“ I could have been a superstar in America – I was certainly taken out there. But I said, “no way Jose, I'm not staying here in this madhouse”. So I left and said, “I'm gonna make arthouse films now”. - Charlotte Rampling.

Whether you agree with Rampling's decision or not, the point is she made a choice, and crucially, her choice goes against the grain of our times; she used her head and listened to her heart and chose a life true to herself rather than becoming rich beyond her wildest dreams. It's also important that she has come out and articulated her choice in public, and it's important because it shows that actors can choose and define their working lives as oppose to being condemned to the cumbersomely unproductive casting process, and it's important because it's all too rare that young actors have this example before them, most mainstream actors seem to have contempt for what they do, and many others are frightened to speak in a serious way about acting because they fear criticism for being "pretentious" or being called a "luvvie". Rarely do we see an actor presented as an artist making aesthetic decisions, mostly we are bombarded by images and stories of actors as celebrities....now, we all enjoy a little bit of gossip but we must be careful not to mistake it for the work itself, because what happens is that this image of actor-as-celebrity encourages, each year, gazillions to become actors because they think acting will give them that celebrity lifestyle, and even more ludicrously, I see many young actors mimicking the behaviour of celebrity actors as if that is enough to get a career, and the net result is a devaluing of the currency - “there is an actor on every street corner”.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's not easy to stand your ground, the tendency is to fall in with the crowd and go with the flow which may be less exhilarating but it's also less terrifying, and the meaningless chattering cacophony will keep you from feeling alone. But I say the artist must stand his ground, for it is from there that art will come.

“I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time” - Orson Welles.  If it's good enough for Orson Welles, it's good enough for me. 

NB – Of Rampling's films, I highly recommend The Damned by Visconti with Dirk Bogarde, and more recently, a British film noir, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, directed by Mike Hodges and co-starring Clive Owen and Ken Stott.

The Story

“October” is based on the true story of Olga Romanova. 

On the 24th of October, 2002, Olga put her life at risk by confronting 41 Chechen terrorists at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow, in order to help 900 people, including more than a 100 children, who were held hostage at the auditorium.

Why this film?

When I heard about Olga Romanova and what she did, I knew I had to tell her story.A person who willingly confronts 41 terrorists, who puts her life at risk in order to save many others...Was she a hero? Was she crazy? Is this the story of an irresponsible person or was she a fearless idealist?It's been 5 months of intense research. And we have also interviewed Olga's mother and her best friend.Now, I know that I'm able to present accurately Olga and what happened that night, and then let the audience decide who Olga Romanova was.

Who are we?

We're a group of young filmmakers, with more than 4 years of professional experience, who have been working every dayfor the last 5 months to make this film happen.

Gonzalo Caride is the Writer and Director. He studied at the New York Film Academy, is an award winner cinematographer and in the last 4 years he has been working in more than 50 professional projects in the US, UK and Spain.

Kuba Gogolewski is our Producer. He has 6 years of professional experience, working in more than 40 projects in 8 different countries. Actually, he's also studying at the Polish National Film and Television School (PWFSTviT) in Łódź.

Oleksander Podznyakov is theCinematographer. After working for "New Materials" and "Reuters", he enrolled in the PWSFTviT in 2009. Since then, he has proved himself as an outstanding cinematographer, shooting more than 15 projects in 35mm.

Kamila Pściuk-Gogolewska is our Art Director and Set Designer. Since 2003 she's been involved in the production of more than 60 films, working with people as Ewa Braun (Academy Award Winner for "The Schnidler's List"), John Kent Harrison and Wojciech Marczewski, among many others.

So far, we’ve been able to assemble a crew of more than 40 professional filmmakers.And the list keeps on getting longer!

Where's your money going?

These are the prices for the 3 shooting days on location.

Renting the Equipment - RED EPIC, Lenses, Lights, Sound (you know how it works) | $2,400

Wages - For the Electricians and Drivers (they never work for free, do they?) | $800

Set Design - Dressing the auditorium, the apartment, and all other locations (it's going to look like the real thing) | $600

Production Costs - Food, Travel Expenses & Insurance (yes, we do have to feed the crew) | $1,700

Renting the Theater - For the films' last scene where she confronts the terrorists | $1,500

We will add it up for you: $7,000

We need your help

For the last 3 months, we have gotten in contact with many different companies and institutions that were interested in helping us finance this project. Many of them haven't made their final decision yet. The others, although interested in the project told us that they are "not comfortable backing up a film that deals with such a controversial subject matter".

We want to tell the story of a woman not to give any political statement or to talk about ideologies. We are not explaining what happened before or after Olga got in the Theater. Those are very important historical facts, but they don't belong to our film.

That's why we think that you, as an individual, not as a business organization with commercial or political interests can make a big difference.

Other ways you can help?

You don't have money? Well, welcome to the club!

But we all have friends, family, we know somebody who knows somebody who maybe knows "that" person. Exactly!

Let them know about our project!

Send them the link to this page!

Every dollar counts!

Check out our Official Website:

http://octoberthefilm.weebly.com

And also our Facebook Fan Page:

http://www.facebook.com/Octoberthefilm

I suppose Irene Jacob will always be inextricably linked with Krzysztof Kieslowski, and the two masterpieces she made with him: The Double Life Of Veronique (for which she won the best actress award at Cannes), and Three Colours: Red, which made her name. I am convinced had Kieslowski lived on, he and Jacob would have made many more films together; the aesthetics of Jacob's acting and Kieslowski's cinema are utterly compatible, both marked by an unpretentious poetry and a sensitivity – no other actor is as seemless in Kieslowski's films as Jacob, infact, the BFI's Geoff Andrew wrote that Kieslowski was“making those films around her”. However, it could be said that Jacob has never quite reached the heights of those films with Kieslowski since. After Red, the offers poured in, from Europe and Hollywood*, but Jacob instead retreated and took nine months off, spending most of her time “reading Tolstoy, Balzac, Singer and several autobiographies”.She worked with Louis Malle before Kieslowski, and Antonioni after, and latterly delivered a masterpiece of screen acting in Theo Angelopoulos' The Dust Of Time.

What is unusual about Jacob on screen, is her shyness. She is never aggressive, or flamboyant, and hardly makes any attempt at intensity, even though her performances are vivid. There is a gentleness about Jacob, with a hint of melancholy. However, there is always joy in her performance, it is the energy source for all her work, and it may be re-shaped in all kinds of ways, such as sadness or confusion, depending on the needs of the moment in the scene. Jacob's performances flow from her, which sometimes gives her an ecstatic quality. Her performances are unfettered, and unmolested by vanity. There is a sensitivity and delicacy about her which can at times be heartbreaking. Her acting has the absolute ring of truth to it. As with all great actors, it is her essential goodness we respond to. Further, we also sense that her performances are coming from a deep place, they are important to her. Although she is physically small, she has a magnitude of soul, as though there is so much more to be explored, as though we are only seeing a fraction of what she may express.

Jacob, by her own admission, came from a “shy” family, who rarely if ever expressed their feelings. As a result, through much of her childhood, she will have repressed much of what she felt, locking it away somewhere. Then she discovers cinema:

“They made me laugh and cry, and that was exactly what I was waiting for in a film: to awaken me to my feelings”.

Suddenly those repressed feelings are stirred, and the possibility of being an actor, offers the possibility of an escape from introversion, albeit temporarily and under imaginary circumstances (ie – for the duration of the performance), and the possibility of giving expression to that repressed material. Here's Jacob again: -

“...the protection of a character....it's the distance that creates the poetry”.

The protection of a character is an interesting point – there is no character, everything the actor expresses is of himself, not of anybody else. In Jacob's case, an introvert, the objectivity of playing a character, creates a vehicle to transport the repressed material out into the world. However, she is such a captivating actor because there is a tension between her inclination for introversion and the demands of the scene (her performance). The poetry is the repressed material touched off by the actor's response to the scene, and reconfigured as truthful fiction by the actor's performance.

Jacob (as with all true actors), possesses a surfeit of thought and feeling brought about by shyness, and from this surfeit, Jacob creates her poetry.

* she was offered the lead role in Indecent Proposal but turned it down because she “didn't feel comfortable with the film's sensibility”.

RELATED

Poetry Of The Mundane

Peter Mullan In My Name Is Joe - Acting Is Poetry

“The more success an actor has, the more he acquires the look of wax fruit; he is no longer devoured by life”. - Elia Kazan.

Much of the actor's life can be, in turn, wretched, absurd, soul-destroying, exhilarating, humiliating, glorious, and he can find himself spending much of his time scratching around simply trying to maintain his self-respect. Little of his life appears to be within his control, but sometimes it's difficult for him to be grateful for what he has - most actors are preposterously ambitious. One of the most complex periods an actor can experience is just after a major goal has been accomplished, and the old habits seem inappropriate. The period is a dangerous one, it can be confusing because the actor has scored a victory but doesn't know what his next move should be. I often think that actors should apply performance technique to their everyday lives because it makes the work stronger, however, when performing we have a road map, the script, from which we can discern the actions necessary for accomplishing our objectives. In life of course, no such map exists, we can come up with a plan, but that really is only an estimate of what might happen. So, during this new period the actor must first decide what he would like to accomplish next – which is in itself a major task. In making his decision, the actor may ask himself where he wants to end up, and then, how he is going to get there. If he cannot answer these questions for the short term, he is likely to become lost and fall into despair. Whichever path the actor does eventually choose however, he must accept that there is no guarantee of success, that's the nature of the life – he doesn't know what is going to happen, he has to take a chance and step forward regardless. The actors life then, resembles that of the gambler, but the actor gambles not chips at the table, but time in his life. So many actors fall by the wayside because they are no longer willing to play the game, they're no longer willing to commit to the toil and the slog without the guarantee of a reward, and picking up the pieces one more time becomes just too much to bear for them.

The actors who continue and flourish are innate gamblers, and they love trying to workout how to lower the odds and beat the system. Actors are adrenaline junkies, we intentionally make our lives insecure, we intentionally posit preposterous objectives for ourselves, we need that edge, we are energized by pressure, afterall, that's the fun of the fayre – most of us would be absolutely horrified if we actually “made it”, we would become part of Kazan's wax fruit, the very thing we sought to avoid by becoming actors in the first place. However, the really smart actor understands that the process of the life (ie: the struggle, the constant self-examination, the toil, the discipline, the self-denial, the seeing our best laid plans turn to dust but finding the strength to start again,overcoming the overwhelming odds stacked against us) is part of the work itself, for it demands that we constantly improve ourselves, thus ensuring that when the time comes, we are worth the time and attention of the audience.

The gambler may only find an equilibrium while he is gambling, and the actor may only do so while he is performing. One life lived steadily over decades is no good to the actor, he must live out many brief lives intensely.

GARAGE IS PLEASED TO PRESENT FILM COURAGE

WITH KAREN WORDEN AND DAVID BRANIN......

Franz Wisner & Kurt Wisner of Honeymoon With My Brother on LA Talk Radio’s Film Courage (Ep. #156)

Franz Wisner and Kurt Wisner are in the Film Courage studio to talk about their New York Times Best Seller “Honeymoon With My Brother.”  They share their adventure of selling their homes, their cars, stock portfolios, walking away from their jobs and traveling to 53 countries in 2 years and the national best-selling book that resulted.  We learn why Hollywood bought the rights to the book, why the movie was not made, and who’s working on the script now.

