Insights 1 - 2007/2008

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SCRIPT & PITCH

INSIGHTS // 1

SCRIPT & PITCH

It is our passion to bring the scriptwriting and story editing professions in Europe to the forefront. By publishing a selection of inspirational lectures in the form of a book, we wish to share some of the insights gathered through our workshops.

INSIGHTS // 1

We have added a fresh email-discussion set between three accomplished European story editors, Franz Rodenkirchen, Christina Kallas and Gino Ventriglia, and a guest lecturer from America, Je Rush.

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Script&Pitch Workshops is an advanced script development course for European scriptwriters and story editors. It was founded in 2005 and is now moving into its third edition.

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SCRIPT & PITCH

WORKSHOPS

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SCRIPT & PITCH INSIGHTS //1

Index

Script&Pitch Insights First edition 2007/2008 Edited by Valeria Richter, Denmark Published by Script&Pitch Workshops, Italy, Savina Neirotti Cover design by Lene Nørgaard, Propel Design, Denmark Book set in Klavika by Daniele Aluigi, Italy

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Foreword

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About Script&Pitch Workshops

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All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the authors and/or Script&Pitch Workshops; except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or as a reference.

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© The lectures remain copyright of their individual authors. © The email-conversation remains copyright

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of their authors & Script&Pitch Workshops. © All other texts remain copyright of Script&Pitch Workshops

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Printed and bound in Italy by Pomel sas – Via Casilina Vecchia 147 – Roma www.scriptpitchworkshops.com

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Biographies Inspirational lectures … but words would only make it smaller: Emotional theme and storytelling

by Franz Rodenkirchen Aristotle vs. Plato: The old battle of truth and story, or, what Aristotle has to do with European screenwriting?

by Christina Kallas Working with the emotional or thematic structure: Consciousness and the Screenplay

by Christina Kallas Beginning the middle at the end: Some notes on non-linear narratives

by Franz Rodenkirchen About Multi-linear Dramaturgies. Some definitions

by Gino Ventriglia Five Scene Structure: A Writer’s Analysis of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore

by Jeff Rush Email-conversation An Email-conversation on Issue Films… with a few comments on adaptation with Jeff Rush, Christina Kallas, Franz Rodenkirchen & Gino Ventriglia Contact information

Foreword

hen I think back to when I first imagined Script&Pitch Workshops, I remember I had two dreams: bringing authors from different countries together, and giving them the opportunity to explore the benefits of group work while fuelling their individual needs. This is exactly what script development achieves when you gather European scriptwriters with a vision, passionate story editors and professional trainers. Once this process starts, something more has to be added: the encounter with the producing world, with people who are interested in the development process. Script&Pitch is more than a course for professional scriptwriters and story editors, it is a place where the people who make it all possible enjoy to be: a place where stories – both the ones we write and the ones we live – are shared in a mutually giving way.

I would love the e-mail conversation in this book to continue with contributions from you, the readers, why not? So do write to us.

Thank you to Jeff, Christina, Franz and Gino for these lessons and your conversation. Thank you to all who believe in our unique spirit of development, first of all our partners and MEDIA. Savina Neirotti Director

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As the editor, I hope this debut edition will inspire and be the first step in a new tradition that may evolve and expand.

Development is about being in motion, it builds on the generosity and experience of all those who daily 'walk the walk'. This book is especially for the participants; we hope it captures some of the Script&Pitch-atmosphere, bringing together ideas, observations and analyses. Enjoy!

Valeria Richter Editor 7

About Script&Pitch Workshops

Inspirational lessons from the course are shared through a yearly publication: Script&Pitch Insights, supporting our passion and aim to shed more light and dignity on the scriptwriting and story editing professions.

About Script&Pitch Workshops

Focus Script&Pitch Workshops was founded in 2005 and is an advanced scriptwriting and development course for scriptwriters and story editors of films for both cinema and TV. We view European scriptwriting as something unique and special and therefore engage mostly European tutors, creating a healthy diversity between the individual styles of the single countries.

The course lasts 10 months and we select 20 participants from all over Europe (16 scriptwriters and 4 story editors) who will follow the whole scriptwriting process, offering education through the development of projects: from the generating of ideas and structuring of the material through a first and second draft to a final pitch in front of invited producers and sales agents.

Who can apply?

This is a post-graduate course open to professional European scriptwriters, story editors, and graduates from European film schools, writer-directors, writer-producers and development executives. Fiction writers and playwrights can also participate, for example with an adaptation project. Most of our participants already have a production company interested in their project and look for development training to enhance both the universality and personal voice of the project, yet it is no requirement to have a producer attached.

Workshops & Alumni meeting Participants work in groups of four writers and a story editor, with a tutor heading the process. Lectures on for example dramaturgy, story editing and film analysis, are, in combination with master classes and one-on-one meetings with industry professionals, an integral part of the course. Three intensive weeklong workshops and two on-line sessions keep the project development in a constructive flow.

Aim A primary aim is to advance writers’ and story editors’ professional skills. The passion and knowledge of our tutors is therefore an important energy for the workshops. A second aim is to create a vibrant network for our participants and we therefore connect Script&Pitch with festivals and industry-events, seeking producers who are interested in writers and development, not just in single projects. Again, the vision is to develop people with projects, rather than projects with people attached, supporting independent creative talent.

Insight The tutors and organisers are experienced and well connected professionals, both in their countries and on a European level. We work from the assumption that every story needs its own individual approach, and that its form is determined by its content.

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Biographies

Christina Kallas Screenwriter, producer and the President of the Federation of Screenwriters in Europe. She is the chair of the commission for the financing of feature film development and a member of the commission for the financing of production of the German Federal Film Board. In 2003 she founded the Balkan Fund. She studied and received her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1992. She taught screenwriting from 1998 to 2007 at the German Film & TV Academy in Berlin, since 2007 she is a Senior Lecturer for screenwriting at the Cinema Dept. of the Aristotle University in Thessalonica. She is the writer of three books: European Co-productions in Film and TV, Screenplay. The Art of Invention and Narration for the Cinema, and Creative Screenwriting.

Jeff Rush After serving as the founding chair of Temple University ’s Department of Film and Media Arts and then the Senior Associate Dean for the School of Communications and Theater, Jeff Rush has returned to the faculty as an Associate Professor to teach and work on his own projects. He is currently writing on contemporary screenwriting, and developing projects in interactive media. The last several years, he has been teaching in Script&Pitch Workshops and the Italian national network RAI. He is the co-author of Alternative Scriptwriting, a book on independent screenwriting widely used both across the country and internationally. He has written critically on writing and narrative theory.

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Franz Rodenkirchen International Script Editor and Tutor. Married to Writer/Translator Sanna Isto. Two daughters. Franz currently heads the consulting department at German script development company Script House.

As script advisor he regularly works for the Binger Filmlab, Amsterdam, European workshop Script&Pitch, CineLink, the co-production market of the Sarajevo Film Festival, and the Deutsche Filmund Fernseh Akademie, Berlin. He co-wrote four feature films with director JĂśrg Buttgereit and helped in bringing them to the screen.

By now, Franz has worked on well over 100 mostly international film projects, predominantly with writer/directors.

Gino Ventriglia Script consultant for Projects in Luce – Development Office of Istituto Luce. Gino has worked for both networks (Rai, Mediaset) and cinema/television production companies. He co-wrote three feature films and has worked on the development of a large number of films. For TV he has story-edited a number of prime time and two part series and co-created a daily serial drama. He has edited three books on screenwriting and teaches drama theories at Rai-script, Mediaset-RTI Courses, Scuola Holden and the National Film School in Rome (CSC). Since 1994 he is member of the editorial staff of the magazine Script. Gino gained a Fulbright Fellowship and achieved a double Master of Fine Arts in Directing and Scriptwriting at the USC in Los Angeles.

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INSPIRATIONAL LECTURES

… but words would only make it smaller: Emotional theme and storytelling

by Franz Rodenkirchen ne of the most complex, but at the same time most important terms in film dramaturgy is the term “theme”, or, as I usually call it, to indicate what it mostly relates to: “emotional theme”.

As the term theme is frequently used in everyday language with a lot of different meanings, there is a strong possibility of using it in an everyday way, as if it were self-evident. For this reason, people quite often think of theme as the subject matter of a film. So in order to understand theme and be able to work with it in the process of scriptwriting and script editing, we first have to define it within our specific context.

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Simply put, theme is what makes stories universal, and allows people from different cultural backgrounds, with different languages and traditions, to emotionally involve themselves in a story.

From a writer’s point of view, theme is what made her or him take up the story in the first place, the principal subject, the main purpose of telling it. As such, it is very close to the writer’s heart, and often difficult to talk about. For some, it is too close to home to feel comfortable about bringing it out into the open, take a good look at it and consciously work with it.

Theme shows itself most clearly towards the end of a script, where one has to make the final decisions. Those decisions reflect the writer’s own view towards the material and her or his take on life. Do we live in a just, or an unjust world? Is it better to fight for your own dreams or console yourself with what can easily be reached? Can we always divide between black and white, good and evil? Can you love forever, or is love a fleeting illusion?

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… but words would only make it smaller: Emotional theme and storytelling

Those and many similar questions might be posed at the end of a script. The way the writer ends the story can be a question or a statement, or a question that is a statement.

We will see that there are films, which appeal more strongly to the intellect where theme is concerned, while others use theme in a way that involves us emotionally as much as possible. Both approaches can be useful. The choice here depends on what the author intends to achieve. It should become clear though, that successful emotional involvement indicates potential for a broader audience than a focus on intellectual involvement, for this necessarily distances the audience from the story, at least to a certain degree.

Maybe the master achievement in terms of successful application of theme is to create an intellectual insight through an emotional experience.

Anyhow, it is from the moment of resolution, looking backwards towards the story as a whole, where theme can be analytically deducted best. Sometimes it takes until that last moment to understand the intention of the writer in dealing with it. That’s why we have a strong desire for closure: because it offers meaning, it offers a sense of belonging and a possibility to relate to a question that is emotionally involving and often morally relevant. We want to know why we were asked to care and spend two hours of our precious lifetime following the film.

Theme is the means through which writers most clearly communicate with their audience. And both sides know it, be it consciously or subconsciously.

In their book “The Tools of Screenwriting”, David Howard and Edward Mabley define theme as “the screenwriter’s point of view towards the material” (p. 55) and illustrate their point with two films: Annie Hall, written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman, and When Harry met Sally, written by Nora Ephron.

While Harry and Sally manage to resolve their problems and are together in the end, Annie and Alvy go their separate ways. One is a happy ending, the other a bittersweet ending. Both are valid in terms of doing justice to their respective stories, but the solutions reveal very different attitudes toward the material. According to Howard/Mabley, “the writer can’t conceal his own attitude; it’s built right into the story, in his treatment of it and how he chooses to resolve it” (p. 56).

Yet the writer’s attitude is only one aspect of theme. For if the attitude answers a question, we should know what the question has been. And in case of the two above examples, the question posed in the theme would have to do with love and sustaining it in a lasting relationship. But the very core of our emotional involvement would be our need to experience love, and the ability to relate our own personal experiences in relationships to the plight of the characters on screen.

This demonstrates that the emotional aspect of theme is connected to successful audience identification.

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What it is not One of the most common misconceptions found in relation to theme is the confusion between theme and subject matter. A writer telling you that the theme of his or her script is unemployment is not talking about the theme, but about a subject. This is another reason why I always use the prefix “emotional” when talking about theme.

Now, what could be a potential theme for a story dealing with unemployment as its subject matter? One that immediately comes to mind (and is explored in the film The Full Monty) is (self)-respect.

People who are unemployed frequently experience an increasing lack of purpose and the way they are treated by the rest of society might give them the impression that they have become worthless. Respect vs. contempt, or self-respect vs. self-loathing would be one way to express theme here.

Another example of a subject presented as theme is illegal immigration. We have lately seen a host of predominantly European movies dealing with human trafficking, illegal immigration and the suffering of the immigrants. A potential theme here would surely be human dignity, while this might be played out as a conflict between depersonalisation and respect for the individual beyond its purely economic value. So another way to put the theme here would be that it poses questions about the value of human life.

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… but words would only make it smaller: Emotional theme and storytelling

Some writers who have published books on scriptwriting differentiate theme and subject matter by calling the subject the outer theme and the emotional theme the inner theme of a story. I myself find that too confusing, especially because the emotional theme can also have a strong “outer” aspect, for example in its relation to structure.

We will look at this more closely later on.

Some people who have written about theme in the context of scriptwriting choose to not express it in opposites, but in one unifying term, simply implying the other end of the spectrum. The already quoted book by Howard/Mabley sometimes does it this way, for example: love, belief, masquerades, lying and deception. They also have combinations, which rather appear oppositional, like belonging and freedom, which might as well be expressed as belonging vs. freedom.

But what is it then?

Equally, a theme like guilt and redemption, despite the connecting particle “and” rather indicates an opposition, between whose poles the story plays out. By choosing not to emphasize the oppositional forces within a thematic complex, but rather connect the terms, we can indicate that this is not so much about a conflict that will be played out until the end and maybe then left for the audience to decide, but that the writer will suggest a development from one pole to the other, which then leads to a resolution for the theme (e.g.: guilt can be overcome and redemption achieved). This may be seen as a more pleasing way to supply closure for the audience.

In every story where characters act and relate to other characters, emotions play a crucial role. To achieve a more dynamic flow of narration, most scripts use different types of conflict (internal or external) to illustrate and explore character through action (being passive should also be considered an action in that sense). As an audience, we may or may not involve ourselves in those conflicts, in the goals and/or needs of the characters. Therefore, we mostly find ourselves confronted with at least two opposing attitudes, convictions or goals. Tension arises from the attempts of the characters to achieve one, while trying to overcome or avoid the other.

It is for this reason that theme is often best explored in terms of pairs of opposites. This way, the dynamic aspect is underlined in the potential for change from one end of the spectrum towards the other. At the same time we can acknowledge that there are positions that lie between the extreme opposites, in the area delineated by the terms we chose to express it.

Examples of such opposites may be: respect vs. contempt, trust vs. betrayal, acceptance vs. rejection/denial, love vs. indifference or even love vs. hate, responsibility vs. irresponsibility/egotism, honesty vs. deception, etc.

With each pair of opposites we should be aware that they do not only relate to the other, but can as well relate to the self (e.g.: selfrespect, self-love, etc). It can be expected that stories that predominantly work with internal conflict emphasize the self over the other.

One could also imagine a pair of opposites like aggression vs. benevolence. But those terms in the majority of cases describe reactions to an underlying emotional conflict, not the conflict itself.

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Every writer and every script editor who has ever dealt with theme knows about the difficulty to isolate theme. Partly this is because our perception of certain emotional conflicts can differ and we might put a slightly different emphasis on them. So one can always argue a point that there is more than one theme because theme reflects emotions and emotions tend to blend into each other and cannot be isolated. It is impossible to always relate a particular emotion to a particular theme and this kind of almost mathematical approach would surely be debilitating.

So, while working with theme, let’s not try to be more catholic than the pope (as a German saying goes) and insist that there be no traces of other themes. Mostly what we get in a script that uses theme well is one dominant theme that supplies focus and creates a strong force field which “attracts” all important elements of the story, while related thematic concerns may be present but should definitely be much less emphasized.

Sometimes we may find that a script deals with a very general theme at the core of its story, like, for example love. This theme can be static in that it is present but does not supply a good conflict to play it out.

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… but words would only make it smaller: Emotional theme and storytelling

So we need another, more dynamic aspect, which in the case of our example could be belonging vs. freedom, or we might call it commitment vs. independence. Through this more concrete pair of opposites the theme may be actualized within the story.

story is really about, without being able to answer it. If neither the writer nor I can answer this question, or if no satisfactory agreement can be achieved, it is virtually impossible to make any further decisions about the turns of the story and the character development.

How to work with theme in your story

To my approach of working with scripts, theme is crucial and clearly overrides plot in terms of dramatic importance.

The first thing that must be said here is that the whole concept of theme and the power it can give to a script makes it a crucial part of the creative process. But it should be applied differently in different stages.

When trying to identify theme, I have found it very useful (and I know some of my colleagues work in similar ways) to retrace your step and find the core of your theme by asking, what had been the initial spark for the story?

The first take on the material, the first treatment, the first effort to organize the ideas in a linear form in writing, should be free of any conscious thoughts about theme. It will in any way be a major driving force. But it will also most likely be an unconscious or subconscious one. And drawing attention to it too early may prove stifling. So the first step(s) should always remain free of conscious intellectual effort.

Does the writer remember the moment of birth of the story?

What was so intriguing about it? Where did the idea come to her or him? At what time and under which circumstances? Sometimes there can also be a musical reference to express a mood or a feeling prevalent at the birth of the story.

But surely in rewriting and in the work with a story editor, theme can then become a strong tool to give your script/story emotional depth, unity and universal appeal.

As I already mentioned, writers often are not able to name their theme. It might be that their theme only shows in a reluctance to “patch on” a happy ending. It might be that it shows in the persistence to stick with a scene, which does not seem to be indispensable in terms of story development.

But whichever way it goes, there is always a point when it is good to know what the story is really about. For if it cannot be demonstrated through the means of storytelling what the story is really about, the audience has no indication about how to judge the decisions taken by the writer – and consequently, by the characters. It then becomes much more difficult to involve oneself in the story.

Therefore, when working with writers (or writer-directors), I always make it a point to dwell on theme and try to bring out what lies at the core of the story. Much too often I find that although I am working from a first or second draft script, I can still ask what the 22

As theme is so closely connected with an author’s point of view towards the material, going back often reveals a certain sentiment or an emotional state the writer was in when the story nucleus presented itself for the first time. This is also a very touchy moment that requires trust between the people working on a story together, for it tends to be extremely personal. Theme lays bare the emotional attitude of the writer and her or his own involvement with it. This can be painful, embarrassing sometimes, and sometimes even more personal than the writers themselves were prepared to expect.

Yet it is exactly this strong emotional bond that makes theme so powerful in terms of audience response. We are all human beings with basically a comparable set of moral values, emotional needs and desires. Whenever a writer / a story taps into this, we can expect to be understood on a universal level that is much more powerful than superficial differences.

Theme and need Most writers who have been in contact with one or several of the books on scriptwriting will have come across the term “need”, which 23

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… but words would only make it smaller: Emotional theme and storytelling

is mostly used in connection with “want” (or “goal”). Both relate to character, usually to their inner (need) and outer (want) world.

While “want”, describes what the character consciously (and most times actively) wants to achieve in the course of the story (e.g. get the girl, rob the bank, win the fight, race, contest…), the term “need” describes what the character needs, to become complete as a human being. It relates to a certain lack in the character make-up.

This lack may be a lack of (self)-respect, an inability to stand up for oneself, an inability to give and/or accept love, etc.

Quite often the character is not aware of this lack at the outset of the story. Actually the development of the story will also chart the development of his/her character, to the point where the lack is finally acknowledged. Whether the character then manages to overcome it or not, is again dependent on the writer’s attitude toward the material.

same theme, while grappling with comparable internal conflicts, but partly come to different resolutions. The neighbour’s son, Ricky, for example, knows exactly who he is and what he wants. Although he is considered a jerk and a weirdo, and is cruelly “disciplined” by his father, he does not hide his personality and indeed becomes a role model for Lester. Lester’s daughter is less content with herself, saving up money for a breast augmentation, while Ricky’s father, a strict military man and homophobic, desperately wants to hide his homosexuality, to the point of eventually killing Lester.

In the classic resolution of this conflict between inner and outer world, the goal is achieved, but then dropped or it has lost its importance, because the character has come to acknowledge his/her need, and values this much more than the goal. There is a rule of thumb, about goal being exactly the wrong way to achieve the need, which indicates that when a character chooses his or her goal, he or she subconsciously knows already that it will bring him/her into conflict with the need.

An almost textbook example here is American Beauty, written by Alan Ball. The main character, Lester Burnham, has a clear goal. He wants to sleep with his daughter’s friend Angela. At the same time he feels like life has passed him by, he is already “as good as dead” and he loathes himself. In the course of the story he rejuvenates, by doing what he feels like, by acknowledging his self and his desires and he enjoys life again, as if he were a teenager, to the point where he finally gets the chance to have sex with Angela. But by then he has found himself again, he feels alive and content, so he does not have to seduce an underage friend of his daughter’s anymore, just to feel something. Instead, he has made peace with himself as the middle-aged man and father that he is, and can even reassure Angela about her own insecurities.

The theme of this film clearly revolves around the question of (self)-respect vs. (self)-contempt. And the main character’s need clearly expresses the theme, developing it into a concrete set of conflicts for each character – and all the other characters relate to the 24

In general, it can be said that the theme of a film is the overriding emotional context, the focal point of all the characters’ inner struggles, while the need is a more individually related realisation of the theme, geared toward the specific character’s conflict. Therefore, need is mostly more refined and specific than theme, but both relate to the same emotional force field.

This way, a film can retain a feeling of unity, despite having disparate story elements or a whole host of characters. So it should be no surprise, that theme can be a particularly effective tool when it comes to ensemble pieces, epic or episodic films.

Multiple storylines and theme Some of the more successful or respected movies of recent years which have used multiple storylines and a host of characters have been Short Cuts, written by Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt, Magnolia, written by Paul Thomas Anderson, Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, both written by Atom Egoyan, Happiness, written by Todd Solondz, Le Goût des Autres (The Taste of Others), written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri and Dog Days, written by Ulrich Seidl.

All those movies develop several storylines mostly in a parallel montage. Sometimes the characters of the individual storylines are closely connected. The characters may be relatives, friends, co-workers, or neighbours. Sometimes the connection is only superficial, through being in the same city, by living through their story in the same narrow timeframe, by experiencing the same events (e.g. an earthquake, a rain of frogs, a public performance, a heat wave, etc.).

Those are outer connectors, which illustrate an attempt by the storyteller to achieve a sense of unity, which counterbalances the 25

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tendency of multiple storylines to drift apart due to a lack of connecting elements.

Another connecting factor can be structure. Well-paced scenes, which can carry the momentum from one scene into the next and give the feeling of a constant flow of events, can be very helpful in moving multiple narratives forward.

are saying that the character is yet unable to do so. At the same time we are implying that it would be a positive turn of events for the character, to learn to take responsibility.

I dare say that our implication comes from certain moral or ethical standards, which we have come to acknowledge as useful for human coexistence. But how do we know that the character needs to learn to take responsibility? Or put another way: is it the character’s own need, or is it something we demand from the character?

Looking at the people around us, we can quickly see that taking responsibility is NOT a need that arises out of a person. Quite the contrary: people go out of their way to try and avoid taking responsibility. We lie, we cheat, we pay others to take our share, in short – we do everything we can to avoid taking responsibility.

Following that argument, we might have to acknowledge that nobody ever feels a real need to take responsibility, but rather the necessity to comply with certain social and ethical standards. It is our fellow humans who want us to feel that need, who tell us that we must shoulder our fair share of the burden.

Still, imagining to follow so many stories (between three and as many as nine in the examples given above) individually, there is a strong danger to lose track and wonder why those stories have been lumped together in the first place. In all cases that have proven to be convincing and successful, the answer to this was that the storylines have a strong inner connection, which unites all the stories, all the characters and gives a sense of purpose to the overall narrative. As you may have guessed, this inner connection is the theme. While people may be involved in different conflicts in their individual stories, their needs can often be found to be very similar and relating to the same dominating theme. Theme provides the underlying gravitational pull, the unifying force field.

In the case of Short Cuts, the theme revolves around the question of responsibility or the lack of it. And the decision to end most stories on a sceptical note clearly demonstrates the authors’ attitude to the chosen theme. For while most of the characters get to acknowledge their need, not a single one of them is allowed to act upon it in what we’d perceive to be a positive reaction. Instead, the characters remain what they’ve been, they do not change (here I am indebted to my colleague Dagmar Benke, who has analysed this movie at length in her book “Freistil”).

Another film with a similar theme is The Sweet Hereafter. The theme also revolves around responsibility, but is also about the reaction of the characters when faced with the demand to take responsibility. Some characters manage to take responsibility, while others decide to resort to repression and displacement. The attitude of the writer seems to be that we are the masters of our actions and there is no one else to blame. But the writer also seems to indicate that not everybody is ready for this truth.

I have chosen as an example the theme of responsibility, because it poses an interesting question when related to the need. If we assume that a character’s need could be to take responsibility, we 26

Why do I dwell on this for so long?

Because we are now getting close to the dangers that theme may present to a story.

Abusing the theme While theme in my view is one of the pillars of successful scriptwriting and at the very core of the creative process, it also has its pitfalls and we will have to talk about those as well.

One of the worst ways to misunderstand and misrepresent theme is when theme is turned into message.

Theme is not only emotional, it also relates to human values and beliefs, which are experienced as being highly emotionally charged.

First of all, as we saw in the example of the need for responsibility, we might impose our values and ethics on a character. On a larger scale, this results in a call for political correctness when sketching the path of the character’s development. In this thinking, the behaviour of a character reflects back on the author to the point where a writer can be racist, misogynistic, discriminating, if the main character or any main event of the story can be perceived as such.

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This dangerous mixing of our everyday reality with the reality of the story’s world, a world we have created to be able to explore something with creative freedom, can be a killer to any story, any script, and any original idea.

At the same time this clearly shows that there is an intuitive understanding that writers do want to express an attitude, a personal view on their material, that stories are never completely outside our world, and are hard to imagine without the ones who make them up and tell them to us.

attempts to fashion a story in order to present a philosophical position, which might be called a thesis. This method leads to clichés, propaganda and lifeless characters because all the human issues of the drama have been subordinated to this thesis the author is out to prove.” (p. 56)

Characters must function in the world we create for them. The laws of this world, while pertaining to our everyday world, can be different; they can be flexible and they must allow us to live vicariously, to explore options of lives we might fantasise about, but never want to take up. Decisions of characters must be based on the laws and relations of the world we created and not on moral standards forced into the world of the story from outside.

Consequently, theme must never be instrumentalised to make overt political statements of any kind. If theme is meant to lead to a statement, it should be by exploring it within the framework of the story, not as a forced meta-level.

It may well be that we, as an audience, come to an intellectual understanding, but it should never be through preaching, but through careful story development and emotional involvement with the characters.

