SOLO EN INGLES ¿Que es Pasa maño?
The
day before I went to Longdome
essay
This essay shows and narrates the director's interpretation
of the film "The Day before I went to Longdome" .
One rainy morning
in November, about six years ago, I was in the London Underground, at
Embankment station. At that time my spoken English was very basic and
my understanding of English was even worse. I was sitting down in one
of the carriages on the District Line, I do not remember very well where
I was going or why I was there, but one single event makes me remember
that moment as if it were yesterday. It was that loud voice saying repeatedly,
“Mind the gap, mind the gap”. My English, as I said, was not very good, I
could not understand what had just been said, but that voice grabbed me.
I do not know what it was: the intonation, the words or the sheer volume
of that voice, but it took me straight to Orwell’s 1984 scenario. I went
back to the underground with the intention of recording that sound. I
learnt then that it is not the same voice in all stations. This particular
“Mind the Gap” can be found at Bank (Central Line), Embankment
(Circle Line), among others. A day later, when I learnt the meaning of
the words I was even more attracted to that voice.
That something in
here is a gap.
Gap: an interval, break or opening.2
We could define a gap as a distance between A and B, for example, in the
underground it is the distance between the train and the platform. In
my case it is the distance between my understanding and my interpretation
of what was said in English at that moment. That gap was therefore a misunderstanding
a break in communication of which, without knowing, I had to be careful.
Fig.
1 still from first version
The Gap in Technology and Confusion.
He tries to
overcome this confusion through the advice that his mother gave him the
day before he went to Longdome. The difficult task of translating this
into film was to transform confusion into mystery through visual language
without creating nonsense. For this I used one of my influences, which
I will discuss later.
Due to the nature of film language, there are so many elements that I must
consider before writing a script.
Film language differs from other means of expression, above all in its
particular combination of materials (moving pictures and recorded sound:
language, sound effects, and music). The practice of filmmaking involves
working with numerous resources available to the filmmaker: diverse codes,
technical processes, systems of gender, and textual systems elaborated
within and among the texts of a culture.
The spectator’s cultural social background influences his/her view and
interest in the film, a similar condition happens with the creator’s (the
filmmaker’s) views and influences. There are always roots in your work
that even if you have tried to avoid, would always arise by nature.
My personal work always reflects my roots, sometimes
I have tried to avoid them but they are always there. Some of my films
are more Hispanic than others but all of them talk about my experience,
and therefore, due to the nature of film language about my social background.
Images and signs.
The images and
the signs are elements which are readable. Not only the picture and the
sound, but also the present and the past notion of absence and presence.
In The Day Before I Went to Longdome, Luigi’s mother talks to him
at the beginning of the film, the image is black and white, and clouds
pass by in the background image -does this image give the viewer a notion
of the past?. The ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ (space) constitute internal language
elements and relations, which must be deciphered, and can be understood
only in an analogous progression of the reading. Indeterminate spaces
are only given a scale later on, closer to a reading than to a perception.
The camera action or presence is also readable therefore the camera speaks
and it has to be listened to or read by the spectator. For example, it
might stop following the movement of actors or directing its own movement
at them, to carry out constant reframings as functions of thought, and
expressing the logical conjunctions of sequel, consequence, or even intention.
Film language makes absence presence; what is absent is made present. Thus,
cinema is about illusion. It is also about temporary illusion, a characteristic
only present in cinema and music, in other arts such as photography and
painting the time taken to read the piece depends upon the spectator,
the timing in filming is created and imposed by the filmmaker.
This notion of absence/ presence applies to caricature and gender
On the question of gender-presence, certain genders appear to be gender-identified.
In the western films, women are, to all intents and proposes, ‘absent’.
We ‘naturally’ accept this narrative convention
of an exclusively male point of view.
Having said this, I conclude that the script is a blue print, this is the
way that the script was used in The Day Before I Went to Longdome,
I used it as a departure of my original idea: a man gets trapped in this
complexity of communication, reflected by text messages. There were too
many elements to be taken into consideration which would change the script
in one-way or another: locations, actors, music, effects. Nothing was
totally decided, the script alone outlined the basic idea of the film:
a man trapped in the speed of technological change. I wanted a partly
digital cyclic film, which evokes mystery with a lot of gaps and leaves
much room for interpretation, an ambiguous story, where the genre is constantly
re-inventing itself.
The answer is always dependent upon how the viewer would choose to interpret
the film. This interpretation marks the death of the director, as Roland
Barthes pointed out, " The death of the author starts with the reader".3
3. Roland Barthes for Beginners, p36
The Circle and the Role of the
Mother
The female parent is the beginning
of the world. Let us forget about Adam, She is the Genesis. I decided
to give this man (Luigi in the film) two representations of his mother
to model the structure of the film:
… my first mother,
The circle, who has always take care of me, bringing me to the place where
I was born, to keep me away from the outside existence and its danger…
8
Fig.2 My
second mother Fig.3 My first mother
As if the child had never left
her womb, she wants her baby to return to her inside, to have more control
over his/ her protection, like a cycle.
