subject: Marco Zaccaria

authors, editors, directors: Marco Zaccaria, Anna Bianco

producer: Roberta Chimera

1venerdì 18 novembre 2011

INT. NIGHT CLUB STAGE - NIGHT

A young woman starts her strip-tease show

VOICE OVER

Who are you?You stayed young on an old film

and you offer yourself to my eyes still seducing me.You come closer and watch me from the past.

Who were you? Who did you become?

Strippers is a film which tells the stories of four unknown and forgotten strip teasers of the past.What they have in common is having been filmed during their strip tease shows.

These short films are the only things we have of them; we can just guess their age, deduce in which years they lived, but who were they?

Seduced by their dances we started to imagine their lives.

Four countries, four strippers, four stories, four lives.

Strippers is a film in episodes made exclusively with archive footage of the past. Each episode tells about a fictional life-story of a strip teaser. The personal stories of the protagonists are based on original screenplays which take shape basing on available archive materials. Each biography brings us into contact with important moments of History of Europe from the 1920’s to the 1960’s, dealing with facts through fiction. Through this narrative choice we travel through the evolution of the female condition, erotic imagery and the social transformations of the last century.

The aim is to make a film which has the appeal given by fiction with the language of historical documentaries.

Accordingly with the footage that we will find, we would like to set the stories of the strip teasers in different European countries, to have a glance into different erotic imageries from Italy (emblematic in its relationship with eroticism for the strong presence of the catholic church), passing through France (where the strip tease was born), Germany (seen trough the eyes of an East German young woman who escapes in West Germany) to Sweden. Since footage is more interesting and valuable in its original language, we'd like to mantain the language of each country as well in the voice over's narration, and subtitle every episode in English.

Producing the pilot story of the film (attached to the application) was a test on how the film could be developed respecting its particular nature. As the fictional life-stories refer on archival material only, the authors worked in primis on a short treatment. Then the script took shape following the material found during their researches. Digital graphic effects has been also used to give a coherent visual support to the materials.

This pilot story is set in the United States, because it was possible to use archival material of public domain.

Ada - Italy Ginette - France Astrid - Germany Inger - Sweden

2venerdì 18 novembre 2011

In Strippers each story develops over the length of a strip-tease and its alluring pace accompanies us to the end. This is the element which brings us closest to the style and the image which each stripper holds in erotic imagery. The stripteases from different historical periods allow us to see how this image has transformed. What was taboo, and how did it play to desire and change the erotic; how did the weapons of seduction change; what were the outfits, the accessories the allusions and the points of reference which tempted the desire of the time, and what do they tell us today?

Each story is part of a mosaic, which builds up to show the image of women over forty years of history.

In contrast to the STRIP-TEASE, educational footage tells us about good habit patterns good women had to observe according to the society of their years. These materials allow us to focus the attention on how the figure of the woman has changed over the decades, and how, in consequence, relationships between the sexes have changed.

What was the route of female emancipation, and how did moral codes influence the evolution of the condition of women?

MATERIALThe stories are based on plausible, appropriate and coherent documents and material. Working on the pilot story we developed a good ability in research on Creative Commons Archives where we found all we needed to write and make the episode and where a lot of material concerning Europe is stored. We also researched Istituto Luce (Italy) and Gaumont-Pathé (France) and there’s plenty of footage useful for our aim.Home movies, historical films, clips, cartoons, songs, radio programs, adverts, photographs, postcards, newspapers, posters are necessary to build the stories by images. Among these, newsreel footage from the period shows us the great moments in history which happened during the life of the characters.

3venerdì 18 novembre 2011

Alongside to the development of the project a transmedia storytelling architecture has been built.We have already activated some digital platforms on the web to increase interest and to build a community around the project by publishing a variety of different digital contents like trailers, extracts of the pilot episode, photos, reports on the working process of the project, etc.

Trailerhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvH6feMpKuQ

First 5’ of the pilot story on YouTube (34,251 views on 15.11.2011)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnMMzyWIvtA

Facebook page: friendly approach to eroticism in the past with magazines covers, microtrailers, photos...https://www.facebook.com/pages/Strippers-Stories/173768362665486

FLICKR: photo-sets giving highlights on the characters and events of the episodes http://www.flickr.com/photos/strippersstories

YOUTUBE channel: outtakes of the episodes/uncut original footage/making ofhttp://www.youtube.com/user/StrippersStories

VIMEO: videoclips, interviews with the authors and producerhttp://vimeo.com/2857971

4venerdì 18 novembre 2011

AUTHORS’ STATEMENT

We find really challenging to examine, subvert and deconstruct factual discourse and its relationship with documentary codes and conventions. The mean we want to use to achieve this goal is the mixing of both documentary and fiction languages, bridging them assuming that “the art of storytelling is the art of spinning a convincing lie” (Costa Botes, Co-writer and co-director with Peter Jackson of Forgotten Silver - Evening Post, 16 November 1995).

Our aim is to reframe, rethink the form of the documentary in order to give different ways of voicing.We want to use fiction as a strategy that enables a coherent ordering of elements to shape a discourse.Through this creative use of old footage, the archive material looses its original value of giving proof of evidence and starts to get a different kind of value with a different kind of language. It’s a sort of ri-positioning of the archives in which their sense is given by the use. Documentary footage moves from information to experience.

Fiction meets documentary as a possibility of a memory never seen before; not to lie to the spectator, but to tell possible stories of a real past.

Marco Zaccaria

Anna Bianco

5venerdì 18 novembre 2011