Επιλεγμένοι συμμετέχοντες αναπτύσσουν τις προτάσεις ντοκιμαντέρ τους για τη διεθνή αγορά υπό την καθοδήγηση εκπροσώπων καναλιών και ειδικών από την Ευρώπη και τη Βόρειο Αμερική. Αναπτύσσονται ενότητες που αφορούν στην ανάπτυξη της ιστορίας και του σεναρίου, την αφήγηση, τη σκηνοθεσία και την παρουσίαση της πρότασης για το διεθνές κοινό. Ολοκληρώνοντας το εργαστήριο οι συμμετέχοντες έχουν αναπτύξει την πρότασή τους σύμφωνα με τις πιο σύγχρονες τάσεις της αγοράς και έχουν αποκτήσει ένα σημαντικό δίκτυο επαγγελματικών επαφών και γνωριμιών.
Ο Ροβήρος Μανθούλης παρουσιάζει τη δική του τεχνική αφήγησης και ανάπτυξης σεναρίου σταχυολογώντας κρίσιμα γυρίσματα από 32 ταινίες του.Σε ορισμένες ταινίες τα κρίσιμα γυρίσματα, περιλαμβάνονταν στο σχεδιασμό της εργασίας του, βάσει της έρευνας, η οποία είχε διαμορφωθεί πριν από τα γυρίσματα Ο Μανθούλης δείχνει ακόμη και πώς απρόβλεπτα, μη σχεδιασμένα πλάνα τον οδήγησαν σε αναδιαμόρφωση του σεναρίου του Η διάλεξη, εμπλουτισμένη με αποσπάσματα απο τις ταινίες δόθηκε στο σεμιναριο στα Χανια τον Ιούλιο του 2009.
I already know it...
It was filthy in the year Five hundred and six
and it will also be filthy in the year Two thousand !
We always had here thieves,
traitors, charlatans and racketeers.We live in the fuzz and in the mud.What if you are a gentleman or a traitor,a genious or a thief. It’s all the same !
Twentieth Century ! What a mess! What a bazaar ! Cambalache ! It is Edmondo Rivero that sings. (The following year, the song was forbidden by the Junta of the Generals).The police agreed to let us film the operation on the highway. They were looking for suspicious cars, among the millions of vehicles entering the city. The chances to fall on a guerilla were 1 to 15 million. The operation begins and they pick a car, in which –for our unfortunate luck- they found fire arms. Luck, because we ran into a scene which was real and rare. Unfortunate, because we probably caused the death of two young men.There are no innocent shootings or innocent films. Look how the driver under arrest is staring at us behind the window glass. I am sure he was trying to register our faces. Most probably, he was later tortured to death. This picture is haunting me ever since. I couldn’t of course cut it out.For several months, after this incident, I was trying to persuade myself that he was not an urban guerilla but a local Mafioso”. >> The Tango 9.I. LOUISIANA: Let the good time roll- Prison “1975. St. Martinville, the French-speaking area of Louisiana, where I shot the film LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL. I have visited several prisons in the States to meεt the inmates. Most of the prisoners are usually Black. In Sτ. Martinville, they were all black. Now, everybody knows –in the States- that in the South filming was not allowed in prison, at that time. My friend the Sheriff of St. Martinville named me Deputy Sheriff, with oath and everything, so that I could enter his prison. As I went up on the second floor where the Sheriff had his prisoners, I heard singing. It sounded like a musical plea in court. I didn’t wish to disturb the ambiance, so I didn’t ask to go in the cells. I only shot black fingers dancing on the cell bars. On account of the distance separating the bars from the open windows, the prisoners cannot see the street but they can hear the basket ball hitting the pavement, played by a young man, also black, that we saw and, naturally, filmed. The bumps of the ball on the pavement were in counter-point with the rhythm of the song coming from an invisible singer in the dark cell. I am sure that the boy passed under the prison windows to let his friend listen to the sounds he made with the ball hitting the pavement”. >> Louisiana 10.II. LOUISIANA: Let the good time roll- Bar scene “In the same Louisiana film, we shot a scene in a bar of the ghetto. I have seen –and filmed- all kinds of sensual dances including belly dances. But this belly dancing of the black lady without moving her behind from the chair on which she is sitting has beaten them all”. >> Louisiana 11.I. EN REMONTANT LE MISSISSIPPI- Work song “I take the opportunity to show 4 scenes from the Blues I filmed and lived. The blues are in many ways related to my life as a film maker. For as much as it may sound unbelievable, I am probably the first one to make an ethnological