Tag Archives: Michelangelo Antonioni

What Makes a Good Screenplay?

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One aspect of my book The Screenplay as Literature that came in for pointed criticism was my brief treatment of the subject of “what makes a good screenplay.”  Here the critics were right.  Not because what I had written was not valid, but because the subject really had no place in a book entitled The Screenplay as Literature—just as the subject of “what makes a good novel” would have no place in a book entitled “The Novel as Literature.”  The question is much too subjective; and the variety of reasons why a screenplay may be considered good, may have nothing at all to do with whether or not it should be considered as Literature in the first place.

Certainly we would be inclined to think that a screenplay that is turned into a good film would be considered good. Screenplays (or versions of the same) are written for various purposes, and why they are good depends on the purpose for which they are written.  For example, a screenplay written on speculation, that is, for the purpose of being sold, might be written one way; whereas a screenplay written to be directly filmed might be written in another way (e.g. a shooting script).  Some writers may write a screenplay that leaves a lot to the imagination of the reader (or director); others may write in a manner that leaves nothing to the imagination.  Sergei Eisenstein once remarked that a shooting script is “an instrument to transpose a fact, abstracted into a concept, back into a chain of concrete single actions.”   But it doesn’t have to be that way: that is, a screenplay doesn’t have to be taken to the shooting script level; furthermore, a shooting script doesn’t have to break down a concept into concrete single actions:  it can remain on a metaphorical level.

Arguably there is no right or wrong way to write a screenplay, although there are certainly conventions.   So do I have any advice for the aspiring or working screenwriter?  Yes, I do, which follows.

My most important advice for the screenwriter is that it doesn’t matter how you get there—that is, to a completed screenplay—just get there!  Do what works for you.  Start at the end and jump to the beginning.  Or start in the middle and jump to the end: it really doesn’t matter.  The important thing is to start—to start writing.  The late French writer-director Eric Rohmer wrote that “To shoot a film is always to shoot something.”  For, as he said, “one never makes a film out of nothing.”  And it is the something that is the most critical—and elusive—element: no one can tell you where or how to find it.  In most cases it simply happens.  Ingmar Bergman wrote that for him a film begins as “something very vague—a chance remark or a bit of conversation, a hazy but agreeable event unrelated to any particular situation    It can be a few bars of music, a shaft of light across the street.”  According to Michelangelo Antonioni, “A picture probably has its birth in the disorder within us, and that’s the difficulty: putting things in order. . . . to recognize an idea out of the chaos of feelings , reflections, observations, impulses which the surrounding world stirs up in us.”  Lajos Egri (who I discussed in an earlier post) states that you can begin your work “with a character or incident, or even a simple thought.”  Tennessee Williams related that his renowned play A Streetcar Named Desire began simply as a vision of “a woman in her late youth . . . sitting alone by a window with moonlight streaming in on her desolate face.”

Once you have found that something—that beginning–what comes next?  Again, it is what works best for you.  Ingmar Bergman and Erich Rohmer early in their careers would write their first drafts in the form of novellas.  In the case of Rohmer, he would often write in the first person, but in subsequent drafts and the final film, this first person narration would disappear almost entirely or be conveyed through the dialogue of the other characters.

Today, screenplay writers tend to write master scene screenplays, that is, screenplays that are not broken down into shots.  This is in contrast to the detailed shooting script that Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote for the break-through Last Year at Marienbad (1961) because he could conceive of it in no other way than through concrete images.  Again, what is important is what works for you: what turns your formless inspiration into a completed work.  Furthermore, with script formatting software you can always edit your first draft in whatever form you feel is most acceptable for the intended reader.

It should never be forgotten by the screenplay writer that film is a collaborative art.  Don’t be afraid to avail yourself of the talents of the costume designers, music composers, special effects and stunt coordinators, and numerous technical advisors that will be associated with the film.  You don’t have to think of everything—but you could.  In that vein the very successful American screenwriter and novelist William Goldman remarks that in comparison to the novel, the screenplay gives him a certain freedom from research.  The screenplay has few conventions and even fewer rules—and rules can be broken.  It is a literary form that allows its practitioners complete freedom to express themselves—but only if they should choose to avail themselves of this freedom.

