The ontology and literary status of the screenplay: the case of "Scriptfic"

Are screenplays - or at least some screenplays - works of literature? Until relatively recently, very few theorists had addressed this question. Thanks to recent work by scholars such as Ian W. Macdonald, Steven Maras, and Steven Price, theorizing the nature of the screenplay is back on the agenda after years of neglect (albeit with a few important exceptions) by film studies and literary studies (Macdonald 2004; Maras 2009; Price 2010). What has emerged from this work, however, is a general acceptance that the screenplay is ontologically peculiar and, as a result, a divergence of opinion about whether or not it is the kind of thing that can be literature.Specifically, recent discussion about the nature of the screenplay has tended to emphasize its putative lack of ontological autonomy from the film, its supposed inherent incompleteness, or both (Carroll 2008, 68-69; Maras 2009, 48; Price 2010, 38-42). Moreover, these sorts of claims about the screenplay's ontology - its essential nature - are often hitched to broader arguments. According to one such argument, a screenplay's supposed ontological tie to the production of a film is said to vitiate the possibility of it being a work of literature in its own right (Carroll 2008, 68-69; Maras 2009, 48). According to another, the screenplay's tenuous literary status is putatively explained by the idea that it is perpetually unfinished, akin to a Barthesian >> writerly text > Yes > Yes > No > scriptfic > scriptfic > scriptfic Scriptfics > series > virtual series air

Animals, ethics, and the art world

This paper argues that debates over art exhibitions that make use of live animals, such as the Guggenheim Museum's 2017 Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World, are reflective of a schism between two general approaches to the ethico-political criticism of art. One of these approaches, the interpretation-oriented approach, is dominant in the art world and its adjacent institutions. The other, the production-oriented approach, is tacitly adopted by art-interested non-specialists. This rift explains why the use of animals in contemporary art—a practice that many art-interested people outside of the art world find bizarre and prima facie unethical—is so rarely discussed critically within art world institutions such as museums and journals. In an attempt to redress this oversight, the paper argues that the production-oriented approach is not only conceptually sound, but rationally preferable to the interpretation-oriented approach in many such cases

A Novel Experience in Crime Narrative: Watching and Reading The Killing

This essay will consider the adaptation of series one of the Danish television serial Forbrydelsen / The Killing (2007) into David Hewson’s novel The Killing (2012). Considering the television show through theoretical paradigms of contemporary long-form television, I will examine the discourses of ‘the novel’ and the ‘novelistic’ as they relate to both texts. As I will argue, attributing ‘novelistic’ characteristics to television texts may be problematic, but it also provides a significant opportunity for rethinking dominant or fixed conceptions of the novel as a cultural form and product. Looking closely at Hewson’s novel, the paper will also aim to reconfigure the ‘convergence’ model of novelization, thinking instead about the novel adaptation as a form of interpretive process across media. In doing this, I will consider how such adaptations are informed by conceptions of novelistic form and style, which may work discursively to reconfigure or ‘legitimize’ the adapted text but also to disavow ‘low’ cultural connotations

Screenwriting as a mode of research, and the screenplay as a research artefact

Screenwriting practice is now a flourishing mode of research within universities internationally, whereby the act of writing a screenplay or developing screenplay works is not only understood, but also celebrated as a legitimate form of knowledge discovery and dissemination. The resulting work of this creative practice research, which we might call the 'academic screenplay', thus functions simultaneously as a method of research enquiry and a 'non traditional' research artefact. In this chapter we explore what it means to develop and write a screenplay in the academy, under the conditions of and for research. By positioning screenwriting alongside and in between the disciplines of creative writing and screen production, we reflect on how it can draw from both disciplines at different times and for different purposes, and can be influenced by their specific - and sometimes contradictory - discourses. By doing so, the chapter provides a comprehensive overview of screenwriting as a growing mode of research, and its practice as an important addition to the academy

Match-action: the role of motion and audio in creating global change blindness in film