Luigi (the protagonist) comes
back to the same physical location a few times during the film, where
his mother speaks to him. It is like a perpetual cycle. The text showed
above 8, which describes The Circle mother, is displayed on a background
of clouds. My idea was to fly into the past in the narrator’s mind, as
I develop a fresher idea of what this Circle mother represents to me.
I introduce the image of an empty chair with
a shadow in the top left hand corner, which rocks smoothly. With this image I
try to create the absence of the mother through the empty chair. The movement
of the shadow mirrors the natural
cradling of a child by its mother.
I wanted to create absence because
it is something which belongs to the past. The presence of the mother
is represented by the text displayed on the image.
His second mother is The Advice,
the voice from the past that we all have in our subconscious. The Advice
warns him about what he will find where he is going and the gaps that
he will have to jump. She gives him clues about the progress of technology
and its danger, her words are the vertebral column of the film.
Fig.4 still from final version
The Genre Salad and Confusion or Mystery?
David Lynch’s films have influenced my work regarding the
understanding of my stories: what is really happening and what is imagined.
Mystery is good, confusion is bad, and there a great difference between
the two. Confusion is a state of mind, whereas mystery is not a state
or a form, but something which has to be discovered. It is hidden in our
dreams, in our subconscious, and my recent work is a study of the visual
images in my own subconscious, a difficult and almost impossible task
which leaves the final piece between reality and unreality.
In The Day Before I Went to Longdome, one action begins in one location
and is then, in responde, taken over by a second action in a different
location. The same happens with the genre. I don’t interpret this as confusion
or as a ‘salad film’, for me this creates a mystery. When you create a
mystery through your work, it is dangerous to offer your personal interpretation.
If things get too specific, you kill your work and the viewer is no longer
a participant but an automata and your work dies.
In the words of David Lynch: “ I think fragments of things are pretty interesting.
You can dream the rest. Then you are a participant.”4
4. Funny How Secrets Travel / interviewing David
Lynch,Chris Rodley, London- Boston: Faber and Faber, 1997, p.12.
The
propose of mixing the genre is also a function in the language that I
want the viewer to read. My first version was like an advert which went
wrong, but why?. The answer is to create mystery through the juxtaposition
of commercial images and poetic words. Thus you create this gap where
you leave the interpretation up to the viewer. You show the main path
but not the small ones. The viewer find these through her/his personal
interpretation.
I kept this wrong advert as part of the main
body of the film, but I made it smaller and introduced other footage with
different aesthetics and genre. In the first part of the film we have
Luigi’s mother talking to him: the image is in black and white, the mother
is a man and you can hear that his voice has been dubbed by a female voice.
The intention was to imitate the old silent movies, something in the past,
an event that Luigi will remember until the end of his life (the film).
Fig.5 Luigi’s mother talks to him.
Fig.6.
Credits
From the Old Factory to the Urban Underground:
When
at first I wrote the script, the picture that I had in mind regarding
the locations consisted of two different places: my hometown (Zaragoza, Spain) and London
and its underground. The original idea was to create two contrasting atmospheres.
On the one hand an isolated place where Luigi says goodbye to his mother.
On the other hand a place with crowds of people but, where the individual
is isolated by both the crowd, like London, and by the progress of technology
in communication. Some individuals fail to make
sense of this progress, and this is the concept of the film. The final product
has not changed much from the original idea, apart from the inclusion
of the old factory. At the beginning, I chose, as an isolated place, an
old church near my hometown. However, after I spoke about the project
with some friends, one of them suggested an old abandoned sugar factory
in town. Once I saw the place, I fell in love with it, you could imagine
this remote sound of old machine and breath the smell of how progress
had killed the old factory. For this reason, the location was perfect
for my film.
Longdome: Flower and Flavour, Can You Spell it, Mister?
When I was a child I saw a film
called ‘Blue Lagoon’, it is a film where two small children, who are travelling
by boat to San Francisco with their dad or uncle?, become shipwreck on
a desert island where they grow up away from adult influences. There was
a detail in the film which caught my attention: at the beginning, when
the children are on the ship with their father, they say ‘San Francisco’
like ‘San Harisco’. This is a normal problem of pronunciation that some
people have upon hearing a word for the first time. After the shipwreck,
the children find themselves alone on the island and as they grow up they
continue to refer to ‘San Francisco’ as ‘San Harisco’, and do so for the
rest of the film.
