THE SOILED EYE

SYNOPSIS

Francis is a young painter who suffers a crisis of sudden

blindness. Hyper-realistic confessed, formed in the classical
precepts, and used to copy from life, will have to find an urgent
alternative to continue 'painting' without using the sense of
sight.
Instead of resting, Francis disregards the advice of the
ophthalmologist, abandons his fiancee, Bianca, and get
imprisoned with his assistant Mauro in his painting studio, totally
obsessed with learning to live and paint like a blind.
After much effort and few successes, Francis comes into
contact with the world of the kitchen by her friend Cristina
which features him a famous chef of the moment, Joaquim,
cynical and controversial-genius, self-proclaimed 'feelings
designer', an excessive and theatrical character, which teaches
Francis part of his culinary secrets, and introduces him to a
world of excesses and outrages that Francis will be unable to
escape, abducted by the overflowing Joaquim personality, and
also dazzled by the amazing progresses his art work reports
from its dubious relationship with the chef.

THE SOILED EYE

STORY-LINE
ACT I
Francis has a knack for drawing. His parents encourage his talent
since his early childhood while their home is kept like a little museum full
of classical pieces wich Francis copies tirelessly as he grows up.
At ten years old, Francis participates in group exhibitions, showing his
charcoals, and at age fifthteen he unveils his first solo exhibition, an
outstanding series of oil paintings.

Francis discovers the hyper-realistic artwork of the spanish master

painter Antonio Lpez Garcia, who sets his course as an artist for ever.

Before entering college, Francis is discovered and hired in exclusive

by the reknown art dealer, Kahnweiller. Despite his early success and
fortune, maintains an orderly life happily living with his fiance Bianca,
a young pianist with whom hes expecting a child.
Abruptly, Francis suffers a temporary, inexplicable blindness.

ACT II
Though the optimistic diagnosis, Francis disregards the
ophtalmologist recommendations about rest and sleep, shutting himself
away in the studio with his assistant Mauro to desperately find out how
to paint without using the sense the sight, totally swayed hes gonna get
blind.

Francis becomes an obsessive, disgusting and misanthropic person

and turns out Bianca from their home.

Although Francis and his assistant Mauro develop many interesting

approaches to blind painting, the process prove useless and threats
Francis sights health, ending with his collapse during a series of self
portraits from realism to abstraction (as Mondrian did), using the sight,
mirroring his own vision and identity destruction, just like happened in
the Artistic Avant-Gardes in the early 1900s, finally versioning the
legendary and nihilist Malevitchs Black on black.
Since blindness, Francis has recurring dreams of an island where he
dreams himself as a pre-historic cave-painter, who curiously depicts life
from memory and imagination, all the opposite Francis had done his
entire life.

ACT III
Amazingly, Francis awakes from the collapse revitilized in the
cheerful studio of his old friend Mike, a fellow painter who brings new
points of view to Francis with his luminous expressionism painting and
personality. His friend try to convince him to rest and forget his wacky
ideas about blind-painting. Life is before than art, Mike sentences.

Francis visits his old friend and professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts,
Christina, whose Art History lectures keep on mirroring Francis as a
symptom and symbol of sick contemporary art which has drifted into
unintelligible languages and codes, more and more commercial,
reproductible, narcissistic and meta-linguistic, further every day from
mankind, nature and sensousness. The Image had sadly become the
absolute truth in modern society.
Christina strongly encourages his students to arrive back to
painting, back to the physicality of the canvas, the body and the studio.

JOAQUIN or BLIND COOKING

Christina features Francis a famous chef friend of her, Joaquim, a

cynical and controversial genius, self-proclaimed 'feelings designer', an

excessive and theatrical character, who teaches him the curious art of
blind cooking but also introduces him to a world of excesses and
outrages that Francis will be unable to avoid, abducted by the
overflowing Joaquim personality, and also dazzled by the amazing
artistic progresses wich he reports from its dubious relationship with
the chef, based on the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, sharing ideas
from cooking to painting and viceversa.
Irretrievably came infidelities and infamies, follow a robbery,
culminating in a murder which Francis committ unavoidably pushed by
the chef:
-just as Caravaggio did, Francis. -Joaquim whips him up-. There is
much more to painting than hanging fabrics on the wall...
***
Wacked and convinced that he has achieved something for art
history, Francis gathers for a late-night meeting in his studio with all his
friends and relatives to show them his Blind Paintings and Exquisite
Corpses. No one can believe their eyes...:

Francis had not only turned to convulsive Figurative Expressionist

painting and plagiarized several famous painters styles including his
friend Mikes-, but also portrayed in his megalomaniac canvases all his
felonies along with Joaquim, with harmful realism, including the
unfortunate murder. They all get devastated
Pan had dismembermed Dionysius, the marquis de Sade had
perverted a bourgeois, lord Henry had poisoned Dorian
Gray... Joaquim has raped Francis mind and soul.

