Cassation, Film Treatment

Movement within the Stillness of Time ...

Treatment for a short Ballet FILM ...

based on the short story by Djuna Barnes ...

A Dissonant Dialogue between Movement and Stillness ...

"GAIA and her Dancing Girl ..."

(Not so much a mere "ballet film"—characters acting out a story as if they were ballet dancers, in the way singers act out an Opera—but ...

Film AS Ballet ...

Dancers, Music, spoken words (a young girl's voice throughout) ... a large wasted Nineteenth Century house, a city of gardens, palaces ... statues which cannot move like the dancers but might suggest embodied movement. Stilled ... trapped, killed ... caught in the act ... puppets manipulated by invisible strings against the backdrop of the magnificent grandeur and corruption of Empire ... Ideally the Austro-Hungarian Empire—the film to be shot in Vienna or Paris. (Not Berlin.) Or all three ...

The two principle [sic] dancers, the older woman and young girl, never show emotion—facial emotions. Even their physical gestures, as they dance or touch each other, are subdued, slow, minimalist ... They are like dolls, puppets lifted off a painting by Paul Delvaux. Or Bellmer ...

(The film could be shot with two/three dancers from the Béjart dancing troupe in Belgium. Their style of choreography.)

Montage/Shooting Style

The film does have a linear movement from the start to end; entirely created by the girl's voice/narration—her dialogue with an "invisible" woman at a cafe. Her voice tells a story, a remembered story, and much of the film's flow coincides with phrases or memories of dialogue between the young girl and elder woman. But between these synchronous sections there are short sections, syncopes, ruptures, which are edited as if "vertically"—brutally counterpointing the gentle flow of the ballet's linear movements; short disjointed dance-dialogues illustrating the words spoken and the complex actions between the two women. There is love between them, calm interludes, but as the film progresses, so does the sense of fracture and menace. We see this in quicker, dislocated, dissonant montage, expressing their pulling, tearing apart, their emotional and physical separation as their shared "dream" falls apart, fails to bind them in a forward movement. There are more and more "stills" in these quicker linking sections, of the dancers and their locations, until in the final parts of the film, these "stills"—these moments of absence of time—are expressed and embodied by images of the statues themselves. At times the statues seem to be strong enough to "still" the movement of the dancers. They are halted in mid flight ... The statues are suggesting Life and Being in time past and its memories; but they become dead metal and stone as the dancers start moving again. The dancers will die, but the stones will remain ... with no life inside them.

Part One

PARIS or VIENNA: An old un-refurbished café, next to gardens ... (e.g., those of the Tuileries) ... The interior of the café with larger cracked mirrors around the main large room, pock-marked and stained, as if it was lucky they had survived the war ... ancient battered tables and chairs in its patio, overlooking gardens and a lake. We do not see the young girl at the start, whose voice narrates the entire film. Nor do we see the woman she is speaking to (Madame): except to see her from behind, her silhouette hiding the young girl's head and face.

"Do you know Germany, Madame, Germany in the spring? It is charming then don't you think? (Or Vienna, or Paris) The spree winding thin and dark ... the roses! Yellow roses in the windows! Men staring over their steins at the light and laughing women!

"In such a spring, three years ago, I came to (Berlin) from Russia. Just sixteen, my heart was a dancer's heart ... I would dream, sitting in my favourite café ...

"Sometimes a woman came there ... once she came with a little man, dreamy and uncertain. She looked so temperamentvol [temperamental, vivacious] ... tall, kraftvol [forceful], and thin. She was about forty then ... dressed carelessly but richly ... Savage with jewels ... She was so vital and wasted ..."

(We see...