Connect with the brothers by visiting www.honeymoonwithmybrother.com

www.howtheworldmakeslove.com

I’ve been kind of looking forward to seeing HE because it’s the second feature length collaboration between two people I follow on twitter, director Rouzbeh Rashidi and the actor James Devereaux. I know I’ve reviewed films by the prolific and mercurial Rouzbeh Rashidi before on here (as I have Devereaux’s) but I’m beginning to get more of a handle on his creative signature now, I think (not that he’d neccessarily want a creative signature).

HE has a really strong opening... especially for people of my age and maybe just a little older. A man who may or may not be Devereaux, wearing some kind of white environment suit, is exploring an abandoned and run down office corridor in long shot with film colouring somewhat reminiscent of sepia tone. There is a grating, scratching sound causing tension on the audio track and visual cycling on the picture indicates that we might be watching a surveillance recording, as the man makes his way slowly, over the course of a few minutes, to the front of the shot, armed with his torch, carefully exploring the debris he finds on the way.

It’s a really, really strong opening and most of the films I’ve seen by Rashidi so far have a knack of opening with a really arresting sequence. This one, for me, had a very obvious early to late 70s Hollywood science-fiction vibe to it. The white environment suit giving the visuals a definitive and provocative sense of the sinister and unknown. The sound design is fantastically effective and reflects this sense of unease... coupled with this one long take of a shot, it contributes to a tonal pitch of almost fear and paranoia. Was really impressed with this opening again.

This is followed with a bit of a mood changer as Devereaux delivers a monologue in black and white, intercut with initially sepia footage of him exploring the odd contents of what looks like the same abandoned building (in terms of budgetary influences, I’m guessing it’s the same place anyway). In these sequences, however, the environment suit is not present... which puts this footage in another timeframe, if you want to stick with a conventional reading of a less than conventional film maker.

The actual monologue is very starkly shot but not to the point that any excessive tonal contrast pops out at you immediately. In this sequence the acting tour-de-force that is Devereaux, details his dissatisfaction with a recent lover, Mary, with whom he's presumably broken up. Devereaux's pacing is deliberately slow, like a man trying to find the words he wants to say... and having an inkling of how Rashidi does things, this may be a very accurate description because it might even all be improvised on the spot. Even so, this is not to suggest that Devereaux is making his character up as he goes along... more that he’s already in the character (to the extent that you can be to create that illusion for an audience), and that character is exploring his words with a sense of slow precision, because they are important to him.

As Devereaux continues what is the first in a series of extremely long, one take scenes and the first of two, quite lengthy, monologues... the shot starts cutting backwards and forwards between the footage of him exploring the building. Sometimes the two bits of footage are cut to a very fast rhythm of roughly a second as shot. Setting up an almost hypnotic sense of pacing, as the fast cuts set up a new mood in your brain. Things settle down a bit then and the cuts to and from the juxtaposed footage come slower as new layers are added to what are presumably memories... which is what the human brain will pick up from the language of cinema as the correct interpretation of the same person being cut against footage of himself (whether this is a correct interpretation or not). Rashidi knows this and exploits that basic self-taught human response to his own uses... I was very much expecting him to pull the rug from under me in this sequence to be honest.

After a while, the director/editor sets up another intense sequence of similar rhythmic cutting within the same monologue. So what we now have is a secondary layer of different rhythms creating a larger, slower rhythm which is being received directly into the mind as a fast series of rhythmic cuts... when what is actually happening at a deeper, and probably subconscious level for the majority of the audience, is that a larger and more serene rhythmic response is being set up... much like the way the music of Philip Glass can play out in the ear as speedy repeat phrases when they are actually piecing together a slower melody inside your head. So what we have is a very striking and initially grating visual ostinato making up a slower piece, which owes as much to Dennis Hopper’s similar cross-cutting effects in his directorial debut Easy Rider as it does to anything else.

The quality of the intercut footage starts to get more colourful and dreamlike in some places and then knocks back down to a state of distress in others. In this second tier of footage, Devereaux continues to wander a rundown building interior, randomly exploring and interacting (passively at first) with his immediate environment on a purely physical level. After a good long while he picks up a load of big Garrick Glen bottles of still water (product placement in a Rashidi movie?) and places them on a ramshackle table he finds. This is a red herring that something pivotal is about to happen because, after undoing the tops of each one and sniffing them in turn before putting the tops back on, he knocks them off the table with a walking stick he's been carrying and carries on exploring his environment. As I write these words now and revisit the movie in my head... I suddenly realise I’ve got a very strong idea of what he is looking for, but to reveal that here would possibly spoil things a little for potential viewers.

Towards the end of this first monologue section, Devereaux’s HE reveals that he is recording his monologue to send to Mary, because he is going to kill himself. It's an audio suicide note.

We then have a scene change with a more colourful and sharper picture, as we cut to what can only be Mary herself. She is talking with someone (possibly her latest lover) in a room as they both gaze out of large windows. We cannot hear the actual conversation they are having, however.

At first Mary is occupying the same basic space to the left of the screen that Devereaux was visually filling during his monologue... so this scene cuts very naturally into this segment before quickly cutting to a long shot of Mary and the other guy in profile... Mary still occupying the left of screen so this is already not nearly as jarring as the sequence with Devereaux in it... until the intercut footage of Devereaux wandering the building continues to be intercut into this sequence, enabling a more intense rhythm mixed with a more aggressive, almost musical sound design... we are now entering the realms of pure visual poetry, ladies and gentlemen, which makes Rashidi something akin to a direct descendant, mutant love child of the cinematic poetry of Andrei Tarkovsky cross pollinated with late 50s beat generation writing (somebody needs to give this guy a big budget and see if he can handle it without losing creative impetus... come on all you slap dash producers!).

We cut to a single shot of the guy which holds for a longer time, like the first shot in this section of the female lead and, yes, he's occupying the opposite space within the frame of the shot to what she and Devereaux did. Is this sequence a mirror image of itself developed through the rhythm of the shots? Well yeah and that’s obviously the intent but it’s almost here as a visual bookend to bring us into a second monologue while still retaining continuity of the cross-cut footage, because as this shot sequence ends we cut to a new scene of Deveraux in a standard colour shot with a new monologue delivery... but intercut with more footage of Deveraux wandering the building, this time (at first) without any deterioration to the quality of the film stock... perhaps symbolic of less mental deterioration as this monologue seems a little faster and more confident... it being another recording, this time to the parents of the character.

The intercut footage grows more angry and destructive and is perhaps a visual echo of the anger that the central character feels to his parents. The content of these shots calms down for a while but the monologue drops out with aggressive audio phase shifting (or some such technique) in what seems like a key place, to deliberately restrict the viewer from being spoonfed certain information and to instead fire the potent imagination, I would imagine... before dropping back into the natural sound of the monologue. It could also, of course, be a way of cutting out material which didn’t, in the final analysis, gel with the tone of the piece... but if so it’s a valid and creative solution to that particular kind of problem and so not to be seen as an invalidation of a piece of work. I suspect half of what happens on a film set is accidental anyway (even with Hitchcock, but I’m not going to try to defend that statement here).

This monologue also becomes an aggressive diatribe against the evils of television and the lack of a role model in the character’s parents which is actually quite heartfelt and somewhat amusing (I can really identify with certain parts of this stuff and believe I’ve said similar about the evils of daytime television to various friends over the years).

We then have another break from the format after a while and various experimental techniques are applied to crosscut footage intertwining with contemplative shots of other characters. Devereaux continues his explorations and antics within the building, this time back in the environmental suit, while sound and atonal music dictates the intensity that these shots are informed by... or at least a retrofitted sense of the informed, if such a thing is possible (and of course it is in cinema).

A sequence intercut to this with the couple from earlier in bed with the guy not being in any way responsive to the world about him, even when aggressively shaken, is cut against a new and hard to digest rhythm.

This is followed by a sequence where Devereaux’s character discusses his impending suicide with a friend, which is a great sequence of two really masterful actors who seem to work pretty well together, juxtaposed against footage featuring a character played by director Maximilian Le Cain, who meets with Devereaux as he assists him by providing him with the means to take his suicide objective a step closer. Le Cain isn’t in it much but adds a little more intensity in his static performance. I once wrote of him in my blog review here that he seems like someone who would “be chasing me down a street brandishing a big board with a nail in it” but in these short scenes he seems somehow less physically aggressive... perhaps more like someone who would be “paying and organising subordinates” to be chasing me down a street brandishing a big board with a nail in it, instead. Either way he has an intensity in this that’s hard to ignore.

Devereaux and his friend explore the motivation and reasoning behind his decision to kill himself and it’s a very rational and almost calm conversation, one that perhaps contradicts the inherent struggle of Devereaux’s first monologue and naked aggression of his second. This gives a sense of depth to the character because it’s clear that he is not telling his friend everything... or at least that’s the way I interpreted it and I’m really not going to say anymore about the content of the film because I think this seemingly inherent but unhighlighted contradiction pretty much sums up Rashidi’s directorial style, which I touched upon somewhat in my review of his movie Bipedality.

That is to say...

In terms of visual aesthetic, this is very much a film which pits beautifully framed, static and crisp shots against more downgraded and less palatable textures and moving camera work. But no answers are provided and visual touchstones are deliberately (I believe) set up to create a “story space” to make up your own ways of reading and interpreting the text. Is the environment suit needed, for instance, because the building is radioactive and Devereaux’s character didn’t know and now he has cancer? Is that the reason why he’s decided to take this course and reexamine his life? Or is he a ghost from the future in a post apocalyptic time period. I don’t know and neither, do I think, am I supposed to.

Rashidi doesn’t tell stories, he sets them up and then leaves them absolutely to the audience's own struggle to provide a shape to house the visual and aural ideas prevalent in his movies. He doesn’t leave it completely without structure and, as we have seen, there is plenty of structure and rhythm within the editing of his sequences... but he does provide a rough guide to an exploration of the narrative and not the key to a fixed narrative conclusion itself. This is the strength of this director’s films and, I suspect, one of the reasons why they have interest independent of their obvious visual beauty. I won’t say more on this because I don’t want to over think this guys working method but I will say that, while some audiences for this kind of, almost challenging but certainly not passively consumed, cinematic dish may find this kind of meal less palatable than others, I would have to say that I quite enjoyed HE and think it’s an another fine example of a director who is making really unique films which unfold on the director’s own terms and which don’t cowtow to commercial pressures. Seek this one out, if you can, if you are into watching a purer (I hesitate to say rawer given the obvious craftsmanship which goes into these kinds of films) and more demanding form of cinema.

For more information on Rashidi and Devereaux, go here and then follow the links... http://rashididevereauxcinema.tumblr.com/

Blogger NUTS4R2 has reviewed HE (2012).

“There are musicians who practice all the time but we actors are not able to do that. We don't have an instrument, except if you say we are our own instrument, and yet I always try to continue searching and working for the moment where you have to deliver.” - Michel Piccoli.