***
Unexpectedly, a TV program shows Francis latest work at a famous
international art exhibition. The academic realist painter had become a
convulsive Dadaist and neoexpressionist, a cross between Basquiat,
Tpies and Damien Hirst, said the reporter. Moreover he made some
of these works by incorporating many of the items stolen in the recent

robbery along with his brand new art-dealer and curator, Joaquim, the
chef.
Scandal, hoodwinking and surrealism reminding the Duchamps
Armory Show exhibition in New York in 1913, says the TV reporter.

Sold out. Apotheosis party with seedy celebration. In spite of his

newfound professional success, Francis soul is deeply sick, just like his
eyes, very close to blindness. Overdozed, Francis collapses in coma,
just like a damned rock star, in the middle of the street.
***

Francis lay unconscious at some hospital. Silence, whiteness,

sadness, despair

EPILOGUE - BACK TO PAINTING

A huge canvas in an apealing beach. We see Francis painting the
seascape with Bianca and their baby swimming in the shore with his
lifelong realist painting style. Its the beach of the island of his dreams,
Crete. Francis got back to painting, back to reality, to nature,
physicality and sensousness. Life is definitely before art. Francis wears
lenses, several gray hairs speckles his scalp and beard.

THE END

THE SOILED EYE

SCRIPT
(5 first pages)
Writer: Aram Bakker

INT/ LIVING ROOM/ DAY

A family is moving into a spacious empty house with bay
windows.
everybody's
pitching
in.
Boxes,
trolleys,
blankets, white sheets, a drawing table, rulers, roman
busts, dusty curtains. Ritzy wood flooring. Lots of boxes
and draped furniture. A two year-old child runs and
chirps through the corridors with a big brush and a paint
can in his hands. Its FRANCIS. He stands in front the
living-room TV and without hesitation starts painting the
screen white, with a Dal interview from the 60s
running.
DAL (archive)
Ive always said Im a very bad
painter because Im too intelligent
to be a good painter. To be a good
painter you have to be a bit
coarse.
Dal disappears behind the thick white grassy Titanlux
painture. MOMMY cannot climb down the ladder. Stucked,
shouts for her husband.
Hector,
CIS!!

MOMMY
please, the

TV!!!

FRN-

EXT/ PRAIRIE/ DAY

A sunny day. The camera glides slowly upper edge through
a wild, endless prairie gently swaying in the wind,
revealing between the weeds a camouflaged cave, the cave
of Altamira in Spain as it was discovered in the 19th
century. Footsteps, buckles, and boots sound in off.
SUBTITLE: ALTAMIRA, CANTABRIA, 1868
Also its a sensual, mature female voice of a PROFESSOR
over the images, lecturing in some university in the
present time. The soothing, smooth sound of the slide
projector. Murmurs, amazement. Clic-clac, clic-clac
PROFESSOR (v.o.)
Realism is that style as old as
mankind, which has barely changed

from Altamira to Antonio Lpez

Its true even children dont like
fantasy Snow White, Cinderella,
and all that jazz ()
Laughs, murmurs. The camera arrives at the mouth of the
cave and penetrates into the stony, damp shadows. FADE TO
BLACK. We hear a flame gas lamp flame jumping.
SUBTITLE, the title of the film: CRETE
INT/ UNIVERSITY HALL/ DAY
A large hall and two open classroom doors to the right,
the last stragglers entering, and in the rare a blind
couple coming with a black Labrador Retriever seeing-eye
dog between them. Outside its raining. Coats, umbrellas.
SUBTITLE: FACULTY OF FINE ARTS, MADRID, 2014
PROFESSOR (v.o.)
() they watch fantasy because we
force them to, but theyre not even
remotely interested at all, they
know its useless to the world we
live
in.
Better
put
them
TV
shopping or realities -laughs,
murmurs-.
The blind couple arrives at the door and enters, leaving
the dog shaking itself off the rain water pushing a
transparent umbrella to the ground with his tail, wich
mechanically wide open, panicking the dog. Freeze frame.
Cut.
EXT/
DAY

BEACH/

A
pre-Minoan
CHILD
operating
a
wooden
and
glass
apparatus, watching the seabed while he wades along the
shore in silence with the water up to his thighs. It is
very early in the morning, no ones around, only a
seagull which lands on a buried pre-doric column in the
shore.
INT/ KITCHEN/ DAY
FRANCIS has grown, he's now over four years old, with the
same intense, big black eyes. He is sat at the kitchen
table, loosely copying a photo of a green chameleon from
a
magazine.
An
exultant
drawing, brilliant, Picassian. MUMMY, an attractive blond
in her forties, enters the kitchen. She is well dressed,

with a nice coat, heels, and big green eyes.

woman.