Of course we can cite examples like Lars von Trier’s Dogville, which consciously points out its artificiality, its experimental setup.

But you may realise that despite all the epic, Brechtian elements von Trier uses, the plight of the character is made to be painful, visceral and accessible on an emotional level.

Trier mainly wants to prevent us from being manipulated by the strength of emotion and sets against it his own brand of intellectual manipulation. But I am afraid not all writers can aspire to reach the skill and complexity of Lars von Trier, so for the majority of us, it is still pretty good advice to not point out the message too overtly, especially not with an authorial voice.

David Howard and Edward Mabley put it this way: “The experienced dramatist or screenwriter seldom begins with a theme, or 28

One way to do this, which is unfortunately a common occurrence especially with beginning writers, is to put the intended meaning into dialogue, to have people express it verbally within the story.

Sometimes the characters then end up discussing the pros and cons of a position that is very valid and intriguing to the author. But seldom does this enthusiasm spill over to an expectant audience, which has agreed to trust the storyteller to tell them an emotionally engulfing story.

Theme and genre When looking at genre (a complex and not always clear term itself), we find that certain genres seem to function best with particular themes or end up exploring similar themes more frequently.

An obvious example would be film noir’s obsession with themes of trust vs. betrayal. Lying and deception are so central to every plot of film noir that in this case we can even find a close connection between theme and structure. Some modern successors of classic film noir have tried to explore this by using the medium itself to make their point (e.g. the “lying camera” in The Usual Suspects or the reverse/forward narrative of Memento).

Similarly, romantic comedies usually deal with themes of love, but here the individual obstacles the two lovers-to-be must overcome can vary. Sometimes they must learn to respect each other before they can come together, sometimes they must overcome misconceptions about the other or resolve some false assumptions.

More closely related to theme is the genre of the “coming-ofage” film, a type of story, which always involves characters in transition, mostly from childhood to adulthood. Quest for the self and the ability to stand up for what one is, are dominant factors and the necessity for change is often at the centre of such narratives.

Examples here would be Stand by me, Pelle the Conqueror, Fucking Amal or Diner.

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… but words would only make it smaller: Emotional theme and storytelling

Road movies also work with a close thematic focus, for this is clearly a genre of character development (“it is the journey, not the goal”). Therefore an inner growth, a change, a self-realisation often lies at the heart of a road movie. This is one of the archetypical genres where goal is forfeited in favour of accomplished need, although many of the better known road movies settle for a journey that resembles not only a character development, but a mirror of a whole life, consequently ending with a question of life or death.

take when weaving it into our story. Never must it become the overt message.

An interesting addition to genre – in relation to theme – can be found in an article by film scholar Linda Williams (“Film Bodies: Gender, genre, and excess” in Film Quarterly, Vol. 44, No.4). There she argues that there are genres that are being driven by excessive use of one primordial emotion, namely fear and terror (in the horror movie), sexual pleasure (in porn movies) and overpowering sadness (in melodrama). According to Williams, those genres seem to aim toward a sort of mimicry, in that the filmmaker attempts to make the audience mimic the emotion displayed on screen.

I can very much recommend to look this up, as Williams then goes on to connect those genres to important and universal emotional themes related to important stages in the life of every human being.

Know your theme, sell your story Apart from focusing on the creative process and giving unity to a script, theme is also, as we already found out, by definition a means to achieve universal accessibility. Theme crosses borders and ideologies, and therefore it is also a great marketing tool. As an element of pitching a story idea it supplies focus and emotional understanding and is a great way to create curiosity, because theme is the promise of emotional involvement.

Theme can be used to create a logline, it should inform every synopsis, and it should always be used when trying to describe why your story idea will be interesting and seductive to an audience and how you plan to capture your audience’s emotions.

At the same time, it should be used with the same care we must 30

Just recently a successful producer working in European co-productions told me that she finds nothing more off-putting than a synopsis starting with the statement of a theme.

Why? Because telling someone what you intend to do in a rational or intellectual way can hardly convince this person of your ability to successfully pull it off as an emotional experience. Rather theme is what informs the decisions taken when writing the synopsis, when deciding which elements to include and which to leave out.

And theme charts the invisible path of emotional involvement when reading the synopsis.

Therefore, to always write your synopsis from the perspective of the audience, can serve as a central piece of advice here.

But what about the log line, you may ask?

Log lines come in different shapes and again we may find that not everybody would give the same definition. For some, a log line is one line (and consequently called one-liner), for others it can be up to five lines, consisting of several sentences.

Some use log line like others use tag line, which is the line you will often find at the top part of a movie poster (“In space, no one can hear you scream” was the tag line of the first Alien movie). In any way, the log line should also not name the theme directly (e.g.: a film about love and belonging; a story of trust and betrayal, etc.), for it turns out that in this context the best strength of theme becomes a weakness: its universality. We need to indicate what makes this particular story so special, we need to find the one aspect that sums it up best and hooks into the subconscious of our audience.

It is useful to be clear about the theme when writing the project presentation, for it can focus our thoughts and guide our decisions.

But also here, we should remember the nature and function of theme as it is expressed in this frequently used example: Imagine a smattering of metal shavings on a table. They lie in no discernible order. Now you hold a strong magnet under the table and they will gravitate towards an invisible centre, which is the magnet underneath. In the same way, theme remains invisible, but brings focus and order to all the individual parts of a screenplay.

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And what if it’s missing?

Although Howard/Mabley claim that theme is built into every story, whether the writer intends it or not, it is easy to see that there are films which do not have a strong theme or do not seem to care much for it. And they might even be successful. Usually films that deal with superheroes will not have a very strong emotional theme (that’s before Batman and Spiderman spent most of their time brooding over existential matters). The James Bond series hardly has much use for theme, and such is the case for a lot of action movies. Then again, if those movies stay with us, it is not because they gave us a deeply felt emotional experience, but rather a spectacle. But a lot of times, movies with a weak or almost nonexistent theme are made for instant gratification and almost instant forgetting.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons for Tarantino’s success. He used the quick formula, where the audience might not expect emotional depth and twisted it into something more profound. We all know what came of it…

It is surely no shame to tell a story which is predominantly the visual equivalent of a rollercoaster ride and every writer taking up such a task may rest assured that at least he must not worry too much about that darn thing called theme.

Additional reading Despite theme being a frequently used term in many manuals on scriptwriting, only a few writers use it consistently.

… but words would only make it smaller: Emotional theme and storytelling

Robert McKee (in his book “Story”), doesn’t like the term theme.

He finds it misused and prefers the phrase “controlling idea” which names a story’s root or central idea, but it also implies “function”. It may be expressed in a single sentence and describes how and why life changes from the beginning of the story to the end. How does this look in action? One example is In the Heat of the Night, a crime story with an “up” ending. Here, an unjust world is returned to justice, suggesting a controlling idea such as “justice is restored...”.

Phil Parker (in “The art and science of screenwriting”) spends about 7 pages on what he calls theme, but finds no clear definition of the term. Sometimes he uses theme and means subject matter; sometimes he’s even broader in his use of the term, while sometimes also using it in concordance with my definition of “emotional theme”. Parker identifies eight thematic types (e.g.: desire for justice, pursuit of love, the morality of individuals), without pointing out exactly how to deal with them. For those who like to get confused…

Linda Seger (in “Making a good script great”) offers no clear definition of theme, although she uses the term sometimes, mostly according to its American use (focus on a somehow emotional complex), but one can’t get much out of it in terms of inspiration or clarification, nor in terms of how to apply it in the writing process.

Christopher Vogler (in “The Writer’s Journey”) fails to define theme and only uses the term in passing, when discussing some films. His understanding of theme is similar to Seger’s.

Syd Field (in “Screenplay” and “Screenwriter’s Workbook”) finds little time to dwell on theme and confuses the term with subject matter. His only advice seems to be that you must know your theme before you can start writing.

Howard/Mabley is worth looking up, especially their paragraphs on theme in the respective analyses of the individual films (although they also mix theme and subject matter in one or two instances).

And I’d like to recommend Dagmar Benke’s “Freistil” (a book on scriptwriting beyond 3-act structure), but unfortunately it is presently only available in German.

Some of the books of other well-known scriptwriting teachers, or even gurus, I have consulted for the sake of this lecture. Here’s what they have to say, in a nutshell: 32

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Aristotle vs. Plato: The old battle of truth and story, or, what Aristotle has to do with European screenwriting?

by Christina Kallas lmost everyone who has ever written a book about the art and science of screenwriting started by referring to Aristotle’s Poetics and by his statement that every cinematic story has a beginning, a middle and an end, which mostly translates into the three-act structure and into a complete, closed form with a non-fragmentary unity (plot?), as well as an entertaining (superficial?) and moral (moralistic?) approach. European filmmakers have often been told that their screenplays are partly or totally lacking any structure and one has come to believe that the American film industry has a bigger audience than the European film industries, because it is respectful of the rules of dramatic storytelling, as these were initially defined by Aristotle. So, through seminars, workshops, books and lectures, the Americans in a way brought “their” Aristotle back to Europe. Or how often have you been told: “It all goes back to Aristotle”, so don’t dare to question it?

A

The Aristotelian closed form has led to reactions in the cinema field as it once did in the theatre field, where the best known revolution is considered to be the “non-Aristotelian” dramaturgic theory and practice of Bertolt Brecht: According to Brecht, the theories which are based on the Poetics set up restricting borders and create models, resulting in a series of the same “product” instead of diverse and unique artistic creations. The classic Hollywood cinema of the broad consumption, who many now want to see in a crisis (creatively, as well as commercially, and this for many years in a row), can best be compared with 19th century theatre, where characters and situations kept being repeated like sure-fire recipes with almost no variations. Fact is that nobody remembers those plays anymore.

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But is Aristotle even partly responsible for that stagnation? And have the screenwriting teachers translated the Poetics in the right way or have they possibly based their theories upon wrong interpretations? It is important to stress that research concerning the Poetics is far from closed: One can tell for sure that there are many different ways of interpretation and also contradictory opinions, concerning a lot of vital issues. This means that, first, Aristotle may still have a lot to teach us, and, second, that the recipes which are being pronounced in his name could perhaps be interpreted in a different way. This lecture aims at shortly reviewing why Aristotle said what he said, and how this influenced cinematic storytelling. Such a review only makes sense if we bring into perspective Aristotle’s long-time teacher, Plato, whom the screenplay people seem to have ignored altogether. And while meeting Plato, we’ll find out that he has a lot to teach us about writing as well. Last but not least we’ll be looking at what Aristotle also said, which may be indeed closer to European screenwriting. We’ll ask and try to answer questions such as: A non-fragmentary unity – but what creates this unity? Is it plot or could it be something else too? And what Aristotle might have meant by what has come to be translated as “entertaining” and “moral”?

This is not supposed to be a lesson on philosophy. It is my firm belief that by understanding the raison d´etre of certain screenplay rules as well as of screenplay exceptions (what we sometimes call alternative screenwriting), and putting everything into context, may help us become more clear about what we are writing and why.

There is some very important background information, which we need to keep in mind on our trip to ancient Greece, which was surely a wonderful place to be, especially if you were Greek, male and educated, as the only thing you had to do in life was learn – and learning meant debating, while teaching was the highest vocation. From Plato we only have his written works and no transcripts from his teaching at the Academy, where Aristotle studied for almost twenty years. We will later see why such transcripts would have been most important. On the contrary, from Aristotle, who was himself the teacher of many important men, like Alexander the Great (perhaps the first ever “citizen of the world”), what we do have is his notes, which he had prepared for his teaching at the Lyceum, and not the edited works which have all been lost. This is important, because it 35

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explains why the slim booklet of the Poetics is so basic and why it leaves so much space for interpretation.

seems like he is willing to flee from this world, in order to meet with divine perfection, while Aristotle writes down methodically what we hold in our hands, and what is in front of our eyes and in our heads.

We should start by saying that the Poetics is not only a fundamental book about the nature and development of drama, but also a cold-blooded, scientific and rather offensive answer to the teacher Plato’s ideas about art. So, in order to understand the dimension and emphasis, which Aristotle gave to certain subject matters and to manage to read between the lines, we need to get to know the teacher’s ideas first.

Like good drama, this is basically a story of action and reaction, which goes on and on, most obviously until today. The teacher’s opinions are said to have exercised a sort of “intellectual terrorism” at the time when Aristotle was writing the Poetics (which is probably why he wrote them), while tragic irony wants the same “intellectual terrorism” to be exercised in the name of Aristotle’s Poetics by almost every book we know about how to write and rewrite a screenplay. At the same time, the other side’s answer, the one that argues against three-act-structure or any structure indeed, is at least as absolute and even more ideologically categorical as Aristotle’s arguments in the Poetics. In a way, it doesn’t matter so much what you argue about: It is the why and the how that matters.

In a way, Aristotle’s Poetics was written with a double goal in mind, one being the interpretation of the phenomenon of drama, while the other was the negation of the Platonic opinions, the reconstruction of his theories, and that makes the Poetics a daring book.

But what exactly did Aristotle react to?

The two giants of Western philosophy are supposed to stand for two diametrically opposed general attitudes and ways of thought. In his famous wall painting “The School of Athens”, Raphael is expressing this difference, as it was perceived back then: Plato is pointing his finger towards the skies, while Aristotle’s is showing at the earth. This way, Plato and Aristotle embody two poles of intellectual life. The one is a utopian, the other a realist. The first one is seduced by perfection; the second one is open to investigating the field. Their division is clear: Theoretician vs. practician, thoughtful spirit vs. encyclopaedic research, and dreamer vs. scientist. Plato 36

This substantial difference is supposed to take other forms as well: Plato researches, while Aristotle teaches. The first one is questioning, is pointing at all kinds of possible ways, trying out a thousand different hypothetical questions, does often not reach any conclusions, and is definitely not a friend of definitions which are set in stone. The second one sets the foundations and creates systems.

Aristotle seems to subdue with respect to the rules of the language, of storytelling, of drama. What he teaches to whoever wants to understand the world is first of all the necessity of a method.

Plato again, before he forms any theory, is the creator of a constant instigation for research. His aim is to awaken, to open up the spirit.

To shaken the immoveable sureties. He sets mechanisms in motion, which are creating one question after the other. He teaches us the art of asking the right questions, the game of doubt. His aim is foremost to find the truth.

But: Art’s distance from the truth, which is the most substantial aim of platonic philosophy, is so big, that a work of art becomes instantly suspicious. Poetry, that is drama, is unnecessary, says Plato, because from an ontological point of view it is a copy of the copy (Politeia 597e 6-8) and from a philosophical point of view it is outside the borders of conscious creation, so it does not offer any knowledge as other sciences do and it is damaging, as it endangers the politically organized society and its interests. Plato goes as far as declaring that drama destroys the human soul and the poet is therefore to be excluded from the ideal society (Politeia 599a, 595b).

Such is the ideological background when Aristotle writes his Poetics, which is the first systematic theoretical text about drama, and which – with the help of descriptive analysis – tries to define the excellent, the best – which means: the most successful drama form.

But what is the most successful drama? And, successful in which way?

First of all, Aristotle contributes substantially to the rehabilitation of drama in an effort to protect it from being exiled, by recon37

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structing Plato’s basic theoretical argument against it, which refers to the idea of mimesis. The basic contradiction between teacher and student was the student’s argument that art (drama) is the reconstruction of the world as we feel it, while the teacher insisted that it is a fake idol because the world as we feel it does not exist. For Aristotle the artist mimics reality directly, and not a second or third level reality, as Plato seemed to think. Besides, Aristotle negates emphatically the idea that the artist has to capture the world as it is, directly and loyally, and he upgrades the idea of mimesis, arguing that the tragedy plot may be indeed completely invented.

What Aristotle did, was to draw away the focus from the truth by arguing that the primary task of drama is NOT its pursuit. Thus he finally and inarguably realized the decisive step from ethics to aesthetics! So why have we come to connect him with the moral, even moralistic approach of some Hollywood movies? And aren’t the avant-garde movements more ethical, at least concerning that specific approach?

Plato, on the contrary, sets “the myth” in a clear contradiction to “the word”, i.e. the story in contradiction to the truth. Without doubt the dialectic intrusion of reality, which is being achieved through argumentation, is the philosopher’s highest goal. Still, he cannot ignore the myth’s entertaining powers. But foremost he cannot ignore the ability of story (and of the images that story manages to create), to present a theme wholly and emotionally, which is an absolutely necessary addition to intellectual consideration. The myth proves to be a second approach to reality, and in relation to “the word” owns a privilege, which cannot be substituted by anything else.

Even if this sounds paradoxical, it suggests that Plato recognized the power of drama (or why else did he choose the drama form for his Dialogues?), and that he came to consider that power as being too dangerous and damaging, especially if it is placed in the wrong hands – a subject matter which occupies our minds and discussions even today, especially in our world of the most powerful media of all times, the cinema.

Fact is that the debate about the seducing powers of drama has always preoccupied the different schools of cinematic thought: in fact it was always the most important issue. The cinematic movements which have made history, like the Italian Neorealism, the French Nouvelle Vague, the British Free Cinema, or the German Junger Deutscher Film, and even the most recent of all, the Danish Dogma 95 seem to have taken in the platonic and later Brechtian line of argumentation, blaming classic storytelling in cinema for being seductive, and declaring that their own programmatic wish is to represent directly the objective reality, that is the truth.

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Another most vital issue, which has long been and is still the subject of many discussions between filmmakers, is the “whole that is structured by causality”, an issue, which is of great importance to ¹ π??? ?? ????????? ???? ? ???? ????», Aristotle. «????Greek 1???? ??? says Aristotle. In other words: what is important is the whole which is structured upon causality, and not simply upon chronological order, because in the second case the result would be a syntax of chronology, and not the composition of a dramatic work of art. What Aristotle does here is that he goes around and negates completely the second part of Plato’s arguments against drama. Remember: what Plato said, was that from a philosophical point of view drama is outside the borders of conscious creation, so it does not offer any knowledge. But how can it be outside the borders, if it is a purely conscious creation?

The preference of the so-called closed form presupposes an active intervention of the storyteller into the constant flow and the chaotic form of reality, as well as to the many and diverse incidents which may happen to a person. The intervention aims at isolating a core incident which offers the required unity or which can achieve it by additions through the organizational will of the writer, so that the result becomes a whole according to the rules of possibility and of necessity (please note that the unity of time and place is not obligatory with Aristotle, as the renaissance critics have wrongly established). A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility, says Aristotle.

What is most important is that continuity, consequence and unity occur in such a way that if a part of the composition is subtracted or moved, then the whole poetic building collapses. The last remark has lead to one of the golden rules of screenplay structure and is an important basis of analysis while rewriting: “Kill your darlings”, said Frank Daniel, while others instruct to only keep what moves the action further, what keeps the action going. The removal 39

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of every scene or character, which does not move the plot any further is considered to be obligatory. But which are the criteria for deciding which is the point of collapse in the dramatic building, especially if we start by saying that it is not the plot but character and, as we will discuss later, even emotional theme which is the skeleton of the building of (the best) drama? (We will have a go at the definition of the best drama later.)

has hindered generations from looking closely at what Plato has to say concerning the creative process and dramaturgy. Truth preexists: in mathematics – and indeed almost all mathematicians (see Grothendieck) see themselves as Platonists because of that notion – as in screenwriting: the story, the theme is inside the screenwriter and what we need to do is to find the right way to get there.

By arguing as he does, Aristotle is basically trying hard to prove that drama is nothing other than conscious creation. Which, funnily enough, should be nothing new to Plato, as he has used the dramatic form in his Dialogues – and in them he shows that he knows how to “play” with all the tools of a developed dramaturgy. Especially if one tries to forget the ideological weight of their conclusions, the philosophers even use similar termini. The platonic dialogue has mostly a continuous plot, while one of his means to help the reader keep that plot in mind is the repetition of certain elements (in the planting and pay-off way). Besides, his starting point is always the characters, and he is using the status transactions between them: a conversation between characters of equal status does not exist with Plato. Conflict is the heart of drama.

So the Dialogues must be read like dramas, like works of continuous plot and with a well planned and executed relationship-network between the characters. “The form of platonic dialogue is not something external, but is of decisive importance for the content”, says the German Plato researcher Thomas Szlezak (“Reading Plato”), who belongs to the generation who has brought in a new image of Plato: away both from the censorship monster and from the romanticized version, which is Plato as the permanently unfulfilled seeker of truth, an image which is in fact closer to German infinitism than to Plato himself. For Plato, man is indeed able to achieve decisive knowledge, but he can only stay in knowledge for a very short time.

This is why Eros encapsulates philosophy’s meaning in the best possible way: Eros does conquer what it chases, but whatever it conquers will eventually escape (Symposion 203e).

Finally, the one important issue which keeps being valid and which has always inspired (and indeed still does) whole generations of artists and scientists, is the idea that truth pre-exists. We’ll keep this in mind and try to forget every prejudice, right or wrong, which 40

As I said before, Plato clearly realized the ability of story to present a theme wholly and emotionally: Something which reminds us of Aristotle’s remarks about what he named the «??????? » (1451b: the universals, as opposed to the singulars of history, of what might be, rather than what has been, of story, rather than truth). These are meant to be the basis of drama and are closely related to what we call the emotional theme: Totally ignored by all the screenwriting theoreticians, the “universals” bear great importance, especially related to what I call emotional structure, as well as to the method of creative screenwriting. It is important to stress that so far no screenwriting theory has dealt with that subject matter which is so vital to Aristotle, and which is the codified meaning, which lies in the deep structure of the dramatic text.

In his highly contradictory and disparately interpreted ninth chapter of the Poetics, Aristotle comes to the conclusion that drama has as its theme the universals, that is situations which refer to eternal and fundamental human reactions and psychological moods: desire for revenge, pain of abandonment, hurt to honour and selfrespect, devoted love, unbridgeable hate, incontrollable erotic passion and its fateful consequences etc. etc. So, while history is interested in a concrete incident, that is, in a singular (?? ???? ???????) and in the people who have been involved in that singular, whether they have been active or passive, drama is interested in the permanent and in the universal. It is obvious that drama is different from history, in that it is characterized by repetition while history is characterized by singularity. The repetitive aspect has come to be known as a universal story. Universality is supposed to have lead to the success of American screenwriting, but many accuse American films of being repetitive, in comparison to European, Asian etc. which are thought to be unique.

As this is especially interesting when we try to define European screenwriting, let’s stay here for a moment. It has often been said that the universality of American cinema i.e. of American culture is based on the fact that it incorporates many different cultures, which 41

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form part of its society. So if we followed that thought, it would surely mean that the unified Europe is our chance for universality and commercial success? Not necessarily, say the sharp, adult, sometimes negative European minds. Or why do we tend to call our co-productions “euro puddings”, a definition which is said to describe the disappearance of diversity? The term “universalism” (universalismo) is supposed to underestimate or ignore the diversity of cultures, through the common denominator approach, and to lead to simplicity. But because here in Europe, prejudice has always been in our way, why don’t we just use a different term and try to look in a positive way at what we have and what we could have even more of ? So what about the third way between Haddington and Fukuyama, “cosmopolitism”, a term which has been recently “rediscovered” by German sociologist Ulrich Beck in his book “Rower in the Global Age”?

Cosmopolitism is, other than globalism or universality which tend to be one-dimensional and thus negative terms, the attitude which means the acceptance of the others as different but equal, and thus includes them and profits from their diversity. (Which was by the way the main point of dispute between Aristotle and his own student, Alexander the Great: In contradiction to his teacher, the latter considered Greeks and the so-called Barbarians, who meant everybody else, as equal, and did not seek to dictate Greek culture, but looked for the dialogue and enrichment of different cultures: cosmopolitism.) This is especially important in modern day Europe, as the national and the trans-national become more and more difficult to define, based on the fact that every state has an augmenting number of people with mixed origins and cultures. The idea of cosmopolitism starts in ancient Greece and is the marriage of two words: cosmos (world) and polis (city). Cosmos in the sense that we are all part of the human kind and polis in the sense that we are all also members of different countries and nations, and all have our own special cultural idiosyncrasy. I will close this very important bracket by daring to pronounce a thesis, which I personally find very inspiring: The chance of European screenwriting lies not in its universality, but in its cosmopolitism.

So what did Aristotle mean by that which has been translated as the universals, if not what we have come to see as a universal story?

Drama uses the specific and unique mythological plot in order to transfer and open up the universals to everybody, even if in different degrees. The «??????? », the universals, are something, which is

underneath, which is the basis of the dramatic text, the codified meaning. The aim of a work of art is knowledge of the universals and not their mimesis, as well as the satisfaction, which comes from such knowledge. Such is for Aristotle the soul of drama. Without it, “the best” drama cannot exist. It is not only the basis of drama’s organized plot, but also the field for the compositional abilities of the writer.

In film, what Aristotle described as the universals is what I call the emotional theme. It represents a general human emotion and gives to the screenplay an internal unity, which is further than and above structure, and in fact makes up a structure of its own, as we will discuss in the next inspirational lecture. It refers as much to the classic dramatic structure as to the so-called epic structure as well as to other alternative storytelling forms. In fact in such forms the dramatic theme is even more important than in classical structure, as plot tends to be too weak or even non-existent.

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The emotional theme in a screenplay can be best compared with the main theme in a musical piece. We could even call it an emotional or directive motif (“Leitmotiv”). So whilst the goal of the character in connection to the plot defines structure, that is, the mechanics of a story, the dramatic theme is responsible for the unconscious part of the story.

What is important is the concentration on one theme, because differently than in novels or other literary forms, in screenplay, whenever we have more than one theme, these themes function as opponent powers, which finally weaken each other.

The dramatic theme is connected with the main character’s need – this means that whenever there is more than one character, they share the same need and of course the theme, which as said before in alternative storytelling functions as the only unity basis.

Such definition of theme has consequences: the audience cannot name the theme, but it feels it. The writer does not choose the theme consciously but unconsciously – his/her theme finds him or her. Very often it is one theme, which occupies us creatively, for most of our lives. In a certain way we could talk about the thematic identity of a screenwriter, which is not the same as what we call the artistic/aesthetic “signature”. The theme represents more than any43

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thing else the screenwriter and his/her attitude towards life and its big issues: love, death, betrayal etc.

which provoke, which interest us, which shake us out of our everyday state of mind, and which widen the phasma, or spectrum, of our experience, which is an experience in itself. This does not sound like the standard well-structured blockbuster film, does it? But it also does not sound like the standard inert, symbolic European movie.

