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The Via Crucis
of Camille - Crux 2 - Page 3
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Camille reacted to the new lash, letting
the pain become part of her, rising over it
and this is what I admired of her, her capacity
to rise over the situation, to keep herself
in character, to show her defiance, a defiance
that was part the character, part of herself.
In the story we were working on, the character
was a young woman in an act of rebellion against
her father. The moment Camille and I were
living, was somewhat similar. Camille came
into my life as a lover, but given our age
difference, she probably saw me as a father
figure as well. I was her protector, I brought
the food to the table, I made sure she kept
her studies going and going well.
At the same time I was her boss, I was her
director in a movie, I introduced her to this
world, to the world of film and to my more
private world of sadomasochism. I was, in
that sense, her master.
In this performance Camille showed her defiance
as the character in my film should..
Camille's eyes were so expressive in the
moment of her lashing. I was always in awe
of her natural performance. The longer the
whip fell on her back, the stronger she seemed
to get, even if at one moment she had to faint.
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Not long ago Lyvia
the slave had found herself thinking that she
wanted to escape. It was the awful day when
she had been tied to a post, stripped naked
and whipped mercilessly. Her punishment came
about when her master suspected her of being
disloyal, it was something she had said to someone
who then told it to someone else.
Lyvia was suffering
because of a tale that had passed from mouth
to mouth, evolving as it went from version to
version until it was totally desfigured. Not
even a shade of what was originally said.
It was that day,
when the whip was falling on her back and her
feet were trying to find some rest on the ground
below, that she decided to run away.
It shouldn't be hard,
she thought, she had often seen opportunities
in which she could've escaped but she never
acted on them, she didn't even considered them
until this moment. It looked easy, especially
for a house slave like her who had the freedom
to walk about the place and to go in and out.
She was aware, as
everyone around her was, that escaping could
bring consequences, awful consequences if caught.
She had seen how one man lost a foot because
he attempted escape, that was his punishment,
after 100 lashes. And yet, after her flogging,
Lyvia, the young slave, made up her mind.
As she rested on
her bed, healing her wounds, crying her pain,
she decided she was going to escape and if caught
she would kill herself...before or after her
foot was cut off."
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I didn't measure the strength of the lash.
At the beginning I had, I was careful not
to scare her, to turn her off. But now, after
all this time, after all the sessions we did,
I was no longer that careful.
Just as she let herself become the character,
I too became a character, that of the man
holding the whip, the chastiser, the punisher,
the executioner.
But in the story we were working on, the
chastiser was a servant, a slave, a black
man whose task in life was to punish black
slaves, a low creature that went by the name
of Azotes. And that slave, that punisher of
slaves, was going to whip the white woman,
daughter of the owner of the plantation, owner
of the slaves.
I told that to Camille, to think of me as
that man, Azotes. Camille showed her defiance
and her control over my character, she was
my owner, I was under her direct comand.
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There
was a time, way back, when I had some fantasies.
I imagined myself meeting some extraordinary
women, women willing to engage in these 'games',
willing to take these roles, Needless to say,
I never thought it would be possible. I was
living the life of a normal young man, struggling
to survive while going to school to learn a
trade, the trade of filmmaking.
Even if then I engaged in games with some of
my girlfriends, I never thought of making movies
with them, movies where I would be whipping,
torturing, crucifiying them. Only in my fantasies.
Only when I traveled into the unreal worlds
I created in my mind, I allowed myself to know
these extraordinary women.
That old fantasy was turning into a reality,
a reality far better than the fantasies I had.
A reality of whip striking flesh, a reality
of love making after a good whipping. A reality
with a name and a face. Camille's.
It was during those days when I rode the horse
of my fantasies into exotic worlds of exotic
women in exotic forms of torture, that I came
up with some stories that I thought I would
never dare to make them into a film.
One of them in particular, the one closer to
my heart at this time. The Passion of Maricelli.
Set in Cuba, where I lived for two and a half
years working on a film about voodoo and dictatorships,
about the manipulation of the beliefs of people
to enslave them, that I came across some tales,
stories, anecdotes of the caribbean island where
Castro was a demi god and Che a kind of communist
Jesus, the saviour of the poor and downtrodden.
But the story that came from those days was
not about the Cuba of the revolution, but about
the colonial past, when the island was populated
by rich landowners from Spain and slaves brought
from Africa to work on their plantations, mostly
sugar plantations.
The character that I fell in love with, as
I wrote the script, was Maricelli.
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