29.07.2010
The first public projection of the film is behind us. It was a lovely, although very hot evening at the Maison Descartes, near the garden which is the set of a huge scene. We got very useful comments, and used those to finalize the film. It is now 2h 10 minutes, after lots of small and regretted sacrifices. The pace is better and the story clearer. Just as the colour correction has made an enormous difference, now the sound is in the hands of a brilliant sound corrector, and we cannot wait to see/hear the results. This will be in September. After a final check, the film will have its World Première in Haarlem, in the Festival Madness & Arts, on Sunday afternoon September 26th at 4 p.m. Lots of participants have promised to come, including the brilliant actress Marja Skaffari whose presence as Sissi is a major draw of the film; Marjo Vuorela, Sissi's new analyst, hopefully Thomas Germaine with his multi-appearances as Antonin, Artaud and Herlat; and many others, and of course, Françoise. We hope many of you will be able to come. You can make reservations for the première after August 16th at an address we will post by then. Participants in the project who wish to come can let Mieke know, so that we can put you on a guest list.
More news: Juho Heinola has made a brilliant poster we will use for publicity and for the DVD box. It conveys the multiplicity that characterizes the film, while preserving the enigmatic character of the title figure, Mère Folle. It is unlike any poster we have seen, and we expect it to have a great impact.
Elan Gamaker, creator of the first trailer, made a second one to replace it and thus refresh the film's image. As much as we all loved the first one, this trailer conveys more strongly the high stakes of the film; its newly-invented genre as a "theoretical fiction" and does more justice to the personal connections between Françoise's life story and her chosen profession. Check it out on the home page; it should be on line soon.
Warmest wishes,
Mieke & Michelle
20.05.2010
We have a film! Nous avons un film! Tenemos Película! We hebben een film! Meillä on elokuva! Wir haben einen Film!
We have made several drafts, and are now satisfied that we can show this film to a public. We are currently finalizing the edit. We have edited the sound, which was challenging, and added lovely music. In addition to set music, we have added lovely music from Leticia's album which was released just this week (www.rumbadama.nl). The track "Cálmate" on the album has been dedicated to all participants of Mère Folle. We also met a composer who gave us a track of music box music, to accompany Sissi's treatment.
Colour correction has been done, and the difference is amazing. Every image looks glorious. We wait with the sound mix until we have screened the film for a sneak preview in order to get final, final criticisms. The draft has gone through a number of very capable, critical hands and eyes, we went through a series of revisions and attempts to shorten, shorten, shorten. The current length is 2 hours and 25 minutes, and we plan an intermission in the middle. Today, and we mean this very day, we are finalizing the edit.
A major job is still ahead of us: distribution. Meanwhile, there is enormous interest for the film. Here are some dates for you to consider making a trip:
- on June 24, at 8 p.m. a sneak preview screening will be held at the Maison Descartes in Amsterdam, set of the courtyard scene. We will hand out questionnaires to solicit final comments, which we can then think through and work into the definitive version.
- On Sunday September 26, at 7 p.m. the World Premiere will take place in the Filmschuur in Haarlem, as part of the Festival Madness and Arts. (www.mafhaarlem.nl) With the help of the festival directors we are still trying to find a location for a concurrent installation of "Sissi's Treatment."
- On November 1st, 2010, we screen the film at Columbia University, hosted by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
- On November 6th, 2010, an American Première will be held at Austen Riggs, the institute that has been the inspiration for so much of the ideas of Mère Folle. The occasion is the awarding of a major prize to Françoise and Jean-Max the day prior to the premiere.
- On Friday November 12th, 2010, an Austrian Premiere takes place in the Freud Museum in Vienna.
- In late January 2011 we will present the film in Valencia, Bullas and Murcia, at venues not yet decided. This will coincide with a small Cinema Suitcase exhibition at the Fundación José García Jiménez in Murcia.
France is still uncertain, but obviously, we will do everything we can to have a great French premiere in Paris. Also Helsinki, and / or Tampere, are on our "must" list. Any ideas are welcome.
We are also having a promising contact with a fantastic distributor, but obviously, they need to see a screener before they can decide.
We hope you all keep interested in and supportive of our film. If you imagine that the credit sequence at the end is almost 8 minutes long, you can see the tribute to the many, many people who have helped, contributed, and supported the film. This is a truly collective endeavour.