 

 

 

Michelangelo Antonioni Revisited

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A few years ago (2007), headlines were made when two legendary filmmakers died within one day of each other: Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, respectively.  They, including Federico Fellini (who died in 1993), had dominated European filmmaking during the late 1950’s and throughout most of the 1960’s.  Most people, whether cinema lovers or not, were familiar with the names of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, while Antonioni, who had continued to make films into his nineties (he died at the age of 92), was largely forgotten.  I have often asked myself why his name has faded while those of his two illustrious contemporaries have survived.  Sometimes I think the reason is to be found in the fact that none of his films have ever been made into Broadway musicals: Fellini has had two musicals based on his films and Bergman has had one.  I often wonder why someone has not adapted Antonioni’s L’avventura into a musical, although I am sure someone has at least thought of it.  What I am really saying here is that for an average audience, Antonioni was probably the least accessible of the three.  Let us now review Antonioni’s long and distinguished career and his contributions to film as art and “the screenplay as literature.”

Although Antonioni had worked on the fringes of Italian film production for many years, he did not make his first feature film until the age of thirty-eight in 1950.  The plot of his first feature, Cronaca di un amore, a sordid melodrama, is not important for us.  But what are important are the discoveries he was to make in filming it.  For example, his habit of shooting rather long scenes was born spontaneously on the very first day of filming.  Soon he began to follow his characters until he felt the need to move on to another exercise.  For Antonioni this was the best way to be real, to be true:  that is to be inside the scene, exactly as in life.  But it was not just in the use of the camera that Antonioni was to make discoveries in the making of his first film, but in storytelling as well.  After Cronaca di un amore  opened in Paris in 1951, one French critic observed that the film “spins no plot; on the contrary, it draws a discursive tale to which the word ‘End’ is written only after the play of events has dispersed its three characters.”

I vinti  (1952), La signora senza camelie (1953), Le amiche (1955) and Il grido (1957)

In his next four feature films following Cronaca di un amore, Antonioni continued to make important discoveries and develop new techniques.   This was particularly true with regard to the subject of pictorial composition (e.g. the framing of the shot).  In this regard he went far beyond what had been the accepted conventions at the time.  For example, it had long been known in theater, and subsequently recognized in film, that the position of the actor’s body in relation to the audience (e.g. full face and profile) affected the intensity (strong, weak, etc.) of the dialogue delivered by him.   However, Antonioni discovered that   “a line spoken by an actor in profile doesn’t have the same meaning as one given in full-face.  Likewise, a phrase addressed to the camera placed above the actor doesn’t have the same meaning it would if the camera were placed below him.”  Thus, pictorial composition in Antonioni’s films came to serve as a means of conveying meaning—and sometimes meaning not directly expressed in the script—as well as feeling, intensity and mood.

Perhaps the most important discovery about cinema that Antonioni made during this early period was concerned with plot and story construction.  “Thus I have rid myself of much unnecessary technical baggage,” he related, “eliminating all the logical narrative transitions, all those connective links between sequences where one sequence served as the springboard for the one that followed. . . cinema today should be tied to truth rather than to logic.”  And how would Antonioni accomplish this?  By structuring his films according to the rhythm of everyday life, and not according to dramatic conventions—that was what would come to be known as The Cinema of Antonioni.

It was not until 1960, when his sixth feature film, L’avventura , was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, that Antonioni’s cinematic techniques and discoveries were to achieve the world-wide recognition and attention they so rightly deserved (up until that time, Antonioni was little known outside his own country, and none of his previous five features had yet been released in the United States).   Antonioni referred to this peculiar love story as a “mystery in reverse.”  A girl (Anna) vanishes and her friends conduct a search but never find her.   At the end of the film, the remaining characters go off in different directions, apparently forgetting about the lost girl.  What infuriated many of those who first saw this quite remarkable film at Cannes was that they never did find out what became of the girl, Anna.  This is not as illogical as it may seem, critic Pierre Leprohon observes:  “what concerns Antonioni . . . is the characters and their relation to themselves and to events.  Why, then, should he sustain interest in facts that have ceased to interest the heroes of the story he is telling?”  This was indeed a revolutionary concept in 1960: for an author to concern himself with only those things that interest his characters—and not his audience—was akin to giving them a life of their own, something utterly unheard of in cinema at that time.

While L’avventura did deviate significantly from previous theatrical traditions, it still contained one age-old dramatic element—although perhaps unintentionally—suspense.  In Antonioni’s next film, La notte (1961), however, even this element is lacking: we are not so much concerned with whether or not the protagonists find a way out of their predicament, but with the magnitude of their problem and how they go about solving it (or perhaps their lack of concern about finding a solution).

