Karen Pearlman – The Story Department

How To Make Our Myths

Karen Pearlman — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 10:04:09 +0000

In late 2009 I wrote an essay for Lumina, called Make our Myths. This essay argued that the purpose of Australian feature film production is not to tell our own stories. The purpose of our feature film production is to make our myths.

by Karen Pearlman

The essay went off like a firecracker, with excerpts being reproduced in a range of print and online media, including this illustrious site. I still have people quoting back lines to me, such as: “most people would rather stay at home and fight with their own families than go and watch another Australian drama onscreen.”

Make Our Myths put forward three key elements needed to elevate our stories out of the domestic drama doldrums: scale, (ours need to be bigger both imaginatively and cinematically) dramatic questions (questions where an action is implied and something is at stake – without which, who cares?) and ownership (that the stories have to be owned by more than just the people making them.)

No one has returned to me with an argument against these ideas. The question that has come is: how do we implement them? That’s the question I’d like to address here, and even more broadly, it is the question we’re addressing by creating the AFTRS Graduate Certificate in Screen Culture.

The Screen Dramaturge

Here’s what I propose: a potential new role for the Australian feature film industry: the Screen Dramaturge. I know, I know, it is a terrible name, but bear with me while I explain where it comes from and how it functions, then please accept my invite to write to me with some alternatives!

A dramaturge is a familiar figure in theatre, particularly European theatre, and they have four or five functions in that context:

• concept/script editing and development,
• research,
• something I will call ‘vision holding’ for this purposes of this argument, and
• talking to audiences and marketing people, even creating marketing copy.

They also sometimes work directly with actors, coaching them in performance, but although that is how the word is most often used here, I would argue that a performance coaching function is the one we need least.

What we need is someone who is with the project from beginning to end, who recognizes that marketing is part of development, not just something tacked on the end, and who is not a key creative, but is someone who watches the key creatives at work and asks useful questions or makes observations that keep them on track.

What we need is someone who is
with the project from beginning to end

Here’s how it might work:

Script editing and development

The Screen Dramaturge is not the writer, nor have they invested money in the production.

They look at successive drafts of the script as ask useful questions such as: can you tell me more about the world of this film? Is there some way the world could be metaphorical as well as being realistic so that the scale of the ideas could be bigger? Or, what is at stake for this character?

These kinds of questions can guide script development
towards something bigger than ‘our own stories’

What action will he or she take to accomplish their goals? Or, who is this story for, specifically? And, can you tell me what that specific person (and the audience segment they represent) cares about? Worries about? Needs to understand? What do you (the key creative) care about? believe intrinsically; want to argue philosophically with this production?

These kinds of questions can guide script development towards something bigger than ‘our own stories’

Research

A Screen Dramaturge would use their research skills to enhance the production in many ways. They would do research to add specificity to the world or circumstances of the story; research about the audiences the story is for; research about other similar productions for references or talking points amongst the key creatives; or research about the technology and culture the production is being made within.

All of these can add to the substance, scope and effectiveness of our productions, making them richer in ideas, details and knowledge about their purpose.

Vision Holding

This is a personal favorite of mine. Where normally a researcher and developer would have disappeared from a screen project by the time production starts, a Screen Dramaturge’s work includes two important functions in preproduction and production.

The first and most vital one is listening for and drawing out a clear articulation of the vision for the project. Having worked on the script so that there is scale, something at stake and an audience firmly in mind, the dramaturge now helps the people who are working on the production, particularly the director, to articulate how all of this will be realised on screen.

The dramaturge asks useful questions, makes non-confrontational observations and uses a good understanding of screen culture and story to do this. But his or her job is not to tell the story, it is to support the storytellers by holding the vision it for them, where it can be easily and dispassionately accessed when things get fast paced and complex in production.

The dramaturge asks useful questions,
makes non-confrontational observations
and uses a good understanding of
screen culture and story to do this

When production starts the vision holder observes the action and, when asked, supports the process by responding to questions about any of the thousands of decisions that get made moment to moment with information about how those decisions relate (or not!) to the bigger picture of the vision.

