Music on the set

There was solid certainly even about Kassandra’s shooting even before Roger Monteiro presented the first draft of the script, and that is we would make the scenes with music.

The film has little dialogue and most of its sound will be recorded in post-production, which allowed the presence of music on the set. The idea was well received by the crew as a whole, especially by composer Chico Pereira (pic), who made a playlist to run not only as the scenes while shooting, but also in the intervals. Renata Stein also enjoyed the idea: she could choose her own music for the emotional scenes, helping her performance.

Below are two examples of the songs played during Kassandra’s filming. The first is a piece of Phillip Glass, one of the references collected by Chico, and the second is the theme from Requiem For A Dream, composed by Clint Mansell, chose by Renata to play in a few moments of the film:

Metamorphosis - Phillip Glass

Lux Aeterna - Clint Mansell

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)

About the cast: Maico Silveira

We already talked about Renata Stein, the leading actress of Kassandra. Now, it’s time to talk about the other cast members. One of them is Maico Silveira, who plays the therapist that takes care of Kassandra.

Maico is a brazilian actor who’ve been in France and Spain. Despite his acting in several short and feature films, he usually prefers the stage. Or whatever can be turned into a stage: his monologue O dia em que aprendi a dizer não (The day I learnt how to say no, in english) requires nothing more than a small room to be performed.

Now you may be questioning yourself: how did a theater actor, used to the stage, got in this project? Maico is an old friend of director Ulisses da Motta Costa and of most of Kassandra’s crew (like composer Chico Pereira and producer Roberto Coutinho). The actor worked on their first short movie ever, O Gritador (The Screamer, in english - watch it with english subtitles), back in 2006. By then, Maico auditioned for three different characters and played them all good – which made the director say: “This guy has to be in the movie. I don’t know what he’ll play, but he IS in the movie”.

In Kassandra, Maico has a small participation. His presence, however, was essential to bring to debate the concepts of acting and to develop the work of preparation and rehearsals. Being a theater thinker, he used to discuss different ideas of acting with Ulisses, differing the stage acting and the work in front of the cameras.

 “At a certain point, we talked about Hitchcock, who said that was essential that, on suspense, the actor could play neutral eyes, so the director could build in the editing the meaning he wanted the character to have” , says Ulisses. “Maico, then, started to exercise this neutrality, playing really soft nuances of intention in some chosen moments. “This level of subtlety is pretty hard to reach”.

“At the rehearsals’ beginning I told Ulisses about some acting habits and asked him to don’t let me do those on the film”, the actor says. “I think he made a great work guiding us in a very subtle way to the whole meaning of the movie. No one had ever act in a suspense film and the suspense itself teach us a lot about acting in movies.”

Maico also appears on the “movie inside the movie” in Kassandra. But that’s another post.