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‘THE NAUGHTY ARTS’ MOTION PICTURE

Script (5 first pages)

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, roman busts, dusty curtains. Ritzy wood flooring. Lots of boxes and draped furniture. A two year-old child runs and chirps through the corridors with a big brush and a paint can in his hands. It’s FRANCIS. He stands in front the living-room TV and without hesitation starts painting the screen white, with a Dalí interview from the 60’s running.

DALÍ (archive) I’ve always said I’m a very bad painter because I’m too intelligent to be a good painter. To be a good painter you have to be a bit coarse.

Dalí disappears behind the thick white grassy Titanlux painture. MOMMY cannot climb down the ladder. Stucked, shouts for her husband.

MOMMY Hector, please, the TV!!! FRÁN-CIS!!

EXT/ PRAIRIE/ DAY A sunny day. The camera glides slowly upper edge through a wild, endless prairie gently swaying in the wind, revealing between the weeds a camouflaged cave, the cave of Altamira in Spain as it was discovered in the 19th century. Footsteps, buckles, and boots sound in off. SUBTITLE: ALTAMIRA, CANTABRIA, 1868 Also it’s a sensual, mature female voice of a PROFESSOR over the images, lecturing in some university in the present time. The soothing, smooth sound of the slide projector. Murmurs, amazement. ‘Clic-clac, clic-clac…’

PROFESSOR (v.o.)

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Realism is that style as old as mankind, which has barely changed 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 the cave and penetrates into the stony, damp shadows. FADE TO BLACK. 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 blind couple coming with a black Labrador Retriever seeing-eye dog between them. Outside it’s raining. Coats, umbrellas. SUBTITLE: FACULTY OF FINE ARTS, MADRID, 2014

PROFESSOR (v.o.) (…) …they watch fantasy because we force them to, but they’re not even remotely interested at all, they know it’s useless to the world we live in. Better put them TV shopping or realities… -laughs, murmurs-.

The blind couple arrives at the door and enters, leaving the dog shaking itself off the rain water pushing a transparent umbrella to the ground with his tail, wich mechanically wide open, panicking the dog. Freeze frame. Cut. EXT/ BEACH/ DAY A pre-Minoan CHILD operating a wooden and glass apparatus, watching the seabed while he wades along the shore in silence with the water up to his thighs. It is very early in the morning, no one’s around, only a seagull which lands on a buried pre-doric column in the shore.

INT/ KITCHEN/ DAY FRANCIS has grown, he's now over four years old, with the same intense, big black eyes. He is sat at the kitchen table, loosely copying a photo of a green chameleon from a magazine. An exultant drawing, brilliant, Picassian. MUMMY, an attractive blond

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in her forties, enters the kitchen. She is well dressed, with a nice coat, heels, and big green eyes. A career woman.

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

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

I’m pulling up the car, hurry up everyone!

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

DADDY But Francis… what you've done there, little animal? Such a coarse(?). Look buddy…

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

Remember: triangles. See? Like this, just like this. You can do it a much better. It has to be lifelike… Lifelike!

Francis look up at his father, deeply concerned. AGNES smiles. The car horns. Daddy leaves. His SISTER passes by loaded with books.

SISTER

Good morning, squirt! FRANCIS crumples up his chameleon and tosses it into the trash, a failure. The wrinkled paper ball rolls along the floor, stopping near another discarded drawing, also crumpled. AGNES bends down to pick them both up. Unfolds. The Original Sound Track starts some ‘initiation’ melody, something between prehistoric rithms and contemporary piano. INT/ LIVING ROOM/ NIGHT Travelling-In. A warm and huge living room full of old, original antiques and selected neoclassic art. FRANCIS blows out four candles on a big birthday cake in front his entire FAMILY. Applause, birthday songs, presents,

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plenitude. The camera crosses the table and stops in 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 no corrections, ‘alla prima’. INT/ VARIOUS LOCATIONS/ DAY/NIGHT EDITION SEQUENCE Overview of FRANCIS' fruitful childhood increasingly and happily devoted to art.

