User:Kovács Ivette/sandbox

The Rub (2018) is a Hungarian film directed by Péter Lichter and Bori Máté. It is a psychedelic retelling of William Shakespeare's Hamlet from within the mind of the protagonist. The film was created with hand painted and decayed 35 mm and 16 mm celluloid strips, to create a new vision of the Danish Prince's experience.

Directors
Péter Lichter is a Hungarian experimental filmmaker and writer. He studied film history and film theory at ELTE, Budapest. Péter makes found footage films, lyrical documentaries and experimental features since 2002. He is one of the most radical contemporary avantgarde film directors in Hungary.

Bori Máté is a Hungarian experimental filmmaker. She graduated in 2019 from ELTE with a master’s degree in film studies. Since October 2019, she is a PhD candidate at the Universität für angewandte Kunst, Wien.

Péter Lichter and Bori Máté often work together as co-directors, having multiple film titles registered under both of their names.

About the film
The creators of the film used celluloid strips of films, buried them and let them decay, or artificially damaged them through various methods. Using these damaged strips of film, they created stunning imagery, illustrating the emotions of Hamlet.

The opening shot starts with the quote “Sooner or later, you’ll have to go to sleep” from the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The narrative of the film is mostly linear, with the exception of Hamlet’s soliloquy starting with the line “To be, or not to be”, which was brought to the beginning. The narrator of the film is the Hungarian actor and film director, Szabolcs Hajdu, who recites Hamlet’s lines throughout the drama, using Ádám Nádasdy’s Hungarian translation of the play.

Throughout the narration we mostly see flashes of colourful and abstract images of the decayed strips of film. However, there are more static scenes as well which show the projection booth and auditorium of a cinema. During these scenes, the spectator can hear other voices besides the narrator’s, this time in English, most of them being from the 1948 Hamlet adaptation by Laurence Olivier.

The Rub is a radically avantgarde adaptation of the play, a self-reflective Hamlet paraphrase. With its sixty minutes, this film is the longest experimental film adapting the Prince’s tragedy. It handles the visual tools in a more associative manner and creates continuity by means of sound through narration, and the repetition and rhythmic dramaturgy of certain visual elements. The relationships between images and content are abstract associations of ideas and, in many cases, carry open associations. Sound and image do not relate based on fixed rules, or direct connections, the distant coupling creates new meaning, new content, and associations.

Production
The creators of the film used approximately 30 000 unique frames of celluloid. These were 16mm or 35mm strips of celluloid, mostly from contemporary European and Hollywood films and trailers, collected from private collections or the Hungarian National Film Archive.

Péter Lichter and Bori Máté spent approximately ten months burying, decaying, hand-painting and damaging these strips of film with various methods. Since film is an organic matter, the strips of celluloid started decaying. In the summertime, when the weather was humid, the celluloid started decaying in only ten days, resulting in organic shapes and creating a picturesque effect. In order to achieve more diverse results, the creator pair often buried the strips together with fruits or milk to accelerate the decaying process.

However, only half of the frames were created by decaying film, the rest were hand-painted or bleached by the creators, often using these methods on the already decayed film strips as well. Bleached celluloid strips tend to create a green or yellow effect, while decaying results in small, red dots on the rotting surface.

After the decaying and damaging process, they photographed each frame individually with a forty-year-old lens that was previously used to copy negatives. Sometimes, they put three Super 8 strips on a single 35 mm film, to create the finale image where several frames are visible at the same time.

Used 35 mm films

 * Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines – Jonathan Mostow, 2003
 * Trouble Every Day – Claire Denis, 2001
 * Melancholia – Lars von Trier, 2011
 * Green Lantern – Martin Campbell, 2011
 * Va savoir – Jacques Rivette, 2001
 * Tetro – Francis Ford Coppola, 2009
 * The Bourne Identity – Doug Liman, 2002
 * Assasins – Richard Donner, 1995
 * Sucker Punch – Zack Snyder, 2011
 * Wanted – Timur Bekmambetov, 2008
 * The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – David Fincher, 2008
 * Underworld – Len Wiseman, 2003
 * Eastern Promises – David Cronenberg, 2007

Used sounds

 * The Tingler – William Castle, 1959
 * Hamlet – Laurence Olivier, 1948
 * Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Don Siegel, 1956
 * Point Blank – John Boorman, 1967
 * Attack of the Crab Monsters – Roger Corman, 1957
 * The Terror – Roger Corman, 1963

Title
The title of the film comes from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in Act III, Scene I, which starts with the lines “To be, or not to be, that is the question”. The titular phrase appears in the following passage: To die, to sleep

To sleep, pechance to dream – ay, there’s the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause – The use of this phrase as the title comes from the American producer of the film, Aaron Khandros. It refers to the monologue and the deconstruction of Hamlet’s mind, but also to the production method of the film. The creators of the film literally “rubbed” off the surface of the Hollywood blockbusters to create this Shakespeare adaptation.

The mind of Hamlet
The sixty minutes long film does not play out or narrate the original drama, but rather evokes it through Hamlet’s perspective. Due to the abstract imagery and the lack of action, this adaptation is less about revenge, and more about the mental journey of Hamlet, who is questioning life and death itself.

Death
The theme of death is present not only because of its importance of the play, but also because of the method of creating this adaptation. The strips of celluloid used for creating this film decayed in the earth just as a human corpse, and the resulting images could represent the dreams coming after death.

Inspiration
In an interview, Bori Máté mentions Steven Woloshen’s book, Recipes for Reconstruction, as a source of inspiration. The book describes different methods of decaying film, which were useful to the creators of this film.

The film was also influenced by Hans Richter’s three-minute-long Rhythmus 21 “in terms of both Richter’s rhythmic editing process and his effort to create a “universal language” that could trigger responsive arousal in viewers’ brains”.

Release
The worldwide premier of the film was at the Berlin Critic’s Week in 2018. Later that year, there were several screenings in Hungary, at Art+Cinema, Budapest. At the entrance hall of the venue, an exhibition was organised, displaying the hand painted and decayed celluloid strips that could be appreciated as an artform on their own.