For me, it is the definition of what European screenwriting can achieve, should try to achieve, and indeed sometimes does achieve.

We’re not as bad as the box office says. But we can get better and that without betraying our true natures.

As the great theatre theoretician Gustav Freytag writes, the writer’s personality defines in drama more than in any other art form the energy, and it also has the biggest influence upon the material’s formation. And this does not only concern the morals of a piece, but also the technique and the emotions, which it provokes and transfers.

The screenwriter is also the one who should decide how the story ends. Even if it is an open end, the end demonstrates a certain attitude of the story’s creator towards his/her dramatic theme. If this is different than the rest of the piece, then it will feel “fake”.

As, in the best of cases, the dramatic theme appears during the screenplay’s development, and as it comes from the unconscious, we must see it as the reason for our decision to tell the concrete story and as the connection with our personal story and our creative sensibility. Which is why one of the most difficult places to start, is the theme. The only way we can approach writing with the dramatic theme as a starting point, is the thematic couple approach of the opposites. Everything else seems to lead to essay writing and not to functioning, emotional storytelling.

The theme is not considered as substantial to screenplay structure. It is true that there are many films, which have no emotional theme. But a film with an emotional theme has a structure, which is above the structure, which plot offers. It also has something else which makes some movies feel different than the others, which creates waves, which moves our minds and our hearts, which makes us remember them long after we’ve seen them: it has soul. And, yes, it is what Aristotle described as the best drama, as the “excellent”, the “most successful” drama. Certainly not superficial, in the sense that it distracts us from our real problems, in the sense of amusement, of passing entertainment, of diversion.

Aristotle defines success neither by artistic self-fulfilment nor by commercial means, but in terms of the degree of influence dramatic writing can have upon its audience. What he clearly means is satisfaction, both intellectual and emotional – which asks for stories 44

While looking for the decisive highest “science” or “art”, Plato looks at and criticizes the art of writing, of “word making” (Politeia, 289c 7). What he accepts is that “the concrete art of the word cannot be the highest art, the cause of well-being”, while in Phaedro we read that only oral dialectics bring the highest well-being which is humanly achievable (277a 3). The reason is that writing is open to interpretation and can never create the satisfaction of getting close to the truth, as live dialogue does. Plato knows what he’s talking about: his writings have been the source of many a wrong interpretation.

In direct comparison, Aristotle, having as his criterion the upgraded definition of mimesis, accepts the existence of literature as a positive factor in human life, because it enriches knowledge and widens human experience. He accepts that learning can bring the feeling of “hedony”, i.e. of happiness, of fulfilment, of satisfaction, which means that logic and emotion are equal in their seeking of knowledge.

This brings us to the third element, which, after the fact that storytelling is supposedly bringing us away from reality and the element of causal coherence, makes up the three-piece argument with which Aristotle managed to get around or to reconstruct Plato’s arguments. Ironically these three steps of the argument are also the three basic arguments against the Aristotelian approach of cinematic narration, seemingly resulting in the creation of alternative storytelling forms. The third element concerns the scientifically and artistically contradictory Aristotelian term of catharsis (see E. Belfiore: “Tragic Pleasures. Aristotle on Plot and Emotion”, 1992, as well as D.R. White: “A Sourcebook on the Catharsis Controversy”, 1984).

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In the famous ninth chapter of the Poetics, happiness is named as tragedy’s utmost goal, while in the sixth chapter pity and fear are said to be the basic feelings through which we can achieve happiness and which lead to the catharsis. Which means that enjoyment (what we have come to name entertainment) has a double face: it is about knowledge but it is also about emotions. Aristotle is not the first one to point this out: in the Odyssey, the Sirens tell the hero that whoever listens to their song goes back to his country, full of joy and knowledge. In tragedy, the audience realizes the negative emotions (of shamelessness, of fearlessness and of aggression), fears that the painful and shameful incidents could endanger them and their own people, and feels sorry for the troubled hero. The audience also knows that whatever is happening is not happening in reality, but is instead a mimesis of things real. This security distance gives one the chance to think about the human condition, to accept that pain and unhappiness are an inseparable part of human life and to erase the extreme and arrogant feelings, which are supposed to house in every human being, even subconsciously.

may become undone. This is certainly a very moralistic way of looking at the world, and it is certainly not the ancient Greek world, where the sins of the fathers visit upon the children, even generations afterwards, and where the hero is punished for his sins; understandably a much darker way of looking at life. But it is also not Shakespeare. The scepticism towards the Hollywood “Weltanschauung” and certainly towards the premise that people can take their fate in their own hands has lead to strong negative reactions against the three-act-structure or indeed any form of structure, as filmmakers wrongly tend to identify structure with a moralistic and patronizing approach in storytelling.

That security distance was not enough for modern Hollywood drama – this is how full restoration has come in the door, in the form of the so-called “happy end”, which mostly means the punishment of the guilty person and the triumph of goodness and justice: welcome to the dream industry. So that is perhaps how we came to connect Aristotle with morality, and why many avant-garde filmmakers treat commercial films as something, which is basically far away from reality. And this is also why certain blockbusters give us the feeling of superficiality, as they have no emotional theme or as they betray their emotional theme.

Now, is dreaming so bad? It certainly is comforting, and it states that good intentions will triumph, that the world is understandable, consequent, easy, and that it responds to goodness and truth. If we feel this way, then it is probably our world. If we feel this way, then it will probably show in the emotional structure. But if we don’t feel this way, then we’re in trouble. Because this life approach also means that external incidents can never happen without a reason.

The hero’s personality must call for them: story is nothing else than a lesson for the main character. In the three-act-structure your fate is not only literally in your hands, but if you are eager to accept your mistakes, then the consequences of whatever you may have done, 46

We have discussed the idea of emotional theme creating a nonfragmentary unity that is stronger than plot and which may build a structure of its own – and indeed does, both in classic and alternative storytelling forms. We have argued that Aristotle saw emotional theme as the structuring soul of the drama, which we will address in more detail in the next inspirational lecture. Last but not least we have tried to set the record straight on the issue of the interpretation of “entertaining” and “moral”, and to put them into context.

This is a lot, still: it is impossible to realize and profit from the whole extent of Plato’s and Aristotle’s contributions, both concerning the philosophical discussion about screenwriting and filmmaking, which as I said is directly connected with the way we try to write (every single avant-garde movement had a theory), as well as concerning the practice of creative process, without referring to a last big conflict between the teacher and the student. As I mentioned, Plato draws a clear line between the emotional and the intellectual world: this division also concerns the poet i.e. the writer as the creator of the story.

Plato (Ion, 534b) basically suggests that the poet does not create consciously but is conquered by godly mania and that while he composes his oeuvre, he reaches a state of ecstasy. As I mentioned above, Plato uses this as the basis of his argument that the poet’s creation has thus not the same knowledge content status with the products of other professions, and that the myth is universal and does not offer any knowledge, so it cannot be included in the highest sciences. In a funny way, what he used as the beginning of his argument against poetry, later made the artists and gurus of cre47

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ative writing and the creative process in general, to name him as their first teacher.

Edgar Allan Poe in his “Philosophy of Composition”, where he speaks of writing as of something which has the precision of mathematics – he thus represents the Aristotelian approach, which has so much influenced writers like Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Broch and Gottfried Benn, while Arthur Rimbaud brings back the mythological and platonic image of the ecstatic poet and shows the way for the expressionists and surrealists of the 20th century.

On the other hand, Aristotle sees the probable plot composition as the writer’s utmost task. In other words Aristotle argues that the key characteristic is fictionality, provided it confirms to the rules of probability. By stating this, Aristotle describes the creative process as a technical process, as a craft which can be taught, and which concerns solely the left-brain half. It is the audience’s enjoyment of poetry and not the poet’s self-expression or the seeking for the truth, which is the main cause and task of poetry.

In his effort to contradict his teacher, Aristotle refuses to accept a metaphysical origin in the creative process. For Aristotle poetry comes from talent, which can be formed (poeta doctus), and not from enthusiasm – in fact, whenever ecstasy enters, poetry stops.

So he gives us the rules of how drama functions and what is the effect on the audience. On the contrary, Plato starts from enthusiasm and argues that poetry cannot be born before logic leaves the poet (poeta vates).

Focusing upon the effect of drama on the audience has lead to the so-called dictatorship of the audience, as writers are asked to consider what the audience may tolerate, and whether what they write may be too difficult, tiring or disturbing, which means unacceptable. This again is immediately connected to the fact that cinema is, compared to other art forms, the most expensive, both in production as in distribution. It is not at all strange that all the innovative cinema movements have produced their films with very low budgets.

But doesn’t emotional theme also have an influence upon the audience? Certainly. Gustav Freytag even went as far as stating that the audience post-creates while watching drama. But, the creation of emotional theme has as little to do with a conscious, technical process, as creative writing has as a whole. Does this mean that we do not need to learn the craft, to exercise the rules, that we do not need our left-brain half while writing? We certainly do.

Still, although Plato and Aristotle represent such extremes they have never been seen in the ancient world as not combinable.

Indeed, it is essential to use both ways of thought – the chaos and the order. In the method of creative screenwriting we use the techniques of improvisation and of dialectics, the latter meaning that the answer is being achieved through a series of questions, a technique which is being used in psychology as well as in mathematics, assuming that the answers and the story already inhabit the screenwriter’s mind. It is that part of the work which is based upon the notions of imagination, the unconscious, emphasis, emotion and upon creative “ecstasy”. But we also use structure and storytelling techniques for further development and for re-writing.

What truly defines classicism is the idea that art is mostly technique, a craft, as well as the existence of strict rules, in the frame of which human creativity can evolve. The conflict and subsequent synthesis of chaos and order, as well as the contradiction between research-mimesis, imagination-logic, unconsciousness-planning, ecstasy-communication, emotion-distance, child-adult, is not something new in storytelling: Schiller, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, to name but a few, have written a lot about it. It is not even new in cinema – it has just been limited in theoretical ideological discussions and it mostly goes down to the acceptance or refusal of the rules, which have come to be known but are mostly not Aristotle’s “rules”.

Through their conflict the two giants have also defined the basic conflict of the creative process: this conflict has been expressed by 48

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Working with the emotional or thematic structure: Consciousness and the Screenplay

by Christina Kallas

O

ur most important job is to create an emotion. Our second most important job is to keep that emotion. These are Hitchcock’s words, in his famous interview by Francois

Truffaut.

In his book “Technique of the Drama” Gustav Freytag is referring to how “whoever has noticed the effect of tragedy on oneself”, will have come to realize, with great surprise, that he or she was both touched and unsettled by the movement and the development of the characters, and that this, in combination with the strong suspense which is created through the coherence of plot, finally would evade his emotional life. The fact that we are touched and unsettled at the same time is thus combined with a most unusual feeling of happiness, as the spectator on the one hand shares the thoughts, the mishaps and the fate of the heroes in such a vivid way, as if they were his own, and on the other hand, in the peak of his stimulation, is overcome by a feeling of unsuppressed freedom, which raises him above the pure facts.

Freytag believes that such emotional stimulation, combined with the intensity of our imaginations and with our intellectual perception, is what makes the dramatic arts so special. Music can also unsettle our emotions, perhaps even more so, but sound touches our direct feelings and does not simultaneously “move” our thinking process. Cinema has an even stronger dramatic energy than the theatre (which is all Freytag knew in his own time), because of the direct use of the image and the image’s effect on our subconscious.

So, if our most important job is to create and keep an emotion; and if the Aristotelian « ??????? » means the codified meaning, 50

which lies in the deep structure of the dramatic text, as Aristotle defined it (which, as we discussed in the inspirational lecture “Aristotle vs. Plato: The old battle of truth and story or What Aristotle has to do with European Screenwriting”, corresponds to the emotional theme or central emotion); and if the emotional life during a film has a structure; and if we are able to define this structure: Then the skeleton of the specific and special form of a script should neither be plot structure nor the hero’s journey but primarily and most importantly that emotional structure! We could even call it a thematic structure, as the emotional theme represents the central emotion and thus the core of a screenplay.

Freytag, in a most inspiring way, concludes by saying that the dramatic arts have such a big impact, not because the spectator wishes to suffer, but because he feels the need to create. In a certain way the dramatic poet “obliges” him to post-create. The spectator must bring to life the whole world of the characters, their pain and their fate, this time inside his own head. This way, although he is on the receiving end, he is simultaneously in the middle of a strong and fast creative process. The same warmness and happiness, which is inherent to the poet during creation, is what the post-creating spectator is also feeling, and this is why emotion and unsettlement, even the pain which becomes alive inside him, brings him contentment, and this is why at the end he raises above the mere facts of life.

Freytag’s somewhat younger contemporary Nietzsche called such contentment “tragic joy”, while the spectator who post-creates became “the spectator-artist”. According to him, the dramatic work allows us to present, to forebode a joy higher than the purely aesthetic one, the joy of meaning (the joy of realization that there is a design in what we experience and, because of that, perhaps also that everything in life has a meaning after all), which surpasses every pain and fear. The work of art is thus elevated to a medium of initiation in metaphysical joy, which it thus expresses. Art as a whole is invigorating, said Nietzsche, who also considered tragedy a strengthening medium, as the ancient Greeks, both the artists and the spectators, actually proved through it (most of all to themselves) that they were capable of looking into the face, and thus confirming and transforming even the most horrible situations of existence.

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Thus Nietzsche removes completely art’s old platonic conviction.

But he also confirms Aristotle and Freytag in their perceptions of drama’s ability to offer “catharsis”, to raise us above the mere facts of life. It is important to remember this in a time when “entertainment” is understood as something which should erase our thinking process but also in a time when “art”, as the other pole, is almost solely addressing our thinking process: the secret for the whole experience is in the combination, and only the combination can offer the invigorating effect of “tragic joy”.

and the transcendent, is to commit the fallacy of dualism, which runs deep through the history of Western culture, but is now (according to Ryle and others) dead and buried. Or it ought to be.

The emotional or thematic structure (other than other structure models) should mostly be sought in the spectator’s emotional reactions or in the creation of such emotion by the screenwriter; and that the structural points are connected to the emotional reactions, which shall be created together with the spectator and which are also created inside us while writing.

Still, the structural points or “joints” (as we are talking of the skeleton of emotional structure) are mostly created by instinct and not by careful planning. In the previous inspirational lecture we have discussed how the writer does not necessarily choose his/her theme consciously and that the theme is responsible for the subconscious part of the story. We have thus taken the terms conscious and subconscious as self-evident. But are they really? And what exactly are the implications while using them (as we indeed do in the method of creative screenwriting and the analysis of the emotional structure)?

Last not least, can we really learn to work with them, as we can learn to work with mythic structure and plot points? I will get to that. But first you will have to allow me a small deviation.

The recent and still current intellectual debate about the nature of human consciousness, in which old philosophical issues are being refreshed by new input from the sciences, has turned consciousness into a hot topic, with most challenging consequences. To make it simple: on the one end is the religious idea of the individual immortal soul, which in some Platonic interpretations pre-exists human birth, and on the other end is the orthodoxy (best represented by Gilbert Ryle in his influential book “The Concept of Mind”), that the human body, including the human brain which produces the phenomenon of mind, is a machine; there is no ghost, no soul or spirit, to be found in it. To distinguish between body and soul, the earthly 52

As novelist and academic David Lodge points out, psychoanalysis was always concerned with trying to understand consciousness, but its claims to be a science have been dismissed by most natural scientists, and many of its critics have regarded it as a kind of religion or substitute for religion. The current stir of scientific interest in consciousness, to which we owe most new insights – and which continues producing new insights almost by the day – has been largely encouraged by the discovery in quantum physics that an event is ultimately inseparable from its observation, undermining the assumption that science is absolutely objective and impersonal.

This and the following discoveries it has triggered, has also changed our whole view of the world: there is no absolute knowledge, as there is no absolute truth. But, it has also been encouraged by the discovery of DNA, which put biology in the driving seat of the physical sciences; or by the development of new brain-scanning techniques in medicine; or indeed by the surge of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory in the 70s and 80s, disseminated by brilliant popular science writers like Dawkins, which offered a comprehensive materialist account of human nature; and last not least by the spectacular development and advances of research in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

So, for instance, AI starts with the assumption that the mind or consciousness is like software to the brain’s hardware, and tries to design architectures on which the operation of the human brain might be simulated. One can only imagine the influence regarding the creative process and the techniques of its stimulation.

David Lodge, being a novelist, argues that the novel is man’s most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time. Challenge that! And realize the importance of what we are doing, as writers, whether it is a novel or the arguably even more powerful “filmmaking on paper” (as Frank Daniel used to call screenwriting).

A good deal of the recent scientific work on consciousness has indeed stressed its essentially narrative character. Antonio Damasio, in his most recent book “The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness”, lays great emphasis on 53

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this: “Telling stories,” he says, “is probably a brain obsession… I believe the brain’s pervasive aboutness is rooted in the brain’s storytelling attitude.” Daniel Dennett, in his book “Consciousness Explained”, says something very similar: “Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others – and ourselves – about who we are.” As spiders make webs and beavers build dams, so we tell stories.

Let’s take a film example, Vera Drake (written and directed by Mike Leigh): the first stop in our emotional journey as spectators is at the point where, in a classical structure, we would be expecting the inciting incident or hook in the middle of the first act, approximately 15 minutes from the film’s beginning. Mike Leigh’s film starts with an extremely slow dramatic rhythm and rather low-key style, which gives us the impression that we are observing the characters´ everyday lives. Then suddenly we are witnessing the rape of a girl on her first rendezvous. When later (at the time where in a classic structure we would have the first turning point) we are witnessing Vera Drake operating an abortion at the house of another girl, we are as spectators ready to accept this experience, both morally and emotionally. As we have witnessed a possible reason for this pregnancy, which we couldn’t have liked or considered acceptable otherwise, we now take in Vera Drake’s action, as an act of helping out somebody in need. The rape was an emotional cold shower: so the abortion, even if the two girls are different persons, is connected in our hearts (brains? souls? whatever you may wish to call it…) directly with this first experience. In a classic plot structure, the two girls would have had to be the same person, in order to serve the cause-and-effect logic. The story would have been probably told through the eyes of the victim or through the eyes of Vera who would have been confronted with a moral dilemma: should she help or not? She would have probably first refused the call and then experienced something, which would have persuaded her to help the girl. And so on. In this story, the two incidents have an emotional coherence, and function as structural points, as they are impressively enough positioned at exactly the “right” moments. Their emotional impact is probably even stronger, because of the mild and documentaristic style of the narration.

While developing what I have come to call the method of creative screenwriting and the theory of what I call emotional or thematic structure as the corresponding analysis tool, I have focused on how film (and screenplay as film on paper) represent consciousness; how the consciousness and the unconscious of a creative writer do their work; how the analysis through emotional theme and emotional structure, which is based largely on Aristotle’s theories about the «??????? », can infer the nature of this process; how the creative writer can also do so by self-interrogation (a better tool, especially for beginning writers or for any writer who can afford to do it, is indeed group work and what I have come to call the dialectic questioning of a scene or a story).

Each one of us has a functioning storytelling instinct: the stories, which come out of an apparently random process, will be structurally whole. The storytelling instinct is something which we already have as kids and which we can try out, by telling a story to a child and noting the child’s reactions: we will realize that while we tell the story, we will speed up or slow down, once we see that our little spectator has stopped to follow, either because he or she is bored or because we gave him/her too quickly too much cognitive or emotional information. In fact what we simulate is the process of rewriting. The analysis of the emotional structure of our screenplay will help us correct our rhythm, where this is necessary – something we cannot do and which we also should not do while writing the first draft.

So what about stories which do not apparently follow the classic model of storytelling, whether this is three act, eight sequences, 22 steps or a hero’s cycle? Do structural points continue to exist? Yes, they do. But they serve different functions.

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Did Mike Leigh plan them to be 15 and 30 minutes after the film’s beginning? I suppose not. I suppose they are there because of his narrative instinct – it works in the same way as when we are telling a story to a child or a joke to our friends. A good musician isn’t thinking of rhythm while playing, his/her music still has rhythm. As Hitchcock said, our first job is to create an emotion, our second to keep it. How we do this, is irrelevant.

I have already referred to the background of the Aristotelian theories and their different interpretations in my first inspirational lecture.

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Aristotle sees drama as a coin with two sides: one side is its creation, where the poet’s main task is the probable construction of a plot, while the other side is the level of effectiveness, where the spectator is the focus of interest. In other words Aristotle is arguing for a poetics of effectiveness. As I explained in the first inspirational lecture, he had his reasons for stressing plot construction as the poet’s major task, as well as, from the point of view of invention, to stress the enjoyment of a work of art as the main and defining measure. Besides, for Aristotle, enjoyment is twofold and undividable, being enjoyment of knowledge and of emotion, while it is unacceptable to ignore his thoughts about the emotional theme (« ??????? ») as the basis of a story and as the a ????? »). cause of familiar pleasure («??????

dimension, which we can also analyze in relation to the plot and the hero’s journey. Still, it may be that plot or the hero’s journey are more important in certain films, thus resulting in a weak emotional structure. On the other hand, it is characteristic that for instance films, which have more than one main character and many equal plotlines (films like Magnolia, Happiness and Lantana), rely especially on their strong emotional or thematic structure.

Still, it is a fact, that the idea that probable plot construction is the poet’s major task, which means a whole, closed and unbreakable unity with a well-studied architectural design, as it has been indeed embraced and promoted by mass cinema production, often leads to dramaturgic predictability, especially if it is being used as a starting point for the screenwriter. Dramaturgic predictability has become identical with superficial entertainment, entertainment that leaves no traces.

But how big is finally the spectrum, which can be covered by analysis of the emotional or thematic structure?

But: the Aristotelian enjoyment does not mean superficial entertainment, in the sense of detachment, distraction, passing diversion. It also does not mean exclusively cognitive satisfaction, as it is the pleasure of poetry and not the expression of the poet or the discovery of the truth, which is the autonomous prime reason of creation. Which means, as we already discussed, that pleasure should be both cognitive and emotional: That presupposes stories which provoke, which create interest, which disturb our everyday routines and which open up the spectrum of our experience, which are last not least an experience of their own. And which thus have a strong emotional structure.

It is important to point out that this does absolutely not mean that popular Hollywood films have no emotional structure. The analysis of emotional structure is another method for analyzing screenplays, which as a tool seems to cover a bigger spectrum of screenplay creation. In screenplays, which have all the construction points of the classic storytelling form, the emotional or thematic structure, if it does exist (and in most films it does), offers another 56

The director becomes automatically the first recipient of the emotional structure of a screenplay – through his/her art he/she can add or indeed also deduct from the initial dramatic energy. This is a huge issue, and cannot be dealt with in the frame of this lecture.

One of the biggest theoreticians of screenplay theory is as far away as possible from what we have come to call the Aristotelian rules (whether we are right or wrong in calling them that, is another question which I addressed in my first inspirational lecture). He is at the same time the big theoretician of Neorealismo (a term created

by Umberto Barbaro, who was teaching cinema at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome): I am talking about Cesare Zavattini. Zavattini was the screenwriter of no less than 54 movies, from 1940 till 1992. There is surely no second phenomenon of that scale in cinematic history, which has had such an influence on cinematic dramaturgy in the whole world, as Italian Neorealism. For many, Neorealism meant the emancipation from the Aristotelian austerity in storytelling. For others it meant the departure from commercial cinema and the beginning of the process, which eventually lead to the loss of the audience.

“We should not invent situations and turn them into reality by giving them the image of truth, but form things as they are, so that they represent their meaning on their own”, writes Zavattini.

“Cinema’s real purpose is not to tell stories (myths)”. He thus gives the theoretic basis for an alternative storytelling, which some theoreticians, to distinguish it from dramatic storytelling, will call “epic”.

In fact some have ended up describing everything, which is not formalistic and moral, as epic. The paradox is that cinematic schools of thought like Neorealism are in their nature much more moral than 57

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Aristotelian theory ever was, as they indeed start with a moral thesis. What is most significant is that causal coherence of myth has next to no vital importance in Neorealism as it indeed does in dramatic storytelling.

without improvisation. This is how a special psychological realism is created in scenic “microdramaturgy”. And it is a method which is currently being used by many young filmmakers and which is indeed bearing some interesting fruits.

And still: the films of Italian Neorealism, as all the films that follow that tradition, tell stories. The only thing, which is different, is the way in which they are telling them. The plot points do not have to be caused by each other, but build incidents, which are largely connected which each other through the emotional theme. The heart of the drama goes on beating: only the conflict is not between characters, but between situations. Where plot was, is now situation, the incidents. There are still construction points, but they serve different functions – which is a slight variation, because it is often more cognitive than emotional, but still the same principle we have discussed earlier, using Mike Leigh’s film as an example.

But: The touchstone of the real cineaste, the ticket for entering in the holy temple of avant-garde or simply the proof for cinematic progress, continues to be an aversion to the classic storytelling cinema, the traditional dramaturgical prototypes and storytelling structures. That aversion seems to have been born simultaneously with cinema art. The Russian pioneers admired none other than the American Griffith, the inventor of introvert montage, who shocked everybody in 1916 with his film Intolerance. Griffith was the first cinematographer who turned his focus onto the characters´ thoughts – as his inspiration source for parallel montage and close shot he refers to the novels of Charles Dickens. Griffith’s goal was to do exactly what some still claim to be doing: to transport a meaning without a story. He wanted to attract the attention to the eternal conflict of suppression and justice and to ask for more tolerance, through the abstract philosophical generalization and through the techniques of metaphor. But metaphor, which in lyrics has enormous powers, is in audiovisual storytelling a weakness: the power of the image creates very concrete associations in the spectator’s mind, which means that the image can impossibly lose its meaning, just to become form and finally a symbol. (Please see also Aristotle’s “Poetics”, especially 1459a 5-13 and 1459b 35, as well as G.R.Boys-Stones’ 2003 book “Metaphor, Allegory and the Classical Tradition”.) So, following on the steps of Griffith, filmmakers Eisenstein and Dowshenko (and Dsiga Wertow in the documentary field), sacrifice the storytelling elements for the cause of metaphor and symbolic montage.

