UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 39

The final day of the shoot, and we are sent reinforcements from Bandits-Mages and beyond: Olivia Earle and Julien Record (an appropriate enough name) join us from our host organization, while Lola Martin and Anna Woźnica join us from the ranks of ENSA. Their assistance is invaluable following Decerle and Delevacq's departure yesterday, and Leray's 11am flit today (all three need to get back home in time to prepare for the new school year).

What the rookies miss in being new to the set, they more than make up for in enthusiasm and initiative. Earle and Record immediately go to work preparing body-length smoke suits for a cast of five, while Martin and Woźnica decorate our model of Bourges Cathedral with the tin foil flames that cause the smoke. Leray passes on some newly-learnt lighting tips to Record before his departure, and we get the cathedral inferno scene over with in good time, allowing us to get some pick-ups of a scene by our multi-purpose Roman rampart wallpaper before break time.

After a lunch of delicious baguettes (Niemczyk's catering has been delicious and plentiful throughout the shoot, and somehow we've filled our bellies to bursting without any real encounters with the dreaded post-lunch slump) the afternoon rolls relatively smoothly. 

My brain (and I'm sure those of the other long-term crew members) is beginning to creak and groan after a month in this studio, and this cardboard universe. Fortunately most of the afternoon's scenes are based around more or less the same set-up, the climactic showdown scene in Jacques Coeur's historical pantry, in which Harley Byrne finally catches up with his quarry - who is discreetly recording the ambience of the room. The process is disturbed by noises rising up from the graduation expo at the art school downstairs; some of the more droney sound art works we decide we just have keep in the background of the dialogue and perhaps even use as the 'ambience' which our hero seeks; this works fine at least until the drone is followed up with a hip-hop number in the middle of our delicate finale.

Somehow we negotiate the noise and the fatigue and Mrs Coeur's cartoonishly over-sized hat, which has been a real engineering issue all week, and particularly in the cramped and turbulent showdown scene. We get the scene done with a couple of minutes to spare before our ultimate kick-out time of 6pm; but so long as we have our wonderful 'Real Ursinus' actor Ethel on set, I decide we should push our luck and get one more cutaway of her performing the title track of the movie. Thankfully, the guardian of the building is a friendly and accommodating chap; he is able to factor our needs into his locking up route, presumably at the cost of the noise artists downstairs. There's probably some irony that UNIVERSAL EAR villain Being would find in that. Anyway, we tidy the studio as much as we can between goodbye hugs and getting our rare flamenco albums signed by Felipe, our multi-talented guest star. Then we swipe some costumes for the evening's fancy dress do, and hotfoot it to the Pub Jacques Coeur for some fancy pints in an appropriately named setting.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 37

Bourges is known for its tendency to erupt into flames: today we replicate one of the many times the cathedral has blazed, as hero Harley Byrne is tempted into a cross-element empathy experience by the mysterious Mrs Jacques Coeur. The sequence requires no small amount of desk fan breeze, tin foil flames and slinky dancing, except for the poor old character of Saint Ursinus, a statue, who has been played with uncomplaining stoicism all week by local performer Felipe, forbidden to speak or move any part of his body except his eyes. The good humour and friendliness Felipe has shown on set is the absolute inverse of the look in his eyes when the camera rolls. The power of constraints!

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 10

After a fairly nondescript couple of days (hence they have not been described in these pages) of hammering away at the script and malingering around our Bourges digs recovering from Monday night's accident, Thursday begins with a little light leg treatment before we join Robin-Tyrek in the Bandits-Mages van for a trip to the shops.

Niemczyk changes my dressing.

We try to upcycle and recycle as much as possible at Universal Ear Studios, partly out of the belief that it makes little sense to ransack the planet in the name of modulating the soul, but mostly out of adherence to the quasi-mythical cineaste and TVaste Francis Dove's aesthetic school of 'clunkyism'. Of course, we need some things to stick these old bits of junk (and cardboard) together, so we start at Brico Dépôt for masking tape and paint brushes. On the way out, we are shocked to see La Dépôt stocks a range of doors that are both named and styled after the fourteen members of arch-villain Being's girl gang in one of the many unfound UNIVERSAL EAR spin-off series. It's surely a work we should look at in closer detail in the near future.