Like his countryman Alain Delon, although a very different acting animal, Michel Piccoli has worked with many of the great auteurs of European cinema; Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Luis Bunuel, Jacques Rivette, Claude Sautet, Otar Iosseliani, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, and those are only the ones I can think of. And not only has he worked with the best, but Piccoli has also appeared in several masterpieces, my favourite of which must be Godard's Le Mepris, where Piccoli plays a hack writer, who spends most of the film trying to keep hold of his wife, played by the beautiful Brigitte Bardot. He fumbles around after her, trying to satisfy her needs which are apparently incomprehensible to him, but we see Piccoli really trying, desperately trying, we see it in his face, it's the sad sight of a strong man brought low, until he does eventually lose her, tragically, to his own paymaster, played by Jack Palance.

Piccoli is a real lion of an actor, he's physically strong, and possesses a personality of force, along with an easy vocal power. But there is also a delicacy about him, a grace, he's self-conscious, he is generous and humble. He is mentally tough too, a rigorous thinker, which gives his strength a vulnerable quality, all of which adds up to a provocative and compelling acting whole. It has even been said that Piccoli is the perfect split between the physical and the intellectual, and I'd go along with that.

I began to understand the nature of Piccoli's talent better, after I read an interview with him in Cahiers Du Cinema, where he expressed his admiration for the work of Louis Jouvet, describing him as having “a kind of discreet madness”. I thought this an apt description for Piccoli himself. The “discreet” is the intellectual, graceful side of Piccoli, stiff upper lipped and impassive. In this mode, Piccoli's work is pared down, allowing the audience to project their own imagination onto him, and therefore vicariously experience the character's trials and tribulations. This is the Piccoli of self-control, enabling him to play the white collar gangster, Nuttheccio, in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos, or an old woman (yes, an old woman) in Otar Iosseliani's Gardens In Autumn, or a great painter in Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse. And yet, even here, beneath Piccoli's intelligence and civilised mannner, there is the “madness” too. And we sense it, even when it is not brought forth directly, as in Claude Chabrol's Les Noces Rouges, where Piccoli plays the Deputy Mayor, he seems somehow savage when cherishing Stephane Audran during their illicit love affair. But Piccoli only ever offers us brief glimpses of this madness, but when it comes it's shocking, fierce, and decisive, and tends to manifest itself in sudden outbursts. In Claude Sautet's Les Choses de la Vie, Piccoli's vicious berating of the architect who messes up his plans is intense but it apparently comes from nowhere and is over in a moment, it's effect however, is total. There are other moments too, in the aforementioned Le Mepris, where we see Bardot flinch when faced with the chaos of Piccoli's temper. Ultimately though, this madness is always present in Piccoli's work, even if it's usually only latent, shadowing his essentially classy nature.

Michel Piccoli is one of the greatest actors there has ever been. His body of work is immense (which includes a substantial amount of theatre work, infact, the first 10 years or so of Piccoli's career were spent upon the stage, learning his trade, sadly I have never seen him live), and I can only look upon it with awe. The qualities he embodies as a man, and therefore brings to his work, are a lesson for any actor. He also thinks deeply about his work, in this sense then, he is a philosopher of acting, aswell as an artist.

I fear Michel Piccoli is little known here in United Kingdom, if you don't know his work, I urge you to watch his films, any of the films mentioned here would be a good place to start*, try them, and experience, for yourself, the discreet madness of Michel Piccoli.

* and I have hardly mentioned his substantial work with Luis Bunuel, for whom Piccoli was an important collaborator.

Homo Sapiens Project (24) will play in the next Live@8, Bar 8 The Docks Galway, Wednesday 21st March at 8pm.

ANTHONY KELLY & DAVID STALLING have been collaborating on a series of sound and visual works since 2003. Together the make sound and video installations. Their work encompasses a shared practice of recycling ‘objets trouveés’ of sound, visual and text material in their ongoing collaborative sessions. The juxtaposition of contrasting material results in a series of audio/visual ‘musique concrète’ pieces. Kelly and Stalling also perform live improvisations, as a duo as well as with others, such as The Quiet Club, Barbara Lüneburg, David Toop, Stephen Vitiello, Alessandro Bosetti amongst others. Some of their recent performances include Just Listening, LSAD Gallery Limerick; the i-and-e festival 2011, Dublin; Sonic Vigil, Triskel Christchurch, Cork; Hilltown New Music Festival 2011, Visual in Carlow; Soundwave 2, Sirus Arts Centre, Cobh and Kaleidoscope at The Odessa Club.

Over the last few years Kelly and Stalling have programmed the Hilltown New Music Festival, this has included music, screenings and audiovisual installations by national and international artists. They have also contributed varied music, sound & screening programmes to Solus Film Collective, Sounds Electric Festival '05 & '07 and various recent EAR festivals.

Kelly and Stalling founded the sound art label Farpoint Recordings in 2005, programming and publishing projects by artists such as The Quiet Club, Jennifer Walshe and Linda O’Keeffe, and many others alongside their own work. Recently they completed compiling the audio CD project The Sound We Are Now. Future releases include projects by Fergus Kelly, Strange Attractor with David Toop, Stephen Vitiello and Danny Mc Carthy.

Selected performances/exhibitions: 2011: Strange Attractor at Cafe OTO and Pigeon Wing Gallery, London; Auralog Draft Five: Infinite Messages, Tinahely Arts Centre, Wicklow; Auralog Fourth Draft: The Presence Of Trees, The Return Gallery, Goethe Institute, Dublin; Yellow, SOMA, Waterford; Just Listening, Strange Attractor, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. 2010/11: Shorelines, touring exhibition, venues include Sir Wilfred Grenfell Gallery, Cornerbrook, Newfoundland, The Rooms, St. Johns, Newfoundland, Mermaid Arts Centre, Wicklow, Siamsa, Co. Kerry and Ten Days On The Island, Tasmania. WAFER at SOMA Contemporary Art Box, Waterford, Sonic Vigil V, St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork. 2009: Unknown Point as part of Visualise Carlow & Eigse, Frequencies at the Basement Gallery, Dundalk. 2008: Two Places at Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast & Limerick University, The Incubation Space - artist residency (Aug - Nov) at The LAB, Dublin. Auralog at This Is Not A Shop gallery, Dublin as part of DEAF festival, screenings at Anthology Film Archives, New York, 2006 & 2008.

Live@8 is a regular contemporary art evening in Galway, showing the work of Irish and International artists who make video, film, live art, sound and installation in a social context. Organised by Vivienne Dick, Maeve Mulrennan and Áine Phillips, Live@8 invites a guest curator bimonthly to put together a dynamic social art event which has attracted large local and national audiences since 2008.

If you are interested in curating or showing work at Live@8, please contact us at liveatnumber8@gmail.com

Live@8 is hosted by Eight Bar & Restaurant, 8 Dock Rd, Galway and supported by Tulca, 126 Gallery and funded by Galway City Council and the Arts Council of Ireland.

Posted byÁine Phillips

“I get impatient when I hear dialogue that's just too natural. I write what people would really say and then I artificialize just enough so it becomes a beautiful object”. - Hal Hartley

For anyone not familiar with Hartley's work, the dialogue is very distinctive, it's precise and rhythmical (the clip above will give you a taster), critic Jason Wood even described the characters as speaking in inverted commas. Hartley doesn't disguise the fact that what we hear is scripted dialogue. An attempt to create “naturalistic” dialogue, is an attempt to convince the viewer that what he is hearing is real – which of course it isn't.

“Naturalistic” acting then, is a style which the actor applies to his performance in order to convince the viewer that what he is doing is not acting but real, and hopefully, the viewer will buy into the fiction of the film as a result. However,  whether a film seems real or not, is irrelevant - The Fox And The Hound is no more nor less real than Casablanca - what counts is whether the film is true or false.  When the work is true, the viewer will accept that a talking fox and a talking dog can be friends, and the viewer will accept that Humphrey Bogart is in love with Ingrid Bergman – the viewer uses his own imagination. In the theatre, it is more obvious: the actor stands on a bare stage, and, speaking in verse, informs the audience that he is stood in a castle, and the audience will create the castle for themselves, in their own minds.

Artificial means consciously creating something which serves a specific function within the overall piece, creating it with a specific intention, which gives it a specific meaning – this is very different from adding extraneous details to masque a lie. And so with acting; having a specific intention for the scene, for the performance, organises it, gives it definition, rhythm and force. Talking of Casablanca, a quick comparison of American acting from that era, where nothing was included which wasn't serving the film, with the “naturalistic” performances of contemporary American acting, reveals how trivial and tight-fisted the vast majority of modern actors are. An attempt to naturalise our performance, is the attempt to remove from it all beauty, as if ashamed, but the actor needn't be ashamed: cut out the feeble-minded irrelevance, find an intention and stick to it with an iron will.

I leave you with that maestro of acting, Charles Laughton:

“Great acting is like painting. In the great masters of fine art one can see and recognise the small gesture of a finger, the turn of a head, the vitriolic stare, the glazed eye, the pompous mouth, the back bending under a fearful load. In every swerve and stroke of a painter's brush, there is an ambundance of life. Great artists reveal the god in man; every character an actor plays must be this sort of creation. Not imitation – that is mere caricature – and any fool can be a mimic. But creation is a secret. The better – the truer – the creation, the more it will resemble a great painter's immortal work.”

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Up to 10,000 bucks – Young Talent’s Competition

Cinema City Festival, which is to be held from 16 to 23 June 2012 in Novi Sad, will officially open the Call for entries in “Up to 10,000 bucks” selection on Thursday, March 15th. This competition selection represents films created using a budget of less than 10,000$ and their authors, who, in their bravery and creativity, saw their ideas through, using limited funds. The call for entries will be open until April 5th, and all those wishing to apply can do so using a form at www.cinemacity.org/upto10000.

This selection traditionally awards cash prize for the best film, but this year, owing to IPA Cross-border Co-operation program between Hungary and Serbia, co-financed by the EU, Cinema City will present two additional awards within this section – the award for the best Hungarian film and the award for the best Serbian film, in order to encourage creative work and cooperation between young film authors in the border-area. The idea is to show that there are no boundaries, financial, geographic, or otherwise, when the creative process of filmmaking is in question.

“Up to 10,000 bucks – Young Talent’s Competition” represents one of the most attractive selections of the Cinema City Festival. Each year this selection, together with its audience, discovers new talents and gives them the opportunity to establish themselves in film art. Authors of chosen films, coming from all over the world, will be guests of the Festival, and will get a chance to meet each other and participate in numerous workshops, and master classes held by renowned film authors. Programme selector will be Nikola Ležajić, whose film „Tilva Roš“ won the Grand Prix at last year’s Festival for the best domestic feature. Films entering this competition should not be older than 2010. All films are welcome, whether they be short, documentary, animated or a feature films.

“Up to 10,000 bucks” selection represents authors and films coming from Serbia, Japan, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Germany, the USA, New Zealand, Georgia, etc. Least year’s IBIS award for the best film was presented to Irena Škorić for “March 9”. As is tradition, at this year’s Festival Irena Škorić will be a member of the jury. All the additional info regarding the call for entries can be found at our web page www.cinemacity.org.