film –in fact, 2 films- on the blues. I wanted to see what documentary films existed in the United States on this cultural phenomenon and its history before I started mine, in December 1971. There were none. I shot Upstream the Mississippi River and The Blues between the teeth, two films on the blues from the historical, sociological and anthropological point of view, from the turn of the century until the day of the shooting.Any scene of a film on the blues would be meaningful. But we don’t have 4 hours to see them all. The first scene will be one of the work songs I shot in a Texas penitentiary. More meaningful than this one there cannot be. It is the only place where work-songs of the time of slavery were still sung. By convicts with an average sentence of 50 years. I had to present false proof that I had permission from the Justice Department to enter the prison with a camera. This is the only existing record on film of negro work songs, which –along with gospel singing- are in the origins of the blues”. >> Blues 12.II. EN REMONTANT LE MISSISSIPPI- Furry Lewis “The next scene is with the legendary bluesman Walter ¨Furry¨ Lewis. We will only see part of the shooting with him that lasted all night. In his house in the ghetto of Memphis, Tennessee, on the Mississippi River. Furry Lewis not only shares with most of the Afro-Americans this Mediterranean quality of being pleasant, but he has also traversed the 20th century with all kinds of blues and circumstances of life.At dawn, when we had finished shooting he sang to me a superb song which relates his own funeral. In the scene we are about to see he sings something similar. The day he will lay his burden down. When his time has come”. >> ¨Furry¨ Lewis 13.III. BLUES BETWEEN THE TEETH- B.B.King “A French scholar calls Sapho’s songs cries of passion. So are the blues. Which, in one way or another, are protest songs. Passion is sometimes political, sometimes fatalist, sometimes amorous. It can be unrestrained and it can simply be pathetic. In this last case, the blues is heart breaking. I happened to witness such a unique moment. B.B.King’s momemt. Only in a black club, in a black ghetto, this moment can happen”. >> Blues 14.II. BLUES BETWEEN THE TEETH- Mamma “Blues is a distant ancestor of all Western popular music, from jazz to rock. Its picture would not be complete without adding a scene from my feature film BLUES BETWEEN THE TEETH, quite a meaningful scene, from a visual, humane and musical point of view. And also a musical testimony of the Prohibition period. Claude Mauriac describing this scene in the magazine Express wrote: A face washed out by the water of time; a hand that searches its memories dancing on the keyboard of a wreck that was a piano once…” >> Blues- Mamma 15.WHITE BLUES - Karel Dalton “As it takes an Andalusian Gypsy to sing the flamenco, it takes an Afro-American, descendent of slaves, to sing the blues. Many Whites have tried, very few were admitted in the blues club of the Blacks. One Wednesday night, in 1968, I planted a camera in the Gaslight, the famous club, the temple of pop music in New York’s Greenwich Village, in order to film new talents. One of them was Karel Dalton. She sat there with her guitar and humbly sang a blues of her own, I think. I –personally- have never heard better blues singing coming from a white mouth. A voice of the quality of Billy Holliday.I first illustrated another film with her song, one I had shot in Las Vegas. They kept calling us fron all over Europe : Who is she ? and Who is she ?. When the real film was shown, Mireille Mathieu’s manager rushed over there to sign her. Too late. She was too deep in drugs, incapable of starting a career. We found her later retired in a house deep in a forest of the Adirondack mountain. The Americans did not pay any attention to Karen. Only Bob Dylan speaks of her. He also heard her sing in the Gaslight, as I read in his autobiography. She has never been recorded or filmed, except for the scene we are going to see now”.