MICHA EDEN Erdész INTERMEDIA ARTIST
*8 Jun 2023
Some texts from a recent course with Emma Bolland ‘Screenwriting as Poem Form’
Jesh and Jagar: A Mini Screenplay’ [excerpt]
EXT DAY Hastily tiled edge of the river.
PAN UP POV STEADYCAM ESTABLISHING SHOT Suburban River panorama.
JESH IS OFF SCREEN
JESH
Tripping over a tile would be bad thing here.
TIGHT ON
Tip of burn off tower in the distance across the river.
JAGAR
This used to be the glow of your face. When we lived in the apartment. The one you hated so much. I really don’t know why you didn’t get those photographs out when I asked you. It was so much like this.
MOS
INTO VIEW
Concrete bunker with dimly lit entrance.
Camera swings repeatedly between sight of tower refrain and entrance as if synonymous.
JUMP CUT TO
EXT CONTINUOUS Apartment view.
JAGAR faces the window in his briefs and multiple towers cast a warm light across hazy roofs.
JAGAR
Doesn’t it remind of you of the boat? A wall of burn off instead of the coast. Would you have preferred to stay there?
Jagar slides his bare foot against a splintered floor, discoloured by use and maybe rain. He picks at the inside of his right wrist. His jaw seems slackened.
INDISTINCT CHANTING
STEADICAM
CLOSE ON Jagar’s face.
TRACKING SHOT Along the inside of Jagar’s shirt.
VOICE OVER FEMALE VOICE
Don’t sever yourself from the experience of your father’s work. It was his friend; it is yours now, well in your mind. In pictures the gap behind the garden behind the backdrop before where you were headed. Where you recognise.
REVERSE ANGLE From middle of river looking up to the building on the other side. The terrace is empty.
JESH is holding on tightly to a railing at the edge of the pedestrian tunnel. He is swinging his mobile in his other hand as if wanting to inadvertently drop it. He pulls it to his chin.
JESH
I would have never guessed you wondered about that.
‘Again Joan: An Alternative Screenplay for The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) (dir. Dreyer, Carl Th. et al)’ [excerpt]
(Again Joan resorts to Loiseleur. He gives the same sign as before, and Joan says yes. Massieu's eyes are as if riveted to Joan's lips, and now when she answers yes he forgets where he is, forgets that Cauchon is just beside him, and almost without thinking says to Joan: Do you realize that this is an extremely important answer? Cauchon pounces on Massieu and bursts out: You had better hold your tongue!)
TIGHT ON
An important answer
All lips and gestures
Heads turning to the side
STOCK SHOT – MAN MOWING LAWN
SUPER Zoom to violence nodding neck
VO – JOAN
The grape juice is Concord from the States.
And turned away from the fanatic gaze
PUSH IN / MONTAGE
Lips turned downwards the words escape like a philtrum snake
Are you? Are you? Could those glossy eyes speedy with amazement, crazed with delight and
awesome pity cast Chinese whispers among the delegates?
SMASH CUT TO
GOLF DRIVING RANGE
The comical retort – pantomime authority and more chainlike ball hopping turns
IRIS OUT
When does civility turn accusatory in the face of those awesome lips? Who cares what they say?
Spittle on the face unbridles the distance from which they judge
Human excuse looking down in deference to the beauty switching hands
INTERCUT A chiselled chin against a distance-less background flipping fanlike through a fantasy
doorway
Welted doors Welted doors
If it wasn’t for that staff wood-fed by salty perspiration and indignant holding on
INTERCUT She might answer no
POV PAN Squeegee face can’t avoid thinking those eyes are like pole axe extensions lifting, raising, beckoning, grazing and the men just run about like little farty dragon children
PULL BACK
Cloth mingling, sackcloth on wool, seamless upon seem, pulled down lip of parchment stretching, stretching the law, words straining, bleeding
DOLLY
Give me my fucking crown. So, I can better make beautiful gothic serifs of my own, the twine, backhanded arthritic finger
And a ring becomes a focal plane
Tears crawl, bulbous jelly, sin food, get me through the peep shaft, looking through with better judgment as Cyrillic master
I want to smooth those caps or ruffle them up. How long will it take for the angles of my neck to persuade them of my ecstatic truth.
