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Writing for 2D and 3D 2006 Video, 700k
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| Rating | |
| Title | Writing for two and three dimensions, Iowa City Public Library, October 6, 2006 |
| Creator |
Lou, Ye, 1965- Sa'adeh, Mazen Courtoisie, Rafael, 1958- |
| Creator - Nationality |
Chinese Palestinian Uruguayan |
| Contributor |
Merrill, Christoper |
| Date Original | 2006-10-06 |
| Description | International authors and filmmakers meet to discuss their perspectives on translating writing into film and television. Lou Ye experiments with how changing the delivery of message changes the thoughts that get delivered. Rafael Courtoisie's talk references Marshall McLuhan and delves into the narrative similiarities as well as the semiotic differences between literature and film. Mazen Saadeh elaborates on how writing is the work of individuals and theater and cinema are collective works; actors flow "warm blood in the arteries of the text." |
| Venue |
Iowa City Public Library |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | Writing for Two and Three Dimensions. October 6, 2006. Iowa City Public Library. http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp/EVEN/EVENmain.html Lou Ye On Writing In my view, provided writing is not understood as something isolated, enclosed, static, and a profession related only to words, then all types of writing are similar. It’s especially so in terms of language, as all sorts of languages are intended to convey the thought of the author. To an author the question of how one should distinguish between thinking in pictures, in words, or in connection with the stage does not exist. Thought is thought; it cannot be divided up into segments, It cannot be defined as picture-related or word-related, sensual or sensible. By nature, thought is a force that springs from inside; whatever motivates it springs forth all at once, and is always an expression of authorship. It is entirely personal for every author to choose his/her own system of expression, and this system is by definition open and free. There are a lot of source materials you could choose from, such as (if our discussions are confined to only arts) words, stories, characters, plots, structures, colors, light, brightness, depth of field, motion, composition, models, surface or three-dimension, objects, details, environment, speed, sound, dialogue, frequency, volume, timbre, musical form, tonality, melody, counterpoint, orchestration, performance, rhythm, act, expression, gesture, figure, etc. Given all these different choices you are eventually streamlined into different systems that have already been labeled; a person who is capable of expression obtains then the title “author,” and then--almost randomly--in particular ‘a novelist,’ ‘a poet,’ ‘a painter,’ ‘a musician,’ ‘ a sculptor,’ ‘an actor,’ ‘a director’ and so on. Yet his expressive actions are really nothing other than writing, the form of which is by necessity various, personal, open, mobile, natural, and free. Let’s do an experiment: you could choose from the expressions listed below as you prefer, and you will find out clearly, through comparison, that as soon as you change your way of expression, you change the thought you want to get across: Text: Natalia As I open the Tristia, evening spreads its nets And a woman I love runs from a parking lot. “You will run away” she says. “I already see it: a train station, a slippery floor, a seat.” 1 I tell her leave me alone, inside my childhood where men carry flags across the street, And they tell her: leave us alone, as if power were given to them, but it is not given. She attacks with passion, lifts her hand and put it in my hair. On my right side I hide a scar, she passes over it with her tongue and falls asleep with my nipple in her mouth. But Natalia, beside me, turns the pages, what happened and did not happen must speak and sing by turns. My chronicler, Natalia, I offer you two cups of air in which you dip your little finger, lick it dry. Here “Natalia” is poetry, a passage of abstract text, which you feel free to put in service of your imagination, as it is open; the relative simplicity of expression opens up to fantasies outside… Picture: Natalia Here Natalia is a still picture, you could possibly believe this girl is Natalia. We cannot tell how many readers believe she is reading poetry, and are even less sure if the poem is in the collection she holds. The message a picture gives is also relatively simple, but because the picture is concrete, to the extent that it destroys the abstractness of the text, this destruction results directly in the change of meaning: possibly the key message here is: Natalia is a girl, she is reading a book, she seems to be on board a vehicle, there seems to be sunlight outside, but we don’t know how many people there are in the car, and if the car is moving… 2 Frames: Natalia Here Natalia becomes a series of continual frames, whereby we get in touch with more information: we see there are other people in the car, and the atmosphere seems jovial, as there are people laughing; the car is probably moving, because the backdrop is shifting; we know approximately what the girl is reading, and judging from her expression, we are