The Cambridge squatter E-Book

Carla Caffé

• Herausgeber: Edições Sesc SP
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 103

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Extrapolating the boundaries between art and education, Carla Caffé portrays the art direction work of the award-winning feature film The Cambridge Squatter (2016) through the comics format. With the help of architecture students of Escola da Cidade, Carla worked on the composition of the art direction of the film from the architectural improvements that could be left in the building for the families living in the Cambridge squat in downtown São Paulo. Merging collective work and creation and the problem of homelessness and refuge in the great metropolises, the book also includes texts by Eliane Caffé, Jorge Lobos, Lucia Santaella, Nabil Bonduki and Raquel Rolnik, as well as an enlightening interview with Carmen Silva, leader of Frente de Luta por Moradia (FLM – Housing Struggle Front). This ebook contains images that are best viewed on tablets.

Leseprobe

Enjoy your e-book

Edited to suit the digital format, the e-book The Cambridge Squatter presents some features that make the reading easier:

• By placing your reading device in the landscape position, the images are displayed in a single frame per screen;

• On most devices, you can zoom in with a double tap on the image;

• Font face and size can be adjusted in parts such as “Presentation”, “Introduction” and “Appendix” by changing the settings in your device.

Good reading!

To Kiko, my love and partner in all adventures.

Banespa Building: drawing by Lucas Gabriel de Almeida Cordeiro, resident of the Cambridge building

Contents

Presentation: Space, Technique and HousingDanilo Santos de Miranda

Introduction: How It All Came AboutCarla Caffé

The Movie and the School

Preparation/The Cambridge

Pre-Production/Set Design Workshops

Acting/Costume Workshops

Refugee and Immigrant Workshops/Animation

Shooting

Extended Movie

Appendix:

Constructing the Movie The Cambridge SquatterEliane Caffé

The Indomitable Struggle for Life DignityLucia Santaella

Interview: Carmen da Silva Ferreira, Leader of Frente de Luta por Moradia (FLM – Housing Struggle Front)

The Cambridge Squatter: A Movie by Eliane CafféJorge Lobos

Towards a New Model of Urban Development: From the Struggle for Housing in Downtown Areas to Advances in the Master PlannNabil Bonduki

Credits

Presentation

Space, Technique and Housing

Fundamental human rights such as health, food, education and housing are values which people continue struggling to attain worldwide. In this sense, the state, government agencies and human rights institutions are the depositaries for the demands and expectations of increasingly heterogeneous groups, as seen in large metropolises that receive expressive numbers of war refugees, victims of natural disasters or people in search of conditions for work and survival.

The social mobility that has characterized the first half of the present century is observed everywhere: abroad, the social and cultural landscape of European countries is starting to change, as in the United States and other economically developed countries; and in Brazil, new waves of immigrants such as Koreans, Chinese, Peruvians, Bolivians and, more recently, Haitians and Syrians have contributed new accents to the Portuguese language and forced us to rethink Brazilian multiculturalism.

One of the needs posed by immigration and migratory movements to major cities is housing. Living well means, in this context, having access to appropriate transport, residing relatively close to schools, making use of a wide range of services in short journeys, commuting without losing several hours a day and being able to enjoy quality leisure spaces. In this sense, living and residing are inseparable and the issue of social housing is embedded in everyday urban life. If concern with universal rights and belief in education as an instrument of social transformation are still part of our values, how can we become more sensitive to the other human needs?

Undoubtedly, art is one of the most appropriate ways to address sensitive issues such as squatting action in large urban centers by housing rights movements. The book Era o hotel Cambridge by Carla Caffé, based on the creation process of the movie The Cambridge Squatter by film director Eliane Caffé, affords us privileged insights into the daily life of those who live in improvised homes, often in transient situations. But this publication goes further, providing us with innovative educational experiences in the filmmaking process and the adaptation of a former luxury hotel – now a housing estate – into a movie set.

In this experience of creating and adapting environments for the filmmaking, the educational partnership with the Escola da Cidade’s students was crucial to develop both the movie and the present book. An example among others consisted of using the movie storyboard in the book’s graphic design.

This volume documents filming techniques, costume sketches, script adaptation, the scenic preparation of squatters to take part in the movie, the interaction between amateur and professionals performers, furniture making from recycled materials, and the creation of sets in successively adapted spaces. It is about, therefore, a singular process of artistic creation in the long list of Brazilian film productions whose practices and outcomes may be shared from this book.

Sesc strives to valorize the filmmaking and the spread of Brazilian and foreign movies. It also holds festivals, exhibitions, releases, debates and workshops in its film department aiming to foster the development of this language that is so significant for understanding and questioning our reality. This publication is part of these undertakings, and may interest film students and artists, and those interested in social housing issues as well. Therefore, it is our pleasure to invite readers to learn about the experiences described in Era o hotel Cambridge.

— Danilo Santos de Miranda

Regional Director of Sesc São Paulo

Introduction

How It All Came About

In 2013, I was invited by the movie director Eliane Caffé to work as art director in the film The Cambridge Squatter. The script’s initial title was Um passo para ir (A Step to Go) and the main theme was refuge in Brazil. At that stage we already knew we would be working in a squat, but had no idea of how involved we would become with the housing rights movement. Following a few meetings and readings with members of the crew – film director Eliane, production director Julia Alves, screenwriter Inês Figueró and art assistant Juliana Bucaretchi – we starting visiting squats in downtown São Paulo. We were impressed with the movement Frente de Luta por Moradia (FLM – Housing Struggle Front) and started attending their meetings, where we learned that the basic elements involved in this struggle are participation, commitment to improving community’s quality of life and mutual respect.

