The Artist and the New Silent Films

By Ulisses da Motta Costa, Kassandra’s director, on the current trend of silent films:

It may seem somewhat surprising that this year Academy Awards decided to consecrate a black-and-white silent movie. The Artist, a Belgian-French production that pays homage to the American cinema of the early decades of the twentieth century, won five statuettes: best picture, director (Michel Hazanavicius), actor (Jean Dujardin), original score (Ludovic Bource) and costume design ( Mark Bridges). However, it is not an isolated case.

The film looks back at the cinema history to find a new benchmark, in a time of creative crisis in American cinema. To search in other times a new foundation to rebuild or renovate the arts is something that happens frequently in human culture. Thus, the apparent aesthetic audacity in The Artist is actually part of a "movement" (in the lack of a better term) to seek for visual narratives.

Or perhaps this “better term” I'm missing is "trend". In the last half decade we have seen popping examples of films based less on dialogue and more on the visual.

It is easy to remember recent examples in Hollywood: the Pixar animation Wall-E , the first 15 minutes of P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, or even crucial scenes from Rise of the Planet of the Apes. In the same France that has produced The Artist we have Sylvain Chomet, who directed two feature animation films, The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist. In the 2009 Gramado Film Festival, I saw this uruguayan comedy, Gigante, who badly needed dialogue or music to tell its story.

We can ask why the makers of these films have toke this decision. But most important is the fact that films form diverse genres, origins and intentions have worked so well with the proposal of not using dialogues to drive the narrative. The Artist, of course, go further: don’t even have noise or sound effects of any kind (except for two scenes). All you hear is the music. After all, the intention was to recreate a cinema of the past and so the process had to be more intense, including a characteristic black-and-white cinematography.

The film caught my attention when we were in preproduction of Kassandra. Our little film is also in black-and-white, virtually dispenses the dialogues and has a mute protagonist. Of course, these choices do not intend to recreate the past, but are based on what we believe that work’s for the story.  But the "blame" for a lack of creativity never hit me. On the contrary: it made me feel inside and "belonging" to something bigger and more powerful.

It’s a feeling that the path we choose seems to be more certain than we might suppose.

Of Terror and Horror - Part 2

(Read part 1 here)

Jean Cocteau's
The Beauty and the Beast 

The Beauty against the Beast

We can say that most of the horror movies are readings of the tale of Beauty and the Beast (without the romatic emphasis).There are countless movies in which women face evil creatures (from Alien to The Silence of the Lambs). The sexual connotations are inherent several degrees of subtlety and somehow represents the purity that some monstrosity (of a male kind) wants to destroy. Since horror movies tend to be moral tales, the purity of women in these stories inevitably overcome the evil.

That's what happens in the Nosferatu, the German Expressionism classic: a young girl attracts the scary vampire to her own room and offers her neck. Drunk with blood, the monster does not notice the sun rising and dies. In her ultimate sacrifice, the martyr gave his love to kill evil. So, the opposite of fear is not courage: this is a typical element of the Epic. Here, the opposite of fear is love. The Beast can be redeemed (or released) by Bela. Therefore, under certain perspective, the horror tales are storioes of famale triumph: only women qualities that can thwart evil.

If we want to go deep in the differences between the Epic and the Terror as representatives of a "war of the sexes", we can dabete how blood fulfills an important role, however diverse, in both narratives.The Epic is also bloody, but as a celebration of men: heroes taking the lives of heroes in battle. In the terrifying narrative, blood is something more vital, to be preserved or to be sought at all costs, indicating more life than death - taking a closer relationship with menstruation, for example.

Sea monster reported
in Brazil's shore
in 1564

The Man vs. Evil

This kind of story is a reinforcement to the feminine construction of the "Beauty against the Beast", and not it's counterpart. It's a subversion of the myth of the hero who descends to a lair of an evil creature and destroys it, symbolizing the victory of light over darkness. It is an important issue for mythologies, from David and Goliath to Batman and the Joker. But when reread by horror, such stories receive other treatment. To hunt down the beast is a nightmare, not an act of heroism (in Jaws, is the lair is the sea). And it is tragic or, even worse, useless heroism and often evil will prevail (as in The Omen).

Another way to classify this subject is "Man against the Demons": a journey against various evil forces, usually a descent into hell (as Dante does in the Comedy), where the actions are beyond the protagonist's control . Its most common contemporary counterpart is the zombie movie. No matter how the hero is resolute and prepared, it will never prevent the undead invasion.

The reason for the hero's failure  is explained in The Beauty against the Beast theme: courage is not enough; to fight evil, only love has real strength.

