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Personal Scriptwriting: Beyond the Edge

Up until this point, we have primarily been discussing the scripts for feature-length theatrical films written in standard screenplay form so that others might direct them. However, with the growth of alternative sources of funding and the low-tech production opportunities afforded by Hi8 video, super16, or even Fisher Price Pixelvision, we are seeing an explosion of productions of varying lengths, intended for a wide range of audiences, many of them written to be directed by the writer. Although some of these are so personal as to be elaborate home movies, others have demonstrated new ways to speak from experience and, in so doing, they have redefined our notion of the possibilities of the personal script.

In addition to their raising questions of screenwriting technique, these alternative, self-made forms have served as vehicles for underrepresented peoples to express a voice that otherwise may have been denied them. Many times, such expression unites directing and writing, suggesting that the way we see and the stories we use to organize our seeing have to be developed together. Thus, many of these alternative films open up story structures to provide opportunities to explore moments of visualization and rhythm that can be prepared for through writing, but cannot be directly expressed through writing alone. Working through distribution channels such as Deep Dish TV and Women Make Movies, women, historically minimally employed as mainstream film and television writers and directors, have transformed lowtech video into an expressive form in its own right, while Third World News-reel has provided distribution to emerging writers and directors of color.

We would like to conclude Alternative Scriptwriting with a brief consideration of a few short films, paying particular attention to their development of new narrative languages that serve as expression of voices not traditionally heard. But we cannot do this without first considering once more the power and the problems associated with working close to personal experience. As we have said before, one of the central premises of this book has been to encourage writing out of the self, because that is where the deepest possibilities for self-expression and originality lie. But, as writing teachers, we see everyday examples of what can get created under the notion of the personal—highly self-involved stories whose authors write with the same blindness that cripples their characters. The approach to the personal we are talking about must find a way to counter this by requiring both immediacy and reflection. Without the immediacy, our work will have neither heart nor drive. However, without the reflection, our work risks being only an immature self-justification of the particular limitations that bedevil our life. To break out of this, we must find some way to look with clarity at the very personal experience from which we are writing.

Seeing Oneself

Undigested, our lives, our personal perceptions, and our experiences communicate nothing. Without any prior extra-textual interest in the author, we cannot expect our audience to care. That which is purely personal is, by definition, inherently uninteresting to others. Although this is not true of textbooks in fiction writing, most texts on screenwriting warn against this personal writing for exactly this reason—in a medium that needs to reach millions of viewers, it is assumed we cannot find something in the details of our lives that is sufficiently broad.

Screenplay texts stress conceptual issues such as structure, act breaks, and even external conceptions of character as a means of separating writers from the personal, of concentrating on communication practices rather than on the extraction of meaning from what we know best. Screenplay texts do this for a number of reasons, of which two are important to us here. The first is that mainstream film, almost by definition, substitutes the broad and the general for the individual. The second is that while it is possible to guide writers by making general statements about structure in a textbook, it is not possible to discuss how to make meaningful and universal the individual experiences that make up our lives and that we seek to transform into story. While we will provide some examples, we have no illusions we can do that here.

Being aware of the danger must not keep us from working out of our own sense of the world, because without doing so, we have little true investment in our work. We must learn, however, that while we fully embrace our experience, we also must stand outside it and understand what the viewer might make of it. The central issue here is not one of technique but rather one of courage and honesty in looking at ourselves. We all have areas of darkness where our motivations are not clear or our self-perceptions serve to hide our disappointments. This can be rich and powerful stuff, but it can also be terrifying to examine. But we cannot write about these areas without honest self-awareness.

Characters may in fact never escape this trap of self-delusion, but we, as writers, cannot let ourselves fall in. We must push our characters to the point where they either must see or be lost.

The Intensely Personal: A Few Short Films Peel and Molly’s Pilgrim

We will start as we did in Chapters 2 and 3, by comparing a traditional short film with an alternative short film.

