Treatment for Six Characters

An artist film made by Anne-Marie Creamer between 2012-15.

During a Scholarship at the British School at Rome Creamer adapted a 1935 text by Italian writer Luigi Pirandello called Treatment for Six Characters. Written over 10 years this was intended to be a precursor to Pirandello’s seminal 1921 meta-play Six Characters in Search of an Author; had it been realised the film was to feature a fictional version of the development of his play, allowing Pirandello to explore the ethics of the creative process.

It presents a famous author - clearly based on Pirandello himself – who meets a family who become unwitting catalysts for his imagination. He behaves destructively with tragic consequences. Tantalisingly Pirandello's text concludes with the historical premier of Six Characters at Teatro Valle, Rome’s oldest working theatre. Together the play and the film form an innovative temporal loop precisely united in place by the complex presence of the stage at Teatro Valle.

Apart from one sequence the locations of Creamer's film were lit and filmed without actors, part of a deliberately oblique approach intended to propose a ‘cinema of the mind’: she considered Pirandello’s film a kind of ruin and not intending to make his film in its entirety she set out to construct her work around the paradoxical lures and failures of another, absent film.

The film is narrated by veteran Italian actor Norman Mozzato, also featuring Pirandello’s home in Rome, Studio di Luigi Pirandello and iconic Italian fashion atelier Fondazione Micol Fontana. At the time of production the influential Teatro Valle was under occupation, by Fondazione Teatro Valle Occupato who collaborated with Creamer, and gave her on-going access to the theatre. Pirandello’s film is then not just set in the locations he wished but also within a newly intense social and political space whose urgencies add new dimensions to Pirandello’s unrealized project.

High Definition video - Colour. 33 mins duration.
Language: Italian, with English subtitles.
Stereo sound, 48 Khz, 24 bit.

Director: Editor, & Soundtrack: Anne-Marie Creamer.
Cast: The Narrator: Norman Mozzato. The Mother: Simona Senzacqua. The Chorus: Simone Douani, Nadia Ostacchini & Lara Permiani
Technical: Lighting technician, Teatro Valle: Saba Kasmai.
Soundtrack: mastered by Enrico Pinna at Quadra Recording Studios, London.
Translation: Jacopo Benchi

The work is also discussed or focussed on on the following UAL Research Online pages:
• Article; The Dilemmas of Adaptation: Making Treatment for Six Characters
http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/8705/

• Pirandello’s Unrealized Film, Treatment for Six Characters: An Interview with Film Director and Artist Anne-Marie Creamer
http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/8706/

• Conference presentation of my film 'Treatment for Six Characters' at international conference: 'Global legacies: Pirandello across centuries and media' at Hunter College, CUNY, New York, USA, followed by Q&A before conference audience.
https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/13674/

• http://amcreamer.net/treatment-for-six-c...
• http://www.bsr.ac.uk
• http://www.teatrovalleoccupato.it
• http://www.bsr.ac.uk/awards/fine-arts
• http://www.micolfontana.it/homepage.php
• http://www.studiodiluigipirandello.it