still likely to think that this is a series of photos about the girl Natalia and several of her friends riding on a car… Scenes with sound: Natalia (2’45’’ ) In this sequence of scenes we read many more complicated messages, whose meaning becomes very complex and unstable. We see a lot of people in the car, we perceive the relationship between them (characterization and plots), we know this is probably on the morning of a Sunday, and to our surprise, toward the end, an accident happened… Finally, if a voice-over reading the original poem is (super)imposed, the context will be extremely complicated. To an audio-visual author, all these messages should be considered and controlled strictly, as they constitute the language of visual art. Through this simple example, we can perhaps understand where the basic differences between writing and visual writing lie. 3 Writing for Two and Three Dimensions. October 6, 2006. Iowa City Public Library. http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp/EVEN/EVENmain.html Rafael Courtoisie Different Paths for Writing When I was a little child I used to watch TV one or two times a week. When I grew a little older, I used to watch TV every day several times a day. You know, when you are a child television is one of the most beautiful ways of catching reality. As a matter of fact, television is a marvellous way to understand things. Once upon a time, an intellectual called Marshall Mac Luhan considered all kinds of human expression, all human devices, as suitable media for getting in touch with one another. Marshall Mac Luhan was born in Canada. He became a teacher of English literature in the United States of America. He had taught literature for several years, notably studying metaphors and all kinds of rhetorical features in the English language. One day, Marshall woke up with a new idea. The day before he had been watching TV for hours. The master Mac Luhan discovered a new land, the land of media. It is easy to get lost in the middle of this “forest of symbols,” as the great French poet, Charles Baudelaire termed. It is possible that at the time you listen to this speech you are wondering what this has to do with writing—which relationship between mass media and literature is being shown. Most people would say that TV has nothing to do with writing. But all the tales, all the short stories, all the human plots around the world concern each other. When you know the facts you know the relationships between various media. The first man in the world, the first man called Adam meets the first woman called Eve. That seems to be the first point of our history, at least in a symbolical sense. For our parents, Adam and Eve, the most important thing in Paradise was the word. The word, since the beginning, was the most powerful tool for the human being. The word symbolizes both sin and salvation. At this point all of you could be wondering what the moral of this essay is. Well, I will tell you what the moral is. There are not words that are without at least one meaning. Every word has meaning: the idea of creation, the idea of being a wholly new thing for all the earth. But that does not mean that all the ideas related to a word are visual. The world is an amazing stage. You and she and he and I, all of us are the main characters of a huge comedy. It is not “The Divine Comedy” by the famous Italian genius Dante Alighieri. It is a real comedy, our comedy, the comedy which we play every day, each moment of our lives, always in different ways. I will tell you the ways that it is possible to write about our human lives, about our own human comedy. Narrative, poetry, essays, movie scripts writing for theatre, are all forms of creative writing. 4 Essentially writing is a technology that produces different aesthetical objects. But although each one takes place in one medium in one case the written language, the grammar, the orthography, the syntax, and, in an elemental level, the alphabet, are the substance and the end of the creative travel. In other cases, written language is only the beginning of the journey, a long travel to reach a totally different goal. To make a clear outline: there are, at least, two ways to write. One of them is literature, that is: written narrative (in contrast with visual narrative), poetry, and essay. Among these three genres, poetry and essays exist exclusively as works of writing. They don’t exist without language. For instance, we can read this beautiful and well known poem by Silvia Plath (from the book “Ariel” 1): The title is “Death & Co” : “Two, of course there are two. It seems perfectly natural now- The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded And balled, like Blake’s, Who exhibits The birthmarks that are his trademarks- The scald scar of water, The nude Verdigris of the condor. I am red meat. His beak Claps sidewise: I am not his yet. He tells me how badly I photograph. He tells me how sweet The babies look in their hospital Icebox, a simple Frill at the neck, Then the flutings of their Ionian Death-gowns, 1 Faber and Faber, London, Great Britain, 1987. Pages 38 and 39). 