Talking to Audiences and Marketing People

This is not the last thing screen dramaturges do but the first and the last thing they do. They have done it as part of script development, and research, and they have done it throughout the process, using the creative team’s articulation of the vision (which they helped to draw out and clarify) to bring people into understanding and interest in the production.

When it does go to market (whether for investment, grants, pre-sales, or audiences) the screen dramaturge gives the vision back, in language especially tuned to the listeners (the potential audiences) thus helping to reach them and to create and fulfill their expectations.

In this process the dramaturgical functions comes full circle: a story can’t be mythic unless it finds its place in our culture, and the dramaturge, through development, research, vision holding and talking to audiences helps it find its place in our culture, and be worthy of it.

a story can’t be mythic unless
it finds its place in our culture

The AFTRS Graduate Certificate in Screen Culture has, as its secret mission, the idea that we are developing Screen Dramaturges. These people may actually get jobs as creative producers, or other key creatives, or as festival directors, project officers, administrators even critics or commentators, but the ideas and capacities they develop will let them contribute ‘dramaturgically’ to our screen industry.

It is a role our industry could make good use of alongside its new focus on development but, if you have an idea for a better name than “Screen Dramaturge”, post it in the comments. I would love to know!

-Karen Pearlman

Dr Karen Pearlman, is Head of Screen Studies at the Australian Film, Radio and TV School. She is co-director of the multi-award winning Physical TV Company. She was a co-editor on Performing the Unnameable; An Anthology of Australian Performance Texts and has published essays and articles in Metro, RealTime, The Journal of Performance Studies and other anthologies, conferences proceedings and journals. This essay is published in full in the 2nd issue of Lumina, AFTRS new Journal of Screen Arts and Business. Visit www.aftrs.edu.au to find out more about Lumina.

photo credits
Myth images: h.koppdelaney
K.Pearlman: AFTRS

Make Our Myths

Karen Pearlman — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:00:15 +0000

What is the motivation for our films?

How does the Australian film industry maintain its identity in this new age of filmmaking?

What should a screenwriter focus on in order to catch the audience?

The purpose of Australian feature film production, I propose, is not to tell our own stories. The purpose of our feature film industry is to make our myths.

SCALE

The purpose of any feature film in our new media environment, is, technologically speaking, scale. Feature films in cinemas may or may not survive the digital revolution, but if they do it will be because we crave a big, social experience, not a small, private one that we can watch on the 5 cm screen of our iphones.

The implications of this experiential ‘purpose’ are that the cinematics must be given stronger consideration. Cinema is not made of moving images and sounds for no reason. It is a sensual, vibrant experience of light, movement, colour, composition, tone and dynamics.

We can’t just make pictures and sounds we see every day.

It is bigger than life, more entrancing, more overwhelming, more transformative.

We can’t just make pictures and sounds we see every day, but must compose this art of movement on the scale of symphonies. And scale is also salient to making our myths. Myth is, by definition, larger than life.

ARCHETYPES

The ancient Greek and Roman Gods at the heart of so many western story telling are larger than life beings, embodying human traits and living those traits in extremes for the purpose of testing their strength and understanding their qualities. They are archetypes.

As embodied beings, mythological gods and heroes serve the purpose of making something that is abstract into something that is alive and kicking. And there are dozens of these gods and heroes. There are the big ones, such as the goddess of love, Aphrodite, and the God of War, Ares. But there are many, many others, who embody traits like foresight, chaos, wisdom, or trickery.

The story is bigger than just
the person who feels chaotic or capricious.

When a myth is made about these traits it is ‘our own story’. it is the telling of a story in which some core human quality comes into conflict with another. But the story is bigger than just the person who feels chaotic or capricious.

It becomes mythic when it embodies that quality on a scale that is potent, active, calamitous and consequential.

DYNAMICS

Dynamics are central, absolutely core, to the purpose of cinema. The Greek root word of ‘cinema’ is ‘kine’, meaning movement, and this is what we go to the cinema for: An experience of moving images, moving sounds and moving stories.

Dynamics must be given active attention in constructing a movie. They are the audience’s immediate, kinaesthetic, physiological experience of meaning.

Dynamics are central, absolutely core, to the purpose of cinema.
The Greek root word of ‘cinema’ is ‘kine’, meaning movement,

Change and modulation of force and conflict or confluence of energies of life, emotion, image and sound are understood by audiences at an immediate physical level, a communication direct to the body that precedes our cognitive understanding of plot events.

