READING ROOMS
what is left speaking when no one speaks
What is the point of creating a piece of art work? a distinct art work. A book, a piece of music or a film, not in the existential sense, but in the, what is it trying to capture?
I think of all the forms, music answers fastest, because it skips the question entirely. It goes straight to the gut and you respond before you have decided anything. Yes, no, oh, my first date. An atmosphere, literally a sound wave, transmitted.
Filmmaking ie, creating a visual story is a lot about reading room, especially when looking for the right location. For this film I wanted to shoot that real spaces, as opposed to sets.
When you walk into someone’s home, their entire emotional system is suddenly visible in object form. What they choose to display, and what they omit. The antique dining table beside the extension cord that has clearly survived an acute electrical fault. Real homes are wonderfully incoherent, and what I was after was not realism exactly, it was something more like residue. Spaces shaped by repetition, ambition, discipline, disappointment. Look at the room you are sitting in, the chair worn slightly deeper on one side, the cupboard you have to slam to close, the object on the kitchen counter that somehow became permanent.
The real beauty of making a film, more like a painting, or a piece of music, is not only the control over how time and money are spent, but that serendipity enters the process. People, places, things you would never have thought of arrive, and with them a new perspective. For example:
The Polish house scouting happened while I was still in Australia.
The location photos arrive, and one in particular catches my eye.
It’s like a Bruegel painting, hundreds of details, a life layered in inseparable history, loving, painful, forgotten. Among it all sits a man. There is dignity in his posture,
He wears a hat and a flannel button-up shirt.
His name is Pan Franek.
Photo by Michał Woźny. Pan Franek Kasia Mazurek
He is the house and the house is him, and I know this is the place I want to shoot. I can’t take my eyes off him.
I ring my producer, Sylwia, who has seen the place and met the man. Would he consider playing Karolina’s father?
“He used to be an actor, so let me ask.”
He says yes.
The serendipity of a real person in his own home carries a voltage no set can imitate. It presses against the neat architecture of traditional filmmaking. Professional actors step into that atmosphere and something dangerous begins to happen, the performance blurs into something less obedient, more alive.
Here there is an invisible transmission, the atmosphere I am trying to capture, to augment the feeling of my main character, the paradox of the life she now has to face.
Photo by Michał Woźny.Lech Łotocki with Pan Franek
Film at the end of the day sits in the film industry as a product, packaged, polished, vacuum-sealed against uncertainty, I am trying to shape it into a work of art made from the unruly material of real life, which drags real life through the frame with all the disorder intact. I am not against craft, or structure, or the hard machinery required to raise a thing from nothing. But there are moments during the making when the work itself becomes possessed by something larger than ambition.
Film preserves behaviour, but it also exposes it. Cinema, at its most honest, is closer to witness than invention, it constructs a world, then watches it fracture the moment something unplanned arrives the small betrayals of the body when language gives up. So I hold the word CUT longer than I need to. And there they are, the unrehearsed gesture, the squishy human life no one decided to perform.The space inherently informs the performance.
So when we needed a “location of intimidation” for the final exam scenes we searched endlessly for a hall that didn’t just look prestigious. Prestige is easy: marble, symmetry, emptiness. I wanted a room where ambition and rigour had already happened.
We find Sala Miodowa in Warsaw, with acoustics designed by the Japanese hands responsible for the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the LA Philharmonic. I mention them only because they understand silence as a living thing, not an absence.
Empty, it is one of the warmest performing spaces, the ash wood holds sound softly, almost domestically, and I find myself lowering my voice for no reason. It feels and looks like being inside a waxy beehive. But the moment someone enters to perform, the atmosphere changes completely. The room becomes a colosseum. It demands discipline. When the twelve-year-old girl walks on stage, every step is crisp and tense. Here, there is recorded rigour.
So, we have reached a rough cut, which feels like a big exhale and a pause. It has now gone to a few careful eyes for the oldest of questions “ does this makes sense?”
And now I can watch it, still in its tender structure.
The point, for me, is to record a world before it hardens into explanation. A feeling that refuses to be vacuum-sealed, what remains is residue, voltage, the strange charge of what is still alive and unprocessed.
When I think of the films I return to, they are held in a kind of fragile vessel, a coracle of care drifting through time. an atmosphere that cannot quite be pointed to, and yet is unmistakably felt in the body.
Until next time,
Warmest Annika
That was a lovely read thank you A.