English is not my first language and the most difficult challenge to me,
is the pronunciation. I frequently come across words which phonetically
are the same, like flavour and flower. This gives the English language
a great potential in for words games. This can often be seen in the headlines
of papers such as ‘The Sun’. For me, however, it is a problematic in my
understanding, which increases my pronunciation problem. I still pronounce
some words as I did the first time that I heard them, like these two children
with ‘San Harisco’.
I originally decided to call the film ‘Mind the Gap’,
but once I had progressed in the script-writing, and had changed the word
‘London’ for ‘Longdome’ (the idea is based in what I have just explained).
I decide to change the title for a sentence in the script where this word
appears. I liked the new word, it evoked mystery to me.
Fig.7 Title.
This
was the first time that I had done a digital film. Previously I had worked
with Super-8 and S-VHS. It was also the first time that I was introduced
to non-lineal editing.
The
digital camera that I used (Cannon XM1) allowed me an image consistency
and colour fidelity which had previously been restricted to film formats
alone. The main problem
that I found with the use of non-lineal
editing and the software, that I was using in film for first time, (Photoshop,
After-effects, Director, Premiere and Dv studio), was that in the first
two months of the editing process, I realised that the machine was dictating
to me what I was supposed to do, the machine was in control of my film.
In a period of two months I made about five different versions due to
the progress of my learning in the use of this new software. Details that
I had not included in the previous version, suddenly appeared in a fresher
version. It was like playing with a new toy, until I released that the
film had been taken onto the wrong path; too many digital effects that
were unrelated to, and therefore detracted from the initial concept of
the film. It looked like the kind of film which demonstrates the skills
of the filmmaker in computing effects, but has a poor story and talks
less due to that the film is overloaded of special effects. So there I
was, stuck in the progress of technology, just like the protagonist of
my story. I decided to restrain myself and took out some scenes which
from an aesthetic point of view were, perhaps, beautiful, but did not
add anything to the story. I still find this a big
problem in digital art. Software becomes redundant too quickly. The danger is greater to those
artists who work with computers and new technologies. They must face new
software in a matter of months, instead of modelling a technique over
a lifetime using the same medium.
The
music that I had in mind regarding the actions in the film consisted of
two different pieces: Antonio Badalamenti’s piece from the film ‘Lost Highway’ and Elvis’s
song ‘Evil in Disguise’,
The first piece reflects nostalgia and a feeling of
something that is lost or has finished, this music mirrors Luigi’s nostalgia for his
mother. The second song, which I used just in the first versions, reflected
speed in the film (when Luigi runs carrying a television). After I saw
the result, it did not totally convince me, due to gave an extra comedian
feeling, then I changed it for a piece that I created in the computer,
this new music is electronic and I think it is more related with the concept
of new technology.
Final Product and Conclusion.
The
final product reflects my original idea: a man gets trapped in this complexity
of communication, reflected by text messages which are screening in a
television that this man carries, like if it were an stone in his shoe.
However there are things that they did not go as I predicted, principally
some images which do not reflect the image quality that I was looking
for, due to the use of a wrong video compressor, a use that I learnt during
the edition, but the film shows the mystery that I was looking for, it
is like a broken poem, and it leaves much room for interpretation. The
story is always in an edge, it looks that an answer is going to be given
in any moment, but it is never said. It is a perpetual
cycle. The answer is always dependent upon how the viewer would choose to interpret
the film.
Things that we can’t even imagine are happening. The recent wave of television
talk shows where people confess all, are bringing the unspeakable into
the open. They were unimaginable things but they are hidden in the subconscious,
it is like you always knew it, and now they are naming it, showing it.
But with this naming, a lot of mystery is disappearing. If I resolve totally
the mystery in my work, if one day I fully understand my work, I will
cease to create films. The dream will stop.
Bibliography:
Screening the text : intertextuality
in new cinema / T. Martin
Like a film : ideological fantasy on
screen, camera and canvas / Timothy Murray.
Funny How Secrets Travel / interviewing
David Lynch. Chris Rodley,
London- Boston:
Faber and Faber, 1997.
Communication as culture / James W. Carey.
Boston: Unwin H Ltd, 1989
Textos y Manifiestos Del Cine / Joaquin Romaguera
I Ramiro. Madrid. Catedra, 1998.
Key concepts in Cinema studies / Susan Hayward. London: Routlege, 1996.
Cinema 2, The time-Image / Gilles Deleuze. London: The Athlone Press, 1992.
Film History. Theory and Practice/ Robert C. Allen / Douglas Gomery. University
of North Carolina, Film History, 1985
Roland
Barthes for Beginners
Ars Electronica : facing the
future : a survey of two decades/ Edited
by Timothy Druckrey with Ars Electronica.
Paul Brown “ Reality Versus Imagination”, John grimes and Gray Long (eds). ACM Press, New York, 1992