It is for this art of poetics that Hegel wrote in his “Aesthetics”: “Through plot all leads to internal character, to goal, to morale, to intentions. Through situation it is the external side of things which takes up the role which belongs to it (character, goal etc.), as objective reality defines the form but also forms a big part of the content”; and – of course – eventually of the characters. This is because the conditions are as active as the characters, and sometimes even more so. As with Brecht, it is the conditions, which make people, and not the other way round. Such is the credo of the neorealists.

But is there an objective reality? Or, can we still believe in an objective reality? Let us think of quantum physics and the current discussion and research of consciousness.

Still, the neorealist credo has been and still is largely embraced by many filmmakers. Some, like Ken Loach and indeed also Mike Leigh, have developed it further into the creative process of their films, especially in terms of the writing of screenplays. The same applies to some of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers. Eric Rohmer developed his own method of screenwriting, in order to get as close to reality as this is possible, especially in relation to characters and dialogues. Rohmer has the actors improvise the scenes he has thought of and records the improvisation. The result is what the screenwriter will partially include in his/her screenplay, which will become the basis of the final script, which will be followed this time 58

In some countries (like, funny enough, in Greece and certainly not in the former Soviet Union), the poetic cinematic language whose foundations have been laid especially by Dowshenko, still has its fans. It is still considered as the only pure and revolutionary storytelling form, which may be an explanation to why there are so few classic films, which come out of some (mostly European) countries.

It is also considered, wrongly, as a testimony of reaction to the universalism of American cinema and to dramaturgic predictability. The truth of the matter is (1) something that has been tried in the begin59

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ning of cinematic history cannot be thought of as revolutionary anymore, (2) there are a lot of “crimes” which are being committed in the name of poetic cinema, which are anything else than poetic and which are very far away from Dowschenko´s intentions and indeed works, and (3, and most importantly) storytelling is not an American invention.

But this shouldn’t predispose us: storytelling cinema prevailed over each era’s tendencies and fashions, even the repeated one of putting on the pedestal again and again the fundamental expression of the self, as the only higher artistic and moral value, for which often no screenplay is needed. Such tendencies are often not far from Plato: drama is lower than history, subsequently story is less than the truth, and storytellers are nothing else than condemnable liars and seducers of people. The word “fable” derives from the word “fariboles”, which means something unimportant. The cycle is closed: the filmmakers of lyrical storytelling are so far away from myth making as this is possible. (An interesting note is that in Greece, the country of Plato and Aristotle, feature films are called mythoplasia, which means myth making. There is documentary i.e. reality and there is myth-making.)

The most important element of the self-proclaimed poetic or lyrical films (some use the term art house, which is even more often misused than the term poetic, to excuse shortcomings or in the best case to define anything which is not classic or genre and everything which has no audience or at the most a small one) is the avoidance of logic in storytelling, which is being replaced by lyrical pathos. But the poetic extravagances are in conflict with reality, which is still created through photographic depiction. Besides, the importance of character is being replaced by the importance of the filmmaker: the filmmaker’s goals are of greater interest to him than the characters´ motivation. The result is an extremely cognitive form of storytelling. The poetic school of thought eventually addresses and concerns more the other filmmakers, especially the Western European ones, than its audience. Focused on the ego of the “poet”, lyricism fails to offer the needed distance or transposition, which is required for the construction, the arrangement and the enactment of a story – the self-centered lyrical cinematic storytelling only functions on a personal level. It is the storytelling of self-depiction and of self-ideology.

The cinema screen is certainly the most attractive mirror of our times. For the egocentric storyteller it is a challenge. But at the same time it disappoints him, as he is forced to realize that the films, which touch their audience and which in some cases, are the connecting link of whole generations and which thus defy time, are not necessarily the personal testimonies. The uncontested winner of cinematic art, at least in terms of connection to the audience, continues to be the dramatic storytelling form, the so-called storytelling cinema – to it also belongs, but certainly not only, the classic Hollywood cinema of broad consumption (which today may feel dramaturgically predictable and may thus remind us, at least in its biggest part, of the 19th century theatre that should we still remember it, would make us realize the parallel, as it also repeated characters and situations with very few variations).

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The refusal of formalistic order and logic has also lead, even early in cinema history, to extreme storytelling experiments: Such are the films Entre’ Act by René Clair and Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel. In these, narration is not the result of psychological thought, neither the result of metaphorical codification of messages. It happens haphazardly, in fact by elimination of anything, which means anything.

For the sake of completeness, one should not forget the mixed forms, as for instance some of Kusturica’s screenplays, who in 1995 manages with Underground (written by Dusan Kovacevic and Emir Kusturica) to break the intellectualism of historic parable by achieving detachment through grotesque comedy. Such films make it evident: the school of lyrical screenwriting concerns mostly clear and simple stories, as symbols and metaphors eventually lead to simplification. It is apparently impossible to transport people and incidents with more complex and complicated natures into the image and sound medium, with that way of narration.

And still Jean Cocteau wrote: “The poetry of cinema derives from the unusual relations between things and images.” A filmmaker who seems to embrace such an idea is Andrej Tarkowskij, who calls these relations the “poetic logic” of a film. For Tarkowskij, the most important and finally most loyal to the nature of audiovisual storytelling is “the representation of the logic of human thought”. This is what will define the order of what happens, both in the time of 61

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Working with the emotional or thematic structure...

invention as in the montage, and which will create the whole which is a film. For Tarkowskij the poetic logic is closer than the logic of classic dramaturgy, by which he means the Aristotelian dramaturgy of causal coherence, to the way thinking is functioning and to the way life is functioning in general. Now, how close is this to emotional or thematic structure? (I must confess I rather like the term “poetic logic”.)

in front of their eyes a tragic case, and the manic ones, who by losing the control over their consciousness, communicate with an unfamiliar situation by intuition, and based on ecstasy”. In 1448, 21-3 we read: “Those who are built from their nature with a special inclination to these, by developing them, have created poetry through improvisations”. Improvisation is thus linked to the loss of control over consciousness. Even if Aristotle’s remarks are sometimes controversial, Aristotle tells us that poetry, drama is teachable, as any other manual art and introduces the term “improvisation” as one way of producing poetry.

Certainly cinema’s aim cannot be just to tell a story. There are other means for that, but, as in theatre, story is one of the elements, which serve emotion i.e. the emotional reaction of the spectator. Still, it is one of the most important elements.

One thing is for sure: for the analysis but also for the synthesis of every alternative screenwriting form (and by this I do not mean films which sacrifice story completely, but films which are not structured in a classical “one hero, one plot, chronological order, plot causality” way), the rules of most of the screenwriting theories seem irrelevant. What emotional structure does, is that each (successful) work of cinema, whether it is constructed in an Aristotelian way or not, has it. The term successful does not concern the commercial or artistic success but the capacity of a film as a creation to reach, to communicate with its audience, even if it is a small one. In this way, even if the audience lacks the code, which will allow the access to the intellectual content of a film, narration functions for emotional reasons.

It is in this context that the technique of improvisation is most important. This technique naturally presupposes a group. But what is improvisation?

As we discussed in the first inspirational lecture, Aristotle went to great lengths to prove that poetry is not transcedental. Because if it were, his thesis that his goal is the production of good (i.e. effective) poetry, which means that poetry is teachable, as any other (manual) art is and that it follows certain rules, would not be supportable. Still, Aristotle (1455a 32 etc.) accepts that “productive imagination, which is appropriate for poetic creation is owned by two sorts or people: The brilliant ones, who are adaptable (malleable) and who have in their natures the rare capability to enter other people’s situations, and are therefore in the position to bring 62

Improvisation has long had its place in music (starting by Indian and African music and leading to the jam sessions of jazz music), in dance and of course also in acting, starting with Commedia dell´Arte (or whatever we know of Commedia dell’Arte) and leading to the Happenings of the Living Theatre. Improvisation is a technique especially important to Stanislavski’s method, which was the basis of “The method” by Lee Strasberg. (For the sake of reference: Strasberg created his method in the 1930s and -40s, after he got acquainted with Stanislavski’s work in the American Laboratory Theatre, as the charge of Maria Uspenskaja. Cheryl Crawford, Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis founded the Actors Studio in 1947, where actors were educated according to Strasberg’s method; he managed the Studio himself from 1951 to 1982.)

Improvisation is last but not least extremely important to Keith Johnstone’s method. He started in the 1960s in England with the Writers´ Group and went on later with the theatre group The Theatre Machine and elevated improvisation to an art, also re-discovering it as a method for writing. Improvisation is a most constructive way to tap on endless inventing resources, both from our right brain hemisphere, as well as from our bodies and our psychologies. And it is like walking into a dark forest: you know who you are and what has happened but you don’t know where you are going.

Improvisation, together with the dialectic questioning of a scene and the dual thematic approach are the cornerstones of the method of creative screenwriting, as they best let the creative writer’s consciousness and the unconscious do their work. Correspondingly, the analysis through emotional theme and structure can best infer the nature of this process.

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Consciousness has definitely a dimension of depth, which is the task of cinema, as of literature and art in general, to explore. As David Lodge points out and as we have seen above in our excursion to poetic cinema, paradoxically the effort to plumb these depths, to get closer to psychological reality, entailed an abandonment of the traditional properties and strategies of realism: in film as in literature the traditional plot, which demonstrates that all effects have their logical causes, is often discarded or destabilized, and poetic devices of symbolism and leitmotif and intertextual allusion are used instead to give formal unity to the representation of experience, which is itself seen as essentially chaotic. This is paradoxical, because writers thus give up on an essential dimension, suspense or momentum which is given through coherence of plot and which, as we saw, was an essential dimension both for Aristotle as for Freytag (and Nietzsche) in their definitions of the post-creating spectator’s joy and fulfillment. It is as if we do not realize that we need all dimensions to have the full and invigorating experience, which makes cinema so very special. And as if for some reason we decide to give up on our brain’s storytelling attitude.

Last not least: while in literature there are limitations, as verbal language is essentially linear, cinema, and screenwriting, as the youngest form of writing, are after all best adapted to representing consciousness. Perhaps, as consciousness research goes on, we will in one way be better equipped to describe what Aristotle, Freytag and Nietzsche tried to tell us by terms like “familiar pleasure” and “tragic joy”. In that sense, as in the sense of expanding cinematic storytelling, there is still a lot to expect and a lot to try out. As with consciousness, cinema is still a field with no borders.

Beginning the middle at the end: Some notes on non-linear narratives

by Franz Rodenkirchen “Every film has a beginning, a middle and an end – but not necessarily in that order”.

This famous quote from Jean-Luc Godard is often used to liberate the scriptwriter from the straitjacket of the “one hero, one goal, rising action” three-act paradigm. And does it not indeed feel liberating to toy around with the laws of narrative that seem so clearly defined and so difficult to ignore? Well, I guess it does, and for some reason there seems to exist a kind of silent agreement, according to which anything that challenges the dominance of the paradigm is more fresh, more daring and more artistic. Some even claim it is also more European (as opposed to American, of course).

In the following text I want to explore different ways to organize film-narratives that are situated, to a greater or lesser degree, outside the governing idea of chronology and/or linearity. We will see whether this calls for abandoning elements of classic structure altogether, and also whether linearity is intrinsically tied with the 3-actparadigm. And one of my central questions will be how the means relate to the end(s). Are there stories that seem more suited to be told in non-linear fashion than others?

In my work as a script editor I have come to be convinced of one thing, more than anything else: every story needs its very own form.

It is my task to help find it and bring it to bear. And no generalized concept (no matter how conventional or unconventional) should ever govern the crucial decisions to be made about one singular script/story.

This individual approach unfortunately means that, while we can surely learn a lot by looking at how other scripts and the respective

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films are made, whatever insights we might gather there, they can only be generalized to a certain degree.

most cases where celluloid is still used) recorded/projected at 24 frames per second. The physical script also requires linearity. There is a page one, followed by a page two, and so on, until we have reached the end.

I am all for using whatever narrative means are necessary to help a specific story achieve an emotional impact. Because non-linear narrative is by definition putting the focus on structure (not on character), I am going to say right away where my biggest problem lies: some types of non-linear narratives seem so elegant and attractive in their structure that the story to be told gets easily overwhelmed by it. There are quite a few films, which deliver a self-indulgent game of structural virtuosity and end up with a very expensive equivalent of a crossword puzzle.

I say this so provocatively because I am aware of the fascination of non-linear narrative and how much it can keep an audience spellbound, as long as the film is running. It is only afterwards, when trying to make sense of what one has just seen, that the potential pitfalls become apparent.

It is for the reasons mentioned above that I suggest asking one question first, before getting lost deep in the maze of the non-linear: is it possible to tell the story chronologically / in a linear fashion? If yes, why not do it? What is to be gained from choosing a non-linear form? What are we aiming at? Is the gain rather of an intellectual or an emotional kind? Are we expecting our audience to mostly reflect on the story or identify with the character(s)? Or even both?

This is the moment where the emotional theme plays a crucial role again. Especially those stories, which need to disrupt the flow of narrative, which demand an alternative structure, can benefit from a theme to function as a unifying element to prevent the story from falling into pieces. But it goes without saying that maybe the best choices are those, where a specific structure can be used to enhance the theme. An example would be Irréversible by Gaspar Noé, or Before the Rain by Milcho Manchevski.

Time is also used to distinguish between the epic and the dramatic, since Aristotle defined tragedy in opposition to the epic through the different kinds of time portrayed (when speaking of epic or episodic forms of film narration, we already implicitly acknowledge the important role of time). According to Aristotle, the tragedy (drama) covers a short continuous stretch of time.

Everything important happens during that timeframe. The drama unfolds, complicates and reaches crisis and denouement, all within a short period of time. Whatever the intention of the narrator, the message must be delivered through his choice of a timeframe.

It is the part representing the whole.

If we cut out a part from the dramatic story, we lack an important piece of information, necessary to follow the development of the story.

The epic can deal more freely with time. It can cover years and years, have long ellipses in between, periods we do not learn of and do not need to.

It is the whole represented by parts.

If we cut out a part of the epic, we also lack something. But the narrative does not rely as much on the interdependence of consecutive pieces, and therefore we might still be able to get and understand most of what was intended.

Time shapes all

In terms of causality, we could also distinguish epic and dramatic form through the connection of its parts: the dramatic form says: something happens, which leads to, which leads to… while the epic form says: and then, and then, and then, ad infinitum.

The dominant factor of film is time.

“Cinema is truth – 24 times per second.” This is another famous quote by Jean-Luc Godard, pointing out that film consists of a series of distinct episodes organized in time, which are (at least in

As we know, not all forms of dramatic storytelling comply with the classic “one hero, one goal, three acts” – structure (sometimes referred to as “the paradigm”). So we must distinguish between the classic three-act drama, and other forms, that are still rather dra-

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matic than epic. As there is actually no completely epic narrative (for there is always some kind of connectedness and causal relation at least between parts), we can say that the broad spectrum between the dramatic and the epic is one of a gradual shift from a dominance of more dramatic to more epic elements.

chronological. The term “chronological” can be defined as “arranged according to the order of time”. And this definition assumes that we know the order of time to be fixed. We use calendar – and clock-time to relate to that order. Obviously, the use of ellipses and jumps in chronology is also not necessarily an indication of non-linear narration, if the movement in time is always forward (or in the same direction on a time-line), for every story works with shorter or longer ellipses, which usually are invisible (it was again Godard who made this aspect of time purposefully visible by using jump-cuts).

Linearity or non-linearity is clearly no criterion to distinguish between a dramatic and an epic story. But it seems that due to the fact that a non-linear narrative draws more attention to its structure and the way its parts are organized, we tend to perceive closeness between the non-linear and the epic (and consequently, the linear and the dramatic).

It appears to be rather difficult to escape the crucial aspects of the paradigm completely and this seems to be borne out by the fact that many works dealing with alternative dramaturgies or non-paradigmatic forms still approach and analyse their material with the paradigm in mind – used as the backdrop, against which we might be able to identify deviations.

This indicates the strength and power of the paradigm for shaping and organizing narratives in a way that is perceived as entertaining and accessible. And one can assume that this is also due to the fact that the concept of a clock-time view of causality is so prevalent. Temporal ordering clearly seems to be one of our cultural preferences with regard to what we perceive as a well-formed story.

The classic paradigm organizes the story in the present, which develops purposefully towards a clearly defined future (the goal) and the final determining event. This means that the story has a forward-thrust, it develops in a linear fashion from beginning to end, while largely respecting clock-time chronolog y.

Howard/Mabley put it like this: “One of the important jobs of the screen storyteller is to keep the audience looking forward, worrying about the future, hoping something might happen, fearing something else might happen.” (p. 74) Forward, into the future – for at least a couple of centuries, narrative has been identified with the figure of a line, a temporalised spatial figure, or a spatialization of time. Stories were assumed to flow in a time that goes in a single direction. They were largely 68

But when discussing linear and non-linear narratives, we are actually dealing with two types of time and temporality, and to differentiate them is crucial: We can distinguish between story time and narrative time (see G. Genette). While story time refers to the time of the events within the story, which might for example cover 24 hours, 9 1/2 weeks, 120 days, etc., narrative time is the time it takes to tell that story (in our case equal to the length of the movie). Narrative time is above all important in reception, for the audience. Consequently it is in this mode where we are faced with a seemingly inescapable linearity, while within the story time we can be much more free of such constraints.

The distinction between story time and narrative time ties in with another very important one, namely between ‘story’ and ‘plot’.

Story is meant to be the sequence of events in the order in which they occurred, that constitute the subject matter of the film. It refers to the actual chronology of events in a narrative, independent of the sequence in which they are narrated. The closest a film narrative ever comes to pure story is in what is termed “real time.” This would be a film without any ellipses. The TV series 24 is based on that concept of synchronicity between story time and narrative time.

Plot is the unfolding of the events in the film narrative itself. In order to create suspense and hold an audience, plot is often in a very different order to story. Some narratologists use the term discourse instead of plot. Similar to plot, discourse refers to the manipulation of the story in the presentation of the narrative.

Thinking again of 24, we immediately realise that while the sequence of time seems unbroken, there is obviously a difference between story and plot, otherwise there could be no suspense.

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This indicates that the distribution of information is a defining aspect of any narrative.

everyday assumptions about cause and effect. We are used to think in terms of the chronology of cause and effect. It rains, I get wet.

The causality-principle gives the cause logical and temporal priority over the effect. But at least since Nietzsche, people have started to question that chronology. Nietzsche said, let’s assume that someone feels a pain and therefore searches the spot where he feels it.

He finds a needle sticking in his leg and postulates a causal relation. In doing so, the chronology of perception “pain – needle” is substituted with the causal chain “needle – pain”. Nietzsche remarks, that the part of the outside world we become conscious of, only follows the effect it has had on us, and thereby is belatedly projected as its cause. The basic fact of internal experience according to Nietzsche is a cause, which is imagined after the effect has already happened.

It will also play an important role in distinguishing linear from non-linear narratives.

Cause, effect and the arrow of time Whenever we look at narratives that use a mode that is different from clock-time chronology, we automatically, intentionally or not, look at the story from the audience’s perspective. All disruptions of chronology in a narrative only work for the audience (apart from some specific cases where it is part of the set of rules that characters can move backwards and forwards in time), because the characters in any story that complies with the rules of our world cannot escape the arrow of time while living it. It is useful to remember this, for it might influence some story decisions in terms of distribution of information between audience and characters (who should know what at what time?).

On a very basic level, non-linear narrative means that information needed to understand what is going on in a film is not necessarily given in the order of its chronological occurrence. Or in the terms we have defined now: non-linear narratives are those where plot and story do not follow the same temporal order.

But as all fiction is preconceived, we always witness an unfolding past; no matter how “present” it is made to look. So we basically also know that the storyteller does have more information than we do and we anticipate that this lack of ours will gradually decrease the closer we get to the end. When we examine what a narrative provides, we find as its most important feature the sequence of events, which leads to a final event or solution. That means that the sequence of events explains this final event. As a result the narrative – its structure and purpose – is an explanation.

The assumptions that most viewers (readers) carry with regard to endings are this conditioning or instinct which leads us to follow a narrative expecting that the author will reveal his or her intended meaning somewhere up ahead, usually most explicitly at the moment of closure.

In classical Hollywood cinema plot reveals story in the end and audience expectations are met. But non-linearity challenges our 70

I think that many non-linear narratives are at least subconsciously playing up to that ambivalence between cause and effect. On one hand we are used to think and act according to a strict chronology of cause and effect, on the other our everyday experiences can question this assumption if we allow ourselves to look closely enough.

There is an emotional causality, which can override the intellect.

David Lynch is particularly apt in challenging said assumptions in his structurally complex films Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

Again, it is the audience’s perspective that counts here. The characters within the story react to their immediate reality. But it is the audience that has to juggle the different possibilities and bits of information. It could be said that non-linear narratives in general confront the audience with a much stronger insecurity, at the same time creating an emotional curiosity, asking us to suspend judgement until we have enough information to put the pieces together.

In this state we are oscillating between two modes, one clearly more intellectual (in our attempts to “make sense”), the other (hopefully) emotional, through our curiosity or actually, our hope for an ending that will intellectually reward us for our active participation and emotionally gratify us for having cared about the characters.

Re-visiting the past – anticipating the future When the arrangement of events in the plot is compared with the succession of the same events in the story, there are two clear 71

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operations that bring discordance between the two temporal orders of story and plot.

such aims at telling a story, unravel a plot and conform to the “illusionist” (dramatic) variety of cinema. The more we veer into the epic, the more structure is made visible, the less chronological disruptions appear to matter, for the pull or thrust of the narrative is deliberately reduced in favour of other narrative intentions (like continuing reflection and critical assessment).

There is a narrative maneuver that consists of evoking after the fact an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment. This is what we know as flashback, and it is a very common element in film-storytelling. Actually it is the most common technique in non-linear narratives.

While we all know how to define for example a flashback, it must be kept in mind that such definitions depend completely on the decision, which is the dominant story time. Before we have established a narrative present, it is very difficult to judge what has come before or will come later. Frequently there are scripts, which employ a voice-over that is not grounded in any “reality” within the story, despite using the voice of one of the characters from inside the story. Consequently it becomes very difficult to fix the story time (and the narrator seems to be the voice of the author…). That is why we usually find that all non-linear stories that employ voice-over narration usually indicate very early on, where the narrator is situated both spatially, as well as within the story time of the story he’s a part of.

Although we are mostly told that flashbacks betray a bad or at least mediocre scriptwriter, they are used frequently and not only by the hacks of the business. True, they often appear unnecessary, their use motivated by a too close obedience to a rule book, saying, for example, that characters need a back story (usually a back story wound) to become three-dimensional. Or the writer is so infatuated with the character that he/she becomes blind to the question, whether the story really needs that additional information. And sometimes flashbacks are used to get out of a tight spot and make up for earlier gaps in the chain of necessary information.

Usually flashbacks are meant to underline the importance of a past event for the present state of a character within the story.

Apart from unveiling back-story, they can be used as reminders of important previous events – even such we have already seen earlier.

In strong dramatic stories flashbacks can be felt to invert the arrow of time, slow down the forward thrust of the narrative and thereby disrupt the seamless unspooling of the story. This disruption of chronological narrative is felt strongest where the film as 72

We find flashbacks especially in such narratives that deal with an event (often a crime or an accident) that happened in the past (think of Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside) or La Mala Educación (Bad Education), to name just two recent Spanish examples). We will later see how a film like Rashomon makes use of flashbacks to explore questions of theme.

Flashbacks are also often used to illustrate what past event a character thinks of at a given moment that is relevant for a present decision – usually those flashbacks deal with something lost, or difficult to regain, quite often they illustrate a psychologically formative event or trauma, that still lingers on. A good example of a decisive moment, a central motivating experience is used in C’era una volta il west (Once upon a time in the west, written by Sergio Leone, Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci and Sergio Donati). It is the moment when we understand the origin of the haunting tune Harmonica has been playing throughout the film, so that in a way one could argue the music has been a constant flash forward to the moment of the actual flashback, where we see Harmonica as a boy, a harmonica between his teeth and his brother standing on his shoulders with the noose around his neck.

What all flashbacks seem to have in common is that they are meant to motivate present actions through past actions. We are often critical of flashbacks because we feel that using them might indicate that the present motivation is too weak and consequently the inevitability or plausibility of a character’s action might be questioned. So when we have the feeling that a flashback is meant to provide additional dramatic “ammunition” to create conflict, we feel the author’s shaping hand too clearly.

On the other hand, sometimes flashbacks are necessary to provide a narrative frame, or set the tone. They might be necessary to get out of a very confined main location (e.g. stories taking place in locked rooms, like prison cells or other types of confined spaces).

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Again, Mar Adentro (written by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil) is a good example. The main character is a quadriplegic bound to his bed. In order to escape the confinement of his room, we have flashbacks that show the accident (the strong scene where he gets up and flies across the land to the seashore is not a flashback, but serves a similar function).

asked to consider the “why” over the “how”. In contrast, those stories, which flash forward to a moment in time that is crucial for the outcome of the story, but leave it open (cliffhanger), want to create suspense, which can then become a governing line of inquiry for the whole narrative. Here the “how” clearly overrides the “why”.

The distinction does exist in said clarity, but there are also a lot of cases where the question raised is more along the lines of “what is going on here” or “what does it all mean”?

But all flash-forwards that do not reveal the ending play on the curiosity of their audience, while the others seem to rather address their analytical capacities.

Normally a flashback is considered a special moment within an otherwise linear narrative. Also most of the criticism concerning flashbacks is aimed at this way of using it. But there are other ways.

One could claim that all narratives that employ a completely nonlinear form technically do use flashbacks, at least partly, but we might start perceiving them in a different way.

Beginning at the end – spoiled or spellbound?

Another narrative maneuver is the evocation in advance of an event that will take place later. In films, we are used to refer to this element as a flash-forward, and it is frequently used to “frame” a narrative. For example in Sunset Boulevard (written by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D.M. Marshman, Jr.), there is a dead man in a Hollywood swimming pool and the film then sets out to tell, how the man ended up dead in that pool, going back 6 months and telling the story chronologically up to the opening scene, back to the dead man in the pool. The pool scene is, as in Citizen Kane, the end of story.

