In any case, without linearity, time is not important in the narrative.. Experimental narrative does not require a lot of story, so simplify.. How to Use Character Since plot is not a fa
Trang 1and that might be too strong a term for the outcome of their relationship The young girl makes sure his appetite is satiated—she invites him home for her grandmother’s authentic cooking But beyond the cursory hanging out together—visiting her grandmother in the hospital and so on—there is
no apparent arc to the relationship
The Narrative Style
The young girl is happy and outgoing; the man is introverted and caustic Beyond that, we do not get to know either character very well Consequently, in the character layer of this story, there is no clear develop-mental quality Each character seems pleased about the relationship, but nei-ther can go much furnei-ther There is no plot
The Narrative Shape
Just as the characters seem suspended between epochs, time too seems sus-pended In any case, without linearity, time is not important in the narrative
Tone
There is a cool, ironic tone to Autumn Moon Although there are moments of
deep feeling—his confession to the Japanese woman about his inability to feel, his cruel description of the preferable anatomy of her sister—more fre-quently the film takes the point of view of voyeur, looking from the outside
in on these characters His constant video filming supports this sense The stylized sense of the city—flat rather than deep—also abstracts the sense of Hong Kong
WRITING DEVICES What Kind of Story Benefits from Experimental Narrative
Unconventional stories are the first source for experimental narrative Generally, the stories tend to be exploratory—stories of identity, stories of
alienation, meditations on a time or place Vincent Ward’s film The Navigator looks at a medieval period; Clara Law’s Autumn Moon looks at Hong Kong—
a place where change and tradition meet and, in the 1990s, conflict Because experimental narrative sidesteps plot, stories of character dominate Because the genre favors open-ended or nonlinear stories, the preference is for tone,
to make up for the absence of resolution
Trang 2The Link to Poetry
Poetry may be nonrhythmic or rhythmic; it may relate to content, or it may emphasize form There is a freedom in poetry that surprises It relates to the organization of words—patterns—rather than to single images It is the same with experimental drama
If you consider your drama as if it were a visual poem, you will strive for the feeling of a relationship or place, or both, and not unduly re-reference the story back to a conventional mode The key with experimental drama is that sense of liberation You are doing something different, and when it works you are a poet, working in the medium of film
A Simple Idea
Large scale simply works against the experimental drama, so think in very sim-ple, elemental terms If you limit the parameters of the story and strive for a feeling-tone, you will be on the right road for experimental narrative Keeping the idea simple—two people, a particular place—will help you limit the narra-tive in such a way that you do not accidentally lapse into a more traditional narrative Experimental narrative does not require a lot of story, so simplify
How to Use Character
Since plot is not a factor in the experimental narrative, the use of character becomes very important
On one level, the writer must keep a playful attitude toward character The
man in Autumn Moon is depressed, and yet the way the writer-director
works with him produces an appealing side to him It is important that the female character is different from him in the story; the larger the contrast, the
better In Autumn Moon, that character is a girl, 15 years old, as unspoiled as
the man is spoiled The larger the gap, the more play enters the narrative and the more creative the writer can be
We also should be dealing with the characters in a personal way We are close
to all these characters They are vulnerable, and yet they remain somewhat inscrutable They are vulnerable and mysterious The writer does not want us
to know these people any better than they know themselves As they struggle
to understand, so do we This is an important element of the charm of experi-mental narrative The narrative and the style are used to attempt to gain under-standing of and insight into the character Change may or may not happen, but that is less relevant than the exploration itself, the internal struggle
Trang 3Finding a Structure
One observable aspect of the experimental narrative is that no two structures are alike We can say the story tends to be nonlinear, but beyond that, few structures resemble one another
There are shaping devices: A tourist from Japan comes to Hong Kong What will he find? Can he relate to the Chinese? He finds a Chinese girl, and they strike up a relationship That relationship is unpredictable They must use English to communicate rather than their own language
In the above example, the relationship itself is the shaping device In
Exotica, a place is the shaping structure In Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain, an idea—racial hatred kills love—is the shaping idea Shaping devices
become a means to create a structure The shaping device, however, is not linear—ergo the unpredictability of the experimental narrative
Tone and Voice
This is a form where your voice can be truly unique The form, the substance, the people, and the structure all will be interpreted through tone The tone can
be poetic, ironic, or expressive, but it should be specific, to help us understand why you are drawn to the characters or place of your story The tone is the crit-ical mode in which you will transmit your ideas and feelings, so in a sense, if you choose the experimental narrative, it is your most important decision
A CASE STUDY IN CHARACTER: SLEEPING BEAUTIES
In Karyn Kusama’s Sleeping Beauties (reprinted in Appendix B), two
adoles-cent sisters prepare for bed They smoke a cigarette and share a fantasy about a young man on a motorbike who will come and take them away They go to sleep They hold hands, thereby acknowledging the love between them Such a motorcycle rider actually does appear, and the dominant sister decides that the more modest sister should join him She does so The one who is left behind feels abandoned Her sister returns They climb into the same bed, but the dominant sister is unsettled Was this a dream or an actual occurrence? Was it the beginning of a rift in the relationship? Is fantasy an antidote to the life they live at home?
The focus is on the two sisters One is dominant, and the other is pliant—
a leader and a follower But what happens to the relationship when the fol-lower leaves? Will she return? Will the roles be reversed? These are the issues
that are explored in Sleeping Beauties The male is simply “the male,” but the
two young women are given characters, if in a very polarized fashion They are not fleshed out beyond those extremes The leader initiates—smoking,
Trang 4ordering the pliant sister to join the bike rider—and the pliant sister does as she is told Will this change? The ending is open-ended, unresolved, leaving
us with the puzzle—will she or will she not?