Original Frankenstein's
cover (1831)

The Monster in Us All

Characters like Frankenstein's creature are essentially tragic. They are typical anti-heroes from tragedies, with the difference that the treatment given to their march is darker and has more garish colors.The legends of Oedipus approach of horror tales: murder of the father, mother's abuse, self-mutilation. 

It is customary to use the term "monster" to describe something gruesome, abhorrent and representative of evil. It would be a synonym for "beast". However, the latin origins of the word can mean both "show" and "warning". That is, the monster is someone or something who reveals and gives a warning. Its difference from the tragic hero is his deformed look - which reminds us of our own twisted psychological constructs. The Monster externalizes what we hide in ourselves - and, by definition, he is in a state of helplessness before the world.

Unlike the previous examples, the Monster Within is a male kind of scary stories, in which the monster is nothing more than a representation of a man who does not find its place in society and seeks only love. King Kong, despite its power and strength, "surrenders" to love only to be torn from his habitat and taken to a place infinitely more hostile than his jungle full of dinosaurs.

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In short: for repulsive that they seems, the Terror / Horror stories are a counterpoint to a idealized world that we see in the epic tales. They are not stories to be told in public, in daylight, but in the dark of night, at home, to teach moral and ethical behavior. It would be the horror story a female resistance to a man's world? It is an interesting hypothesis. 

Written by Kassandra's director Ulisses da Motta Costa

Of Terror and Horror - Part 1

Hi! Ulisses da Motta Costa here again. During the preparations for the filming of Kassandra, I wrote this text for cast and crew about the horror genre. I decided to share it with you. The text has two parts:

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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
the first horror movie

In Portuguese, we usually do not differentiate the meaning of the terms "terror" and "horror". Roughly speaking, they are considered as synonyms. We use "terror" to define when a person has an uncontrollable behavior ("this guy is a terror"), and "horror" to say that a situation was catastrophic ("the accident was a horror"). But when applied to a narrative genre, whatever: they mean the same thing.

Not so in english speaker cultures. Terror and Horror have different meanings when applied to movies, books, comic books and so on. In narrative terms and without much theoretical checks, Terror is the feeling that precedes a frightening experience; Horror is the feeling one gets after such experience. That is, the first is connected to fear and the second is connected to shock.

H.P. Lovecraft

Terror is considered the most "noble" because it relies on a gradual development of anxiety and discomfort. There is a need to establish firmly the feeling of fear. On the other hand, when this construction reaches its climax and we witness the dread promised along the narrative, we feel shocked. So, a good scary story, we can tell, invests on the Terror during its course and leave the Horror to the viewer how when the story ends.

Why Terror and Horror works as a narrative, for more disgusting that sounds? According to HP Lovecraft, american writer noted for his short scary stories, "man’s oldest and strongest emotion is fear, and the oldest and strongest fear is the fear of the unknown". When one enjoys a story that creates fear, one notes this feeling. And the "role" of the arts is to remember that we have certain feelings - that is, that we are truly alive.

Blackbeard 

by Gustave Doré

No wonder that the scary elements permeate our culture: the mythologies of ancient civilizations are full of nasty creatures and situations; fairy tales are bloody and cruel. In the Odyssey, fear is the feeling that prevails in the cave of the Cyclops. In Macbeth, the terror of the Three Witches is established already in the prologue. That’s why perhaps that Orson Welles, in his version of the play, gave the movie a gothic clothing more likened to a horror movie than to an epic.

Thus, Terror and Horror have an ancestral origin, although it’s specificity as a genre. For all intents and purposes, they are both tragedies that go deep into the dark side of anti-heroes. Within the field tragic, we can say that there are three themes dear to Terror, which we will call here: Beauty against the Beast, The Monster in Us All and The Man vs. Evil. A bit about them:

(To be continued)

Making of Kassandra - 6 - Mystery

In this new video, the cast debates the screenplay, specially the story's mysteries. Luis Franke creates some theories about them (as we can see in the picture above).

Check it out (video in portuguese)!

About the cast: Leandro Lefa

He’s the last one on the presentations. Doesn’t mean he’s less important: Leando Lefa plays one of the main characters in Kassandra, a weird and nameless neighbor which represents a threat to the leading character. However, the actor was the last one to be confirmed in the movie.

According to director Ulisses Costa, the difficulty was to find someone different from the other men in the cast. “Roger Monteiro, the writer, imagined someone older and possibly ‘bigger’”, he remembers. “But I was really afraid that the character was confused with the Big Man”.