Who would you cast in each of these roles?

Honing Robin-Tyrek's cardboard-sensing capabilities.

Outside, however, the sky mocks our efforts with row upon row of perfect cartoon clouds and a pink castle that's clearly been made with the cardboard from a giant toilet roll. It is surely time for a classic French 2-hour dejeuner.

We lunch on gourmet fast-food burgers and dreadful coffee amongst the concrete gardens of Bourge's inhuman industrial suburb (which we should actually make a point of boycotting since it's killing the city). Robin-Tyrek fills in some gaps in my knowledge of the local history, particularly the subcategories of fire and pastry, and suggests that the 'ass' of the cathedral that was pointed out to us the other day is just one of many profane flourishes to be found around the building, reasoning that the cathedral took so long to build that the workers just got bored and started freestyling. Now that's what I call heritage!

Next we make the journey to an Emmaüs du Cher outlet packed with dusty, half-broken, once-beautiful things-de-house, from tasteless oversized and completely desirable furnitures to stinking books and haunted ornaments. The counter-intuitive, hand-crafted, and in many cases vernacular nature of these objects is a testament in miniature to a time before the helicopters came to drop Brico Dépôt-sized architectural onesies packed with affordable, car boot-friendly goods across the west's under-exploited sub-suburbs. As we prepare to leap into a project that can't help but highlight the absurdity of the things we label and treat as heritage objects and locations, it sort of makes one want to scrape the filth off those wretched, beautiful former possessions of wretched, beautiful former people and reanimate the DNA in a corrugated-iron warehouse theme park of the bad taste and good times of the city's countless golden ages.

I can't wait for this band to come on.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 6

Today, a kind of safari party with Isabelle Carlier, only instead of the wilds of the savannah or the parquet, we took to the marshes of Bourges. Over five gruelling courses of the Marais Cathedrale Food Tour, we met local artists, shared audition flyers, and digested a new, non-circular circuit of the city, all before the acid reflux of a script consultation between Niemczyk and myself in the evening.

On a cathedral/heritage note: as we passed around the front of that already-explored building, a member of our party named Francoise promised to show us 'the ass of the cathedral', so that we expected to be taken to its rear. Instead, she pointed to an obscure, high-up sculpture, amongst the angels and devils and so on, of an ass: a disembodied derrière with just the hint of a pair of balls hanging beyond. 

Not wanting my assumption - that this was some 13th-century apprentice craftsman's cheeky, illicit signature, unnoticed by his superiors (with the exception, surely, of the almighty one) between countless more sacred motifs - to be corrected, we hurried on to the cheese course before Niemczyk could get a photo. Watch this space!

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 5

A trip for provisions saw us chance upon the monthly flea market. A modest affair, but one stall in particular was crammed with old books on Bourges and esoteric matters, as well as sheet music, stereoscopic views of Paris and the like. 

I picked up an old suitcase-friendly guide to Bourges (with a darling font I just have to share with you, perhaps in the form of Tympanum's intertitles) and Popular Tales and Legends of Berry and Sologne, hoping to find some dirt that hasn't yet found its way on to the internet. Both books are in French, so it could take some time.

Drunk on mothballs, I made my way to a table of postcards, photo albums, and old negatives, and spent far too long sifting through the latter, before finally settling on a pack that seems to describe a post-war re-enactment of ye olde times in the vicinity of the cathedral, and - more intriguing - a set of negs recording the various chairs of a wealthy domestic interior, a Perecian sort of endeavour, or perhaps a pre-echo of today's attempts to 3D scan every space and man-made object of note in case we should wish to regenerate them later in the name of heritage, or just lack ideas for posh new furniture.

Naturally, the pictures carry more gravity in the negative, but I present below the crudely scanned and inverted collection, plus the most romantic of frames sliced from the day of the re-enactment.

I might also draw your attention to today's release of an excerpt of the chapter of Harley Byrne's memoirs that we are focussed on (p)re-animating in movie form, when not getting caught up in hidden heritages and carefully tucked away spaces.

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.