Bolzano 1944-45 Andy Besuch - Wardrobe Designer for BolzanoGold Photo /Copiright Frank Schenke /

"This is a map made by an exiled pianist, as a directive to the members of his band. He could not foresee that his musical and topographical instruction should be used backwards. As a cartographer, he was not appreciated in his own country." - A Walk Through H

 P E T E R G R E E N A W A Y M A S T E R C L A S S

 

 

Luper believes that the gold has been stolen from the victims of the Third Reich, smelted down from their gold possessions. He provides a story and a case history for each bar, all the time tracing Harpsch’s car ride - creating his exact journey from maps discovered in the Bolzano restaurant.The cafe owner is a renegade and a malcontent fomenting Fascist trouble, trying illicitly to offload the gold for his own profit. Luper as he writes a story for each gold bar moves it from one pile to another on the floor of his attic prison. One of the cafe customers is Primo Levi returning from his concentration camp ordeal. He had met him before in Turin and they discuss the significances of the atomic table - most pertinently with theelement 92 of uranium. With the miller betrayed over an infidelity escapade involving his wife and his daughter, and US military police about to recover the gold and with the 92 stories finished, Luper, to his very great surprise - for his reconstruction of Harpsch and his life and journey is entirely fictitious - discovers Harpsch’s daughter Fidelia in the cafe - happy and healthy and well-looked after by a devoted Italian childless couple. With both her parents dead, Luper reveals nothing of her background, fact or fiction, and presents her with her father’s mended watch as a gift. With his business in prophetic fiction completed, Luper makes his escape on his whitehorse back into the pine forests and into the mountains.

 

A Jewish Wedding In Jaffa, 1899   Jewish Family "This is my family which I never knew. Standing from right to left youcan see my father David Nachimzon, the only survivor,his brother Izioand his sister Lila.Sitting My grand father Wolf and his mother PaulinaNachimzon (Wolfson). sister of the known Prof.Julius Wolfson,directorand composer of the philharmonic orchestra of Vienna.This is only a small part of a great family,which the nazi totalyextinguished during the second world war.My great-grand motherwas over 90 years old when taken to the gas chambers of Treblinka,mygrand father was "lucky" to die in the getto of Wloszczowa duringthe war.My uncle was killed in Warsaw a few weeks beforethe war ended, fighting with the polish resistence.My aunt was taken to Treblinka with her mother and the rest of the family.After the war, my father returning from Russia to Poland,did not find any member of his family alive,and left to Israel to start a new life."

 

 

LupersResume

There are three layers to the project, like transparent skins of an onion, lying one on top of the other, each one showing through the other.1. Luper’s story.The background and incidents and events of Luper’s imprisonment in the Bolzano cafe for eleven weeks, from May to August 1945, where he writes the Gold Bar stories, and invents a fictitious life for Harpsch. The day by day events of this Luper imprisonment can be related to an exact calendar of dates, days, weather reports -and maybe a day-by-day textual and visual account of the events of the post-war world.2. Harpsch’s story
The story of Harpsch’s life, invented by Luper, most pertinently an account of Harpsch’s robbery of thegoldbars and subsequent journey to Bolzano.

3. The 92 Gold Stories.
The 92 stories (plus 9 others) that tell of gold appropriated by supporters of European Fascism from the ThirdReich’s victims, mainly jews.

“SETS”There are many “sets” or ambience/location backgrounds to the narrative, related, again as above, to the three layers of plotting. And these can be manufactured by multiple still images manipulated in verysophisticated ways by Photo-shop techniques, often simulating movement.
Onto these we will insert pieces of moving film activity, either to be shot or from the copious materialalready filmed for the Tulse Luper films.

 

B O L Z A N O G O L D

1. The Last Apple.
On the crowded cafe-terrace a young man with good teeth noisily eats an apple. He is accompanied by his girlfriend who eats bean soup (Luper brings the soup to their table) and they are joined by an aggressive-looking young man who orders coffee in English from Luper - an action that turns heads.
AMBIENCE: 1940s dentist surgery.

