Matthew Hardy

It Makes the Dead Sing is currently in post-production.

And finally, the film is interested in the ghosts of very particular kind of hatred, at a time when those ghosts seem to be re-emerging...

Download the treatment:

English it-makes-the-dead-sing-treatment.pdf

French ca-fait-chanter-les-morts-traitment.pdf

It Makes the Dead Sing will compete at top international film festivals.

Acting as a proof-of-concept, we will use the film’s feature-length potential to attract larger-scale investment, transforming our 20 minute short into an artistic and financial success.

Some short to feature comparatives:

Whiplash, Damien Chazelle
18 Minute Short → Feature Feature Budget: $3.3 million Gross: $50 million

Les Misérables, Ladj Ly
16 Minute Short → Feature Feature Budget: €2 million Gross: €19.2 million

Son of Saul, László Nemes
13 minute short → Feature Feature Budget: €1.5 million Gross: €9.7 million

Backstory

Last summer, on the final day of my trip to Paris, I had a momentous decision to make: shall I go to the exhibition on Romy Schneider at the Cinémathèque, or Pionnières at the Musée de Luxembourg, showcasing women artists of the années folles?

I was already on my way to the Schneider when I discovered that the Cinémathèque was closed: the Luxembourg it was.

With all due respect to Mrs Schneider, fortune had been on my side. Puppeteers and painters, filmmakers and performance artists, these women were pioneers indeed, opening up a culture that had hitherto been dominated by men.

But then, in the second to last room of the exhibition, I saw it: Romaine Brooks’ Au Bord de la Mer, 1914.

Standing before this simple figurative painting, seemingly indifferent in style to all contemporary trends, I understood for the first time that a painting could haunt.

Her face a mirror, her soul a sea, I cannot say how long I stood there in her thrall.

Upon my release, I ignored the final room, found a café, and began to write. And, after twenty minutes, the basic story of It Makes the Dead Sing - the painting, the curse, the war - were written out in front of me.

And yet this story did not take twenty minutes to write.

On the contrary, my interest in Vichy France can be traced back to the time I spent in the archive of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, where I undertook research for my last short film, The Pacifist. Like Sylvie’s story, The Pacifist was preoccupied with less visible traumas of war, far away from the battlefield, in the quiet of college dormitories or Occupied cities.

And it was there that I returned over the past year, this time to study the incantations of the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic inscription bowls. I was particularly interested the series known as the ‘Berlin bowls’, one of whose fearful inscriptions - ‘sit like a bolt on his heart and like a load on his brain and kill him after thirty days’ (Bowl 040A) - served as the basis for the nature of Yimakh Shemo curse that attacks Sylvie, and before her, her great-grandfather.

But the path towards that day in the Luxembourg has been populated by so many experiences:

I remember, for example, when my friend returned home from an acting class in Paris only to tell me that another actor had used the guise of performance to attack him for his Jewishness. I remember too, when I first recognised the parallels between the obsessive compulsions of Sylvie’s relationship with the painting and the challenges that obsessive-compulsive disorder has presented to my life.

It was the visceral beauty of Brooks’ Au Bord de la Mer, though, that bound and catalysed those preoccupations, experiences, and anecdotes into the living narrative of the film. Yet, like going to one gallery because the other is closed, the true beginning of anything is always a matter of chance.

It was a little strange, therefore, to discover that Romaine Brooks was known in her time as the ‘thief of souls’: clearly she was in the habit.

Since that day, the film’s basic story has remained unchanged. I knew its structure, and I certainly had my model for Löwy Fassler.

To actually build the world of the film, however, an education was in order. Joshua’s specialist knowledge of the period of Occupation and the legacy of the scandale proved an invaluable resource, offering me the depth of insight into those subtler aspects of the film’s background, from the tactics of La Police to the fictional backstory of the Fassler family. The Rape of Europa by Lynn H Nicholas was foundational text for me, whose thriller-like qualities belie a lifetime of astonishing research into the Nazis’ plunder and looting of art across Europe. Last Times, Victor Serge’s masterful tale of the city’s fall, was a great aid too; like infesting spiders, he writes, in place of the people who drained from the city, swastikas multiplied.

But, like Sylvie, the written word simply wasn’t enough.

I immersed myself in Montparnasse for days, tracing Löwy’s imagined paths and observing life’s minutiae. My memories of these walks - the cafés’ fleeting mirrored glass, their anxious reds, their waiters’ drooping faces - now comprise Sylvie’s feverish pilgrimage into the night, an intensely visual flashback whose storyboarding has taken inspiration from the fragmentations and distortions of modernist painting.

Walking through the city, night and day, I tried to reconcile images of the thriving culture of the Ecole de Paris - from La Ruche to La Closerie and back again - with the quiet of the Occupied city, a sobering image-negative of the fallen capital.

Yet again, like Sylvie, this wasn’t enough: I went to the archive in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine to research French visual culture of the 1920s and 30s, where I read about the perceived threat posed by the cosmopolitan emigrés of the Ecole de Paris to France’s cultural wellbeing in the pre-war period. A similar phenomenon could be observed in Germany at the time, whose 1937 ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition in Munich had taken to a new extreme the distinction between nativist art and the internationalist styles of Paris.

On two separate trips to Berlin, the city from which I imagined Löwy to have emigrated in 1933, I visited Jewish Museum. There, the stillness of the Axes of the Holocaust anchored me to the unspeakable tragedy beneath Sylvie’s story. The names of two individuals whose identity cards were displayed - Jacob Fassler, born 1924, and Löwy Magdolna, born 1919 - caught my attention: I remember imagining their lives, textured and real, before the war. When I began to write, their names came back to me as one, thus forming Löwy Fassler’s name. I returned there last month for the Paris Magnetique 1905-1940 exhibition, the first major exhibition in Germany devoted to the Jewish artists of the Ecole de Paris.

Today, when I revisit my memory of Au Bord de la Mer, it is no longer just the painting’s beauty that moves me, but the recognition of that artwork’s remarkably generative power. Brooks, in perfecting her craft, struck me with something so profound that I have spent a year developing my own.