The Visit of the Little Lady
Other work done in the Film Lab had various points of emphasis. Jessica Lind was interested in exploring intimacy between the camera and a child. The director provided only a rough sketch of a frame story for her project. She describes her scene thus:
We thought up a little story in which my two-year-old niece (Luise) and a fellow student (Achmed) perform together. A situation that takes into account the fact that Luise does not know Achmed. It was surprising to realize how quickly we all got used to this situation, which was also made possible due to the flexibility of the small team, the continuity of the narrative and the seclusion of the set.
In long, improvised takes, the camera observes the gradually growing closeness between the two-year-old child and the actor, Achmed, who had been a stranger until now. The great openness with regard to improvisation, mood and intuition that was so crucial to the project allowed the director to arrive at moments of intimacy that it would have been very difficult to achieve in a scene that had been fully written out. Many factors contributed to the intimate atmosphere that Jessica Lind was able to create on the set: most important, she felt, was the small film team that had been reduced to a minimum for the shooting of the scene, as well as the possibility of filming very long, uninterrupted takes, which helped the actors to get into their roles and establish a “filmic reality”:
For me, the film was not only about intimacy, it was also about the choice of actors and the method of working. Namely, filming with a small, flexible team that does not have to keep resetting the lighting after every shot but can instead react to what is taking place.
(To see the video clip, click on the first picture on the right. In German without subtitles.)
