Sunday was a smooth rush through six minutes of dancing bookended by a 7am stagger out of bed and a 6pm return to the Chesterfield sofas, and containing some 30,000 watts of white light, a pea-soup of undulating smoke, a salacious box of Zeiss lenses, two 16mm cameras shooting black & white anamorphic and a glistening frittata seeping golden olive oil.
This is the third film I’ve made with Paul Williams, and once again Marcus joined in operating one camera, along with Tim doing gaffer/grip/everything, Rhys taking stills, Bart recording every sweaty breath and footfall, Yvonne painting Gala and Bonnie’s faces, and a truckload of gear.
The last two weeks have been a strange, fast ride, from conceiving the film to rehearsing and shooting, all fortuitous because Gala was in Melbourne and had spare evenings, the Temperance Hall was empty of rehearsals these two weeks, Paul had a fridge stacked with film stock and everyone seemed to be around.
Shooting on black and white, on a stock that Paul thinks is a couple of decades old and has an unbelievable amount of contrast and lack of grain in a black hall, even setting up there was a dreamy lack of colour, a monochromatic palette of flesh tones in-between the lightless matte black of the interior and over-exposed glare of the smoke haze.
Mostly I got to sit and eat, and take photos, occasionally give some notes and look busy with a pen and paper. Actually I was just doodling. For me it’s finished, now the four rolls of film – some 45 minutes – are off to the States to be developed, then the editing begins.