La notte (“The Night”) examines an intellectual crisis that is faced by an Italian writer, Giovanni; his relationship with his wife, Lidia: and the disintegration of his marriage—all three of which are obviously inter-related.  An American film of the same period and with the same subject matter would probably have concentrated on the reasons for the writer’s mental state and the failure of his marriage—a la Freud—relying heavily on the use of flashbacks.  However, Antonioni does no such thing: he does not attempt to analyze the situation—there are no flashbacks; he merely presents the situation as it exists for our examination, which covers approximately eighteen hours   in the life of the protagonists.    This one day (and night) in the life of the protagonists is not, however, just any ordinary day; in fact, it is a very important day, when a great deal of self-knowledge is to be gained (the couple come to the terrible realization that they no longer love each other).

In his next film, L’eclisse (1962), Antonioni continued to expand and perfect the techniques noted in La note and L’avventura.  L’eclisse (“The Eclipse”) is the third and final part of this trilogy examining the phenomenon of love (or lack of it) in our time—a modern love story (ca. 1962).  The film deals primarily with one character, a young career woman, Vittoria, and her new lover, Piero, a stockbroker; there is a strong implication that this relationship, like an “eclipse,” will be short-lived.  New for Antonioni in this film  are a very unusual documentary on the Roman stock exchange  and an Eisensteinian montage at the end that in an abstract manner attempts to tie together all the narrative and thematic threads of the film into one unified statement.  The rationale for this documentary digression into the world of money and banking is to illustrate the prison of investments and speculation that Vittoria’s lover is trapped in, affecting his every aspect, including his love life.  Antonioni’s premise is that the “world today is ruled by money, greed for money, fear of money” and that this “leads to a dangerous passivity towards problems of the spirit;” yet his premise becomes lost in this story where the two protagonists are so vibrantly alive.    The montage at the film’s end, however, is more successful than the aforementioned premise.  Here Antonioni juxtaposes several shots (fifty-eight in all) which show the places where most of the liaisons between the heroine and her lover took place and where they were, for brief moments, so happy, but shots in which the two lovers are conspicuously absent, perhaps a comment on the permanence of things and objects contrasted with the ephemeral nature of human relationships.

Antonioni’s next film, Deserto rosso (1964) is unquestionably his most masterful—the culmination and total perfection of his previous cinematic techniques and discoveries, as well as his first experiment in the use of color.  Deserto rosso (“The Red Desert”) is the story of the mental deterioration of a young, married woman.  Here, Antonioni’s use of color is a completely subjective one: the colors that we see are by and large exactly those that the characters see (Antonioni is reported to have painted a marsh gray for this film because that was the way his characters felt when they looked at it).

After Deserto rosso, Antonioni made three films in English.  I didn’t find any of the three particularly distinguished, but I will recount them for you anyway.  In 1966 Antonioni made Blowup, a mystery about a fashion photographer set in the “swinging” London of the 1960’s.  In 1970, he made Zabriskie Point, a film that dealt with the American “counter-culture” movement of the 1960’s.  Finally in 1975 he made The Passenger, another mystery film.  The first one, Blowup, was the most successful of the three, both critically and financially.  However, as this was essentially a purely entertainment film, it did little to advance the art of film or Antonioni’s reputation, although his mastery of his medium is certainly in evidence.  Zabriske Point was an unmitigated disaster, both critically and financially, although the film was meant to do more than entertain—which it certainly did not.   The Passenger, which starred Jack Nicholson, was, at least for me, the most interesting of the three.  It contained a seven minute scene consisting of one take that is still talked about today.  It is not easy for a filmmaker to transition from one culture and/or another language to a new one:  Antonioni’s experience in this regard demonstrates why.

Antonioni was to make just three more feature films during his lifetime.  They were Il mistera di Oberwald (“The Mystery of Oberwald”), 1981; Identificazione di una donna (“Identification of a Woman”), 1982; and Al di la delle nuvole (“Beyond the Clouds”).  I have to admit that I have seen none of the three, so I cannot comment on them.   Furthermore, none of them received wide distribution in the United States .
Antonioni was very supportive of my work on The Screenplay as Literature and graciously gave me permission to quote extensively from his screenplays.  One year when I was going to the Cannes Film Festival I had learned that Antonioni was also to be in attendance.  I brought with me a copy of my book in which I wrote a dedication and which I intended to give to him.  The dedication reads as follows:

To Michelangelo Antonioni,

The greatest creative talent that the Cinema has ever known and the inspiration for this book.

Regrettably I never met up with him that year, or any time afterwards.  By the way, I do not find that the passage of time has changed the validity of the above dedication.

Michelangelo Antonioni was ahead of his time.  Even today he is still ahead of his time.  Maybe in another fifty years Cinema will finally catch up with him.