5 Then two little feet. He does not smile or smoke. The other does that, His hair long and plausive. Bastard Masturbating a glitter He wants to be loved. I do not stir. The frost makes a flower, The dew makes a star, The dead bell The dead bell. Somebody’s done for.” This piece of writing is not narrative. It does not have a line of time. The poem says a lot, but its meaning is impossible to translate into narrative, into movies, into visual language. The poem transmits a special feeling, a beautiful, terrible and suggestive atmosphere. But it is not possible to reduce it to images, it is not possible to reduce or convert it into a movie without losing content. Its kind of language is not transferable to a different system of signs like—let’s say cinema for example. Marshall Mac Luhan said, “The medium is the message.” Then, if you change the medium, you change at least a part of the message. Something similar happens with the essay. I invite you to consider the following quotation by the famous American thinker Charles Sanders Pierce. It was written for “Popular Science Monthly,” 2under the title, “How to make our ideas clear”: “A clear idea is defined as one which is so apprehended that it will be recognized wherever it is met with, and so that no other will be mistaken for it. If it fails in this clearness, it is said to be obscure.” The meaning of this quotation is very clear. In addition, the whole sentence seems to be just a matter of common sense. Anyone could say it, no need to be a philosopher or a thinker. Nothing complicated or hidden could be found in it. However, it is impossible to transfer the pure content of this sentence to images, to movies. It is not a narrative sentence or phrase. It is a reflexive one. Narrative could be considered both as a genre of literature as well as of film. 2 number 12 (January 1878) among the pages 286 and 302 6 In short stories, novels and movies, narrative is a genre. The narrative genre has several characteristics. First of all, one of the themes is time: narrative means a line of time, a fictional time in the place of real time. This item can be found in literature and in film. The second characteristic is the use of the characters: protagonist and antagonist, secondary characters and so on. But there is a huge difference between narrative literature and film. They have totally different semiotic systems. They work with different types of signs: the linguistic sign and the visual or audio-visual sign. In literature narrative is a special kind of virtual reality. The basis is the written language, the grammar, the alphabet. But in film the real system is made of images, in film you have to think in visual terms. Written words are in this case only a plan, a map, an outline to build the movie through images and sounds. Let’s look at a brief scene from the famous film “Reservoir Dogs,” written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. The third scene of this movie is brief and strong enough to show an awareness of what it is to write while thinking in visual terms, to write while thinking in images. In this case, the words are only tools to build the visual narrative and visual atmosphere that the author wants: 3 INT. GETAWAY CAR (MOVING) - DAY The Somebody screaming is Mr. Orange. He lies in the backseat. He's been SHOT in the stomach. BLOOD covers both him and the backseat. Mr. White is the Somebody Else. He's behind the wheel of the getaway car. He's easily doing 80 mph, dodging in and out of traffic. Though he's driving for his life, he keeps talking to his wounded passenger in the backseat. They are the only two in the car. MR. WHITE Hey, just cancel that shit right now! You're hurt. You're hurt really fucking bad, but you ain't dying. MR. ORANGE (crying) All this blood is scaring the shit outta me. I'm gonna die, I know it. MR. WHITE Oh excuse me, I didn't realize you had a degree in medicine. Are you 7 a doctor? Are you a doctor? Answer me please, are you a doctor? MR. ORANGE No, I'm not! MR. WRITE Ahhhh, so you admit you don't know what you're talking about. So if you're through giving me your amateur opinion, lie back and listen to the news. I'm taking you back to the rendezvous, Joe's gonna get you a doctor, the doctor's gonna fix you up, and you're gonna be okay. Now say it: you're gonna be okay. Say it: you're gonna be okay! Mr. Orange doesn't respond. Mr. White starts pounding on the steering wheel. MR. WHITE Say-the-goddamn-words: you're gonna be okay! MR. ORANGE I'm okay. MR. WHITE (softly) Correct. On the other hand, there are a lot of examples of pieces of literature that are untranslatable into movies. For instance, I invite you to listen the beginning of Poe’s tale called “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”: ”Those special powers of the mind called the analytical are not easy to explain. We can see only their results. We know about them, among other things, that they always give their owner the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man delights in action that calls his body into use, so the man of analytical mind delights in taking a problem to pieces. He gets pleasure from even the smallest act that needs his skill. He likes any kind of problem, and in finding the answer to each he shows a degree of sharpness which appears to go beyond the usual power of the human mind. His results, though brought about by the most careful method, seem instead to have been pulled right out of the