THE NAUGHTY ARTS

MOTION PICTURE
Script
(5 first pages)

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
2

in her forties, enters the kitchen. She is well dressed,

with a nice coat, heels, and big green eyes.
A career
woman.
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,
3

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)
4

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
6

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.