In Molly’s Pilgrim,¹ a recent Russian Jewish immigrant girl is teased by her schoolmates because of her accent and her misunderstanding of American culture. Assigned to make a Pilgrim doll for Thanksgiving, she brings in instead a doll dressed in a Russian folk costume. Her class and her teacher laugh at her misunderstanding of how a Pilgrim should look, until Molly explains that she has come to America to seek freedom and that makes her a Pilgrim also. The teacher, realizing that it has been a mistake to laugh at Molly, then connects the Thanksgiving feast to the Jewish Festival of the Tabernacle, and Molly’s classmates come to accept her as one of their own.

Jane Campion’s Peel ² is much more difficult to summarize. A man, his sister, and his son, driving back from viewing a piece of land, fight, pull off the road, and, although the alliances change, continue to fight. The film ends with the son jumping on the car’s roof as the sister sulks inside and the brother sits dejectedly on the rear bumper. On one level, looking at Peel and Molly’s Pilgrim together is unfair, because Molly’s Pilgrim is designed for a young adult audience while Peel is not. Yet Molly’s Pilgrim is valuable to us because it illustrates in a short form some of the elements we have talked about as characteristic of mainstream film:

• Problems are shown to belong to individuals, not to society at large.
• When individuals overcome the problems, the problems vanish.
• Stories have a clear beginning, middle, and end that shape experience in a satisfying way.
• The individual voice of the filmmaker is concealed behind the working out of the story.
• The implied perspective of the filmmaker regards the class’s ultimate acceptance of Molly as right and proper, as does the viewer.
• This eventual acceptance is set up as the correct answer in the beginning, and the story serves to bring us to its realization.

We can see the clarity of this design by considering the way Molly’s Pilgrim begins. Molly stares at a music box that we read as representing her Russian past. Her mother enters and begins to speak Russian; Molly interrupts, asking her mother to speak English. The two-part split represented by the music box and by speaking English resolves at the end of the story, when Molly has both her Russian Pilgrim and her English friends.

Peel works on totally different levels. The character tension develops first between the man and his son, because the son refuses to stop throwing an orange peel out the window, and then, after the son has been sent off to gather the discarded peel, the tension shifts to the man and his sister. The text of the ensuing argument is trivial—the sister is angry that she has gone on this expedition with the brother because she will miss a favorite television program. The argument appears continuous, without end, and seems to conceal more than it reveals. Finally, an added element of tension that drives the story is the threat from the cars that are whizzing past on the highway.

Let’s look at the conflict a little closer. In a mainstream film, the main characters are thought to be in a transitory state—the playing out of the story is designed to bring them to resolution. If the conflict does not resolve, the characters will remain undefined and the film will not appear to be over. (Think, for instance, of how vague the character of Rick in Casablanca would be if the film ended before he made his final decision about Ilsa). Thus, conflict functions as an obstacle for resolution; it must be transcended for the story to end.

As the character moves to resolution, several things tend to happen. First, the subtext emerges and in most cases is confronted head-on. This is part of what gives many mainstream films a “self-help” feel—confronting feelings leads to overcoming them. (It is what makes a film such as sex, lies, and videotape, which initially feels original, so predictable and pat at the end). Thus, the class’s recognition of how unfairly they have misjudged Molly in rejecting her Pilgrim is a necessary precursor to accepting her in the end.

Second, a lurking potential for resolution that has been set up earlier in the story becomes activated. Molly is initially rejected by a number of classmates, who represent a spectrum of attitudes; some classmates project outright hostility, others just go along with the group. When the story resolves, the classmate who has been most tentative in rejecting Molly—not the classmate who has been most hostile—is now the one who first hugs her. By introducing a spectrum of characters, the potential for change has been set up right from the beginning.