This technique has been used by a lot of writers / directors since.

While sometimes it is justified by narrative intention, the practice to create a strong audience-pull for the opening with a strong and suspenseful first scene has nowadays become a staple of commercial television. In the constant war of ratings, they need to hook their audience immediately or else risk losing them during the story setup. There seems to be a certain agreement that you have about 1520 minutes to hook your audience in the cinema, because they have paid for their tickets and won’t leave so quickly. But in TV, the remote control has become the most powerful script editor, empowering an audience’s demand that a film must deliver the goods soon, or be relegated to the amorphous mass of failed programming.

Flash-forwards can be distinguished in those that really reveal the ending of the story, which is usually to indicate that we are 74

I have heard some people ask why anyone would want to watch a story if the end is the first thing we get to know about it. For this part of the audience, the threat of a spoiler is the worst that can happen. They watch films to wonder about its outcome and would surely agree that the most important moment in any story is the moment we learn how it ends. Once this moment has passed, they grab their coats and start leaving the cinema. Although they make up a significant part of the audience, I am afraid we cannot dwell too much on their tastes for the present purpose.

One reason why writers decide to give away the ending upfront can be that they have a story on their hands where the main character will eventually have to die. By saying right away that we’re asked to follow the story of a “walking dead”, the writer spares the audience a severe disappointment later and can still get them interested to stick around to watch. Examples mentioned here are Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane, another would be Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, written by Agnès Varda).

Similarly, though using a double strategy, American Beauty (written by Alan Ball) opens with the information that the main character Lester Burnham will be dead in less than a year. Actually it is him who informs us of this through voice-over, while at the same time saying that of course, he did not know it back then. At the same time we get a pre-credit sequence, which seems to indicate that he will be killed by an unseen man on behalf of his own daughter. So while we know he will die, we are kept wondering at whose hand it will happen. The question of “how” is therefore stronger than the question of “why”. Still, I would say that the construction of this suspense through-line is used to allow the writer more freedom 75

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elsewhere, to explore his character’s emotions. The audience might follow the suspense question, but while doing so they get to see a lot of other things, too. In the end, Lester, who acts as the omniscient narrator to his story seems to sit with the angels, for he is able to witness his own death (and “survive” it in the voice-over).

This way, the writers could emphasize that their hero is a marked man. It is similar to what Walter Benjamin observes in his essay “The Narrator” (“Der Erzähler”): once a man is introduced to us as one who will die at the age of 35, this will be the governing idea we then have of this man. We will look forward to this death and it will inform all our perceptions of him and our judgement of his actions.

Clearly this way of telling the story also emphasizes the emotional theme.

Those flash-forwards that only show a crucial situation from the climax as a cliffhanger are also used in different ways. Because they tend to create suspense, they are sometimes used in stories which need a long time to develop or do not have a strong rising action suspense. By providing a central through-line, which is actually a teaser AND a promise, narratives that are in danger of fragmenting can be held together. We will find this technique quite frequently in stories that span a longer time e.g. biopics or historical epics. An example would be Amadeus (written by Peter Shaffer), where the suicide attempt of Salieri leads to the dialogue between him and the priest, where Salieri claims to have killed Mozart. This then becomes the frame and reference point for the narrative of the life of Amadeus.

One could argue that Fight Club (written by Jim Uhls) uses the cliffhanger opener also to hook the audience and so allow for more time to narrate its episodic story.

Another example of opening a non-suspense story with a cliffhanger is Les choses de la vie (The Little Things in Life, written by Paul Guimard, Jean-Loup Dabadie and Claude Sautet), a beautiful film worthy of longer analysis, which opens with shots of the site of a road accident. We hear that the driver is not dead; he fainted. But it looks really bad. Then we are literally sucked back into the story, with the wrecked and burning car becoming whole again, speeding back to where it came from until it rests safely at the curb of a Paris street. Only now we meet the protagonists and when, at the end, we will have reached that site of the accident again, we still do not know whether Michel, our hero will survive. But in the meantime we have seen him in a kind of midlife crisis, grappling with decisions, wondering whether to leave his girlfriend or make a real commitment. This is frequently undercut with replays of parts of the accident. The story is low on suspense and very character (and actor) driven. By using the accident as an opener, we are made to realise that there is an urgency to things, which Michel has not yet understood.

We see him act as if he had all options open and all the time in the world on top. But we know he might not and finally he has not.

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We can find a mechanism very similar to the flash-forward in the popular genre of the mystery. In all mystery stories that open with a murder being committed, the writer (as well as the detective) works backwards. The ending is known, and the story is designed to arrive at the ending by gradually untying the knots and line up the clues.

What is different here is that usually the victim is not the main character, sometimes not even a central character. But without the opening murder, those stories would start with a sequence of actions leading up to it, and the death would be the end. Such stories would lack a quintessential element, namely that of examining the past to unveil a secret, which can be said to be the main source of pleasure for the audience of this genre. So the murder puts the focus on the pleasure of the audience, while by following the chronology of events we would most likely have to focus on the conflicts of the characters. Those characters quite often tend to be a little flat and one-dimensional, because they were mainly created to serve a plot, so there’s actually not that much to be interested in them personally. I think it is for this reason we have seen a strong desire for variation in mysteries during the past few decades.

Nowadays detectives are no longer only restoring order, usually they have troubles of their own and quite frequently are involved much more than they would care to admit.

A film that makes different use of the structure of an inquiry and deals with an event from the past is The Sweet Hereafter (written by Atom Egoyan). Told in non-linear fashion, with two dominating and several more contributing perspectives, Egoyan’s film explores a central event, a school-bus accident that killed almost all the children of a small Canadian town. The complex plot moves between 9 identifiable time-levels, which are not specifically marked, nor is the switching between them. The narration moves freely between past, present and future, even introducing a date within the film’s narra77

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tive, which lies far beyond the date of the actual film’s premiere.

Still, it is relatively easy to follow, as Egoyan uses the inquiry (and the investigating lawyer as his detective-figure) as a thread to create what is usually referred to as “the unity of action”. By locating the actual accident – an event from the past, which is only made visible through the testimonies of those involved – in central place, right in the middle of the story, he can also ally the two times of before and after with the perspectives of his two main characters, lawyer Mitchell Stephens and the sole survivor of the accident, Nicole Burnell.

the story is the unity of action. … Even when time is not followed – by means of flashbacks, flash-forwards, reversals of time, recollections, and all the other ways in which the film storyteller can vary time out of the strictly chronological … so long as there is unity of action, the audience will be able to stay grounded and participating in the story.” (Ebd. p. 58/59).

In the end, the inquiry into the responsibility / guilt for the accident is terminated. The desire to lay the blame, to find someone who is guilty in order to be able to stay “innocent” is clearly reflected in the personal stories of the two main characters. But the thematic concern is not necessarily reflected in the specific structural choices.

Although Egoyan seems to need a non-linear narrative to juxtapose the time before the accident with the immediate aftermath and also introduce the long-term effects, one could not say that the specific non-linear structure brings out the theme better than any other.

What it does, though, is to allow a close juxtaposition of the characters’ emotional reactions to experiences from different times – experiences that come to bear on the seemingly clear case of an inquiry, without ever being pronounced.

Actually, to do the film justice in its complexity and to acknowledge the elegance of its narrative one could easily give it a whole lecture of its own.

Interlude – a word on suspense and an example As we have seen, audience involvement through suspense is something writers should carefully consider. It doesn’t always have to be “Hitchcockian” suspense, but it should at least suffice to keep the audience interested. In that respect, it might not always be accomplished through a strong and dramatic cause-effect structure, but if it manages to early enough raise a governing question to form an arc over the story as a whole, it can already be extremely beneficial.

Again, Howard/Mabley got something to contribute here: “For most films, the unity that helps give shape to the raw material of 78

A well-known film that kind of sums up most of what we’ve been discussing so far is Annie Hall (written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman). Annie Hall utilises several narrative strategies. First of all, the whole film is framed. At the start Alvy Singer tells us his intention to examine the reasons for his break up with Annie, indicating a first through-line or arc, namely the relationship to Annie.

The flashback narrative is itself disrupted by the inclusion of additional flashbacks that provide an associative and often ironic commentary on the other events in the film.

The structure of the romance that forms the spine of the film is itself fragmented and associatively ordered at times which illustrated the discontinuities between story time and narrative time. The first time Annie appears eight minutes of narrative time have elapsed. If we were to place the scene in a story time context, that is to say within the timeline of Alvy and Annie’s two year relationship, it presumably occurred towards the end as Alvy and Annie are shown bickering constantly. Nine minutes of narrative time later, Annie makes her second appearance in a scene where the couple try to cook live lobsters. It is hard to judge where this event happens in story time, although their good rapport with each other would suggest that it is near the beginning of their relationship. Six minutes later, after twenty-three minutes of narrative time, we get to see Annie and Alvy’s first meeting. It is interesting to note here that for a while the narrative structure of the film reverts to telling a linear story. In the following nine scenes (seventeen minutes of narrative time) we watch their relationship develop. This section is also characterised by the withdrawal of other overtly authorial devices (with the exception of the subtitling of Annie’s and Alvy’s thoughts, during their conversation on the balcony).

In the end, Alvy flies to L.A. to meet Annie and proposes marriage. Annie is not interested and walks away. So what Alvy told us in the opening turns out to be true. He and Annie are no longer together. But we now might have a much better idea of Annie’s rea79

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sons to leave Alvy, a person who simply seems unable to allow himself to be happy. In the final moment, after Alvy has corrected his failure in life by transferring it to the theatre stage (where Annie accepts Alvy’s proposal to marriage), he again turns to the audience, addressing us directly as he did in the first shot. And he ends the story as it began, with a joke. But this time, the joke contains an insight: that no matter how weird it might make us feel, it is better to have love than live without.

In terms of narrative, Allen’s governing idea has quite obviously been an emotional one, but his desire to involve himself as much as possible in the story made it quite logical to opt for a non-linear form, for example to directly juxtapose chronologically distant events, and also to be able to comment and interfere in ways an invisible narrator never could have done.

happened. No one can be trusted, because everybody turns out to have been involved – if only by the act of seeing. What becomes very obvious in the course of the narrative is the focus on a theme of truth and subjectivity. The writers chose to tell their story in a series of repetitions to explore exactly the relativity of something as seemingly definite as factual truth (well, that was 1950, way before the post-structuralists rid us for good of that particular illusion).

Form consequently follows an overall narrative intention and helps to underline it. No present chronological rendering of that story could have had such a strong effect, for it would have been very difficult to choose from whose perspective we’d first see the event. In a linear story, the first version (no matter if from a personal or a seemingly omniscient p.o.v.) would invariably be taken for the “truth” (or else, we’d have to work with an “unreliable narrator”, like in The Usual Suspects). To avoid such bias, it is important to relegate the event itself to the past. It cannot be witnessed any more, it must be narrated. Therefore what we actually get to see ARE unreliable narrators, patching up things to make themselves look better in the process. But we have no way of knowing if any of them come closer to any “truth” than the others. And that goes to the heart of the matter.

Remembering, repeating and working through Another way to use non-linear narrative can be found in films that repeat a story several times, either from different perspectives, or with different twists and turns. The repetition is either used to reveal and explore an event from the past (then it is usually presented through different perspectives, remembered by different people. The classic example here would be Rashomon) – or the repetition plays out different possibilities for the future, as if in a series of trial runs. In such cases, we often find that the same character is involved (Run, Lola Run would be an example here). A particular case of repeating the present can be found in Groundhog Day, where repetition is used to instigate an important change in the main character.

In Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (written by Shinobu Hashimoto and Akira Kurosawa), a monk and a woodcutter discuss a recent case of rape and murder. A samurai was killed after a robber had bound him and raped his wife. The meeting of the men serves as a frame for a series of flashbacks, but each of them consists of one version of the events, first told by the robber (now caught and himself bound, and confronted by the court), then by the samurai’s wife, then by the ghost of the dead samurai himself (speaking through a medium) and finally, by the woodcutter, who had been a witness to it all. As it turns out, all versions differ drastically from each other – in the description of what happened, as well as in the reasons why it 80

I don’t want to suppress the observation that it is primarily an intellectually challenging and satisfying film, for the emotional involvement with any character is difficult in absence of a guiding perspective and the strong focus on an essentially philosophical theme.

The repetition in Run, Lola Run (written by Tom Tykwer) doesn’t want to investigate the past and our subjective memories, but rather question our influence on the future. In a way, the film is a reflection of chaos theory’s famous theorem about the beat of a butterfly’s wings causing a tornado. In the consecutive stories, Lola is always faced with the same initial situation. She has 20 minutes to find 100.000 Deutschmarks, or her boyfriend will die. First she fails to get the money, but the boyfriend successfully holds up a supermarket. Then Lola is shot dead by the arriving police. Second, she holds her father hostage at his bank, gets the money and arrives at the meeting point only to see her boyfriend being run over by an ambulance. Now he ends up dead. In the third try, Lola manages to win the money at a casino, but her boyfriend has simultaneously 81

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found the man who took the cash from him and got it back. So he can pay his debts and they still have the same amount to themselves. This story is told in a fast-paced and exciting style, but with little emotional involvement, beyond the usual effect of a “ticking clock”-device. Tykwer (reportedly very late) inserted two scenes between Lola and her boyfriend in bed, playing “what if… you fall out of love”, etc. It turns out that what they long for is the feeling of being special, that their love is meant to be – a question of fate.

At times we are shown brief flash-forwards of people Lola encounters, mostly in passing, on her quest for the money. In every version of events the encounter is slightly different in time and consequently has different effects. For example in one version, a woman Lola bumps into while turning a corner wins the lottery and lives happily ever after. In another, Lola dodges her and the woman does not win with her lottery ticket, but becomes an alcoholic and her life goes down the drain, etc. While these changes of fate are clearly in tune with the general idea of the movie, it is not strong as an emotional theme. The film addresses more the intellectual side of what could have been a fascinating moral and emotional dilemma. But as Tykwer seems mostly interested in experimenting with styles, his characters feel more like comic book characters, and in one episode, Lola literally becomes one. Therefore, while the nonlinear narrative serves the ideas pretty well, it does little to involve us emotionally. Still, it is a fun film to watch and works well as long as one does not need to get too involved with the characters.

Compared to Lola, Groundhog Day (written by Danny Rubin) uses repetition primarily for an emotional change in the main character.

The cynical and arrogant TV-reporter Phil is caught in a loop of the day he hated from the outset. And repeating it doesn’t make it better – until Phil manages to use his accumulated knowledge of his eternal day no longer selfishly, but to help others. Only when he starts to become interested in the people around him is he able to get the girl and get out of the time loop. The metaphor here is simple and effective: as long as you do not change, you are stuck with the negative effects of your behaviour. Only when you see the error of your ways and start to do something about it can you move on.

Simplistic as this may sound, it makes the chosen form effective and highly illustrative of the character’s need and the emotional theme.

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But is it worth it…?

Even without yet addressing all the other ways of non-linear narratives, what has hopefully become clear is the idea that the choice of narrative structure should be governed by the author’s intention to convey his attitude to the story. The more the structure draws attention onto itself, the more careful one should be in employing it.

A quite recent example, where structure seems to have been used to obscure, rather than to emphasize and reveal, is 21 Grams (written by Guillermo Arriaga). Like Amores Perros (Love’s a Bitch) before it, 21 Grams deals with some people whose lives cross in connection with a fatal car accident. Told in non-linear fashion, we spend at least 20 minutes to figure out what’s going on and by then the central characters have been sufficiently exposed. It is only later that we learn that Sean Penn’s character Paul, whom we have seen with a debilitating gunshot wound, inflicted it himself, while trying to take his own life. When this suicide attempt is actually shown, it comes at a point of heightened drama towards the end of the story, and we do not really question it. We have seen the wound already, got to know the consequences, so it all makes sense. It was only afterwards that I realised that Paul has no clear motivation for wanting to commit suicide at that point. Other viewers I talked to in retrospect had the same problem; and the story hinges quite a bit on that crucial moment, therefore it needed to happen. So here the non-linear narrative has managed to obscure a severe lack of credible character motivation. It remains up to you to tell, whether this is a trick worth repeating or not.

The arrow of time reversed Among the many other examples of non-linear narratives, (just think of the great works of David Lynch, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, of Gus van Sant’s Elephant or Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain, which must stand as a prime example of a beautifully executed circular structure that manages to convey theme through narrative form) I finally want to single out two which have some similarities but are eventually pretty different. One of them is maybe among the films immediately quoted when thinking of an especially striking case of non-linearity: Memento. For the remain83

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der of this text, I’d like to analyse and compare it with Irréversible. I will skip to look at Francois Ozon’s 5x2 because it fails so miserably in making anything worthwhile of the backwards narrative.

sequence we saw before. So the coloured narrative works like a series of interconnected loops and we are actually in the same position as the protagonist, sharing his handicap: at the beginning of each new sequence, we don’t know what has happened before (in story time).

The beginning of the black and white sequence marks the earliest point in story time, while the beginning of the coloured episode marks the end of story time but the beginning of narrative time.

In terms of story, Lenny has developed his memory system, but was manipulated by Teddy to kill Jimmy, the drug dealer boyfriend of Nathalie. When Lenny finally understands (in a moment of clarity he perfectly well knows will pass) that he’s been taken advantage of, he decides to manipulate his own memory system such that it points to Teddy as the murderer. And it is him he finally kills, before he presumably goes blank again and continues his search. So by the end of the film, we have finally collected all the information, similar to Lenny. The most emotional moment is one of bitter recognition, namely that Lenny understands how he’s being manipulated by people to do their bidding, by becoming their involuntary hit man.

The theme of the story deals with revenge, but also with questions of identity and how it is related to memory (we are what we remember – the sum of our memories). Lenny actually does take revenge – not on his wife’s killer (according to Teddy, he did that long ago) but on Teddy for manipulating him. And by making the conscious decision to let his condition run its course knowing he will hence kill Teddy, the ending is downbeat and cynical.

If the story was meant to be about the futility of revenge, it definitely takes a crooked path to make its point. But emotional theme is not the strongest point of Memento.

Memento (written by Christopher Nolan) has a memorable premise. It is about a guy who cannot make new memories.

Grappling with this severely debilitating condition, he’s searching for the man who raped and killed his wife, in order to take revenge. The movie is told in two narrative strands, one in colour and one in black and white. It appears to be completely in reverse, starting at the end, and continuously working its way toward the beginning. In other words: the temporal order of story and plot seem to be the exact opposite.

A closer look reveals that actually, the story time of the black and white parts, which alternate with the colour episodes, follows a chronological order. It is only the coloured parts that work their way backward. Eventually the story time of the black and white parts merge with the story time of the coloured parts. Altogether, Memento consists of 2x22 sequences (including some flashbacks within individual sequences) plus a closing sequence. Of the 113 minutes of screen-time, 36 minutes are actually told chronologically.

The first important aspect to note in Memento is that it has a main character (Lenny) with a clearly defined goal. The goal is to find the murderer (John G) and kill him. In the opening shot, we see a polaroid of a man who has been shot in the head. The polaroid pales and vanishes, is sucked back into the camera and we see the actual taking of the picture, then the shooting of the man. This opening works really backwards, as every action is reversed in time. This first sequence is carefully chosen, as it immediately accomplishes two things: it indicates that we are watching a narrative in “backwards” mode. And the vanishing also relates to Lenny’s big problem, the loss of his short-term memory. So we are immediately given a very effective non-verbal tutorial about a key element of the narrative, which also relates to the content of the story.

In the first colour sequence after the opening we are then introduced to Lenny’s problem, hearing him explain it to the guy at the motel’s reception, and to Teddy, who turns out to be the guy he just shot – or actually, will soon shoot. The structure of the coloured narrative is such, that a sequence is told up to a point, then we jump back in time to an earlier point and watch events unfold until we reach the same point in the story time, where we have started the 84

On the other hand, the decision to tell the story “backwards” abandons the usual chain of causality, because as in Nietzsche’s example of the pain and the needle, we first get the effect and must then look for its cause. This increases the suspense of a story, which, told completely in linear fashion, would actually be a rather slow and tedious story of a guy who spends three days collecting bits and pieces of information, which lead him to kill Teddy.

In the end, there are surely enough good reasons to tell the story the way it was told. But it could be told in linear fashion, only then it would not be very interesting, as everyone can check by watching the DVD, which has an option to watch the whole movie in chronological story time.

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The general feedback on Memento seems to agree that it has a strong initial pull for audiences to enter the world and unravel the intricately woven narrative web. But after the film has ended, it seems that audiences are mostly concerned with making sense of the narrative by attempting to restore chronological order and distil story from plot. The emotional involvement and questions of character identification or theme are clearly secondary. This may well be due to the fact that we as an audience constantly accumulate information while the protagonist doesn’t. Our knowledge grows, while he must repeat. The growing gap between Lenny and us seems to result in an increasing difficulty to empathise and identify with him. Consequently, we watch and observe rather than live vicariously.

The film is told in twelve long continuous sequences, or rather shots, as there is no discernible editing within each shot. The narrative technically functions like the colour part of Memento, always telling the story in interconnected loops up to the point we left the sequence before (sequences are actually connected by something similar to wormholes – “time tunnels”). Yet there are a few peculiarities. First, the film opens with the end credits rolling backwards.

This functions similar to the opening “polaroid” sequence of Memento, as both are running backwards. Then a swirling camera, which seems to come down from the heavens, eventually enters a window to find two men on a bed, having a conversation. The first sentence, uttered by one of the men, is “time destroys all things”.

Both men will never appear again in the film (but one of them is the butcher, the same actor continuing his role as the character from Noé’s two previous films).

When we swoop down into the street to meet the actual protagonists, Marcus and Pierre, it takes until minute 15 before we have the first jump back in time and until then we are almost completely unable to orient ourselves. What becomes clear first is that the very agitated Marcus is looking for “La Tenia” to take revenge. The first dramatic question is of course what for. But it is difficult to identify a main character, as Marcus and Pierre seem to share the goal of finding “La Tenia”. And due to the backwards narrative we know they found at least someone on whom they took revenge. In absence of a classic character goal to form the story’s dramatic arc, we as the audience are kept interested in the question “what happened”?

The next important piece of information comes in sequence five, where we learn that Marcus wants to revenge what happened to Alex, obviously a rape. We wonder who Alex is, and we then meet her first as the victim of said rape (sequence eight). After having seen the rape, the main question is solved. We know what happened and we’ve seen the outcome. But in terms of narrative time, we have only come about half way. The remainder of the film shows what happened before (with a camera that becomes progressively calmer). The focus changes from “what happened” to “who did it happen to”, as we get to know the three main characters, especially Alex. In the last sequence, with Marcus and Alex at home, the 14minute “unedited” sequence conveys great intimacy and closeness to the characters in a tender and playful moment full of affection. In light of our knowledge of the future, it almost becomes unbearable,

Irréversible (written by Gaspar Noé) seems to have several strong similarities to Memento; most obviously the “backwards” narration, but also the fact that both are “rape-revenge”-movies. But revenge implies some deed that can be taken revenge for, and while that deed is shown in Irréversible it is actually outside and before the story time in Memento. Then again, as we saw, Memento could also be taken as a story about revenge for betrayal.

Irréversible, the “scandal film” of Cannes 2002, as it unfortunately became known, has only one line of narrative, which starts at the end of story time and continuously moves backwards in story time, covering events that span not much more than a day in the lives of its characters. It tells the story of Marcus and Pierre, who have violently killed a guy who maybe was a man named “La Tenia”. They have been frantically searching for him, because he reportedly was the man who raped and beat up Marcus’ girlfriend Alex so badly she fell into a coma. Alex came from a party she attended with Marcus and Pierre, but left on her own. At the party, Marcus had been going wild, while Alex seemed subdued and not really in the mood for that kind of fun, so she left early. On their way to the party, Marcus and Pierre jokingly spoke about Pierre’s former relationship with Alex and his sexual prowess. Before leaving for the party, Marcus and Alex had been at home, sharing a warm and tender afternoon, lazily relaxing in bed. When Marcus left to fetch some wine, Alex discovered that she is pregnant. The film ends with Alex lying on a sunny lawn, in blissful ignorance of everything, which was to follow so soon. The camera retreats into space.

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but at the same time, the scene is strong enough to yield a positive emotion. When we finally leave Alex, the camera retreats up into the sky, where it came from and goes out into space, looking into the eternity. The final frames show, what should actually be the title of the movie, as it is the beginning of story time : “time destroys all things”.

In my opinion, Irréversible is a film that must be told in reverse, for it completely changes the perspective on its story and especially its theme. Told chronologically, the film would end with an almost unbearable murder and would then really be a reactionary revengemovie. Seen in reverse, it is a meditation about irreversibility, about the difficult acceptance of the fact that what happened, happened and cannot be undone. We cannot escape the arrow of time (meaning death), and it is very fitting that the author actually tried to do exactly that while telling a story of why it can never happen. Of course it also touches the question of fate and destiny, but most of all, it seems to convey what Camus has called “the tender ignorance of the world”, which does not care for the people who live in it. And this view is supported by the final comparison between an individual human life and the vastness of the universe.

After moving ever deeper into space, the image finally starts to flicker. It is Godard’s notion about the cinema showing truth, 24 times a second. When we sit in that flickering light of the last images, we “see” the projecting mechanism at work and are reminded of the fact that while we watch, time passes. Always, and irreversibly.

End of lecture.

About multi-linear dramaturgies.

Some definitions

by Gino Ventriglia

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he following are some preliminary considerations about multi-linear drama structures, usually called multi-strand or parallel narratives in the Anglo-American drama theories.

In order to catch their specific expressive potential, and thus identify the peculiar construction problems they imply, it is necessary to define the object we are talking about with as much accuracy as possible.

A first distinction concerns a double possibility of articulation in creating parallel narratives. On one side, we have ‘sequential structures’ – in which the narrative lines with different protagonists are independent, each separate from the other, developed one after the other, but tied up together at the very end; we see this in films such as Pulp Fiction, Go, Before the Rain, and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

On the other side, there are ‘tandem structures’ (I guess they have been called this way to point out that when one narrative line stops “cycling”, the other starts), in which many interconnected stories are told in a parallel way; for instance in films such as Short Cuts, Magnolia, City of Hope, Crimes and Misdemeanours, Happiness, Traffic, Lantana, Crash and Babel.

