UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 7

Yesterday, that is. A day of meetings - the final one, with DESTINY!

In the A.M., Niemczyk and I finally read the screenplay for Tympanum from cover to cover, making a preliminary pass to sketch out some possibilities (categorising what is possible to shoot, given the prevailing laws of light, and what is otherwise) and removing not the impossible parts, but the unessential (which always seems a shame).

We’ve seen the movie now. It’s too long and it destroyed its creators. (But more on that later).

A lunch meeting is held with Robin-Tyrek, assistant director and more, who promises she has “a lead on some cardboard”. Regular viewers will know how important this is. We pitch the movie to/at her, starting with the whole UNIVERSAL EAR concept and leading to the polyauthentic reveries of the new episode; Robin-Tyrek’s expression seems to suggest flabbergastery at the childishishness of our endeavour, but she clarifies that she is flabbergasted merely at the scale of what we must achieve.

The lunch team moves onto the Bandits-Mages HQ, where the first disaster is to happen. Niemczyk and I are pleased to catch up with Boris Lehman, who is in town on archiving business - not least archiving the faces of all whom he meets with the little handy snapper that hangs from his neck; but when I step back to pose with him for Niemczyk, I manage to put my foot through the floor of the Bandits-Mages production office. The scar will prove to be a cruel pre-parody of things to come.

Next, we scour the B-M shed with Quentin Aurat, trying to tick as many pieces of equipment and junk as possible from our need-list, but mostly adding newly-spotted items to our want-list. Outside, where the land that Bandits-Mages share with the neighbouring Emmetrop organisation is being re-configured into office, performance, and garden space, Niemczyk narrowly avoids being decapitated by an industrial digger.

The evening, and a group dinner chez B-M chief Isabelle Carlier in her divine water-mill conversion home. Lehman gives us a slide show of a workshop he attended last year, and a secret preview of a new movie on which he collaborated with a mutual friend; I make an excruciating screening of It’s Nick’s Birthday, the problems with this movie - shot a decade ago - only illuminating (undesirable) flaws in the new project; and Niemczyk shows her painterly Gjemsel to the acclaim of a plum tart-devouring audience.

A peaceful ride home through the quiet suburban roads of Bourges is punctuated by the slamming of a spinning pedal into the back of my right calf on our arrival. Indoors, while reading about the impending nuclear war, I notice blood dripping down my leg, but think not too much of it until I roll up my trousers to discover a pinky-sized lump missing from the flesh. In all likelihood, rival filmmakers have tampered with the pedal of my Bandits-Mages-issue bike.

It’s not a wound that’s going to heal itself without polyfilla, so we call a taxi to the hospital - on the far side of town - where a three-hour wait gives us a chance to put the wound, the creative crisis and the nuclear apocalypse into perspective. Five artfully applied stitches later, the taxi operator recognises my foreign tones and orders us the reverse taxi back home. If only script-doctoring were so painless.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 4

The (p)reconstruction of the Curse of the Phantom Tympanum script is reaching completion; or at least the first stage of completion, after which we’ll have to smash the gaudy monstrosity to rubble again and pick out the bits we want to film. The shape of the residency itself took a little more form as we met with Bandits-Mages boss Isabelle Carlier and project assistant Delphine Robin-Tyrek, who will work alongside tech guru Quentin Aurat to ‘get it all happening’.

Our reunion/introduction meeting painted a curious landscape as conversation drifted from the practicalities of working with Berruyers (as the locals are known, although the term is not without controversy), to the twin regional pastimes of witchcraft and alchemy, to the impending arrival of Boris Lehman, ‘Godfather and filmmaker permanent resident’ of Bandits-Mages, with whom I visited the infamous Bosnian pyramids in 2014, to the idea of a film that encapsulates ‘The French’ – of which our hosts’ surest guess was that it must be Bruno Dumont’s P'tit Quinquin.

Hipsters put a football through this vintage window just yards from the 800 year old stained glass of the cathedral while we stood and laughed.

To business, though, and we postponed the local auditions for one week in order to give everyone (not least yours truly) a chance to prepare, and also to try to rouse some more talent on this Sunday’s mysterious social tour of the city (including the epic grid of marshes that bubble away just to the north-east of the alchemy district).

Afterwards, Niemczyk and I finally wandered inside the imposing cathedral, my ears headphoned and wired to the sound recorder, so that I didn’t notice how quiet it was until we stopped recording. While hardly silent, the cathedral turns out to be a cavern of microscopic noises, whispers, hiccups, stumbles, and digital camera shutters; the most prominent sonic motif, a cynic might note, is the jangling of coins.

The well-to-do of the past eight centuries have co-opted various little lounge pods around the insides of the cathedral, each trying to out-do the last in the eyes of god and the Joneses, and as Niemczyk pointed out: probably some serious deals were cut here across the years.

That feeling when your head's off and it's a bank holiday weekend and there's no way you can see a man about it until Tuesday.

It suggests a double–purpose for those echoing expanses. Not only must the preacher or what-have-you bellow to be heard, his Latin kumquat-ex-deuses indecipherable in the loud smudgy fear-inducing acoustics of the church, but conspirators must keep their voices low to be intelligible to their collaborators.

Today, a more intuitive use of the premises - in line with the ideal that heritage sites should move - might be as some alien sports venue, the peculiar unreachable balconies, sticky-outy bits and ribbed, phallic columns just waiting to be thrown a dodecadodecahedral ball, a unicorn polo squad, and a book of esoteric rules and rumours.

And that’s just the inside! As we might've noticed during our dehydration-defying crawl past the mighty tabernacle three days ago, the exterior's quite a sight, too. "It’s impressive," mused Niemczyk, "but is it beautiful?"

Personally, I feel some affinity for the medieval wretch responsible. Clearly intimidated by the profile of the job, he threw everything he had at the damned thing.

When all hell breaks loose around you, what is there to do but shrug.

Likely considering a small investment in salvation.

All photos courtesy of Aleksandra Niemczyk.