« San Clemente » is a project developped by Pierre Jodlowski en 2019.
It tells the story of the only building on the Venetian island of San Clemente. The building is working as a luxury hotel nowadays, but the history of it being a psychiatric hospital for a century is hidden behind closed doors. The composer strongly believes it’s wrong to ignore the past and tackles the importance of collective memory in our society in this piece. It includes a mix of different media to fully unveil the whole story.
What is the story behind the piece?
The idea started when I was reading a newspaper on a plane and there was a small article about the former psychiatric hospital of San Clemente’s Island in Venice being turned into a 5 star luxury hotel. There is a French documentary by Raymond Depardon about this specific psychiatric hospital that was made in the 1980s and watching it left a very strong impression on me for years, even decades. Sitting in the plane and reading the article made me realise that I had to do something about it, because I strongly believed that it would be wrong to do not tell about the psychiatric facility which was there for a century before the hotel had been opened.
After landind, I felt some kind of anger, but I didn’t know how to develop this idea further. I began with doing some research, such as checking the website of the hotel to really see if there was anything said about the history of the building and, of course, there was nothing mentioned about it being a mental institution beforehand. I hated the false advertising of it, because it was disrespectful to the people that suffered from the medical experiments which had been done on them. It took about 3 years after I had read the article when I really started to create this piece and define how I wanted the storyline to progress.
What was the context when you started to work ?
I could see the whole situation as very problematic and complex, so I thought about different ways to showcase my point of view on this issue and I realised that a kind of documentary would be the most appropriate form of expression. The documentary by Raymond Depardon I mentioned previously was a huge inspiration while I created this piece. I’m not directly a filmmaker, so I started to gather information and I defined each aspect of the composition - the instruments, the setup, the reasoning behind each detail, etc. I chose only female performers, because there was a link with the subject as the hospital was mainly for women. For this project I wanted to create a special team with performers whom I worked already before and whom I trusted fully. I choose 3 instruments (keyboard, clarinet and accordion), as well as a singer because I knew that there would be texts in the project.
During the process I asked myself a question: “How can I tell the audience what’s happening there now without just saying it?” At that point I realised that I had 4 characters to tell the story on the stage, but I also wanted to work with a dancer who would tell this story on a screen, just by movements. I asked a dancer to watch the documentary by Raymond Depardon and to observe the behaviours of people in mental institutions. They have very special gestures and attitude and that was the main aspect of what I wanted to show in the video. I proposed that the dancer could get inspired and learn some parts of what she had seen there, because I believed that it would be a visually strong and integral part of the composition.
How long did the process of composing take?
I started working on the piece in the summer and then the premiere happened in May of the next year, so it took about 10 months. The first step of the process was working with the dancer, so she came to the studio and we spent like 3 days watching the film to isolate the specific moments we wanted to include in the piece. Then I started to plan ahead and realised the next logical move would be to travel to the hotel and re-enact some of the scenes we saw in the movie. It was quite a tricky process, because I didn’t ask for authorization from the hotel and wanted to film everything incognito. We had rented a room for only one night (as it is extremely expensive), therefore the whole thing had to happen very quickly.
One important thing that I have to mention is that the only way of getting to the island is by renting a room, because it’s a private island inhabited only by the hotel. It’s very close to the centre of Venice and there is a private vaporetto taking the visitors to the place. Me and Annabelle, the dancer, had decided on inventing a character, so we introduced ourselves to the lobby with Annabelle as the star and I was her assistant - this hotel is only accessible for very rich people! When we entered the hotel we realised it was almost empty, because we had travelled there in November which was the end of the hotel season. We proceeded to shoot everywhere: the lobby, corridors, etc. Even if we encountered someone we didn’t really care and they weren’t saying anything to us either, so we just continued the process however we wanted. It took us all night and we finished at 6 in the morning; then we went to sleep for a couple of hours and we got back to Venice.
How did you combine different kinds of media and aspects into one piece?
Well, there are many different aspects to this composition - the documentary part, the video part, the dancing part and live musicians as well. In Venice, I didn’t just shoot everything in the hotel, I actually stayed there for 2 weeks to get different shots to include in the visuals. For the first part of the composition I filmed scenes of the laguna where you could see the island of San Clemente from afar.
