TOWARDS AN EGG WITH NO SHELL

The Making of the Film

The idea for An Egg With No Shell that of deconstructing text combined with voice work first came to mind during an orchestra-directing course some fifteen years ago. Whilst singing one voice and conducting several others, they fused into a language aspiring to the sublime, in which the sense of words shared meaning with rhythm and tonality as percussive and melodic parallel narratives. The idea persisted and over time several other elements came into play.

The libretto is based on my first published poem, A Cock is a Woman* an autobiographical piece playing off childhood events against chicken imagery. This was the first time fowls appeared in my work but the theme was subsequently explored in performances such as Schreber’s Chicken (Market Theatre, Johannesburg, 1983) and in a film, Chicken Movie. Cluck ! (1984). Here chickens feature as a plastic leitmotiv edited to a prototype exploration of decomposed « chicken speech » in the soundtrack. Under the charm of chicken representation, this thematic strand developed into fetishism. Imaginary or real, chicken images released an implosion of energy in my being. My favorite chicken activity used to be hypnotizing by tucking the heads of fat hens under their wings. During this time I became aware of the omni-presence of chicken references in global culture. Often, when people heard of this preoccupation, they would relate a chicken anecdote from the past. The spell was broken with the making of An Egg with no Shell, which is the last chapter of a chicken adventure that lasted for a decade.

The second autobiographical element is the massacre scene. One day, around the age of nine, as I walked out onto the back stoep I saw my mother in the midst of decapitating my twelve pet chickens. Some were running around without heads, others where screaming in disarray and yet some others’ heads were squeaking on the lawn. As I moved forward into the sunlight my mother saw me. Holding down the next chicken in line, she lifted her axe and said: « If you think it is easy for me, you are wrong », before she slashed down sending another chicken head and body flying in opposite directions from the blood streaked wooden block. Transformed into poetic ritual, this past event became the massacre scene in the film.

My mother’s action needs to be placed into its right context: We were due to leave for the interior the next day and there was no-one to look after the zoo I had collected in the form of rabbits, hamsters, rats, snakes, parrots, frogs, etc. My mother grew up on a farm in the Northern Cape near Mafeking where animal slaughtering formed part of the life chain. As a child I would sometimes watch domestic animals being slaughtered and find the meat on my plate later that same day. The act of slaughtering does not shock me and has often appeared in my work in the form of ritual killing, which may contain an underlying element of violence as a dimension of the South African imagination. What did shock me was that she apparently had hoped I would not appear and when I did, she justified herself. At some point in life, everyone faces sacrifice of some or other aspect of life, be it spiritual or material. The error one makes is to complain about it. Life is an unjust and solitary time where many human beings are basically bad and the good that comes from their actions constitutes moments of grace.

In terms of the making of the film: I tried to create a constant flow between sound and image. Work with composer and accordionist, Jean Pacalet started more than three years ago. From the main theme I had composed at the time when the idea first came to mind, I asked him to create a fugal work in which voice, accordion and chicken speech would intermittently carry the main theme which in turn would have a thematic relationship to the images. Right into postproduction, we allowed image and sound to dominate alternately. When it came to casting, I originally wanted to find a woman with a low voice for the role of the Diva. I had worked in performance art with such an actress in South Africa many years ago and knew exactly what I wanted. But this appeared difficult to find in France and I eventually decided to split the main role in two parts, with a woman singing with a normal voice and a man singing with a
counter-tenor voice. But when meeting with Thierry Dubost after having seen him two years before in a stage play at the Vincennes Castle outside Paris, I asked him if he would be prepared to interpret the role of a hermaphrodite. He immediately agreed. I had not forgotten his magical performance putting on approximately hundred pullovers of all different colors and then proceeding to take them all off without repeating his gestures. Nor had I forgotten his improvising of an operatic aria at the end of the play. At that moment the Diva finally became a man singing with a castrato voice. To match Dubost’s improvisatory skills was not an easy task. I immediately thought of Jean Rouch’s instinctive poetic improvisation through the eye of his camera and asked him to interpret the role of the butler. For the remaining actors, I looked for specific faces and presences for the monks and the slave as characters that were to occupy prototype roles somewhat like stifled dolls. There were moments of magic during the shoot when Rouch’s minimalist interpretation met with the outraged improvisation Dubost constantly kept creating for the character of the Diva.

The film is set in the old quarters of the Kremlin-Bicêtre Hospital outside Paris. The massacre scene was shot in the old reservoir, which was in part built by the inmates and the final scene was shot in the Court of Massacres where, during the French Revolution, an expedition of Parisians « cleaned » Bicêtre from of some 300 « psychiatric patients » which at the time included anything from venereal
disease to mental disorder.

An Egg with no Shell could be read as an attempt at gesamtkunst with various autobiographical strands conveyed intermittently by image and sound,
textured with a leitmotiv of chicken visuals and sound, and set in a historical setting charged with tragedy. These various elements are unified through constant allusion to near-symbols as one imaginary rite flows into another.

Why An Egg with no Shell? But is a transparent egg less mysterious, some
would ask. The demystification of hidden dimensions is represented by the
transparent treatment in the art design. The film uses dream and memory as
source materials and in a sense could be interpreted as a subconscious narrative. After a man’s mother told him about a dream in which she made love to his brother, she concluded: « Any way, I’m not directly involved, it is my subconscious. » The principal character of the film, the Diva, leads the action as an ode to spiritual hermaphrodism where conditioning (« éducation sentimentale ») does not mask our dual nature. His attitude to life as a reality we become, at least in part, as we continually create ourselves, as opposed to life being a mere adaptation to a set of absolutes, requires continued sacrifice, of which the
conclusive expression in the final scene is his resignation to the ultimate solitude of the human condition.

Rina Sherman
Paris, June 1992

* My first published poem (STET, 1983) shortly before leaving South Africa. Following this publication and my first film, Antics of the Artists inspired by Etienne Leroux’s novel Seven Days at the Silbersteins, film rights for the novel secured.