THE SOILED EYE' - DOSSIER Pitch

8/9/2019 'THE SOILED EYE' - DOSSIER Pitch

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THE SOILED EYE SYNOPSIS

Francis is a young painter who suffers a crisis of suddenblindness. Hyper-realistic confessed, formed in the classicalprecepts, and used to copy from life, will have to find an urgentalternative to continue 'painting' without using the sense ofsight.

Instead of resting, Francis disregards the advice of theophthalmologist, abandons his fiancee, Bianca , and getimprisoned with his assistant Mauro in his painting studio, totallyobsessed with learning to live and paint like a blind.

After much effort and few successes, Francis comes into

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THE SOILED EYE STORY-LINE

ACT I

Francis has a knack for drawing. His parents encourage his talent

since his early childhood while their home is kept like a little museum fullof classical pieces wich Francis copies tirelessly as he grows up.

At ten years old, Francis participates in group exhibitions, showing hischarcoals, and at age fifthteen he unveils his first solo exhibition, anoutstanding series of oil paintings.

Francis discovers the hyper-realistic artwork of the spanish masterpainter Antonio López Garcia, who sets his course as an artist for ever.

Before entering college, Francis is discovered and hired in exclusiveby the reknown art dealer, Kahnweiller . Despite his early success and

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Although Francis and his assistant Mauro develop many interesting

approaches to blind painting, the process prove useless and threatsFrancis ’ sight’s health, ending with his collapse during a series of selfportraits from realism to abstraction (as Mondrian did) , using the sight , mirroring his own vision and identity destruction, just like happened inthe Artistic Avant-Gardes in the early 1900’s, finally versioning thelegendary and nihilist Malevitch’s ‘Black on black’ .

Since blindness, Francis has recurring dreams of an island where hedreams himself as a pre-historic cave-painter, who curiously depicts lifefrom memory and imagination, all the opposite Francis had done hisentire life.

CT III

Amazingly, Francis awakes from the collapse revitilized in thecheerful studio of his old friend Mike , a fellow painter who brings newpoints of view to Francis with his luminous expressionism painting and

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cynical and controversial genius, self-proclaimed 'feelings designer', anexcessive and theatrical character, who teaches him the curious art of

blind cooking but also introduces him to a world of excesses andoutrages that Francis will be unable to avoid, abducted by theoverflowing Joaquim personality, and also dazzled by the amazingartistic progresses wich he reports from its dubious relationship withthe chef, based on the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse , sharing ideasfrom cooking to painting and viceversa.

Irretrievably came infidelities and infamies, follow a robbery,culminating in a murder which Francis committ unavoidably pushed bythe chef:

-…just as Caravaggio did, Francis. - Joaquim whips him up-. There is

much more to painting than hanging fabrics on the wall...

***

Wacked and convinced that he has achieved something for arthistory, Francis gathers for a late-night meeting in his studio with all hisfriends and relatives to show them his Blind Paintings and ExquisiteCorpses. No one can believe their eyes...:

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robbery along with his ‘brand new art-dealer and curator, Joaquim, thechef.’

‘Scandal, hoodwinking and surrealism reminding the Duchamp’sArmory Show exhibition in New York in 1913’, says the TV reporter.

Sold out. Apotheosis party with seedy celebration. In spite of hisnewfound professional success, Francis’ soul is deeply sick, just like his

eyes, very close to blindness. Overdozed, Francis collapses in coma,just like a damned rock star, in the middle of the street.

***

Francis lay unconscious at some hospital. Silence, whiteness,sadness, despair…

EPILOGUE - ‘BACK TO PAINTING’

A huge canvas in an apealing beach. We see Francis’ painting theseascape with Bianca and their baby swimming in the shore with his

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https://vimeo.com/118573107


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THE SOILED EYE SCRIPT

(5 first pages)Writer: Aram Bakker

INT/ LIVING ROOM/ DAY A family is moving into a spacious empty house with bay

windows. everybody's pitching in. Boxes, trolleys,blankets, white sheets, a drawing table, rulers, romanbusts, dusty curtains. Ritzy wood flooring. Lots of boxesand draped furniture. A two year-old child runs andchirps through the corridors with a big brush and a paintcan in his hands. It’s FRANCIS. He stands in front theliving-room TV and without hesitation starts painting thescreen white, with a Dalí interview from the 60’s

running.

DALÍ (archive)I’ve always said I’m a very badpainter because I’m too intelligentto be a good painter. To be a goodpainter you have to be a bitcoarse.


