srn – Page 16 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: Time, space and movement: screenplay as oral narrative by Adam Ganz

Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne

Time, space and movement: screenplay as oral narrative by Adam Ganz

Paul Schrader contends that the screenplay is an oral medium. This article explores the validity of this contention by analysing the ballad Janet or Lady Maisry (Child 65) and its use of what are generally thought of as screenwriting techniques to tell its story, in particular looking at the way it makes use of montage, multiple narratives and different timescales to create suspense and involve the audience. It looks at the role of visualization in oral narrative and suggests that screenwriters and analyses have much to gain by looking at films as oral narratives, which like ballads are told rhythmically in real time in front of an audience. It suggests that screenwriters and academics studying the screenplay could benefit from looking at song and music as a helpful paradigm for understanding screenplay techniques and developing screenplay notation.

The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: No room for the fun stuff: the question of the screenplay in American indie cinema by J. J Murphy

No room for the fun stuff: the question of the screenplay in American indie cinema by J. J Murphy

One of the most interesting trends in recent independent cinema has been for film-makers to avoid using traditional screenplays in making their films. Not only have emerging film-makers associated with the so-called mumblecore movement, such as Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz and Ronald Bronstein, veered away from depending on conventionally written screenplays, but other critically acclaimed films, including The Pool (Smith, 2008) and Ballast (Hammer, 2008), have as well. Indeed, some of the most notable American indie film-makers Gus Van Sant, David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch have employed alternative strategies to the screenplay in such recent films as Elephant (2003), Inland Empire (2006), and The Limits of Control (2009). What is behind these developments and why has the conventional screenplay been under attack? What are the aesthetic benefits of choosing not to rely on a traditional script? Is this a completely new phenomenon or has the industrial screenplay always been an obstacle? I explore these issues by looking at three major strategies that indie film-makers have used in place of the traditional screenplay: improvisation, psychodrama and visual storytelling. Finally, I argue that for current independent film-makers in the United States of America these methods provide an appropriate model for a practice that is attempting to create a truly viable alternative to Hollywood cinema.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: Screenwriting strategies in Marguerite Duras’s script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1960) by Rosamund Davies

Screenwriting strategies in Marguerite Duras’s script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1960) by Rosamund Davies

The published scnario et dialogues (Duras 1960) (Figure 1) of the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) feature precise technical specifications of sound and image and more novelistic passages, all of which create an emotional resonance that has been left to the director to translate into images. This article explores Marguerite Duras’s text as a particular example of how the written component of the screen idea (Macdonald 2004a) might function on the page and as part of a dialogue with the director. It also examines the way that the script’s concern with problematizing and drawing attention to the process of representation makes it a palpable and controlling presence in the resulting film.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: Creating Authorship? Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s collaboration on If. (1968) by Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard

Creating Authorship? Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s collaboration on If. (1968) by Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard

This article draws upon the research currently undertaken for my doctoral thesis and is meant to act as a complementary study of Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s partnership on If. (1968), following Charles Drazin’s 2008 article for the Journal of British Cinema and Television, If before If. Charles Drazin (2008: 318) highlights the idea of a creative dynamic underlying the working partnership between Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin on If., as well as in the subsequent projects they developed together. The following article aims to uncover the nature of the creative dynamic suggested by Drazin’s article by looking at both the personal and the artistic dimensions that the working relationship assumed. The aim is to highlight the distinctiveness of their collaboration in the cinema; the article will show that in the course of this collaborative work they realized their artistic potential through an exchange of expertise, and that their collaboration helped to bring about an alternative approach to the conventional opposition between screenwriter and director, especially when it comes to claiming authorship over a film.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: Tonino Guerra: the screenwriter as a narrative technician or as a poet of images? by Riikka Pelo

Tonino Guerra: the screenwriter as a narrative technician or as a poet of images? Authorship and method in the writerdirector relationship by Riikka Pelo

The article focuses on the invisible role of the screenwriter and makes observations about the screenwriter’s part in the process of writing a screenplay together with a director. By studying the two examples of the collaboration between the screenwriter and poet Tonino Guerra with the directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky, the intention is to follow the ways in which authorship is both constituted and shared in such a liaison. I observe how the craft of the screenwriter is understood in relation to the different aspects of his task. By focusing on the case study around the writing of the film Nostalghia/Nostalgia (1983), I also consider how responsibility in developing these aspects is shared between screenwriter and director during different phases of a screenwriting process: in gathering ideas, sketching, building the story structure, writing drafts, rewriting and completing the final draft.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: Cyber-Aristotle: towards a poetics for interactive screenwriting by Jasmina Kallay

