Yesterday our group experimented with the final scene from the classic film Brief Encounter as it is both a prime example of unrealistic and overly romanticised love that we can contrast with real life. Also, as we have now discovered, many of it’s fans believe it has connotations of forbidden homosexual love which is something that we have been weaving into our own plot more and more.
Much of our time was spent discussing how we could use this clip. We had already established that we wanted to have two projectors on stage as well as a selection of microphones and instruments. We concluded that the use of a live-feed camera, an idea inspired by Michael Pinchbeck’s performance of The Beginning, could be used to project on to one of the screens. We could replicate the scene on the live camera for that screen and have the real clip playing on the other. All of the performers in the mock film will be female which will have to be the case considering that we have nine females and only one male in our cast. This, however, allows us to play with the gender roles in the film and the interpretations that many people have about the sexuality of the characters. As well as this, the light and sound effects in the film (such as the light flickering on the woman’s face as she stares at the train) could be created by the rest of the company who are not speaking or on camera. This would be done using basic household objects like a torch.
This scene would then become very visually exciting: the real film and our own perfectly replicated version will be playing at the back while chaos ensues live in the foreground. This would continue our home-made aesthetic that we have developed in most of our scenes as well as creating a beautiful replica of the original film that we have come to respect.
The use of classic films may be used beyond this one scene. We have identified a few other iconic scenes that could either be recreated/referenced/mixed together somehow in the performance. If we did use other films it would not be in the same format as the recreation of Brief Encounter but have not made any clear decisions about what will be involved yet. With this in mind though, I had a quick look at some clips that we may want to explore in rehearsal. I chose these two clips from the film Casablanca because the piano is central to our performance and in these scenes:
