despite the fact that they had been created spaced apart by time, there were elements that tied all the pieces together. One of them is flowers, another is water. These elements were not at all planned, but as I was creating each "chapter" of my script, certainly they must have been in the back of my mind, as bridges from one filmed piece of script to the next.
The skirt I wore in the scene where the woman comes home and opens the door from the outside is covered in flowers. I had chosen a skirt that had been given to me as a gift but I had not worn yet for this scene, a skirt which was unmistakably feminine. But as I saw the movie for the first time from beginning to end, I noticed that from the very start with the camellia petals on the ground that the first woman (the "real" Anisette) is walking on, flowers appear here and there throughout the film. For example, the flower that the camera focuses on before it moves on to a crack in a glass window overlooking a highway, the flowers on some of the cards that Chartreuse writes to Anisette on, the flowers of Mexican sage attached to the necklace Anisette receives from Chartreuse, the flower pattern on the pillow Anisette opens the “new” Chartreuse’s letter on at the end of the film. This flower imagery to me represents an awareness of the sensual potential between Anisette and Chartreuse. But in each scene, this flower image varies according to mood. In the beginning, there are dead petals, scattered, no longer a whole flower. The flower near the highway is a little ominous and sad, its colors strange, orange and black, the camera moves around it and backs away from it, warily. The gift of Mexican sage, so fuzzy and fragrant, when put on the neck, appears to contain something toxic and dangerous in it. The flower pattern on the pillow is blue, black and white, two-dimensional, flat. Not alive. As are the flowers on the cards that Chartreuse writes on. Throughout the story, flowers that appear seem to follow the course of action in mood, but they always hint at what the reality is – illusion, a dangerous illusion, a deadly illusion.
Water is also used as a theme. In the beginning of the movie, before the piano music starts, the sounds of crickets and water accompanies the “eye” of the camera as it searches in the woods for something. Later, when Anisette reveals the phrase she keeps hearing repeated in her ears at night, there is the image of a fountain, water flowing downward over steps, rushing but “tamed” water. Finally, there is the water that is used to wash the ashes of the letters from Chartreuse and the letter from Chambord that she burned down the drain. The sound of the water hitting the tinfoil, the ashes, the gulping sound of the drain – the water sounds in the beginning of the movie were wild, free in nature, then this water was channeled into a fountain, lively but controlled, and finally water is the element used to bury evidence, definitively.
Aside from all the scenes shot directly from the script, I used random footage I had shot over time, sometimes months in advance of the conception of Letters, to flesh out the story between Anisette, Chartreuse, and Chambord. Taking randomly shot footage one day, and later using it to speak for some very personal thoughts and feelings is typical of my style of filmmaking. It was really atypical for me to combine a more structured story-telling device like a script with that style of working, but I really enjoyed it. Somehow, it seems I found a way to tell a story without losing my preferred manner of working, and that was a wonderful surprise.
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