Borders of Scriptwriting

Borders of Scriptwriting
Writers for Europe 2013
Scriptwriting Symposium
Documentation
FAMU—Prague—2014
Borders of Scriptwriting Symposium
Organizers: Anna Bobreková, Borjana Dodova, Viera Hladišová,
Pavel Jech, Marek Vajchr
Website: www.scenaristika.cz/bordersofscriptwriting
Date: 8 - 11 April 2013
Venue: FAMU, Prague
Participating schools: FAMU (Prague), DffB (Berlin),
NFTA AHK (Amsterdam), RITS (Brussels), VŠMU (Bratislava)
This project was supported by the Student Research Grant awarded by
the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in 2013.
Borders of Scriptwriting
Writers for Europe 2013
Scriptwriting Symposium
Documentation
Edited by Borjana Dodova and Asmara Marek
Lectures given by Hans Heesen, Jochen Brunow,
Miroslav Petříček, Keith Cunningham,
Rick L. Blackwood, Borjana Dodova,
and Muriel Aboulrouss
FAMU—Prague—2014
List of Participants (in alphabetical order): Muriel Aboulrouss, Ernesto Anaya,
Rob Arends, Dimitar Banov, Daniel James Berens, Rick L. Blackwood, Anna
Bobreková, Lucie Bokšteflová, Csaba Bollok, Christian Brecht, Magdalena
Brossmann, Jochen Brunow, Jo Coune, Keith Cunningham, Borjana Dodova,
Meir Lubor Dohnal, Silke Eggert, Lies Gallez, Marek Grajciar, Hans Heesen,
Malte Heitman, Lianne Hillebrand, Vendula Hlásková, Radek Hosenseidl,
Barbora Hrínová, Pavel Jech, Perla Karvašová, Toks Körner, Iris Kelly Kuntkes,
Johannes Machnik, Petr Marek, Milada Mašinová, Gregor Matuschek,
Ashar Medina, Marína Mlkvá, Alicia Muñoz Reyes, Marc Nollkaemper,
Lukáš Obermajer, Katerina Petkovska, Miroslav Petříček, Carl Plaisier,
Florian Plumeyer, Sonja Polligkeit, Martin Ryšavý, Alena Sabuchová, Migle
Satkauskaite, Gesa Scheibner, Jeroen Scholten van Aschat, Marcel Schröter,
Marielot van der Slikke, Carlota Sola, Daniela Staníková, Ivana Sujová, Loulou
Swarte, Wander Theunis, Josef Tuka, Marek Vajchr, Helena Zajícová
Contents
Foreword
by Borjana Dodova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
What Borders Supply
by Jochen Brunow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Introduction
by Hans Heesen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Borders of Fiction
by Miroslav Petříček . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Framing Stories: Beyond the Storyline
by Keith Cunningham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
A Dangerous Method: Screenwriting and Strategic Game Design
by Rick L. Blackwood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Mathematics and Storytelling
by Borjana Dodova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Cine-Jam: To the Jammers of the World
by Muriel Aboulrouss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Foreword
by Borjana Dodova
The theme for our scriptwriting symposium was found very easily. The historical
surroundings of Prague with their numerous systems of fortification and the recent history of the Cold War dividing Europe into Eastern and Western Blocs led
us directly to the idea of a border. We asked our speakers and guests to explore
the concept of borders and their connection to scripts and scriptwriting.
Scripts are usually analyzed in terms of drama and time. Linear structures
help us to shape ideas and turn them into stories. Space has a slightly different
character. First of all, it doesn’t have any beginning nor any end. There isn’t any
special point from which to enter a forest and there are infinitely many ways to
go through it. We took the spatial concept, the border, as a basis for our discussions purposely, because we hoped that its incongruence with linear storytelling
would influence and enrich the way we speak and think about stories.
The idea of borders helped us ask questions that wouldn’t be accessible if
we had stayed in the scope of scriptwriting, script editing and theories of narration. We didn’t analyze how stories are created directly. Instead, we asked from
which perspective they are formed and within which systems do they live. While
questioning the systems that create a basis for their existence we started to think
about artistic freedom. The very presence of borders allowed us to take into
account the dangerous areas outside of them where most of the monsters live.
And finally the dissolution of borders that is happening in our postmodern technological world of fast travel and electronic devices provided an explanation of
why so many monsters are being transformed into pets.
The symposium, Borders of Scriptwriting, began with two introductions.
Jochen Brunow formulated the basic premise of our endeavor and Hans Heesen
made clear how important stories are for our survival. During the next four days
we listened to five lectures. Miroslav Petříček spoke about the cuts which happen
at the level of a script, Keith Cunningham described different levels of framing,
Meir Lubor Dohnal spoke about the borderline life experience of the Jewish
filmmaker Kurt Gerron, Rick Blackwood invited us into the world of war games
and Borjana Dodova made an argument about self-reflexivity.
We saw two presentations of borderline projects. The first one was given by
Muriel Aboulrouss who presented her workshop Cine-Jam. The second presenter
was Martin Ryšavý who spoke about the position of a filmmaker as a patron
and inspirer of a utopian idea: creating an artificial sea in the Czech Republic.
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We screened the feature film Love from Above, directed by Petr Marek, who participated in a discussion about the condition of people who consciously decide
to stay on the border of a society. Students presented and discussed their work
during two pitching sessions. They also had two chances to get lost in Prague.
During the trip to an island on the river Vltava they were given support to perform organized wandering. During a walking tour to an independent café on the
distant border of the center of Prague they visited the construction site of the
tunnel Blanka as part of a real lost-in-the-city experience with FAMU’s dean
Pavel Jech.
The symposium Borders of Scriptwriting took place at FAMU in April 2013
and included participants from five European film schools: FAMU (Prague),
DffB (Berlin), NFTA AHK (Amsterdam), RITS (Brussels) and VŠMU (Bratislava). This Documentation is a collection of the lectures that were given. Audio
recordings of the lectures are available online at: http://www.scenaristika.cz/
bordersofscriptwriting/. We decided to rewrite them in case there is an interested reader who, as we hope, might feel a temptation to think about borders
together with us.
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What borders supply
by Jochen Brunow
What began as a so-called Wandertag, a mere excursion, slowly evolved into
an interesting event, a symposium, exciting and challenging not only for our students but also for us as teachers. I am very thankful that Pavel and his dedicated
team organized this years’ Writers for Europe and even more that he brought
a new perspective to our primary question: “How do stories learn to travel?”
What does a story need in order to travel beyond cultural, national and linguistic borders? The original impulse of the symposium was to cross, to penetrate,
to tear down borders. Adding the heading ‘The borders of scriptwriting’—like
Pavel did—changes drastically the perspective on the topic. The very first ideas
I had when I was confronted with the term borders were: well, we live in very
exciting and fascinating times. We live in a time where walls came down, a lot
of walls, borders came literally tumbling down on us, walls of national borders
and walls of rules and regulations. We were lucky and happy that the Berlin Wall
came down and the Cold War ended. But we struggle extremely and fiercely—
and still not very successfully—against the deregulation of neoliberal economic
ideology. In a way it is strange that the American financial system is still called
Wall Street. Why? Because the walls that fenced in Wall Street—the walls of
financial laws—also came down long ago. The regulation of financial business
was reduced. And once certain borders are crossed, you might realize that they
have been there for a very good reason. But it is not easy to erect them again.
People will resist, because the borders seem to limit freedom, the freedom of
trade and business—which some people confuse and mistake with the freedom
of individual expression. But without borders, eternity begins, randomness,
invisibility. Without borders everything is either indifferent or one. What we
are experiencing right now is how difficult it is to sensibly reintroduce formerly
dissolved borders or limitations. Once you’ve scrambled the egg, you can’t turn it
back into a fried one. The urge to cross borders is immanent to all human beings.
We all think the neighbor’s cherries are much sweeter or, in other words, paradise is always elsewhere. And this is where we long to go. But it’s only because
of borders that we learn to distinguish, creating predictability and trust. They
make life in community possible in the first place. So, is the crossing of borders
a central pattern in human behavior in all known social forms of life? And is there
a limitation to border-crossing or continuous conquest?
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This is how I feel and what I ask myself about the general or global paradox we live in. And when Pavel brought up the new headline for your symposium ‘Borders of scriptwriting,’ these were the first ideas triggered in my brain.
Borders are something we try to avoid. And at the same time there are certain
borders that are absolutely necessary to keep life as fair, as just, and as suitable
as possible.
By choosing borders for the new topic, Pavel not only provoked these first
ideas but he influenced my perception and suddenly I was observing the new
key word borders all over the place. It seemed as if the word had to do with what
we in German call Zeitgeist. Lettre, the wonderfully inspiring European culture
magazine, chose the title ‘Niveau sans frontiers’ for its one hundredth issue:
standard without borders or level without borders. The paradoxical declaration
of the Swiss artist Max Grüter ‘Niveau sans frontiers’ ironically comments on
the end of the bipolarity of the world and emphasizes the necessity of borders.
The German magazine Brand Eins dedicated its latest issue to borders, using
a proverb we often heard in times of the Berlin Wall: when we protested against
West German politics our parents said: “Geh doch rüber” meaning “cross over—
why don’t you go and live behind the GDR wall.” In this magazine I found a definition of borders by philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann who claimed that
without borders we couldn’t even live. Maybe his definition helps us clarify what
exactly we are trying to think about. “To begin with, a border is nothing more
than a real or mental line, separating two things from each other. It simultaneously
lets one thing end and the other begin. And vice versa. And it gives both contour
and shape. Most of all, it distinguishes one from the other—or it at least claims the
difference. Without borders nothing was perceptible. They are prerequisites for all
types of human insight. Because every insight starts with one crucial act: understanding. This is not that.” So borders supply awareness, insight, perception: no
knowledge without borders.
The declaration of Max Grüter I mentioned also has a hidden anarchic
artistic bond with a Czech poet. We are here holding this symposium in the
Czech Republic and it is the home country of The Good Soldier Švejk. Der brave Soldat Schwejk is a figure in world literature everybody in this room knows,
and his creator—at least the Czech students will know his name—was Jaroslav
Hašek. And this guy had a very special relationship with borders.
Hašek was a satirist and temporarily an anarcho-syndicalist, both features
requiring a particular relationship with borders and the crossings thereof. Hašek
founded ‘The Party for Moderate Progress Within the Limits of the Law.’ This
might sound somewhat harmless at first. ‘Party for Moderate Progress Within
the Limits of the Law.’ The party manifesto included the reintroduction of the
Inquisition and slavery. Why not? After all, both had once been within the
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limits of the law and completely legal. This great anarchist satirist who—probably
fueled by alcohol—founded his party in the Prague neighborhood ‘Vinohrady’
in a pub called ‘The Golden Liter’ brings home to us just how relative is the business of borders. Just like Grüter. How they change historically but also how they
fall victim to different interests. However we chose to set and define the borders
or frameworks, determines how we value things.
What does this have to do with scriptwriting? First: we write about reality,
and how we perceive reality will influence the way we narrate it and how we will
dramatize our real life world. And second: the borders of scriptwriting underlie
the same notion. The way we define them predetermines the outcome, the individual, social, or economic value of our writing.
Another experience that was triggered by the shift of perception was that I
suddenly realized we are completely surrounded by and involved in ‘stories’ all
the time and in any place. People search for narratives almost everywhere, in
politics, in ideology, in public relations, but also in marketing, in advertising.
These are stories in quotation marks, in inverted commas. These stories frame
and reframe facts; they are told to influence our perception of the world. And the
question arises: how do we separate the ‘false’ stories from the dramatic stories
with a meaningful connection to the real world? We can only do this by defining rules for stories, by specifying certain components and ingredients that are
inherent parts of storytelling.
Nowadays, the classical storytelling in our business is challenged by new
formats. Phenomena like the docu-fiction and the scripted reality formats, and
then the games industry propagating cross-media products. People in the business increasingly speak of content when they mean storytelling. For the different
distribution platforms available to us these days ‘content’ is the new hype word
for all this obliterating the differences between all the diverging forms of moving
images.
Dramatic scriptwriting is separated from this rather vague notion of content by existential borders. In his key note, Keith Cunningham will tell us more
about the effects which occur when these borders are touched or disturbed and
I think, we will discuss these ideas throughout the course of the symposium.
We aren’t the only ones holding a symposium on the topic of borders.
Each year in January, political and economic leaders—even a few scientists are
admitted—meet in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. World
leaders discuss the borders of trade, of quota and the reduction of trade barriers. In 1996, when John Perry Barlow made his appearance, things were quite
different. Barlow is the songwriter of the rock band Grateful Dead. I sincerely
hope that for some of you in the audience, this brilliant band still rings a bell.
John Perry Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation defending the
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freedom and rights of internet users. He wanted to protect cyberspace from
governmental influence and declared cyberspace a frontier, a border, restricting
the influence of governments. Today, we know of course, that the real problem
in cyberspace is not the governments, but the corporations that have big data
available on a global scale and process it through algorithms. Big data is what
we call the mass of data, worked out by algorithms, offering reliable information
about the user.
The problem seems to distract us from our actual topic, but only on a surface level, as I will show with a small example. The new ways of distribution for
film via the Internet are being praised as our independence from big companies
and corporations and the fossilized TV networks. But those of you who use the
new internet platform ‘Netflix’ to view movies on demand is, just like all the
other users, delivering big data. One’s viewer habits are recorded: which parts of
the film he/she rewinds or fast forwards, when and for how long he/she interrupts the film, primarily and which point exactly. The combined gigantic mass of
data serves as a pretty exact indication of the effect of the films and their stories
that we, as writers, try and create.
To the industry of course, the only effect of interest is one isolated factor
within the dramaturgy: viewer loyalty. When effectivity is everything, so is viewer loyalty. And I am slightly concerned that the new guidelines, generated from
this big data, will make today’s agonizing discussions about TV ratings seem like
a walk in the park.
Since the rise of the so-called ‘Pixar Story Rules,’ a critical conversation
about processed storytelling has erupted, brought about by Richard Brody from
The New Yorker. The Pixar Story Rules refers to the 22 prescribed regulations
intending to guarantee a universal, global effect of the story for all the studio’s
animation work.
There have always been programs, like ‘dramatica’, asking the writer
different types of questions to guide him or her through the material and hopefully improving the story. So far, its success was limited. But the capacity and
complexity, and therefore the effectivity, of algorithms is growing. At the end
of the last century we thought a lot about what effect digitalization would have
on the moving image. Today we have long gotten used to them. What effect
digitalization and the invasion of calculation has had on storytelling we don’t yet
know much about. Professional musicians already made some painful experiences in their field. I heard someone complain, “the people in the industry know
exactly how many beats per minute will get people dancing. They know how many
beats per minute will prompt them to get a drink. So they play a beat in the studio and then take it apart and piece it back together like lego, depending on what
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it is they need.” This type of studio work wasn’t for him, he said despairingly.
“You can’t improvise and that’s really the soul of music.”
On Wednesday, we will have a lecture called ‘Mathematics and Storytelling’
and I hope we will hear more about the power and the dangers of algorithms in
storytelling.
There are other borders of scriptwriting we might touch on during the next
days of the symposium. Now, I want to have a short look at the more obscure or
opaque kind of borders that are not so obvious but exist nonetheless.
The borders between screenplay and film for example seems to be a clear
and definite line between word and image. But even in the screenplay we find
deep connections between the text and the image/space, complex metamorphoses are taking place. In certain respect, the image and the narrative language
are rooted one inside the other. On the one side, language is an abstract logical
construction, but when it’s used to tell something real, when we use it for storytelling, wouldn’t we first need a prelingual, spatial notion of the matter? Wouldn’t
we need to experience something, or see it in our mind’s eye, in order to talk or
write about it? The analytical way of speaking or writing is called ‘reflecting’
or ‘mirroring’. A visual/pictorial? representation of reality through the medium
of the mirror. This idea will be discussed further in the lecture this afternoon
by Miroslav Petříček, ‘Borders of Fiction.’ On a related note, I would like to quote
an author and scriptwriter very dear to my heart:
“One does not look through writing on to reality—as through a clean or
dirty window-pane. Words are never transparent. They create a space, not
of existence, but of experience. The clarity of the written word has little to do with
style itself. A baroque text can be clear; a simple text can be opaque. Clarity is the
gift of the way space, created by words in a given text, is arranged.”
These are the words of novelist John Berger. His storytelling in images
has become known through his screenplays for Swiss director Alain Tanner’s
best films. The space he claims necessary to arrange words in a narrative text,
of course, is not of a physical nature. It might be that the scarf of a woman demands more space than a cloud. This depends on the particular experience that
is being related. In any case, the space we need in order to arrange the words, is
one of images.
And then there is another totally different kind of border, with strange
kinds of doors—the threshold which the actor must cross to enter the game.
Actors contribute something to the story that doesn’t necessarily add up with
what the script or the dramatic composition provides. Actors bring their
immediate physical presence to the table. They add the subtle relationship
between their own persona and the performed, fictional character, our creation.
It’s a very special ingredient of any film. The special thing about actors in film is
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that—in contrast to the theater—the craft and the very personal become much
more intertwined. Film actors work with body and soul, their eyes and their
voice, with their posture and shape. Things happen no one could put into words
beforehand. Things that can’t be captured in words, but rather invade through
a void in the text, through a sort of gate we have to create. Robert Towne once
described this process as follows:
“The point is that a fine actor on screen conveys a staggering amount of information before he ever opens his mouth. The scriptwriter must be skillful with
dialog to add to that information. This brings me to the biggest ongoing concern I have always had writing screenplays: if you believe that the actor projects
character on film tellingly in silence, then the questions you ask yourself are:
how do I NOT say something? How do I not get into the actor’s way? How can
I exploit an actor’s performance and place it at the service of the screenplay before
he’s given it?”
This means we need to create space, a manageable basic action that is easy
to comprehend. This leaves space for minor matters and the actors can do and
say things that aren’t necessary to explain the story but tell us something else.
You create these open spaces for actors by not cramming a scene. By trying to
write laconic dialogue. If you can get the same result with three instead of five
lines, it’s the better option.
Towne—who is also a great director—added something else. He said,
“strangely enough, it is mostly the calmness in the actor’s face that makes this
possible.” He compares it to the water’s surface. “When the water is moving
you cannot see deep, you only see the waves. But if the water is calm and clear,
you can see deep down to the very ground.”
Questioning the borders of scriptwriting is, in some way, limitless. It can
lead us way out into the realms of philosophy, the borders inside ourselves and
outside, our borders of knowledge, of skills, of imagination, and of creativity.
It leads us to the philosophical question: is the universe without borders or is
it endless? Is there a chance to know which is true? You might ask: does it even
make a difference? I think it does. But before things get too confused I want to
quote Kafka. I think you can’t have a symposium in Prague without quoting
Kafka. So after offering up my own insignificant thoughts, I take refuge in Kafka.
