Film company paying homage to German art form
A Saskatchewan film production company is taking Throwback Thursday to new heights.
Moxie Films has transformed one of Regina’s sound stages on College Avenue into a set for a German expressionism-esque film, paying homage to a style that was popular in the early 1900s.
Stark against the sound stage’s jet black walls, the set of Der Glockner consists of two-dimensional, handpainted, black-and-white pieces. They’re made to look stylized and even phoney, their angles bending perspective and heavy shadows providing a dark mood. Together, they form an unidentified European village from early in the First World War.
At the heart of the set — and the story — is an isolated bell-ringer who lives in a tower, and the mysterious girl who pops up whenever he sets to work producing chimes for weddings and funerals alike.
The film’s director, Chrystene Ells, has been interested in German expressionism since the infancy of her career.
The style was inspired in part by Freudian psychology and the idea of projecting the unconscious onto the screen. For Der Glockner, that means no dialogue or title cards, although a local composer is providing a symphonic soundtrack. In their place, actors must perform theatrically, with faces wrenched into expressive angles from emotion and big actions.
The set pieces and heavily contrasting lighting add to that effect as well, speaking to what’s going in the bell ringer’s mind. At the movie’s end, a step into the “real,” three-dimensional world expresses the protagonist’s awakening. It’s the only scene that takes place outside of the studio.
Adding to the moodiness of the movie’s set, lighting and acting style is the approach to the filming itself: 16-millimetre.
Filmed on actual celluloid (as opposed to digital), the finished product will feature flickers, specks and other imperfections. It will also be a squarer frame than digital, adding to the claustrophobic feeling of the movie, said Ells.
Using 16mm is far from a breeze. The film is fickle and could jam up in the camera. Shots could be lost. And there’s no immediate playback: You can only see what you filmed two weeks later, at which point you can’t re-shoot.
“It’s like a one-shot thing. It’s a big challenge — huge — but it can be very worth it,” said the project’s cinematographer Berny Hi.
If all works out, Hi and Ells hope the project gets accepted into a movie screening of contemporary German expressionism-style films in October that’s part of a larger Regina festival called the Caligari Project.
Regardless, the team plans to market the film globally.