ZOOM
For I know, I know
I am just an analogue warmth of a human in service to your gaze
If only I could make sound
‘Euh had so many stars: An Alternative Screenplay for The Passion of Joan of Arc’ (1928) (dir. Dreyer, Carl Th. et al) [excerpt]
Euh had so many stars.
The mountain was coming. But the sky was dirty.
Your crown is slipping, the red sun-star.
Small pet in your arms doing your bidding in the trees: it’s not your fault.
Arms out to the side are better than in front.
The mirror crack’d.
Elusive friend, a reflection of the coat in the glass.
I thought I heard a sound. The drops are not enough.
Playful ball into the water – coat colliding colours with the saturated palate.
Crouching like a luge.
In the church looking up at a different mirror.
Donald is looking to the side. What does it mean? He looks young.
All the images are mixed up reflections: coat, slide, lightbox, halo in the water. Eyes panning above the magnifier. Zipper frame actualising button. Have I cut myself on the digits – a frock not hewn, too young to be dead? At the beginning, it isn’t fair on all of us.
She is still looking at Mary.
Can those inks bleed like the background of my house in my head?
Running, yelling, calling – we don’t see what happened.
Retrieving her from the water – DON’T!
Look, can’t see through blue cataracts. Blue and yellow cataracts.
Regina in the mirror: I see cataracts in the mirror!
Sister: She likes triptychs because they are like mirrors.
Joan [pouting] : I am too tired for this.
She is still running along the line – the border – staring down at me as if she knows something but yet is just a dream of mine confounded by the hearts on the ground.
Donald doesn’t believe in the dead coming back. Even though Julie has beautiful eyes.
He raises his voice in a crescendo, mock tactics, military on exercises.
War of curly hair.
Three on a stage in profile, different heights, the medium filled with presence.
Both dead and also living through this woman’s lungs. Expiring.
He is a man not afraid to show his teeth.
Like a repeat frame on frame – gesticulating technologically.
And he turns – always turning, turning means something.
Camera launches at the tap-dancing fool.
Comisario: What is it you fear?
Foreigners.
Warned me I was in danger because the dead are going to lead you to the dead.
Cradle the medium’s face like a manger. Soft skin – permeable – able to tell the weather just by looking at it.
Too much flailing about. Partial works and strange hair.
The stairs at an angle of misunderstanding say it all in their arabesques in the dark. Shadow of permanence. Stay here, stay here.
Priest: I hope it’s not another murder that makes you climb that unsecured ladder like a fool.
Who is laughing now? My white gloves are being sullied on the wood surface.
And old Hollywood’s lights are behind me like syrup dripping kelvins.
Every now and then the lens is a halo. Bubbles of cameo.
I will open my mouth for you. And she will shut hers for you like the water. Cause he stares in disbelief – wondering if starting a chain reaction that can’t be stopped, might just be enough to realise these incumbent hooligans are dead turning in their graves.
The spinning ball on the water animates the place that swallows her plotline.
I am not sure what a baptism in Venice would be like in the canal, next to an oligarch’s yacht drawling expensive fumes.
But this arch has a floating piece of paper with nothing written on it.
Falling frame, falling table, on high, on low, dinner will fall on top of her, and a whole set will fall on top of him.