4. Butter Crucifix Gold
A group of six small children, wearing crucifixes, drink soda water with straws out of bottles at a cafe table in the sunshine.
AMBIENCE: 1940s orphanage

5. The Scheherazade Commandant.
Luper serves two deaf mutes wearing Austrian army uniforms. Their fingers are heavily ringed. One deaf-mute has a party-trick for the children in story 4 - spinning three coins at once on the back of a plate.
AMBIENCE: 1940s concentration camp

6. Coat of Yellow Stars.
Every day a writer - a regular - dressed suspiciously like a writer - floppy black hat, white beard, theatrical coat, bi-focal spectacles, writes at a corner table with a leaky fountain-pen on buff paper. He is untidy and the manuscript papers repeatedly fall to the floor, become ring-stained with coffee cups or spilt upon with white wine. He flirts with the cafe female clientele who, cynically, when they humour him, know that they will be bought drinks. There is one young woman who makes a genuine fuss of him - his regular and regularly deceived, mistress. Tulse takes an interest in what the writer is writing.
AMBIENCE: 1940s Berlin theatre and back-stage

7. The Biscuit Tin.
A plump moustached elderly German officer entertains three Italian sisters who nibble biscuits and drink tea nervously. A rabbit seller - with rabbits caged in a wicker basket on his bike - stops outside the cafe for an espresso - he leans his bike close to the sister’s table.
AMBIENCE: 1940s zoo

10. Peter the Great.
Luper in the kitchen at night - bends over a dirty sink trying to scrub burnt spaghetti off a large pan. Above the sink someone has pinned postcards sent from abroad - amongst them, side by side, grimy with steam and splashed greased, is a postcard of the Kremlin and a postcard of Dutch windmills.
AMBIENCE: 1940s soviet Russia/Peter the Great’s Dutch collection of curios.

11. Colosseum Jews.
On a Friday night, Luper lights the terrace cafe-table candles and looks at the sky to count the three stars that are necessary to start a Jewish ceremony. He stands by a table where a man is obscured by his newspaper showing a photograph of the Colosseum in Rome.
AMBIENCE: history of the Colosseum - ancient and modern

12. The Violin Suitcase.
Regularly, a middle-aged violinist plays on the street corner for the terrace clientele. He has three children with him, who sit patiently on the pavement whilst he plays. Luper throws an occasional tip into his open violin-case.
AMBIENCE: 1940s street musicians

13. The Sausageman.
A night in the kitchen - Luper contemplates the fat-filled greasy saucepans kept almost permanently on the back rings of the gas-cooker.
AMBIENCE: 1940s proletariat kitchens

14. The Goosegirl.
A pale young woman without shoes walks past the cafe every lunch-time.
AMBIENCE: 1940s riverside landscape

15. Danae.
A smart young woman with an extravagant fashionable coiffeur and a large gold crucifix around her neck, takes a coffee every day at the same table, sometimes accompanied by her Lothario boyfriend.
AMBIENCE: 1940s smart city life

16. Love of Dentistry.
Fidelia, the cafe waitress, like a dreamy automaton, serves drinks and coffee to seven professional-looking men in suits. Fidelia alerts Luper to the fact that they are dentists. Luper tries to catch a glimpse of their teeth. Some indeed have very artificial looking teeth, but in two cases the teeth are grey and ill-placed. The dentist will meet regularly at 4 o’clock every afternoon. Occasionally Fidelia’s husband, the dentist’s general assistant, joins them, to bully and show off in front of Fidelia.
AMBIENCE: 1940s dentist surgery (same as story 1).

21. The Golden Weathercock.
Five boisterous, German, blond-headed, young, optimistic soldiers noisily drink beer.
AMBIENCE: 1940s church tower at night

22. Twelve Days to Christmas.
A quiet, impoverished elderly couple sit timidly in the shade at a side table drinking tea. They nervously watch the German soldiers of Story 21.
AMBIENCE: 1940s lower working class kitchen etc

28. The Ring Cycle.
Luper brings assorted ice-creams to a table full of elderly ladies who all wear large wedding-rings.
AMBIENCE: 1940s trains

30. Gloved in the Bath
A faded woman wearing too many clothes sits alone at a table and drinks Martinis. She lines the olives up on the table-cloth to make a necklace.
AMBIENCE: 1940s tenement bathroom
31. The Dolls-House Booty.
A young girl plays with a doll in a wheelbarrow of fish.
AMBIENCE: 1940s children’s dolls-house

32. The Cigar-Box.
A pair of chess players regularly occupy the same table in the hot afternoons and smoke cigars taken from a Dutch wooden cigar-box. They sometimes ask Luper for a light and he obliges. They blow out clouds of blue cigar smoke.
AMBIENCE: 1940s dentist surgery

37. The Three Bears.
A neatly dressed child sitting with her neat parents, clutches a yellow teddy-bear.
AMBIENCE: 1940s Berlin toy shop windows

