THE FROG PRINCESS

My partner, Kami, improvised some very interesting, quite emotional material for this short mocumentary made for college. The improvisational approach to filming meant that I was able to edit very much as I would a real documentary - there's was a lot of strategic cutting and juggling involved.
I think the tone is just right, and the dramatic flow (the breakdown of Eva's childlike facade) is as good as I could hope to get it given only 6 minutes.

The Frog Princess from Ewart Shindler on Vimeo.

MOCUMENTARY - RESEARCH NOTES

Since ancient times, there has been a belief that frogs, newts, snakes and lizards can live in the human stomach as parasites. These typically caused pain, weakness, and sometimes additional complications, such as increased appetite and thirst, melancholia, and flatulence.

The scientists of that time did not realize that the stomach's digestive juices would quickly destroy the creatures. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries such stories were common, and most pathological museums contains specimens of vomited amphibians.
Most commonly they were believed to be injected as spawn in dirty water, but some thought the animals could simply crawl into people's mouths while they slept. Other explanations included spontaneous generation, and witches.

Remedies ranged from hanging the sufferer upside-down with a bowl of warm milk placed near their mouth to tempt the creature out, to making them drink horse's urine, or swallow a baited hook.

THE TOAD-VOMITING WOMAN OF GERMANY: in the 1640s, Mrs. Catharina Geisslerin told people that she'd swallowed tadpoles in swamp water, and that frogs were thriving in her intestinal tract. Whenever she drank milk, the frogs would hop about madly. Despite initial skepticism, she convinced physicians after vomiting full-grown frogs (sometimes living) in front of professors and medical consultants.

When the famous Dutch anatomist Thomas Bartholin dissected on of Catharina's frogs, he was shocked to find dozens of black flies in its stomach. How could this be if the frog had grown to maturity in the woman's belly?

When Catharina died in 1662, the medical community were excited about dissecting her body; but to their dismay, no frogs were found.


THEODORUS DODERLEIN was another famous case. The son of a paster, he began by vomiting an assortment of bugs, before progressing to amphibians, and finally random metal objects, including knife blades and nails. In the end - after purgatives and exorcisms had failed - he was apparently cured by a large dose of horse urine.

Why would these individuals swallow creatures only to vomit them in front of crowds? Well, some merely for attention; for others it was a desperate attempt to convince others of a condition they themselves truly believed in. And some found it a clever way to convince people that they needed strong liquor to calm the beasties.


As recently as 1991, a woman believed that she had not only a snake in her stomach, but a small computer, which she could hear beeping, as though the snake were playing on it.

(Source: A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, Jan Bondeson, 1997)

(Newspaper articles from http://tidingsofyore.blogspot.co.uk/)

GASTRIC-BROODING FROGS: an extinct (since the 1980s) genus of frog from Australia. Following fertilization, the female would swallow her eggs. The jelly surrounding each egg contained a substance called prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), which could turn off production of hydrochloric acid in the stomach. Once hatched, the tadpoles secreted the same substance in mucus from their gills. These mucud excretions do not occur in most other species. During the period that the offspring were in her stomach, the mother would not eat.

(Source - Wikipedia)

FURIOUS FOOTAGE

Scratch Video is a style of film-making which first appeared in Britain, in the 1980s. It involves editing together scraps of found-footage taken from mainstream media, including newscasts, advertising, popular shows, etc. As a form of 'outsider art,' scratch videos are designed to make a statement, and are often politically radical.

I worked alone on this scratch video for college, which was initially meant to put across my misgivings about - how to put this - the way everything has just, sort of, got 'out of hand'. Intensive farming, over-fishing, massive waste, that kind of thing. It is not meant to be in any way discriminatory against large American people - which I used at the beginning of the video to represent mankind's consumption in general. Of course I chose images for their impact; with the intensive farming footage though, I tried to avoid some of the incidental cruelty and mistreatment that goes on, as I thought it could infer a slightly different point than the one I was making.

I couldn't resist using of a clip from a cinematic film (Taxidermia) - probably against the rules.

The music is the theme from Cannibal Holocaust - which is not intended as a statement against eating meat, although I can see how it could be taken that way; I guess this kind of video is inherently open to interpretation, and maybe that's the point.