A career

MUMMY
How's my little Francis? Come on,
give mummy a kiss.
MUMMY kisses her son's head while grabs a pear exiting
biting. She shouts across the house.
Im pulling up the car, hurry up
everyone!
DADDY approaches his son and kisses his forehead,
carrying floor plans and rulers of an architect or
engineer.
DADDY
But
Francis
what
you've
done
there,
little
animal?
Such
a
coarse(?). Look buddy
Daddy takes the pencil from Francis little hand and start
drawing triangles all over the chameleons snapshot.
Remember: triangles.
See?
Like
this, just like this. You can do it
a
much
better.
It
has to be
lifelike Lifelike!
Francis look up at his father, deeply concerned. AGNES
smiles. The car horns. Daddy leaves. His SISTER passes by
loaded with books.
SISTER
Good morning, squirt!
FRANCIS crumples up his chameleon and tosses it into the
trash, a failure. The wrinkled paper ball rolls along the
floor, stopping near another discarded drawing, also
crumpled. AGNES bends down to pick them both up. Unfolds.
The Original Sound Track starts some initiation melody,
something between prehistoric rithms and contemporary
piano.
INT/ LIVING ROOM/ NIGHT
Travelling-In. A warm and huge living room full of old,
original antiques and selected neoclassic art. FRANCIS
blows out four candles on a big birthday cake in front
his entire FAMILY. Applause, birthday songs, presents,
plenitude. The camera crosses the table and stops in

front of the drawing Agnes discovered, elegantly framed,

full of wrinkles, filling the screen. Awesome, realistic
picture of the chameleon drawn in blue pen, with no
corrections, alla prima.
INT/ VARIOUS LOCATIONS/ DAY/NIGHT
EDITION SEQUENCE
Overview of FRANCIS' fruitful childhood increasingly and
happily devoted to art.
FRANCIS CHILD (on/off)
Edmund Burke. On Beauty and the
Sublime. Ireland. 1757. Section I.
Imitation. ()
EXT/ PARK/ DAY
FRANCIS carefully observes the reactions of everyone in
that park while making gorgeous quick
sketches on a
notebook, even using a binoculars, noticing how the young
copies the eldery, mimetically. His hands as fast as his
eyes and capture with three lines everything. Poses,
gestures, reactions, tics
() Imitation is the second most
important passion belonging to the
society, after sympathy. Imitation
forms our customs, our opinions and
our lives. Here is why painting and
other pleasant arts have taken the
fundamentals of their power within
society.
FRANCIS' draws and measures famous Greek and Roman
statues and buildings, one after another, making constant
partitions, proportions and triangulations, mainly from
Phidias artwork. Francis read quotes from other books
his father puts in his hands.
(Winckelmann)
Beauty cannot be conceived without
the proportion which is its very
foundation.
FRANCIS' arm grows with age and the sweater gets
increasingly smaller on the contrary as seasons pass by
through the window.
Noble
Simplicity.
Greatness...
(Leonardo da Vinci)

Silent

'Painting is silent poetry heard

with sight, and poetry is blind
painting watched with ears.'
The painter fights with Nature and
struggles to imitate it, creating a
sort
of
Second
Nature in
his
canvases...
INT/ LIVING-ROOM/ DAY
Francis parents are carefully unwraping a canvas
recently
bought.
Silence
and
amazed
contemplation.
Francis couldnt believe his eyes, absolutely abduced by
its beaty goes towards touching the canvas,his parents
smiles.
Its
an
astonishing
Antonio
Lpez
Garca
painting, a portrait of a woman with a pair of huge deep
eyes. Francis takes his coarse as a painter. Hes gonna
be a realist.
FRANCIS CHILD
'Part
XXXIII.
About
eyes.
I
consider the eyes as a source of
beauty, and this is because they
are
directly
related
to
the
concepts
of
transparency
and
clarity. ()
INT/ ALTAMIRA CAVE/ DAY
FRANCIS visits the cave of Altamira with his school on a
fieldtrip. Completely amazed with the 30.000 year old
paintings, the child daydreams wondering how those
coarses would realized these masterpieces, upside down.
INT/ ALTAMIRA CAVE/ NIGHT
Four torches through the darkness towards the Camera in a
cavern. Four PREHISTORIC MEN pull a huge bison through
the clay soil and lean the beast against the wall,
putting sticks, trunks and stones under his belly and
legs to keep it standing. One wizened, old NEANDERTHAL
starts moaning a deep, continuous low C note. In other
corner of the cave, a little female HOMO-SAPIENS female
kid emits the same C note but in a higher octave.
Hipnotizing acoustics. The ARTIST drinks something from a
shell and starts drawing the animal on the roof in thin
charcoal. All present moan with irrational pleasure
looking in awe at the hand creating animals from the
stones, from nothing. A stream of air crosses the cavern
and blows out the torches. Darkness, frighten murmurs,
the ARTIST groans and curses for his fire.
() We like eyes for the same
reason that we like diamonds, clear

water, glass or other transparent

substances.

