[joe-frank-list] Chel White on 'Soulmate'

[rbell at alumni.caltech.edu]

to:  joe-frank-list at armory.com
subject:  Chel White on 'Soulmate'

	On 2001 February 16 Chel White appeared on 'Oregon Art Beat'
to talk about his work, which included the making of 'Soulmate'.  This
film is a live reenactment of the nosy landlady scene from 'Emerald
isle' - it has no relation to the Joe show 'Soul Mate'.
	https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-3b6ee6e7b92

	White: Yeah, well after I did "Dirt," Joe Frank, who wrote
"Dirt," liked it a lot and said I could use another story in a film.
So I went through a bunch of tapes of his radio shows, and I found
this piece.  And I don't really know what the title was, but I think
"Soulmate" was actually the title of another piece.
	Anyway, I just really love this piece.  And partly, part of
the attraction for me was that it was so different from "Dirt," and I
really wanted to do something that was longer.  And just really
exploring a different place, maybe carrying over the idea of
obsession, but in a totally different way.  So yeah, like most of my
work, it was kind of an experiment.
	My original idea for it would all be - and I realize now it
just was a terrible idea - but it would all be her saying this
monologue.  And then you get these little glimpses of things now and
then.  Well, I figured out pretty quickly that that really wouldn't
work.  And now there's hardly any shots of the landlady in it, but I
think that's much better now.  And you really get this kind of
voyeuristic thing of her watching him for a long time.  Yeah, I don't
know.  It made a very interesting evolution, the project did.
	
	Host: What's the story, basically?
	
	White: The story is about this snoopy landlady who has a kind
of sexual obsession, I'd say, about one of her younger male tenants.
She's maybe in her 50s, and he's probably in his mid-30s.  And he's
kind of a very loner, sort of stays to himself most of the time.
	Well, she snoops into his things.  She finds his box of porno
magazines and his diary and starts reading his diary.  And she's got
all these great excuses about why she's reading it.  She says, oh, it
was dusty, and I found this and opened it up.  And then I saw your
handwriting, and I just thought you had lovely handwriting.  And so,
of course, I had to read it.  And then when I found out it was about
me, I just had to keep reading and reading.  So I mean, I think
there's a lot of - I personally feel there's a lot of kind of dark
humor there.  And some people, I think, pick up on that, but I don't
know.
	But one of the things I like about this story and what we did
with it in the film was that it really makes this unexpected
transition.  It starts out kind of spooky and creepy and then stays in
that zone for about five or six minutes.  And then you sort of get
this other side of things that's much more touching, and sort of these
two people who are so alienated in their own ways and objectifying
things in their lives.
	And yeah, I mean, I just wanted to work with that and explore
a different kind of emotional tension than I had worked with before.

	 Host: When you read the story, did you go through those
emotions too?  Just kind of sort of snicker at it and have that sort
of dirty feel and then be touched?
	
	White: Yeah, I absolutely felt those things.  And that's one
of the things - that's a big part of what attracted me to the story
was - well, I love this - the main character had this - she was, on
the one hand, very judgmental, but she was also kind of - you had a
certain amount of pity for her too, because she seemed to be capable
of a certain amount of maybe passion or love.  But she could never get
to that point where she would ever allow herself, I think, to express
it.  But yeah, I think a lot of the kind of contradictions of that
character - I thought that was a great - because there was so much
depth to the character that you don't always see.

	 Host: It certainly has a totally different feel from the
other films.
	
	White: Yeah.
	
	Host: I mean, how did you - what did you do to change the look?
	
	White: Well, we shot color film, but we did things to it with
filtration and stuff.  We actually shot reversal film for it.  And
yeah, I was going for a certain look with the color.  It reminded me a
little bit of old Technicolor film.  Once again, as in Dirt, I wanted
it to have this little more timeless feel.  I didn't want it to
necessarily look like modern color film or video, but maybe something
that has a sort of antiquated feel to it, like it could have been shot
in the '50s or not.  It could have been shot yesterday.
	
	Host: What did you do to make that happen?  

	White: Well, a lot of it was using the reversal film and also
the filtration that was used in the laboratory, too.
	
	Host: What's reversal film?
	
	White: Well, normally, these days, you shoot color negative.
And that has a real specific look, a sort of more normal look to it.
And then with this color reversal, we did something called
cross-processing, where you process it like you would negative.  And
it gives you this kind of high-contrast look and also makes certain
colors really, really bloom.  But it's hard to control.  It's hard to
predict what's going to happen with it.  So we had to do a certain
number of tests and try to figure out, well, what's the best way to
light this stuff?  Because it does tend to go very contrasty and very
yellow.  So we had to work with lighting in a way that we were trying
to work in a way where we are anticipating it doing this certain
thing.  It's kind of a strange process where you're lighting it like
you're imagining it'll need to be rather than what it's really looking
like.  So we would end up lighting things kind of flat, which is not a
particular lighting style that I like.  But because it gains so much
contrast, then it ends up looking a lot better than actually when
you're shooting it.

	https://jfwiki.org/index.php?title=Soulmate

russell bell