air.” It is obvious that the whole tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” could be translated into an image code. As a matter of fact, this text has been adapted to cinema. The tale refers to specific 8 actions that could be brought into cinema. But the first part of the tale, the introduction, is untranslatable. It is a kind of specifically literary product. You only can read it. You can imagine it. But you can not put it point by point into images. You can introduce in the movie a voice with a kind of alive narrator saying the same words, but that is not the same thing. You actually cannot translate the spirit of the paragraph into images. These examples show the huge gap between film and narrative literature. When writing for cinema you have to think in visual acts. But when you are writing narrative literature you can dream in the inner language among the words, you don’t have to refer to a particular scene, you can leave this world and fly over other worlds, worlds made by words. And this sentence is not only a play on words. There are works that are easy to be translated into cinematographic language. If we take the following piece of the masterpiece called “The Old Man and the Sea”, by the Nobel laureate, Ernest Hemingway, we can see how easily it sets the literary images in visual scenes: “The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hand had the deep-creased scar from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.” As a matter of fact, there is a play of words in literature. You can create a whole new and different world, a virtual and arbitrary world, a new world with words. If writing for film or for drama, or if you are just working in front of an empty page, you have to remember only one thing: the mind has no borders; the mind is the matter with which you have to work. 9 Mazen Saadeh (Ramallah/Palestinian Authority) Writing for Cinema and Theatre Writing for cinema and theatre is an incomplete act, in that the text—the script—is written to be performed and watched rather than read and interpreted by individual readers. It is true that language is the tool of the playwright or screenwriter, but for the text to be complete it needs other elements and other techniques which have nothing to do with language. Films and plays are much easier for the public to deal with than a written text such as a novel or story. Films and plays amuse and entertain the audience and for that they are widely accepted. In addition, by means of the television screen, films—and to a lesser extent, plays— can be accessed by every home. Movies offer screenwriters publicity and fame, while the theatre allows for the vital interaction with the audience, which is the lifeblood of the language—which brings the text to life. The idea of breaking the fourth wall is but an expression of the interaction of the text or dialogue with the stage. There has even been talk about breaking the fifth wall which exists between dialogue and monologue. I have had four experiments in writing for the theatre: 1. The Great King, with the Palestinian director Sawsan Droza. 2. Eyewitness, with the director Hakem Masoud. 3. The Kingdom of Chaos, with the English director Filda Loid, in the Royal Court Theatre in London. 4. The Last Hour, where I worked with a Palestinian actor for two months, in the National Theatre in Jerusalem. I have found out how much the actor can add to the text; I call this the flowing of warm blood in the arteries of the text. On the stage, space has limits that cannot be ignored. It cannot fit your imagination or your armies. You, as a writer, are bound by the space where your characters are going to perform. Writing for cinema or theatre is a physical writing, visual. But in literature in general, there are other dimensions to the text which are not physical: aesthetic works and the text or language. Language is the tool of creation and is its wings to fly with in the sky of imagination. The spaces of the text are limitless. In the language of novels and stories, form is more important than content because form contains the aesthetic elements. Writing for cinema and theatre doesn’t use metaphor and simile. However, in novels, short stories, and poetry, the text has space, an open space, full of magic and metaphor and imagery. 10 I recall that many literary works have been reconceived into cinema and theatre more than once, but each time with a different vision, which means a different interpretation of the text. This is because the text can be interpreted in several ways. After I left politics, through writing I became involved with cinema and participated in a scriptwriting workshop in 1991, which was organized by a famous Palestinian scriptwriter, Walid Siaf. He told me then that God is the best scriptwriter and he referred to the book of Yousif in the Koran. He asked me to write a script for the story as it was presented in the Koran. Of course, the film was not made, but it was my first attempt. Many years later, Yousif Shaheen an Egyptian film director, made a film of that story from the Koran. In 1999, I was asked to write a treatment for a film for an Italian company. Since it was my first time, I asked an experienced friend of mine how to do it. He answered in one sentence: “Write what the