Another job awaiting us is constructing installation from the gorgeous material that remains.
Warmest wishes,
Mieke & Michelle
31.01.2010
FILMING IN SPAIN - THE LAST SHOOT! JANUARY 15-17 2010
The big Netherlands shoot fell on the hottest day of the year; our final shoot, in the South of Spain, on one of its coldest. But luck, again, smiled upon our project. Luck during a shoot doesn't start and end with the weather. In our case, it's also very much about, as before, the people, the places, the sets.
Beginning with contacts in Murcia, we ended up in Bullas, a beautiful historic town set in exquisite hills producing the best wine of the region. Indispensible organizational help came from Juana María Del Baño Espinosa and Oscar Espín Gómez, professional filmmakers and producers, and friends of our old friend Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro. And, as always, from Jean-Max Gaudillière, Françoise's husband, who doesn't want to appear in the film but is always helping, from rehearsing with actors to shopping for food and cooking, and cheering us on.
The scene in question compresses several visits across two time periods to Monsieur Louis ? one when he is in prison ? described towards the end of the book. When Françoise is just starting out as a psychoanalyst, she visits an old friend of her father, a fellow Resistance fighter. Don Luís has fighting fascists in his blood. First he fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, then joined the French resistance during WWII. For Françoise, he is a source of memories she doesn't have, as well as a reality-check for her professional choices and the stories transmitted to her by her parents. She turns out to have the memory flaws typical of the second-generation survivors of WWII. In this scene, the personal depth of her professional attitude ? what we call "extreme identification with her patients" ? comes to the fore, casting new light on earlier scenes.
So, how do you shoot several visits over three decades? It's a casting challenge as we had to cast different people for the younger Françoise and the younger Don Luís. Again, our luck prevailed. For the younger Françoise we found a young actress in Murcia. With a resemblance as much spiritual as physical, Suzi Espín López was completely convincing as a younger Françoise, as you can see from the clips. For the younger Don Luís we gratefully thank Alberto Montoya Hernández, a colleague of Françoise and author of a beautiful, related book, Pasajes de la Locura, who came all the way from Mexico City just for this purpose. For the older Don Luís, we had the brilliant Francisco (Paco) Fernández Navarrete, a theatre actor and high-school teacher of ? another stroke of luck? French, which meant his rapport with Françoise was instant and profound.
So, now we are a bit nostalgic. The filming is over. The next update will be about editorial decisions and such.
An article on the film project (written by Mieke), with photos, will be posted on http://www.nomadikon.net (click "about images") for March 2010. It discusses the meaning of images in a film based on a book filled with imagined images?
Finally, a bit of personal news: Michelle got married, had a glorious time in South Africa, and is now MICHELLE WILLIAMS GAMAKER.
Warmest wishes to all our visitors,
Mieke & Michelle
02.10.2009
Latest update
We have been so busy lately that we didn't even have time to fill you in on the latest.
- There is now a trailer, which will remain on the home page. It's very enjoyable.
- We shot a short scene in Paris, where in fools wreak havoc on the flea market. We'll make a clip soon.
- We went scouting in Spain for the scene to be shot in January. We found wonderful sites and people to help us.
14.09.2009
FILMING IN THE NETHERLANDS, AUGUST 6-8 2009
On August 7th, the hottest day of the year up to then, we filmed a long scene, called The Courtyard, in the beautiful, classical French garden of the Maison Descartes, a cultural institute of the Consulat Général de France in Amsterdam. Thanks to the institute's collaboration we were able to stage in this wonderful setting the first encounter between Françoise and the Fools. Françoise, who is reluctant to go to work in the hospital after the news of Ariste's death, sits down with a book on mediaeval culture she had forgotten to bring to Ariste. The mediaeval fools suddenly appear when she is reading about them, as if coming out of her book, her mind. We had a brilliant group of extras and actors, as usual, a few professionals, most amateurs. The video clip "The Nurses" gives a good impression of the spectacle.
At the end, Françoise decides to go in to resign, but is caught again in the web of patients who, now, appear to be relatives of the Fools she just met. The next day we shot these encounters. A number of patients are together in the "Grande Salle" of the hospital. A musical nurse attempts to calm them down when they are agitated, or to distract them from an addiction when they continue to suck a water bottle. A variety of characters appear and interact, among themselves and with Françoise. The cast is totally international; in total, during these two scenes twelve different languages are spoken. The clips show the new major characters.