Dynamics are taught in music composition, but dynamics of sound and image construction are not given enough attention in the teaching of cinema in Australia. Nor are dynamics of story.

THE DYNAMICS OF STORY

Story dynamics are the rise and fall of movement and energy in the story events. Construction of these relies on construction of dynamic dramatic questions. A dramatic question is a question that implies action and has something at stake.

It often starts with the word ‘will’ and it always has an active verb in it, not a passive one. Will someone do something, get something, achieve some thing, not: does someone feel or experience something. Action is dynamic, it forces change, movement of story, emotion, images and sounds. Creating dynamics is the reason for taking human traits and embodying them in Gods.

It often starts with the word ‘will’ and
it always has an active verb in it, not a passive one.

In ancient mythology Gods give these traits a body and power with which to act.

Having something at stake is the other important half of a dramatic question. Stakes create dynamism by making us care. The more we care, the more we experience the movement between hope and fear. We hope something will happen, we fear it won’t. These things, in a myth, have room to move dynamically.

In real life, relationships that may have potential for hope and fear can stay the same forever. It is possible to be quietly irritated by someone for 20 years without ever becoming antagonistic. Relationships with colleagues, friends and family have dynamic and dramatic potential, but tend to stay static as we avoid confrontation, get along, compromise a bit and muddle through.

We don’t really want to live dynamics, we want to live peacefully, but want to see dynamics make relationship myths on the big screen.

We should not tell our own stories, we should make our myths.

We should resurrect the debate about our purpose and offered a challenge to our implied assumptions about genre, emotion and entertainment. I’ve also argued that we should not tell our own stories, we should make our myths, and that the difference between our own stories and our myths are scale, dynamics and ownership.

I have sketched out some ideas about scale and dynamics, but I have not yet made a case about ownership, because this is where all of the ideas come together.

OWNERSHIP

The notion of ownership is deeply embedded in the phrase ‘tell our own stories’ but the question of who the owner is needs to be confronted here.

If the ‘owner’ of the ‘our own stories’ is the person or people with the money to make the movies or the filmmakers who raise the money, then we are ascribing ownership to a very small, and by our own admission, culturally proscribed group of people.

Myth on the other hand is owned by everyone it speaks to, and it speaks to humans more broadly than within specific cultures or societies. In order to be a myth is has to be a story bigger than ‘our own’.

This does not mean it has to be an American movie. American movies are based in American myths, and these are not the same as Australian myths.

I speak from personal experience here, Americans believe in manifest destiny and Australians do not. Americans are raised to behave as though they could become the president of the United States and Australians are not.

Americans believe in manifest destiny and Australians do not.

American movies uphold the underlying myths of pursuing your destiny or dreams, and taking individual action in the world. So, dynamics and scale come easily to those myth makers, which is why it may seem as though to argue for scale and dynamics is to argue for Americanisms. But I hope that this is not the case.

As David Stratton writes in his review of Blessed in The Weekend Australian on September 12, 2009 “we don’t do Hollywood style movies very well.” However, he has also called 2009 an “annus mirabilis” for Australian film, using a mythically saturated word, miraculous, for a year that has seen some remarkable myth making by Australians.

Robert Connolly has mythologised the Balibo five and awakened exactly the sort of energy to work towards ideals that myths are capable of doing. Warwick Thornton has create a mythically resonant tale of indigenous kids sniffing petrol – with an optimistic ending – are these heroes not ideals for all indigenous cultures and their colonisers to work with?

Mao’s Last Dancer is classic myth making: the dynamics of a rags to riches/ repression to freedom/struggle to triumph story, with dancing on a spectacular scale. It not only has built in international ownership across the U.S., China and Australia, but it’s a story owned by anyone who strives.

Mao’s Last Dancer is classic myth making:
the dynamics of a rags to riches.

Myth making does not mean movies have to be happy or sad, smart or dumb, expensive or cheap, real or surreal. They must have scale, dynamics, and ownership by more than just their makers. Don’t tell our own stories, make our myths.

photo credits
Myth images: h.koppdelaney
K.Pearlman: AFTRS