Tài liệu Writing the short film 3th - Part 26 ppt

There are short films, such as The Lady in Waiting see Appendix B, where a very modest plot is used; the New York blackout is more a plot device than plot proper, but it is nevertheless

to a resolution and generally implies a diminished role for characterization.

In short, if you use plot, the likelihood is that it will play a dominant role in

the script There are short films, such as The Lady in Waiting (see Appendix B),

where a very modest plot is used; the New York blackout is more a plot

device than plot proper, but it is nevertheless the plot of The Lady in Waiting.

More often, however, when a plot is used it dominates the short script Because it does so, it bears down on the main character and his or her goal with particular intensity If that plot does not oppose the main character’s goal, the script as a whole softens under the intensity of a character’s pur-suit, with too little resistance offered to that pursuit The result is a loss of credibility in the character This is true for melodrama

It’s useful to look for a moment at the situation comedy, which is the “pos-itive” (in photographic terms) of the melodrama This means that elements such as plot will be used in the opposite way to how they’re used in the

melodrama In Matthew Huffman’s film Secret Santa, it is Christmas time.

The seven-year-old main character simply wants not to be bullied and belit-tled by a larger classmate That’s his goal The plot enables him to achieve that goal as follows: A bank robbery is carried out by six men wearing Santa Claus outfits One escapes, but is injured in his hurry to get away He is found by the seven-year-old, who believes he has found Santa Claus He takes him home, where the robber hides in the basement This is the catalytic event In the second act, the boy befriends “Santa” and convinces him to have words with the bully “Santa” tells the bully to be good—or no presents this year The bully complies: the main character achieves his goal (“Santa”

is caught climbing out of the basement window.) Here the plot—robbery and its aftermath—enables the main character to achieve his goal

Tone

Generally, the tone of the long-form melodrama is realistic The short film has a much greater tolerance for moving away from realism Because of the urgency of the character and his goal, or conversely, because of the intensity

of the plot, subjectivity and irony both have a place in the melodrama In this sense, the short film more readily offers the writer the option to enlist his or her voice directly in the script

CASE STUDIES

These case studies will illustrate how short films that are melodramas use character, structure, and tone

Case Studies in Character

In Elke Rosthal’s My Name Is Rabbit, a young woman returns to visit the father

she has not seen since she was a child As a child, she had been a witness to her mother’s death in a car accident; her father had been driving The current visit does not go well Her father, an alcoholic, is inappropriately affectionate with her He’s sexually jealous of a friend she has made at work In fact, the visit is a disaster, but it does prompt her to recall her early life She remembers his tem-per and his possessiveness toward her mother As the story ends, she is left with

a conscious feeling of her guilt for her mother’s death She felt guilty because the accident occurred when her father swerved to avoid hitting a rabbit He had always called her Rabbit

In My Name Is Rabbit, the character pursues her goal of a relationship with

a father who is a mystery to her Although she discovers that a relationship

is impossible, her pursuit is understandable and earnest Because she is modest, her father’s over-the-top drinking and salaciousness is all the more shocking By the end of the film, we understand that it is the father, rather than Rabbit, who bears the responsibility for the family tragedy

Case Studies in Structure

Christian Taylor’s The Lady in Waiting (see Appendix B) proceeds in an Act

I–Act II structure, essentially resulting in an open-ended conclusion

In this film, the main character is asked to take a letter to New York This event—taking the letter to New York—is not the same as the catalytic event,

or turning point between acts The turning point here is when the elevator stops as a result of the power outage Act II is dominated by the exploration

of the relationship between Miss Peach and Scarlett From the elevator, to the apartment, to the parting of their ways, the focus is on how Scarlett influ-ences Miss Peach The story is character-driven; it has little plot (the power outage) The end is open, leaving us hopeful that Miss Peach will feel better about herself She remains, however, marginalized

Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story exemplifies the Act I–Act III structure.

The main character is a six-year-old girl The film opens with children being very playful on a school bus The driver tells them to settle down, not to show each other their underwear The driver seems to be a genuine friend to the main character In the following scene, a school psychologist looks into a parallel incident, where the driver was inappropriately friendly with the children The act ends with the driver being arrested for molesting the main character In the next act, the investigation continues We learn that the main character has had “numerous fathers.” The community is pressing for con-viction of the driver This requires the testimony of the main character As the

psychologist tries to learn more via play therapy, the main character is fear-ful about releasing a secret Ultimately, though, she inadvertently reveals that it is the mother’s current lover who has been molesting her The script ends with the driver freed, once again presented as a true and caring friend

to the main character

In A Children’s Story, the discovery of the true antagonist and his

conse-quent arrest brings the story to resolution In this sense, the long act resem-bles Act III of a feature film

A Case Study in Plot

Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story also provides us with an example of the

deployment of plot in the short film In the classic sense of melodrama, plot works in opposition to the main character’s goal In this film, the goal of the main character is to keep the family secret of sexual abuse She does so out

of fear of losing her mother’s love The plot—the investigation into the case

of sexual abuse—puts continual pressure (via the school psychologist) on the main character As the investigation progresses, so does the pressure to reveal the secret

