It would be naive to assume that fantasy has no place in a short film grounded in British social realism. Fantasies can easily convey aspirations for the future or longing for an unobtainable lover. Surrealism could convey a perverted mind or drunken fumble in the bushes. Mysticism can imply segregation by lack of heritage or someone knowing more than they let on. I watched Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's deliberately blasphemous surrealist film L'Age d'Or which emphasizes how symbols can be used to create a feeling of unease. For example the scene in the garden with the couple who are passionately (and awkwardly) sucking all of each others fingers at once. He strokes his lover on the cheek and his fingers disappear revealing a deformed hand as if she's just eaten them. My first reaction was horror and then I questioned myself why I found the image so repulsive. I found it a really responsive moment that brought to my attention my prejudice against ugliness and how I equate it with negativity. This is hopefully something I can aim for in my final script; an audience reaction.
My brief idea this week came from an unlikely source; my mother. My Nan had visited a ghost whisperer to speak to her relatives whom had passed. Mum said that at some point during the session my granddads mother (who had treated Nan like an literal slave) came through asking for forgiveness because she was in a 'bad place'. Shocked my Nan simply replied that there was 'nothing to forgive' and that she doesn't hold grudges. Strangely all this happen before I realised what this weeks lesson was about. Couldn't of been more apt. My scene, involving two characters and including a reversal of status between them, is called The Good Women
In today's lecture we looked at the power of the unconscious and talked about Freud's structural model of the psyche;
Id - "It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. [It] produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle."
The Id could be likened to the over-riding desire of a character to maintain equilibrium.
Ego - "The ego separates out what is real. It helps us to organise our thoughts and make sense of them and the world around us. The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions. But the super-ego is constantly watching every one of the ego's moves and punishes it with feelings of guilt, anxiety, and inferiority."
The Ego is perhaps a characters sense of practicality over desire or even the acceptance of life as is.
Super-Ego - "The super-ego retains the character of the father. Under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading, the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on—in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt."
The Super-Ego could be seen as the consequence of a characters actions or the resistance of action.
In the lecture we discussed the way in which a characters psyche both affects and effects how a narrative plays out and how surrealist ideas can visualise those outcomes. We used an abstract method to create ideas in our seminars involving a person taking notes on two others having a conversation whilst they read a news paper. From the record of the conversation we then took an moment and embellished it into characters and a short narrative. My experiment resulted in to school boys talking about batman on the bus and then showing off to a girl they like - hardly Scorsese but it will do. I guess the most interesting characters are the ones that are recognisable to us in some respects but unpredictably volatile in others; the same applies to to real people I guess.
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Brief for Week 6
Write a PITCH!