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In Reply to: Narrative Elements In Film posted by AudioHead on August 18, 2000 at 14:13:42:
The statement you quoted is a commmonplace not only with respect to film but also with respect to "serious" fiction. Many, many works of serious fiction are "about" the telling of the story as well as the story itself: Moby Dick, The Canterbury Tales, Ulysess, to name just a few.With respect to movies, the statement is correct insofar as shot setup, camera angle, lighting, music soundtrack etc. affect the film. However, the screenwriter supplies one additional crucial element in a film, besides the narrative -- the dialog. Unless your taste in flim runs to pretty pictures and great music -- Claude Lelouc's "A Man and a Woman" (1967) and "Elvira Madigan" (1968) come to mind -- dialog is extremely important and can make or break a film.
A good example of this is the first three Star Wars movies. The first one, written and directed by George Lucas has absolutely ridiculous dialog. Despite that, the inventiveness of Lucas and his gang with all of the creatures, etc. carries the film.
The second and third installments were directed by other directors, and Lucas had a co-author on the screenplay. The narrative, I am sure, is all Lucas; but the dialog is much better.
The recent Phantom Menace, is I believe, all Lucas -- and it shows. By now, we are all familiar with the dimensions of Lucas' imagination; and he really doesn't show us anything new -- except that progress in computers now contributes to even more impressive effects.
Maybe the films of the 40s and the 50s, with their split-second repartee, are too "talky" for modern tastes. But the screenwrite writes the dialog and that IS important.
RBB --
"Still getting the wax out of my ears."
Follow Ups:
...a great movie with every word (after the intro) written long ago by a scenarist named Chekhov.*If* a movie relies, like a play, on dialog, writing is of supreme importance, narrative or no.
From "From Script to Screen: The Collaborative Art of Filmmaking" by
Linda Seger & Edward Jay Whetmore, page 43: "Frank Pierson's final
comments reflect his vision of what the very best scripts must accomplish as they offer various possibilities in the context of the
collaborative process: 'It is the writer's job to force the director
and actor out of merely reproducing a text and into finding themselves in it, thereby allowing some possiblity of creating art.
The text is meant to be and must be constructed to be interpreted.
This is the true meaning of collaborative art.' "
nt
Agreed, there are some movies in which the writer seems more dominant
than the director. This especially seems to be the case in the films scripted
by Paddy Chayevsky, in which the dialogue tends to dominate the
visuals.
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