>> Karel Dalton 16.BRAZIL in transe “What the Afro-American world of New Orleans is for America, the Afro-Brazilian world of Salvador of Bahia is for Brazil. Brazil is a treasure for the ethnologists. Consequently, for me too ! I discovered a corner of the life of Salvador of which, curiously enough, no one had spoken before; the lake of Abaeté, which is only a few yards from the sea; a lagoon of both sociological and ethnological interest, besides its exotic beauty. Priestesses of the Candomblé sect come here with flowers to calm down the goddess Yemanjia who has her throne in the bottom of this lake in which many children disappear from time to time, as they say here. They must be the chiidren of the washer-women who, along with their offsprings, bring the linen and clothes of the well-to-do white families of Salvador to wash them here. The washer-woman lays the clothes on the white sand to dry them out and at the end of the day, she picks up clothes and children and makes her way back to town. This very meaningful scene is from the film Brazil in transe, of 1979”. >> Brazil in transe 17.GREECE: The Survivors of History - Mani “We will now see a similar meaningful scene from the film GREECE – The Survivors of History shot mainly in Mani, the southern, arid part οf Peloponnesus. We will see a peasant woman who owns an olive tree. This tree endures the wind and the rain all year around. And this country woman is doing all she can to protect her tree as if it were her only child. The camera rolls. From far away. The woman never knew that she was filmed. It was in 1976. I hope she is alive and she was able to see the film when it was recently shown on the Parliament Channel. 33 years later. The moral of the story is that you should always watch the documentaries on TV. You may see yourself on the screen some day”. >> Greece, Mani 19.FACE TO FACE “Can you mix fiction and reality? The question is why fabricate meaningful scenes in fiction when you can find them in real life? Fiction is by definition a hypothetical reality. It wants to look real –or, at least, surreal. So does the documentary film. Therefore, there is no clear line of demarcation between fiction and documentary. Reality is re-arranged, anyway, by both fiction and the documentary film, for dramatic or for ideological reasons. By mixing fictional drama with documentary drama, you are giving your story a double conflict. Therefore the magic will be twice as powerful.The following scene is again from my film FACE TO FACE. It was shot on the day of Greek Independence, during the march past the monument of the Unknown Soldier. The tanks and the invalids are real; the scene is surreal. And it is bigger than life, which is Aristotle’s requirement for tragedy. Furthermore, it is prophetic. The same tanks came back the following year and took over the government”. >> Face to Face 20. FRANCE O THE THIRTIES- Hitler in Paris “Now, there are some scenes in life which are even bigger than big. They are mostly historical situations so unexpected that look like authentic fictional stories. Take Aeschylus’ tragedy, the PERSIANS. It relates the battle of Salamis; α real battle in which Aeschylus took part. And which was not shown on the stage. The real show took place in Salamis in front of a real public: Xerxes, the Persian king and his entourage, seated on thrones on top of the hill facing the battleground. It was a reality show. If it could be filmed it would have been a documentary film. But it would still be a drama; with a happy end. Because we had won! (Well, the Persians had lost… ).One can understand the place the battle of Salamis can have in the identity of a film maker. So here is another -more recent- historical scene, also bigger than life, equally dramatic and equally meaningful. The winner here was not us, but a Caesar of modern times. It is one hundred percent real and yet, thanks to its huge subject –and to the way it was filmed- it also looks staged; it could very well be the ending of a Shakespearean tragedy called Veni, Vidi, Vici. I borrow this document from my film France of the Thirties. We are in Paris, on June 17, 1940, at 6 o’clock in the morning, precisely when Adolph Hitler’s visit begins…>> France of the Thirties22.The telly of the brads “Magic is a product of conflict. But, as any student of Sergei Eisenstein will tell you, conflict is born basically by montage. Therefore magic resides in the process of editing. And the quality of magic resides in the identity of the editor –that is to say of the film maker. His cuts are meaningful to his style of editing; to his credentials as a poet, in the last analysis. The film maker that wants to marry fantasy to reality should make sure that his special effect is not a gimmick but sheer poetry and credible magic.Let’s take this sequence from the film called The Telly of the Brads which analyses the influence of TV –and of Japanese cartoons- on the kids. You will see a creature that jumps from outer Space on earth and lands on the glasses of one of the 700 children I filmed watching television. The magic of montage allows an extraterrestrial fantasy to take place within a documentary film 100% terrestrial”.