Site Spcific Thinking - Extended writing
in relation to the locations of the film
The story takes place in Paris and we used the city as one of the film's fundamental visual tropes. We did test shoots in a number of specific places in Paris that might somehow reflect the different characters and their various world views: parking garages, boulevards, airports, suburbs and backstreets. None of this material was created to be part of the final film; we were trying different visual ideas and developing the manuscript in relation to the sites and their visual potential.
We worked from the idea that each image should contain multiple layers of visual information and possess some kind of content but no specific story; images where the gaze could rest for a long time – wide shots with many people, animals and vehicles moving through a public space. We also looked for graphic images based on movement: clouds, foliage, shadows, wide shots of highways, cars moving in different directions like ants. We consciously sought out different neighborhoods in the city with different cultures, classes and identities.
We edited the material together with sound recordings to create a number of short test scenes. The text manifested differently via each combination of image and sound, which gave me the possibility to rework the script based on the aesthetics we were after. The sites of the city gave rise to new ideas and lent new layers, new rhythms to the text. Some of the written dialogue was revealed to be too long and too literal when combined with the complexity of the images. Other parts of the script were cut entirely, proving to be unnecessary.
