A tastefully half-nude blonde lies on the hood of an antique red convertible. An ominous man clad in a black suit appears in the background. Two more men, one holding a club, the other holding a net, gradually materialize in the foreground.
"The man in the background should technically be standing next to a gramophone, but I couldn't find one," explains Duke senior Lauren Wolkstein. The scene displayed on her brand new Macintosh editing suite is a tableau--a silent, motionless representation of a scene, in which each character assumes their proper position--of a René Magritte painting, "The Threatened Assassin." The tableau is part of her senior independent study and latest film, tentatively named after the Magritte. "The woman lying on the couch looks so naked and vulnerable," Wolkstein said, explaining why the picture inspired her. "But the three people looking at her don't do anything." In her tableaux, the couch becomes the convertible, and the witnesses and the victim become the characters in her film.
Wolkstein's film centers around three witnesses' perceptions of date rape at a drive-in movie theater, in the vein of Kurosawa's 1950 classic Rashomon. But Wolkstein gives her film another twist: Each character tells their point of view from a different genre. Her idea, borne from a Duke-in-L.A. film class at USC, was to "make a film that was a character study as well as applying different genres to each character's story." The disgruntled concession stand employee gets a surrealist section that often lapses into destructive fantasies; the prostitute working the back line of cars gets horror; and the flighty model and her lover spontaneously burst into song in a musical section.
For each section Wolkstein expertly incorporates elements characteristic of the respective genre. For the surrealist section, she and cinematographer Steve Milligan employ a fish-eyed lens, bright red lighting and a long take chopped down by rhythmic editing. The horror section is shot with harsh shadows and bright light and will be converted to black and white in post-production. It was hard for Wolkstein to veer away from making this section too campy--instead she tried to be creepily erotic like Nosferatu and other classic vampire films. The musical section will be shot with a Technicolor feel--hard to do considering she's saving money by shooting on video--and the actors will sing a song with lyrics by Wolkstein, composed for guitar by senior Jason Saltiel, and set to orchestra by an L.A. composer.
The final portion tying everything together is shot Dogme-style. Dogme is the revolutionary film movement begun in 1995 by Lars Von Trier and other movie-makers who took a so-called "Vow of Chastity." That is to say, they vowed to shoot on location, use only diagetic sound and hand-held cameras, shoot only in color, avoid the use of filters and artificial lights, and never credit themselves as directors. Therefore, the last section of the film is characterized not by its genre, but by its lack thereof.
The finished product will be only twenty minutes long, but Wolkstein has invested thousands of her own dollars into the production. Though the owner of the drive-in (which doubles as a gun-shop by day), the actors (all Duke students) and the cinematographer have all agreed to give their services for free, the costs of the camera, film stock, microphones and editing equipment add up quickly.
Wolkstein, who graduates this May, plans to enter The Threatened Assassin into several independent film festivals before applying to film school.
The works of Wolkstein and other Film/Video/Digital certificates will be displayed at 7 p.m. in White Lecture Hall on April 23.
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