From what we know about his life he was not a very happy guy. And his work is
also not exactly bursting with joyful delight. But it is full of insight into life. He
was a very, very good writer and a deep thinker and so he could not well avoid
touching upon the source, the well, the offspring of all human creativity. No
wonder Kafka has the best advice for authors I’ve ever read in a book, or any of
the innumerous scriptwriting manuals we have. So here is my Kafka quote:
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“Du brauchst Dein Zimmer nicht zu verlassen,
bleib einfach an Deinem Tisch sitzen und horche.
Du brauchst nicht einmal zu horchen, warte einfach.
Du brauchst nicht einmal zu warten, werde einfach still –
Die Welt wird sich Dir offenbaren, sie hat gar keine andere Wahl.”
[You don’t have to leave your room,
just stay at your table and listen.
You don’t even have to listen, just wait.
You don’t even have to wait, just fall silent.
The world will reveal itself to you, it has no choice.]
Research and experience are important for our work as writers; we need
to be connected to the world around us but the inner source of our creativity is
stillness, and this source has no borders at all—it is limitless, endless. I wish you
all that you might be able to tap into this source, because then your stories will
cross all national and linguistic borders.
--Jochen Brunow is an author of essays, film, and radio drama scripts. He teaches
Scriptwriting and Dramaturgy at DffB in Berlin and ZHDK in Zürich. He is
a member of the German Film Academy. He has edited and published several
catalogs of film scripts.
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Introduction
by Hans Heesen
On the plane from Amsterdam to Prague, crossing several national borders,
I read a story in a volume of short stories by Jaroslav Hašek, the author of
The Good Soldier Švejk. The story is only three pages long. It is called Class Differences. It is about two guys who get drunk every night. One is a forester, he chops
wood in the forest, and the other is of a higher class, a bailiff. They go to the pub
together, drink about thirty pints of beer and get totally pissed. And on their way
home, they have fun with the local cop by throwing him in the fountain. They
do this every night of the week, and every time people will comment on them
by saying: The forester was drunk as a pig and the bailiff was quite cheerful too.
Then, one day, the forester gets annoyed by the fact that people call him
drunk as a pig, while he drinks the same amount as the bailiff. He decides
to have only one beer when the bailiff drinks three. So, the next night the bailiff
drinks his usual thirty pints of beer, and the forester drinks only ten. Nevertheless, the next day people still say that the forester was drunk as a pig and
the bailiff was quite cheerful too.
After a couple of nights the forester accepts that no matter how much
he drinks, people will call him drunk as a pig, so he decides he might as well
drink his usual thirty pints instead of only ten, and not worry about it any more,
because he can’t do anything about it. On their way home they can’t find the local
cop to throw into the fountain, but they do find another official and throw him
in the fountain instead. This other official, however, is much higher in rank, and
he doesn’t accept being treated like this. He takes them to court.
The forester and the bailiff appear before the judge, and there are a lot
of witnesses, who declare that the forester was drunk as a pig and the bailiff was
quite cheerful too.
On hearing this, the judge decides not to sentence the forester, because he
was drunk as a pig and consequently couldn’t help himself. The bailiff, however,
who was only quite cheerful, was found guilty. This, of course, was much to the
satisfaction of the forester. But the bailiff tried to defend himself, with no end,
that he had been drunk as a pig too!
This, of course, is a very nice story about crossing borders. It is about
crossing the border from being sober to being drunk as a pig, the border from
being responsible to not being responsible, and about the borders between social
classes.
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There’s a movie called Runaway Train, an American production by Andrei
Konchalovsky, a Russian director. It is based on a screenplay by Akira Kurosawa
and it has Jon Voight in the lead. He plays a prisoner who escapes from a maximum security prison way out in Alaska. He crosses the border from captivity
to freedom. When he breaks out of prison a young inmate joins him. He doesn’t
want this kid to come along, because it decreases his chances to break away
successfully. There is only one way out of the territory, and that is by freight
train. They both climb on a train, but it so happens that the engine-driver drops
dead because of heart failure, and the train gains speed and gets out of control. So they are free, but the train will kill them if they don’t manage to get to
the locomotive and stop the train. Halfway there they discover that there’s another person on the train. It’s a woman. Manny, the Jon Voight character, wants
to kill her. The kid wants to stop him, because that is crossing yet another border
of cruelty, from humanity to bestiality. They fight, and it is a fight for life
in which Manny almost kills the kid. The kid then tells Manny that he is an animal. And Manny answers: “No worse, worse… I’m human.”
When it comes to the borders of freedom and captivity, humanity and bestiality, free will and predestination, we must move from Alaska to Siberia and
talk about the Russian author Varlam Shalamov, who lived from 1907–1982.
He was one of the many victims of Joseph Stalin. Shalamov, being found guilty
of ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyite activities’ was sentenced to five years’ hard
labour. He was sent to the worst of all labor camps: the one in Kolyma, Siberia
that because of the extreme conditions was known as ‘the land of white death.’
Shalamov wrote how, after a while, he had learned to tell by the way his
breath froze whether it was twenty, thirty, forty or fifty degrees below zero.
Shalamov survived his sentence, and then had to serve a second term for calling
Ivan Bunin, an émigré short story writer who was critical of the Bolshevik government, a ‘classic Russian writer’—which was considered an act of anti-Soviet
agitation. This one remark, this praise of a fellow author, cost him another ten
years at Kolyma. So when Ivan Bunin lived in a luxurious villa in the south
of France, near Cannes, his colleague Shalamov, just for praising him, spent his
days in the North-Eastern part of Siberia. (Bunin, by the way, is a truly great
author, one of the great men of 20th century Russian literature as is generally
recognized nowadays. So what Shalamov said was nothing but the truth.)
In his masterpiece, The Kolyma Tales, which is an impressive as well as
a depressing read, Shalamov describes the struggle to survive the horrors and
hardships of everyday life. These were threefold. First, there were the extreme
arctic conditions. Second, there were the extreme working conditions in the
mines where the prisoners had to work long, long hours. And third, there
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were the fellow inmates. Many of them were intellectuals and artists, just like
Shalamov himself, but the rest were killers, rapists, psychopaths. These were the
guys who controlled the barracks, the gangsters who would steal the one watery
cup of soap a day from you without any scruples.
Man, as we know, is a wolf to man. The name of the Jon Voight character
in Runaway Train was perfectly chosen: Manny. How did Shalamov survive this
barbarism, this hell? By telling stories!
By telling stories the border between the intellectuals and the gangsters
could be crossed. Because we all, even the worst possible gangsters in the worst
possible conditions, need stories to live on, to survive, to stay human. The guy
who could tell stories was the person they respected most of everybody.
There’s a well-known quote by Alfred Hitchcock who says there are three
things important about a movie and that’s the screenplay, the screenplay and the
screenplay.
What goes for movies goes for life as well. To stay alive we need stories.
Stories that cross borders and make us cross borders.
--Hans Heesen is a scriptwriter. He worked with Jos Stelling on the movies
De Vliegende Hollander, No Trains, No Planes, and Duska. He teaches
Scriptwriting at Nederlandse Filmacademie - AHK.
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Borders of Fiction
by Miroslav Petříček
First of all I must apologize for my Czenglish. I’ve tried to brush up my language
abilities but in vain. Secondly, I will be very short because I don’t like too long
and boring speeches. It’s better to open up a space for discussion. So how to
begin? As my starting point I decided to choose the peculiar position of scriptwriting from the point of view of literary theory—namely the fact that in current theories of narrativity scriptwriting is mostly ignored. So that for example
a vast handbook on narrative analysis published some ten years ago mentions
the term script only as a useful term borrowed from the vocabulary of computer
programming and artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, scriptwriting is without
a doubt a sort of narrative but in a sense it’s not the complete narrative. Why
such hesitation? The answer in my opinion lies hidden in the very title of today’s
session—the borders of scriptwriting. Scriptwriting is always a form of narrative, whether true or fictitious, but what really characterizes scriptwriting are
precisely those borders through which it is connected and by means of which
it is at the same time separated with regard to what is commonly designated
as a story or récit. I mean that scriptwriting is script writing and not in a full
sense story telling.
This peculiarity of scriptwriting follows first from its form itself and from
its function, but secondly also from the fact that a script is not primarily meant
to be read but to be converted into a movie. In this sense scriptwriting is, to use
the French term, énoncé not énonciation, utterance. So, scriptwriting somehow
anticipates its way or the way of its materialization or actualization. It anticipates
the stages when telling in the form of writing becomes showing, to use the wellknown distinctions. And it is possible to bring into discussion the notion of border especially in the context of scriptwriting—and it’s possible to use this term
in discussion slightly differently, and this could be useful for our understanding of the concept of border as well as for the concept of scriptwriting itself.
So what’s specific to the form of script in particular and in the case of our discussion of the borders of scriptwriting? Specific is the anticipation of cutting.
Film-editing begins, according to my opinion, at the level of scriptwriting. Either
by means of explicit instructions like cut to, back to, dissolve to, etc., or implicitly
when the scriptwriter takes into account in advance the future activity of the
cutter or the film-editor. But the cut itself—the cut indeed—is a very special case
of a boundary. To begin with cutting or film-editing is not just a technical issue.
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It co-creates the movie. Also, the cut itself as such is literally nothing—nothing
between two shots or between two sequences. It would be interesting to ask this
question from a phenomenological point of view, whether the cut being somehow invisible appears, or not, but that would be a too long and too complicated
digression, so I’d better leave this problem aside. In any case, the cut is experienced by movie spectators. He or she feels that something happened. But what
does it mean? Instead of answering I would like to put forward a certain working
hypothesis: only this nothing between occurrences makes some line of incidence
to be an event. This however indicates that an event is never a simple thing. That
what we name as an event is in fact a complicated thing.
Now we can go back to literary theory and scriptwriting. The common
analysis of narrative form wants to go down as deep as possible and in such
a way to find a minimum common ground for all cases or of all tokens of narrative. This analysis finally comes to what is commonly referred to as the plot.
However it’s obvious that a mere temporal or causal sequence of incidences
or actions do not create an event. Quite the opposite. In linear succession there
is no such thing as a sudden reversal. Causality rather eliminates event because
the condition of every event is unexpectedness or unpredictability. And you
can’t identify an event with what is possible in a given situation, and with what
could be inferred from the actual reality of such a situation. The action is a part
of the event only as being a re-action. Only then, when this reaction is induced
by the difference between expected possibilities and the sudden emergence
of something impossible—only then there’s an event. And that means that the
plot itself is something like a mixed unity rather than the very last given of narrative. The plot could be broken into small pieces all of them being formed—
not only by terms, actions, incidents—but by relations. Very significant in this
respect is the old Greek term peripetia (peripety); every relation inside of the
plot implies a difference, a difference which connects as well as dis-connects
incidences or actions.
Only at that moment, namely on the level of relations and differences,
the analysis of narrative form really passes to the last plane which is the plane
of differences. Relations as differences. A cut. But it’s equally possible to argue
that one such difference—or one of the forms of such difference—is a movie
cut as anticipated in scriptwriting. Cut, in a very peculiar function because every cut functions as a so-to-say seam, a disconnecting connection, a connecting
disconnection, or a sort of paradoxical disjunctive synthesis. When in this line
of reasoning we try to make the next and hopefully the last step we can arrive
at the following conclusion: if we understand the narrative as a model of reality,
as it is lived and as it is reconstructed by means of various narrative forms then
these seams, connecting disconnections and disconnecting connections are
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perhaps the ultimate substance of our reality. It’s a very crazy idea, I know, so
I leave it as it is. Of course all this I’ve said was meant only as a remark by the
main way, not to the main point. But it’s useful to know a wider horizon.
And now I can return to the problem of borders of scriptwriting, finally.
The whole purpose of all my previous remarks was to prepare a certain important concept I need when I try to solve this issue of scriptwriting. Sometimes it’s
good to be aware of very trivial facts. If it is true that scriptwriting creates something like an internal border when the scriptwriter anticipates cutting, so creates
some internal borders inside the text and when he or she takes into account all
necessary cuts then it’s perhaps also true that equally important are the outer
borderlines, or borders of a script. Taking into consideration that the boundary
in the form of a cut and the boundary as a seam is connecting disconnection
and disconnecting connection then we can better grasp this outer boundary. The
boundary by means of which every scenario as a product of scriptwriting faces
outwards, points to its outside. But this outside, because every border is a seam,
every scenario, every outside becomes a part of the scenario’s inside.
I’ll try to unravel this entangled knot I’ve just created. So what do I mean
by the outer or external boundary of scriptwriting or scenarios? Quite obviously the boundary or the dividing line between the imaginary and the real
or between fiction and non-fiction. Of course I’m aware of the fact that these
concepts defy any attempt at a clear and exhaustive definition, but it doesn’t
matter. The script or scenario is like any narrative form defined as a fiction.
What then is the difference that makes the difference? What’s characteristic only
for scriptwriting? I think that maybe there is not a such crucial difference distinguishing scriptwriting from other narrative forms but to speak positively I
think that the genre called scriptwriting shows something better because of its
technical means, because of its precarious position in narrative theory and because it’s something, the scenario, script, is something which is only waiting for
it’s full realization or actualization, waiting for its becoming a movie, that means
scenario as something only floating in the medium which is generally considered to be temporary or provisional. So I think, in short, that this genre called a
script or scriptwriting shows much better the various details which are later—
that is in a movie or in a film—obscured, which are almost made invisible in
the movie, because the details, the specific marks are dissolved in ordinary rules
of ordinary narrative forms. So then I think that scriptwriting, which is considered as a genre only conditionally, reveals better then any other narrative form
the very essence of what we call fiction. Namely the fact that the crucial point—
when we speak about fiction and narrativity—is not the plot, or the difference
between syuzhet and fabula—but the crucial point is an event.
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The event is what forces us to revise our understanding of the notion of
possibility itself. If something happened, if some event occurred, it means that
all of the old possibilities are closed as well as the old reality. Every event, just because of its unpredictability, suggests or indicates that reality could be otherwise.
Every event involves a different horizon of our world understanding and therefore a different set of possibilities. Perhaps the whole popularity and strength
of the theory of possible worlds as it is commonly used today lies in this potential incommensurability not between the worlds but between the possibilities.
And all this seems to suggest that narrative fiction is by no means some kind
of a representation of reality, but rather fiction can or could create scenarios
that have their basis in the fact that something happened, in the event itself.
And of course in the sensibility of a writer for these peculiar cuts in reality itself. Events happen, but we only rarely take notice because the natural tendency
of our perception of the world is as a smooth cut, an effort to save the continuity of our world at all costs. Therefore our habits, automatisms, and not only
our habits, but of course also our movies, our novels, even the institution of
narrativity itself should serve to uphold the continuity of the world, because
most narratives, while representing some event, try to present this event in such
a way that in retrospect this event appears as a logical part of a causal series. But
scriptwriting, insofar as its’ products are scenarios, should and could be entirely
something else.
Not being a professional I imagine that scriptwriting seeks to reconstruct
the event. And thus to present an event as such. Not to put our reality in other sets but to create another horizon or to put reality into another horizon of
understanding. Or scriptwriting tries by means of cutting to transfer us into
another world. If the cut is something like the seam, disconnecting connection
and connecting disconnection, it means that fiction and reality are just as disconnected as connected. Nevertheless it can be said too that the cut is a shortcut
to another reality. To the worlds of other possibilities. And in fact that the cut is
a shortcut to infinity. And that’s all I was able to think out, so to say. So, if there
are questions, comments, or critiques, I’m all ears.
Discussion
When everything is connected and every action is in fact a reaction then how
does the deus ex machina fit in this model?
Deus ex machina could be the scriptwriter, or is the scriptwriter. A very author
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functions as a deus ex machina or can function as an deus ex machina if he
or she is daring enough.
But it is not a logical reaction, by definition, it’s a separate thing.
You are right. For example when John Cage creates a composition known
as 4’33’’ then he’s working as a deus ex machina. It’s something unexpected. It
changes the musical world and it’s something illogical with regard to the evolution of western music. It’s a sort of a cut. And only afterwards we can say that
it’s a logical conclusion of this evolution of western music. But only afterwards.
After it was created.
So does it mean that deus ex machina is in fact logical because at some point the
reality just has to be broken?
Why are we so certain that our world is a continuous reality? That our history is
a logical line of actions and that it has a linear form? It’s not true. There are jams,
there are various branches of evolution. And only afterwards—when writing
a history book—we see that our reality is made by smooth cuts, but not while
living in it.
The problem is maybe with the word machina itself, because in the old use
of the word ex machina, for example in the 17th century, the word machina was
connected with notions like miracular machina. It was nothing mechanical.
So deus ex machina makes miracles. And that means only that there is something sudden, unexpected. But it’s important because it’s a part of every story.
What you said about the film and the way the script is cut reminded me of Malevich who described the film as the first medium that allow to make conjunctions and only by this to create a movement.
I’m also wondering about what you said about the script as being in the stage
of waiting for becoming, materialization. In a way the film is in a similar stage
because it’s waiting to be produced, to fill in this nothing—to really make the
fiction work. If nobody sees the movie it’s just pictures. Don’t you think that only
when someone sees the movie, fiction starts another world which you describe
as created by the events?
There are at least three steps from scriptwriting to a movie, but the difference
is that a script is waiting for its realization not in the same way as a movie is waiting for its reception. Normally we don’t read scripts, so there is no problem with
reception of a script. The theory of reception, literary theory, is devoted to texts,
to books, but scriptwriting only occasionally is read as a text. And my point
is that this view is perhaps right, but nevertheless we can see the script as a text.
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And just this is ignored in common literary theory. So there’s a difference in
the form of reception between normal texts and scripts.
And to your first question concerning this assembling of parts into a story.
What I had in mind was the common structuralist interpretation of narratives.
There are some last units, there are some types of relations and every narrative is in a sense assembled from these units and relations. The effect is that
then every narrative is the same as every other. And what I miss in this theory
is an absence of the theoretical grasp of the term event. Event doesn’t mean that
there are some actions connected by means of some abstract relations. Event is
something more. Event brings into play a new horizon of understanding of the
world in which such an event happened. So we must, in a way, be shocked by an
event.
Could you give an example?
The second volume of Deleuze begins with Italian neo-realistic films. Deleuze
tries to accent or to emphasize the moment when a person doesn’t know what
does it mean, that it is not possible to continue living, that there is some change
but the person doesn’t know what it means and so it loses the ability to act and
to react. And that is, according to my mind, an event.
There’s another contradiction because if you write a scenario, you lay out the
event. That’s not unpredictable in most cases.
Yes, but if you are false to anticipate the cut you can present this event in another way than simple storytelling. You can postpone something or flash-back,
flash-forward and so on. I would say that just this technique makes it possible
to prevent event as such.
As you said before, as scriptwriters we should anticipate the cuts, in order to create a compact story. How would you explain the causality between the cut-outs,
between the disconnections?
Do we take them out in order to create cause and effect in a compact story? If
you said before that disconnecting connections and connecting disconnections
is quite the same, then what is the causality between these cut-outs, between the
parts that disconnect?
It is a strange form of causality. But, after every cut I, as a spectator of a movie,
I am trying to find a way out. How is it possible if in fact it is impossible. That’s
a good cut. I try to find an answer to this problem. And my question is the
relation between a question and an answer, the causal relation. The answer
is induced by the question. Important is that I’m able to answer. Whether I am
able to solve the problem, to give a last answer to the question, I would say that
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this could be the same as the relation between action and reaction connected by
a cut. Reaction is an answer. And the whole is an event.
How does the predetermination work in this framework? If you predict something then you create a new reality. If this event does not happen or something
else happens, could you say that you created two realities at the same time?
Perhaps many. There is a problem of possibilities. Our common concept of possibility is that the possibility is the other side of reality. So there is a situation, the
situation is our reality and we are able to infer from our situation the possibilities. That’s true, perhaps. But when the situation changes, then there are other
possibilities and that means that the concept of possibility is not related to the
concept of reality in such a simple way. In actual situation we don’t know what
other possibilities are hidden in our world. And we reveal the possibilities, new
possibilities, only after some event has happened. We are not able to create new
possibilities, but we are able to reveal it, to be aware of a new set of possibilities.
You said before that you don’t have to give the answer or solve the problem. But
you have to make clear whether you can give the answer, if I got it right, like
to open a new set of possibilities. Do you think this also counts for the ending of
a story, so we can keep it open?
Important is that I am trying to answer, which is not a quite logical operation.
Which is a kind of a trial and error procedure. I’ll try to find some sort of answer. It’s possible that suddenly you will be able to recognize, that through your
answering these questions you were able to find another better question. And
then there is a change. You have a new point of view. You are thinking otherwise. There is a difference between before and after. In the trying of answering
you can be shocked by an event that happened while you were trying to find
an answer. So there’s another field of possibilities. I don’t know whether it’s true
but as a philosophical experiment it would be interesting.
--Miroslav Petříček is a Czech philosopher, essayist and professor at Charles University and FAMU. He was heavily influenced by Jan Patočka. His professional
interests include contemporary French philosophy and the connections between
philosophy and visual arts. Apart from his own studies he also translates French
and German authors into Czech.
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Framing Stories: Beyond the Storyline
by Keith Cunningham
The title of this talk is ‘Framing Stories,’ and that title will explain itself as we go
along. By ‘framing’ I mean that term in a number of different ways.
Before I begin I wish to make some acknowledgments. First of all to Pavel,
Jochen, and Hans for being the three musketeers who put this event together
and keep it together. Every year Writers for Europe has its own unique challenges and every year we seem to meet these challenges. And then I want to also
make a special acknowledgment to FAMU and the FAMU staff, and especially
to Pavel and Borjana, for creating this theme that to me seems to show so much
potential: the topic of borders and boundaries and how this relates to stories. I was
thinking about that this morning on the level of personal boundaries because,
as I said to Jochen, when I start speaking people are going to be thinking that
I’ve been looking into his notes. There is a kind of continuity between Jochen’s
response to this theme, Miroslav’s response to this theme, and my own.
Now, I want to make a couple of further acknowledgments or statements
to take us into the topic of framing. For me this talk is partly in memory of
Stéphane Hessel, who was born in Berlin and moved to France as a resistance
fighter. He was one of the drafters of the United Nations Universal Charter of
Human Rights, and wrote a book few years ago called Indignez-vous! which
means Get mad! and this became the philosophical statement of the Indignados
Movement of Spain. That is the term for the popular movements that are coming up in response to very new and unprecedented socio-economic and political conditions in the Western hemisphere, and all around the world. This also
has to do with framing. So, when I’m speaking about framing today, I’m not
speaking just about framing a shot or framing a story—this refers back to what
Miroslav was talking about because any time you frame a shot with the camera, you frame something in and simultaneously you frame something out. All
of you have made your first films, whether as writer or as director or in some
other capacity, and you know that when you’re making these decisions—to go
now to a medium shot or to stay on a long shot—that you’re making choices.
Deciding when to cut also frames the information in time.
Coming back to Stéphane Hessel, there is one statement of his that I think
stands out strongly for me. He said that, “To resist is to create and to create is to
resist.” This in itself is a framing of the act of creation and of the act of resistance
in relationship to each other. I’m putting his statement in a framing or context
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of two specific points. One point is resistance to non-democratic forces that have
especially in the last twenty or thirty years risen up. If you just look at what’s happened in Greece or Italy or Portugal or Spain, the possibility exists that policies
of once-sovereign governments will be dictated or held hostage by non-elected
entities such as the World Bank or the European Central Bank. And we see that
even elected governments may not have sovereignty in relationship to those
supra-governmental entities. And this lack of representation, lack of transparency, that undermines democratic principles was something that Stéphane Hessel thought very strongly that we have to resist. For us as storytellers, I think it
also means that a movie or a story that we put out into the world—which is also
to say put out into a market—may be an act of your own personal sovereignty,
or it may be to some extent held hostage to supra-personal forces that we call
‘the Market.’
A story is not a product like all other products. You can’t compare a story
to a tube of toothpaste. However, in the market, when it gets translated into
a product—when it crosses the boundary from your world into a market—then
it’s treated according to market rules and in the same way as toothpaste or deodorant. So whether you assert that your movie is a product or not, meaning
whether you do it to make money or whether you make this movie for yourself
is often a difficult choice. I think one thing that is a direct connection between
Stéphane Hessel and the founding spirit of Writers for Europe is the core idea
that storytelling is a human act. First of all, it’s not a manufacturing process.
Introspection, reflection, and ethical choice cannot be removed from drama
without turning drama into either advertising or propaganda. And we have
to assert, and we have to continually reassert, that we believe in storytelling as
a human act.
And then finally I want to also say that speaking here today fills me with
a lot of personal feelings about the Prague Spring forty-five years ago, in 1968.
In 1968 I was a high-school student, and on April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King
Jr. was assassinated in the United States. That was an event that shocked me
very much. It was a school holiday that day, and a lot of the students from my
school went into the city and went to baseball games in Chicago. It was a time
in Chicago when entire neighborhoods were going up in flames as frustrated
black people decided that they would rather burn it down than live under the
conditions that they had. And during that day strange things were going on,
there was a strange atmosphere. But it wasn’t until we returned home at the end
of the day that we found out the news about this assassination of Martin Luther
King. At that time of my adolescence one interest that was very big was that
I was leading a fundraising campaign in the school for the relief of Biafran refugees. The Biafran war was a civil war in Nigeria, and the images of the starving
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Biafran children were among the first mass public images of emaciated, starving
children that appeared around the world, and which were also used deliberately
to raise funds for a project. In the context of those turbulent events, just the word
Prague meant hope. For me it was really the bright place. I followed intensively
every day what was going on in the Prague Spring, and went back to read the
history of the Czechoslovak Republic that existed between WWI and WWII.
I would say that even after the Prague Spring was suppressed, that feeling of
hope associated with Prague remained with me. So to be here forty-five years
after those events is very personally touching for me.
I want to begin with a personal question for you. You don’t need to answer
out loud, but I’d like you to think about it. Did you ever get the feeling that there
is a big part of you that nobody sees? Maybe when you are alone at the end
of the day, or maybe when you go to the club and nobody wants to dance with
you, or in different kinds of moments. This feeling of isolation itself is a framing that we put around our experience. And that’s what I want to begin with.
Our day-to-day lives are dominated by a surprisingly small number of internal
storylines or scripts. They tend to be rather narrowly defined according to what
I think would give me pleasure and what I think would give me suffering. So
much of the drama in movies and TV tends to blow up and magnify this theme
in our internal scripts or storylines. You could say there exist collective attitudes
about ‘who we think we are.’ Movies and TV tend to follow those existing collective scripts and repeat them, rather than challenging those scripts or seeking
to change them. And that’s probably not an accident, that movies reinforce these
tendencies. Not only do the movies tend to reinforce them, let’s say especially
mainstream movies, but the media also gives an official sanction to these collective attitudes as they get up on the big screen. We can all look up at the largerthan-life image and go yes, this is what we all think; this is how we all behave.
I think about this a lot in Germany, where there is a kind of new flowering
of romantic comedy and a lot of the romantic comedies are based on a premise
that love is difficult and painful. I personally don’t accept that particular framing of love. I didn’t grow up in it, I didn’t live in it, I don’t take it for granted,
so for me as a story consultant in Germany there is a kind of cognitive dissonance
in relation to these collective attitudes that I always have to face when I want
to deal with the writers. I would say that the repetition of these collective social
scripts creates a kind of reality bubble. And that reality bubble is something that
is hard to pierce because it’s constantly being reinforced simultaneously from
the inside and from the outside, in a feedback loop. Many of us spend our entire
lives in the bubble of these collective scripts. And there’s one set of scripts for
teenagers and there’s one set of scripts for adolescents and post-adolescents, and
then there’s another set of scripts for you in your working life, and then there’s
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another set of scripts for what makes good sex and so on. We kind of slip into
the envelope of this script, and then we slip out of that and into the envelope of
the next script.
In TV series development, the scriptwriting is often divided between storyliners who create the plots, situations, dialogue, and tone and color specialists
who fill in the dialogue and action details. One consequence of this setup is
that no one person is really responsible for the whole thing. And that is also
a hallmark of our times. The storylines float in our media environment and they
float in our interior environment. And they seem to pass back and forth like
viruses. We don’t have much of a defense system against them. The critical education pertaining to the rhetorical power of the image or the meme is nowhere
in any educational system. I’ve not seen that, except when you get into university or graduate school: if your training is to be one of the people who control
the messages. Then you start to study this. Our communication is more and more
visually ruled, but nobody is taught how to read images, how to decide what an
image is suggesting to you or asking from you. These messages or memes simultaneously belong to everybody and nobody. I get the image of jungle drums that
are sending signals across the valley, tadadam tadadam tadadam, you hear it but
you don’t know where it is coming from. In my mind this whole issue of framing has very much to do with who are we individually, who are we collectively,
where we are, and where we think we’re going—and is this going someplace
under our control or not? As long as the active framing remains invisible to us
outcome is not under our control. This is a part of what Stéphane Hessel was
saying. We should create and resist.
To put a big frame around this I’d like to make a long quote of a statement
given by Václav Havel in 1994 when he was receiving a special humanitarian
prize called the Liberty Prize in the United States. This was a part of his reception speech:
“The single planetary civilization to which we all belong confronts us with
global challenges. We stand helpless before them because our civilization has essentially globalized only the surface of our lives. But our inner self continues to
have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides
to the basic questions of human being, the more deeply it would seem that people,
behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe. Because
of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner
differences of others. Cultural conflicts are increasing and are understandably more
dangerous today than at any other time in history. The end of the era of rationalism
has been catastrophic: Armed with the same super modern weapons, often from
the same suppliers, and followed by television cameras, the members of various
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tribal cults are at war with one another. By day, we work with statistics; in the evening, we consult astrologers and frighten ourselves with thrillers about vampires.
The abyss between the rational and the spiritual, the external and the internal,
the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the
unique constantly grows deeper.”
“We will fix it in the mix,” that’s what filmmakers always say when things are
out of control. “The abyss between the rational and the spiritual, the external and
the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique grows constantly deeper.” In that small statement Stéphane
Hessel has brought together a number of boundaries that he thinks we have
to pay attention to. And this is what I want to get into.
This talk today is sort of multileveled, and there are number of little parables
that are woven through it. The first of these is a Chinese parable called Three in
the Afternoon. It’s from a Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tzu, who lived more or less
at the same time as Alexander the Great. It goes like this: in the zoo there was an
uproar in the house and the zookeeper had to respond to an emergency call and
go to the monkey house. All the monkeys were protesting. They were all gathered around, some of them were holding placards that said, “We want three in
the afternoon, we want three in the afternoon! We demand three in the afternoon!”
The zookeeper had some intelligence and so he guessed that what they were
referring to was the amount of food they got. The way that it was organized was
that the zookeeper would give them three measures of food in the morning and
two measures of food in the afternoon. Now the monkeys were demanding three
measures of food in the afternoon. So, the next day the zookeeper gave them two
measures of food in the morning and three measures of food in the afternoon,
and the monkeys were completely content.
That’s a parable. Parables work on a number of different levels, and each
level has to do with framing. One thing that parables do is that they reveal
their own framing mechanism. So, one frame is the set of: what do the monkeys know? What the monkeys know is that either they are getting three, or not
getting three. They don’t seem to notice that if they get three in the afternoon,
now they are getting only two in the morning. But they got what they wanted,
so they’re happy. And there’s another framing. What does the zookeeper know?
He knows something different than the monkeys. He’s the operator of the Skinnerian operant conditioning. He’s smart enough to not give them more total
food, but just change the order by which he gives it to them. And there is a third
set or framing that is implied, and that is: what do we know now? One thing that
we know is that there’s a difference between what the monkeys know and what
the zookeeper knows. Now, maybe the zookeeper is under certain limits, he’s
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got a certain food budget of five units a day and if he went to his administrator
and said, “I want six, I want six!” then the administrator would have to play some
other kind of trick on him. He might get six units of food for the monkeys every
day…but he might get his pension taken away. These kinds of things happen.
So framing highlights some boundaries and some perspectives while obscuring
other boundaries and other perspectives. And that’s what I think we need to pay
strong attention to.
So what is framing? The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty
said that language is a way of partitioning an undivided whole. And I’m gonna
get into what we mean by that. What I mean might not be exactly what MerleauPonty might have meant, but I think what he means is that before language,
or before consciousness, there’s a kind of continuity of experience, a flow of experience. Very small children, before they start to speak, before their nervous
systems develop, live in this continuity of flow, of proverbial primary process
experience. And it is fair to say that this is where we all came from. That primary
process, that flow, is not yet framed, not yet divided, into a conflictive duality.
This level continues to exist in all of us, but in our day-to-day experience it is
largely framed out of our awareness. For most of us, unless you have a special
practice like a meditation, non-duality is not something that we experience every day. British philosopher Allan Watts said, “Every outside creates an inside
and every inside creates an outside.” So every boundary looks two ways, like the
Roman god Janus: the act of framing something in automatically frames something else out.
Framing is related to the concept of neural nets in the brain, and at any one
moment there are thousands of these neural nets that are being activated. And if
you take as a simple example a word, the neural nets generated by a simple word
like red: if we could map out all of these associations, conscious or unconscious,
or hypothetical and potential, to the word red—and the associations to those
associations and the associations to those associations—you get a sense of the
neural nets that get activated by the word red. These neural nets and their activation isn’t something stable, it is constantly moving, so red wagon is different than
red dress. The nets are shifting all the time.
Framing activates frames. Choosing the frames carefully that we want to activate is just as important as being able to tell a coherent story well. One example
that I think is really strong and important right now is that in the last thirty or
forty years the word humanity has gradually gone out of use, especially by politicians and state leaders. As the word humanity has gone out of use, the framing
evoked by the word humanity, humanity that we all share, has also gone out
of use: meaning the entire net of associations is less activated in our brains
and our neural systems. The word humanity today doesn’t bring up a surge
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of emotion for a lot of people the way that it did for example in the early 1960s,
during the time of pope John XXIII when the Catholic church was very forward
moving and humanity was everywhere. As this word and the framing around
the word humanity have gone down, in its place has arisen the phrase: ‘global
markets.’ You see, global markets has replaced humanity as a way that we frame
ourselves, or at least the way that politicians and people that appear on television, people that get headlines in the newspapers, frame us. Now, this difference
makes a difference. It makes a difference in terms of how we define ourselves.
So that’s why I think it makes a difference if you assert that as a storyteller your
story is a human act. And that’s a different posture to take than to say my story
is a product that’s designed for a market. It’s not that one is true and one is false,
of course both are true, but I think the real question is which one of these
framings you want to reinforce in yourself and the people around you. And
I think this really very much makes a difference.
This is a little bit like a set diagram in new math. If we take two concepts,
let’s say, me and love, what is the relationship of me (think of you) and love? Try
to make some kind of diagram on a piece of paper. Just take a minute and do
that. Or draw on the back of your hand: me – love. Just see what happens...
[Keith Cunningham is drawing on the blackboard.]
If you think of love, picture love, as something external to yourself, then you
have to go out and get love! That would lead to one set of expectations and experiences. The psychologist Erich Fromm said that if you regard love as an external
object and you have to get it, then you will always be miserable. There will never
be enough, never enough love, because from his psychological understanding
that’s a faulty framing to begin with. You could say it is a framing that, in an
existential sense, will disempower you. But if you think of love as something that
is basic and intrinsic to your nature, then you have the experience that you can
never run out of it. You can never run out of love and will always have the power
to share love because, if it is intrinsic to your nature, no one else can control it.
When I meet with students about their scripts and they are framing love
as something that you have to go out and get, it’s like a commodity, and in
order to get that commodity you have to make yourself an attractive commodity.
I’ve taught so many hundreds of students and so many variations on this basic
theme and almost nobody figures this out. It’s not about finding the best object
and not about making yourself into an adequately attractive object, it’s that the
whole framing of the situation is wrong. If you believe that there’s an object
that you have to get, then you are prevented of loving unless you achieve that
object. But if love is something that is inside of you, then nothing can prevent you
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from experiencing love. That may or may not resemble the sketches that you are
making but it does say something about the very deep power that this framing
has, not just to define passively what our experiences are, but actually to lock up
or, unlock, our own potential to experience. And that’s why I think that storytellers need to be not just technically competent as scriptwriters, but that storytelling is one way of living our fundamental human adventure, the adventure
of being a human being.
Through framing we frame values. Core values become the outer frames
that organize the experience within them. By outer frames I mean mythologies, ideologies. These are the deep neural nets and conceptual frames that are
the conscious precipitates of even deeper patterns: which you could either call
instinctual or archetypal. The Oedipus complex is an instinct/archetype pattern
that already exists in our nervous systems, ready to be triggered. The hero’s journey is another instinct/archetype complex, a tag for a very deep set of neural
nets that can be activated when we face an existential threat. This also exists
in our nervous systems ready to be triggered. It can be triggered involuntarily by
events or situations that threaten us, or we can, as storytellers, access this pattern
voluntarily as we’re developing our stories. It’s the human side of scriptwriting
that transcends technique.
Framing is something that we experience all the time, but normally the
frames themselves remain invisible. What I’m doing right now is I’m making
you aware of certain of these frames. Like how me and love get framed, how
humanity and markets get framed, in relation to each other. But these frames are
all around us, and whenever we tell stories we are framing them. Not just framing shots cinematographically, not just framing a sequence of cuts by deciding
where do you cut into the shot and where do cut out of the shot, but the whole
story has a frame around it and that frame around your story has a lot to do with
what your core attitudes and beliefs are.
Then there are also the big story-liners. They are the ones that control public
taste, public policy, and the collective myths that we live by. They can be governments, corporations, industrial lobbies, think tanks and supra-governmental
entities such as the World Bank. The macro story-liners, these big story-liners
and their storylines, are driven by reiterated themes, themes that are repeated over and over again, so much so that we don’t notice them any more. They
become a part of our environment and we look at them uncritically. I think it was
Goebbels who said that a big lie that gets repeated insistently enough becomes
the truth. And he was getting his ideas from the American godfather of the
public relations business, a fellow named Edward Bernays, who was a nephew
of Sigmund Freud. So this is about how the big story-liners get down into the
framing mechanisms inside of you and work on orchestrating the public’s ‘hearts
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and minds.’ It is the power of the mass media that makes such mass operant
conditioning possible. Today people are discovering just how hard it is for individuals and societies to confront and question, or revise, those frames.
So what are some frames that especially need our critical attention these
days? One is the framing of man and nature. That’s an important one and I’d like
you to again make a little sketch for yourself of how you think man and nature
are related to each other. Please do that. This is a kind of brainstorming.
[Keith Cunningham is drawing on the blackboard.]
These attitudes shape the stories that you choose to make, or the stories you
don’t choose to make, and how you choose to make them. There are two very
common framings in the Western world of the relationship between man and
nature, both of which have no basis in science as we currently understand it,
but which present themselves as a kind of pseudo-science. One is that man did
not come out of nature, but man came down from heaven. In this scenario, man
is essentially not a part of nature, but above nature either because man is created
by God independently from natural processes or because man is rational and
that rationality distinguishes man from the rest of nature.
The second framing uses the metaphor of a pyramid—there is kind of
a hip phrase: We’re the top of the food chain. This refers to the ‘food pyramid’
where gazelles eat a lot of grass and where a lot of gazelles and other animals
are food for the top predators. And the top predators are the ‘lions.’ That’s us:
proud, swaggering consumers of all that there is to consume. And entitled to it.
We think that being top predators makes us important. One thing that we don’t like
to think about is that the top of the food chain is the most precarious place to be.
These people who think of themselves as a top predator, they think, “I’m a lion,
I do what I want to.” But… if the lions succeed in eating all of the gazelles, they
have doomed themselves. And if changes in the climactic pattern cause all the
grass to dry up and that kills the gazelles, then the lions still die. So this narcissistic grandiosity of being at the top of the food chain is not just a grand delusion,
but it is a self-destructive hubris. It is a framing that will distort our attitudes
and behavior, and will kill us. This is also the power of framing: when framings
misrepresent reality the consequences are catastrophic.
So, man and nature is one important framing to consider, always present in
movies because movies take place somewhere—and that somewhere is framed
by the natural world. Body, mind, soul—the relationship of the physical to the
energetic and the metaphysical—is a second crucial frame. And citizen and
society is yet another: in these same decades when you could say that we’ve gone
from ‘humanity’ to ‘global markets,’ individuals have been pervasively coached
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to equate being a citizen with being a consumer of government services. And the
two ideas and framings are completely different. To be a consumer of government services is to be passive, and the main question becomes do you like the
product line. You are active to the extent that you choose a product, but you deny
responsibility for the range of choices. So politicians ‘sell’ a tax increase, a service
cut, a bank bailout, or a war. But if you’re a citizen in democracy then you are
the government; you are ultimately the responsible one, the decider. In this time
when people have been coached to think of themselves as consumers, two generations of the population have become more and more politically ill informed,
more and more passive, to the point where it is a very critical problem.
Ego and chaos, appetites and products, global and local, childhood and
maturity… This brings me to a second little parable. This is a story about
an American cavalry officer and a Native American tribal chief. The Indian chief
(as they were called by the whites) has just surrendered and he’s submitting his tribe
to go on the reservation. And the cavalry officer is feeling pretty good. He wants
to make the point to this Indian chief, rub it in a little. So he draws a small circle
on the ground, in the dust, and says, “This is what the red man knows…”—and
then he draws a much larger circle around the first one—“…and this is what
the white man knows.” You can imagine the cavalry officer smiling at his own
cleverness. Now the Indian chief looks at the two circles for a couple of minutes.
Then he gets up and he draws a huge circle around the other ones and, pointing
to each circle, he says to the white man: “This what red men know; this what white
men know; and this (pointing now to the huge outer circle), this what NOBODY
know.” And I think this brings us to a film clip that I want to show, and I would
suggest to you that one of the functions of art is to take us out of our status quo
concepts to this zone where framings become fluid, as Miroslav suggested just
earlier.
When we break out of inherited framing, when we can step out of the event
and call it an event—and if we can further realize that this event is an event for us
partly because we have framed it as such, and that our framing is something that
is not The Ten Commandments—then we can experience a whole new realm
of possibility. And I think this is one of the important functions of art, that is,
to spring us out, launch us out of our expectations. And for this reason I want to
show you this ten minute clip from a film called Once Upon A Time In Anatolia
by a great Turkish director called Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It won the Grand Prize at
Cannes two years ago. Before I show this clip I want to give you a little framing.
The story is very Chekhovian, and I don’t know if it was directly taken from
a Chekhov short story or inspired by a Chekhov story. In Chekhov short stories
and Chekhov plays especially, nothing seems to be happening on the surface
but people, characters, that are living within the framings which constitute their
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comfort zone are sliding into an abyss without quite realizing it, thinking for
example: “If I can continue along the same old way I will somehow be able to save
my lovely house by the river with its beautiful cherry orchard that brought so much
happiness to my youth.” And meanwhile, somebody with no scruples has already
bought the house and is already planning to chop down the whole cherry orchard. He sees a profit to be made by developing the land for tourism. At the
end of Chekhov’s play, as the family prepares to leave the house behind, they are
still thinking, “Oh, wasn’t it lovely ten years ago!” But at this moment the axes
are already chopping the trees down and they are being rushed out of the house
because it no longer belongs to them. The play ends with the bare stage and the
ominous sound of the axes.
In Once Upon A Time In Anatolia we follow an investigating team around
the countryside: policemen, two murder suspects that have confessed to murder,
the prosecutor, the police chief, the forensic doctor, and they’re trying to find
the body that was murdered. And every time they go to a certain place in the
landscape, the murderer says, “Oh it’s here,” but then it’s not there and he says,
“I was so drunk that I can’t remember.” They go to another similar place and it’s
not there either. Now it is night and the countryside is pitch dark. The police chief
is getting very frustrated. That situation: the fruitless quest in the dark night of
nature provides a kind of a setting and the setting allows Nuri Ceylan to explore
the ways that we try to keep this illusion of continuity, to generate storylines
that create a feeling that everything is okay, everything is the way it always was,
everything will always be this way. But as we observe these men we begin to see
more deeply. In the middle of this, which can, I think deliberately, begin to feel
rather tedious, at a certain point the film springs us out into another dimension.
A dimension of possibility, a dimension that doesn’t have words, a dimension
that’s not even narrative any more. It’s simply sort of ‘it’: a mystery of life.
[A clip taken from the film Once Upon A Time in Anatolia by Nuri Bilge
Ceylan is shown.]
So, I think there are some very fresh framings in this movie. One of these
fresh framings is: what is the relationship between the investigation plot, the
murder plot, and the lives of the men investigating the murder plot. If you watch
a typical TV movie or any kind of mainstream movie, once these guys get their
assignment they’re driven by it. We have a destination and it’s so heroic: get the
answers, reach the goal. Here, however, the action’s been placed in a different
framing. It’s another dark and tedious case for country policemen who have seen
too much misery and too much crime. There is no attempt to romanticize the
murderer or romanticize the policemen or make it bigger than life. It’s reframed
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within a kind of a banality where everybody still has to live his life, a life that
borders increasingly on the absurd. The police chief is frustrated because he’s
being embarrassed directly in front of the prosecutor by the murderer who will
now not cooperate. At the same time the chief ’s wife calls to tell him, “Don’t
forget to make a stop and get the medications for your son.” So, one thing that the
film is doing through this framing that I think is significant is (not necessarily
that this would be either mainstream or ‘Big Box Office,’ but he did get the Grand
Prize at Cannes so you could think about that too…) to reframe the relationship
of the storyline to life. We are reminded that the police investigation and the
murder itself are human acts. They are kept within a visible human context. This
is what I mean by asserting that storytelling is a human act, keeping us rooted in
our human nature and resisting the pull of grandiosity.
Going along with this, and reinforcing it on a visual level or cinematographic level, is that there is a framing of man and night. In this cinematography man
does not dominate night. Man is small and the night is all around. And the
forces of nature are all around. The wind that comes through the trees and all
these leaves that are blowing around remind us of our own mortality, as autumn
does. That human beings are also like leaves, or like apples that grow into a fruit
and ultimately that fruit falls down and goes into the ground, and starts to rot
until it’s all gone. It’s all gone back into nature. For some reason that I’m sure
Nuri Ceylan knows, he has chosen to frame the story in this way, where man
is not the conqueror of nature, but where man is part of nature. Most people forget that nature is inside of us as well as outside of us. In fact, we’re all nature. You
probably know that you at this moment are host to more or less two thousand
different species of bacteria, seven hundred of which live in your mouth. Is it
OK? OK or not, that’s the way it is. That’s a kind of basic fact that we are in denial
about in order to maintain a certain kind of framing that we feel comfortable
with. That we are above nature and are not touched by nature, and that by extension we will not be touched by it: we will not smell bad and we will not die. One
of the things that Václav Havel was referring to, when he was speaking about
a new time in history, has to do with the fact that we must make peace with
life, peace with nature within and without, because we have already overshot
the capacity of the Earth to carry us.
I want to go on with a part of Václav Havel’s statement in 1994. He says:
“Until recently it might have seemed that we were an unhappy bit of mildew
on a heavenly body whirling in space among many that have no mildew on them
at all. This was something that classical science could explain. At this moment
when it begins to appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science reaches the outer limit of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for
universal laws (that can be discovered through experiment and that can be applied
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from one situation to another situation), it cannot deal with singularity, that is,
with uniqueness. The universe is a unique event and a unique story, and so far we
are the unique point in that story. But unique events and stories are the domain
of poetry, not science.”
The Gaia hypothesis, for example, brings together the proof that the dense
network of mutual interactions between organic and inorganic portions of the
Earth surface form one single system. A kind of mega-organism, a living planet:
Gaia. Havel takes the Gaia image or framing from the scientist James Lovelock.
According to the Gaia hypothesis, we are all parts of a greater whole, our destiny
is not dependent merely on what we do for ourselves, individualistically, but
what we do for Gaia as a whole. If we endanger her, she will dispense with us
in the interests of a higher value, meaning the more systemic value of restoring
equilibrium conditions.
So one thing I’d like to suggest is that you can see this movie as a kind of
beautifully photographed version of a slow-moving detective melodrama, and
you can compare it with other melodramas, or you could think of this movie as
a statement of a brand new framing which is trying to find the cinematographic
ways to place man back into the context of nature. Place man within nature. Take
the movie out of the framing of man being the master of technology. Of course
they’ve got cars they are driving along with, but they are not flashing their guns.
There is not that kind of erotic phallic interest in the guns and the cars. These
are all framings. We live in a world where we have inherited, especially over the
last thirty years, a set of framings through the commercial media, that is: advertising, public relations, mainstream television, mainstream movies, the music
that you listen to. This all has been designed not because it was a good idea, but
to make some people money. These interests believe that defining the framing
of me and love as something I have to go out and get is to their advantage.
To get love I will spend money to make myself a more attractive object, and that’s
designed to make people money.
I’ll tell you a little story about this, as I’m moving towards a conclusion.
I was in a peripheral way present at the beginning of the creation of this pervasive landscape of frustrated desire. A couple of years after the Prague Spring, this
high-point of idealistic humanism, I was at the university where I was beginning
to study cinema. I was taking a course in the techniques of visual rhetorical
persuasion. It was during that course that I actually made my first film. The
professor of this class was really into strategies of how can you manipulate the
public on a Skinnerian-Pavlovian biological level. Believe it or not, this was all
connected to the birth of singles bars—the singles bar phenomenon. You might
have believed that singles bars always existed, but no. This is a cute and revealing story so I have to tell you about it. Through the 1960s, people in marketing
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realized how much money pop culture could make. The pop culture of the sixties
was a semi-spontaneous thing in the zeitgeist. The Beatles really were just four
neighborhood guys in Liverpool who liked to play this kind of rock’n’roll music.
They had a manager, but they didn’t have this kind of big branding that exists
today. Almost nobody wore logos in these days. There were no clothes with logos.
No clothes where you are paying money to advertise for somebody else. Among
the only ones that really existed were the little alligator, Lacoste tennis shirts, and
those tennis shirts were only white. It was very, very simple. And about that time
Adidas came out with stripes on its shoes and that was it. Your visual landscape
was not all crowded with brands and branding, and nobody had the idea that
they have to brand themselves. This was really a kind of beginning of a great new
golden age of advertising. All of you have probably seen Mad Man, which was
sort of a second golden age of advertising in the 1950s, and the seventies was
the third golden age of advertising, call it the ‘nuclear age’ of advertising. That
new development was really about how to use Skinnerian operant-conditioning
techniques to make the public an offer that it can’t refuse.
And the singles bar scene was one of the places this was tested first. This
professor of mine was so proud because he was one of these psychologists who
were brought in as consultants. The question was: how can we make an environment that is so framed that people must react in a certain way, specifically
in a way that returns maximum profits, while believing that they are exercising
complete freedom? I’m going to reveal some of the secrets behind the single’s
bars. We don’t necessarily have pure singles bars so much any more, but these
techniques have been applied to every bar, more or less. If you go to the music clubs, then you’ll recognize this same strategy at work. The singles bar was
divided into three spaces and each space had a specific function. The generic
shape of this is a little bit like a woman’s reproductive organ. The function of the
Space Number 1 (the broad entry or foyer) is: for people to come in and mingle
a lot and check each other out. So you’re coming to a big space and there will
be a kind of random movement. We’re dealing with atomic particles that have
not yet been charged. So people are checking each other out—you know how
to do this. And from this first space they can see through to the Paradise or the
Holy of Holies. That’s the dance floor, where back in those days were always these
revolving mirrors, almost a psychedelic effect of moving light. This is a Saturday
Night Fever epic. And you could see that, but you couldn’t get there, not yet.
But you could desire it, and that was the point. You see people dancing, you see
people kissing, see people holding each other tight, doing all those sexy things
people are supposed to do. But in order to get there you have to pass through the
narrow passage.
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This narrow place, Space Number 2, is where the bar was strategically
placed, and this is where the psychologists came in. They were hired to calculate
how many touches per second people will receive in this narrow place, so that
they would in a kind of Pavlovian or Skinnerian way subconsciously associate
the pleasure of all of these touches with the action of buying alcohol—because
that’s where they got the money. Whatever they could do to raise this from three
touches per second to six touches per second, then they could coordinate that
with how much more alcohol they actually did sell. Then somebody commented: “Well this is great, but let’s take it all the way. Since we’re designing the whole
experience for people, what about the music?” So some commercial genius came
up with this idea, and I think it’s brilliant. (Now I see the framing and it doesn’t
touch me anymore. You might think that it makes me a boring guy.) They asked
themselves what would be the perfect music that would hook people like a drug,
and somebody came up with a brilliant idea. If you could program the music
to be exactly the same tempo as the heartbeat of somebody having orgasm, and
you program all of the music to that same tempo, it will constantly, on a subliminal level, remind people of orgasm, and then they will expect orgasm! So, the
whole idea is that people get imprinted, entrained in a very strong and pervasive
neural net. For this sexual experience they go into the Holy of Holies after having
bought twenty dollars worth of cocktails, and they meet somebody and get sexy
and get close. They go home, they have sex, and then they associate that whole
successful process of having sex with this bar. And then they are more likely
to go back to that bar. That’s gonna become their favorite bar and that bar’s gonna get more money from their cover charge and their alcohol. It was all designed
to work on the level of imprinting in your neural nets in a way that is simultaneously invisible and irresistible. And that’s how disco music got to be disco music.
That’s why disco music always has the same tempo, the same beat. It wasn’t about
the music; it wasn’t even about sex. It was about money. The music was created
to be a function of a larger framing that remained—and still remains—invisible
to most people.
This is why, according to Stéphane Hessel, to resist is to create and to create
is to resist. To be awake is to be awake to the framings that condition our existence, and to be awake is to have the power to resist and to choose, and thus to
possibly—possibly, with very great efforts, engagement, and solidarity—create
a world of justice. I’m going to end here with a last quote from Václav Havel and
a last parable. Václav Havel said:
“Yes, the only real hope for people today is probably a renewal of our certainty
that we are rooted in the Earth and, at the same time, the cosmos. Only someone
who submits to the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values
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the right to be part of it and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his
neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well.
It logically follows that, in today’s multicultural world, the truly reliable path
to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from
what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts
and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies or sympathies: it must
be rooted in self-transcendence. Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the
human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe; transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what
we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us
in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because,
together with us, all this constitutes a single world. Transcendence is the only real
alternative to extinction.”
And now I’d like to just think about the apple in this sequence in Nuri
Ceylan’s film, and how the journey of this apple opens up another dimension.
A dimension that is metaphorical of the original Fall, the apple in the Garden,
the fall into the stream of life, finding its way by gravity, and how this applemetaphor moves through the middle of a scene where all of these characters are
bound up in their banal issues. Nuri Ceylan springs us out into this transcendent
dimension represented by the apple that is so natural and self-evident. This is
a perfect cinematic example of Vaclav Havel’s point.
I was struck by this, because this kind of poetry has over the last
twenty years been more and more absent from the cinema. Because movies have
become more and more driven by pace, by power, by, as they say in the Hollywood slang: “grab-the-audience-by-the balls-and-shake-and-don’t-let-go.” This
apple is a different metaphor. It springs the audience into openness. That’s a different framing of the whole act of telling a story.
And this brings me to this last little parable. It’s by the great Persian-Turkish
poet Rumi. It’s called Rumi’s Invitation. He says, “Out beyond ideas of right-doing
and ideas of wrong-doing there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.” So that is an invitation to you. To think of your movie not as winning or losing, but to think of the
story that you want to tell as an open field. And remind yourself that a storyline
exists in a world that has it’s own extension in space and time. It is not just
a line from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ And that if you can open up that Rumi-esque field
of possibilities and learn how to use the metaphors that spontaneously appear
in your story-field, or as Franz Kafka said: if you become still enough—the entire
world will come to you. I think this journey of the little apple, sort of joyful but
full of gravity, is an example of how the world can come to you if you are willing
to open up.
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Discussion
Why did Ceylan put this little scene with the apple right at this point?
It’s a wonderful question. Let’s put a kind of framing around it. For me to answer
that wouldn’t be the right thing because then I’ll be taking away your experience. But one thing I would like to say about this, also in terms of a kind of
narrative framing, is that Nuri Bilge Ceylan in this movie sets up questions that
then are suspended for a long time. It’s one of those movies that you can’t just
watch on your iPhone while you’re sitting on the bus because you really have to
pay attention to it. So gradually and very delicately he builds up his dramatic
and thematic lines. He didn’t always use to be like this. He has learned a certain
kind of self-transcendence from his earlier films. This is the first one of his films
in which I think he and his family don’t appear. So he’s taking a different posture
and he’s weaving something in a very delicate way.
What he’s weaving is being built up in a Chekhovian way toward a climax. We know that they are looking for this body, but we don’t know what
the murder was about, what the motive was. We’ve got a group of men who are
just dealing with the crude brutal matter: a dead body that’s in the dirt and is
decaying and they can’t find it. The murdered man is no longer a person but
has become pure matter, with all the inertia of matter. You couldn’t get an any
more materialistic image. Along the way the police chief ’s wife calls and says,
“When you will be home and are you going to stop and get the medicine?” Then
they start talking about women and sexual potency (none of these men are cute
and in their twenties), and prostate cancer and other things that men talk about
or don’t talk about but it comes up. And then about twenty-five minutes into
the film the prosecutor starts talking to the forensic doctor about a woman who
died mysteriously, with no medical cause of death. And we see this difference
between the characters’ attitudes. The doctor doesn’t believe that she could have
died mysteriously, so what was the diagnosis. We go on a little bit into their
dialogue. There’s this gorgeous woman who died mysteriously, then the police
chief is coming back with the murderer suspect and the police chief starts beating him and the apple falls down. In the Christian context the apple falling down
always has to do with the story of Adam and Eve. And now we are in the night.
This is a dark Garden that has led to a murder. So this is like a little suggestion.
Later it comes out that the motive of the murder was that the murderer had had
an affair with the murdered guy’s wife and was the father of the boy that the
murdered guy thought was his own son. And at some moment when they were
drunk he couldn’t resist telling him, the truth came out. They got into a fight
and the man and his brother killed the other one. So now we find out this was
36
all about a woman. Then, later, towards the end of Act 2, we find out that the
mysterious beautiful woman that the prosecutor was talking about was in fact
his own wife, and that she committed suicide so that she would die on the same
day she would give birth to the prosecutor’s child. All of this in order to punish
him for an extramarital affair that he had had.
You could say that this aspect of men and women, masculine nature and
feminine nature, and how it works and how it doesn’t work, that the whole thing
is put into this different context—without saying why exactly he put the apple
at that moment. In art nothing serves only one function and nothing has only
one cause. He has more than one reason for putting the apple right there and the
apple opens up multiple dimensions to us because at that moment it’s not connected to the plot. It’s gratuitous rather than functional, the way that great art
always is: it takes us to another dimension.
Do you have any strategies or suggestion about how to step outside those very
narrow scripts that we tend to do in these days?
Here is one to try. This is one of a number of story development models that I’ve
developed together with my colleague Tom Schlesinger. This model, which we
call ‘Mode versus Need,’ grows out of an insight of the great American scriptwriter Waldo Salt, who was the scriptwriter of two Academy Award-winning
films, one in 1969, Midnight Cowboy, known in Germany as Asphalt Cowboy.
Tom was at a workshop where Waldo Salt spoke about what we call the throughline or the ‘red thread,’ that runs through your story all the way from the beginning to the end. Waldo Salt said that the basic dramatic tension that forms
the through-line of the story, holding plot, character, and theme together, is the
inner tension between the main character’s mode, how my character looks
at the world and tries to achieve his goals, and what the character really needs
to learn about life. These two things, the mode and the need are fundamentally
in opposition. Waldo noted that his main characters are getting in their own
way and get into trouble because they do not understand what they really need:
they are as it were blinded by their own attitudes. And he said further that when
he’s writing every day he tries to ask a question that gets to the heart of this dialectical tension between how I look at the world—you can also say “who I think
I am”—and what I really need to learn about life. And by persistently asking that
question and addressing it to every scene, that’s how he builds and stays on his
through-line. Later, Tom had the opportunity to spend a weekend with Waldo
to discuss this further. After this weekend with Salt Tom and I started to work
and develop these insights into a much fuller paradigm.
The mode is how the character looks at the world and responds to the
world. That mode is based on their learning and their experience. I was born
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as an American man in the post WWII economic boom in America. I wasn’t
born as an Indian woman in north-eastern India during a famine. That’s a difference that makes a difference. This woman and I come into a situation with very
different inherited framings and expectations. So one thing that’s very useful
is to understand that every mode creates a perspective, and every perspective
creates a blind spot. This is just an existential fact: that every possible perspective
that we have as human beings comes with its own blind spot. And the more that
a character is identified with their mode, the more they are focused on their mode,
and things have to be this way and I have to be able to stay in my comfort zone,
the bigger the blind spot is and the more dramatic its consequences.
If you have a floodlight it lights up a big area; if you have a spotlight
it lights a small area very brightly but the bigger area is in the dark. This is simply
something that is basic about human nature and human cognition. Then the last
things I would say about this is that you as the writer also have a mode. And you
also have a perspective and that also creates a blind spot. Turning around and
looking at your blind spot is probably the most important thing that a writer can
do. To know thyself, as Socrates would say.
Building a drama is very much like a Socratic process of asking questions.
Earlier, Miroslav was asking his questions in the kind of abstract language
of western philosophy, but it’s a similar kind of process to try to get to the truth.
To get beyond the surface. And I would just say to you that the number one
reason why writers fail with their stories is when they are over-identified with
their main character. When that character’s mode is the same as your mode, and
you know their favorite football team, and their favorite beer, and their favorite
bar, and their favorite sex positions, and their favorite band, and everything…
because that’s what you love, then you can bet that it will be hard for you to see
that character’s blind spot, because it is so close to your own. That identification
means that your character’s blind spot is also your blind spot. When you really
look at it analytically that is the one biggest thing that causes writers all those
famous ‘middle act problems.’ It’s not about technique; it’s about being blind.
If you weren’t blind you would find the right technique.
So writing a screenplay is always in my mind a journey of self-discovery.
Every script that I work on takes me directly into the shit that I’ve got at that
moment in my life. Without fail. It has to be that way because I’m the one
who’s writing it. It’s coming out of me. So if inside I am dealing with insecurity,
or loneliness, or whatever, that issue is naturally and necessarily going to come
out in my story. That’s not something to feel bad about, it’s just part of the process. Being awake is how you get out of those narrow collective scripts, both in
your writing and your life.
38
To put a good positive frame around this, I would say that writing a screenplay is one of the very greatest opportunities for you to get to know yourself and
for you also to get to know your humanity. And that’s great.
--Keith Cunningham is a scriptwriter and consultant based in Chicago, Illinois,
USA and Munich, Germany. He met or worked with some decisively influential
teachers and leaders including mythologist Joseph Campbell, psychologist Jean
Houston, philosopher Alan Watts, and writer Anaïs Nin. He has conducted many
seminars on five continents. Along the way, he has developed his own scripts for
TV episodes and films have been produced by RTL-TV and PRO-7 television in
Germany. His book for writers based on his seminars, The Soul of Screenwriting,
was published in 2008.
39
A Dangerous Method: Screenwriting and Strategic
Game Design
by Rick L. Blackwood
War. You’re not as smart as you think you are. Neither am I. No one is.
People ask me all the time, Why are there wars? There’s this assumption
inherent in that question that is wrong, I think: that people engage in war
because they’re very different from you and me. No. They engage in war because
they are very much like you and me. Complex. Self-centered. And dead certain
they are right.
I’m here to talk about violence. I think that your scripts probably have
violence in them. I could just as easily talk to you about sex. Both of them are
things that we don’t talk about—not honestly, that is—that we don’t tell the truth
about. And as writers and artists, getting at the truth is really important.
Monkey Business
Let’s start by using your imagination. You’re in Africa. You’re in Kenya. You’re on
the Ugandan frontier. It’s night. It’s dark in the jungle. No, it’s really dark. Right
across the border, in Uganda, there’s an AIDS epidemic that beggars the human
imagination. And people are really just not doing anything about it. You’ve been
over there. And it’s awful to see, that AIDS epidemic.
Last night you parachuted into the jungle. You jumped out the back of an
airplane in the dark and that hot air hit you in the face. Feel it? And now you’re
in the jungle. All day you forced-marched in the heat. You’re exhausted, you
don’t have—you can’t carry—enough water. After the sun sets you sneak up
and you see what you’re looking for: it’s the camp of the enemy General. You are
there with seven soldiers. Seven Kenyans, Kenya Rifles—the Kenya Rifles are
some of the toughest soldiers in the world. You’re there as a visitor. A hanger-on,
you watch what they do.
You’re here to kidnap the enemy General.
Now. This is not a real war. It’s an exercise. The so-called General is really
a corporal in disguise, for the exercise. But he’s surrounded by government soldiers and you’re there to get him out. It’s a kidnapping.
The Kenya Rifles are exercising with special forces from Europe -- French
paratroopers, British Special Air Service guys and Special Boat Service guys.
U.S. Navy SEALs, that’s who you’re in with, U.S. Navy SEALs. Under cover of
40
darkness—it’s really dark in the jungle, and scary; feel how scary the dark is?—
you crawl over next to the camp.
You explore around the perimeter. The light from the camp is about five
meters in front of you. And the light in the jungle disappears completely under
the tree cover. So you can stay about five meters away from the light and they
can’t see you. They can see you if they look up and they look for you, but they
don’t. They’re not looking for you. The General is not a real general; no general
would let you do this, he is a corporal and as a joke he has an arm-band that says
General on it. But the joke is not for you tonight. You’re there actually to kidnap
somebody, like a criminal.
It’s called a body snatch. The Kenyan army is playing the defensive force
and all of the special operations teams including the Kenya Rifles and all these
special operation people including Navy SEALs, the British guys and others, all
these special operations people are playing the aggressors. They’re coming into
the country to cause all kinds of trouble.
So right at ten o’clock at night—because the British have trained the Kenyans when the Brits were the imperialist power there—right at ten the lights
go out.
You’re seeing the exercise General moving around—as we’ve said he is a corporal—and you’re lying there and you’re trying to figure out what to do and all
of a sudden the light goes on in his tent. He has an actual general’s tent and this
is probably the best couple of weeks of this corporal’s life. He is about go to bed.
So he is in his big tent, all of a sudden this flashlight goes on and this flashlight
comes out and he starts walking right toward you. Like he knows you’re there.
You’re lying there, you’ve just jumped out of an airplane, you’ve hiked all
day, you’re ruined, tired and this guy will just walk over saying, This is a hand
grenade. And he’ll drop it in your lap and kill all of you. You’re lying there and
you’re frozen with surprise and it’s pitch black dark and the flashlight comes right
at your face—you’re the only white person, your face is all painted in a camouflage—and the black guys also have camouflage on them so the sweat on their
faces doesn’t reflect—yes. And he walks right at you and just as you’re about to
say: Oh Crap! And then he turns, he goes by and you all completely freeze.
He walks up the path—you don’t know what’s up there—and he stops.
And you’re watching and the flashlight starts to point here and there all around
on the ground and behind the tree… And you’re lying there like this, wondering
what he’s doing and he sets the flashlight down and he unbuckles his pants; and
he takes his pants down and he reaches and he turns the light off. And you can’t
stop laughing.
You’re hysterical with exhaustion and you’re lying there trying to stifle it.
In a few minutes the flashlight comes back on. This guy walks back by you,
41
as you hide there in the dark. This time you could reach out and grab his trousers. You think, Ok, we know how we’re going to get him.
You crawl away, about half a mile away, you set up, and what you’re gonna
do the next night—you’re gonna grab this guy. You’ll get him out of the camp,
get him to the helicopter and get away. The next morning you make your plan.
Nightfall. You crawl back over. This is Africa. There are snakes. Every place
you go there are snakes. There are ants. You crawl over and you’re very careful
because of the snakes. There are different kinds of snakes; there is a snake called
Puff Adder and when you crawl up to him he’ll make a sound at you; he’ll go like,
Puff in your face. And believe me, in this black night, if you hear something right
in front of your face go Puff it will get your complete and undivided attention.
There are also the black mambas and cobras. The black mamba will actually attack you. The puff adder will see that you’re coming; she’ll puff at you and
crawl away. Unless she has young snakes nearby. But the black mamba will stand
up and fight you like a man. They are super, super aggressive.
But tonight there are no snakes. Tonight you’ve got a good plan. You crawl
over right as the light goes off and you just wait. Right on schedule this guy’s
bowels are in motion; thirty seconds after the light goes off he switches the flashlight on; here he comes again and walks right past you. You don’t take him this
time. Think about why. You don’t grab him. Not yet.
He looks around with the flashlight; this time he even shines the flashlight
up into the trees. Looking for snakes—that’s what he’s scared of. He’s scared of
snakes. Turns the light out. You lie there and you wait. And you’ve got him.
Five minutes later here he comes. But there’s something wrong; something you
weren’t expecting.
He hasn’t turned the flashlight on.
You can’t see him. If you’re in the dark like this, you can’t see something
when you look right at it. If I wanted to see you I would have to look over here
and I’d see you move, something in my peripheral vision. So you’re looking and
he’s going by and there is like 10 seconds to decide what to do. You can’t turn and
say, What do you wanna do? You can’t say anything. And there are eight of you
and you all have to act at the same moment. And as he walks by, it is the warrant
officer who really makes the decision.
And when he moves everybody moves at the same time. You jump the guy.
This guy is hit from eight directions at the same instant. BAM! You’re very
proud of yourself. You got him. You have hold of him. He didn’t even have a moment to yell. The warrant officer—this is an exercise, remember—hits him in the
Adam’s apple like this POP!, so he has to open his mouth and the warrant officer
has a handkerchief around his three fingers. And when the corporal-General
opens his mouth the warrant officer sticks his fingers into his mouth and down
42
his throat so he can’t breathe. Unless the warrant officer lets him breathe. So he
can’t call out.
But just at the moment you’re sure you got him, this light hits you. Wow!
You’re standing there in the light and you turn and look and there is the little
corporal General with his flashlight shining at you, holding it in one hand with
this look in his face like he can’t believe what’s in front of him. And what you
have done is, in the dark, you jumped out and grabbed this big thick strong male
baboon who was walking down the path—looking probably for Ms. Baboon—
and Mr. Baboon is really upset with what you have done. Just really upset.
Now there’s this moment when you can let this big ape go. It’s perfectly clear
to you you’ve made a comical mistake. There is a moment when you can let him
go but you were trained as a soldier. And you’ve been trained when something
hurts you don’t stop. When they shoot you don’t run. When something goes
wrong you don’t quit and there’s the moment when your brain has just enough
time to say, Nobody quits here. The baboon on the other hand is not schooled
in this martial philosophy.
He turns on you now and goes completely nuts.
This big, strong baboon starts throwing soldiers in every direction. There’s
a moment he cuts his head back and yanks away from the warrant officer who
has still got his fingers down the baboon’s throat. Yanks away, coughs up the
handkerchief and it opens in front of your eyes like a flower and you stand there
looking at it holding on to this big goddamn monkey and then he turns and the
next thing you know there are packs, rifles, bayonets, hand grenades, wallets,
and pictures of wives flying through the air and everybody is screaming trying
to figure out what to do.
It would be hard to capture how ridiculous this is. You find yourself
in that moment again airborne like you’re parachuting except there’s no parachute. BAM, you hit this tree because this baboon has thrown you like a ball.
You hit face-first and you spin around 180 degrees and you’ve lost your glasses
and you’re trying to find your glasses and you get your glasses and now you can
see again and the scene in front of you is the funniest thing you’ve ever seen and
you can’t stop laughing.
Somebody—these guys have a very good sense of humor—one of these
guys says in English: How did we grab a monkey? Everybody is laughing really
hard. You’re trying to get up to help but you’re laughing so hard you can’t get
up plus the wind is knocked out of you. And the ape—you’re wondering what
kind of ape it is; they will tell you later it was a baboon but baboons never look
that big and this thing looks really big — but whatever the ape is, it grabs the
warrant officer and the warrant officer is a big very very tough boy, and yanks
him around.
43
The two of them are face to face and the ape’s head cocks back like a pistol
hammer; he has these huge sharp canine teeth, and the head snaps forward so
fast you can’t see it move. BAM! on the warrant officer’s shoulder. And this big
tough boy yells with his voice like a schoolgirl: Somebody shoot this fucking monkey! And it’s holding on his shoulder like a vise. And you get your wits about you;
everybody yells and you’re the first one who can grab a rifle, find a loaded clip,
and pop it in; and you come up on your knees ready to shoot and you look. And
the ape is gone.
There are just these seven guys in this pile. They look like they’re drunk.
The warrant officer is holding his arm, dust coming up everywhere. The Kenyan
army is in the camp to protect the general. They ran over to see what the noise
was about and now they’re all standing around. They didn’t see the monkey.
They take you prisoner.
And it’s funny. Because it’s an exercise, they take you prisoner. It wouldn’t be
funny if it wasn’t an exercise. They take you prisoner and you don’t understand
a word of Swahili except jambo—jambo is a word that means something like hi
or bonjour—but you can tell that this General is now gonna be the hero in every
drinking party in Kenya for the next two years because he’s telling them in Swahili and they’re laughing really hard.
So….
Violence; It’s Really Easy To Make Mistakes
I went to the U.S. Naval War College. The U.S. Naval War College is I believe the
foremost institute of war game strategic planning in the world. I heard Russian
generals say this: that the big Global War Game held each August at the U.S.
Naval War College is the foremost war game in the world.
There’s a sign above their door. Admiral Chester Nimitz was the senior U.S.
admiral in the Pacific during World War II and he said something that’s written
above the door. He was describing war gaming at the U.S. Naval War College
from 1928 until 1941. They did such a good job war gaming, he claims, that they
in fact foresaw in their games everything that happened in the Pacific during
World War II.
They did five or six war games looking at the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, the invasion of Singapore, and the Japanese moving into China. All this they
had foreseen in the Naval War College’s war gaming.
And then Nimitz says this very interesting thing: that as the war was progressing, he kept reflecting and saying that absolutely nothing was happening
that they had not thought of ahead of time. There’s a lot of very interesting things
44
that you read in the press: the people who have no military experience saying
that military officers have no imagination. This is ridiculous. Some of the most
brilliant people in the world have been in uniform. Many of them make history,
many very smart people.
But then Admiral Nimitz says, We did not get a single surprise out of the
Japanese in World War II. Not a one… Except the kamikaze, he says. Nobody
thought of that.
[Video of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center]
It was at about 9 o’clock in the morning New York time, but it was 3 o’clock
in the morning Hawaiian time. The middle of the night.
I left the Pentagon on the 7th of September 2001. At about 3 o’clock in the
morning I get a call from a friend who is in New Orleans and she says: Turn on
the television. You have to turn on the TV. So I turn on the TV just in time to see
that moment right there: just as the second plane hits the second tower.
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Honestly, I’m standing there on the phone. Watching this on a TV and I can look out of the window and see the USS Arizona
memorial from the Japanese surprise attack December 7th, 1941. Somebody said
yesterday—I think it was Keith—talking about the Indians. This Indian chief
says: What you don’t know is this: the world is filled with things you don’t know.
And you might have a very, very hard time guessing things you don’t
know.
Here is the argument I’m gonna make.
I don’t think any of the things in the world are ever the same. Ever. Two steel
balls are never the same. They do look the same to your senses, but your senses
are incomplete—as Einstein writes about so well—what he calls sense experience.
Sense experience is all you have to understand what’s in front of you, and Einstein, a pretty smart guy, says your sense experience is always wrong.
This is part of what you’re working with when you are making a movie. Your
characters’ senses are incomplete. One of the models I will argue for you to think
about human reasoning is the confrontation between Pontius Pilate and Jesus
of Nazareth. Now, if the myth is true, then Jesus of Nazareth is God. And Pilate
is a very smart man. He is not a fool. And there is God Himself standing right
in front of him. Can you imagine? Imagine yourself facing God. And Pilate asks,
What is the truth? And do you know what God answers?
Nothing. He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t say anything.
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Things We Are Certain Of
Let’s talk about some simple things, like identity. I’m sure if I ask you who are
you, you are going to be sure what the answer is. So let me confess first:
I don’t know who I am. I’ve done so many different things and led so many
different lives. There’s a funny line from a movie where the British actor Patrick
McGowan plays a spy and somebody criticizes him: I don’t think you have any
character. And he replies: I don’t have a character. I assume one.
He’s a spy. But I think this is true for way more people than know it; they
are never exactly the same, even an hour apart. A man can promise his wife he
will never be unfaithful and mean it and betray her an hour later. People change
from moment to moment. Your characters—in your movie—will change from
moment to moment.
What am I doing now? I live in Paris. I’m in school at Sorbonne and I’m
studying French. I am a terrible French student. I’m in a class and the average
grade in the class is about 50 percent. I am also a teacher at Ecole de guerre, the
French War College. I took this job, teaching at Ecole de guerre. I am retired,
I have plenty of money, everything is fine; I don’t need to do anything. But somebody asked me, How would you like to teach at the French War College? And it
sounded so sexy to me I took it. And it has been really, really interesting. The
French, now, are in this war. Isn’t that interesting? A French socialist president
has entered this war. The French socialist President has sent the French army
into the war and those who want to criticize the war have every right to talk
about the oil but there is no oil in Mali. And still the French socialist President
has sent his army, his paratroopers there.
Movies are unpredictable, because what we call Real Life is unpredictable.
Identity
This is me: Graduated with highest honors from UCLA Film School. Member
Writer’s Guild of America (West). Sold or optioned about a dozen of scripts to
Blake Edwards, Harrison Ford, David Kirkpatrick, ABC TV, CBS TV, HBO TV,
USAF. Taught at U.S. universities since 1990. Captain, U.S. Navy Ret., Special
Duty Officer – Intelligence. Grad (with distinction) U.S. Naval War College. Three
years with Navy Special Warfare Group One (SEAL Teams 1, 3 & 5). Nine years
at U.S. Special Operations Command. Six years as a techaing war game designer
for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Away from teaching a lot for Desert Storm and from
2001-2005 for the GWO Al Qaeda. Active Duty 2004-2005 as Chief of Intelligence
Requirements for U.S. SECDEF.
46
Written By, the magazine of the Writers’ Guild of America, has written
articles about my design work in the game I am gonna talk about.1
I sold or optioned about a dozen scripts and I’m gonna talk about this very
briefly, because this establishes my credibility as a scriptwriter. I sold scripts to
a bunch of big people like Blake Edwards. Just outside the room here there’s
a poster with Blake Edwards on it. He directed Days of Wine and Roses and
Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I sold a script to Mark Harmon from NCIS. I actually
worked at NCIS when I was young. I was then an analyst. I sold a script to Kevin McCormack and Sally Field. Kevin MacCormack was the producer of Saturday Night Fever and Sally Field won an Academy award. They optioned my
first script I wrote after UCLA film school. It was about abortion. In that script
about abortion in the United States I discovered something about power. I discovered that I could write a script that was really good and really powerful but
it wasn’t as powerful as the anti-abortion lobby. The anti-abortion lobby is half
of the United States. And I am hearing from Sally’s agent and she says, Sally really wants to do this but whatever happens if she has the abortion at the end of the
movie, or if she doesn’t, half of the world hates her. Half of her audience base hates
her. So we didn’t make the film.
I got really fed up with this, you know. I think if you scratch a special operations person, or a writer, you find an anarchist. I think you really find an anarchist, somebody who just decides to do what he’s doing because it’s interesting.
But I don’t believe in anything. So I hated the interference in what I wrote. The
last things I sold in Hollywood were two scripts in a 10-day period in 1992 and
I made more money in those 10 days than at any other time in the rest of my
life.
One was bought by David Kirkpatrick for Harrison Ford, for his producer,
David Kirkpatrick. It was about terrorism. This is 1991. I wrote this, sold it in
1991. It was before the first World Trade Center attack and I said in this script, If
terrorists attack the U.S., they will attack the World Trade Center in New York.
This was not a prediction. War gaming or script writing is not about prediction; but they’re about writing things you think might happen. I have no predictive abilities at all. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I don’t know what you are
gonna do next. I am not even sure what I’m gonna do next. Do you? Let alone
what terrorism is gonna do next. But I look at it and I think, If I am somebody
who wants to make a big picture, what do I blow up? Yeah. The World Trade Center.
1
The articles are online here: http://altscreenwriters.wordpress.com/thearchives-1996-2007/2000-archives/april-2000/ and http://altscreenwriters.wordpress.
com/the-archives-1996-2007/2000-archives/march-2000/.
47
The day of the first attack in 1993 my phone rang all day. I had argued
that the terrorist attack in the movie should be against the World Trade Center.
If you’re ever in business in the United States, Paramount is a big corporation
owned by another big corporation. They own Rockefeller Center. And they said,
Well, look we own that, let’s do this at Rockefeller Center. I said no, That’s not what
the terrorists would do. Arguing back and forth. So Paramount changed the attack to Rockefeller Center. So the second version of the script was worse than
the first one. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s less true, it feels less true.
But it was business…
So let’s have a look at this slide about my background again. I am playing
a game here with you. There is a lie. In one of these slides about me. A lie. Your
character is not gonna know something. And he’s not gonna tell the truth about
something. You tell the truth about everything? No. I’ve had class with about
four hundred students at LSU and I said: Young lady, next time you’re on a date
with a guy, and he takes you out, first he is gonna talk about himself. Cause this is
what men do. And he’s gonna pretend to be listening to you and you’re going say
things and he goes like “Hm”, “Ah”, “Oh.” And in the middle of one of his soliloquies about himself—you are on a date now, he has combed his hair, he has got on
a clean shirt—stop and look at him and say “Exactly what is it you want from me
tonight?” And see what he does.
He wants sex. But he will probably deny it. Part of what he says will be true.
He is complex. He is self-centered. And he thinks you don’t know he wants sex.
It is a real measure of what he’s worth if he can think of a good response.
We don’t tell each other what we want a lot of times. The second half of the
slide is the other me. When I was young, I went through a bad divorce. I think
there is a lot to learn about how hard this world is from personal relationships.
I know all of your personal relationships have worked perfectly. No one in this
room has ever been even slightly hurt by love. Because love is really good. Always. Everything with love is good. And everything without love is bad. But if
you weren’t that lucky and you got hurt in love, you can write a good love story.
Who am I? What is my identity? In 1977, I was in this divorce and miserable. It was the worst time of my life. I was in Villefranche, on a U.S. Navy ship.
It’s Bastille Day. We do a twenty-one gun salute. I’m the gunnery officer and it’s
filmed for French TV. We’ve got all these guys in white uniforms—you’ve seen what
naval officers wear—and afterwards we go drink and watch ourselves on TV.
We go ashore and I’m drinking wine. And I look up and there are a bunch of
flags. And I’m walking there with some of my sailors and they are talking to this
guy. He is not French but he is a Foreign Legionnaire. Do you know about the
Foreign Legion? They are not French. They are foreigners. They are people who
come and join. Sometimes they are running from the law. And it’s an extremely
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tough military organization. This guy is standing there and I don’t know what his
name really was; he told me his name was Claus or something like this. I speak
just enough German to confuse myself. And I am talking just enough French
to confuse everybody. He speaks just enough English to make the conversation
funny nonsense. So we are standing there and having this weird conversation.
And my sailors all drift off.
Remember: I’m in this divorce. This has been one of the most unhappy
times of my life. I’m standing there, the most unhappy I have ever been in my
life, and this guy Claus looks at me and he says: Rick, I think you would make
a good Foreign Legionnaire.
And I say, No. You don’t understand. I’m an officer in the American Navy.
I did the twenty-one gun salute today. On TV. I am in the American navy now.
And he looks back at me and he says, We don’t care about that. That wouldn’t
matter to us at all.
They could erase my identity. I walk down the hill and I realize, I can change
everything, right now. If Mrs. Blackwood, my mom, comes and finds me, they
will say, No, Madame, this is not your son. This is a pied noir from Algeria. He
speaks French badly, yes; but he is from Algeria. They will have a record built for
me. Not all of them have changed their identity but some of them have. Identity.
Here is the other part and it doesn’t fit with the first part. Captain US Navy,
Special Duty Officer, Intelligence. I went to SEAL training but I lasted thirty
seconds there. I was injured, the doctors pulled me out. They put me over into
intelligence.
Graduate of the U.S. Naval War College. I don’t think anyone else in the
world graduated from both UCLA Film School and the U.S. Naval War College.
Three years with U.S. Navy Special Operations Group One, out of San Diego.
Nine years in and out of U.S. Special Operations Command. Six years as a game
designer for the Joint Chief of Staff J2P Futures Group.
The JCS J2P Futures Group is a military think tank in the bottom of the
Pentagon… These are people who are hand-picked out of other organizations
because they come up with weird ideas. And we have been given this task; they
have been given this task to design this big war game that I am going to talk
to you about.
Away from teaching a lot. Ended up retiring from the U.S. Navy in 2005.
These dates are significant for what I am gonna tell you. But I ended up as the
Chief of Intelligence Requirements for the U.S. Department of Defense. I have
several service medals, that’s fun, that’s nice. I have the Legion of Merit equivalent. I don’t know any other reserve who has the Legion of Merit who is not an
admiral or a general.
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Identity. Your character will be complicated. It all has to be believable. It
all has to work somehow, beyond logic. It’s not algebra. Dashiel Hammett has
a really good line: Never trust anybody whose story fits. If somebody tells you
something and it all comes together perfectly it’s a lie. He’s leaving something
out. Somebody says: What is your family like? What do you tell them?
Everything? Absolutely everything? I don’t think so. We all lie about something. And leave things out.
I am now gonna say something because I am gonna confess something to
you. Nobody understands this. Not really. I had one of the scariest moments
of my life. Right before the second invasion of Iraq, sitting in a room with Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense at that time, the architect of the invasion of Iraq. A whole lot of people did not want to go to Iraq. A whole lot of
admirals and generals. I did not know one who was enthusiastic about a war in
the Middle East, not a one. I’m sitting there, listening and I don’t wanna imply
to you that anybody there cared what I thought. Nobody turned to me and said:
Oh Rick, what are we gonna do? But I am sitting there listening. And I get this
sick feeling—have you ever had a panic attack? You are just sitting there and
then you suddenly realize that the world is completely insane? I am sitting there
and I realize absolutely clearly:
They are guessing. About this war that’s coming. They’re guessing.
I could not breathe. What we are talking about in your stories or in scenario
design: they are each a rational art and craft designed to examine both the rational and irrational in your characters. If your character is just rational, he is very
dull. Unless you put your irrational people around him like Spock.
I think about it in terms of planes of human conduct. It works something
like this: there is the rational plane. That’s where we believe we live all the time.
We are on the rational plane right now. It’s where we do our most important
intellectual work. Nobody is going to hurt us. It’s all quiet in this room and well
under control. I want to argue that there is another plane and you are familiar
with it too. You don’t like it. Every woman who leaves her building at 9 o’clock
at night who has to walk to a parking lot by herself feels this. It’s the plane in
which really bad things happen in the world. Really bad. However bad you are
thinking, worse than that.
So everything that happens, happens on two planes: one rational and
civilized. And the other, chaotic and insane. Movies, and war games, and war
are about what happens when these two planes cross, and it becomes clear at
the critical place, and at the critical time, that your sense experience gave you
wrong data about Peace.
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Soldiers And Script Heroes
There are really sort of two ways of thinking about what soldiers and script
heroes do. One is: everybody is really fighting to keep this second plane away
from you. They don’t want this chaos anywhere near you. They don’t want you
to hear about it; they don’t want you to think about it. Writers make them very
nervous because writers think about this. And filmmakers. About violence and
mayhem and lying and shooting. They make everybody nervous. So soldiers
and policemen and movie heroes want to keep this second plane away from you
because they don’t want it to hurt you, to ruin you. They don’t want it to ruin
your children and their children.
Movie scripts and war games offer controlled models to explore what
human beings do to one another. Love one another. Protect one another. Assault
one another. Massacre one another. Invade.
In a way I would like to be able to snap my fingers and set you as observers
to what the bad guys have done when they go into a village in Darfur… at the
moment where there has just been an attack. Because you would stand there
for a minute not believing what you’re seeing. You are completely unequipped
to understand it unless you have seen something like it. And if you have seen
something like it you are never the same again. Ever.
I’m talking about war now. War is violence in a very highly organized and
policy ori­ented way. A state decides its policy; they decide to wage war against
somebody else.
A long time ago I stopped trying to answer the question, Why? I am not
smart enough to answer; I am just trying to see for my scripts and stories and
my game design how and by what means civilization allows and even implicitly
encourages violence and war. I wonder whether we encourage it when we put it
in our movies, I don’t know. Do films ever stop wars? Does art encourage peace?
I used to work out in a gym in Coronado in California with SEAL Team 1.
So I go one afternoon and someone is playing this movie soundtrack, including
the voiceover. I’ve met Francis Ford Coppola, we are not any kind of friends
or anything, but I met him and if anyone in this life ever tried to make a film
where there is some kind of anti-war statement it’s Coppola in Apocalypse Now.
And do you know what they are listening to? On the sound system while they’re
working out? Dialogue and music from Apocalypse Now. Getting turned on by
its insanity.
Civilization on some level encourages war and runs it as a kind of business.
But it is not a business. Your villain, in your story or game is human, and is as
complex as your hero. Maybe even more so.
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Philosophers For Film And Game Writers
I am gonna talk a little bit about philosophers. One of them is a baseball catcher named Yogi Berra who says all kinds of funny things and one of them is,
The future ain’t what it used to be. Well it never was.
History is a kind of story. You frame things, you cut things out. In the United States the 21st century citizens don’t believe there was ever a Left in the U.S.
But one of the most powerful left unions in the world, the International Workers
of the World (IWW), was really powerful in the state of Louisiana. They arrested
and hung them and ran them off and killed them all and erased them from history books. The longest-lived socialist colony in the United States is not in New
England, it was in Louisiana. The authorities drove the IWW into the ground.
And drove them away. What is the truth worth? Well.
You look into World War I and the Battle of Passchendaele. General French—
and this is World War I, what Woodrow Wilson idealistically called, The war
to end all wars—General French was the commander of the Allied forces and
General Allenby was one of his assistants. In a planning session General French
said, We’re going to attack at Passchendaele, and General Allen said, I think that’s
a mistake. And he argued with the general and General French told him to sit
down and shut up. And French went into the battle and lost the battle and it was
one of the worst days of the World War I, which is really saying something.
Of course General French should be fired and replaced by General Allenby,
right? But is that what happened?
No. General French fired General Allenby and sent him to Palestine. Where
the General Allenby who turned out to be right about Passchendaele was wrong
about the Arab Rebellion. Looked down at the Arabs and thought, They can’t do
anything. But the Arab Rebellion beat Allenby and the British to Damascus. Did
you see the clip of 9/11 I showed you earlier? The Arabs keep doing things way
smarter than we think they can. Way better. I have a lot of respect for Osama bin
Laden. A visionary.
There is no connection whatever between great vision and doing good
things. This makes for good movies. And good war games. That you can be brilliant, and wrong. Or brilliant. And do mayhem.
General Billy Mitchel prior WWII in about 1934 said, The Empire of Japan
is going attack the United States at Pearl Harbor. He was one of the people working at the war games at the Naval War College in Newport. And he was fired
for saying this, of course. For saying this in public. And he was right about it.
The Japanese did attack Pearl Harbor. And the Navy didn’t go hire General Billy
Mitchell again.
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He was on the other hand an air power advocate who thought if you bomb
people they will quit and you can win a war just with bombing. But they don’t
quit. They don’t quit, they get mad at you. They get really mad at you for dropping bombs on their homes. He was a brilliant man, a visionary. He wanted
to end war. The way he thought to end all war was to get rid of the army and
navy and everything except the air force, just heavy bombers. And Billy Mitchell
believed this and started to build the first heavy bombers in the United States.
So he was right about one thing—the attack on Pearl Harbor—and wrong about
another—how air power will end the need for armies and navies—and that’s the
story of thinking about the future.
And it’s the story of your characters. In violence. What are they right about?
And especially, what are they wrong about? And from this, what is the Future?
Couple of books for you to think about. I like the Apology of Socrates.
I never trusted Plato; I don’t trust him as a storyteller. He seems to have his own
agenda—and he sounds different from Socrates in a way the disciples sound different from Jesus of Nazareth. They don’t sound like the same story. But in the
Apology at one point Socrates says, I don’t really know much of anything. I know
a very few things. My advantage is that I know what I don’t know—and you think
that you know that and you don’t.
And of course the Greeks reward him for truth by killing him.
The Gay Science by Nietzsche. You can read this at the airport and people
will look at you funny—if you are a guy reading a gay science—they think it’s
something else, but you know, OK.
Spacetime is a short article, you can Google it online; it’s from the Encyclopedia Britannica. You maybe are not gonna understand two thirds of it but the
first part is fascinating because Einstein is basically saying that everything you
look at, you are wrong. Not five degrees off a little bit, not not quite right. You are
simply wrong. About everything you are looking at.
And from this should come some kind of humility.
And one of the most incredible documents ever: The Einstein-Freud Correspondence from 1922. Two pretty smart guys. They write back and forth on
behalf of the League of Nations. Einstein is asking Freud: Is it possible to make
people stop fighting each other? And Freud’s answer is really interesting.
Einstein: Is it possible to make people stop fighting one another?
Freud: Duh.
Three thinkers: Nietzsche, Einstein and Freud.
Why Is There So Much Sex And Violence In Movies?
I think Nietzsche, Einstein and Freud would answer: There is so much sex and
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violence in what we call Real Life. Freud would say, Look at your dreams.
Dreams, movies and Real Life. The similarities between the violence of
movies and the violence of what we call Real Life scare me. The similarities between the predictability of horrible human behavior and violence in what we call
Real Life, and the predictability of horrible human behavior in a movie. A really
scary movie is like a really scary dream. Because it seems like this Movie World
or Dream World where people do bad things exists in a Real World where the
movies and dreams are really kinda outdone. By real people. In places like Nanking. Or Darfur.
Nietzsche. Nietzsche talks about the kind of humility that isn’t a lack of ride
in oneself. It’s rather understanding the fact that you’re never completely right
about anything. Neither is the character you’re writing. Your characters, everything they think is in some sense wrong.
Einstein. Your characters’ sense experience is incomplete. As is yours. You
know if you take the entire human race and you crushed out all of the space
in all of the atoms it would create something about the size of a baseball. Isn’t
that interesting? So most of what we are looking at in each other is empty space.
We don’t see that. This is what Einstein is saying.
Freud. Thus you are forced to use special methods, to see important truths.
Art and science give us some of the best methods. To think in special ways to
figure out what your characters are doing. What bends gravity in your story?
Freud, I love Freud. People have been writing Freud off for a century. Everybody
I know who has said Freud is dead is now dead and we are still reading Freud.
He’s on to something. Does he have the answer? No, I think if he’d be sitting
here and I asked, Doctor Freud do you have the answer? I believe he’d say, No, no
I don’t. But I can tell a smart question from a dumb one.
Freud is really useful. He writes about wishes. I’m not smart enough to define what it is to be human. But if I had to try to clarify, I’d say:
A human being is a ghost, riding a meat packed skeleton—made of stardust—
through the universe; and performing one certain task: Making Wishes.
Human beings wish. For riches. For love. For Peace.
I play games with people. Thought games. I have a thought game for you.
Don’t really do this, but think about it.
Pick up a scorpion by its tail. Now hold it in front of you, watch it kick. That
scorpion believes it is the center of the universe. The most important thing that
scorpion has to do right then is to kill you. Megalomania. In script writing or
war game design—or in believing one has the formula for world peace — no
matter how smart you are you are gonna sit at the table and you are gonna be
wrong about something. And you very likely won’t know you’re wrong until it’s
too late.
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And maybe you won’t even be able to admit it, then.
Anyone of you ever had to rewrite your script because you didn’t get it right
the first time? Our defaults are pre-set to wrong. I love Freud’s line of reasoning.
I’ve seen soldiers who were borderline psychopaths. A part of the reason they
are psychopaths is what they’ve done is making them crazier and crazier. I think
there is no killing without guilt, there is no torture without guilt, there is no cheating on your beloved without guilt. There is always some kind of price.
Alfred Thayer Mahan. He says this thing that everybody hates. It’s about
selfishness. Alfred T. Mahan is the theoretician of the sea power. And he says,
Everybody wants more than his share. Of something.
I taught also at Pomona College. It’s one of the small elite colleges in the
United States. One of the students there, for example, was Max Spielberg. You’re
not going to believe this but after graduation Max got himself a good job. With
Stephen Spielberg’s company. I’m glad. He’s Max Spielberg, the son of Stephen
Spielberg. Max is a talented guy. He’s a very talented guy. He helps his father.
This is not fair.
I’m in this class at Pomona and this other student, this other very privileged
kid, this student is doing a really good job arguing with me about the war in the
Middle East. He says, with this moral certainty, It’s all about oil!
I’m talking about the complexities of war—the Shi’ia and the Sunnis and Al
Qaeda and Hezbollah and Mubarak and Assad in Syria—and he says: No! It’s all
about oil and greed. And I say of course it’s about oil. Of course this is true. But is
oil all it’s about? No. It’s about people’s megalomania. They can’t stop it perhaps
because it’s not about only one thing, but many things. One of them is that everyone is so sure he’s right. This is selfish. And I ask him, Are you selfish? And he
says, No. And I say, OK.
Let’s play another game, I say to him. A one-character war game. Gaming
you. I’m your fairy grandfather. Here’s my magic wand. I will give you one wish.
You don’t get to wish the world were perfect. No, even your fairy godfather isn’t
that powerful. But I can do something small. Here it is.
We’re in Darfur. There’s this little girl and she’s playing with her little brother
and in one hour some really bad men are going to show up. And something horrific
is going to happen. This little girl’s going to see her father butchered and I’m not
going to talk about what she sees happen to her mother. And because her mother
won’t stop fighting, the mother is butchered too. And the child will be taken as
a slave and she will die young from an awful disease she’s going to catch. And
you can stop that because I’m your fairy grandfather. Here’s my little magic wand.
All you’ve got to do is say yes. All I want from you is ten IQ points. Not really the
points; the intelligence those points attempt to measure.
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Now, I say to him. You want to go to Harvard to be a lawyer... You won’t
be able to. You won’t be smart enough. But you will know you have saved this
child….
And, God bless him. He admits it. No. He will not trade ten IQ points to save
the life of a child he doesn’t know…
Fighting? Surrendering? Winning political victories? There’s a line from the
military – Nothing is too hard for those of us who don’t have to do it. Peace is
easy for people who do nothing. It’s hard for people who try to make peace,
like Nelson Mandela for example. Or Dr. Martin Luther King. Or Ghandi, who’s
daughter-in-law ends up invading East Pakistan. This kind of truth—about the
complexity of all human beings, and then about their political institutions—
is very disagreeable.
But as Freud says, That something is disagreeable does not make it untrue.
Movies And Movie Making
Let’s talk for a minute about movies and movie making. Movies run on a timeline. I like Nietzsche’s theory about time. I think it’s very interesting. Anyone
here ever worked with Final Cut Pro? You’ve got a time line across the bottom.
This is Nietzsche’s theory. He says, There is a time line that goes in one direction
forever into the Past and in other direction forever into the Future; and the Present
is a wave riding along on that time line.
The Present? That’s all there is. The Past is gone, the Future is not here yet.
It’s a fascinating concept. It’s very much a movie concept. Because in a movie there’s only what’s happening right there. Right then. Right in front of your
eyes. And what it’s heading towards. What you think it’s heading towards. And
like Donald Rumsfeld, you’re guessing.
When it’s not heading towards a surprise you have a lousy movie.
This is a screenplay paradigm, designed by Syd Field. There’s nothing
gospel about it. People misunderstanding it think there’s a formula and that Field
is saying you can do anything on this time line. No. He says, You can follow this
paradigm and write the worst script in the history of world (which would be really
saying something). But it offers a shape, in time, for what happens in a movie.
Film Structure
Intro
00 min
Pinch 1
30 min
Pinch 2
Midpoint
60 min
Plot Point 1
Act 1
30 min
Desire
Pinch 3
90 min
Pinch 4
Plot Point 2
Act Break 1
Act 2
60 min
Act Break 2
Deception
Discovery
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Destiny
Act 3
30 min
Climax/Coda
120 min
Most movies look very much like this paradigm; there are some brilliant
exceptions that are great film art. But most movies that don’t follow a three-act
structure are bad, like a symphony with nine movements, or a painting shaped
like a trapezoid.
People ask me, Why do people fight wars?
People fight wars because they are just like you and me, complex and selfcentered. People ask me, Why do people make bad movies? People make bad
movies because they are just like you and me, complex and self-centered.
The Timeline and the Three Act Structure
You want to be brilliant. Good. I want you to be. I also want you to write movies
that people want to make, and then other people want go to see. That is not the
same thing as being brilliant.
One of the worst things a Hollywood producer can say to you is that you
have a really brilliant idea. Because he knows it’s hard to do it unless he’s got
Martin Scorsese to direct it or unless he’s somebody with the horsepower
to make that brilliance to come to fruition. Mediocrity is easy to understand,
easy to work with. Brilliance is very hard to realize, when you have not only
a good idea, but a budget of $20 million and a crew of 400 people, not a one
of whom agrees with the others.
The Producer is gonna be scared of your brilliant movie. For good reason.
He’d rather make Joe Versus the Volcano 2, because Joe Versus the Volcano was
dumb and successful. He wants a simple timeline people can understand. He
wants a three-act structure. You will believe he’s thinking in a formula. No! He’s
thinking about the audience.
Don’t think of the three-act structure as a formula. If you think of time
as a dimension and things are happening in time and you’re moving in along
this timeline, in time, you realize that a movie is a two-dimensional thing that
becomes a three-dimensional thing. A movie is something that looks three-dimensional that runs along a timeline, from minute zero to minute 120. This is
no formula.
Time is also a factor when you’re thinking about something like a game.
If you play chess you don’t just think about just this moment. The Present. You
look at the guy and ask yourself, What’s he gonna do with that rook two moves
from now?
So you’re not thinking just in terms of gaming psychology but in terms
of gaming psychology and time.
Time frames a movie. Time frames what we call history. Things change.
Time in a sense frames a movie. I believe this has something to do with
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human biology. Is there a one-to-one relationship? Of course not. But you can go
through a whole lot of good movies made in places from India to USA, Britain
or France and you can follow that time line and you will find out that something
really interesting happens about thirty minutes in. I’ve read some research from
big shot experts on this, from a neuro-scientific standpoint. They say dreams
work in thirty minutes cycles, thirty minutes, sixty minutes and then ninety
minutes.
It’s interesting that when David Sarnoff invented the American television,
he built it in thirty and sixty minute cycles and built the advertising around critical moments like fifteen minutes in. If you ever sell to a Hollywood producer
he’s gonna say, What’s the Act 1 break? The first plot point arrives at about thirty
minutes, that’s the Act 1 break. What’s the midpoint, what’s the climax?
Well, I like your script but if what if we change the midpoint? He’ll ask questions like that. Real Life doesn’t have a midpoint. But remember. There’s fifteen
thousand writers lined up at that door to take your job. And everyone of them
will say—to the producer—Yes. And this is a miserable way to do business. It’s
a miserable way to make movies. It’s complex, and self-centered. And everyone
knows for certain he’s right, especially the Producer with the money. Great movies
are made in America basically by people who themselves became so powerful
that they can do whatever they need to do. Martin Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg
and the others. In the United States, that’s where many, many good movies are
made.
There are true independent films too though. Blair Witch Project. My lawyer, Linda Lichter, is one of the top lawyers in Hollywood. I went into her office.
Linda is a tough girl and this day I go in and she looks like something’s bothering
her. I say, Linda what’s the matter with you, are you sick or something? And she
says, No, no.
So what’s going on? I say. And she says, Have you seen the Blair Witch Project? And I said, Yes, it’s pretty good. And she said, They didn’t even talk to us. They
didn’t talk to any of us.
The new technologies. The digital revolution. Not needing their money.
It scares the power brokers in Hollywood to death.
So it’s a new tool in your hands and you can game your future differently.
But you still have to make games people want to play, and films people want to
watch.
Games And Movies
Gaming. The games I wrote at the Pentagon were built around a forty-five
minute structure.
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There’s a good line from the U.S. Military Academy that they teach to each
professor: The mind cannot comprehend what the ass cannot endure. Forty-five
minutes, that’s the limit we set for ourselves in the games we designed. One minute in a game or film is forever. If nothing is happening your audience will start
to shift around. You have to deliver your point. In building the game we made
this decision—forty-five minutes is the absolute max including an interactive
session that occurred just before the climax.
Game Session Structure
Intro
00 min
Pinch 1
15 min
Pinch 2
Interactive
Session
Midpoint
22.5 min
Plot Point 1
Act 1
15 min
Desire
Pinch 3
30 min
Pinch 4
Climax/Coda
45 min
Plot Point 2
Act Break 1
Act 2
15 min
Act Break 2
Deception
Discovery
Act 3
15 min
Destiny
Heading towards the climax you make the player play and force him to make
a set of difficult decisions. The game is basically a teaching game. We’re at the
very beginning of game design in the United States at this point. This is like 1995
or 1996. We made this up. We’ve drawn this thing, you got a text, there’s a voice
over, you have pictures, they’ve brought in all these high-end animators and
people to work with us to put the thing together.
This is what the script looked like:
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If you are in the United States, go to Florida, go to Disney World, go to the
Epcot Center. It’s filled with these displays with multiple high density screens,
stereo surround sound and everything and it gives you this completely immersive experience where you feel like three or four things are going on at the same
time.
That’s what a good game or film is like. Time is saturated, but comprehensible.
We designed the game with multiple screens. We had to design what happened on those screens so that every screen was interesting. You could force
them to look from one thing to another. You are not just amusing yourself.
You are directing the attention of the audience. You are making them look where
you want them to look. Then you give the eye a moment to look around. And
then you make them look back. They learn the teaching points in the order you
want them to learn them. I brought ten minutes of the game that is unclassified
but I’m not going to be able to show it to you because the other sessions ran
overtime and we are almost out of time here. I will try to put it on a link and send
it to you if you would like. (Please don’t think I will ever make anything as ugly
as this unclassified.) This was built in one weekend by the contractors and it is
a synopsis of where the game came from.
Let me tell you how I got into it. I was a screenwriter. I was a very unhappy
screenwriting author. I took a year off to go to the U.S. Naval War College just to
amuse myself, because I was fascinated by war gaming. I spent a year there; and
then I graduated from the U.S. Naval War College and I went home.
I’d been back at Louisiana State University, where I taught, for about two
months. I’d come home back from the War College. I called my lawyer, saying, Let’s set up my next deal. Or try to. I made some money, so I’m lucky not
to be broke. I don’t really want to go back to Hollywood writing but I’ve taken
a year off and I’m teaching at Louisiana State University partly also because
I hate working in Hollywood so much. And the phone rings. I pick up the phone
and this guy says, Hi, my name is Chuck Zingler and I’m calling you from the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. I don’t know what
country you are from, but this is kind of like someone’s saying, Hello, I represent
the foreign minister of your country and I need to talk to you. So I’m holding the
phone and I said, Well, sure, what’s up?
And he says, We’re trying to design this big game and we’re not getting anywhere. We’ve got the smartest people in the world. We’ve run the Department of Defense database looking for somebody from the movies or television who has worked
with the military special operations people. Who sold movies, who has an agent
and a lawyer and a psychiatrist and the whole bit. We’re looking for somebody like
that. We want you to come up here and just talk to us for a few days. And I say,
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Well, yes, sure. But honestly I thought that I would never hear from him again.
The next day the phone rings again and he says, Hi, this is Chuck Zingler
at the Reagan National Airport and I’m flying down to see you.
So he flew down to LSU to see me. We spent an afternoon talking about
how to do this and they wanted me to come right away. And I said, Look, I can’t.
I’m teaching right now and I’ve been pulled out from teaching too many times and
I can’t do it again. But I get a break at Christmas. He said, OK.
So I went up there around December 15th, 1995. I wanted to go for seven
days. They said, No, we want you for seventeen days. We’re serious about this. So
I go up there for seventeen days and I’m sitting there and I feel like I’m wasting
my time and their money. And nobody cares what I think.
But they had brought in super-smart people.
Do you remember when you were at the second grade and Mrs. Rothrock
says, How much is eight and seven? Everybody knows fifteen minus five. Eight
and seven are hard at the second grade. You pop your hand up and you get the
right answer and she says, Very, very good. And you sit there and you think, God,
I’m the smartest kid in the class. It was just like that except the opposite.
I’m sitting at the table. I’m the dumbest guy in the room. This guy’s got a
PhD from MIT, this guy’s got such and such big prize and they are sitting there
and they are not getting anywhere. And I raised my hand and I said, Look, I’ve
got an idea. I knew how to say this. I’m the dumbest guy at this table but I’ve got
an idea. And they all shifted their heads like okay. And so I started talking and
they started yelling, No, no, that’s never gonna work, it won’t work, it won’t work.
So I shut up.
Couple of days later I’m ready to leave for New Orleans. I’m sitting there
and Chuck comes in. Chuck is a really smart guy. Chuck comes in and he’s
really upset and he says, I don’t know what I’ve got to do. We’re at a dead end.
And so I go and sit with another guy, Major Hank Foshee, a marine and a very
creative guy who likes the movies and I say, Look. We took two pieces of paper
and started. I said, How about some big screens? He said, It has to be interactive.
And I said, Well, let’s draw some lines and lock some computers to it. What’s the
story going to be? So we started to talk about this.
On the next page is what the interactive looked like.
We went to see the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General
Hughes. Chuck did the talking: Here it is. We’ve put it on some paper with lines
on it. General Hughes is an incredibly smart man. George Tenet from the CIA is
a very smart man also. You might not like them, that’s not the point. Very, very
smart guys. And at the end of the presentation General Hughes is sitting there
and he’s looking and saying, OK, this is like a story. We watch this and it’s like
a movie playing. But what’s the role we play? he asked. I said, Every player is the
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Joint Task Force Commander. Every player as he’s learning is making these life and
death decisions. When the game stops, the computer pops on, you have to make the
decisions about what to do next.
And General Hughes looked at me.
This is what we want. Here’s what he said to me: You ain’t going home. And
I didn’t. They pulled me out of LSU, recalled me to active duty, and gave me a big
promotion. And I ended up as the project designer on this game.
We went and presented it all around the world. We would stop in the middle, present each with a problem-set that would just cross anybody’s eyes. And
he has to then present a decision brief to the President of the United States.
He gets ten minutes. Catastrophic consequences will follow from his doing this
wrong. You’ve got tremendous pressure to get it correct.
If the story is working you’ve got them. And we built the fifteen-minute
interactive and we’ve taken them through each step of things. They had to make
decisions, they had to decide what kind of satellites they want to use, they had
to decide whether they want to try to put somebody on the ground. They can
choose to knock out the communications of the bad guys. Or they can use other
satellites and spy planes to listen to the communications of the bad guys. And
you say to yourself, Should I knock the communication out so they can’t talk
to each other? Or is it worth more for me to be able to hear them? Because we won’t
know what they are going to do if we can’t hear them.
Because they’ll figure out another way to talk. They’ll figure something else
out. They always do. In life and death situations people figure something else
out. And so they have to do these very, very important kinds of decisions.
In April of 1996, I’m sitting there with all these super-geniuses. All kinds
of people are there. Big guys from MIT. Big guys from the CIA. We’re trying
to decide how to build this thing and I’m its project designer—the storyteller.
We’re trying to figure out what to put in and I remember what happened now.
We were deciding what kinds of modules to make… Crisis in Europe? War
in Asia? Crisis in the Mid-East? I raised my hand and I asked this question: What
about terrorism? There was a moment of quiet at the table. The big super-genius
from the David Sarnoff Institute looked up, thought about that for a minute and
said, Terrorism’s too hard. And that was the decision.
Would we have guessed what’s happening? I doubt it. God, I doubt it. But
we didn’t try.
One of the happiest days of my life was leaving active duty. It was winter and
I was in my little German sports car, a BMW Z4. I was cold as hell, and I was out
of the military and heading to Amsterdam with a beautiful girl to become a hippie and get my ear pierced. I was so happy. I’m flying out of the parking lot and
I’m on the I-395 entrance ramp hitting the third gear, at like 80 miles an hour.
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I glanced up and I saw the Pentagon in my rear mirror. It was one of the happiest
things to know I would never have to go back.
The game was a story. It had a beginning. A middle. And a surprise ending.
In the symposium that I left behind, the last minute of the symposium, the
first day we showed it, I remember dreading that last surprise. It was a writer’s
trick; it spun the story around on the players. They would see that they had been
tricked by the story’s bad guy: Yes, the bad guy is the smartest guy playing. There’s
this room with very smart people, very judgmental people: generals, admirals,
ambassadors, some of them very tough boys and girls. And I remember thinking
about five minutes before the end, what if they say, Come on, this is baloney.
But when the bad guy made his last maneuver, the whole place went dead
quiet. And the whole room said, almost together in one voice: Oh shit…
Because the message is: you are about to kill people. And you are not
as smart as you think you are.
--Rick L. Blackwood is an author, scriptwriter, military strategist, professor at the
Ecole de Guerre in Paris and former professor of English & Media Studies at
Pomona College and of English at Louisiana State University. He wrote scripts
to several movies and produced the award-winning documentary film American
Utopia. He served as a project designer, writer and creative director for the
Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Symposium of the CIA and
as the Interactive War Game Designer for the Pentagon.
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Mathematics and Storytelling
by Borjana Dodova
Mathematics and Storytelling are both very broad parts of human culture.
Putting them together doesn’t make this vastness any smaller. I might be scared
but I’m not. I don’t understand infinity. For me, it is a word. What do we usually do with infinity? We write it down, describe its properties, make up stories,
make jokes about it. It seems that there’s nothing mysterious about infinity. For
this reason, I’m not afraid that I will shrink it to a zero. Shrinking infinity to
zero sounds like a terrible idea, but people sometimes do terrible things when
they don’t fully understand. This is why we have stories. To describe our infinities. To touch our unknowns. And our unknown unknowns. I’m abstract here,
of course. Am I speaking about mathematics or storytelling? Let’s take a guess.
Choosing such a broad topic gives me a lot of freedom. My lecture will be
a short game without strictly defined rules and without any winner. I will try
to establish some connections and narrow the gap between mathematics and
storytelling and I hope you will enjoy it. I will talk about mathematics first. I’ve
heard so many times that Mathematics is difficult. Most of my friends say that
and I can more than agree. It is a difficult word to pronounce, especially for
a nonnative English speaker. You can get lost in the complexity of those four syllables with their touch of ancient Greece. For this reason I prefer to use a more
playful word: maths, sticking to the British version of the word.
There are many myths associated with maths. I will try to unmask two
of them. The first myth is that maths is about counting. Don’t be mistaken—
counting is a very useful skill. We master it during the first grades of primary
school. It’s a basic part of our education. If we practice counting regularly we
don’t lose our basic orientation with small numbers and even much later we still
know how much makes seven times eight. Let’s count: seven times eight is fiftysix. This equation is almost not worth noting. But it is an equation, a sentence
in the mathematical language. Of course, there are also other much more interesting sentences, like Ramanujan’s equation which says that:
√ ∞
2 2  (4k)!(1103 + 26390k)
1
=
π
9801 k=0
(k!)4 3964k
.
This equation might look dangerous, but it’s not so complicated. (We state
it here just to break the rule that there are no equations in the texts about storytelling.) There’s the strange number π and an infinite series. (Let’s recall that π is
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the number that is so important for counting the perimeter of a circle.) If we
shrink infinity to a more accessible finite number, for example 10, we may use
it for getting a nice approximation of π. In the universe of mathematical statements there are also equations that might be confusing, like:
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +... = −
1
12
.
This equation might raise doubts in some people because of the special
combination of natural numbers, fractions and the negative sign.
What I want to stress is that besides those many strange, dangerous, beautiful or powerful counting sentences there are parts of maths that don’t deal with
counting, at least not in the usual sense. Some of them describe abstract properties of shapes and explore what happens if those shapes are stretched or contracted. Others might be concerned with knots. There is also a part of maths
dedicated to logic. Many powerful theorems in those areas take an existential
form. One example might be the solution to the so-called halting problem which
says that there isn’t any program that would decide about any program with any
input whether it will stop or not. So, mathematics is not only about equations,
numbers and counting.
The other myth I would like to put your attention towards is that mathematicians are good at counting. Of course, they know how to count. Sometimes
they can count in many different ways. My friend, who is a mathematical physicist, discovered that if he took two equal glasses of gin and tonic and poured gin
slowly into the other glass so that the two substances mixed together completely
and the rest that didn’t fit into the glass was spilled out of it, he would get a mixture which would contain 1/e of gin (if we count the whole as unity, that means
1). He called this drink Euler’s cocktail because e is known as Euler’s number.
What did he do? He found a unique way of seeing Euler’s number in nature.
But that is not exactly the same as counting. In fact, mathematicians usually
don’t like to count at all. They might even forget how much makes seven times
eight. But they usually know how to find the correct answer and (probably more
importantly) what are the conditions by which seven times eight is fifty-six.
Thinking about conditions and the rules of calculation helps us to understand better the numbers and operations we can perform with them. As you
probably know there are many different sets of numbers, like natural numbers or
rational numbers. You can add and multiply any of them without any problem
but when it comes to division there’s a difference: if you divide a rational number
by a rational number you will always get a rational number, but if you divide
a natural number by other natural number you might not get a natural number.
This shows that there are some properties and differences among numbers and
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these differences in mathematics are described by different structures.
As scriptwriters we know that a structure is a complex thing. Structures
arise when we start to think about stories analytically. As scriptwriters we deal
with structures a lot, but we know that they are by no means obvious. Likewise
some mathematical properties are not readily accessible. After the Sputnik crisis
in 1957 the U.S. grade schools adopted a new approach to teaching mathematics. It was called New Math (without s at the end) and it was meant to educate
children in more abstract mathematical concepts. The objective was to prepare
students during high school so that they could cope better with higher maths
at the university level. The administration wanted to have new engineers faster.
The result was a big failure. The students “heard of the commutative law, but did
not know the multiplication table”. The approach was mistaken precisely because
it is not possible to understand abstract properties of numbers without understanding numbers. The same is true in storytelling. You can’t analyze stories
before you really appreciate some of them and start to think about them.
Let’s move on to storytelling. Vladimir Propp was a Soviet formalist who
analyzed Russian folk tales in the 1920s. He used a big catalogue of Russian folk
tales collected by Alexander Afanasyev and wrote a famous study called Morphology of the Folktale. How did he proceed? Of course, he had to read through
the material first. He realized that there are an enormous variety of motives. For
example villains are very creative in doing harm. A dragon can kidnap the tsar’s
daughter, older brothers can abduct the bride of a younger brother, a princess
can seize a magic shirt, a finger-sized peasant can make off with a magic steed,
a stepmother can order the killing of a miraculous cow, a clerk can order the
slaying of a magic duck or chicken, a mare can eat up a haystack, a bear can
steal the oats, a crane can steal the peas, and so on. A villain can even seize the
daylight, which occurred only once out of one hundred stories and Vladimir
Propp found it so interesting that he made a note about it. But all of these were
very particular observations that were not well suited for any kind of a general
theory.
So Propp had to invent a method. He compared one hundred fairytales and
asked what is common for all of them. He identified seven types of characters:
the hero, the villain, the princess, the dispatcher, the donor, the helper, and the
false hero. He observed that it might be useful to analyze actions performed by
those characters, but only those which are significant for the story. He called
those actions functions. The term recalls the mathematical word function. Functions usually take as an argument a number and perform an operation on it. The
functions in Propp’s analysis act in the same way. For example the first function
absentation takes a person and sends him on a journey or makes him absent
from home. Propp liked to count and so one of the most natural questions for
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him was: how many functions are there? And he answered: 31. And he suggested
more. He stated that there is one and only one sequence of these narrative elements. Some functions might be missing, but the order will be always the same.
Propp’s analysis established narratology as a new field of study, but it was
also very often severely criticized. The theorist Claude Lévi-Strauss considered
Propp’s approach very narrow because it dealt only with the structure of the
text without any connection to its meaning and sense. Lévi-Strauss favored
a different approach, which took elements of a story out of the given order and
regrouped them using some analytic scheme, for example, by exploring binary
oppositions of life and death or man and woman. It is not our task to dive into
this discussion.
The discussion is not crucial for us. It is more important to notice that Propp
described something that very closely resembles an algorithm for generating
fairy-tales. You have to add some initial data, invent a hero, give him a name,
describe the magical devices, but after that is done the algorithm might continue
and the story might evolve until it ends almost automatically. Wow, that’s great!
said mathematicians who worked with the first computers in the 60’s and made
the first simple program which generated fairy tales. And many others tried to
develop a story generator afterwards. The first generators were using Propp’s
functions. More recent implementations are able to perform semantic analysis of a corpus of existing stories and to derive a similar one. This might cause
a conceptual and qualitative shift in generating.
The algorithms haven’t been very successful yet. Television series are still
written by authors because generated stories aren’t powerful enough. Usually
they are able to describe only the basic structure of a story. Let’s take an example.
The following text has been generated by jBard, an automatic story-generator
which is a continuation of ProtoPropp and uses Afanasyev’s catalogue together
with some semantic analysis: The witch scared the frog. The witch used a magic
spell against the frog. Others and the king heard about the witch. The king heard
something. The witch heard about the king. The king shared information with others. The knight departed. The knight fell into a trap. The witch enchanted the knight.
The frog returned. Not surprisingly, this fairy-tale isn’t very interesting.
It might seem that generated stories are useless. Not completely. A coherent
combination of characters, actions and moves is very important in the gaming
industry. The times have changed. We live with electronic devices that influence the way we experience the world. They talk to us and they invite us to play.
One of my friends, who is a computer linguist, has been developing a computer
conversational partner for older and lonely people. There are many questions
associated with that. Is it scary? Is it inhumane? And most important, can we tell
the difference between a human partner and a computer? Officially, we can. The
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Turing test, which has been suggested by Alan Turing in the 1950’s, hasn’t been
passed yet. But the time when we will not be completely sure is coming fast.
Pop music must have passed the Turing test in the late 1980’s. In 1988
the music band KLF reached number one in the UK Singles Chart with their
novelty pop single Doctorin’ the Tardis. This single was a conscious combination
of the Doctor Who theme, Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll, Blockbuster! by Sweet
and Let’s Get Together Tonite by Steve Walsh. Later, in 1988, the same artistic duo
consisting of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty published The Manual (How
to Have a Number One the Easy Way) in which they described in steps how to
win the charts without any musical skills and money. They specifically warned
against creativity: “Every Number One song ever written is only made up from
bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to
the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality.”
In the end of their sarcastic tour-de-force they burned one million pounds sterling on the Scottish island of Jura. This was all the money the duo had earned as
The KLF.
So we can’t deny that some kinds of stories or music can be generated and be
more or less successfully used. My argument is that there will always be a space
for free invention, something that escapes the code. There isn’t any machine that
could generate all stories. Let’s move on. I’m sure we feel at least slightly uncomfortable about computer-generated stories. Why? Because we don’t like them.
They stick too much to the point. They are too precise. We don’t enjoy absolute
exactness. And, on the other hand, if they incorporate randomness it seems too
volatile. Holden Caufield from Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye explains this
delicate ambiguity to Mr. Antolini: “I like somebody to stick to the point and all.
But I don’t like them to stick too much to the point. I don’t know. I guess I don’t like
it when somebody sticks to the point all the time.”
There is one very special case when writers don’t stick to the point. It happens when they are speaking about themselves and the story begins to be selfreflexive. With self-reflexivity something strange happens. We have the feeling
that the story knows about itself. And self-reflexivity might not be easily reached
by any kind of artificial intelligence, precisely because in computer generation
there’s no real understanding of what’s happening in the text.
Self-reflexive statements are mischievous members of our linguistic universe. One of the most popular creatures is the liar’s paradox. Think what happens when a liar say’s: I’m a liar. In mathematics self-reflexivity caused nothing
less than a sensation. In the beginning of the 20th century many mathematicians
were hoping that they would be able build up solid foundations for mathematics
from a small set of axioms. Kurt Gödel, an Austrian logician, proved that this is
not possible. In any axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithme69
tic of natural numbers there will always be true statements that aren’t provable.
This is called the First Incompleteness Theorem. The true sentence from which
Gödel derived his argument (using precise mathematical techniques) could be
stated as: I’m not provable. Philosophically it was a very important discovery. The
Incompleteness Theorem showed that all maths can’t be generated from a few
first principles by logical derivation. But what does it mean? Gödel, who was
a mathematical realist, believed that is the same as to say that there is always
something to be discovered by intuition, a space for human creativity unreachable by any kind of generation or derivation.
This is very close to our problem with computer-generated stories. Even
if we use the best analytic algorithms, the best formulas and the corpus of all
stories we know I believe that there will still be a space for creativity. I don’t have
any proof of that. Most probably there’s none. But I suggest you to consider the
complexity and interrelatedness of meaning and comprehension when a story
digresses and says: I’m not a usual story.
There are many degrees of self-reflexivity. Many of them are almost
unnoticeable. Some are created by the author; some are found only by the recipients. Some are lost forever, others might emerge after many centuries when
the context changes. But I think that at least a small portion of self-reflexivity is
the important spice which makes the difference between a good story and a list
of consecutive actions. You might call it a trace of consciousness.
One of the most interesting cases of self-reflexivity happens when an author takes into consideration the limits of language. Language gives us tools for
expressing ourselves, but at the same time it forces us to speak in a codified
way so that we can’t properly express ourselves. This is a paradox. Sometimes
the limits of language might be made visible. In the arts we may use non-sense
to transcend ordinary logic. We say No one goes there because it’s too crowded
and we understand it. Let’s recall a text which is situated on the border of sense
and non-sense, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through
the Looking-Glass. It might be a surprise for you, but Carroll was a mathematician and also one of the best portrait photographers during the Victorian era.
He knew precisely how logic works and he transcended it by creating a fictional
world visited by a small girl. In this world almost everything is understandable
and logical, but at the same time it breaks the limits of common sense and transforms strict order into a play. Which is, probably, one of the most reasonable
things we can do in our too-rationalized world.
--Borjana Dodova is a PhD candidate at FAMU. Currently she is working on her
doctoral thesis about narrative strategies during the Cold War.
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Cine-Jam: To the Jammers Of the World
by Muriel Aboulrouss
My dear passionate artists, I write you this letter to tell you how much the
world needs your stories… How much the world needs you to be you and
how important it is for you to be yourselves for better & for worse. Most
importantly it should be felt through your art.
Films are born to share your experience of the world and bring down
boundaries through the big screen. Your films can be seen & felt anywhere
else in the world when they are genuine, personal and authentic… They have
to come from within and reach the world by the power of their intensity,
authenticity and cinematic quality.
We don’t aim to find a recipe for universal films… We are not a recipe for
what works or is expected… We are unique and special… We have our own
language and sensitivity… As artists, how do we unveil this special part of us?
I’m not saying that we are all geniuses… I’m just saying there is only one way to
find out… It’s the hard way… It’s a lot of persistence… It’s a lot of sacrifice and
perseverance… A lot of joy and happiness; it’s the way to the light… And it’s
not given to most people because it is definitely outside the comfort zone.
Cine-Jam was born in Beirut, in a country where the cinema industry is
fighting hard to exist and from a hunger for story telling that I feel intensely.
Cine-Jam is borderless like films; it addresses artists from all over the world.
Let’s tell stories, our stories... with no censorship. Let’s take the chance; we have
nothing to lose except ourselves if we don’t.
When there is a will, there is a way…
That is why I created cine-jam.
love & light
cine-jam
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The Name
‘Cine’ for Cinema
‘Jam’ for music jamming
In Cine-Jam we improvise, we jam with the emotions, the images and the
sound… We experiment, we dare to express and create an impression of what
we feel. We do our best to touch the world with our artistic vision by sharing
our personal stories and emotions.
In Cine-Jam the only rule is that there is no rule; there is no right or wrong, no
black or white, except the one of authenticity and the necessity of expression.
Jamming with images and sound is a beautiful experience and a continuous
rejuvenation process for the 7th art creator.
The Intention
Cine-Jam saw the light to encourage talented and passionate artists/filmmakers
to discover the beauty in their own material, and to give them the faith that
their original cinematic language is actually better than copies of what has
already been recycled.
In Cine-Jam we experiment with the tools of the 7th art… we jam & grow from
there.
Its only a step towards who we are as an artist… a step towards discovering our
potential… passion is a must, talent is an innate gift, hard work & perseverance
are the only way to unveil it all.
Cine-Jam exists because we need to see newborn talent give hope to the 7th
art anywhere in the world. Have we forgotten it is an Art? The Art of ultimate
expression, the art of projection in light and sound, the art of observation, of
awakening, of education, and the art of making a difference simply through
authentic expression and our personal need to paint our universe with music and
lights.
It is the filmmaker’s duty to keep the memory alive by sharing his or her own
story (personal, cultural, political…) in whatever form they choose, in order to
create an emotion, a reflection or even an “evolution”.
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--Muriel Aboulrouss is an award‑winning Lebanese cinematographer and the first
female cinematographer in the Arab World. She is celebrated by the industry for
creating unique visual universes on select projects with auteur filmmakers. Her
numerous credits include A New Day in Old Sanaa, and Falafel. She won the
BAYARD D'OR "Best Cinematography" award for Stray Bullet at the Namur
Film Festival 2010.
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Copyright © 2014 by the Authors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage
and retrieval systems, without written permission
from the publisher or author.
Published in the Czech Republic by:
The Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU)
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Praha 1
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Printed in the Czech Republic