In Peel, however, the text of the argument is about nothing that is intrinsically important, and the subtext seems to imply a whole history of specific irritations rather than one conflict that can be overcome. Nothing deeper than the surface conflict is even engaged; there is no suggestion that something might be overcome. Arguments cannot be transcended here as they are in mainstream films, because arguments and a kind of low-grade tension are precisely what define the characters and the experience of their life. Thus, the argument in Peel provides a kind of centrifugal force, a sense of what makes families spin apart.

But stop. Anyone who has seen student films or read student stories knows about this centrifugal force. At a certain age and with a certain mind-set, young writers and filmmakers always construct a world in which everything falls apart. Anxiety is glorified, despair celebrated. Stories end with suicides or lonely walks in the sand; they do not recognize the needs that work to hold us together. If this is what we mean by personal filmmaking, then why should anyone be interested? It is not what we mean. It is precisely the perspective that the writer gains by being able to look back on her experience that provides an answer to this.

Recognizing the limitations of presenting disintegration as an easy way out, Campion proves a contrasting centripetal force by dramatizing the cost of the tension driving the family apart in Peel. In doing so, she brings a perspective to the disintegration. The boy—confronted with his aunt sitting motionless behind the wheel, and his father, head in hand, on the rear bumper—stares into both of their mute faces, looking for similarities, apparently seeking to connect their faces with his own. The shots that Campion gives us go beyond the boy’s individual point of view to represent a more general meditation on commonality and difference. As the boy touches the faces, the camera frames them with great tenderness, caressing them in such a way as to suggest it is seeking a connection between father and aunt and the reverse shot of the boy. At this moment, although the conflict does not end, we see, directly expressed by the narrator, the forces that keep us from spinning entirely apart. Conflict is not transcended, definition is not static. Rather, life is seen as a movement between forces of disintegration and the need for cohesion.

Finally, Peel is not a work in which we can separate script from final film. The dialogue is minimal and hardly consequential; there is not a clear and readable progression of beats that serve to bring us into character, nor is the action focused to provide revelation. The quality of shots in which we examine the faces at the end could not really be anticipated in writing. All this is not to negate the importance of the writing or the design of the piece, but rather to reposition it. Although it is achieved without a traditional script or relationship between writer and director, we are still witnessing a masterful act of storytelling that has been constructed to allow shots to resonate far beyond their literal meaning.

Sink or Swim

Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim³ is structured in 26 sections, each of which is introduced with a short title. The titles begin with the letter z and work through the alphabet in reverse order, “Zygote,” “Y Chromosome,” “X Chromosome,” “Witness,” etc. Over these sections, a young girl’s voice narrates the story of a woman whom we come to regard as the central character. Gradually, the narrated story focuses on the relationship between this woman and her father. We learn of the precariousness of their relationship, the cruel tenderness that marked their dealings with one another (after learning to swim by being thrown into a pool, she and her father celebrate their enjoyment of swimming together before her father frightens her by impossible tales of water moccasins lurking in the lake), and the hurt the woman feels when her father leaves her mother and, later, when her father sends the woman home early after an abortive vacation in Mexico. Struggling with subsequent unsatisfactory contacts with her father, the woman finally is able to declare herself and begin to live her own life.

Told this way, the story sounds as specific and private as do the stories of many of our friends. It is so personal that our reaction might be to think: What a difficult situation living with a father like that, but we all have our problems and we can only listen to so much that does not directly concern us. Friedrich counters this by finding moments of broader resonance that make the actual narrative less important than what she sets against it. This narrative space is created by various formal strategies that serve to modulate the distance with which we regard the story.

