SYNOPSIS
ACT II
Though the optimistic diagnosis, Francis disregards the
ophtalmologist recommendations about rest and sleep, shutting himself
away in the studio with his assistant Mauro to desperately find out how
to paint without using the sense the sight, totally swayed hes gonna get
blind.
ACT III
Amazingly, Francis awakes from the collapse revitilized in the
cheerful studio of his old friend Mike, a fellow painter who brings new
points of view to Francis with his luminous expressionism painting and
personality. His friend try to convince him to rest and forget his wacky
ideas about blind-painting. Life is before than art, Mike sentences.
Francis visits his old friend and professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts,
Christina, whose Art History lectures keep on mirroring Francis as a
symptom and symbol of sick contemporary art which has drifted into
unintelligible languages and codes, more and more commercial,
reproductible, narcissistic and meta-linguistic, further every day from
mankind, nature and sensousness. The Image had sadly become the
absolute truth in modern society.
Christina strongly encourages his students to arrive back to
painting, back to the physicality of the canvas, the body and the studio.
***
Unexpectedly, a TV program shows Francis latest work at a famous
international art exhibition. The academic realist painter had become a
convulsive Dadaist and neoexpressionist, a cross between Basquiat,
Tpies and Damien Hirst, said the reporter. Moreover he made some
of these works by incorporating many of the items stolen in the recent
robbery along with his brand new art-dealer and curator, Joaquim, the
chef.
Scandal, hoodwinking and surrealism reminding the Duchamps
Armory Show exhibition in New York in 1913, says the TV reporter.
THE END
MOMMY
please, the
TV!!!
FRN-
BEACH/
A
pre-Minoan
CHILD
operating
a
wooden
and
glass
apparatus, watching the seabed while he wades along the
shore in silence with the water up to his thighs. It is
very early in the morning, no ones around, only a
seagull which lands on a buried pre-doric column in the
shore.
INT/ KITCHEN/ DAY
FRANCIS has grown, he's now over four years old, with the
same intense, big black eyes. He is sat at the kitchen
table, loosely copying a photo of a green chameleon from
a
magazine.
An
exultant
drawing, brilliant, Picassian. MUMMY, an attractive blond
in her forties, enters the kitchen. She is well dressed,
A career
MUMMY
How's my little Francis? Come on,
give mummy a kiss.
MUMMY kisses her son's head while grabs a pear exiting
biting. She shouts across the house.
Im pulling up the car, hurry up
everyone!
DADDY approaches his son and kisses his forehead,
carrying floor plans and rulers of an architect or
engineer.
DADDY
But
Francis
what
you've
done
there,
little
animal?
Such
a
coarse(?). Look buddy
Daddy takes the pencil from Francis little hand and start
drawing triangles all over the chameleons snapshot.
Remember: triangles.
See?
Like
this, just like this. You can do it
a
much
better.
It
has to be
lifelike Lifelike!
Francis look up at his father, deeply concerned. AGNES
smiles. The car horns. Daddy leaves. His SISTER passes by
loaded with books.
SISTER
Good morning, squirt!
FRANCIS crumples up his chameleon and tosses it into the
trash, a failure. The wrinkled paper ball rolls along the
floor, stopping near another discarded drawing, also
crumpled. AGNES bends down to pick them both up. Unfolds.
The Original Sound Track starts some initiation melody,
something between prehistoric rithms and contemporary
piano.
INT/ LIVING ROOM/ NIGHT
Travelling-In. A warm and huge living room full of old,
original antiques and selected neoclassic art. FRANCIS
blows out four candles on a big birthday cake in front
his entire FAMILY. Applause, birthday songs, presents,
plenitude. The camera crosses the table and stops in
Silent
EVENTS
HALL/
the car leaving from the kitchen, and cuts himself trying
to slicing a tomato, blindly. Two porcelain plates crash
against the wall. A kitten appears in the rear walking
with a sock over its head, unable to get rid of it,
desperately
backwards,
straight
to
the
shards
of
porcelain.
FRANCIS ADULT (v.o)
Darkness
can
be
terrible
and
Sublime in an association common to
man, since in complete darkness is
impossible to know if we are safe,
we ignore the objects surrounding
us, we would found a dangerous
item, we could stamble the first
step we take, and if an enemy
approaches, we wont know how to
defend ourselves.
(CONT.)
Object to be destructed (Man Ray), The blind swimmer (Max Ernst), You
stink (Duchamp) or the sword cutting the eye in Luis Buuels An andalutian dog,
were some of the titles and metaphors which this avant-gardes used to express
how depth was their compromise against burgeois ocularcentrism. To them, the
eye was a mere object, a mechanical artifact easy to flatter and a dangerous source
of social influence and ideological manipulation.
In that sense, THE SOILED EYE wants to revisit all that passionate
years of the avant-gardes, traslating their still-living doubts and achievements
into the present time through a fictional character, Francis, a paragodical blind
hyper-realist painter, synthom of our Image Era and sickness of the hyper-visual
art.
Death, sex, beauty, happiness, spirituality... every trascendent feeling in
modern human life already has its predetermined form on a screen or flat surface...
all reproducible up to the infinite, as Walter Benjamin noted. Today, only the
image is Real. The body and the physicality had become the Fantasy.
We are all mere followers in this unnatural and conceptual behaviour of life
imitating art. THE SOILED EYE talks about going back to painting, to
figurative painting as the symbolic, refreshing and natural act of art imitating
life.
Aram Bakker