We then began to reflect on how the film crew could share the movement’s principles. We opted for finding ways to empower the movement and improve the daily life of people who temporarily occupied abandoned buildings in the downtown region.

Due to this demand for participation, art direction would play an essential role in the process, as we could work on the movie sets and at the same time carry out renovation work in the building, operating on the boundary between architecture and cinema. That is when we had the idea of ​​inviting the architecture school Escola da Cidade to take part in the project, collaborating in art direction.

Escola da Cidade readily embraced the project, since one of its teaching principles is to bring the institution closer to the “city-making,” by reducing the enormous gap that currently exists between educational experience and actual demands of our reality and by raising students’ awareness of their transforming role in society.

Being a professor at Escola da Cidade and also the film’s art director, I was able to invite the architecture students to enter and investigate an area of ​​urban conflict to increase their knowledge of the subject and raise reflections based on an experience of close coexistence with the community, which contributed to their critical and humanistic education. The students were able to have a first-hand understanding of what goes on in the internal spaces of a squat, what a movement for housing rights is and how architecture skills can be applied to solve the housing issues that plague most contemporary cities.

At this stage we were able to chart the territory, understand some of the community’s dynamics and get to know their residents, to then share this comprehensive knowledge of the squat with the film’s director.

The film production company Aurora Filmes, owned by producers André Montenegro and Rui Pires, realized the creative force behind the partnership with Escola da Cidade. Throughout the pre-production phase we worked collectively in workshops given by the school’s faculty and screenwriters Eliane Caffé and Inês Figueró. Thus, little by little, we strengthened the bonds between film crew and community.

In the movie The Cambridge Squatter, intimacy with the universe portrayed on screen bubbles beneath the surface and fiction is blurred with documentary. This stems from the workshops taking place side by side with the shooting.

Unexpectedly, we stumbled on a great possibility to work creatively and artistically in the pre-production stage, which is usually viewed as a merely executive step. In our experiment, we developed through architecture-specific knowledge a fruitful relationship with the community and the film’s production crew. We carried out research alongside the making of the film that contributed directly to the narrative.

The possibility of opening up the pre-production stage to investigations that were not necessarily linked to the script was a positive revelation that created a precedent in filmmaking. I realized that pre-production work can be experienced through specific forms of knowledge, not only in the actual making of the film, but also to enhance the project’s research and mediate the dynamics between production and the universe in which the movie is inserted. This emerged as a way to work the production steps of a movie from an artistic approach.

The production of a movie, being an essentially temporary and mobile process, deals with the ephemeral and is capable of adapting to any situation. This feature, coupled with research by other artists, can produce rich content and distinct languages.

Of course we are dealing here with a type of cinema that addresses territories, a subject also linked to architecture. In this case, preparation and pre-production must be flexible and necessarily open to better adjust to the location. That opening allowed us to act and create our pedagogical exercise of architecture.

Later on, in the filming stage, production is geared towards obtaining total control over what is being filmed, focusing strictly on having the camera capture the universe of the script. In our case, the presence of students on the set during the shooting was occasional and merely observational (with the exception of the props master and costume assistants).

Such a configuration required the full complicity of director Eliane Caffé. Her enthusiasm for experimentation and new creative processes was key to the acceptance of the proposal and our joint work. Her work method normally includes collaborative creation processes through workshops that support the acting. Absorbing one more, this time linked to the art direction of The Cambridge Squatter, was no problem, since she is used to working out of the box, often in cooperative processes.

In fact, that was my starting point to conceive this book. By the end of the art direction and filming process, the amount of material collectively produced by the students and workshops was so great, not to mention the myriad images of esthetic and investigative value, as to enable us to build this architecture-inspired visual narrative of the film’s art direction process. Therefore, this graphic story features the adventure that explored the boundaries between cinema and architecture via a pedagogical experience, raising our awareness of the countless ways of making art and of the pressing need for reflection on housing in large urban centers.

— Carla Caffé is an architect and professor at Escola da Cidade and worked as art director in award-winning films such as Central Station (1998) and The Storytellers (2003).

A film crew is structured into different departments, each one with distinct functions. At each stage of the film, those departments take part to a greater or lesser degree. Art, for example, works hard in the early stages of preparation and pre-production.

In the last weeks of the pre-production phase, the photography and sound departments get organized, set up their workplaces, and go out to check the locations. These visits, also called scouting, are made together with the directors of each department and those responsible for the machinery and electric equipment, to assess material and logistics requirements.

The shooting is the most complex moment of the production in terms of coordination, since all departments involved so far must work on the film set in a simultaneous and synchronized way to record the images and sound of the script

After the shooting, some departments are restructured and postproduction work starts, proceeding up to the last adjustments in editing, photography, sound, credits and final screening format.

The post-production crew works on the assembly, editing and sound mixing of all audiovisual material recorded during the shooting, always under the supervision of the director.

The director of photography, in turn, supervises the adjustments in image quality and color.