An everyday example of change blindness is our difficulty to detect cuts in an edited moving-image. Edit Blindness (Smith & Henderson, 2008) is created by adhering to the continuity editing conventions of Hollywood, e.g. coinciding a cut with a sudden onset of motion (Match-Action). In this study we isolated the roles motion and audio play in limiting awareness of match-action cuts by removing motion before and/or after cuts in existing Hollywood film clips and presenting the clips with or without the original soundtrack whilst participants tried to detect cuts. Removing post-cut motion significantly decreased cut detection time and the probability of missing the cut. By comparison, removing pre-cut motion had no effect suggesting, contrary to the editing literature, that the onset of motion before a cut may not be as critical for creating edit blindness as the motion after a cut. Analysis of eye movements indicated that viewers reoriented less to new content across intact match-action cuts than shots with motion removed. Audio played a surprisingly large part in creating edit blindness with edit blindness mostly disappearing without audio. These results extend film editor intuitions and are discussed in the context of the Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity (Smith, 2012a)

Drawing with a camera? Ethnographic film and transformative anthropology

Drawing has emerged as a recent focus of anthropological attention. Writers such as Ingold and Taussig have argued for its significance as a special kind of knowledge practice, linking it to a broader re-imagining of the anthropological project itself. Underpinning their approach is an opposition between the pencil and the camera, between ‘making’ and ‘taking’, between restrictive and generative modes of inquiry. This essay challenges this assumption, arguing that these elements in drawing and filmmaking exist in a dialectical rather than a polarized relationship. It highlights particular insights that follow from a dialogue between written and film-based anthropologies and links them to broader debates within the discipline – for example, debates about ways of knowing, skilled practice, improvisation and the imagination, and anthropology as a form of image-making practice

Instances of cinema

This article sketches a commonplace yet neglected epistemic puzzle raised by the diversity of our film-viewing practices. Because our appreciative practices allow for variability in the "instances" of cinematic works we engage, many of our experiential encounters with those works are flawed or impoverished in a number of ways. The article outlines a number of ways in which instances of cinema can vary-including, for example, in terms of color, score, and aspect ratio. This variability of instances of cinema and, hence, the variability in our experiences of a cinematic work raise potential problems around normative questions of interpretation and evaluation

Screenplays

A number of contemporary theorists have reiterated Osip Brik and Béla Balazs's claims that the screenplay is not an autonomous literary work, not an "independent object". Echoing Balazs's remarks on the relationship between screenplay and film, Barbara Korte and Ralf Schneider suggest, "a screenplay is 'absorbed' into one film only", that it is "entirely 'burnt up' in the production process". Like the ingredient hypothesis, the incompleteness hypothesis makes a claimabout the ontology of the screenplay that may or may not be harnessed in support of an argument against the screenplay as literature. Roughly, the thought is that rather than endorsing a particular definition of literature that will includescreenplays, the proponent of the screenplay as literature can proceed by showing that on any number of a variety of extant definitions at least some screenplays will count as literature. Of the various extant definitions of literature, perhaps the only one that may give screenplays trouble is an institutional definition

Towards a philosophy of the screenplay

The purpose of this project is to take the first steps towards a philosophy of the screenplay. More specifically, the project attempts to clarify our present concept of the screenplay in two regards—in terms of what the screenplay is and what kind of a thing it is. In doing so, it makes the following three arguments in each of its three parts, respectively. (1) The screenplay is an artifact concept and, therefore, an essentially historical concept, the boundaries of which are determined by the collective practices of the creators of screenplays. Therefore, any plausible definition of the screenplay must be an intentional-historical definition of some variety. (2) Because early Hollywood screenwriting practices intelligibly emerged out of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century playwriting practices (which are acknowledged art practices), Hollywood screenwriting can plausibly be identified as an art practice and at least some Hollywood screenplays can be plausibly identified as artworks. Other screenwriting practices and screenplays can plausibly be identified as art in virtue of their intentional-historical connection to acknowledged, prior art. (3) Through their collective creative and appreciative practices, practitioners (and others who ordinarily deal with screenplays, like readers) determine the facts about what kind of a thing the screenplay is. Any plausible account of the ontology of the screenplay must, therefore, be strictly constrained by those practices. Furthermore, an analysis of those practices shows that the screenplay must be the kind of thing that is creatable, multiply instantiable, finely individuable, and destructible. The master argument is that because the screenplay is a kind of artifact its boundaries are determined collectively by screenwriters, and its ontological nature is determined collectively by both writers and readers of screenplays. Any plausible theory of the screenplay must be strictly constrained by our collective creative and appreciative practices