>> The telly of the brads 23.LIFE IS A SHOW: I. The descent in the stomach “When you set out to make a work of cinematic art out of stock-shots and archive material that you have not filmed yourself, creative editing –poetic, dramatic, comic or ideological- can be a generous field for experiment. And a good occasion, for the rest of us, to read your style, your personality as an artist. I often use a technique that I call –I don’t know why- introvert montage. Perhaps because I let a kind of mental gravitation take me deeper in memory, in a world dedicated to the association of ideas. And dominated by what we may call subversive metaphors. In our case, when you see a lyre you don’t necessarily think of the lyre player –as Plato taught you to do. If you are an irritated, sarcastic critic and in search of a powerful association of metaphors, you will not put digestion after stomach. You will put indigestion. And you will not add food but maybe a more indelicate image: your boss, your mother in law or a deplorable tv program. We will find an example in the film LIFE IS A SHOW which is entirely made of archive material coming from French Television. In fact, French Television asked me to show what French Television looked like in the years when it it was still searching its personality.We will first see the very beginning of the film. When a physician in a hospital pushes a tiny video camera down the patient’s throat and hands him over the view-finder to see, in his stomach, the indigestible TV programs he has swallowed during the first part of his life”. >> Life is a show 24LIFE IS A SHOW: II. May 68 “The next scene is the very end of the film. We are in May 1968. Even Television is on strike. The speakers and the commentators are now the ordinary citizens who gather in the streets and in the squares. The politicians have become silent. The journalists have become silent. So the citizens now speak to each other, more live than live TV. Suddenly, you realize that when the citizens find themselves on the forum, although they are not acting, the tribune on which they stand and converse becomes a stage.I was editing archive material on the feverish discussions around the Sorbonne, but this time I was there, practically part of the crowd. I was entitled to comments too. May 68 in Paris was a great meaningful moment. But there were too many different voices fighting over practically similar ideas. By an association of ideas, the confusion was leading to the theatre of the absurd. In fact, in the same year, there was a revival of the original presentation of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot”. >> Life is a show 25.LILLY’S STORY – The Key “Waiting for the Barbarians is one of Cavafy’s most known poems. While Cavafy was waiting for the barbarians and Beckett was waiting for Godot, we the Greek exiles in Paris were waiting for the fall of the Colonels and the end of the dictatorship. And this was the subject of my feature film LILLY’S STORY of 2002, which is in fact a documentary film with actors playing the parts of real people as the real people, 35 years later, had all passed away. Lilly’s Story was a long story, because the junta’s regime lasted for seven years. And this film did not want to end. Some films are stubborn. They wish to go on for ever. Only a purely cinematographic idea, bigger than life and sufficiently meaningful could bring about the indispensable Aristotelian catharsis. In other words, I had to find a key scene. And why not a real key ? One that falls from the sky in the Aegean sea, like a curtain made of verses, in order to lock the story. I borrowed the key from another Greek poet, George Seferis, who also wanted to lock up this asylum called Greece and throw the keys away, in the same Aegean sea!…”>> Lilly’s Story