Ulisses chose Leando Lefa also because their long friendship. He was one of the actors of  The Screamer (watch it with english subtitles), the director’s first short movie. The promise that they would work together again stood and more than one project was thought to continue the partnership, but none worked out. Another point well considered about Lefa was the fact that he already had done a horror movie – played a role in the almost legendary Beyond the Grave, a zombie movie shooted in Porto Alegre, never released commercially.

The construction of the character had to be really specific. Even with a tight schedule, Lefa was able to email pictures to the crew, showing some ideas of costume, make up, facial and body expression (pic). “Despite the lack of time to rehearse the way we did with Renata, for example, Lefa’s dedication was essential to make the character as ready as it was in the day of shooting”, tells the director.

“Ulisses’ merit: with intelligence and sensibility, he knows exactly how to say what he wants and then things just flow”, says the actor. “All I needed was the script, one coffee and three minutes of improvisation exercise where enough for me to feel completely safe and comfortable with my character and the whole crew, particularly with the rest of the cast.”

Coffee? Yep: on his first scenes, Lefa needed to look dirty. Art director Ana Gusson, suggested that a shirt was stained with coffee, to make the filthy look on the black and white photography. After that, the actor wore a wet shirt with a strong smell of coffee for several hours, what resulted in many jokes from Renata Stein.

About working in more than one horror movie, Leandro says: “I wanted to create a guy without deepness, driven by sex, who thinks is fun being grouse and repulsive. It’s interesting that in Beyond the Grave I also played a man intellectually limited and who didn’t know how to act like a person, but the characters are completely different”.

Shooting in black and white

The black and white photography always was one of the main ideas on Kassandra’s creation. We always imagined the movie with no colors. The image had to be thought in dark and light. So, the decisions of the cinematography, art direction, costume design and make up had to be different than usual.

Kassandra’s director of photography is Pablo Chasseraux (pic), a most wanted professional who works in several projects in advertising, TV and cinema – check his cinematography reel here. He used a Canon 5D and shooted in color to apply the black and white on the post-production. However, the scenes were monitored with no colors, so one could see the contrast between the light and the dark and if the image wasn’t too grayish.

Once the main worry was the light and dark, Pablo simply started to ignore the color temperature, which means that some of the shots had warm and cold lights mixed. In color, looks like a mess, but in black and white it’s all simply wonderful. Worried about the crazy colors on the camera, Pablo asked more than once to the director Ulisses da Motta Costa:

- Are you sure that’s gonna be in black and white? There’s a purple light here.

The costume designers Isabela Boessio e Giulia De Cesero also had their issues to solve. One of the characters, for example, had to wear a dark shirt in a certain moment. They got a navy shirt, hoping that it was good enough. At the camera, however, the navy looked like a light and lovable grey. A quick switch for the Daniel Coutinho’s, the adman, black shirt and the problem was gone.

Making of Kassandra - 3 - Acting

Kassandra’s new video shows a bit of the work that director Ulisses da Motta Costa is making with the cast. Here, an exercise between leading actress Renata Stein and Maico Silveira, one of her co-partners. It was in the same occasion that she wrote the first of her Kassandra’s Feelings.

The rehearsal’s objective is to increase the cast chemestry. This work helps to create new dynamics and also helps to build the characters (video in portuguese). 

When three ideas unite

Ulisses da Motta Costa here, director of the short film Kassandra.

A movie is like a child with several fathers and mothers. One of these genitors need to produce the original zygote, so to speak, need to light the first flame that begins the project. In this case, this blame is mine to bear.

Kassandra came up to my mind in the last winter, in a rainy period, when I was taking a few days off. That’s when three long-time different ideas blended in a surprising amalgam. The ideas were:

  

1 – I’ve always wanted to make a film based only in the visual narrative, a film with very few dialogs. I’m a silent movies big fan, but all of my other films were quite verborragic. So, for me, the best character for a visual narrative is one that could’t speak.

2 – On the other hand, I’ve always wanted to shot a film in black-and-white, to think not in colors, but in light with a primitive state of constrasts between darkness and brightness.

3 – At last, the third idea was born in a conversation with score composer Chico Pereira. We’re talking about how difficult is to listen a non-cliché music for horror films. We’re sort of decide that one day we would make a flick with a soundtrack different from what one’s used to hear.  

Those three concepts were sparked togheter one night, probably inspired by Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness (the book I was reading at that time). Like three twisted creatures, they gathered in an indissociable maner. From this primordial mix, new ideas breeded: a charecter, her name, tarot cards, family photos, a scary shadow, a bathtube filled with blood.

Finally, the confusion founded an order when the face of actress Renata Stein appeared in Kassandra’s silhouette. She was the first invited for the Project. She told me: “I’m in, but movie had to be made”.

Her wish is an order. Through this blog, we will tell you how the production is going.

Be welcome.