A particular case of tandem structures are the binary ones, as featured in The Double Life of Veronique, L’Uomo in Più (One Man Up), Changing Lanes, The Man on the Train, and in certain aspects, Sliding Doors: their peculiarities, implying a strong sense of destiny and fate, are to be analyzed separately.

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In the following pages, we will deal with the tandem-parallel narratives.

As a consequence of such a definition, we must say that these structures are not to be confused with stories having more than one single protagonist. Usually in such a case, a set of characters (all reacting to the same event, or having the same goal) are developed within just one single story-line and at the same time each one has to compete for the limelight in the story (e.g. The Big Chill, Tea with Mussolini, El Angel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel), The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, Il Giudizio Universale (The Last Judgement) and Independence Day).

A further form of parallel narratives to deal with are flashback structures: Non-linear structures hinged on a narration in flashback are for example used in Citizen Kane, Rashomon, Once upon a Time in America, Courage under Fire, Memento and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. In these movies, the story develops on non-chronological time planes or even different reality planes (as it also does in Mulholland Drive, The Sixth Sense, The Butterfly Effect and Deja-vu) where long sequences belong to dreams, supernatural phenomena and hallucinations. These various “nonreality” levels function as a flashback, but have a deeply different sense.

Of course, multi-strand structures may be combined with flashback-parallel narratives in order to obtain specific effects, such as sequences of narratives, as seen in Pulp Fiction, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The English Patient and The Hours, as well as tandem structures (for example, in 21 Grams or Crimes and Misdemeanours).

Therefore, when we talk about tandem-parallel narratives, we mean a specific structure that involves three or more narrative lines, each one having its own protagonist or protagonists.

Some of the most innovative and original films made over the last twenty years are tandem-parallel narratives, as the above-mentioned titles. Although they refer to a three-act-structure, they operate remarkable variations with some of its elements.

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The potential of multi-linear structures The main aesthetic and expressive value of the tandem-parallel narratives is given by the fact that they allow you to express the complexity and the actual chaos of life that the protagonists are confronted with, thus having a more pregnant, or significant, ‘reality effect’.

In most cases these structures are “choral”; “ensemble pieces” representing a vast ‘community’ of characters. No doubt that the chaos of life, its variety of tones and density, its ‘facts’ caused and generated by chance and destiny, is much more effectively represented in several story lines than in one classic three-act-narration, where all the fundamental events, the turning points and the minor characters are centripetal toward the sole protagonist, and to the subplots organized around him. Even the secondary stories, if any, are always nothing but variations of the theme carried by the protagonist’s story line.

Quite often the three-act-structure (which allows us with great effectiveness to represent strong value-systems, that are usually universally shared – good/evil, just/unjust, love/hate and so on) fights against the ‘dictatorship’ of the unique point of view, the protagonist’s. Frequently, the scriptwriter is just left with a forced choice of featuring the protagonist in all scenes (aiming to tell the story only through the main character’s eyes, e.g. through his actual presence in the scenes); or the writer must ‘surrender’, thus taking some narrative liberties and have pieces of the story happen or be told in absence of the protagonist.

In this regard, multi-strand structures do allow a greater freedom: they allow you to take into consideration the most useful segments needed to narrate the various protagonists’ individual stories in a relatively more arbitrary way – less gradual and cadenced – at least up to a certain point, as we will see. As a consequence, a multistrand narration becomes objective, external to the characters; it comes from an omniscient and hidden narrator.

The price of this greater freedom is most likely a loss of involvement on the part of the spectator; as a matter of fact, s/he can’t be taken fully into the identification process of the single protagonist’s 91

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psychology and logic, since s/he must, almost simultaneously, follow the psychologies and logics of several characters. There is therefore a strong need to compensate for the ‘dramatic temperature’ of the narration. In order to achieve this there are at least two main and strictly related problems to solve: those of closure and of the theme.

Like two thunderbolts by Zeus, who comments and punishes the behaviours of the narrated community.

Closure and theme The first problem is: how to choose the different stories to tell in a multi-strand structure?

In general, this is a constant question of the storyteller’s work. In addition, if one is preparing a three-act linear structure, there are various options to face: a scriptwriter may be interested in a story, a single event, a novel or a character – or some elements to explore, treat, or tell in a certain key.

It is for sure that the real and true meaning of the story will be clear in the closure, between the climax and the final scene – the resolution. How worthwhile for the writer this ‘sense’ is, as well as to what extent, will only be discovered or revealed in the course of the writing process. Sometimes, the theme can be decided before and then ‘deduce’ the whole character and his relative story, as in the case of Paul Schrader with Taxi Driver.

In a tandem multi-linear structure it is absolutely necessary to clearly hit the theme of the narration from the very beginning. The theme, in fact, is the only “compass” for the writer to properly select and develop the stories belonging to that particular structure. And vice versa, the theme, the ‘sense’ of the stories, will only come out from the whole set of different storylines and the way they relate to each other. The feeling of completeness in a narration is given by a satisfactory ending, a closure that will justify the story lines that have been chosen and intertwined.

Two of the most successful tandem structures are probably represented by Short Cuts (10 storylines) and Magnolia (8 storylines).

Two catastrophic natural events conclude these films – an earthquake in the first movie and the famous “frog rain” in the latter.

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That has nothing to do with the resolution in a classical three-act structure, which follows a finalistic logic, and where, therefore, a catastrophic natural event would be a heavy violation of the spectator’s expectations of the transformational arch of the protagonist – in that case not anymore a maker of his or her own change, but annihilated by a ‘deus ex machina’.

In Short Cuts and Magnolia, the tragic events work as cathartic endings: they offer a solution – a judge, a verdict, although arbitrary ones – to the writer on how to close several storylines which don’t demand to be closed with a unifying closure leading to a unique, strong and deep sense of the narration.

Surely, today there are spectators who deem it as a positive value of a film that the dominant theme is never disclosed. Indeed, they often appreciate an ending open to many readings, or to an ambiguous and elusive meaning (“as life is”), or to a greater theme, either sociological or ideological. Nevertheless, the kind of public waiting for a climax/resolution that combines all the narrative lines and gives them a clear and unique ‘sense’ still represents the vast majority of the audience.

This is not by chance: the problem of the clean theme, both in tandem and sequential parallel narratives, has been pointed out since the very beginning of the movies.

In this regard, it is worthwhile to mention what Bordwell, Steiger and Thompson write in “The Classical Hollywood Cinema” (1985): “The classical narrative settled into a pattern of linear causality with multiple lines of intertwined actions. But there was at least one alternative narrative model which filmmakers could theoretically have adopted – a model based upon parallelism. A film may follow several lines of action which are not causally related but which are similar in some significant way. American filmmakers of the silent period did occasionally experiment with parallelism.

Porter’s The Kleptomaniac (1905, Edison), and Griffith’s A Corner In Wheat (1909, Biograph) and One Is Business, The Other Crime (1912, Biograph) all use contrasting lines of action to create a conceptual 93

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point. The fact that all three of these films involve social criticism may suggest why parallelism proved such an unlikely option in the classical paradigm: it lends itself readily to ideological rather than personal subject matter. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) revived the parallel narrative, which proved too abstract for widespread use.

The causal chain with an interweaving of lines of action won out easily over parallelism as the basis for the classical film.” (p. 176177)

– if it comes to partially giving up the Aristotelian ‘consequential necessity’, inherent of the classic three-act structure, how do you avoid the impact on the viewer of the writer’s arbitrary choices in jumping from one storyline to another? As well as the ‘how much’ of each single storyline to tell in the different scenes/segments?

An interesting attempt to give a dramaturgic answer to such a limitation of tandem parallel narratives is given by Lantana. The story features a cop investigating the case of a psychoanalyst who has disappeared. The investigation allows us to know quite a large number of characters, actually four couples. The ‘powerful’ mechanisms of the detective story (who killed her? why did s/he kill her?) enables the story to hold a high level of suspense, which would probably not be achieved by a multi-linear narration not using the genre. Only at the very end do we realize that there was nothing to be detected: the psychoanalyst was not killed, she died of a mere fall. Therefore, the spectator is forced to reconsider all his/her expectations up till then, and s/he, finds out that the film, by using the mechanisms of one of the strongest genres, has explored in depth the theme of the difficulty of living together as a couple, loving each other and cheating on each other.

A second set of problems inherent in the multi-strand structures are strictly connected with theme and closure, and may be pointed out as follows: in a multi-strand structure, how do we go from one storyline to the other?

This is a ‘technical’ issue only in appearance; as a matter of fact, the answer will determine the very rhythm of the narration and its fruition, the holding of the suspension of disbelief and the attention on the viewer’s side.

To make the sense of the question clear, it is probably useful to split the above question into some of its specific aspects: – how to avoid the mechanicalness of the transitions from storyline A to storyline B and then to storyline C, to go back again to lines A or B, and so forth?

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– if the single storylines still consist of a three-act structure, each one having its own plot points, there will be a first act of the multistrand structure made by the first acts of all the storylines, each one with its own set ups, inciting incidents, first turning points, and so on, for all subsequent acts?

– how to avoid to frustrate the spectator who, once into a storyline, is suddenly ‘moved’ into another line, in a totally different point of development, or, even worse, carried into the same point but from the beginning? How do you create some form of suspense?

– how to avoid losing what is defined as ‘momentum’, e.g. the powerful, tensive impulse of the progressing storyline, and how to make another line ‘pedal’ (the tandem story cycle) if the storyline stops quite often?

Causality and chance A first consideration is that a larger arbitrariness in the progression of the different strands implies that the causality of the threeact classical structure goes together with a good deal of casualness.

Usually, the “coincidence” in the three-act structure is allowed only in the first plot point, the catalyst, the event that actually starts the story (which is – not by chance – also called ‘inciting incident’). Something ‘happens’ in the life of the main character, and, from there, the story develops. Once “that event” has occurred, coincidence and chance really become the last resorts of the scriptwriter (in the case of a detective film, a real and true taboo).

When it’s used for example, in the second or third act, it appears clear and plain that the writer has a strong need to make something happen at a certain time, but he loses the consequential necessity, since that ‘something’ doesn’t happen because of the protagonist’s (or the antagonist’s) will, or at least by his or her 95

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action starting the causal chain of effects/events. It happens just by chance.

dences offered by the physical context – a railway station, an airport, a shopping centre, a “Grand Hotel”, all places where characters of different storylines can come across, meet and join each others storylines or give rise to a third one (in which case it becomes a dramaturgical issue) or not (and then it is only a ‘technical’ device).

Multi-strand structures, which already accept an element of arbitrariness in their choice of a number of storylines to develop the variation of the theme, can benefit from a higher rate of chance.

Coincidence becomes a constitutive factor of the narration, thanks to the crowded ensemble of the characters (i.e. the community which lives in that narrative universe) and even more so in the binary structures with their halo of ‘fate’, of unavoidable destiny. From this viewpoint, a clear example is given by the voice-over voice in Magnolia’s prologue where, despite the fact that the three events narrated are all featuring ‘extraordinary’ coincidences, that extraordinariness doesn’t really resound in the remainder of the film. As a matter of fact, they help to set the viewer to a high arbitrary rate that can be identified as coincidental casualness.

Multi-linear tandem structures are mainly low concept, character-oriented stories, where the systems of interpersonal relationships are dominant. Sentimental ties, relationships of friendship or blood, business and job relations – these are usually the contexts in which it is possible to establish connections in this type of story; they are external ones, but are nevertheless making the arbitrary element less ‘hard’. The three sisters in Happiness, the psychoanalyst’s disappearance in Lantana, the city of Los Angeles in Short Cuts do offer environments and contexts where coincidences, meetings, crossings of lines as well as of characters, are ‘more’ plausible.

It goes without saying that chance cannot resolve all passages: coincidences are to be used with caution. Some possible passages from one line to another can be carried out by merely ‘technical’ expedients, just like real and true scenes of transition. The dialoguecue of a storyline in which an absent character is mentioned allows to immediately ‘focusing’ on that character and therefore transferring ‘ipso facto’ to another storyline. Similarly, following a character in a narrative line that, at the end of its own segment, goes out and meets another character/protagonist of a different narrative line.

For example, a patient who leaves her child and goes to a psychoanalyst, a policeman who just finishes arguing with his boss and questions a murder-suspect, and so on. Or exploiting the coinci96

The key role of tv-series and serials If the production of films structured as parallel tandem narratives, and in general, films using non-linear narrative structures, has remarkably increased in the last years, this is in large part due to television drama writing. Both to serial dramas, either daytime soap operas or prime time super soap operas, and, above all, to the TV-series; especially the multi-strand series that started to appear at the very beginning of the 1980s. The competence of the television audiences, their ability to follow more than one storyline in the same episode, their flexibility and adaptability in getting into quite different dramatic situations and at once orient themselves, has been developed and improved thanks to those serials and series.

Surely, daily serial drama has no closure or theme problems like a multi-strand film, since it is created to not ever end – if not forced to by for example production problems or low ratings. Therefore, it does not show a community that, in the various lines of the characters, has to carry a unique as well as a ‘varied’ sense. On the contrary, that community represents for the television viewer a “substitute family”, along with all the implications that may derive. As Robert Allen writes in “To be continued… – Soap Operas around the World” (1995): “In a sense, these serials trade narrative closure for paradigmatic complexity. Just as there is no ultimate moment of resolution, there is no central, indispensable character in open serials to whose fate viewer interest is indissolubly linked. Instead, there is a changing community of characters who move in and out of viewer attention and interest. Any one of them might die, move to another city, or lapse into an irreversible coma without affecting the overall world of the serial. Indeed, I would argue that this very possibility of a central character’s demise – something that is not a feature of episodic series television – helps to fuel viewer interest in the serial.” (p. 18) 97

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“Something that is not a feature of episodic series television”: This is certainly a correct statement, although just until 1981. In the middle of Fred Silverman’s ascending career at the NBC a new era for the TV-drama series was started, thanks to his involvement. This is the period when Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll realized a cop series with a brand new structure: Hill Street Blues, which immediately appeared a step ahead when compared to traditional closedepisode series.

where the quality of the scripts is often equal to or better than that of cinema drama writing. Probably because the vast range of difficulties I referred to in the previous paragraphs were already dealt with and often solved, so television drama writing is therefore a huge mine to dig out and search for more evolutionary keys to multilinear dramaturgy.

Bibliography

Hill Street Blues was in fact the very first multi-strand TV-series, a “tough” detective story in which each single episode included three or four narrative lines, some of those ending soon, in the same episode, and some lasting for a longer period. In brief, it was the first mix of a both ‘closed’ and ‘open’ series.

After some initial difficulties, this new kind of drama writing caught on and was immediately followed by other series, like Chicago Story and St. Elsewhere; the latter was perceived by the audience as a sort of ‘Hill Street at the Hospital’. The TV multistrand series went on again with Bochco’s L.A. Law and N.Y.P.D., up to today’s multi-strand series like E.R., the leader of open serial drama shows with a ‘closed case’ of each episode, from Northern Exposure to The Practice, from Homicide to Oz, up to current international successes like Desperate Housewives, Lost, and the last Bochco-series, Over There, about the still ongoing war in Iraq. These are only some of the most important narratives to use non-linear multi-strand patterns.

The multi-strand pattern had a great impact on sit-coms (like Friends) and on closed serial series, from Twin Peaks to Murder One, up to 24, a top tension closed serial in real time, meaning twentyfour hours narrated throughout twenty-four episodes. In 24, the multi-strand is even declared from a graphic point of view: each narrative line segment ends with a split screen in four squares, each one featuring just for a few seconds what is simultaneously happening in each storyline, and then picking one of them, to go back to full screen and tell the new segment of the selected one.

Allen, Robert C., 1994 – To Be Continued… Soap Operas Around the World – Routledge, London Aronson, Linda, 2000, Screenwriting Updated: New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen, Allen & Unwin, St.Leonards Bordwell, David, 1985, Narration in the Fiction Film, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison Bordwell D., Staiger J., Thompson K., 1985, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University Press, New York Dancyger K., Rush J., 2006, Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully Breaking the Rules, Focal Press, Burlington Johnson S., 2005, Everything Bad is Good for You, Riverhead Books, New York Longworth J. L. jr, 2000, TV Creators: Conversations with America’s Top Producers of Television Drama, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse

It is easy to realize that television drama writing is an incredible bulk of multi-strand drama production: Something that is still relatively rare in the cinema industry has become the daily bread in TV, 98

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Five Scene Structure: A Writer’s Analysis of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore

Five Scene Structure: A Writer’s Analysis of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore

by Jeff Rush ne way to approach story structure is to identify an arbitrary number of scenes that mark the end-points of dramatic lines. For our purpose, we will consider a dramatic line to be a section of a story that starts from the time the writer poses a dramatic question and ends when the question is resolved. The dramatic line can be global, in which case it marks the overarching question the writer is posing for the whole film, or local, in which case it marks the question posed for some subsection of the script.

O

For many scripts, I have found that the most useful number of end point scenes for the writer to identify is five. They correspond roughly to the two plot points that mark three-act scripts, along with an initiating event, a tentpole scene, and a resolving scene.

There is nothing absolute in this number, but identifying five scenes expands our perspective beyond three-acts, allowing us to talk about the scene that gives the story its initial focus, the scene that marks the most significant character change, and the scene that caps the story’s overall movement. The midpoint or tentpole scene in particular gives us the opportunity to knit together story and character development.

Scene 1: Initiating Event – World Changing Released in 1998, Rushmore follows Max, a fifteen year old student at Rushmore, an elite private boys school. Rushmore is Max’s life, and he celebrates by founding and/or running every club in the school to make up for his dismal academic performance. But Max is a financially-strapped commuter in a school of wealthy boarding 100

students, the son of a barber, whose identity he hides. Except for his young sidekick, Dirk, Max is poorly regarded by his peers. His world changes when he meets disaffected industrialist Herman Blume and new teacher Rosemary Cross.

Between the beginning of the script and the first end-point scene, the initiating event, the writer has two goals. She must set up the existing world and then she must begin to break it. Further, the writer must situate the main character within the status quo, while establishing his discomfort, however unconscious, with it. At some level, the status quo must be fragile, false, a lie that the writer seeks to challenge. In Rushmore, this is done by the yearbook montage that both celebrates Max’s ambition, while at the same time revealing, by the scarcity of actual members in the clubs Max leads, how flawed it is. We see it again when Max tries to assume a familiarity with the headmaster who is threatening to throw him out of the school. At some level, Max projects himself as an adult compared with the other students in the school, while at the same time, he conveys, inadvertently, a sense that he is much younger than the fifteen year old boy he really is.

Max faces two changes in the first ten minutes of Rushmore, the beginning of a friendship with Blume and the arrival of new teacher Rosemary. We might be tempted to think that both of these events constitute the initiating, because they clearly both redirect the story and both characters will have great consequences for Max’s life.

However, it is critical we make a choice here or ultimately we will lose focus.

Any story worth telling will have a number of dramatic lines.

Some will be defined by the working out of character relationships, while others will serve to dramatize the theme. If the script succeeds, the lines will reinforce one another. However, it is essential that the writer pick one of these lines to dominate and be willing to subordinate all other lines to it. The purpose then of the initiating event is not only to start the story, also to mark the beginning of this dominant or overarching line. The writer’s choice of whether to emphasize Blume or Cross,Cross is a decision as to which defines the dominant line. To make the choice, she has to decide on the focus of the movie.

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So what is the focus? I see it as Max’s need to prove himself exceptional against the fear that he is really not. As mentioned above, the quality of exceptionality that Max seems to be reaching for appears, at least to him, as a form of adulthood. We can see this in the manner in which he has made his mark at Rushmore. He is not the coolest fifteen-year old in the school and, not the most popular, the rowdiest, the funniest, or the best athlete. Rather he is the best organizer, the most responsible, the most able to talk to adults, the best able to curry favor. He succeeds at Rushmore at the cost of skipping over the irresponsible and disruptive joy of being a teenager. But it is not that he has already passed through it. Max’s problem is that he hasn’t really got there yet. He hangs around with a sycophant kid, years younger than he is, lives in a world of fantasy, denies his background, and is sexually immature.

Scene 2: The First Act Plot Point

From the writer’s perspective, Max must be made to face the paradox of his immaturity before he can begin to achieve true adulthood. The writer’s goal must be to challenge him. Blume provides an important line in the script, but in many ways Blume is as immature as Max. In fact, Max has as much an effect on Blume as the other way around. Blume does not hold any mystery that Max does not already possess. Rosemary does. Rosemary, whom Max thinks he will conquer in the same way he has conquered all of Rushmore, will say no. Ultimately faced with this failure, Max will have to come to terms with who he really is. The moment, then, where Max first looks through the door and sees Rosemary in her classroom is the initiating scene. It marks the beginning of the overarching line.

One defining element of our five scenes is that each one marks the end of one movement and and the beginning of another. We test our scenes by asking if the scene that follows suggests a different reality. At first blush, it may be that our best choice is the scene where the headmaster kicks Max out of Rushmore. Certainly this marks a shift, because the scene that follows shows a definite change: Max now in public school. Yet, in the scene in the headmaster’s office, Max is passive, forced to listen to his new fate. In fact, in this scene he is already moving toward it. I will argue that the key scene is actually the scene before when Max, knowing the likely consequences, cuts down the trees. Here Max actively makes the choice that causes him to be thrown out of Rushmore, a sacrifice he thinks he is making for Rosemary. Although we don’t see him in public school for another two scenes, his fate has been sealed, as evidenced by the following scene with the headmaster.

Before we go on, we need to consider one more point. We have identified the writer’s goal in this first scene as introducing something that will take Max out of his comfort zone at Rushmore. Why not do it by undercutting the school? It is certainly an easy target.

However, it will not work. As a dramatic strategy, undercutting the character’s ardor, as opposed to introducing something that will challenge that passion, almost always destroys more than it gains.

Killing Rushmore for Max would destroy the only enthusiasm that he has, making him a less compelling character. It also would be a passive act, forcing Max into a position of spectator. The better solution is the one that Anderson/Wilson came up with, not to undercut the school, but to give it competition in the form of Rosemary.

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The second end-goal builds on the breakdown of the status quo in the first scene. If the writer’s goal in the first end-goal scene is to threaten the hold Rushmore has on Max by introducing something that is equally, if not more, exciting than the school, then the goal of the second scene is to cause Max to sacrifice Rushmore for Rosemary. Such a moment frequently corresponds to the plot point that marks the end of the first act. In Rushmore, we have two possible choices for the second scene. One is where Max cuts down the trees and tries to move the baseball field in order to create the aquarium he has promised Rosemary. The other is the following scene, shot through the window of the headmaster’s conference room, where Max is kicked out of Rushmore.

The writer’s problem in moving from scene one to scene two is to press the conflict set up between Rosemary and Rushmore until Rosemary wins. More than a plotting problem, this is one of character. As we mentioned in discussing scene one, right from the beginning we must feel the vulnerability in Max. It has at least two elements – in one, he pretends to a mastery of Rushmore by running clubs that interest no one else, and in the second, he is sexually immature, while surrounded by boys his age who think of nothing else. His reaction when he meets Rosemary is to extend the illusion of being king of Rushmore’s by pretending his father is a neurosur103

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geon in a world where such an identity is important, while sexually, when he falls for her (admittedly his attraction to Rosemary is still sophomoric), he falls hard. In both cases, there is an exaggerated swing, from son of barber to son of neurosurgeon, from sexually indifferent to romantically obsessed.

willingness of Rosemary to finally fight back. In the scene that follows, the scene I believe marks the tentpole, Max meets Blume at the grave where his mother is buried, and gives up on Rosemary.

Scene 3: The Tentpole We see this exaggerated swing in the tentpole where the character frequently moves from one extreme from to the other. In the first half, we sometimes have the sense that the character is working so hard to construct himself or live a lie, that in the second half when he lets go, he seems to swing to an opposing pole. Accounting for this swing is what differentiates this structural model from the more traditional three-act one. Beyond dividing a script into thirds, the tentpole provides a point where the script splits in half. Usually, it also marks the place where the character’s first half illusions finally collapse. Given this collapse, the question after the tentpole turns on how the character will remake himself.

Choosing scene three in Rushmore is tricky. The first candidates might be the scenes where Max reads the letter from his friend Dirk exposing Blume as Rosemary’s lover or Max’s subsequent confrontation with Blume as he leaves Rosemary’s house. However, although it certainly is important, these scenes represent more of a change in Max’s attitude toward Blume than a shift in his direction as a character, more about Blume’s betrayal than about Max’s loss of Rosemary. At the end of this pair of scenes, Max is still determined to win her as evidenced by his tag line to Blume, “I saved Latin. What did you ever do?” Two scenes later, far from giving up, Max turns on Blume, squealing to his wife and causing their marriage to break up.

Although Blume’s is the most overt betrayal in the script, one that has the power to turn Max’s character, ultimately it does not.

Max maintains his determination through an absurd series of petty revenges with Blume, until Rosemary finally humilities him in her classroom, flinging at him slang terms that suggest an adult sexuality that Max has never considered. The staging of the scene – after he advances, she turns and drives him across the room – reflects the 104

After splitting Max from Rushmore under the illusion that he still has Rosemary, the writer’s goal as he approaches the tentpole, is to erase the possibility of Rosemary. Max must be stripped bare.

Without Rushmore and without Rosemary, Max has nothing. Here he reacts with a characteristic either/or swing. Exposed, all he can think to do is drop out of high school and go home.

While three-act structure tends to dramatize the story as the writer organizes it, the two-part design suggested by the tentpole serves to dramatize the story as the character feels it. In the first half, the character gains energy by progressively avoiding things he is afraid to face. With the tentpole, the character is forced to confront them. Instead of this being a modest act, a gentle acceptance of what he knew all along, it becomes a violent rejection of all that he was in the first half.

In the scene after the tentpole, Max gives up everything to work with his father in the barbershop.

Scene 4: The Second Act Plot Point In the first half, Max has concealed his identity from those who matter (Rosemary and Blume). Posing as the son of a neurosurgeon and as an adult in a kid’s body, he is energetic, imaginative and charming, but also an emotional fraud. In the beginning of the second half, Max sees himself as nothing, as though all that energy he displays in the first half belongs to someone else. He is either an adult, king of Rushmore, the most talented and grandiose playwright, the potential lover of Rosemary, or he is a nothing, a child, a boy who can’t even relate to those his own age.