As expected in a melodrama with plot, there will be resolution and, accordingly, an Act I–Act III structure There also will be twists and turns— thus the catalytic event, the arrest of the driver; and the resolution, the arrest

of the mother’s lover What also needs to be mentioned is that the presence

of plot diminishes the level of characterization in the screenplay as well as the screenplay’s dependence on the dialogue for energy In plot-driven melo-dramas, the characterizations are often stereotypes, and the energy in the screenplay derives instead from the twists and turns of plot

Case Studies in Tone

The tone of the short melodrama is usually realistic Christian Taylor’s The

Lady in Waiting and Graham Justice’s A Children’s Story are each presented

realistically This means recognizable characters in recognizable situations The result is a dramatic arc for the main character that does not veer from the expected

Having confirmed the expected tone of the genre, it’s important to reaf-firm that tone in the short film has a wider latitude than does tone in the long-form melodrama Two examples will illustrate the point Ayanna

Elliot’s Tough is a story of a teenager The story is simple, “a day in the life.”

But it’s a special day—the first day she menstruates She is on the verge of womanhood Also, her father (divorced from her mother) is to take her out

for the day The incidents in the story are as follows: She has a vicious argu-ment with her mother Her mother is more attentive to her female lover than she is to her daughter’s anxiety about menstruation The main character decides to move out Her father does not realize it, but the main character is now planning to be with him for more than the day The main character

insists on bringing a friend along The father insists on bringing his new

lover along Needless to say, parenting is not the order of the day—rather, who can be more childish, the adults or the children, is the goal

In order to make her point about “who is the parent here,” Ayanna Elliot

uses humor and irony If there is a consistent tone to Tough, it is irony The

tone is effective in making her point about parenting

Emily Weissman’s Pocketful of Stones offers a very different tone This film

opens with the admission of the main character, in her late teens, into a hos-pital She has attempted suicide; a failed relationship has driven her to the act The story focuses on her hospital stay Will she get better or worse? The story ends with her more withdrawn than ever and confined to the hospital

In between, we learn that her goal is to get out of the hospital Although rebellious toward authority (the nurse), she is nevertheless fairly reality based She develops a relationship with a young man, also a patient Through his influence and control, she is coaxed into self-mutilating behav-ior, and she becomes increasingly withdrawn, then aggressive She goes from talking with the psychiatrist about a release plan, to behavior troubling enough to preclude release At the end of the story, she is worse off than she had been at the beginning

The tone in Pocketful of Stones is expressionistic, even nightmarish,

empha-sizing the main character’s emotional, subjective state By doing so, Emily Weissman puts us in her place—time is obliterated, authority figures are monsters, the hospital is a war zone By resorting to an exceedingly subjec-tive tone, Emily Weissman avoids the case-study approach and takes us inside mental illness The result is very powerful Here again, moving away from the expected tone creates a powerful and fresh experience Here tone makes the short film quite an original experience

Summation

The key issue in writing melodrama in the short film is that there are classic commonalties between the long and short forms—the nature of the main character’s struggle, his or her powerless against the power structure, the recognizability of character and situation, the characters living the lives that

we do, and of course the narrative approach, which is essentially realist But the differences between long and short films are considerable Compression of time means faster characterization and fewer characters and

plot It also means a structural choice—for an Act I–II approach or an Act I–III approach The short film also allows the writer latitude in the area of tone Like the short story, metaphor and poetics can work in the short melo-drama in a way that the need for greater characterization and plot tends to disallow in the long film The key in all your considerations about the short film is to be aware of these similarities and differences

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THE DOCUDRAMA

On one level, that of content, docudrama has much in common with melo-drama The nature of the struggle, the positioning of the main character, and

the tone are similar But on the issue of style, the manner of presentation of

the story, they differ The docudrama is concerned with a particular kind of style, a style that assures an aura of veracity This style may be present in the melodrama, but it is never as central a feature as it is in the docudrama The docudrama has its roots in the documentary The sense of actuality in

Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and Man of Aran conveyed the idea of

cultures quickly giving way to modern urban life Equally important, how-ever, these documentaries took editorial positions about those cultures, advo-cacy positions that were romantic but also represented a wish that the pattern

of these cultures passing were not so inevitable a byproduct of moderniza-tion These two elements—actuality and a social, or political, perspective on the life situation of the participants—link the documentary directly to the docudrama

Whether anarchistic (Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera) or fascist (Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will), the documentary quickly became a form

whose agenda was principally educational and propagandistic rather than entertaining This quality too became a link to the docudrama

Style became more pronounced in the ‘50s with “direct cinema,” in the

documentaries of Lindsay Anderson (Everyday Except Christmas) and Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson (Momma Don’t Allow) This was even

more the case in the “cinema verité” explosion in the documentary film-makers of the ‘60s (Leacock, Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers) But no examples of the style sacrificed those original intentions—actuality, edu-cation, political goals Also, the style crossed over into the feature film—

Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool and Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate In the

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