The third day we benefited from the museum of the Army (Legermuseum, Delft) to shoot the dream Françoise has early on in the book, in which Ariste appears with a group of Fools. They gossip about how Françoise has failed Ariste. The displays of the museum lent themselves marvelously to the dreamy atmosphere we sought to evoke. All in all, this shoot was again, entirely exhausting but utterly fulfilling. The clips "Ariste" and "Fools" give a glimpse of this dream sequence.
07.07.2009
FILMING IN FINLAND.
The Finnish adventure has been wonderful. Michelle and Mieke went there in the week of Midsummer. First we filmed on Seili Island, a place with a history of madness. After the leper colony established there, the hospital needed a new destination. All over Europe, the idea of the "madhouse" came about in this context. We filmed some scenes in and around the old hospital, taking advantage of the fantastic scenery. The island was the setting of the "half-way house" where some of the patients went after leaving the hospital in France. See the clips introducing the characters Aurora, Morgue, Hanna and Marjatta.
This shoot had been planned at this date to coincide with the Mediaeval Market in Turku. There we filmed there a beautiful puppet show of a trial. According to a traditional story from the Middle Ages that inhabitants of Turku were chanting, A girl who had been raped had taken vengeance of the young man, along with her friends. She was taken and put on trial, but in the end, the Devil let her go because the country needed her fertility to produce new fodder for the wars. See the clip "Mediaeval Trials".
After this, we shot a sequence of sessions of Sissi's treatment by psychoanalyst Marjatta, in the old Pitkäniemi Hospital in Nokia, near Tampere. Sissi was Françoise's first patient, and like Ariste, whose death set off the analyst's professional crisis, her treatment was a failure. So, we made her try a second time, now in Finland. The actress Marja Skaffari brilliantly changed personality from minute to minute. See the clips "Sissi", for one session, and "Sissi's Beginnings" for a series of quick cuts of her entrances into the analyst's office.
11.05.2009
NEW NAME!
Barely have started the website, and we are changing its name ? Here is why.
Mia Hannula, one of our participants, suggested that the name "Crazy Mother" was not such a good translation of the French "Mère folle". In French the qualifier would always follow the noun, so the English has a choice the French doesn't have. We did some brainstorming and consulted the author and the translator of the book. What is the difference? Crazy Mother sounds like a mother who is bad; Mother Crazy sounds like a proper name. In the story, there is a figure called Mère folle, and since she has no other name, this must be her name. Other aspects make Mother Crazy the better title. It does justice to the complexity of Françoise Davoine's book. As there, the new name establishes a contact between contemporary mothers driven crazy by the violence that occurs all the time and everywhere, and the figure from the historical "sottie", the French political theatre that was a successful popular form of theatre in the late Middle Ages. Moreover, it resonates with Bertold Brecht's anti-war play Mutter Courage. This is a good reference, inserting the twentieth century into the work, along with the presence of the likes of TS Eliot, Wittgenstein, and Artaud, as you can see in the clip "Past Voices". Last but not least, the phrase Crazy Mother is so frequently used that it is easier to find us under the new name.
So, all these reasons add up, enough so to bring us to a decision. Until the new website is up we will continue with the old name.
07.05.2009
THE WEBSITE IS NOW UP AND RUNNING
The latest is also the first: the website is now up and running. We will keep you posted as we go along. Since both co-directors are also busy with academic and other work, the progress will be in bits and pieces. For now, we show the provisional result of only a few shoots.
The big one happened in Paris, on April 2nd. This is the central scene of the film, Françoise's trial. This occurs in a theatre, to which the good doctor has been abducted at the end of a long and confusing work day (still to be shot) by some rather un-intimidating Mafiosi. The "court" consists of a combination of mediaeval fools and twentieth century mad geniuses, such as TS Eliot, Artaud, and Wittgenstein. Mère Folle presides, keeps order, and sentences. One insert for this trial scene was shot in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and is posted here as "defence". More inserts will be made after we shoot them in Finland, on a small island, in late June. You can also already see shots from the Carnival in Basel, which is intended as the end of the film.