Submissions for the festival are now open, with a special late entry deadline on the 1st of April. The East End Film Festival accepts all UK and international, fictional, documentary, music, animation and experimental films of short or feature length. Feature submissions must not have previously been released in the UK on any format. Without box members may submit online until April 15th. More details available here.

Participants have three weeks to submit their films at the East End Film Festival 2012! The East End Film Festival returns from 3rd-8th July for what promises to be the biggest and most ambitious EEFF to date.  Moving to the summer in Olympic year, EEFF 2012 will feature a huge programme of British and International cinema, talks and special multi media events across London’s most dynamic quarter. 

GARAGE IS PLEASED TO PRESENT FILM COURAGE

WITH KAREN WORDEN AND DAVID BRANIN......

Filmmakers Audrey Ewell & Aaron Aites on LA Talk Radio’s Film Courage (Ep. #155)

Filmmakers Audrey Ewell & Aaron Aites call into Film Courage to talk about their latest film, 99% The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film.  They share with us why they have to make this film, how they got 99 filmmakers to join them on this collaboration, how they are keeping this film objective, and the challenges they have faced on the front lines.

Connect with Audrey & Aaron at www.indiegogo.com/99Film,www.99percentfilm.com, www.facebook.com/99percentfilm, Twitter at @99_Film

Once in a blue moon a performance comes along which is so excellent it forces me to completely re-examine what it is I'm doing in my own work, and Peter Mullan's in My Name Is Joe is one such performance.

Mullan plays Joe Kavanagh, a recovering alcholic, who has got himself onto the straight and narrow with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Although broke and unemployed, Mullan seems happy enough, especially so when managing a hopeless and hapless amateur football team, which gives him a real sense of purpose and joy. And it is through the football team Mullan meets and falls in love with Sarah, a healthcare worker, who is helping ex-junkies Liam and Sabine with their new born baby. Liam plays for Mullan's team, and Mullan has a bond with him, he's protective of Liam, offering support and helping Liam stay clean. But it is also through Liam that Mullan's new found and hard won happiness begins to fall apart. Sabine starts using heroin again and racks up a £1500 debt with McGowan, the local gangster, who gives Liam the choice of having his legs broken to pay off the debt, or putting Sabine on the game. Mullan steps in and agrees to do a job for McGowan, which involves picking up a couple of cars within which heroin is stashed. Sarah, who has seen many young families destroyed by drugs, finds out and finishes with Mullan, who, in turn, frantically tries to get out of his deal with McGowan in a bid to win Sarah back.

But what is it that makes Mullan's work in this film so special? I could mention that it is of true technical brilliance and not the result of some flukey bout of inspiration, and I don't mean technical in the Charles-Laughton-Hunchback-Of-Notre-Dame sense, Mullan's performance is simple and direct, but technical in the sense that it is immensely disciplined and precise, he never allows, what is a ferociously emotive role, to descend into some kind of “actory emotional showcase”, no, Mullan is always serving the film, scene by scene, and in the end delivers a whole series of wonderful, provocative moments economically and truthfully and with control. All of this alone would add upto a great performance, but what puts it among the top handful of performances I have ever seen is the sheer force of Mullan's intentions, which are so great that they reveal acting to be poetry and Mullan a poet. Mullan's character is a tragic hero whose efforts to do good bring about the very disaster he sought to avoid, the problem lies within his own nature, he is the cause of the plague on Thebes as it were. There is a scene where Mullan beats up some of McGowan's goons with a basball bat, then turns and smashes up a nearby Vauxhall Cavalier, and he does so with a force so great that the action goes beyond emotion, beyond reason, beyond the material, beyond the individual, and can only be expressed poetically, as when our love is so great we might say; “my love is like an ocean”. It is an attempt to comprehend the awesome. Mullan gives form to mankind's rage brought forth by the knowledge that we are helpless in the face of circumstance and that even our best intentions may lead to tragedy. No mean feat.

What an actor.

“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.” Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Maria Falconetti's performance in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion Of Joan Of Arc is the most astonishing and astounding in all cinema. It is a performance whose intensity of expression has completely overwhelmed me, and utterly captivated me, and I am still, several days after seeing it, struggling to come to terms with it's impact upon me as a film viewer, and as an actor. In short, I can't get it out of my head.

Falconetti's performance here is all the more remarkable because she is shot almost entirely in close-up, and expresses all that she needs to with her face only. And what a face it is: beautiful and symmetrical, instantly compelling, capable of startling animation. But it is her expressions which are consistently compelling and provocative throughout this silent film, where she spends most her time surrounded by inquisitors and jailers (in whom, Dreyer has assembled surely the finest group of vulture-faced potato-headed old gits in the history of cinema) who want Falconetti as Joan Of Arc to do something to discredit her belief that she is on a mission from God. Of course, her performance is essentially made up of her responses to the actions of her captives, and these responses are mostly drawn from the extreme end of human experience: bliss, terror, shock, incomprehension, depression, dismay (to name but a few), and all are delivered with a force and absolute truth, bringing about the revelation of Falconetti's soul.

I wondered how Falconetti came to this performance, it was clear to me that it was not the result of a technical process because it lacks shape and precision of intent, but on the other hand, the consistent clarity of her expressions meant that her work could not have been the result of free form. It is true that her freedom of expression and her generosity in this role show that she must have been at ease on set, and would also indicate a good relationship with her director. However, I was surprised to learn the following from Roger Ebert's review of the film : -
“for Falconnetti, the performance was an ordeal. Legends from the set tell of Dreyer forcing her to kneel painfully on stone and then wipe all expression from her face so that the viewer would read suppressed or inner pain. He filmed the same shots again and again, hoping that in the editing room he could find exactly the right nuance in her facial expression.”

This makes sense, and explains the precision of Falconetti's performance in the absence of consummate technical control. However, I would suggest that Falconetti was more complicit in Dreyer's method than this quote might infer, infact, I would say that Falconetti more than went along with it because she is enjoying her work, and enjoying it too much for it to be the result of mere directorial manipulation. Falconetti's suffering on set, is her suffering to deliver the performance, which, in the eyes of the audience, becomes the illusion of the character, Joan Of Arc, suffering (which the audience pays it's money to see). For the actor, there is no Joan Of Arc, she exists only as lines on a page in a script, and so, for the actor to give a truthful performance, he must go through a struggle congruent to that of the character. So Falconetti had to be complicit in Dreyer's process, it was necessary in service of her work, her “ordeal” on set is congruent to Joan Of Arc's, had it been anything less then we would not have been treated to the calibre of performance that we were. Ultimately, Falconetti's performance is the result of innate acting talent, I don't care what process you employ, it takes a special kind of actor to do what she did, and the range and intensity come from within the woman herself, they have to or else she couldn't have done it, this stuff cannot be copied and it absolutely cannot be faked, and furthermore, acting is a mysterious and a largely intuitive business, and I'd offer Falconetti's performance here as an example of the shamanistic dimension of acting, when the actor is apparently possessed by a spirit, and in the way Joan might have been (and they wont teach you how to do that at drama school).

I don't know much about Falconetti, although I was amazed to learn that this was her only major film role, she preferred to work on stage as a light comedian (choosing the stage over the cinema was not unusual in those days, in the way it might be today). I urge all actors, directors, everybody to see this film, I believe Falconetti's work to be at the very pinnacle, it's certainly a very obvious example of great acting if you were unsure about what great acting might actually look like. No, it cannot be copied or faked, and few are blessed with an instrument such as Falconetti's. Perhaps then, we can hold her work up as an example, a standard we may strive to meet, and something to measure our own work against, and perhaps one day we will be able to produce work that touches people in the way Falconetti's performance of Joan has. That's certainly something worth aiming for.

When an actor's performance is dull and plodding, it is usually because the actor is trying to supply a predetermined effect ( this may manifest itself as line readings [we've all heard the gag of the actor struggling to workout which word to stress in the line] or the actor trying “to do an emotion” or “do a character” or plot out a “character arc” or a combination of all of these) in order to control all aspects of performance and lessen the fear brought about by the truth of the moment. In this case, the actor is less apt to reveal himself and his true nature, with all it's strengths and weaknesses. By repressing the truth of his personality, the actor succeeds in generalizing his work, his performance becomes safe, predictable and polite, and false. I knew an actor who was exciting and charismatic whenever I met her in a bar or a cafe and I loved having her attention, but she was almost invisible when I saw her on stage, her performance was tedious and I had to wrestle with myself in order to listen to what she was saying. She was trying to control what the audience thought of her, and as such, she had drained the personality from her work. 

Charles Laughton's performance as Quasimodo in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame is one of the most piquant, individualistic and moving, in all cinema. It is also a great technical tour de force: Laughton wore heavy make-up and heavy prosthetics, he even ensured that his “hump” have extra weight so that he really was carrying a heavy load, and which also served to change Laughton's whole physicality, he also employed an accent not his own. As impressive as this is in terms of creating an illusion, it is not the reason for the power of Laughton's performance. No. That lies in the essence of the performance, which is Laughton himself, or put another way: the revelation of Laughton's personality, the truth of it, in all it's glory and all it's wretchedness. Laughton wasn't trying to control the moment, he gave himself up to the moment and confronted it, as it came to him, with as much courage and commitment as he could muster, and we, the audience, are compelled by an individual wrestling with the questions of his life.

There should be no difference between the actor when he is working in front of the camera or upon the stage and when he is living his normal day-to-day life. There should be no difference. The actor and his work should be one.

The scene (6) of The Last of Deductive Frames is completed. 

"The Last of Deductive Frames" is a collaborative omnibus feature film being made gradually over time by the members of Experimental Film Society. It is a film that starts but never finishes. Each filmmaker will contribute a ten minute section to it. These sections will be assembled in the order in which they are completed. This constantly growing work will initially be for the internet, but will eventually be presented on the big screen. The only strict rule at the outset is that each segment must last exactly ten minutes, although further rules might be added as the film develops.

"The Last of Deductive Frames" is a living cinematic organism designed to forget its creators as it evolves.

Back in April 2011, I wrote a piece for Directors Notes detailing the journey that I undertook with my debut feature (as writer/director), Life Just Is, as we went From Paper Cut to Fine Cut. What follows is an attempt to sketch in what happened next…

In the run up to the last piece, my editor Murat Kebir and I had been working on a new version of the film, focusing on each 'day' within the film (the film takes place over seven days), rather than dealing with the film as a whole. Once we'd finished this process, we reassembled the film and watched it through, along with our producer Tom Stuart, for the first time in its new version. Murat loved it and Tom was very happy. At that stage I felt too close to the material to be objective, but I had some concerns about a couple of sequences. While editing this version, Murat had restructured the film very slightly, deleting a scene and moving another one from earlier in the film into its place. For me this change meant that the story arc of two of the characters no longer made sense, but for Murat they were now much clearer, so I agreed to sit with the change for a while longer (though we did eventually change it back – it's probably not a coincidence that the words director and dictator share so many letters...).