The goal for the writer in the fourth scene is to begin the character’s integration of these extremes.

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Margaret blows Max off, while also admitting that her award-winning science project is a fake. Max takes this in while winding down the kite string. Somewhere before the kite reaches the ground, Max rediscovers his zest. He has Dirk take dictation once again – this time, listing names for a new kite flyingkite-flying club.

This might seem to bring us back to Max as he was at the beginning of the film, the leader of clubs with Dirk his only member.

However, things have changed. His projected memberships in the club are people from both Rushmore and his new public school. In the next scene, instead of denying his father, Max ceremoniously conducts Blume into the barbershop to meet him. Together they mock two prizes Max won at Rushmore, his perfect attendance pins.

Max begins to move forward and be Max. Rather than circling back to the beginning, scene four suggests that for the first time Max is becoming grounded in his identity and still displaying the energy that made him such a presence at Rushmore.

which he uses to cover these feelings. When he early in the script tells Blume that his life is Rushmore, it has a double edge. He’s made a world at Rushmore, at the same time, he has nothing else but Rushmore.

Scene Five The goal for the writer as she moves from scene four to scene five is to actualize what Max begins to understand in scene four, to prove his change is for real. In the climax, Max integrates Rushmore and Rosemary into his life as a public high school student, acknowledging whom he really is, while putting on a play that is pure Max. The play’s cast integrates friends from Rushmore and public school, the audience includes both poles: Rushmore’s headmaster and Max’s father.

Max’s sense of himself is either/or. He is either Max the King of Rushmore or Max the son of a barber, doomed to repeat his father’s career. He is, initially, unable to understand that his father has come to terms with his life in a way that the person Max most admires, Blume, has not.

In dramatizing this, the writer uses a number of dramatic lines marked by end-goal scenes that initially seduce Max to step over the edge. The writer teases him in the first scene by introducing Rosemary, setting up the one person who will challenge Max’s love for Rushmore. In the second scene, the writer tantalizes him further, until, faced with a choice between Rosemary and Rushmore, Max makes a decision he would never have made before — he chooses Rosemary. It is only in the third scene where the writer leads Max over the edge, making him realize that without Rushmore and Rosemary, he now must face the question of whom he is. It takes three end-goal scenes, more than half the script, to get the character to this point.

The fourth and fifth scenes give the character a stage to remake himself. The fourth scene allows Max to discover that it is not so either/other — he can still be the son of a barber, still attend public high school, and be someone. The fifth scene stands back while the character acts on this realization. The relationship of the five scenes is detailed in the chart below:

Yet, nothing is free. Max accepts Rosemary and Blume, something he could not in the first half of the film. He may also go off, at least for a while, with Margaret. But this will always be bittersweet, because it comes at a cost — it may be a long time before Max feels anything again as intensely as he once felt for Rosemary.

Summarizing the Way the Five Scenes Work Max’s conflict is one of identity. Being the son of a barber in a rich boarding school, while losing his mother to cancer, leaves him vulnerable and immature. Yet, Max has enormous energy and drive, 106

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Conflict Summary

Character’s Voice

Writer’s Problem: To establish something that will break his Rushmore lie.

Conflict between his sense of being exceptional (adult) and fear that he is no one (baby).

I will destroy myself to prove my love.

She’s beautiful.

Do I dare?

Scene 1 Sees Rosemaire.

Believes can conquer her like he’s conquered all of Rushmore

9.5 Min.

Having lost Rushmore and Rosemarie, he finally confronts his lies about himself. Doing this starts his change.

As things go bad, he insists he is even more exceptional – to the point he is wiling to destroy what he has lived for.

Writer’s Problem: To show how far he will go for her.

Scene 2 Loses Rushmore for Rosemarie

33 Min.

Conflicts shifts to Margaret.

Accepts the challenge of his peer. Wants to prove he’s as good as she is.

She’s not the only one. I can do things too.

I not exceptional.

I’m nothing.

Writer’s Problem: To make him give up his assumed life.

Scene 3 Tells Mr Blue he has given up Rosemaire Barbershop

57 Min.

Conflict resolves

Writer’s Problem: To make him begin to accept his real self.

Scene 4 Flying kite. He starts making clubs again.

72 Min.

I’ve got someone of my own.

Writer’s Problem: To prove his change

Scene 5 He is able to dance with Rosemaire as a friend.

90 Min.

The Tentpole 108

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This lecture argues that identifying a number of end-goal scenes that define dramatic lines helps the writer clarify his purpose.

Further, if properly conceived, the lines will also embed the character’s change in the structure of the script. Typically, the writer will find that the most useful number of end-goal scenes is five. This gives the writer the opportunity to set up a change in the status quo, challenge the character with it, strip the character’s illusions, and then allow the character to begin to understand, and then finally act on his new understanding.

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EMAIL CONVERSATION

An Email-conversation on Issue Films… with a few comments on adaptation (October-November 2007)

with Jeff Rush, Christina Kallas, Franz Rodenkirchen & Gino Ventriglia JEFF: I’m going to start by free-associating some stuff. Please pick up on anything.

I am interested in Franz’s question about the issue film, particularly because we have so many issues over here and a number of films dealing with them coming out this fall.

Is it possible to see Paul Haggis’ In The Valley of Elah where you are? I’ll see it this weekend. The reviews suggest that it manages to be richer in inference and characterization than Crash while still engaging some of the issues related to Iraq. Let me know if you can see it. The comparison between the two scripts might be interesting.

What is an issue film? Clearly Crash; but also the film I showed at Script&Pitch, the Dardenne brothers’ La Promesse (The Promise).

They are quite different in their approach to issues, character and story. I assume we’re sticking to fictional films, but the rash of documentaries over the last few years are all issue based (more or less) and most are highly narrative. Is Blood Diamond an issue film?

What about say the difference between My Beautiful Laundrette and The Queen? It might be good to agree on a few films and focus on them.

How about TV? For instance, The Wire. Does long form TV open up new possibilities or definitions for the image “film”?

One problem with issue films is that most issues, broadly speaking, have been mediated to death. Not well mediated, mind you, but so much so that we carry all kinds of things in our imaginations. The 113

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really good issue film has to take on these generic issues and break them down and replace them with something else. The problem with bad issue films is that they fail to re-imagine what “we already know”.

CHRISTINA: Let me continue, as there are many interesting ideas in what Jeff is writing.

In the US, at least, it has become common usage in political and mediated discourse to use individual examples to make political points. One person’s situation illustrates some idea. I’ve grown very suspicious of it. It has made me long for abstractions, for a broader perspective. I wonder to what extent issue films fall into this trap?

First of all: it is not only you who has grown old, Jeff :-). Our society has grown old. I tend to believe that the reason why multi-perspective storytelling is being used more and more often is because it represents our perception of the world. We do not believe in the truth anymore, at least not in the existence of the one and only truth. We have lost our faith in the integrity of politicians, in the power of democracy. We have grown up. We are disillusioned. And our films reflect this.

In homage to his death this summer, I went back and watched Antonioni’s L’Avventura (The Adventure). It is still astonishing the extent to which the film evokes a larger world and political climate through style and inference. However, it is clearly of another era. We are not going to get back these highly formalist films that work so much by challenging our perception, both of storytelling and reality.

But do we need to settle on the head-on, easily accessible, issue films like The Constant Gardener? Is there a way where film language and story structure can not only give us a story of issues, but also challenge our sense of it?

TV series i.e. the magnificent long form, cinematic storytelling of the HBO-series (West Wing might be also a good example of an issue series, I have not seen The Wire) use different perspectives as a storytelling tool and so do the most accomplished issue films (see Syriana or Traffic). Thus we get the different aspects on one and the same issue and we achieve deeper understanding by relativating any pre-formed thoughts on the issue. Such storytelling challenges easy thinking.

I have a chapter in “Alternative Scriptwriting” that argues that there is a fundamental conflict between character and issues. The more the issues are foregrounded, the more driven by them the character must be and the more his/her personality must be sacrificed. The more quirky characters are, the less they represent a community. I wrote this in response to the many Hollywood films that attempt to deal with issues by telling “character” stories against social backgrounds, for instance a film from the eighties called Mississippi Burning. Is this an issue film?

The American film scholar David Bordwell writes about how the essence of the Hollywood style is to privilege the personal over the impersonal, human will over social forces. I tend to buy this.

I’ve grown old. I used to love issue films. I’m much less likely to buy them now.

I’m handing off to someone else now. What’d you think?

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But perhaps we should start by defining the issue film. Isn’t it in most cases what we used to call the political film or even the political thriller: All the President’s Men, the Costa Gavras films?

Or is the issue film any film, which deals with an issue? Would you call Iris a film on the Alzheimer issue? The Hours a film on the issue of depression? Or am I going too far? We do get deeper understanding on both issues through these films...

It is interesting that you are using the film Mississippi Burning as an example. Let me compare it with a film I absolutely adore which deals with exactly the same issue: Betrayed. Both films deal with modern day racism, both were released in the same year (1988).

They are also both classically told and still, Betrayed used a subjective storytelling, as it made us fall in love with the racist, long before the protagonist and we knew he is a racist and a killer. The protagonist (played by Debra Winger) and we invest emotions and/or positive thoughts for a big part of the movie - the guy is the perfect father and the most tender and thoughtful partner - and then sud115

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denly... the shock. The world turns upside down. And because we like the guy we catch ourselves needing longer to condemn him; trying harder to understand why. Mississippi Burning does not challenge us in this sense. We get what we know. And in a way we feel this cannot be the whole truth. Today we would feel betrayed.

where he states in no uncertain terms that he really wanted to confront and “educate” the audience by holding up a mirror to them, showing them how they are guilty of condoning violence in the media because it is presented as a thrill, not as human suffering.

I agree with your point that the more issue-focused we are the more we have to sacrifice the character, which is why I think that the only way we can approach issue in an authentic way is through emotion, the characters’ emotion and the emotional response of us writers and the audience (which I think is identical, at least this is the ideal). Again, look at the example of Betrayed.

So, yes, I do believe that film language and story structure can not only give us a story of issues, but also challenge our sense of it and that we get more and more good examples of how this can be done today.

We all know of films that want to raise awareness, but instead of making a documentary, choose to make a fiction, supposedly because the emotional involvement of the audience will be stronger.

Issue films, as I understand the term, are at the core of demands for political correctness in narratives; they often come with a preconceived attitude (the example of Mississippi Burning comes to mind), and present less of an open, living and dynamic argument, but rather end up sending messages. So the “message movie” and the “issue film” are one end of the spectrum.

To me the whole question of the issue film started with the emotional theme. When I try to tell people in a bit more detail what I mean by the term and how to use it, the issue film is just around the corner, as the most common misunderstanding.

But I am not interested in just condemning certain ideas of using the film medium to address contemporary stories of a certain social relevance. For example I feel that La Promesse, while clearly demonstrating concern over certain issues, escapes the preaching aspect by contextualising it, choosing to be on the side of an accomplice of the “perpetrator” rather than automatically taking the stand for the victim, while also leaving us with an ending that forces the audience to involve themselves.

In the same sense, a film like Before the Rain, clearly concerned with the (then still ongoing) war in the Balkans, chooses to rather tell a story about the difficulty to take sides than present us with a right/wrong dichotomy.

It is the film that has good intentions and seems to have started with an issue rather than with a story. So yes, character comes later in those cases and what’s more, character is often created and tailored towards fitting the issue - or rather the attitude of the writer concerning the issue. And issue here means clearly taking sides in a socially relevant conflict or problem. It might be as broad as unemployment, it can be more specific, as indeed, Jeff, one could claim that La Promesse has aspects of an issue film dealing with the exploitation of illegal immigrants. But I wouldn’t exclude several of Michael Haneke’s films, especially Benny’s Video and Funny Games; films that seem designed to tell us about the negative influences of modern media and the desensitizing effects on us. One DVD edition of Funny Games for example contains an interview with Haneke

So consequently, by default, I have also put forward certain claims as to what I see as problematic here: namely foregone conclusions about who is right and who is wrong, comforting closure where either the issue, or at least the individual representative within the story, is brought to a satisfying solution, and the choice of perspective when dealing with it.

I could cite the German film The Experiment as a typical example of a safe choice that limits the possibilities of story development and pre-forms the ending. By making the main character one of the prisoners in the Stanford experiment, instead of one of the jailers, all the questions raised are shaped by our identification with the “victim”. What if the writer chose to make his main character one of

FRANZ: As I initially raised the question of the issue film, let me try to point out what was on my mind and how this connects to what you already discussed.

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the jailers? Our job as an audience that relates to the story and its characters would have been much more problematic and open.

ticular structure allowing a more complex (both conceptually and emotionally) framing, then it has a reason to exist in the form of a narrative film. When that doesn’t happen (see The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamonds or The Interpreter) we feel that the materials of the narration, in some ways, force the events and the characters’ actions towards a simplistic and boring thesis – not in itself, but because it has chosen the form of a movie.

What I would consequently be interested in, for the sake of the present argument, is primarily the question of how we, as people who help shape the creative process or are involved in it as writers, feel the question of the issue film can be successfully tackled. Of course that requires agreeing on what success or failure means in this context. I have indicated some of my views above and am curious to hear your response?

GINO: I’ll jump straight into the discussion, which I definitely find interesting.

Mississippi Burning is an example that particularly fits our conversation: I don’t think that Mississippi Burning is a movie about the issue of racism, at least not in a simple way. The racism, and the stand against it, is something already ‘given’ in it – it is never asked if you are racist or not. What is thematized, and in a quite complex and enjoyable way, is rather, how the State must deal with it? How can the KKK killers be nailed? By using the correct – but often ineffective – means, which the legal procedure allows, (‘by the law’ is represented by Willem Dafoe’s character), or, instead, by using some of the same kind of violence that the killers (and the racist community) have showed in their misfits (represented by Gene Hackman’s character)?

The answer (the ‘political statement’, or we might even say the ‘theme’) is clear: yes, in that case, in that context, it is justifiable for the law officers to use illegal tools/methods.

Personally, I may not agree (and I don’t, with that idea in general), but in that case, I do agree. Which are the cases where it is a must to go against the law to do the right thing? That is a formidable question, developable in millions of different variations – and that is why I find Mississippi Burning successful. Some of the same things might be said about Taxi Driver, or, under certain respects, Paths of Glory.

So, if the issue, dealt with in the specific story as narrative material, is pushed to a ‘second degree’ of consideration, through a par118

The problem is not quantitative: the percentage of room occupied by the issue constituting narrative materials (e. g. racism, autism, pollution, unemployment) compared to that of the specific story being told. It is not so much about how much the plot has to ‘cover up’ the ‘real’ issue, as what kind of themes a story sets within the narrative materials of that issue, so that I can develop it better through and beyond the issue itself? If I don’t make that ‘double step’, the risk is to treat the issue as the theme - in which case it would be preferable to choose the form of a documentary.

Is Rain Man a story about autism? Are Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action movies about industrial pollution killing people? Are The Green Mile or Dancer in the Dark movies against the death penalty?

Or, to mention an example dear to Franz, is The Full Monty a film about unemployment?

I think that all these movies manage, in different ways, to deal with strong themes by using their issues as narrative materials of stories and characters, which are memorable.

I don’t find it problematic to start a development from an issue rather than a story: certainly, in the first case, it will be easier to lose the theme (or to treat it in a mechanical way) in the course of the creation of the story and characters, since the issue will ask to ‘live’ throughout the narration, often ‘interfering’ with the theme in the mind of the writer. In the second case, it will be more ‘natural’ to hold the compass of the theme; whether some kind of issue is present or not.

I didn’t see Away from Here, but I’ll try to say something about adaptation and some of the problems it raises. The Truman Show is a movie ‘inspired’ (with no credits) from one of the most famous science-fiction novels by Philip K. Dick, “Time Out Of Joint”. Of course, in 119

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the book there is no mention of the reality-show lasting a lifetime. It was about a man who lives off winning money by resolving a game coming out daily in the newspaper (called ‘Where the little green man will be next?’); then, something happens and he starts to suspect that the world around him is not what ‘they’ want him to believe. He finds that outside the enchanted suburbs where he lives, artificially frozen in time in 1959, the entire world is at war; the real time is 1998 and the government is using (and ‘protecting’) his ability at solving the game to predict where the enemy’s nuclear bombing will strike next. (Wikipedia has a very short synopsis of the novel).

dramatizable, personal story in the foreground. The question is - does such a strategy really dramatize the issue, or just use it as texture?

All of Dick’s fans agree that The Truman Show is one of the best Dickesque representations, even better than Blade Runner or Paycheck. Question is: what makes the movie Dickesque if the entire setting, story line, characters, even theme are different? When we adapt, at different degrees of ‘faithfulness’, what makes the adaptation ‘effective’?

How much does the choice of a different theme (or ending) affect the success of the adaptation? Is it possible to create completely new stories ‘belonging’ to classic authors’ poetics and aesthetics?

Does the particular kind of ‘adaptation’ that is the biopic, obey to the same logics and workings?

JEFF: Good provocative comments from Gino.

I like the phrase “second degree of consideration”. And I think he’s right about Mississippi Burning. However, I still think it raises a problem.

The film critic David Bordwell, in a book called “The Classical Hollywood Cinema”, notes that Hollywood films tend to use the impersonal forces of history/class/culture/issues as the background for personal stories. He wonders whether these films can really tell stories that deal with these issues. He has a great over-the-top example from a film called Balaika in which a couple says, before the fade out: “Think, if it were not for the Russian Revolution, we would never get together.”

So many of the classic American issue films do put the issue in the background, as a second degree consideration, while telling a more 120

While I don’t disagree with Gino’s reading of Mississippi Burning, I also know that my reaction to the film is that an event, in which historically Black America began to control its own destiny, is reduced in the film to a conflict between two white men. This is my problem with the second-degree solution.

CHRISTINA: We seem to be talking about two categories: One where the issue is somewhere in the background.

And one, where the story and the characters come directly out of the issue.

I would add a third one, which is one that most of the times doesn’t work: where the issue is discussed, where it’s all about the issue.

I would agree with Gino that in this third category the stand against something is already “given” – and I would go even further by adding that the writer starts by his/her given stand and tries to prove it by writing. A bit like scientific writing... If lucky, he/she proves it but the result feels dead. If unlucky, what is proven is exactly the opposite.

I find the second the most challenging and this is what I mean by multi-perspective storytelling. Traffic is a good example which we will all have seen and read, there are other screenplays/films which will be less known, like the Croatian Witnesses, a marvellous example of looking at the same war from different perspectives, or indeed Syriana.

Let me try to address the question of how the issue film can be successfully tackled in development in order to be successful; successful in the sense that it moves us emotionally, that we learn something new both intellectually and emotionally, in the sense that it is an experience to watch which may change our lives (I do believe that art has that power).

First of all, I do agree that one can start writing from an issue rather than a story or indeed character. But it is the most challenging and therefore a difficult, tricky starting point. For me the best way to do that is to work from the conflict between the stand I think 121

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I have as a writer and the opposite stand, and group the characters around the two poles i.e. ask myself what their stand is concerning the issue and why. Not intellectually, but because of what they are experiencing or have experienced, or, if I am not writing, to help the writer go through that process.

4. A radical character transformation of the once-bad guy that is motivated by idea and not character, because I have no understanding of what deep need in this character is touched nor why now.

5. An obviousness of plotting that makes the whole piece feel like the safest of well-made plays. As I watch I find myself well ahead of the action.

6. An obviousness of storytelling that makes sure the viewer understands everything without working at it; a kind of unconscious reinforcing of the comfort and ease of the viewer’s position.

There are books, which do that. “The Reader” is one of them and I believe it is one of the rare examples where the writer dares to look at the world from the point of the persecutor rather than the victim, which is the easier point of view. Interestingly enough, I have just finished reading David Hare’s screenplay, based on Bernhard Schlink´s novel for the long awaited film and I am thrilled. As the great screenwriter he is, he has managed to change everything and still remain loyal to the emotional theme, the characters, and the story. It will be interesting to see whether the film will manage to support the screenplay or whether this will get lost in realisation.

Have you happened to see Giuseppe Tornatore’s La Sconosciuta (The Unknown)? If yes, I would love to include it in our list of examples, as for me it worked intellectually and also on the level of suspense, but not emotionally. This is something that the best European screenplays and movies often do - why is that? Is it interesting to ask ourselves that question?

Did others have these feelings? I think some of it has to do with a sense that the writer (in this case, writer/director) is concerned with doing good rather than exploring the ambiguity of the human condition. There is a kind of smugness to these films, sort of like, we all know this and wasn’t it terrible, but it couldn’t happen to us.

I keep going back to the style of storytelling. I think, for instance, of the great films/novels that came out of Eastern Europe before 1989. Because they had to disguise their arguments they had to invent oblique forms that made the reader/viewer work, and feel and laugh. They had a freshness and sense of life.

Maybe I’m always nostalgic.

JEFF: I hope I don’t offend anyone, but I finally saw the film that translates as The Lives of Others, which I found very disappointing and which reminded me of what I think are the generic problems of a certain kind of issue films.

I did like the actress character and felt a kind of longing for properness that I liked (the tie). This served to motivate her.

However, beyond that 1. A very sharp, unambiguous delineation between good and bad characters.

2. The good character, the playwright, has limited characterization because he must not challenge our identification with him. If we do, we sense the writer is afraid that the issue will be lost.

3. The bad character, the minister, presented as sexually aggressive and totally sleazy, in case we are even inclined to think about his point of view.

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I wonder if there is anything to say in a more general way about issue films to keep them falling into the trap I felt this film fell into.

CHRISTINA: Sorry for coming in so quickly after my last mail, but this is a VERY interesting example: what about The Lives of Others?

I guess we are so happy and grateful when we finally do have a commercial hit out of Germany or Europe in general that we are almost anxious not to criticize it, but, yes, let us do so, why not.

Florian H. von Donnersmarck (the writer and director of the film) once said that he doesn’t understand why he is being celebrated as a director and offered jobs as a director after his first film receiving an Oscar, when he felt that writing the screenplay was a much more demanding and difficult job. Of course this is how things (still) are in cinema, when a film is successful people think 123

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it’s the directing. It could also mean that he should have left the writing job to somebody else, and reading Jeff’s comments, one could think exactly that. On the contrary, when I saw the film I felt that it was the directing which was not challenging enough to get all the nuances that the screenplay had between the lines onto the screen. This often happens and mostly even we, the professionals, cannot really distinguish between what part is writing and what directing - unless we can read the original screenplay. So, in a way, because we discuss films, we analyze films and not screenplays.

When people analyze theatre plays, they do so by reading the theatre play, leaving the interpretation (and there are many possibilities there too) to somebody else. Or how often have you seen a bad Shakespeare?

one in his/her own right, but unfortunately this is not how development works most of the times.

But let me get back to Jeff’s comments. When the film came out and mouth of word suddenly was so good, there was a group of people who were pissed off at the film - and those were the intellectuals who felt that it was too black and white and that it was manipulating people to see Eastern Germany in too simple a way. I guess this corresponds to what Jeff is saying and that their problem derived from a rather simplistic approach to the characters which the film indeed has.

I would especially like to comment on two of the points that Jeff is making here by combining them: “As I watch I find myself well ahead of the action.” And: (There is) “an obviousness of storytelling that makes sure the viewer understands everything without working at it. A kind of unconscious reinforcing of the comfort and ease of the viewer’s position.” This for me is exactly the point.

There are two things, which may go wrong, as I see it: 1) The Lives of Others is a perfect example of what intensive development work may also mean - especially if it is of the wrong kind, where lots of editors, producers and financiers each have their say in the course of development, so you need to satisfy everything and end up with the lowest common denominator. It is correct in the sense that there are no offences, no dramaturgic “mistakes” and every single thing is sure to be understood. As a writer (and I try to apply this also when I edit) I prefer to have one single development partner and not many different ones, not even if each one is a good 124

2) The screenplay is in terms of narration rather old-fashioned.

When I spoke about multi-perspective storytelling and alternative screenwriting in former e-mails, as the only possible way of approaching an issue nowadays, this is exactly what I meant. This film may have worked perfectly when we were younger - not in age, but as a civilization. But nowadays we know, we feel that there is more than one perspective and more than one truth. By going into the writing through many perspectives, through many characters one may be in a better position to deal with an issue and avoid the danger of becoming one-dimensional. Of course this is not the only way, but it is interesting that it seems to be the way that successful issue screenwriters of the last decade have chosen.

This, by the way, is linked to my second lecture in this book...

FRANZ: My recent stay in South Africa ties in nicely with the topic of our conversation. The Lives of Others is just screening in theatres there now. I had the chance to speak with two people who had seen it, a director and a commissioning editor. Both were impressed by the film and moved by its story. Both, but especially the director, felt though, that it should have ended with the death of the woman on the street. Instead it continues for another 15-20 minutes (or that’s what it feels like).

When I saw it, and that was rather late, because I somehow wanted to escape the hype, I could acknowledge the conventionally functioning and reasonably well-crafted story, up to exactly that point of the woman’s death. I also found the characterisation especially wanting of shades of grey - everything was spelled out, clearcut, quickly sorted.

Then, with the woman dead and out of the way, the film had to flag its issues, and in no uncertain terms. It changed gear and direction, grinding on and on until it had turned the story into a feel-good movie of East-German redemption. Suddenly the Stasi-character became the martyr of the changes in society, no longer one of the reasons why this society had been as it were. And didn’t we all somehow know the one, good and decent man who worked for the 125

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Stasi but came to see the error of his ways? The issue was clear: reconciliation of the former antagonistic forces, emphasis on the human factor, in effect the emotional equivalent of a tabloid article.

That’s the film people like to see and whether this is due to too many cooks in the kitchen or just simple calculation - we’ll never know. I would claim that most of what we see in the film was already there in the script and hence it could’ ve been addressed then. But more importantly, in this case, the issue, I feel, had been transformed into Kitsch early on, and therefore successfully avoided.

They also tell us that somebody put the cause above the dramatic effect and the successful conclusion of the film in its adequate tone and style. It almost felt like a bad case of sponsoring gone wrong.

