introduction, part 2
Intriguingly, Pirandello sustained an enduring interest in the relationship of his plays and stories to the structures of film and in fact tried thirty-nine times to get ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ filmed, without success. Pirandello died in 1936 from pneumonia, which he contracted while he was in the studio lots of Cinecittà attending the filming of the second film version of his most famous novel, ‘The Late Mattia Pascal’.
Tantalisingly, given that ‘The treatment of Six Characters’ has never been filmed, like Anne-Marie’s recent work ‘Meeting the Pied Piper in Brasov, a paper prologue’ it remains an absent, unmade film. Combining her interest in cinematic drawing, absent films, and self reflexive art forms whilst at the British School at Rome Anne-Marie’s version of ‘The treatment for Six Characters’ will make use of a series of drawings, which she will then place within a filmed journey that will repeat Pirandello’s final journey home from Cinecittà, where unbeknownst to him he will die a few days later.
‘‘The treatment for Six Characters’
The treatment for Six Characters was developed from Film-Novelle (scenario), a screenplay for Six characters written in 1928-30 by Pirandello with Adolf Lantz whilst Pirandello was living in Berlin. Pirandello intended to adapt ‘Six Characters…’ into entirely cinematic terms and was planned his film version would have a strong affinity with German expressionist film in its uses of chiaroscuro, phantasmagorical, shadowy images, urban street scenes, and illusory transformations of character. Pirandello was also interested in an experimental approach to sound and image, which he felt could be used heighten the possibilities of a meta film. A marked difference between The Treatment for Six Characters and earlier versions is that it makes more use of Max Reinhardt’s famous staging of the play in Vienna and Berlin, which focussed on theatre’s and films metaphysical role and the possibility of a form of Kammerspielfilm, a rubric embracing both expressionistic and melodramatic styles. The Treatment also features a long open and closing sequences that distinguishes the Author from the Six Characters and sets one film inside another.
In the 1920‘s Pirandello wrote several times about the possibilities of film as a medium, thinking in inventive ways about the relationship of images to sound, as well as reflexive use of voice and subtitle; he was opposed to the straight-forward filming of theatre or narrative, feeling that there were more radical possibilities and was in dialogue about his ideas with Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, F W. Murnau (who was to film the earlier, failed Prologo), Fritz Lang, Rene Clair, and others. Pirandello’s thinking will lend an important framework for Anne-marie’s personal translation of The Treatment for Six Characters.
Pirandello has been on Anne-Marie’s mind for twenty years. Whilst still a student at the Royal College of Art he was first mentioned to her by her then tutor, Jim Mooney, who felt that Anne-marie’s paintings, at the time, bore a relationship to the narrative tensions of Pirandello’s plays. Since then she has continued to feel the provocative blurring between drama and life, for which Pirandello is famous, helps to gauge similar tensions within her own work. She remains staunchly intrigued by the possibilities of a self-reflexive form.
Preparations for The Treatment for Six Character have already begun, while production will start in earnest from October 2012. Further developments will be posted here.