The voiceover itself is stylized in a number of ways. Using another character to narrate the woman’s story suggests a distance that could not be achieved if the woman narrated the story herself. The effect is almost that of the close-in, third-person narrator used by Henry James; for much of the film, we are so close that we feel as though the story is being narrated by the woman herself, then suddenly something shifts and we become aware of the narrator that stands between us and the woman. Sometimes the film uses its greater narrative distance for irony, as in the passage where the girl tells us that the woman looked up her father’s work to see what he had written at the time of the divorce. “She discovered that two of the articles written that year involve the study of kinship systems.” ⁴ No comment. No reaction. The girl does not probe the woman’s mind and we are left to fill in the irony for her. At other times, we move in very close and the sudden collapse of distance is very powerful, as in the section where we watch the woman type a letter to her father without any comment from the girl narrator. The effect of this movement is to constantly make us consider our position relative to the woman character. Sometimes we see it as purely her story; at other times we are pulled back and invited to consider more broadly the marks a parent leaves on a child.

Making the narrator a young girl contrasts with the controlled, at times formal, diction of the voiceovers. It adds a sense of longing to the film, a sense of a simplicity that seeks to speak directly, but that cannot. We tie this blockage to the woman’s difficulty in speaking about her father. Using the reverse alphabet serves to organize the story around language, providing another way to extend the story beyond the events it describes. Language itself is seen as a way for the woman to come to terms with her father. Finally, individual sections use a wide variety of narrative techniques, including a recounting of myths, spoken and sung nursery rhymes, Schubert lieder, and a letter.

The images are as diverse as is the narrative style. Some are almost literal, such as the roller-coaster ride that plays against her father’s taking the woman to a terrifying movie. But most images function to open a space between voiceover and image. For instance, after the title “Kinship,” we hear a scratchy recording of Schubert’s song “Gretchen am Spinnrad,” music that we later learn evokes her mother’s love for her father. We see images from a plane window, then we move to a deserted landscape, then to the same landscape seen from a car, then to women in a shower, then to strangely floating birds, then circle back to the women embracing in the shower, back to the desert, then to women drying themselves and laughing in the shower, and finally to baked, cracked desert soil. There is no way to summarize all that this communicates except to note that this moment, which we will retrospectively come to regard as the moment when the woman’s father left her mother, is associated with a more generalized feeling of space, of the ramifications of sexual identity and a kind of parched dryness that transforms a specific personal event into a celebration of much greater beauty and meaning.

Daughter Rite

Michelle Citron’s 1979 Daughter Rite,⁵ a personal hybrid documentary/fiction, intercuts Citron’s processed home movies of her childhood under voiceover meditations on her mother, with a series of acted improvisations based on the background of Citron and her sister. We identify the voiceover with the filmmaker. “I started this film when I was 28,” is the first thing she tells us. She goes on to explain that 28 was her mother’s age when the filmmaker was born, and connects her own need to make the film with this coinciding of their ages.

The voiceover meditations are written and delivered with no irony or narrative distance and, considered alone, they are a bit too complete in their understanding of the mother. Within these sections, little challenges the voiceover. Although the filmmaker describes her mother’s actions, we have no basis for seeing them except as the narrator instructs us to. We do not pick up on any inadvertent slips or contradictions that betray the authority of the narrative perspective. We can relate this to our discussion about the tension between the narrative and dramatic voice in Chapter 22. If the narrative voice so dominates a film that it makes other readings difficult, we would say the film is “overdetermined” or without “air.” Another way to talk about this is to say that such a film provides the viewer no opportunity to work within the context of the film. We can take it or leave it, but we cannot engage it.

The particular power of the fictional forms we have been discussing is that, by balancing narrative voice with dramatic voice, they allow us to hear what the narrative voice is declaring; at the same time, by considering our engagement with the dramatic voice, we can challenge and read behind the narrative voice. If Daughter Rite remains overdetermined, this tension would be denied it. This is where the use of the improvised footage comes in. In the scenes, we are privy to a great deal more than the voiceover gives us. While sharing great intimacy with the filmmaker, the sister’s take on the mother is much more forgiving than is Citron’s. At times, the sister seems naive relative to the filmmaker, but at other times, she acts to expose sides of the film-maker that we do not get in the voiceover. We have to weigh the contrasting perspectives.