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

EXT/ PARK/ DAY FRANCIS carefully observes the reactions of everyone in that park while making gorgeous quick sketches on a notebook, even using a binoculars, noticing how the young copies the eldery, mimetically. His hands as fast as his eyes and capture with three lines everything. Poses, gestures, reactions, tics…

(…) ‘Imitation is the second most important passion belonging to the society, after sympathy. Imitation forms our customs, our opinions and our lives. Here is why painting and other pleasant arts have taken the fundamentals of their power within society. ‘

FRANCIS' draws and measures famous Greek and Roman statues and buildings, one after another, making constant partitions, proportions and triangulations, mainly from Phidias’ artwork. Francis read quotes from other books his father puts in his hands.

(Winckelmann) ‘Beauty cannot be conceived without the proportion which is its very foundation.

FRANCIS' arm grows with age and the sweater gets increasingly smaller on the contrary as seasons pass by through the window.

‘Noble Simplicity. Silent Greatness...’

(Leonardo da Vinci)

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'Painting is silent poetry heard with sight, and poetry is blind painting watched with ears.' ‘The painter fights with Nature and struggles to imitate it, creating a sort of Second Nature in his canvases...’

INT/ LIVING-ROOM/ DAY Francis’ parents are carefully unwraping a canvas recently bought. Silence and amazed contemplation. Francis couldn’t believe his eyes, absolutely abduced by its beaty goes towards touching the canvas,his parents smiles. It’s an astonishing Antonio López García painting, a portrait of a woman with a pair of huge deep eyes. Francis takes his coarse as a painter. He’s gonna be a realist.

FRANCIS CHILD 'Part XXXIII. About eyes. I consider the eyes as a source of beauty, and this is because they are directly related to the concepts of transparency and clarity. ‘ (…)

INT/ ALTAMIRA CAVE/ DAY FRANCIS visits the cave of Altamira with his school on a fieldtrip. Completely amazed with the 30.000 year old paintings, the child daydreams wondering how those ‘coarses’ would realized these masterpieces, upside down. INT/ ALTAMIRA CAVE/ NIGHT Four torches through the darkness towards the Camera in a cavern. Four PREHISTORIC MEN pull a huge bison through the clay soil and lean the beast against the wall, putting sticks, trunks and stones under his belly and legs to keep it standing. One wizened, old NEANDERTHAL starts moaning a deep, continuous low ‘C’ note. In other corner of the cave, a little female HOMO-SAPIENS female kid emits the same ‘C’ note but in a higher octave. Hipnotizing acoustics. The ARTIST drinks something from a shell and starts drawing the animal on the roof in thin charcoal. All present moan with irrational pleasure looking in awe at the hand creating animals from the stones, from nothing. A stream of air crosses the cavern and blows out the torches. Darkness, frighten murmurs, the ARTIST groans and curses for his fire.

(…) ‘We like eyes for the same reason that we like diamonds, clear

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water, glass or other transparent substances.’

INT/ FRANCIS’ BATHROOM/ NIGHT FRANCIS begins painting a self-portrait using one of the reinforced mirrors. A light like Antonio López’s. He’s finishing his eyes.

INT/ EVENTS HALL/ DAY FRANCIS’ first solo exhibition in an art gallery. A beautiful triptych based on Ophelia. Relatives and friends crowd the room around a preppy, good-looking boy. Camera flashes. Hundreds of hands applaud him; hundreds of eyes smile at him. Plenitude. Agnes, his sister and parents are so proud.

(…) ‘What color of eyes is most beautiful depends greatly on the imagination of each and every one of us…

False note in the Original Sound Track. The lights of the room go out, just like in the cave of Altamira. INT/ COUNTRY KITCHEN/ DAY FRANCIS' in the same spot of the screen but seventeen years later, in the middle of a huge old country kitchen, in his underpants, sporting stubble, scruffy, tacky. He wears black sunglasses and between his damaged and stripped hands, a white blind can. There’s no furniture, just fishbowls all over the floor and a small canvas hung on the wall, a beautiful and strange piece by Arcimboldo, a surrealist from the 16th century depicting a cook composed of assorted vegetables. Francis’s adult voice finish the quote with a sick voice.

FRANCIS ADULT (v.o.) ‘…but in general no one likes an eye whose water is… -so to speak-… muddy or impure. ‘

By the window we see the entrance full of movers and moving trucks. The cement mixer gives the ambience a certain industrial taste. Slight signs of decadence here and there, like a magpie landing on a pre-Doric column broken and half buried, identical to the one we saw in the shore of the beach. A gust of wind blows across the place and the screen, from one end to the other, and disappears as it came. The car leaves. Francis can hear

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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 is impossible 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.’