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from Altamira to Antonio López…It’s true… even children don’t like

fantasy… Snow White, Cinderella,and all that jazz… (…)

Laughs, murmurs. The camera arrives at the mouth of thecave and penetrates into the stony, damp shadows. FADE TOBLACK. We hear a flame gas lamp flame jumping.SUBTITLE, the title of the film: ‘CRETE’

INT/ UNIVERSITY HALL/ DAY A large hall and two open classroom doors to the right,the last stragglers entering, and in the rare a blindcouple coming with a black Labrador Retriever seeing-eyedog between them. Outside it’s raining. Coats, umbrellas.SUBTITLE: FACULTY OF FINE ARTS, MADRID, 2014

PROFESSOR (v.o.)(…) …they watch fantasy because weforce them to, but they’re not evenremotely interested at all, theyknow it’s useless to the world welive in. Better put them TVshopping or realities… -laughs,


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with a nice coat, heels, and big green eyes. A career woman.

MUMMYHow's my little Francis? Come on,give mummy a kiss.

MUMMY kisses her son's head while grabs a pear exitingbiting. She shouts across the house.

I’m pulling up the car, hurry upeveryone!

DADDY approaches his son and kisses his forehead,carrying floor plans and rulers of an architect orengineer.

DADDY

But Francis… what you've donethere, little animal? Such acoarse(?). Look buddy…

Daddy takes the pencil from Francis little hand and startdrawing triangles all over the chameleon’s snapshot.

Remember: triangles. See? Like


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front of the drawing Agnes’ discovered, elegantly framed,full of wrinkles, filling the screen. Awesome, realistic

picture of the chameleon drawn in blue pen, with nocorrections, ‘alla prima’.

INT/ VARIOUS LOCATIONS/ DAY/NIGHTEDITION SEQUENCEOverview of FRANCIS' fruitful childhood increasingly andhappily devoted to art.

FRANCIS CHILD (on/off)‘Edmund Burke. On Beauty and theSublime. Ireland. 1757. Section I.Imitation. ‘ (…)

EXT/ PARK/ DAY FRANCIS carefully observes the reactions of everyone inthat park while making gorgeous quick sketches on a

notebook, even using a binoculars, noticing how the youngcopies the eldery, mimetically. His hands as fast as hiseyes and capture with three lines everything. Poses,gestures, reactions, tics…

(…) ‘Imitation is the second mostimportant passion belonging to thesociety, after sympathy. Imitation


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'Painting is silent poetry heard with sight, and poetry is blind

painting watched with ears.'‘The painter fights with Nature andstruggles to imitate it, creating asort of Second Nature in hiscanvases...’

INT/ LIVING-ROOM/ DAYFrancis’ parents are carefully unwraping a canvas

recently bought. Silence and amazed contemplation.Francis couldn’t believe his eyes, absolutely abduced byits beaty goes towards touching the canvas,his parentssmiles. It’s an astonishing Antonio López Garcíapainting, a portrait of a woman with a pair of huge deepeyes. Francis takes his coarse as a painter. He’s gonnabe a realist.

FRANCIS CHILD'Part XXXIII. About eyes. Iconsider the eyes as a source ofbeauty, and this is because theyare directly related to theconcepts of transparency andclarity. ‘ (…)


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water, glass or other transparentsubstances.’

INT/ FRANCIS’ BATHROOM/ NIGHTFRANCIS begins painting a self-portrait using one of thereinforced mirrors. A light like Antonio López’s. He’sfinishing his eyes.

INT/ EVENTS HALL/DAY

FRANCIS’ first solo exhibition in an art gallery. Abeautiful triptych based on Ophelia. Relatives andfriends crowd the room around a preppy, good-looking boy.Camera flashes. Hundreds of hands applaud him; hundredsof eyes smile at him. Plenitude. Agnes, his sister and

parents are so proud.

(…) ‘What color of eyes is mostbeautiful depends greatly on theimagination of each and every oneof us…

False note in the Original Sound Track. The lights of the


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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 isimpossible 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 won’t know how to

defend ourselves.’

(CONT.)


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THE SOILED EYE LETTER OF INTENT

‘Only the image is real’

THE SOILED EYE is a fantasy about art, an allegory of the ambiguouscontemporary sense of Realism so in life as in art. Is the story of an academicrealist painter who becomes an iconoclast neo-dadaist. A man changing his mind.

A husband and father who voluntarily abandons happiness in the name of art andmodernity . An artist changing his style.

THE SOILED EYE touches upon the history of figurative painting till theinterruption of the Avant-Garde movements in early 20th century, strikingagainst the tyranny of sense of sight and all the burgeois visual representationcodes. Dadaism, cubism, surrealism and expresionism soiled the occidental eye

with their visionary and artificial fantasies.

As Picasso once said to Braque, (while they were developing up early cubism atL’Estaque in France): “We are going to fill their eyes with petroleum and tow ”.

Object to be destructed (Man Ray), The blind swimmer (Max Ernst), You


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http://es.linkedin.com/pub/aram-bakker/19/5B2/49Bhttp://vimeo.com/user8460463http://www.picabiafilms.com/

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THE SOILED EYE' - DOSSIER Pitch