Here again, we see a tension playing out between the immediately personal voice, with its prejudices and shortsightedness, as expressed in the voiceover, to the slightly less personal voice, which uses constructed dramatized sequence to imply a multiplicity of perspectives that the single voice could not convey. Our sense of the meaning of the film lies in the space between these two presentational styles.

Family Gathering

While Daughter Rite is dynamic in its effect on the audience, the structure of the film remains the same throughout. Lise Yasui’s Family Gathering⁶ changes right before our eyes. This leads us to another generalization about personal filmmaking—that one of the ways to start from the personal and move to the more universal is through the introduction of elements that are outside the writer’s control.

Family Gathering is a study of the filmmaker’s grandfather, a survivor of the American internment camps for citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. About halfway through the film, and about halfway through the filmmaker’s progress of making the film, the filmmaker learns that her grandfather’s death was actually a suicide, which came as a direct result of his experience in the internment camp, a family secret that she has not known. At this point, the filmmaker’s unraveling of the grandfather’s story stops. The issue abruptly becomes one that affects the making of the film itself. Confronted with this new knowledge, can the filmmaker go on and complete the film? Does she want to document her discovery of this family secret? Or is it too great a violation of her family’s history and therefore should not be exposed?

The viewer feels strangely ambivalent, sympathizing with the filmmaker’s dilemma while at the same time wanting the story to move to completion. Eventually it does. But now we watch the film differently. Before, although we had been told that the filmmaker was attempting to reconstruct a past that she did not know, her authority still carried us along. Now, the whole dramatic structure of the piece functions to reveal just how little control the filmmaker actually has and how affected she is by the rawness of what she has discovered. The acute personal nature of her story is given an extra resonance because we witness the immediacy of history’s impact on an individual’s life and understand that as much as we try to define ourselves on our own terms, there are also forces greater than we can control that cause us to discover ourselves as we react to them.

Nice Coloured Girls

Sometimes the tension between history and the individual is played out more explicitly. Tracey Moffatt’s film Nice Coloured Girls⁷ follows four story lines—in contemporary Sidney, aboriginal women pick up a guy in a dance club and ply him with drinks; a voice reads an account of an early British landing on Australian shores; a black-and-white picture of that landing is shown hanging on a wall while performances of the actions depicted in the readings are played out against it; and an aboriginal woman standing on a beach stares into the camera.

The Sidney scene is edited without synch sound. Instead, we are given what looks to be subtitled documentary comments by the aboriginal women about their experiences picking up men they mockingly refer to as “captains.” The irony of the piece is generated by the resonance of this reversal—the present-day captains are powerless against the aboriginal natives. However, the juxtaposition of the reading of the landing account against the contemporary scene adds an additional twist to this shifting of power. The Western settlers believe they have brought control and civility to this wild land. But the film cuts back a number of times to the woman on the beach staring into the camera with a force that denies anyone’s domination. This, combined with the Sydney scenes, makes us listen more closely to the reading of the landing account and, as we do, we realize that in each encounter described, the English sailors are really acting on the dictates of the aboriginal women. While this does not deny the history of Western colonization, it suggests a much more complex dynamic of power than that which is traditionally presented.

Summary

We have ended Alternative Scriptwriting by looking at a different notion of writing than that discussed in the earlier chapters. We present this for two reasons. The first is that these works demand serious attention in their own right. These pieces, along with many others not described here, have contributed to a new visual and narrative expression by peoples not traditionally in control of media. The second is that these pieces all suggest means of exploring the tension between the narrative and dramatic voice that writers, no matter what their genre, may learn from and use.

Although these works are not written in standard screenplay form, are usually designed to be directed only by the writer, and are not feature length, they are logical extensions of the concerns of this book in their intensely personal nature. They provide examples of solving the problem that confronts all independent writers, which is how to embrace our own experience while at the same time gaining sufficient perspective on it to make it significant beyond the facts of our life. This—taking what is ours and learning to make it over so that it resonates for others—is the ultimate and most important thing we hope you take from this book.