Now that we were back to working on the film as a whole, we were able to see that the approach Murat had taken to the material was working well. I spent some time going through the new version in depth, making detailed notes on a scene-by-scene basis. It was generally fairly minor stuff, though I felt like we had two especially problematic areas that we still needed to fix. With hindsight, one of these problems was down to me still being too stuck to the abstract ideas I had concocted while doing the paper edit for the film (see this previous article for more info on the paper edit). When Murat was finally able to pull me out of those ideas, we began to find something within the material itself which worked. The other problematic area was a classic case of something which worked well on the page, but not on the screen; it was by taking a step back from the script and 'rewriting' the sequence in the edit that we were able to solve it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While still going through the film and making notes, I had a meeting with our sound recordist and audio-postproduction designer/mixer, Jason Creasey. I wanted to make sure that our editing choices weren't going to cause any unnecessary problems during the sound mix. Luckily, there was nothing too worrying. However, had Jason told me that, for instance, a certain shot would have required ADR, I would have seriously considered using an alternative take.

It was also around this time that I met up with our music supervisor, James McWilliam, to discuss the music in the film. I'd decided fairly early on that I didn't want a score in the film and that all the music in it would be diegetic – so we needed to find bands that were willing to let us feature their tracks. I'd worked hard even during the initial cuts of the film to choose appropriate temp tracks (some of which worked so well that they made it into the film), but there was still a lot of work to be done and Jim needed time to get it right (and get the rights). From this point on, Jim would send me tracks to listen to and if I liked them I would try them in the film. There were one or two scenes which were especially tricky to find songs for, but generally it was a relatively smooth process. Securing the rights proved a little more difficult. There was one song that fitted perfectly. When we approached the rights holders they said yes. But when we sent them the contractual agreement they went silent on us. Much to our frustration, we were eventually forced to choose another song. Luckily, Jim was able to find something which worked equally well.

Meanwhile, Murat and I were continuing to work through our notes on the latest version. We arranged to do a test screening, and that gave us a clear deadline of when the next edit needed to be finished by. As well as working on the picture cut, I started working on the track-laying, going through every piece of off-screen dialogue in the film and making sure that we were using the best possible take (from a performance point of view – I decided I'd let Jason worry about the technical side of things later on…). It wasn't an easy task, partly because the version of FCP I was using would literally crash and throw me out of the program every five minutes, but also because the new takes would have to fit within a predetermined length of time; sometimes great takes simply wouldn't work because their timing didn't fit with the visuals. (Though there was one actor in particular who managed to be almost identical with his timing in every take, even if the emotional punch was wildly different).

In the run up to the test screening, we decided to show the film to a few members of the crew. It was almost like a test screening for the test screening, and it gave us some feedback which enabled us to tweak the film further before the test screening proper occurred (if I remember correctly, our 1st A.D. Alice Caronna saw the film at this screening, and suggested an idea which lead to the 'rewriting' of the aforementioned problem area). The actual test screening was a small, private event. We hired a room at the London Film Academy, and invited along a select group of contacts. At the end of the screening, we handed out questionnaires.

The response was, to be honest, mixed – but overall it certainly leaned towards positive, and it gave us a good indication of the areas that we needed to work on further. It raised one or two questions, such as whether the pace of the film was right, which lead to a lot of soul searching about what the film was and, more to the point, what we wanted it to be. Off the back of this feedback, Murat and I started experimenting with different pacing and different approaches to some of the scenes. More often than not, though, these experiments were a total failure – but both Murat and I appreciated the opportunity to explore the material in this way. It made us firmer in our convictions, and it meant that, when the time came for us to lock the edit, we really did feel like we had tried everything that we wanted to try (obviously we could have continued for longer – forever! – if we hadn't decided enough was enough, but it meant that we were able to step away from the edit without having a niggling feeling that we 'really should have just tried this...').

Once the edit was locked, we near-enough simultaneously got the film ready for the sound mix and the grade. The transfer to Jason's system was totally smooth – Murat simply exported an OMF file from FCP, and gave it to Jason along with a Quicktime copy of the film. Getting the film into the grading suit, however, proved slightly trickier.

At the behest of our grader and co-producer, Pat Wintersgill, Murat exported the film as an uncompressed tiff sequence. When Pat loaded it onto his system, though, he immediately noticed that we were experiencing a problem with our black levels, which were being crushed. We attempted to get around it by conforming the original H.264 rushes, but this wasn't possible due to some timecode issues. In the end Murat and Pat put their heads together and came up with a solution involving a slight offset of the black levels upon export from FCP. Once this was sorted, the grading ended up being a relatively smooth process, slightly hampered only by having to fit around Pat's full-time work schedule, and the fact that our cinematographer, Yosuke Kato, was now living back in Japan.

After an initial conversation where Pat and I went through the film together scene-by-scene, Pat then worked on his own to complete the first pass of the grade. This version of the film was subsequently compressed and emailed over to Yosuke for feedback. I then met with Pat to discuss Yosuke's comments, along with my own thoughts. After a couple more passes were done in this way, we played the film on a big screen in one of the grading suites at Technicolor, where Pat was then working. It was well worth doing, as we did pick up on several things which we hadn't noticed when grading on the (admittedly sizable) HD screens in the smaller suites. We therefore did a few further grading sessions, during which I no doubt drove Pat crazy with my endless scrutiny and obsessional tweaking.

Meanwhile, Jason was starting to make headway with the first pass of the sound mix, though the process had become a little more drawn out than we had hoped, due to Jason's other commitments. Much like with the grade, the first pass was done alone (by Jason), based on a long conversation he'd had with me in which we went through the film scene-by-scene. In a way, a lot of the work done during this first pass was technical. For instance, in scenes that had been covered with both a boom and radio mics, Jason went through and chose the better recording for any given moment. He spent a long time working on this first pass and editing the dialogue. He sent it to me bit by bit, and I would send him initial feedback (which he often acted on instantly), while also compiling a much longer list to discuss with him once he was finished. I went through Jason's work with a lot of care and detail, always listening to it on at least three different systems. By the time he was finished, I had a very long list of notes! As long as my list was, though, Jason and I were able to plough through it relatively quickly (at this stage, I began working much more closely with Jason, attending the sound sessions and discussing the film with him as he worked, much like I had done with Murat during the edit). Pretty much every point on my list was creative: Jason's technical work was already superb (though that's not to say his creative work wasn't superb too!). In the edit Murat and I had based most of our decisions around one simple question: how can we best render the inner lives of the characterson screen? I wanted to carry this approach over to the sound design, and it was this that Jason and I really fine-tuned during the second pass.

As with the edit and the grade, we decided to play the film out in a theatre environment before locking the sound mix. I was able to secure a screening room at UAL through my work at Student Film Festival London, and Tom, Jason, Murat, Jim and I watched through the film on the big screen, focusing intensely on the sound design. From there, Jason and I went on to do some final tweaks before signing off the sound mix.

I have to say, by this time I had seen the film so many times – into triple figures? – that I was starting to struggle to keep up my concentration when going through the film. It becomes hard to separate yourself from the material and have any kind of objective viewpoint on the film. But somehow I muddled through.

During the grading and sound mix, Murat was still hard at work on the film, even though his role as editor had long since been completed. Legend that he is, Murat had offered to help us with our VFX work. (VFX work? In a character piece? Most of it is invisible; things like painting out the reflection of a certain idiotic director in the living room window.) Murat is something of a VFX whizz, and did a fantastic job for us. I should, however, also give a shout out to Ross Birkbeck and Pat, who did great work on some additional VFX for us.

With the sound, edit and VFXs complete, all that remained was for Pat to reassemble the film – thankfully a rather painless process. Meanwhile, Tom and I set about organising our cast and crew screening at BAFTA – which ended up being surprisingly painful! Sending the invites and managing the RSVP lists turned into something of a mammoth task, but the night itself went off without a hitch, and the response to the film was phenomenal (you can read what some critics thought here).

So, with the film complete we are now, finally, at the stage of submitting the film to festivals and approaching distributors. Hopefully this won't be the last you'll hear of us. (Fingers crossed).

Please watch this 4 minute interview with Alain Delon, which this blog is a response to.

Alain Delon is speaking the truth. How do we know? Because he does not try to sell what he is saying to us, he does not narrate his emotions, he does not indicate to us what we should be feeling in response to his words. No, Delon speaks simply and directly, which is how we speak when we  speak about something which is important to us – we do not embellish those things which are important to us, nor do we embellish the truth. It's worth pointing out that Delon was a major movie star at this time, and Le Samourai was a box office smash – compare his interview to those of the modern day movie star: drenched in the slime of self-promotion, expert in the smug schmooze, and all false self-deprecation*, and it is only ever patronizing when they praise the film they are working on (what is really meant is that film did an adequate job of showcasing their specialness).

Delon's reverence for Jean-Pierre Melville, his love for the film and for cinema itself, are obvious, and they inspire and refresh – no mere “exploitation of the form” for Delon. He recognises an auteur film when he sees one. I've said before on this blog, that actors need to learn about the aesthetics of cinema in order to choose which work to accept and which to decline, which filmmakers to support, and which to ignore – this is especially crucial with the proliferation of micro-budget cinema in recent years (and similarly, I have called on directors to improve their understanding of the aesthetics of acting, so that they can actually tell the difference between good and bad acting, and not just cast an actor because they've got the right colour hair). Delon describes Le Samourai as a work of art, a word ridiculed by self-styled “commercial” filmmakers these days, but perhaps it's worth thinking about what it actually means, and then we might strive to create same, and find the wherewithal to describe it as such.

*..."the director didn't even want me for the role, I had to fight for it, I had to prove to him that I was an artist" (note how the word “artist” here, is used as a term of self-aggrandizement).

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GARAGE IS PLEASED TO PRESENT FILM COURAGE

WITH KAREN WORDEN AND DAVID BRANIN......

Dustin Jansick of Way Too Indie on LA Talk Radio’s Film Courage (Ep. #154)

Dustin Jansick, Founder of Way Too Indie calls into Film Courage to tell us why he launched the site, the indie film club he started in South Dakota, his advice to those who do not have money for website design, how filmmakers should approach press for film reviews, and his thoughts on how to drive traffic to your website.

Connect with Dustin at www.WayTooIndie.com & @AtSymbolDcity

Boredom Of The Disgust & Monotony Of The Tediousness, is a film made up of a series of scenes but there is no through-action – they are linked because each of them is about cinema itself. The film has documentary scenes (as discussed in Part 1), and it has fiction scenes (including a film noir scene about a man trying to escape from some people he owes money to, and the imaginary argument discussed in the last blog), so it was only natural that the film should culminate in a scene that was both fiction and documentary.

Set in the screening room of The Guesthouse in Cork, I was to play an affable, if eccentric, film lover, who had built a cinema with his own hands, in order to screen the films he loved, and here was opening night, and he was explaining his intentions for the cinema. The cinema did not exist of course, not in the sense that I was talking about it in any case – at one point, I introduced Le Samourai as the next film of the evening to the audience, but there was no audience, and I had no intention of screening Le Samourai.  So much for the fiction then. During the improvisation, Rashidi would interject and ask me to speak about my thoughts on cinema generally, about my favourite filmmakers, and what kind of films I loved. Essentially, I gave truthful answers (ie – my actual thoughts rather than made up ones for the character) - I spoke about my penchant for discovering obscure masterpieces, and my preference for personal, idiosyncratic cinema (or auteur cinema) – watching individualist cinema, is, for me, like entering a secret garden. I also spoke about an idea which is important to me: that the richest way a film can be experienced is at the movie theatre, in front of a massive screen (and if you're skeptical about that; watch a film at home on DVD firstly, then go to the theatre to watch the same film). For this whole scene, I was really just riffing – letting ideas form in my mind, in response to the few notes I had been given - it was “playing” in the truest sense. However, I put on a slightly upper class voice, and behaved in a rather stiff manner, along with displaying a certain affability – these are all externals which I applied in order to help create the illusion of character (another example of an external, would be a limp). Of course, this kind of characterization makes perfect sense for the fictional parts of the scene, but is strange when you think I maintained this character while I was explaining my actual own ideas. If the actor is the truth at the heart of the filmmakers artifice, then we can also say he is the truth at the heart of the artifice of characterization – now I think of Charles Laughton in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, where he uses externals masterfully for sure, but it is undeniably the force of Laughton's spirit underneath the prosthetics and the make-up, which truly moves us.

It has been a joy to be given a platform to expound my ideas on acting, and then to put those ideas into action in the same film – and it is a testament to Rashidi's love and respect for acting, that he decided to give the craft such focus within the film. Further, as the role of actors is diminishing all the time, Rashidi is to be commended for striving to give responsibility back to the actor, and, by offering challenging work, offers the opportunity to unlock his true creative potential, and all this takes place within his own personal, cinematic aesthetic. The actor, for his part, must not waste the opportunity, but rise to the challenge, and stretch every sinew in service of the film.

Boredom Of The Disgust & Monotony Of The Tediousness, is the fruit of a true actor-director collaboration.

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Over the years we’ve been lucky enough to travel the world and experience a number of festivals – both as filmmakers and audience members.  We recently had the privilege of premiering our short film The Summer Home at the Festivus Film Festival in Denver, CO.  

When formulating a festival plan, we do a lot of research in selecting which ones to submit to.  Some we choose for marketing, networking and career building; others we choose in order to connect with our truly independent filmmaking compatriots around the world, to find storytellers like us who are doing everything they can to make quality, engaging, art.  Festivus is one of these festivals.

WHAT MAKES FESTIVUS UNIQUE?

No barriers to festival execs

The first e-mail we received from Festivus was from Tim DeMasters – one of the festival founders.  And it wasn’t just a form letter; it was an honest-to-goodness communiqué that originated from his fingertips, which ultimately turned into a lengthy thread with the same man!  This might sound minor, but it made an impression right away.  If you’ve ever worked with a festival in the past, you know this is a special thing; usually emails are foisted upon a volunteer charged with wrangling us eclectic, scattered filmmakers.

This trend didn’t stop once the festival started, either.  All three founders attended most every event; they were incredibly approachable and easy to talk to.  In fact, on several occasions they initiated contact and checked in with us!  This wonderful attitude towards their filmmakers leads us to our next point.

VIP service

Festivus pulls out all the stops when it comes to taking care of their filmmakers.  They claim to be a festival for filmmakers and they’re not kidding around.  From day one you get above and beyond service – including a personal liaison. That’s right.  A person dedicated specifically to you.  A super awesome, cool festival volunteer whose whole job is to make sure you have the best festival experience possible.  This includes a personal pick-up from the airport, recommendations for food/activities around town and someone to hang out with and introduce you to other people at festival events.  

Our liaison, Seneca, was amazing; a warm, inviting, knowledgeable and all around kick-ass person.  She truly made our festival experience unforgettable.

Abundant chances to mix and mingle

Festivus knows how to throw a party and practice clearly makes perfect - they have a party every night of the festival!  Not only do they have amazing sponsors (including Buffalo Trace Bourbon), they booked us in some really cool locations around the city.  And each event was catered to filmmakers mixing and mingling with each other as well as festival-goers.  The way everything was set up, it was virtually impossible not to make meaningful connections.  

Beyond the official parties, each screening venue also had an accompanying lounge just across the street – pre- and post-film discussions, free booze and snacks.  Can’t go wrong.

Filmmaker bowling social

Yes, Festivus organized a filmmaker bowling social.  Want to find the inspiration for your next awkward black comedy?  Put a bunch of sport-challenged, uncoordinated filmmakers together and ask them to figure out ways to throw a weighted ball down a greasy lane in order to knock down the most pins.  Good times for all!

To add some extra fun/complexity, they added “Feats of Strength”: spinning around 10 times before throwing the ball, throwing it between your legs, buddy bowling, etc.  Silly?  Sure.  But by breaking down the barriers of the detached, ironic “cool” we’ve all become so adept at and forcing everyone into the abyss of ridiculousness, they created a perfect recipe for fun and camaraderie.

Not to mention Lindy was the highest scoring girl. Oh, and there was free beer.

Quality programming

Last but not least, and the most important part of any festival, is the quality of programming.  And for a festival in only the fifth year of existence, Festivus has some undeniable chops.  All the films were truly independent and we were shocked by not only the production values, but the storytelling skills many of the filmmakers exhibited.  We also appreciated Festivus pushing the boundaries and programming some truly risky films.  

OUR FAVORITE FILMS

We saw many films while enjoying all this festival had to offer – 43, to be exact.  Here are our Top 11 (because 10 is so last year):

Ghosts of Old Highways (dir. Dan Bush // 16 min): A thematic and structural cousin to the 1962 French short film An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, this is a magnificently beautiful film, ultimately winning the award for Best Cinematography.  It’s a music video, but one with a very strong (albeit abstract) narrative and great performances.  Only one complaint: the credits felt longer than the actual film.  This is an odd trend we’ve noticed, and it needs to stop.  Believe us, as filmmakers, we know it takes a lot people and a tremendous amount of effort (not to mention blood, sweat and tears) to make a film.  But on short films, the credits should be just that – short.  We’re certainly not advocating for no credits, but if people are genuinely interested in the film’s colophon, let’s be honest, they’ll go to IMDb.

Blunderkind (dir. Zak Mechanic // 20 min): A little bit Rushmore(1998), but with more time travel, beer and video games.  Cheeky, clever and highly entertaining.  A boy-genius and his trusty sidekick build a time machine, but the sidekick gets lost in the future.  It’s only when the prodigy grows up that they meet again; except time itself has not been kind to the one-time wunderkind.   It features a gleefully self-referential and sarcastic voice-over and uses the tropes of time-travel cinema to create an emotionally compelling, bittersweet conclusion.  

The Forgotten Fruit (dir. James Williams // 9 min): A short documentary about gooseberries and the men who love them – specifically, the men who compete to see who can grow the biggest.  While it might sound like a slight story, the beauty of this film lies in its refreshingly non-ironic earnestness.  There are a number of wonderful double entendres peppered throughout, but the bulk of the movie is a simple celebration of life’s small pleasures, of a sense of innocence, and a forgotten era.

Remake (dir. Chris Tomkins // 7 min): A hilarious, inspired burglary-comedy for film nerds.  Two men break into a house, only to discover one of the world’s greatest DVD collections; this promptly starts an argument over, you guessed it, remakes.  Wonderful – and fun! – all the way around.  

A Finger, Two Dots, Then Me (dir. David & Daniel Holecheck // 8 min): On paper, this should be a sappy and downright ridiculous film: spoken word poetry about the cosmic glory of love.  But the way it’s manifested, the way the poem is visualized, the energy of the performer, everything coalesces into a transcendent and affecting experience.  Deserving winner of the Best Editing award.  

16-bit Sunrise (dir. Vinnie Pomp // 20 min): when asked during the Q&A about his inspiration, the director responded: “Well, a funny thing happened.  I was a teenager and went to High School.”  That pretty much sums it up.  It’s an awkward, affectionate and occasionally dark story about an outcast, the girl after whom he pines, and the video games he uses as a safety blanket.

Self-Sabotage (dir. Scott Brignac // 27 min): We don’t use the term lightly when we say: this film is epic.  It’s quite long for a short film, but it’s a sumptuous feast for the senses.  A collaborative project branching out from the music that acts as the score/soundtrack, it “follows” the verses of the Lord’s Prayer.  It’s experimental, oblique and wondrous.  

Kama Sutra King (dir. Ben Jones // 10 min): Using the archetype of the Hot Librarian as a jumping off point, this gratifying, big-hearted film is ultimately about inaction and regret, but with a lovely and happy ending. As a film professor once said, brevity is the soul of the short film; this one is short and sweet.

Searching For Sonny (dir. Andrew Disney // 94 min): The one feature on our list.  A suburban black-comedy/neo-noir, from within the first few minutes, you know that you want to spend time with these characters.  Set during a High School reunion, it’s the mystery of a missing friend.  Some great twists and turns, a lot of laughs and gunshot wounds for everyone!

Bunker'd (dir. Chris Canfield // 15 min): Thoroughly entertaining comedy about two men trapped in a bomb-shelter after nuclear war breaks out in the 1950s.  Well, one man and a dead guy.   And a lot of canned peaches.

Spoiler (dir. Daniel Thron // 18 min): The world doesn’t need is another zombie film; but this one has a unique perspective.  After a zombie outbreak, what do people do?  Adapt and get on with the lives, most likely; assimilate the fear into daily routine, keep calm and carry on.  This movie uses that premise to examine a macro concept in a micro narrative of a father trying to protect his daughter from a zombie-fied mother, while the police zero in and are about to “neutralize” the entire house.  Taught, well-acted and intriguing.  

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT?

These are a couple of areas we feel could use a little improvement; but we only say this out of love, to make an already great festival even better.

More Diverse award categories

For such a small and diverse festival, Festivus had a very limited amount of awards.  While they had some specific awards – Best Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Short Short, Best Foreign Short, Best Documentary Short, Best Experimental – they didn’t separate the larger categories like drama from comedy.  Now, of course, having too many awards simply dilutes the value, but it’s nearly impossible to compare a film like, say, Remake with Ghost of Old Highways.  Since awards can help make or break an indie film, Festivus could really continue to help filmmakers and expand their award categories slightly.

In our opinion, they could probably remove the more specialized awards (like editing and cinematography; while filmmakers can appreciate these, a general audience likely can’t discern why one film would win over another, especially for editing) and instead just focus on the best films within sections.  Best Feature (they only program a few), Best Short Short, Best Foreign Short, Best Documentary Short, Best Experimental Short, Best Comedy Short, Best Dramatic Short.

Tailoring programming & advertising to an outside audience

After attending the entire festival and experiencing 43 of the films offered, it seemed that the majority of the attending audiences were other filmmakers.  Festivus can boast some incredible growth since their inception five years ago, and they definitely had an advertising presence in Denver (we noticed at least two billboards while driving around town), but perhaps more general-audience outreach can be done.  And yes, we’re fully aware that this is easier said than done.  

But, as an example: package marketing.  Our film, THE SUMMER HOME, was in a package called “Rehab Shorts”.  To an outside audience, it would make sense that all the films in this package would have a rehab theme.  That’s originally what we thought ourselves.  However, the festival labels it “Rehab” because it’s the first screening after one of their blow-out parties: going to it will help you “rehab”.  We admit, this is clever.  However, it’s targeted toward the inside crowd – to the filmmakers and hardcore festival-goers who went to the party – and not necessarily to a more general/casual audience.