Cyber-Aristotle: towards a poetics for interactive screenwriting by Jasmina Kallay

Through analysing appropriations of Aristotelian dramatic theory within interactive digital narratives (Laurel 1991, Hiltunen 2002, Mateas and Stern 2005), this article assesses the merits of Aristotle’s Poetics in providing a basis for an interactive screenwriting poetics. From the six components of tragedy (plot, character, thought, diction, melody, spectacle) to mimesis and catharsis, these concepts are examined for their value in a new media context. The hierarchy of the components is challenged and new formal and material causative relations are explored, using the interactive drama Faade (Mateas and Stern, 2005) as an example. With new dramatic configurations emerging (such as spatial plotting and narrative architecture), the question posed is – to what degree can Aristotelian thought really aid the interactive screenwriting process? If this approach can not yield substantial results, what is the alternative?

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs by Patrick Cattrysse

The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs by Patrick Cattrysse

Screenwriting manuals tell us that narratives should have a protagonist and that a protagonist should have an important dramatic goal to achieve. With respect to this goal, manuals often mention another common distinction, that between a protagonist’s want and need. Wants are generally understood as external and/or conscious dramatic goals, whereas needs are defined as internal and/or unconscious dramatic goals. This essay argues that these tools could be made more powerful if defined in a more precise way. Whereas wants refer to the goals of characters at the level of story, needs play at the level of the interaction between plot and real audience. This re-definition links the wants and needs debate with the much wider and far more complex study of audience involvement and its relationships with the value systems expressed in a narrative and those experienced by a viewer; a subject which stretches far beyond the limits of a single article.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: Teaching screenwriting in a time of storytelling blindness: the meeting of the auteur and the screenwriting tradition in Danish film-making by Eva Novrup Redvall

Teaching screenwriting in a time of storytelling blindness: the meeting of the auteur and the screenwriting tradition in Danish film-making by Eva Novrup Redvall

This article analyses how the approach to screenwriting in Danish cinema has undergone major changes from an auteur-oriented film culture in the 1960s with basically no professional screenwriters, to a collaborative auteur industry where screenwriting is now a recognized craft and screenwriters are established professionals in the film industry. Focusing on the historical development of the Screenwriting Department at the National Film School of Denmark, the article discusses how the educational emphasis on teaching screenwriting has had an impact on Danish cinema both by introducing a basic understanding of screenwriting models and tools for a new generation of Danish film-makers, and by developing a common awareness of the importance of screenwriting as well as successful collaborations in creative teams. The article highlights how, after widespread enthusiasm over the emergence of successful screenwriters, there are currently debates about the dangers of professionalization as well as critical voices calling for a return to a more personal kind of auteur film-making. Finally, it is suggested that further investigation of the nature of close collaborations between directors and screenwriters, now more prevalent in Denmark, can provide interesting material for new perspectives in discussions of authorship.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: So it’s not surprising I’m neurotic The Screenwriter and the Screen Idea Work Group by Ian W Macdonald

So it’s not surprising I’m neurotic The Screenwriter and the Screen Idea Work Group by Ian W Macdonald

The Screen Idea Work Group (SIWG) is a flexibly constructed group organized around the development and production of a screen idea; a hypothetical grouping of those professional workers involved in conceptualizing and developing fictional narrative work for any particular moving image screen idea. In this article, I use the notion of the SIWG to draw together the views of key workers about how the process of screen idea development works or doesn’t. My findings are based on a small ethnographic study I undertook in 2004, in which, through in-depth semi-structured interviews with seven SIWG workers, I attempted to understand how they came to occupy their role, how they felt their judgements were made and received, and how far the SIWG’s view of the screen idea accorded with the screenwriting doxa (characterized as how to do a good piece of work). As detailed below, their answers were concerned with status, a sense of self-worth and respect, points of tension, power, control, collaboration and trust, and the nature of the doxa itself.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era by Kathryn Millard

After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era by Kathryn Millard

This article aims to contribute to contemporary debates about screenwriting as a process of developing the screen idea; about the ways in which formatting conventions from an earlier era of cinema may restrict innovation in screenwriting; and about shifting practices of screenwriting in a digital era in which images and sound play a potentially more significant role. Additionally, it questions the use of terms such as blueprint to describe the relationship between the screenplay and the proposed film that it represents. The article draws on the author’s body of practice-led research as a writer and director of feature films and documentaries, as well as histories of screenwriting, film production, comics and the graphic arts.

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