INT/ FRANCIS BATHROOM/ NIGHT

FRANCIS begins painting a self-portrait using one of the
reinforced mirrors. A light like Antonio Lpezs. Hes
finishing his eyes.
INT/
DAY

EVENTS

HALL/

FRANCIS first solo exhibition in an art gallery. A

beautiful triptych based on Ophelia. Relatives and
friends crowd the room around a preppy, good-looking boy.
Camera flashes. Hundreds of hands applaud him; hundreds
of eyes smile at him. Plenitude. Agnes, his sister and
parents are so proud.
() What color of eyes is most
beautiful depends greatly on the
imagination of each and every one
of us
False note in the Original Sound Track. The lights of the
room go out, just like in the cave of Altamira.
INT/ COUNTRY KITCHEN/ DAY
FRANCIS' in the same spot of the screen but seventeen
years later, in the middle of a huge old country kitchen,
in his underpants, sporting stubble, scruffy, tacky. He
wears black sunglasses and between his damaged and
stripped hands, a white blind can. Theres no furniture,
just fishbowls all over the floor and a small canvas hung
on
the
wall,
a
beautiful
and
strange
piece
by
th
Arcimboldo, a surrealist from the 16 century depicting a
cook composed of
assorted vegetables. Franciss adult
voice finish the quote with a sick voice.
FRANCIS ADULT (v.o.)
but in general no one likes an
eye whose water is -so to speak-
muddy or impure.
By the window we see the entrance full of movers and
moving trucks. The cement mixer gives the ambience a
certain industrial taste. Slight signs of decadence here
and there, like a magpie landing on a pre-Doric column
broken and half buried, identical to the one we saw in
the shore of the beach. A gust of wind blows across the
place and the screen, from one end to the other, and
disappears as it came. The car leaves. Francis can hear

the car leaving from the kitchen, and cuts himself trying
to slicing a tomato, blindly. Two porcelain plates crash
against the wall. A kitten appears in the rear walking
with a sock over its head, unable to get rid of it,
desperately
backwards,
straight
to
the
shards
of
porcelain.
FRANCIS ADULT (v.o)
Darkness
can
be
terrible
and
Sublime in an association common to
man, since in complete darkness is
impossible to know if we are safe,
we ignore the objects surrounding
us, we would found a dangerous
item, we could stamble the first
step we take, and if an enemy
approaches, we wont know how to
defend ourselves.

(CONT.)

THE SOILED EYE

LETTER OF INTENT
Only the image is real
THE SOILED EYE is a fantasy about art, an allegory of the ambiguous
contemporary sense of Realism so in life as in art. Is the story of an academic
realist painter who becomes an iconoclast neo-dadaist. A man changing his mind.
A husband and father who voluntarily abandons happiness in the name of art and
modernity. An artist changing his style.
THE SOILED EYE touches upon the history of figurative painting till the
th
interruption of the Avant-Garde movements in early 20 century, striking
against the tyranny of sense of sight and all the burgeois visual representation
codes. Dadaism, cubism, surrealism and expresionism soiled the occidental eye
with their visionary and artificial fantasies.
As Picasso once said to Braque, (while they were developing up early cubism at
LEstaque in France): We are going to fill their eyes with petroleum and tow.

Object to be destructed (Man Ray), The blind swimmer (Max Ernst), You
stink (Duchamp) or the sword cutting the eye in Luis Buuels An andalutian dog,
were some of the titles and metaphors which this avant-gardes used to express
how depth was their compromise against burgeois ocularcentrism. To them, the
eye was a mere object, a mechanical artifact easy to flatter and a dangerous source
of social influence and ideological manipulation.
In that sense, THE SOILED EYE wants to revisit all that passionate
years of the avant-gardes, traslating their still-living doubts and achievements
into the present time through a fictional character, Francis, a paragodical blind
hyper-realist painter, synthom of our Image Era and sickness of the hyper-visual
art.
Death, sex, beauty, happiness, spirituality... every trascendent feeling in
modern human life already has its predetermined form on a screen or flat surface...
all reproducible up to the infinite, as Walter Benjamin noted. Today, only the
image is Real. The body and the physicality had become the Fantasy.
We are all mere followers in this unnatural and conceptual behaviour of life
imitating art. THE SOILED EYE talks about going back to painting, to
figurative painting as the symbolic, refreshing and natural act of art imitating
life.

Aram Bakker