Grand Canal

I wrote the screenplays between 2001 and 2008. They are presented below in the order in which they were written. Each is set against the background of armed conflict.

I was inspired to learn how to write screenplays as a result of a number of conversations in New York in August 2001 with Annabel Honor-Lissi, a fellow creative, and digital tutorials with her which followed.

THE MEMORIAL

The Memorial is about redemption through kindness, compassion and love. Set in the immediate aftermath of the 1^st World War, it is a love story that explores class, religion and anti-war issues through the eyes of Captain Edward Standish VC. Much of the action takes place at Standish’s country seat, in a Midlands village dominated by a colliery, as well as in London where the Captain meets and commissions artist Clara Zeligman. The Memorial also takes us to the battlefields on the French/Belgian border where Standish had faced the toughest moment of his military career – an event that haunts him throughout the story.

LOYALTIES

Loyalties begins in 1936, when Kathy, sixteen, beautiful, a film fan and fascinated by Elizabeth, last Empress of Austria, about whom she secretly writes romantic fiction, leaves Llandudno to train as a nurse in London. In 1940, she goes to the Isle of Man to nurse refugees from Nazi Germany interned as enemy aliens and falls in love with Peter, an Irish barman, whom, she discovers, is an IRA Bomber whose real name is Pearse. He renounces violence, though not the cause, for her – until she is the victim of an attempted rape. Pearse murders the likely suspect (who is an undercover Special Branch officer). In despair, she rejects Pearse. She returns home pregnant – and tells her mother that she was married in the Isle of Man but that her husband has been killed in action. In 1946, Pearse – now prosperous and married but still active in the struggle – finds her (and their daughter). She rejects him again.

ALTOGETHER ELSEWHERE

Altogether Elsewhere is a tragi-comedy of errors, driven by character, coincidence and circumstance. Both of the main protagonists were born on the same day in 1953 in Liverpool and Daytona respectively. One becomes an acclaimed documentary and fashion photographer, the other a Vietnam Veteran selling oranges by the roadside in Portugal. The story – set against a background of the decline and fall of empires – focuses on key episodes in their lives from 1961 to 2002.

IN THE LION’S MOUTH

In The Lion’s Mouth is set in 1865, in a Venice under Austrian occupation, and against the background of the Risorgimento, the revolutionary movement to unify Italy. The story describes a love affair which, bedevilled by jealousy, possessiveness, intrigue and racial and religious prejudice, comes to a tragic and violent end. Though set in the past, the story portrays contemporary issues – particularly those of mixed race and of terrorism. The two main protagonists are a Liverpool sugar heiress of mixed Afro-Caribbean and European origin, who is in her early thirties, and a Austrian Jewish doctor in his forties, a widower, who is attached to the Austrian occupation forces but an active though covert supporter of the Risorgimento.

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By David Selzer

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POETRY

CITY OF ART

By David SelzerSeptember 27, 20183 Comments1 min read560 views

There are the Biennale’s Big Beasts, of course –

this year David Hockney’s ’82 Portraits

and 1 Still Life’ at the Ca’ Pesaro (each

painted in three days) and, at Palazzo

Grassi and Punta Della Dogana,

Damien Hirst’s ‘Treasures from the Wreck

of the Unbelievable’, which took ten years –

the pavilions in the Giardini

and the Arsenale; the freebies

in rented palaces and tenements.

And there are the abiding grand masters,

the Titians, Tinterettos, Tiepolos,

displayed in salons and basilicas;

the Bible transubstantiated into

oils and canvas, Latin verses made flesh.

And poor, visiting geniuses opting

for elsewhere – like Modigliani, who stayed

five years near the Accademia

then chose the avant-garde Montmartre,

and whose ‘La Femme en Blouse Marine’

hangs in the Guggenheim Gallery

on the Grand Canal, worth seven figures.

This is a city of stratagems, opulence,

dissembling – each turn of a corner,

each slap of water on bricks in a canal;

no place for penniless innocents,

no place for those without reputations;

mercantile, mercenary, magnificent;

an improbable, floating metropolis.

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By David Selzer

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POETRY

THE FISH MARKET

By David SelzerSeptember 27, 20180 Comments1 min read467 views

‘ The hand holds so much power – the power to love, to hate, to create, to destroy.’ SUPPORT, Lorenzo Quinn

The resin and fibreglass installation

of one of the sculptor’s small children’s

hands and wrists emerges from the Grand Canal

many times life size and startlingly white

to brace the rose Ca’ Sagredo Hotel –

once a palace where Galileo stayed –

as if to prevent its imminent collapse.

When we arrive on the opposite bank

so you can take photographs the market

has closed, all the fishmongers gone but one

gutting and beheading – his right arm tattooed

with a shoal of fish, his left a death’s head.

The otherwise empty arcades echo

with shouting and barking of seagulls,

herring and black-headed, scrapping and flapping

over discarded fish heads and entrails

among the scattered polystyrene boxes

and the plastic wrapping.

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By David Selzer

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POETRY

THE ARMENIAN MONASTERY, SAN LAZZARO, VENICE

By David SelzerSeptember 30, 20163 Comments2 min read585 views

San Lazzaro island was the city’s

leper colony until the Doge

gave the Armenians sanctuary, no doubt

to annoy the Turks. An antique engraved print

of the monastery, which occupies

the whole island, hangs on the wall above

the small table I use for my laptop.

The monks did the engraving and print.

Their library is Alexandrian in scope.

Gordon Lord Byron, escaping the

blandishments of Shelley’s sister-in-law,

took an apartment on the Grand Canal,

in the Palazzo Mocenigo-Nero,

with his attendants – including dog, fox,

wolf and monkey – for two hundred pounds

a year. As always bored and curious,

he visited San Lazzaro, learned

Armenian and helped with translations.

The second book of poetry I owned was

a hand-me-down, leather bound, well read,

complete works of Byron – my mother’s father’s.

He was dead of a heart attack years

before my birth: Welsh, from Swansea, bit of a

bully, a whisky drinker, a bibliophile,

a bombardier badly wounded at Mons,

a Post Office Telegram Manager,

a travelling classified ads salesman.

I have the other books that survived his

middle daughter’s arson of this auto-

didact’s library: BP’s ‘The Matabele

Campaign 1896’, ‘The Greatest

Show on Earth,’ ‘The Makers of Florence’, Wilde’s

‘Salomé’, with the Beardsley graphics, a first edition,

‘The Story of Atlantis.’ Imperialist,

circus master, aesthete, voyeur, dreamer,

he died in a boarding house near Altrincham.

We caught the 15.10 vaporetto, watched

the white campanile with its onion

cupola draw near. The boat slowed, rolled

in the swell, engines into reverse

with a roar of gears. The tour encompassed

printing press (‘per souvenir’), church, library.

In one corridor, I smelt meat cooking, glanced

through an open window. In the kitchen yard

below, the monks were playing 5-a-side.

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By David Selzer

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THEMES: VENICE

FOUR SCREEN PLAYS

CITY OF ART

THE FISH MARKET

THE ARMENIAN MONASTERY, SAN LAZZARO, VENICE

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