A CASE STUDY IN PLACE: EMPIRE OF THE MOON
Empire of the Moon, a short film by John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson (1991),
is about Paris The point of view is that of the tourist—the tourist coming to Paris, the tourist discovering the mysterious beauty of Paris, its inscrutable quality In order to capture the mystery of that beauty, the filmmakers use a mixture of documentary images and abstracted images—parts of buildings, the light of the moon moving across tree-lined residential areas, the artificial lights
of the tourist boats that peddle the story of Paris as they glide up and down the Seine Many of the great sites—the Eiffel Tower, the glass pyramid leading into the Louvre, the Louvre itself, the beautiful train stations—all make up the images of Paris The tourists come from every corner of the world
In order to shape their notion of Paris, the filmmakers use a variety of shap-ing devices—five narrators, readshap-ings from Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein about Paris, and the nature of the tourist—some happy to be photographed
as visitors, others probing, searching for some mystery, a formula that will alter the part of their life they feel needs altering—art, relationships, ideas The key to this experimental narrative is that the beautiful mystery of Paris, the Empire of the Moon, is inscrutable but valuable to each of us who needs such a place in our lives
A CASE STUDY IN STRUCTURE: RIVER OF THINGS
River of Things, a short film by Katharine and Mick Hurbis-Cherrier, is based
on four poems by Pablo Neruda The filmmakers present four odes based on the poems: an “Ode to Things,” an “Ode to the Spoon,” an “Ode to a Bar of Soap,” and an “Ode to the Table.” The film is formally structured by these four odes Not all are similar in length or tone “Ode to Things,” for exam-ple, the most naturalistic of the four, is the only one to focus on a relation-ship—of a married couple It is also linear in its progression—it follows them from the beginning of their day to its end The poem itself forms their obser-vational style of dialogue Their dialogue about things is self-reflexive This
is also the longest of the four odes The next three odes are focused differ-ently “Ode to the Spoon” is less natural and focuses on the ironic dialectic between functionality and artfulness Although each of the episodes is play-ful, this second ode drifts away from the naturalism of the first episode Spoons move on their own; they become animate The pace of the second ode is more rapid
Trang 5“Ode to a Bar of Soap” slows down It remains playful but introduces fan-tasy and absurdity into the act of the morning bath Images of chocolate cake and of a bar of soap transformed into an elusive fish in the tub make this sequence the most nonnaturalistic of the four But as in the first two, the nar-ration is a voice-over In the last of the odes, “Ode to the Table,” the narra-tion is sung, as a choral piece The goal is to make the table the hub for every human activity—functional, sexual, artistic Many people, a chorus of peo-ple, participate around the table in order to give it the centrality the ode implies The tone is serious, sober, important The playfulness is diminished
The overall structure of River of Things comes from the Neruda poems But
a secondary structure comes from the tone—a playful attitude toward the narratives of each of the odes Although the structure is loose, it is neverthe-less present, and it shapes the rueful observation of Neruda with a tonal appreciation of those elements in life that we ignore but whose functionality Neruda and the filmmakers laud
A CASE STUDY IN TONE: ECLIPSE
Jason Ruscio’s Eclipse (1995) is a short film that provides a powerful
experi-ence in tone Set in an unspecified time and place, the only live character is
a young boy, age 12 or 13 Through the course of the narrative, there are a series of flashbacks that tell us he is the sole survivor of a massacre His mother was killed by soldiers Now, as he surveys the farm where he lived,
he sits by the pit where his mother died and finds a dead soldier Holding the soldier’s gun, he fantasizes about killing the man Finally he leaves home, following a railroad track until he is found by partisans and taken in
The tone of Eclipse is elegiac, and is principally about loss Its
nonspeci-ficity with respect to any historical time and place allows us to roam and to believe it is about Bosnia or the Holocaust In fact, the tone allows us to generalize and speculate about all tragic loss, historical or current The film-maker takes a formal approach to his images The consequence is that it
cre-ates two rituals—one for loss, the other for the will to live Eclipse is a
powerful, wordless film that remains with the viewer for a long time The tone is the central reason for its power
A CASE STUDY IN VOICE: ALL THAT’S LEFT: SPECULATIONS
ON A LOST LIFE
Katharine Hurbis-Cherrier’s All That’s Left: Speculations on a Lost Life gives us
an opportunity to focus on the most lingering aspect of the experimental
Trang 6narrative—its exceedingly personal nature It’s not simply the nature of the subject matter that makes it personal; rather, it is the approach taken
All That’s Left is a reminiscence of the filmmaker’s aunt Using a number
of photographs of the filmmaker’s aunt, the aunt’s children, the aunt’s hus-bands, and her own mother, together with images of the leaves on trees and other distinctly rural images, the filmmaker tells the story of her aunt’s life
It is a simple life, a life of responsibility toward children and foster children, toward two men who were not ideal husbands, and toward her sister, for whom she acted as a mother Four generations of children are nurtured by the aunt, from her own sister to her two children, her grandchildren when the parents no longer were willing to care for them, and for foster children
As the filmmaker repeats more than once, her aunt’s life was a simple life The narration, spoken by the filmmaker, searches for meaning Indeed, the whole film probes for values and meaning In a poetic, simple way, the film-maker finds that meaning in the profound sense of giving her aunt exhib-ited Using text as well as image, the film is a diary, an investigation, but most of all a processing of loss The voice of the filmmaker reflects all of these and in a sense internalizes the deep values her aunt represents Consequently, the film reaches an unusual depth of feeling The author’s voice elevates this film, but it’s hard to imagine the same material working
in the other genres If another genre were used, the facts of the aunt’s life might take the story toward the tale of another woman—an abused, self-sacrificing woman—and away from the poetry of the life presented as exper-imental narrative