The document describes a film project called "Strippers" that will tell the fictionalized life stories of four forgotten female strippers from the 1920s-1960s in four European countries (France, Italy, Germany, Sweden). Each episode will be based on archival footage of actual striptease performances from the given country and era and will explore the changing social roles and conditions of women over the past century. The filmmakers aim to blend fiction and documentary styles to creatively reframe historical footage and explore possible narratives of the real women behind the images.

1. subject: Marco Zaccaria
authors, editors, directors: Marco Zaccaria, Anna Bianco
producer: Roberta Chimera
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2. INT. NIGHT CLUB STAGE - NIGHT
A young woman starts her strip-tease show
VOICE OVER
Who are you?
You stayed young on an old film
and you offer yourself to my eyes still seducing me.
You come closer and watch me from the past.
Who were you? Who did you become?
Ginette - France Ada - Italy Astrid - Germany Inger - Sweden
Strippers is a film which tells the stories of four unknown and forgotten strip teasers of the past.
What they have in common is having been filmed during their strip tease shows.
These short films are the only things we have of them; we can just guess their age, deduce in which
years they lived, but who were they?
Seduced by their dances we started to imagine their lives.
Four countries, four strippers, four stories, four lives.
Strippers is a film in episodes made exclusively with archive footage of the past.
Each episode tells about a fictional life-story of a strip teaser. The personal stories of the
protagonists are based on original screenplays which take shape basing on available archive
materials. Each biography brings us into contact with important moments of History of Europe from
the 1920’s to the 1960’s, dealing with facts through fiction. Through this narrative choice we travel
through the evolution of the female condition, erotic imagery and the social transformations of the
last century.
The aim is to make a film which has the appeal given by fiction with the language of historical
documentaries.
Accordingly with the footage that we will find, we would like to set the stories of the strip teasers in
different European countries, to have a glance into different erotic imageries from Italy (emblematic
in its relationship with eroticism for the strong presence of the catholic church), passing through
France (where the strip tease was born), Germany (seen trough the eyes of an East German young
woman who escapes in West Germany) to Sweden. Since footage is more interesting and valuable in
its original language, we'd like to mantain the language of each country as well in the voice over's
narration, and subtitle every episode in English.
Producing the pilot story of the film (attached to the application) was a test on how the film could be
developed respecting its particular nature. As the fictional life-stories refer on archival material only,
the authors worked in primis on a short treatment. Then the script took shape following the material
found during their researches. Digital graphic effects has been also used to give a coherent visual
support to the materials.
This pilot story is set in the United States, because it was possible to use archival material of public
domain.
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3. In Strippers each story develops over the length of a strip-tease and its alluring pace
accompanies us to the end. This is the element which brings us closest to the style and the image
which each stripper holds in erotic imagery. The stripteases from different historical periods allow
us to see how this image has transformed. What was taboo, and how did it play to desire and
change the erotic; how did the weapons of seduction change; what were the outfits, the
accessories the allusions and the points of reference which tempted the desire of the time, and
what do they tell us today?
Each story is part of a mosaic, which builds up to show the image of women over forty years of
history.
MATERIAL
The stories are based on plausible, appropriate and coherent documents and material.
Working on the pilot story we developed a good ability in research on Creative Commons Archives
where we found all we needed to write and make the episode and where a lot of material
concerning Europe is stored. We also researched Istituto Luce (Italy) and Gaumont-Pathé (France)
and there’s plenty of footage useful for our aim.
Home movies, historical films, clips, cartoons, songs, radio programs, adverts, photographs,
postcards, newspapers, posters are necessary to build the stories by images. Among these,
newsreel footage from the period shows us the great moments in history which happened during
the life of the characters.
In contrast to the STRIP-TEASE, educational footage tells us about good habit patterns good
women had to observe according to the society of their years. These materials allow us to focus the
attention on how the figure of the woman has changed over the decades, and how, in consequence,
relationships between the sexes have changed.
What was the route of female emancipation, and how did moral codes influence the evolution of the
condition of women?
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4. Alongside to the development of the project a transmedia storytelling architecture has been built.
We have already activated some digital platforms on the web to increase interest and to build a
community around the project by publishing a variety of different digital contents like trailers,
extracts of the pilot episode, photos, reports on the working process of the project, etc.
Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvH6feMpKuQ
First 5’ of the pilot story on YouTube (34,251 views on 15.11.2011)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnMMzyWIvtA
Facebook page: friendly approach to eroticism in the past with magazines covers, microtrailers,
photos...
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Strippers-Stories/173768362665486
FLICKR: photo-sets giving highlights on the characters and events of the episodes
http://www.flickr.com/photos/strippersstories
YOUTUBE channel: outtakes of the episodes/uncut original footage/making of
http://www.youtube.com/user/StrippersStories
VIMEO: videoclips, interviews with the authors and producer
http://vimeo.com/2857971
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5. AUTHORS’ STATEMENT
We find really challenging to examine, subvert and deconstruct factual discourse and its relationship with
documentary codes and conventions. The mean we want to use to achieve this goal is the mixing of both
documentary and fiction languages, bridging them assuming that “the art of storytelling is the art of
spinning a convincing lie” (Costa Botes, Co-writer and co-director with Peter Jackson of Forgotten Silver - Evening
Post, 16 November 1995).
Our aim is to reframe, rethink the form of the documentary in order to give different ways of voicing.
We want to use fiction as a strategy that enables a coherent ordering of elements to shape a discourse.
Through this creative use of old footage, the archive material looses its original value of giving proof of
evidence and starts to get a different kind of value with a different kind of language. It’s a sort of
ri-positioning of the archives in which their sense is given by the use. Documentary footage moves from
information to experience.
Fiction meets documentary as a possibility of a memory never seen before; not to lie to the spectator, but
to tell possible stories of a real past.
Marco Zaccaria
Anna Bianco
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