*7 Jun 2023
‘The Otter People. A view over the river, could stand opposite a pillar, faced,crushed against it, wet,and nil by mouth.One sublime with the other divided by the only real,One day the water will swallow it up.The Saint Paul Cathedral will die. The peak of his domepoints a path for the dolphins,A slope back to the origin of theman.The water is the domain of the Otter people.One must always take away the thing andDipping into the River next to us.Sounds create pressure in the room. A small difference in the radiatorthe balance changes to the right or left.The fan sounds like a storm from home. Perhaps the reason he shakes an aremembrance of those young flights.That image is like gravity for me.The promise of life is not there yet.And yet, if it got a name,the fan in the bathroom would just be thereto blow.Despite the strict continuum of stairsinto the water, Straight into baptism. into the water, right in baptism.Refer the curiosity of itto sleepwith a woman in bed with a girlfriendand her friend and her friend with lacquered nails,toes like sugar.Caught in a constant fire of. Being clean and cold. Imagine. There is a centre of declinein the depth of the water.Wrinkling like the most unknownexpressionfrom someone I've ever known.It rings above it like candy,and clearer whiter layer of glaze on theporpoiseheld above the expression of thecity.Lips, there were also lips.The river preached the displaced of thehumanity,So when the tides rise forever,There is blue glaze on top,His upper edge, a sturdy hair bunchwith white capitals around.Or could there be a nice light,the weak lights behind half openeddoors,with the colours of that Rainbow Valley(drawn with) paint given by the Englishqueen.That just stands there?Or slightly on the water,they were smoothed out, wiped away,sprayed away to the mighty gripfrom knowing that the pieces have an imageto be.A cutting board to the known presentdivideIt did not exist in the now.Dive into the water, doing tough.Further away, like that conversation, Further away, like that conversationYes. one not suitable for swimming.Yes.No. An excuse for not feeling yourself afloatIn a mass of humiliated water.Breeds on his only life and refers tohimself to prove that.It reaches back to the last momentor its freed board or confetti expressions. from h liberated sign with expressions ofconfetti.Tablets of occurrences that trickle awayin a trance of colliding tiles.Absorb all eventspoisonfor the martyr who accosts you.Deeper in the water there was one downto pullas a tooth floss over a lip.It was like a sharp edge, an industrial onecut.But maybe this is right,this is the moment when an object wouldhave to cut,Yes, an edge like I once told someone thatshould be.A sweet green light as a candythat perhaps did not want to melt.Candies in wrappers, which do not melt.An ideal measure for the river.The new buildings,the fake snowstorm inside aDepartment store,bewitching, overlooking everything,The size is comparable to pureimagination.A park flies from the end of the worldor that I imagined it.There was possibility in milkif those sounds had not come up.The oracle from very far away:Does anyone want to build the silence that they needto have?A colonnade entrance built of glasswith genres out there that are in the etherfloat around.The abundance of sound injures itthoughtswhile hibernating in the closet, during the winter sleep in the closet,locked it from inside locked from the insidelike a circus display - try itsurprising.How do you know how to use the Urgeto treat?love failure,The unruly tapping of the tongue.About a bridge of possibilitieshoping that a sharp fold of the armMe, will save us a landscape.The toddler treasures as naked walkingwithin the lines.The call of cicadas, that slow auction on toneto the end proportion without echo. to deafening proportion without echo.Actually erasing the echo.No shouting. No answer - I find peacethat I sawIn a field in Canada with an out-performablerage of a cicadaand the bubbling of phosphates on the St. Laurent.Like a noise of cola.A definition of successdriven by the Otter People.The mystery of a deadlock through inheritance.The experience country.The Urge would be a sleepy return.To be accomplished in a contemporary breath ofhyperactivityor an existing collectiveness.What would the Otter people say about touches - through your various rolesI rememberon each other's body thenI tried to get rid of the waspmy lip had landed.Sticky to stand full of horror,Standing on the mat of foam in the sunnygarden.After that I did not want to go inside.This is a work on transparency in allmeanings of the word.I remember a girl who had to rely on meto fit,how she got lipstickAnd threatened to kiss me if I stayed with hername calling.and very good reason to bully girls.And down in the ravine, he made one theresubmarine with a trash can.It was plastic, and it just did not want toUnderwater.The water seemed so clean.It was the bridge to Tarabithia thatHoles made in the idea.The same place whereI had smuggled cigarettes in onecassette case.I dreamed about the heapIn the middle of the ravine.It was the place in the middle,The banished middle pocket.It was also not connected to anything.There it was, hard but consequent.The bridge to Tarabithia.There was once a king and a queen.They were in the middle of a river,They crossed with a hanging rope- She fell.She would have survived if there were nonelittle hope.My brother is my sister.My brother is Canada.It is just a matter of nerves.Not forgotten.Waiting for a plane toilet.This challenge,She could be the Hagazuzah.Sitting on the fenceBetween reality and sleepiness.Forget that everyone is really the same.That because of a simple expressionof feareverything is retained,And everything is clear.I connect with the Otter People, brother.If only two things remained, thenthat would be you and the river.When we breathe, we willcontinue to take these life-threadsthe moment they stayed behind.By elimination.Standing on the bridge is likemerge into the origin,Finding the focal point.Be sure it was there.The imagined is not enough.This place wouldYou can thaw to water.the best break.Opposite that place.