Anthology of nine souls on their way to death

1. Talk about the book and the concept?

GC: I discovered the book in Highschool when I had to make a video about the “Penniwitt the artist” poem from the anthology. The book always had an impact on me but remained dormant for years. It was when I saw the poster of De Andre in Tempio Pausania, the curiosity towards this piece of work was rekindled in me. This is when I felt the need to share it with Penelope. She happened to be fascinated. The book was written in 1915 but the concept was fresh to us. The idea of someone knowing personally all the bodies in a local cemetery was very intriguing. Knowing their secrets, the way they died, their interpersonal relationships. We interpreted Andy the Nightwatch as that character. Who felt like a main protagonist to us, like Edgar Lee Masters was him. The one in charge of the knowledge. He is the voice of Spoon River and we have no option but to believe his interpretation of events. Andy was our screenwriter. We followed his lead to a visual language. In the start, we experience Andy kind of giving us a future vision of the whole film when he is being examined by Dippold the Optician. We experience him as omniscient. Dippold does not appear to know that Andy sees the whole picture in Spoon River so he tried to correct him. For example, in the end Andy sees light indicating that Dippold is dead. To us, Dippold was the type of man that wanted a silent life and probably worked until he died, a fact that Andy knew.

2. Why Black and White?

We tried to experiment with contrasts and how we can communicate the relationship of life and death. Two concepts seemingly opposite but mutually inclusive. Get ourselves in the poet's shoes. We decided to do a film together before we figured out the specifics. One of the days we were going to do our laundry and started exploring the visual style that we wanted to give to the poem. We passed by the Tempio Pausania Train station, liked it and decided to come back in the night to check how it looks. The location was so good that it pushed us to find poems that could fit it; something about the way it looked at night, dull and monochromatic made us decide to communicate the poems in Black and white. No colours were needed to communicate these specific poems. It is about life and death. Yin and yang. Black and White.

3. Why did we choose this specific directing style?

We were very fed up with the traditional format of the shorts we were working on 5 weeks prior. We decided to work together because of this frustration. After this decision, in the next city we were visiting, Giuseppe realised that Tempio Pausania was one of the cities where De Andre Lived - the artist that made a whole album using the Master’s poems. He bought the book and we started reading it. So from then on, the creative process began together. We were both in charge of all creative aspects of the film. We read all the poems and marked down which were the most visual to us and then together we decided the ones that could form a cohesive timeline. Having it mind the location, equipment, crew and actors limitations as we were creating it. Same time as we were deciding on everything. We found the right way to tell a story in a limited time frame. Create the whole concept, lock crew and artists, principle photography and editing in one week. We had to be economical and use symbolisms as a tool to give reasons why we made the creative decisions we did.

4. Why do we see the number 9?

When we were reading the book, we came up with a step by step process to figure out how to make a visual. First we read it all together and marked the ones that were more visual in our heads. Turns out we had loads and the project would take way more time than what we had in mind. Also, due to the fact that we loved many, we could not really tell the story that was loosely forming in our heads with just some. Choosing some would only make sense if there was a reason as to why. We thought of numbers with generally high symbolic nature throughout the world. We thought of choosing 3 but this would not make Andy the Nightwatch as omniscient as we had imagined him. Seven was not enough either to keep a narrative going. Nine was a very important number because based on numerology it represents the nine different Body Groups - Brain, Bones, Meat, Nerves, Nails, Hair, skin, veins and blood. After we locked nine we started associating each body group to a story; you can clearly see the nine different things Andy sees through Dippolds testing glasses. Fact that also gives away that Andy knows and watches everything. Nine made sense.