Dutch Elm Productions
wood with a subtle twist of pestilence

- in which our plaintiff strives to make some magic image box trickery, in order to insinuate himself into Dame Marjory's will. Constable Blackthorpe, however, has suspicions.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

A Spooky Coincidence

So a few weeks ago I watched Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly.

I didn't know anything about the film, just knew it was highly rated and I'll confess I've been watching too many Korean films to catch anything by Bergman.

I've not seen the likes of The Magician or The Seventh Seal but they're all stacked up in my DVD rental club "to do" list which now stands at 56 films watched and 249 to go.

The films are sent randomly and this film was the one to arrive that day - this was the also day I decided to change the name of my animation from The Yellow Wallpaper to The Wallpaper.

Through a Glass Darkly is a remarkably shot film, set on the crashing cliff-lined Swedish coast starring the extremely beautiful Harriet Andersson alongside the impossibly austere Max von Sydow, who's gravitas-charged face looks like it has been hewn from the Gothenberg rock itself. Boy does that fella suit a pipe.

I won't give the story away, but increasingly central to the film are scenes of Andersson staring mesmerised at a patch of wallpaper in a spare room in her house, as she gradually begins to lose her mind.

This in itself I found freaky, seeing as it's also central to The Wallpaper. However what really spooked me was when I watched a short additional documentary by Bergman when he explained that the film was very nearly called The Wallpaper !

Plain eerie.

Watch the film if you can. Primal, committed acting and breathtaking panoramic establishing shots. Bergman is clearly a master of the slow hand.

What I did etc: JP Morgan booked me up all day today alas.

2 Comments:

Blogger Tim Clague said...

But what this story does show is that good ideas often happen to different people. When someone says 'They stole my idea' I often find this doubtful. Your story proves this point.

7:14 PM  
Blogger Paul said...

You're right!

Back in the late 90s I had this idea - it was a great one. I saw an article in the New Scientist which said that humans only ever use about 10% of their brain.

I got swept up in the idea - what if a person found out how to use all of it? I was excited for months thinking about how this could be written, then bumped into Ady who just said "Have you seen the Travolta film Phenomenon? Same thing." Gutted.

I'll let Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Bergman fight over The Wallpaper's intellectual origins, since I'm doing an adaptation anyway!

8:13 PM  

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