Sisters
Filmmaker Clara Stern chose for her work in the Film Lab a specific scene from her feature film screenplay Schwestern (Sisters), where she focuses her attention on the relationship between the two characters. Clara Stern describes her approach:
I chose this scene from the screenplay because what I find interesting about it is that the intimacy of the relationship puts one of the sisters under pressure. She is withholding something from her sister in order not to hurt her. She is deliberately keeping her sister at a distance in order to protect her. Her sister does not understand why she is behaving this way, and she tries to intensify the intimacy between them in order to make her talk.
In this project, the director was interested in exploring how knowledge shared about a story, how a shared narrative could influence the acting of the actresses. Accordingly, the director first staged the scene without providing any instructions or background – either to the actresses or to the film team. Little by little, the actresses received background information about their characters. At the outset of the project, the specific questions to be answered were the following:
What happens to the intimacy between the two if they share a past? Does it necessarily become more intense? What happens to the intimacy if a third character interrupts the scene? What changes when the third character is given various roles to play (brother, lover, roommate)?
The director introduced another level of experimentation by giving the actresses various exercises to do. First, between takes, both actresses were given questions to answer, and each time they were asked to keep their answers to themselves. The scene was then filmed again. Following the take, each actress revealed what her specific answer had been; then the scene was performed again – with both actresses now sharing this knowledge about their characters.
The idea was that the actresses should know nothing at first about the story or their relationship to each other. For each take they received new instructions from me, and these were noted down in order. In this way, during editing I was able to keep track of the reactions triggered or of the things caused by each set of instructions.
This was followed by various experiments focusing on the relationship between the actresses and the atmosphere on the film set. The director experimented with, among other things, different lighting moods, various ways of adding music, and the physical closeness between the actresses, who were given dance exercises to do between takes. After a certain time, the actresses as well as everyone on the film team were given the film characters’ background story. Each actress was first given only her own version of the story, the idea being that each character’s knowledge of the story should first be limited to what she could know only from her own perspective. Later on, the entire background story was revealed to everyone. In this experiment, a total of 54 takes of the same scene were produced.
The various stage directions I gave to intensify the intimacy included the use of music, lighting and timing. Here, music was particularly effective, as I matched individual tunes with individual characters, and in this way they could define their roles more clearly for themselves.
When we finally viewed the filmed material and discussed it, we realized once again that it was especially the lighting mood and the background music that had made a positive contribution to creating a moment of intimacy. Tutti Huynh, a student of communication at the University of Vienna, reports from her notes taken during the filming:
Looking back, I find that the takes that were filmed with music being used were the most intimate of the day. The music created a special mood, and this had an effect both on the actresses and on the crew. There were intimate moments for each person, since each person had his or her own associations with the music; and there was an intimacy shared by all, since we were all experiencing this together.
(To see the video clip, click on the first picture on the right. In German without subtitles.)