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| 09-09-2004 | Previous edition: 09-08-2004 |
        
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Printer-friendly version Professor's debut film opens, features Italian background
Assistant Features Editor Patricia Hart felt like she was going to pass out in the brutal Italian summer heat in a field strewn with used condoms. But she couldn’t. She was in the middle of filming a movie. Hart, a professor in the Department of Foreign Language and Literatures, spent her summer starring in an independent Spanish/Italian film called "Como no se Hizo…" (The Unmaking of…). The film is directed by Juan Manuel Chumilla Carbajosa, who is a Spanish director and longtime friend of Hart’s. Carbajosa has released four commercial films in Spain and Hart helped translate two of his films from Spanish to English. One day Carbajosa approached Hart to star in one of his films. Hart said her first reaction was "Who would want to watch me?" Hart’s acting experience is limited. She has never acted before this summer. She teaches Spanish film at Purdue, but this summer she got a dose of the grueling and unglamorous side to making a film. Hart recalls one particularly exhausting day. She hadn’t eaten or slept in 16 hours and was nearing dehydration and a possible heat stroke. The scene was being shot at the site of Pier Paulo Pasolini’s death. Pasolini is a well-known Italian director and was viciously killed at the very place Hart stood when she felt like she might pass out. The area is also a field where sexual encounters between men take place, which explains the used condoms littering the ground. In a email to her friends back home Hart wrote, "The ground was notably sticky. I thought, ‘I’m going to die here, face down in Sperm of Many Lands’." Hart’s character in the film, named Patricia Hard, is an American university professor who travels to Europe and tries to recreate a film that was incomplete. Twelve years have elapsed since the director of the unfinished movie had a nervous breakdown and halted production. Hart’s character in the movie travels around Europe in order to find the estranged director and actors originally involved in an effort to finish the movie. Ben Lawton, chair of the film and video studies program at Purdue, said he has never heard of a professor having such an important role in a feature film like Hart has. "She was the co-star of a feature film by a fairly important young Spanish director. This film will certainly be released commercially in Europe and has a good chance of making it in to the more sophisticated cinema art houses in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Not to mention film festivals from Venice to Cannes to Sundance." Hart describes Carbajosa’s style of movie making as "gritty realism." He wanted the film to be as close to real life as possible and without any glitz and glam of big budget movies. All scenes were shot digitally and Hart had to provide her own wardrobe for the film. There was no such thing as red carpet treatment in Hart’s experience on the set. During the months of July and August, Hart and a film crew traveled to Spain and Italy to film. Hart didn’t feel uncomfortable being in front of the camera, but the lifestyle of being on set was physically uncomfortable. Luckily, many of the scenes in the film only took one or two takes to complete. A scene Hart is unlikely to forget is the scene in which she had to cry. Carbajosa told everyone on set to be mean or ignore Hart so she would be prepared for her crying scene. Though the scene was done in only one take, Hart continued to cry even after the cameras stopped rolling because of the way she was treated in preparation for the scene. Hart’s kissing scene with her co-star also took one take but was not as enjoyable as one might expect. "It was kind of like kissing my brothers — if they smoked cigars." Hart’s experience working on the film may seem harsh but makes sense, due to the nature of Italian film. "The director of this film studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the Italian film school. More than most, Italian directors are famous for working with ‘real’ people to capture a ‘reality’ which actors simply can’t convey," said Lawton, Hart’s colleague. Though Hart isn’t shy in front of the camera, capturing reality was something that was difficult for her to digest. After a day of filming, Hart would sometimes watch footage from the day and she said she would have a hard time watching herself. She eventually got over it and stopped being self-conscious. Though Hart doesn’t feel she is entirely unattractive, she is aware of how some people, including herself, might feel watching a 50-year- old woman on screen. "Hollywood has trained us that physical beauty is a metaphor for goodness," she said. Despite some of her hardships on set, Carbajosa knows he picked the right person for his film. He said Hart’s acting was natural and her extensive knowledge of European cinema helped portray the character easily. "It was very important that Patricia speak different languages: English, Italian, Spanish, Catalan... and she played her character with a lot of sense of humor but there are intense dramatic sequences in the film, too. I am really happy with her work." Hart said her experience will definitely contribute to her teaching and she might even consider acting again in the future. "I finally found an outlet for my inner drama queen." Printer-friendly version |
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