NEWS May 20th 2005 The film is finished!!  Copies are available by contact us via email. Thanks to everyone involved in its production.  I look forward to the next project, which is upcoming in June.  Details TBA! I have this night digg'd up a mandrake                and am grown mad with it.. --Benjamin Capps

PRODUCTION INFORMATION

For many years, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1612) has been my favorite theatrical work.  I discovered the play by accident, due to my childhood interest in werewolf lore and lycanthropy, in a book titled The Werewolf Delusion, by Ian Woodward.  A section of the book regarding lycanthropy in literature featured a photo from a 70’s London production of The Duchess of Malfi depicting Duke Ferdinand strangling The Duchess.  I immediately sought the play out and was immediately drawn in by Webser’s uncompromising autopsy of the darkest side of vengeance, imprisonment and murder.  The mentally ill and incestuous Duke Ferdinand became the character that I had always sought to portray and I vowed one day to produce The Duchess of Malfi as a feature film. On January 15th, 2005 we are shooting a 16mm version of a selection of Act III, scene ii in The International Museum of Surgical Science’s “Hall of Immortal’s” statuary.  The purpose of this film is to submit in conjunction with a proposal to obtain the funds needed to produce The Duchess of Malfi as a 35mm feature. The play has had countless stage incarnations over several centuries, as well as an audio performance on Caedmon records in 1966 and as a 1972 feature.

The 1966 Caedmon 3 LP set

Stylistically we are working from several metaphors in a hyperrealist and surreal context: imprisonment, hidden wantonness, sexual obsession, cannibalism and murderous fury. These factors are encompassed in an appropriate quotation from Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double, which illustrates the spine of the play: “Like hidden rage, the deadliest plague does not show its symptoms.”  The style will also reflect a modified period with period dress and settings which are an embodiment of the subtextual intentions of the characters within. Malfi is a prison.  Malfi is suffering sans gain --sans redemption.  We are all in its court. We are all its hapless courtiers, flowing from the head of a poisoned fountain.

The "Hall of Immortals" at the IMSS

Rehearsal photo by Nicole Burchfield

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