38. The Spectacles.
Luper idly counts all the people in the cafe who wear spectacles.
AMBIENCE: 1940s opticians shop

40. Grosz Enthusiasm.
A young German misanthrope student sits at a table criticising the clientele of the cafe, talking to the amused Luper who holds a tray. The young man’s viewpoint is taken up by the camera that picks out satirical details of the customers - a man grossly picking his teeth, a woman sneezing green catarrh into a handkerchief, a man scratching his crutch, a woman changing a baby’s diaper, the writer fumbling a woman’s backside - items that George Grosz would have satirised.
AMBIENCE: 1940s Grosz drawings

41. The Toothbrush
In the early morning, Luper brushes his teeth in the small and dingy restaurant toilet - looking at himself in the speckled mirror. Through the toilet window into the square he can see pigeons wheeling.
AMBIENCE: 1940s German urban town square

43. The Rabbi Conspiracy
Two greedy middle-aged men are in earnest noisy conversation - Luper brings then pastrami sandwiches.
AMBIENCE: 1940s bookshop

59 Goebbels’s diary
A fine looking woman smokes at a terrace cafe. She is watched by two grey-suited officials - one of whom leaps up to light her cigarette, seeking an opportunity to speak to her.
AMBIENCE: 1940s a german-text diary and small hotel bedroom and 1940s hollywood-style photographs of females with flickering cinema projector.

60. Golden gardeners
An elderly couple whisper together over a pot of tea.
AMBIENCE: 1940s zoo acquaria.

62. Frank’s Friends
Three soldiers in Italian uniforms accompanied by an exhausted and distraught child, bring a fourth soldier into the cafe, on a stretcher from the river. The fourth soldier looks drowned and the soldiers try to revive him with cognac and brandy brought by Luper. The soldier does not survive and they cover him with table-cloths. The exhausted child falls asleep lying across the corpse.
AMBIENCE: 1940s ?
brightly polished men’s shoes.

69. The Golden Bullet
An Italian fascist ostentatiously cleans the deconstructed parts of his army pistol at a cafe table inside the restaurant. The proprietor’s wife screams at him and the proprietor comes and firmly collects all the pieces by lifting the table-cloth, pushing and shoving the man out the back of the restaurant and hurling the table-cloth of items into the street to set dogs barking.
AMBIENCE: 1940s military barracks.

75. Tram Decision
A hungry-looking young man in a long black coat too large for him, sits huddled over an empty espresso coffee cup at a table at the edge of the cafe terrace.
AMBIENCE: 1940s trams, tram-sheds.

77. The Golden Film.
A myopic projectionist eats his cheese sandwich between reel changes at the local cinema. He always - very rapidly - tells Luper the story of the film now showing.
AMBIENCE: 1940s cinemas, and cinema projection-rooms

79. Train Gold.
In a tip received from two travellers whose language Luper cannot identify, there are two badly squashed coins - evidence perhaps of being laid on a train rail.
AMBIENCE: 1940s railways.

91. The Sempstress.
For want of a premises, a handsome woman sews and darns and mends at a corner table in the afternoons.
AMBIENCE: 1940s gypsies and sempstresses.

92. Harpsch’s Story
Fidelia tells her story of her parents separated because her father was a Nazi and her mother a Jewess and she was sent to a Swiss orphanage for adoption. She talks about her mother who was a cook of considerable reputation. Luper suggests she too could be a cook and laughingly suggests she should learn to cook good spaghetti.
AMBIENCE: 1940s swiss sanatoria and kindergarten

95.Barbarossa
A fisherman, sheltering from a mountain storm, wearing an angler’s many-pocketed canvas waistcoat and jacket and hat, empties his pockets on the cafe table - hooks, weights, bait, lines, reels, fish etc.
AMBIENCE: 1940s historical mediaeval cinema film and refugees.

99. Ventimiglia.
Two suitcases, roped together, are left at a corner table. The proprieter’s wife thinks they constitute a bomb. Luper takes the suitcases and they are unlocked and the contents - men and women’s clothes - are unpacked.
AMBIENCE: 1940s big city railway stations

100.Black gold
A man and a woman, both apparent Italian ex-fascists, sit at a table and ostentatiously order an expensive meal. Both of them are wearing excess amounts of jewellery.
AMBIENCE: 1940s busy restaurant

TM & COPYRIGHT 2004 BY ISTVAN HORKAY +INTUITPICTURES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.