Moderated Q&As

Post-film Q&As at Festivus typically begin with the host handing the microphone to the filmmaker and walking off the stage.  In principal, we totally understand the rationale: remove any sense of boundary between audience and filmmaker.  But, a good Q&A needs help from a moderator.  Not someone who takes over the conversation, but someone who helps guide the audience and their questions.  A good moderator is one who has seen the film and, because of their special knowledge of the filmmakers and the stories behind the films, can lead the audience into questions that hit on a deeper and more useful level.  Without moderation, the Q&As can become awkward and consist of the same few questions: What’s your budget?  What did you shoot on?  What was your inspiration?  While these are great questions, audience members usually want to get to the meatier discussion without the unnecessary warm up period.  A moderator can help with that.

CONCLUSION

All in all the Festivus Film Festival is an amazing festival.  It features fun, engaging, quality programming and focuses on the true artistic spirit and talent brewing in the US and around the world.

Personally, we can’t wait to make another film and (hopefully) attend Festivus again!

The scene (6) of The Last of Deductive Frames is completed.

"The Last of Deductive Frames" is a collaborative omnibus feature film being made gradually over time by the members of Experimental Film Society. It is a film that starts but never finishes. Each filmmaker will contribute a ten minute section to it. These sections will be assembled in the order in which they are completed. This constantly growing work will initially be for the internet, but will eventually be presented on the big screen. The only strict rule at the outset is that each segment must last exactly ten minutes, although further rules might be added as the film develops.

"The Last of Deductive Frames" is a living cinematic organism designed to forget its creators as it evolves.

Having completed the documentary scenes for the film, we moved on to the fictional scenes. First up, I was to have an argument with somebody who wasn't in the room, but I was to create the illusion that I was talking to somebody, so all the audience would hear are my responses to this imaginary other person, and if that wasn't enough, Rashidi decided to make it a little bit harder by turning a radio on in the room, blasting only white noise, and no actual music - an actual antagonist as oppose to the imaginary. Again, there was no rehearsal, so I just had to pick a task and back myself. More and more as I get older as an actor, I put my faith in my imagination rather than my powers of reason, largely because the imagination will always cough something up which I can use, whereas my reason can create self-consciousness and cause me to dry – acting technique then, is about intentionally liberating the imagination when under pressure. And my imagination did cough something up: I had arranged a party which was very important to me, but my (invisible) other half was refusing to attend, because the restaurant in question didn't have the kind of chicken she likes, so the improvisation became about me trying to convince her to come to the party – that was the literal action (ie - the fiction of the scene) – however, the essential action (ie – the concretely doable task I was to give myself for the scene) was to “get a loved one to come through for me”. Of course, I didn't think of this whole situation right at the beginning of the improvisation, I just made a start, and the picture gradually emerged, with my imagination feeding me data. Throughout the scene, I executed the action in different ways; to reason with, to persuade, to cajole, to plead, to beg, even to mock (using my special reverse psychology techniques, of course), to lay down the law was another, and all the while trying to deal with Rashidi's mischievous radio and it's fluctuating volume. This scene involved the exploration of a nice, clean line of action, which is such a joy to perform. Having now watched the completed film, I had completely forgotten that Rashidi had been torturing me not only with a radio, but also with his lighting scheme: sometimes a strobe, sometimes creating a shadowy, noirish world, and finally cutting the lights entirely near the end of the scene, so that I was left standing in total darkness, shouting abuse at my non-existent scene partner; “you're f**king nuts, you're a f**king lunatic....” 

Essentially then, this scene is a real summation of the acting techniques that I regularly discuss on this blog: eschewing characterization for action, and a proper commitment to doing the actions will lead to a truthful performance, and then the illusion of character is created in the mind of the viewer – and here the paradox of acting is revealed to us: that a truthful performance helps the viewer to believe a fiction.

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You know how some people think that the day changes when the clock strikes midnight? You're walking around with them and at 11:59pm they say Tuesday and at 12:01am they say Wednesday, and even though they're technically right, it's really confusing? When I used to work a graveyard shift, there was a guy who did that every day and it drove everyone nuts.

Well Day 5 of DECORATION started at 12:30am. At least, the story of it did.

I'm on the couch in the living room, winding down to sleep. The lights are off. Nicolas comes into the living room and tells me that they won't need me for tomorrow's shoot. And then he leaves.

Um…ok.

I try to sleep, but that kind of gets your mind racing.

I often say that there's a better version of A Year Without Rent that involves a camera crew following me around because I can only capture a fraction of what happens, but they wouldn't have been able to capture that unless they had set up a camera rig to record absolutely everything. And I don't know that they would have been set up at 6 something in the morning when Nicolas comes back in, this time more combative, to really give me a piece of his mind.

Of course, I'm barely awake. In retrospect I should have discretely turned on the audio recorder on my iPhone, but I don't remember to do a lot of things before I've had any coffee. But here's the basics.

+ Nicolas, who doesn't have a Twitter account, is mad about some tweets I sent from set. He doesn't know what they are, exactly, but he's heard about them from someone else. You've seen some of them if you've read the rest of the DECORATION posts.

+ He "doesn't care what I write", but his concern is that what I'm Tweeting is affecting the morale of the crew. That's a fair concern. In this case, it might be unfounded, since the tweet he seems to be talking about was pretty obviously a joke about how I couldn't believe someone in the crew hadn't seen a certain classic film. Or he had never had a bloody mary. I forget which.

And there was one sent to someone that said the film I was on wasn't going well. That should have been a DM.

+ Not only does he not care what I write, but has, by his own admission, no idea what A Year Without Rent is, and he doesn't care. You'll remember from Day 1 that this isn't a film I approached. They approached me. For the writer, director, and producer of a film of this size to not have any idea who the press person they've asked to come on set is (or what he's doing there), is stunning. This is not a large production, by any stretch of the imagination. And this is not the first production in AYWR. What I do is pretty well-established by this point, both the blog writing (like this) and the tweets from set. Like, for example, Paul Osborne's FAVOR, which Cheryl Nichols worked on.

If you seek me out, ask me to come to the middle of Arkansas (on AYWR's dime), and don't know what I'm going to do on your set, that's 100% your fault. It's not like I happened to be in Arkansas and stopped by on a whim. And it's not like I'm doing anything I didn't do on FAVOR.

+ He's upset that I haven't even bothered to read the script, which is something he requires everyone to do, because everyone needs to be on the same page and have the same passion for the project.

From what I can tell, the script has changed nearly every day.

No one has given me a script. When I point that out, his demeanor changes considerably.

+ It's a long conversation. Really long. Cheryl comes in and expresses her concerns, but it boils down to one thing: I shouldn't be helping this film. The director doesn't want me there, and AYWR functions best when the filmmakers are willing participants, which is something that I assumed would be the case from the initiative they showed in asking me to drive 833 miles to get there.

Thing is, I'm not leaving. They're on the schedule and I'm in the middle of fucking Arkansas. If this was LA or Seattle or New York, that's one thing, but I don't know anyone in Arkansas. So I offer to read the script, and that placates him. Sort of.

And they have some valid points about the nature of AYWR and what value it actually provides, because it varies from film to film. But the process doesn't, and when you approach someone, you need to know what you're getting. Is AYWR a good fit for every film? No. But it's your project. You know what AYWR is and your should know what your project needs and requires. That's your responsibility. Otherwise, you're just wasting everyone's time.

Once the day does actually start (late), we head to a cemetery to shoot the titular Decoration Festival.

I've searched Google a couple of times looking for information about the Decoration Festival, and have found nothing, so I'll have to rely on the film's IndieGoGo page: "the town's sons and daughters return to celebrate the lives of ancestors buried in the cemetery."

Apparently it's a big deal.

We get to the cemetery and it looks like, well, a cemetery. Ten or so locals show up to serve as extras, and a skeleton crew walks around the cemetery with them while the rest of us kill time by attempting to play baseball with an orange wrapped in tape and making a swing out of some rope and a gobo arm. There's not a whole lot else to do. 

So they didn't really need me after all, but I don't think that's the point.

Eventually, they come back.

What's they've found out from this excursion with the locals is that the festival isn't something they're prepared to fake. It's elaborate, with lots of flowers and, well, decorations all over the cemetery. The whole town comes out. To do it like this would look terrible. So the new plan is to push that scene to the actual festival--in the spring.

Keep in mind, the movie is named after this festival. They know what this festival entails.

It's not the first thing they've pushed. I've seen them reschedule a couple of Arkansas interior scenes to shoot in LA, but this is a pretty big shift. It's a hard thing to shoot around, it being kind of important. Not to mention the fact that they're going to have to match fall exteriors with spring exteriors, and the leaves have definitely changed already. They either have to use what little they got today and make it work in post, or they have to come back in the spring, which brings up a whole host of potential problems with continuity.

I can't imagine they'll ask me to join them in the spring.

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

As I arrived in Cork,  the ever prolific and hardworking Rouzbeh Rashidi informed me that in addition to HE, we were to shoot some scenes for another feature film he was putting together (in collaboration with Maximilian Le Cain), and he did so in a tone of voice which suggested that shooting two feature films simultaneously was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, the obvious thing to do in fact.

He said he wanted to explore on camera some of the ideas I have been developing on this blog over the months, aswell as create fictional, improvised scenes, then finally explore my attitude to cinema generally, in scenes which would be both fiction and documentary. However, as the scenes progressed and as we accrued material, it was decided that the footage would form a feature film of it's own: “Boredom Of The Disgust And Monotony Of The Tediousness”.

5 OF THE BEST

Firstly, Rashidi asked me to write down my five favourite actors and actresses, on a piece of paper, and then discuss what I liked about them, or why I thought they were great. Normally an easy task – I always love a good list, and walking down the street lost in my thoughts, I could probably reel off one name after another, but when someone asks you to name names, suddenly the mind goes blank. However, after some thought, I did manage to come up with five actors – (in no particular order) Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando, Michel Piccoli, Jack Nicholson and Jean Gabin (on my reserve list were Alain Delon and Robert De Niro). For actresses, I decided on: Tilda Swinton, Emmanuelle Beart, Irene Jacob and Delphine Seyrig, and ran out of time before thinking of my fifth (which would have been Monica Vitti). I then offered my reasons for including each. Obviously a lot was said about the excellence of each actor's technique, but, in the end, what we respond to in each actor is their personality, each of them is intrinsically compelling – and I'm not talking about them playing compelling characters, it's something in them, call it energy, call it spirit, there's just something about them that is alight....Of course, as I write this blog, I can think of many, many others I could add to the list (Dirk Bogarde anyone?).