There was another compelling part of the project that is published on my website which essentially could be called an introduction of this composition. It is a documentary that is about 10 minutes long. I walked the streets of Venice and I asked its residents if they knew anything about the island of San Clemente, the history of it and what’s happening there nowadays. It’s quite an interesting insight, in my opinion, because the residents themselves didn’t exactly know what had happened there, especially the younger generations. For me it raised the question about memory and the importance of collective memory in our society as well. If I needed to describe the process of collapse or corruption, for instance, I would most certainly include the topic about memory as well because we have communication tools to create content and it’s been used to make huge amounts of it, but with the overflow of information that we have nowadays these tools can make us forget important parts and events in history, because you need to dig a lot further to access it and most people aren’t up it.
The documentary played a key role in showcasing the real history of the island. Younger interviewees just sort of guessed that there might’ve been a monastery at some point and the same information was stated on the hotel’s website too. Surely, that part is true, because there used to be a monastery during the 17th century, but it fails to include the fact that it used to be a psychiatric facility for an extended period of time. Coming back from Venice with all the recordings I had made there, I started to create the dramaturgy and the progression, including all the different shots I had filmed. Everything begins with the arrival in Venice, then it progresses to the interviews, later on the shots with the island and slowly getting lost in the streets of Venice and after that the dance parts, in the hotel itself. Music was the latest addition to the composition.
What is the meaning or the message of this composition?
It’s about the vanishing of memories to put it in short terms. To add to that, it’s about stabilising our memory in this one specific context if we don’t know anything about it beforehand. For example, if I send you a picture to the Statue of Liberty in New York, the image would have no meaning if you didn’t recognise the monument. There are many complex situations and topics in history, so the creation of memory makes me feel safe, knowing that important events that have led to the world we live in at this moment will not be forgotten.
What was the experience or feeling that you wanted to transmit to the audience?
The main experience or feeling I had in mind was the general paradox of this situation and i wanted to kind of shock the audience by showing it. It was about the juxtaposition of the 5 star hotel which is shown as a paradise. If you search San Clemente Palace Hotel on Internet, you will see wedding halls, celebrities and trails of champagne while people are entering it dressed in fancy suits and gowns. And then I inserted clips of the experiments that were done on the mentally ill, for instance, the use of electroshock and other things that were widely used in psychiatry at that time. We definitely know that these brutal techniques weren’t the right treatment, so I created this strategy on how to combine the suffering that people went through for a century with the entertainment and relaxation aspects that are offered in this hotel nowadays. It’s an ugly contradiction, so the tension builds up from the very beginning of the composition.
Do you think music has to be a multimedia experience?
I do, most certainly. If every aspect of the piece is extracted to just one, for example, the scenography, you can really see that it is an integral part of the vision. I was working with a scenographer to really make sure that the connection between the screen and the performers felt right and both aspects would complement each other. Different media gives an entire context to the piece, so the audience could fully understand and delve into the meaning of the composition.
How did you create a structure for the piece?
The most important aspect of the piece was the way I defined the structure of it. In order to get to San Clemente I had to plan the progression of a piece, so I could make the entire vision up until the point of taking a boat to the island. I think the music unveils itself in a very logical way, because there are distinct parts and events in the piece. The first part is called “Laguna Sud” (South Lagoon) and it’s combined with very peaceful and meditative sounds. Then with the next part you see a progression which is inspired by Acqua alta in Venice when the tides rise exceptionally and floods the entire city. It happens once a year and it usually doesn’t destroy much, but at the time of filming it was quite huge, so it was extremely difficult to get everything done. I had pictures of the dancer on a boat who was making gestures of what was representative of people with mental illnesses and this part also includes very unstable and intense music. The editing process also played a key role, because it allowed me to fit everything in the right places, so the chain of events would be clear to the viewer.
What technology did you use?
The technology was quite standart, I used commonly known video and sound editing softwares, so it wasn’t really anything special. However, I did use one very unusual technique. The final screen is 32:9 proportions which is very wide. So I had to find a way to build up plans that wide when my camera is only the half of it (standard 16:9). So I defined a “shooting strategy” for each plan consisting of filming a scene in 2 parts (Left and Right part of the landscape). It creates a distortion of space and time when you finally combine those 2 pictures and this is quite specific for the project.
What things did you learn during the creation of this piece?
I call this project a documentary myself rather than a music-theatre piece, so that was definitely something new for me. This was a very serious topic that I discussed and it took a lot of imagination to create each part of the piece. It opened up my perspective of music and I realised that there are many different ways to tell a story, therefore the creative process was something new and very stimulating for me.