audience is going to see.” I watched films that I had seen before and which were based on novels such as, The English Patient, Papion, Dr. Zhivago, Gypsies are Rising to Heave, Returning to Hifa, Gone with the Wind, War and Peace, and Zorba the Greek. I read the novels again so I could compare the difference between the novel as a text and the novel as a film. I realized that my friend was right, but I also realized how much is lost from the novel when it becomes a film. Earlier I had discovered that the pleasure of reading a book is different from that of watching a film. The director of a film, through the use of the actors, camera, lights, and music, takes the readers' space. In the book, however, we create our own images. Writing for cinema reduces these aesthetics; we leave this to the director and actors. The writing of novels, short stories, and poetry is abstract, while the writing for the cinema and theatre is physical, which can be seen and not imagined. I read Dan Brown's novel The DaVinci Code and saw the film. In the adaptation many important details were lost. Again, the novel was more effective in presenting the details than was the film. I read the story “Tshodra” by Maxim Gorki before it was made into a film in 1976. The film version of Rada was not the Rada I had imagined. From my experience as a playwright, directors do not like the playwright to write in great detail. They prefer that the writer just write the dialogue and leave the other details to the director. Maybe this is why playwrights like to direct their own work, as did Shakespeare and Brecht. Writing is the work of an individual, while theatre and cinema are the work of a collective. If a writer wrote a play or film for another director, he should give the director space to create his images and interpretations. When somebody asks me whether I am a novelist, a film maker or visual artist, I remember a line from a poem of Al-Motanaby*: "Anxious as the wind is under me." I imagine the picture, the scene, and fly in that vast anxiety and the wind takes me. I know as a scriptwriter, that I am not able to write that scene, so I answer that I am a novelist more than anything else. I find myself in language, language that possesses and haunts me. 11 * Mutanabi, Abul Tayyeb al- (915-965), poet regarded by many as the greatest of the Arabic language. He primarily wrote panegyrics in a flowery, bombastic style marked by improbable metaphors. He influenced Arabic poetry until the 19th century and has been widely quoted. Al-Mutanabbi was the son of a water carrier who claimed noble and ancient southern Arabian descent. al-Mutanabbi received an education which owed to his poetic talent. When Shi'ite Qarmatians sacked Al-Kufah in 924, he joined them and lived among the Bedouin, learning their doctrines and Arabic. Claiming to be a prophet--hence the name al-Mutanabbi ("The Would-be Prophet")--he led a Qarmatian revolt in Syria in 932. After its suppression and two years' imprisonment, he recanted in 935 and became a wandering poet. He began to write panegyrics in the tradition established by the poets Abu Tammam (d. 845) and al-Buhturi (d. 897). In 948 he attached himself to Sayf ad-Dawla, the Hamdanid poet-prince of northern Syria. During his association with Sayf ad-Dawlah, al-Mutanabbi wrote in praise of his patron panegyrics that rank as masterpieces of Arabic poetry. The latter part of this period was clouded with intrigues and jealousies that culminated in al-Mutanabbi's leaving Syria for Egypt, then ruled in name by the Ikhshidids. Al-Mutanabbi attached himself to the regent, the black eunuch Abu al-Misk Kafur, who had been born a slave. But he offended Kafur with scurrilous satirical poems and fled Egypt in 960. He lived in Shiraz, Iran, under the protection of the Adud ad-Dawlah until 965, when he returned to Iraq and was killed by bandits near Baghdad. Al-Mutanabbi's pride and arrogance set the tone for much of his verse, which is ornately rhetorical, yet crafted with consummate skill and artistry. He gave to the traditional qasida, or ode, a freer and more personal development, writing in what can be called a neoclassical style. 12 |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving image |
| Type (AAT) |
Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Language | English |
| Digital Collection | Virtual Writing University Archive |
| Contributing Institution | Iowa City Public Library |
| Subcollection |
International Writing Program Collection |
| Rights Management | Educational use only, no other rights given. U.S. and international copyright laws may protect this digital object. Commercial use or distribution of the object is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. |
| Contact Information | Contact the VWU Webmaster: http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/info/25/ |
Description
| Title | Writing for 2D and 3D 2006 Video, 700k |
| Type (DCMIType) |
Moving image |
| Type (IMT) |
mp4 |
| Duration | 01:26:28 |
| Digitization Specifications | Received as MPEG2 and converted to mp4 for streaming. |
| Date Digital | 2006-10-06 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_10-6-06.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_10-6-06.mpg |
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