GURU

The next set up had me expounding my theories on acting more broadly (never needing to be asked twice to do so of course) – many of which may be viewed as “controversial”, such as the fact that there is no difference between stage and camera acting, but that a lot of people make a lot of money by inventing a difference: then charging good money to explain what the difference is, then charge again to "teach" the actor how to "adapt" accordingly. The wider point, of course, is that a whole industry has sprouted up around the idealism and the ambition of young people who go into acting – and this industry is made up of “business people” who create a problem for the actor and then offer themselves as the solution (in the same way cigarettes create an aggravation for nicotine in the smoker, which can only be soothed by smoking). A classic example, is the “career guru”, who charges actors £50 an hour to assess the marketing effectiveness of their materials (ie - headshots, CVs, covering letters etc). During this hour, the actor is subjected to a comprehensive criticism of all that he has been doing to “get work”, and at the end, the guru gives him list of things to change (whether it is an improvement is moot of course). What else is the guru to do? Imagine that the desperate actor entered the guru's den, hoping to find out “where he's going wrong”, but, after only 10 minutes, the guru simply turned round and said; “congratulations! I've checked your stuff, and everything seems in order – keep doing what you're doing and success will soon be yours”,  then ushered the actor out the door? Wouldn't the actor feel cheated out of his money? Isn't he paying for the guru to criticise him?....With the £50 spent on the guru, the actor could have gone onto Amazon and bought a Flip HD camera and started making his own films.....I didn't put it this way in Boredom Of The Disgust & Monotony Of The Tediousness, but my point is the actor should remind himself that all he wants to do is offer a presentation to an audience (and hopefully delight them in the process) – this way of thinking will keep him fitted for the task - all else should be kept in perspective. If our work becomes simply a marketing mechanism, it will not be long before the lies breed an all consuming self-loathing, and then what?

The next part of the Boredom Of Disgust & Monotony Of The Tediousness blogs, will look at the fictional improvised scenes we created.

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Filmmaker J.C. Khoury on LA Talk Radio’s Film Courage (Ep. #153)

Filmmaker J.C. Khoury calls into Film Courage to share what he learned from studying under Spike Lee at NYU, why he waited 5 years to make his debut feature The Pill, how he casted lead actors Noah Bean & Rachel Boston, and his belief in Film Festivals.

Connect with J.C. at www.ShootFirstEnt.com & @ThePill_Movie

Ergodic Cinema Project Interviews

Questions for Eric Lee, Filmmaker, Act 4

The Ergodic Cinema Project

Interviewed by Jennifer Sharpe (odilonvert)

This is the tenth piece in a series of interviews with each member of The Ergodic Cinema Project. Each member has been asked the same questions for these interviews. These are the responses of Eric Lee (Leefurfur), filmmaker for Act 4, Dogg Lesson:

JS: Tell me about your background in film.

EL: I’m going to school for film/video in Oakland and San Francisco. I really started thinking about making films after seeing Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and Me And You And Everyone We Know.

JS: What inspired you to get involved in The Ergodic Cinema Project?

EL: I just wanted to collaborate with people who were actually interested in film. The Ergodic project sounded like exactly what I was looking for.

JS: What is your segment’s relationship to other segments?

EL: Rebirth and death (metaphorically speaking) are the themes of my segment, which will be the third segment of the fourth act behind JP. Schmidt and before PolarisDiB.

JS: How has your experience with The Ergodic Cinema Project been so far? What do you find is good about collaborating over the internet, and what do you think is a challenge about it? Regarding challenges — any ideas about how to make it work better?

EL: It’s great! I like the people and their open-mindedness. I thank PolarisDiB for roping me into it! The challenge is that we don’t get to meet in person to talk about what we are trying to achieve. The advantage is that we get to do whatever we want and we have our own space to deal with our own challenges.

JS: Anything else you’d like to add about your participation in The Ergodic Cinema Project?

EL: Keep on keepin’ on, pardners.

This is Day 4. I've yet to see a call sheet. #AYWR

— Lucas McNelly (@lmcnelly) October 29, 2011

There's no call sheet, but call time for day 4 is 9:30am. True to form, that doesn't happen. We leave at 10:12am and head back to Nooner's house to shoot the final day there.

Nooner has no idea we're coming. He thought we were done. So, of course, he's started to put his house back together. Luckily, he's pretty easy-going, so it's no problem to take his house back over.  

Just like yesterday, we have to clean the house out completely to shoot the scene, but unlike yesterday, we don't have to re-set it later, other than to put the house back together for Nooner and take our props out completely. Why didn't we shoot the two empty house scenes back-to-back on the last day? I have no idea.  

And you know, it'd be easy to go on a rant about this, but I think you see between the lines here.  

Instead, let's talk about the crew, because sometimes when the top of the hierarchy isn't ideally organized, that pulls focus from the fantastic work being done by the rest of the crew, and DECORATION has a very good crew.  

Today's challenge is to rotate the camera a full 360 degrees on the x-axis as Cheryl Nichols stands on her head. There's gear that does this, of course, but they've got none of it. So, Josh Jones and Stew Yost come up with the idea to try and strap a 5D to a tripod head. This gives them the rotation they need, but takes away access to all the buttons and controls of the camera, so they've got to figure out everything, then set the controls, and then strap it in.

Only, if you don't strap it in correctly, you get a kind of oblong rotation that's less than ideal.  

Oh, and they're trying to do it on a tight shot with an actress who's standing on her head, meaning you can't have her sit there for anything longer than a few seconds to line everything up.

Eventually, they come up with a solution that requires a collapsed tripod laying flat on a bed of sandbags (to give it a little bit of height off the ground, thus allowing the rotation). They have Cheryl stand on her head, then make a note of where on the wall that is and where her hands are to establish the base for that shot. Set the frame, then try and repeat the head stand as close as possible to the last one. Then, they have to get a smooth rotation out of it.

It takes a couple of tries, but they get it.

From there, we move down the hill to a semi truck that's been borrowed for a sequence where Rick Dacey climbs on it in a bit of childish wonder. It's a 2 camera shot, one on the ground and one on more of an eye line thanks to a long lens on a hill.  

Then it's some car mount driving shots to finish out the day. Only, when we get the camera mounted on the hood, it's moving around way too much for anyone's taste. Enter grip/AC/PA Jimmy, who sticks a empty water bottle under the lens. And you know what? It works. It's the perfect height. A little gaff tape later, and it's set. DP Stew Yost jumps in the bed of the truck to shoot Rick on the other side of the scene, and once they double check to make sure the cameras aren't seeing each other, they're off.

And that's day 4, the second-to-last day of principal photography. All that's left is to shoot the Decoration ceremony. You know, the scene the title comes from.  

Filmmaker Lucas McNelly is spending a year on the road, volunteering on indie film projects around the country, documenting the process and the exploring the idea of a mobile creative professional. You can see more from A Year Without Rent at the webpage. His feature-length debut is now available to rent on VOD. Follow him on Twitter: @lmcnelly.

A large part of our work in Cork took place in a empty office block, which had an endless number of rooms, some of them empty, some of them littered with old paperwork and decaying furniture. The whole place had a weird, eerie psycho-geography, just right for the strange dream sequences we were to shoot there. In some respects however, these scenes were the easiest for me to act, largely because many of the tasks I was asked to perform were very simple: sometimes sifting through the debris, sometimes picking up some strange object and studying it, sometimes spraying the place with a fire extinguisher. For most of this work, Rashidi asked me not to have a specific objective, that I was performing these actions without a purpose. This meant that most of what I did I did mechanically – for example; in one room I walked into, I smashed a computer monitor, and I did so not with any anger or even any enthusiasm, but purely by going through the motions – no emotion, no inflection, no point of view. In another room, I had a sack which was full with shredded paper, and I grabbed clumps of this paper, and threw it at the walls, at the ceilings, at the windows, and once I had had enough of this throwing, I simply tossed the sack to one side, and walked off. Again, this was done without object, without intent, and purely mechanically. We worked on in this fashion, going through the various rooms, performing purposeless tasks. The net effect of this approach, was to give my work a certain robotic quality, there was no emotion on my part, nor indeed any kind of expression – very strange, but perhaps just right for the scenes we wanted to create.

Then Rashidi asked me to add a certain upbeat quality, which lead me to behave like some sort of red coat – walking with an exaggerated spring in my step, doing little dances, and which culminated in a little skit: there was a derelict reception desk, and I quickly improvised a scene as a hotel clerk trying to entertain would-be guests. However, during the skit, I did give myself an action: to entertain – which produced some lovely little moments, like when I tap danced on top of the desk. However, if my earlier work had been strange because of my lack of action, this skit was strange precisely because I did give myself an action: being an entertainer amid the dereliction and decay of this abandoned office block, is a slightly freaky combination.

REFLECTIONS ON HE

Both periods of filming, Cork and Dublin, have proved to be mentally exhausting, and not because we worked particularly long days (we didn't), but because of the intensity of my commitment to the scenes. As an actor, I'm always thinking about how I can deliver something a little bit extra, something more. The audience is extremely important to me – I don't view them  as an appendage to my work (as many do)*, but the very reason for it: I want to delight them in the way that my favourite actors delight me. My work is always a presentation and a communication. As the great John Hurt once said, the actor needs to earn the trust of the audience, without which the dramatic interchange cannot take place. Audiences make themselves completely vulnerable to the actor – it's a priveledged position we are in, and one we must not abuse, but cherish and serve as well as we can. HE has been extremely demanding because I set the bar high for myself in striving to go further, dig deeper, and find something extra. It's also because the nature of the material required discipline and seriousness – my character's intent to commit suicide always felt like a burden which needed to be carried, and the improvisations needed to be completely focused. Rashidi will now take the film through the post-production process, and eventually send it out into the world. The next step for me, will be to watch the finished film, and analyse my work to see how I can improve for next time.

What is certain, is that HE is an important and concrete step on my way to becoming precisely the kind of actor I set out to become – an objective I will  never compromise, despite the critcism and cynicism I regularly encounter, and despite the fact that I may occasionally take a wrong turning. It is especially difficult for an actor to create work on his own terms, perhaps more difficult than for any other artist. However, HE, and working with Rashidi, is the embodiment of the kind of actor-director relationship I've been calling for : the director trusts the actor and gives him room to create, while the actor serves the film (ie – the director's vision) totally – a creative partnership**. It's a richly rewarding way of working, which breeds trust and co-operation, which, in turn, means it's a pleasure to crack open a beer with the director at the end of it all.

*as evidenced by the recent trend in the West End of London for actors to break out of the scene and tell noisy audience members to “shut-up” when they make a noise by eating a packet of crisps. How weak and spineless we have become. Old barnstormers like Anew Mcmaster would shut the audience up by the force  sheer force of their performances, as when he stepped on stage before 2000 drunken, riotous Irish, but by the end of the play, they could hear a pin drop. An actor who is less interesting than a packet of crisps may want to think about a career change.

**Although we were using improvisations, this stills applies to fully scripted work – it's a question of how actor and director view each other, and their work.

The Arts Council of Ireland backed experimental feature film HE (2012) by Rouzbeh Rashidi is now completely finished and ready for festivals and screenings. This two hours dream-like film explores the theme of suicide in a very abstract audio visual approach. The production began in September 2011 in Dublin and finished in February 2012 in Cork and it is featuring:

James Devereaux, Cillian Roche, Maximilian Le Cain, George Hanover & John McCarthy.

Soundscape composed especially for the film by Mick O’Shea & Emil Nerstrand.