Video
Filmmaker Achmed Abdel-Salam conceived the following scene for his experiment:
A woman (late 20s early 30s) is sitting alone at night in a loose T-shirt in front of a television set. She is watching a home video in which a little boy is seen having a day out with his father. A man (early/mid-30s) enters the room; he seems a bit stunned at first, then angry. It turns out that the woman is his one-night stand and has chosen a cassette at random to watch. An argument ensues. However, the man’s anger quickly gives way to a kind of melancholy. In the end, both of them watch the video together.
Achmed Abdel-Salam explains the focus of his project in the following words:
[I saw] the challenge presented by the method I chose for my work of finding a form of intimacy. My plan was to work with improvised dialogues and to try out various camera techniques, to explore the scene – which in fact was merely a starting situation – by having it acted out and to put it together piece by piece.
In order to create as authentic an atmosphere as possible, the director made use of private video material from his own childhood. He sought in this way to introduce a level of intimacy from the very beginning. A further element of the project was that the director was to stage himself in the functions of director and actor combined in one person. Since the director was to a certain extent exposing himself, he also wanted to encourage the other members of the team to let themselves go.
At the beginning of his work in the Film Lab, the director decided that the scene should be completely improvised. Thus, the camerawoman was also allowed to focus only on what she intuitively felt was of interest. The goal was to arrive at a continuous take that would require no editing. As regards intimacy in the acting, it was found that the physicality between the actors played a particularly important role.
At first, it was especially the physical contact that proved problematic. We were both very shy and cautious. But Yanina [the actress] had a few good ideas that helped us break the ice. For instance, she suggested dancing during a break. We took each other into each other’s arms and slowly danced across the set. It really did help: doing the next take turned out to be much easier. It no longer felt strange for me to put my hand on her thigh or to hug her. We slowly began to feel a kind of nearness.
Mentor Nina Kusturica provided a significant stimulus with regard to the acting. She suggested that rather than verbalizing the emotions the actors were to put into their characters, they should try expressing them intuitively using facial expressions and gestures. Improvising in this way also gave the characters freedom to evolve in another direction, differently from what had originally been foreseen in the script:
During the first attempt, one already felt that the two were not just having a one-night stand. Instead, it seemed as if they were at the beginning of a relationship and that our scene represented something that was for them a first big test. The energy we managed to release within the team (and here I really mean all of us) also had something very intimate about it, which was important for the scene.
(To see the video clip, click on the first picture on the right. In German without subtitles.)
