Screen writing Lecture 4

Screen Writing: Lecture 4

Short films only came into their own when the full-length feature had been around for a long time after their recession. There are obviously loads of Tom and Jerry films around that can be classified as short films, but it was the ‘60s when they made a come back after the commercial film had been around for a while. Nowadays, short films are absolutely everywhere; they’re adverts, on youtube, music videos and documentaries. This is because it is a lot cheaper to make and distribute a short film these days with the advances in technology.

Classical:
“The Hero Narrative.” One central character. There can be more than the one central character.
Beginning, Middle and End. The story is linear so it feels like our real world. Non-Linear.
Everything has a meaning. There can be coincidences.
The Ending is closed, unless of course it demands a sequel. All of the questions asked in the film are answered. There are open endings, sad endings, or just no ending at all.
It tries to make order out of chaos. No Rigorous causation.
No redundancy.

Causality, one pool ball hits another in a certain way. Once you get at predicting this where the balls goes, you’ll understand why you can predict some films. Coincidence, the balls go seem to rise into the air instead of going down the hole. I can’t think of an example where this happens in cinema, never mind, I’ll show you one of these days.







This barrier in between these two different types of cinema is very hazy these days. We know loads of films that incorporate some of these ‘alternative’ forms into their Hollywood blockbusters. The films that did use the ‘alternative’ forms first though were the French New Wave filmmakers like Bergman Francois Tufaut and Jean Luc-Goddard in the late fifties and early sixties. It seemed the Classic Hollywood narratives didn’t relate to people that much anymore. This was because the world was in post war where most people thought that they could die as result of the war. People’s lives became uncertain and thus they could not relate to characters whose futures always ended predictably well. Causality and individual agency didn’t seem apparent anymore. Why? Because a lot of people had died in the war thinking that they were going to win it, but they didn’t. But these ‘classic’ values are just assumptions, theory that doesn’t have to be correct.

Eisentstein: used montage narrative (very brief, please look over previous blogs to find essays on Eisentstein). The narratives are always politically engaged with “Ivan the Terrible” who was a total representation of Stalin when it came out. Ivan destroyed his enemies in a patriotic Russian way. D.W. Griffith was doing the same kind of thing in America as Eisentstein as L’Herbier was doing in France (more research needed on those characters).

The New Cinemas of Today: In America, every single narrative has been played to shit, it is almost impossible to have an original film about Boy meets Girl and fall in love thus live happily ever after anymore. We/the Americans have to dig deeper or go with something completely different or unpick the narrative if we are going to create original and authentic stories.
Narrative pick apart: Pulp Fiction/Aliens/Shaun of the Dead. 10 – 12 paragraphs, thus 10 – 12 different catagrories.
1. Beginning, Middle and End.
2. Causality.
3. No redundancy.
4. Everything has an explanation and a meaning.
5. Linear narrative.
6. Individual Agency.
7. Closed Endings.
8. Closing all of the questions by answering them all.

Shaun of the Dead: Narrative Conventions: Laurence Bush.
Linear Storyline: The habitual world is set up pretty instantly. It is not perfect though; there are clearly some issues to resolve within the first thirty seconds of dialogue. The second act begins with a recapitulation of the scenes from the first act, only they have changed slightly due to the zombies being in the scene. There are repeated themes that recap throughout the acts.

The Central Character: The character of Shaun is pretty conventional in terms of the ‘Classic Hollywood Narrative’. He is the hero who is in every scene throughout the film. His conscious desires to begin with are to keep things the way they are. He wants to carry on living with Ed, but Liz clearly wants to move in and get out of her habitual world. She wants to get away and see the world, not to settle down in the same old pub doing the same old things, (Liz) ‘If I don’t do something, I’ll end up in that pub for the rest of my life like those other sad old fuckers wondering what the hell happened’. She thinks that it what she wants to do when in fact her unconscious needs are to settle down with Shaun. Her unconscious needs are satisfied at the end when she is explaining to Shaun their plan for the day, ‘Right, cup of tea, go get the Sundays, head down the Phoenix for a roast, veg out in the pub for a bit, then watch a bit of telly then go to bed.’ As a sign that Shaun has changed he asks for two sugars in his tea even though he states earlier that he has not had sugar in his tea since 1982. He also accepts Philip as his father after constantly battling him. He repeats ‘he’s not my dad’ five times throughout the film until he finally accepts him.
Everything has an explanation and meaning: The question that we ask at the end of the film is ‘how did people start becoming zombies’? The film answers this very ambiguously at the end as we see only a few frames of some scientists handling chemicals. When Shaun throws the flowers away in act one, Barbara picks them up in the next act concluding the fiasco that revolved around them. If it were never resolved and left open ended, then it would seem like a waste of screen time. The filmmakers did leave some questions unanswered, such as, how did Shaun chain up Ed in his shed? The impression was that the zombies ate Ed. In the DVD extras though, this anomaly is concluded with Ed telling the after story in a comic book/narration style. In the first act in the confrontation between Shaun and David, it is unclear as to why David hates Shaun so much. In the third act we find out why they hate each other. This closes the question allowing David’s character to be killed off as he is now redundant.
Individual Agency: The characters are not responsible for the zombie epidemic, but they are responsible in different ways for ensuring their survival. David smashes the window of the pub causing the characters to be ‘totally exposed’ in the pub; Ed also draws the zombies towards the pub with the noise from the games machine. At the end where Shaun, Liz and Ed are stuck with no escape, their individual agencies comes to a stop as all obstacles except this last one have been conquerable.
Redundancy: The character Dianne seems to have no need to be in story at all until her acting skills are finally put to use when she teaches the rest of the group to act like zombies. The character Snakehips “always surrounded by women” comes back into the story in the second act getting eaten by women. The other characters in the pub such as the old porn star and the pub owner come back in the third act where they both die. Yvonne appears in all of the acts, but it is in the last one that we see her save the last remaining characters from death. Shaun’s music records also come in useful when they are thrown at the two zombies that are in their garden trying to kill them. They prove to be pretty useless though and serve a purely comic purpose.
Repeated Themes: The characters in this film all have phrases that they constantly repeat. Yvonne is the most extreme, she appears once in each of the three acts and repeats the same lines with a different context every time, ‘Oh my God, Shaun’, ‘Glad somebody made it’. Whenever she asks Shaun how he is, he always says ‘surviving’. It is the same with the line ‘You’ve got red on you.’ The context is always different when the characters repeat the line directed at Shaun. Shaun always says ‘This is serious Ed’ when Ed gets on his nerves. To connect the first act with the third, Shaun and Ed re-enact their conversation at the beginning of the film with “I’ll stop doing them when you stop laughing.” This re-enforces their friendship. Ed says “Two seconds” six times throughout the film whenever he is the middle of something; “Dog’s can’t look up” is a question that is consistently asked by the characters that is finally resolved when the Winchester rifle goes off in the third act.