When I spoke with the South Africans about the film, they told me that for them, it was subtle. They said the style in their country is rather to not veil anything, but instead hammer the issues home. Directly addressing the problems, basically using the fiction narrative as a simple tool to create a kind of fake documentary, and a biased one at that. They said that South Africa is only slowly awakening to the more subtle European style of storytelling. So maybe we must not forget that our take on this is very much culturally coded.

Still, let me get on to another example.

When I saw Isabel Coixet’s latest film The Secret Life of Words, I liked it. I loved the set-up, the quiet nurse, played by Sarah Polley, even Tim Robbins as the hulking, after an accident temporarily blind patient. Waiting on an oilrig until he’s fit to be transported, those two get to know each other; slowly, tentatively, stubbornly - from her side, a subtle seduction with words from his side. The film sustains this tone until what should have been its ending. Then it inexplicably shifts gears, becomes a kind of documentary plea to support the efforts of the Danish crisis centre that helps women who were physically and psychologically abused and humiliated during the Balkan war. The Tim Robbins character goes there to be fed the back-story of the woman he loves. He then marries her and takes her to a safe place, but all this was already in the moment when they said goodbye, about 15 minutes before the film ended. Everything was possible. Those last 10-15 minutes destroyed every subtlety, badgered us with moral statements you find are impossible to not agree with and leave us with the feeling of secure closure for the characters.

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If most issue films have one thing in common, it is that they often feel like one-way streets leading into tunnels. There’s no diversion, no escape route or side street - it is just rallying down this main thoroughfare towards the finish line. A side effect of this is also described by Jeff’s viewing experience: one gets ahead of the action and although the writer/director/producer never wants to believe it to be true, such films are among the easiest to predict, once you got the hang of it.

Which reminds me of that great story the director Luis Bunuel tells in his autobiography “My Last Sigh”, about the system he once devised to predict the outcome of American studio films of the 1930s and how he once told a horrified producer that he had guessed the reportedly great and unusual surprise ending (for Sternberg’s Dishonoured, starring Marlene Dietrich) five minutes into the movie.

Issue films invite formula writing, and so the form becomes as rigid as the content. So what do we do? How, if we come upon such cases, do we (re)act, if the development is still going on, the case still open?

How can we deal with the intentions of writers and directors who feel they have something to say, but find no other way than to populate ideas with cardboard characters and make it a script?

What do we tell those who have something to say and use all their skills, but still it is a foregone conclusion what an audience is supposed to feel and think in the end about a particular question from the real walks of life?

“If you’ve got a message, send it by mail”?

That alone won’t always do.

Just hypothetically, how would you or I have reacted, if Michael Haneke had given us his scripts of Benny’s Video or Funny Games to ask for story notes or a consulting meeting? (Interesting coincidence by the way, that both films star the same actor as The Lives of Others, Ulrich Mühe).

Well, I guess I would’ve tried to find out what it was that was so important for people to understand from that film. I would’ve tried to find the driving force behind the writer’s/director’s intention and why he thinks it needs to take on exactly that form?

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Usually what one finds is that people are relatively fresh to an “important” topic/subject and then the enormity of it, combined with the fresh insights, simply overpowers them. Or they have a strong personal agenda - they or people close to them have found themselves in a situation that called up the issue at hand; and now the film is meant to deal with the emotional impact it had on them and their lives. Normally one then finds the main character to be the victim of something.

Funny enough, The Lives of Others chooses the usually more difficult side/perspective of the perpetrator. Maybe that was the reason why he had to be turned into a good man, a martyr in the end?

Because we cannot really identify ourselves with the perpetrator, he needs to be “humanised” eventually, even if that might entail to eliminate the serious side of the issue at hand.

To get away from this kind of illustrative “I want to make a point”-kind of writing, one has to insist that all different perspectives be taken into account, that all roads should be explored and side streets scouted. It may not be necessary to include them all actively in the story, but they will still inform the movements and actions of the characters.

For behind every issue, there are people who want to communicate something. Instead of focussing on what they want to communicate, it is usually better to ask why it is they want to do that. And then explore this, to see if that doesn’t also change the way they want to say it.

and, instead of deep characterization, the texture of the society and the issue is revealed.

So much for today - and maybe we should start that thread Gino brought up, about adaptation, too? I think I have some nice quotes to start that one off (from trusted old Ingmar...)

JEFF: Before we take Franz’ suggestion and go to adaptation, I want to bring up one other direction.

All the films we have talked about (or at least the ones I’ve seen), involve character arcs and internal characterization. I want to go back to Christina’s point of challenging an issue head on. What I think she means (if not, I’m sorry) by this is that it is possible to make an issue film that has more exterior perspectives, whose characters are more everyday and presented more from the outside, 128

I just saw and was very impressed by Jafar Panahi’s Iranian film, which is distributed as Offside in English. This film presents a group of young women who get caught after disguising themselves to get into the World Cup qualifying match and the young soldiers who have to guard them. It is very flat. Although the characters all have different back-stories and behave in different ways, the script never explores their internal life in depth. None of them go through dramatic change. Yet all of them seem like they will be different as a result of this experience. Of course, it is slow and requires a different kind of concentration to watch. But it seems deeper, not so much in treating the individual, but in exploring the society, the underpinning of the issue.

Any thoughts on this style, as an approach to issue films?

CHRISTINA: Yes, this is kind of what I meant or part of what I meant.

Character arcs and internal character development is often poison to modern day issue films. This is what has gone wrong with The Lives of Others, as we all seem to agree, even if it did work with the crowds. And, yes, I very much agree with Franz that the film should have finished with the woman’s death, which would have made it “bigger ”, more tragic and more authentic.

Authenticity is after all a very important merit when we deal with issue. And the endings are often 50% of the rent, as the German saying goes.

I think another good point is how perception depends on cultural background (the South Africans experiencing European films differently), which is why I think that our own society (meaning the American-European one) is too tired for the classical, one-character, one-perspective, internal character development way of storytelling, especially when it is an issue film. Too tired in the sense that we have seen it all and it all seems predictable and not authentic enough.

I will keep this short and not go into adaptation yet as Gino may have some final comments on issue…

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GINO: I find it difficult to consider The Lives of Others as an issue film – what is the issue? A totalitarian, oppressive society systematically violating any kind of individual privacy? Then also 1984, or The Island or THX 1138, or Logan’s Run should be considered issue films, even if they prefer the escape to shape the narratives?

Recently, Jason Reitman won the Rome Film Festival competition with Juno. A couple of years ago, the same Reitman won, among others, the WGA prize for best adaptation of Thank You for Smoking. Now, the issue of the film is (yeah, ok, I’m directly interested) - is tobacco dangerous? Do cigarettes kill people? - The material is used to tell the story of the protagonist, a clever and smart lobbyist of the tobacco multinational enterprises. Here too, as in The Lives of Others, the POV is ‘uncomfortable’: the man defends an industry that kills people, and he does it just because he is good at it with his words and ideas. Of course, the issue is treated on the screen: we see him on a TV-show sitting next to a boy with cancer, or as he himself bribes the ‘Marlboro Man’, now with lung cancer, to ‘convince’ him not to sue the tobacco industry – and he does it (unawaringly) under the eyes of his own son! A lot of info is given on the tobacco damages, and also on related ‘similar’ issues – his best pals work for two different lobbies, the weapons and alcohol industries: all three cynically compete on how many deaths their respective industries cause yearly!

I do agree with a large part of the criticism: the not really motivated change in the protagonist, the suicide of the woman, which is a rather abrupt ending, the reconciliatory epilogue. In fact, the epilogue is the area that didn’t quite convince me: definitely unsatisfying are the words that the playwright says to the pigminister, “Is it people like you who governed us?” – a line clearly delivered to the audience; and the somewhat literary choice of not having the writer actually meeting the former Stasi agent (a possibility of drama), but dedicating his work to him, ‘The Good Men’, implying that the artist doesn’t have to do with real life, he must look (and thank) from afar: yet, in the presentation, the playwright was given almost as a State-writer, personal friend of Mrs. Honecker… I find the epilogue is by far the ‘issue’ish’ part of the film, at least for the negative aspects that we are considering in our conversation.

I don’t think that multi-strand storytelling is the ‘panacea’ for all issue films: it allows varying the theme (or the issue) but at the same time, it lowers the emotional temperature of the film distributing it among many protagonists. As a matter of fact, it is already becoming mannerist (see Babel, and some other movies show this). The traditional cause/effect chain can be predictable, but the arbitrary going from a strand to another can be excruciatingly boring as well. In television series, surely multi-linear narration makes more sense, since the length of the story that is to be told spreads upon tens or hundreds of hours (thinking of ER, for example).

Let’s go back to the definition of an issue film – trying not to get trapped in the definition itself. I’ll try to clarify what I mean by ‘second degree of consideration’; it’s not so much a dialectic exposition between foreground and background stories, as a deeper thematic exploration of one, a very specific one, of the aspects implied/offered by the issue.

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But the whole script raises a question (a theme), which is more general, and has apparently nothing to do with the issue – not directly: is ‘technique’, in this case the argumentative techniques, always ‘neutral’? Does technique in any way have to do with moral and ethical values? (In some way, it might even be wider and selfreflective – are film craft and aesthetics totally unrelated to the politics?)

At the end, the character leaves the Tobacco Academy he worked for (and it is shown that soon after the tobacco companies were actually condemned to pay a huge amount of money to their victims), but the last shot is of our man who has taken up a new job: he works for the cellular telephone companies, suspected of provoking brain cancer…

The tone of the script is light, sometimes it goes even on a satirical ground, but I wouldn’t say that the theme is not emotional enough – unless I don’t want to identify emotions with melodrama: ethical questions may raise passionate answers. At least, I think so.

Some years ago, Michael Mann brought up on the screen The Insider, another adaptation dealing with the same issue (tobacco 131

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damages) in a different dramatic architecture – in a way, more traditional – intertwining an insider who has the proof to nail the tobacco companies and a journalist who tries to help him. A good film, but the theme was more in the area of: how much are you willing to pay, in terms of personal life, to serve the truth?

Which seems to point, again, to the question as to why would people want to raise issues and convince others (their audience) of certain facts and attitudes in a fiction film? Surely we know one answer: it creates awareness and it is a popular medium. But so is the news on TV, indeed so is the press. What fiction films can do, though, is make you walk in the shoes of the people. So the translation into fiction might entail almost automatically a personalisation.

And of course the first impulse is to dramatise to the max, choosing characters that are right in the middle of the problem and, through a restorative story arch, are brought to become part of the solution.

And heightening the drama, this appears to be the assumption here, will bring it all home, will convince people to take a stand, to become aware, or even active.

So are we actually arguing for an “art for art’s sake” approach when we find issue films (in their broadest definition) problematic?

I don’t know which is the way to deal with authors and writers who want to ‘send a message’, as Franz says: asking them why they want to do that is certainly a good starting point, although the risk is to remain on the ground that the issue imposes. I would devote my efforts to find that particular angle, that single aspect, that second degree of the issue, that allows considering both the issue and the story of my character/s dramatized in function of that specific theme. Paul Schrader says that when he wrote Taxi Driver, he started out from the broad theme he was interested in: ‘the metropolitan solitude’. Well, I think he made a hell of a job, don’t you?

FRANZ: I want to thank Gino, for steering us back onto the original track.

Indeed, The Lives of Others might not be a prime example of an issue film at all and I wouldn’t consider dealing with an overt issue as its “raison d’être” - it might tie in more closely with the broader definition I attempted in my earlier post, namely that the writer/s seem to predominantly want to convey a message or posit an attitude towards an issue that has relevance in the world outside the film, what we might call “reality” for our purposes here. Clearly The Lives of Others wants us to take a certain attitude towards its subject matter, especially in the last part, what you call “the epilogue”.

I also want to remind you of Jeff’s previous quote from Bordwell’s “The Classical Hollywood Cinema”. Jeff says that Bordwell notes that Hollywood films tend to use the impersonal forces of history/class/culture/issues as the background for personal stories.

He wonders whether these films can really tell stories that deal with these issues.

In that sense I’d say The Lives of Others qualifies and the question as to whether we need a particular point-of-view (the personal story, which translates as involved, I guess, as opposed to observing) is exactly what lies at the heart of the matter. Jeff called it “dramatizing the issue” versus “using it as texture”.

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I can say for my part that my feeling of uneasiness stems from the fact that I am asked to buy into something that seems to predate the story. The medium and the story are not used to explore something, but to illustrate a point we are then expected to share.

Consequently, exploration of character and world are limited as to their main function/intention. Things need to lead to certain conclusions. So I feel I am asked to take things in but not actively participate in the development of the story, I can lean back and get the message delivered. Instead of issue film, we might have to broaden the phrase and call it didactic filmmaking.

But of course we have to differentiate. Nowadays this straight delivery is partly supplanted by a “let’s look at all the approaches, let’s get a picture from all the angles”. This leads straight to the question of the multi-strand narrative Christina brought up.

I also don’t have the impression, like Gino, that multi-strand storytelling is the ‘panacea’ for all films that fall under that “category”.

To start with, one of the frequently encountered ways to create the multi-strand narrative is to form a group of characters that represent different approaches or angles on the same problem, theme, topic, whatever. While this is a viable approach, it does not necessarily mean that the attitude of the writer/s or director/s changes much. We might be presented with a host of options, but whether this leads to a more open or a more determined (in the sense of goal-driven) answer, if, indeed there needs to be an answer in the 133

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positive, or if the answer can also be a question, that is largely independent from the number of character points-of-view.

4. There is necessarily a plurality of arts, and however we may imagine the ways in which the arts might intersect there is no imaginable way of totalizing this plurality.

I guess what I raised here and made you comment on seems to come down to essentially one of the key aesthetic questions concerning works of art: does it need to have a message and a defined point-of-view, or is it enough to put things out there for everybody to develop their own take on the material? So before this gets out of hand, let’s stop right here.

As for adaptation, maybe a good point of departure could be this rather long quote from Ingmar Bergman:

5. Every art develops from an impure form, and the progressive purification of this impurity shapes the history both of a particular artistic truth and of its exhaustion.

9. The only maxim of contemporary art is not to be imperial. This also means: it does not have to be democratic, if democracy implies conformity with the imperial idea of political liberty.

“Film is not the same thing as literature. As often as not the character and substance of the two art forms are in conflict. What it really depends on is hard to define, but probably has to do with the self-responsive process. The written word is read and assimilated by a conscious act and in connection with the intellect and little by little it plays on the imagination or feelings. It is completely different with the motion picture. When we see a film in a cinema we are conscious that an illusion has been prepared for us and we relax and accept it with our will and intellect. We prepare the way into our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings without touching the mind. There are many reasons why we ought to avoid filming existing literature, but the most important is that the irrational dimension, which is the heart of a literary work, is often untranslatable and that in its turn kills the special dimensions of the film. If despite this we wish to translate something literary into filmic terms, we are obliged to make an infinite number of complicated transformations which most often give limited or no result in relation to the efforts expended.”

CHRISTINA: As I don’t think that this gets out of hand, but is becoming more and more interesting, I will continue on the issue question, even if we are approaching it from so many different angles that it has stopped being just one theme…

An afterthought I’d like to quote some of Alain Badiou’s “Fifteen theses on contemporary art”, that seems relevant to our discussion of didactic filmmaking or issue/message films:

Let me quote Charlie Kaufman on this and his writing philosophy in general: “I guess my mindset about movies is that I feel like film is a dead medium. With theatre you’ve got accidents that can happen, performances that can change. But film is a recording. So what I try to do is infuse my screenplays with enough information that upon repeated viewings you can have a different experience. Rather than the movie going linearly to one thing, and at the end telling you what the movie’s about – I try to create a conversation with the

2. Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone.

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Let me start by saying that I also do not think that multi-strand storytelling is the “panacea” for all films. As a matter of fact, I am not even talking “just” about multi-strand, but about storytelling which breaks the classic rules of a single active protagonist, restorative closure, one emotional perspective and/or chronological order (whether it breaks all or one of these rules is irrelevant). But even that “alternative”, some would say post-classic screenwriting is not and should not be considered as a panacea.

But I definitely disagree with Gino in this point: I do not think it is or can be more manneristic than classic storytelling, there are simply good and bad scripts and films whether they are told in a classic way or not.

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audience. I guess that’s what I try to do – have a conversation with each individual member of the audience.”

or, to use a better word than the truth, towards meaning? Isn’t that why we create art, isn’t that why we write? To find meaning, even the meaning of life? I never understood why it would interest somebody to write if they already have the answer and even use it as a starting point.

A conversation with the audience?! Well, isn’t this what Nietzsche called “tragic joy”, the joy of post-creation on the part of the viewer, through exactly this conversation? Aristotle has a similar theory and actually pronounces it as tragedy’s main goal, a fact that was completely ignored by the screenplay theoreticians while they were interpreting his Poetics literally into a rather simplistic restorative three-act model.

I guess what I’m saying is that if we look at modern screenwriting through the lens of complex systems theory (and how else can we look at it in the age of writers like Kaufman and Arriaga, video games, long cinematographic storytelling, oops, sorry, TV series like Lost and Prison Break etc. which are completely transforming and expanding our cognitive and emotional abilities as viewers?) then you are also looking at how you create a conversation using a “dead medium”. Multi-strand and/or multi-perspective is just one possible way of many – the experimentation field is wide, which is what makes this so exciting. Using improvisation as a writing tool is another option. Writing as a part of the process of filmmaking, for instance writing in interaction with the actors and the director yet another. But they are all just practical options and methods on the way to one goal: to engage the minds and emotions of the audience in a time where they have seen and felt it all and are thus smarter than ever before. To get the audience to work to make sense out of the first viewing – and make them, by the end, to want to rewind the tape and see it over again, just to figure out what they missed.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that film evolves and that we are anyway in the middle of a cultural revolution, which has immense consequences for the narrative culture. And that screenwriting is currently the most exciting field of literature because of this possible “conversation with the audience” with means that are unique to it.

Last not least, whether a writer attempts the classic or not, the main issue is to start with a question. Because, why else would it be interesting to write, if not to search for meaning and eventually an answer or a direction towards something which looks like the truth, 136

JEFF: I agree with what Christina is getting at. There is an interesting book by a writer named Steven Johnson called “Everything Bad is Good for You”. Concentrating on TV from a more cognitive science perspective, he argues that the multi-strand narratives require a cognitive agility that becomes a layer of meaning. The cognitive complexity of the script evokes the complexity of contemporary experience. This might be another way to frame the problems we have with The Lives of Others. The means by which we understand it are just too simple and over articulated.

I’m not at the moment hot to talk about adaptation, but I probably will be after I see the new Coen brother’s No Country for Old Men which was a mediocre book, but I bet will be a great movie. However, someone turned me on to these two paragraphs from a review article in Film Comment about the new Todd Haynes’ film on Dylan, I’m Not There: “The audience to which I’m Not There will matter most consists of those concerned either practically or theoretically with the present and future of film, for whom it may mark a pivotal moment.

I’m Not There joins Inland Empire, Zodiac, Syndromes and a Century, and I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone as part of a recent and broadly convergent body of work that revises, questions, and sometimes even tosses out narrative fictional structure, in light of our increasingly collective trans-national digital culture.”

“What do these films have in common that I’m Not There pursues with perhaps the most rigorous and consciously elaborate ambition? Critiques of representations of identity and self with a corresponding sense of mutable sexual identity (none of these films are programmatically queer and yet none of them are not-queer); narrative fiction incessantly invaded by documentary codes; cinema made with an entirely new post-Internet awareness of the perme137

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ability and fragility of all narrative structures; movies that in different ways scan information, in the modes of sampling and remixing.

All of these portend an entirely new digital culture as yet impossible to envisage.”

theoretical written works, etc.) as well as the relation/idea of adaptation in something like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, always credited as being based on a Julio Cortázar short story. When you read said story, you’ll have a hard time to understand why they felt they needed to credit it at all. Then again...

I wonder what you think?

CHRISTINA: Here is a last contribution as we are approaching the deadline and I must say I will miss our conversation…

There is indeed an old saying which states that “you can only make a great adaptation out of a bad novel”, but I am not so sure that this is so close to the truth. At least some of the adaptations I loved, like About Schmidt and The Hours were also wonderful books. And I look forward to watching Atonement based on a Christopher Hampton screenplay based on the wonderful Ian McEwan novel or The Reader, which was adapted by David Hare from the great novel by Bernhard Schlink… I think that if a screenwriter finds a way of translating the emotional experience he or she had while reading the book for the first time (which you can only have if it is a great book) then he/she is almost there. But of course adaptation, says another old wisdom among screenwriters, is one of the most difficult things to do. Which is perhaps why the films I mentioned are all written by extremely experienced screenwriters (and playwrights, as a matter of fact).

But this is all I can say about adaptation at the moment, given the fact that we cannot really open up the conversation to broader aspects, due to time shortage.

Last not least I am more than intrigued by the new digital culture as yet impossible to envisage which lies ahead of us!!

FRANZ: Famous last words...

I guess we won’t have a conversation about adaptation, maybe that’s for the future then. I am predominantly interested in adaptation in the broad sense of using a source material from a different medium, including the world at large (biographies, “true stories”, 138

Jeff, what you quote from that review is extremely exciting, I am very interested and think this is really an observation we’ll be dealing with a lot in the near future and which has far reaching consequences for our profession, too (well, mine definitely). Actually one of my current S&P projects is very close to the mentioned film-works in both style and concerns.

But what I maybe want to finish on is our discussion of issue films and didactic filmmaking.

I almost forgot that we can cite an old, great comedy, and a still very impressive example of the idea of the issue film put into action.

I am speaking of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. Here is a film about a successful Hollywood director of light comedies like ‘Hey, hey in the haystack’, who is determined to finally make a film that has real relevance to the people. A film about the poor! A film that makes a difference! Its title will be “Oh, brother, where art thou!” Of course our hero has never been even remotely short of money. He decides to have himself outfitted like a hobo (at the studio’s costume department) and hits the road to finally learn what it means to be poor. But it turns out to be a difficult job to keep his lifestyle and fame hidden - and his own desire for comfort. Just when he has resigned himself to end the experiment and deal out 5$-banknotes to the homeless, he is robbed and the robber is run over by a train, leading to the assumption that our hero is the dead man. He gets in trouble with a railroad-guard when trying to insist on his identity and ends up on a chain gang. Locked away in a work camp, officially dead, life for the first time looks really grim. One day all the prisoners are taken to the local church for the sermon - and a film-show.

Sitting among the down-and-out criminals, our hero watches some cartoons. People are laughing like crazy and have a really good time.

Eventually, our hero manages to save himself by claiming that he is the killer of the famous Hollywood director (himself). As he makes headlines as the killer, his people recognise his picture and he’s freed. Now he has enough material to make his film. But he decides 139

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not to make it and declares that he has eventually understood how important laughter is to people and he will continue to make light comedies, with a little sex in it ;-).

In the form of this breathtaking and witty comedy, Preston Sturges has put the finger on the problem already more than 60 years ago. Good intentions are not enough to make a good film and even real-life experience doesn’t necessarily help. What is more important is that the artist does what he can do best and feels good about, without looking too much at what might be considered socially relevant. Art should move you, but it shouldn’t preach.

identifies in the ‘roman à thèse’. There is what she calls the ‘structure of confrontation’. Well, interesting enough to keep our conversation going for a long time, which is not the case…”.

GINO: A few words to say that our conversation, as all good conversations, has raised a lot of questions in my mind while looking for answers; for me, that means that we’ll never stop enjoying and ‘studying’ and, occasionally, creating the cinematic forms of narration and representation, and I’m very happy with that.

That is definitely the area to explore (instinctively, I would add Todd Solondz’s Palindromes): and a start could certainly be the comparison of these innovative motions towards new paradigms of cinema narration and representation with the attempts tried by the Nouvelle Vague in the Sixties and the ‘modernist’ cinema in general – very interesting are the chapters on art-cinema narration and parametric narration. Still, remains the problem of the popular accessibility to these forms.

Franz’s example of Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels – a real ‘cult’ for cinema lovers – justifies the entertaining moviemaking as away to show the audience both serious (in our case, the issue films) or ‘nonengagée’ themes (a French description meaning films not politically or socially engaged), always allowing a popular access to it. And I think that ‘popular accessibility’ is something never to be forgotten, even when an author is pushing his narrative style beyond the traditional borders, into new territories.

In a book by the already mentioned David Bordwell, “Narration in the Fiction Film”, (written in 1983 and published in 1985, in the same year as “The Classical Hollywood Cinema”), the main approaches to narrative strategies are examined and analysed: it’s a very important attempt to give general as well as historical patterns. In the case of the issue films, he roots that peculiar approach into what he calls ‘the Soviet historical-materialistic film’: “One task of tendentious narrative art is to create conflicts that prove the thesis and furnish narrative interest. In these films, the viewer is likely to know, or quickly guess, the underlying argument to be presented and the referential basis of the fabula world. (…) Most of our interest thus falls upon the question of how history takes the course it does. In a general sense, the Soviet historical-materialistic film answers this by adhering to the two schematic patterns which Susan R. Suleiman 140

I mentioned the book because it will be also useful to afford both the questions raised by Christina and above all the suggestive passage proposed by Jeff about the new harvest of films considered as pioneers or ‘signals’ of a possible new digital culture, founded on mutable sexual identity, use of documentary codes, permeability and fragility of all narrative structures, the sampling and mixing of information.

But here comes (at least for me) the problem of adaptation, or better, the adaptation theory: not so much a reflection about the techniques of an effective transposition from one semiotic system (a novel, a legend, a newspaper story) to another (the narrative film), as the choice of criteria of what is to be in the movie in order to obtain a specific aesthetical effect; which is actually true for any kind of narration in film - there is a line of thought that goes up to consider all movies (both original and ‘based on’) an ‘adaptation’ from something else, existing in texts or in life.

Isn’t I’m Not There a kind of particular biopic, Todd Haynes’ very personal ‘adaptation’ of Bob Dylan’s life? May its narrative structure, the use of the different actors to interpret the same characters, the different moviemaking techniques and styles in the different episodes, constitute a sort of paradigm or is it a one-time, ‘unrepeatable’ piece of work?

We’ll continue in our next conversation…:))

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