This book is about film screenplays and about one of the most exceptional epochs in the history of literatureâthe epoch of modernism. In particular, this book is about the connection between the two. It gives the screenplay a place in literary history that is rightfully its own, and highlights the role literary context played in the history of screenwriting. In doing so, the book aims to restore the possibility of reading screenplays as literary works in their own right. This possibility has been repeatedly compromised in the course of a century-long debate on whether the screenplay is a functional or a literary genre. I do not hope to end this debate, but to give it a new direction by showing that the question asked has been the wrong one: What matters is not whether the screenplay is a functional or a literary genre, but how and why we read screenplays. In fact, what matters even more, is that we read screenplays. But wait, âweâ who?
This book is meant primarily for screenwriting researchersâa growing international community that exists at least since the Screenwriting Research Network was established in 2006. At the same time, it is meant for non-academic and academic readers, especially for scholars of modernism, who may have never read a screenplay or have stumbled upon one and are not sure how to approach it. Should one compare the screenplay to the film made on its basis? Or should one imagine themselves in the shoes of a filmmaker? Or should one try and read the film script as one reads a novel or a playâand what does this mean exactly? These are the questions guiding the first two chapters of this bookâhow we can read screenplays and why it matters. I propose an approach to reading film scripts that regards them both as texts embedded in film production and as potential literary works. The rest of the book puts this approach into practice. Exploring modernist screenplays from the 1920s, I show that film scripts require different kinds of attention, but also that they are worthy of attention in the first place. Across the pages of this book, the reader will encounter many new names but also many familiar ones: Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Sergei Eisenstein, Abel Gance, Maxim Gorki, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Romain Rolland, Viktor Shklovskyâthe list could go on and on. All these authors wrote fascinating screenplays that you can borrow from a library, buy at a book shop, or read in digital editions; this book will show how and why you can read them.1
Reading Film Scripts
So what sort of a thing is a screenplay? On the most general level, screenplays belong to the ever-growing category of scripts that serve as a model or prototype for something. A manuscriptâthe original sense of the word âscriptââis the basis for a printed publication; a call centre script is the prototype of a conversation; a behavioural script is the model of a social situation; a programming script is the basis for operations of computer; in the psychological theory of Eric Berne, a script is roughly the scheme of an individualâs life formed in their childhood; and in the novel The Bone Clocks (2014) by the British writer David Mitchell the Script is the model of the entire human history. A separate category of scripts, which includes screenplays, can be subsumed under the term ânotationsâ; such scripts serve as prototypes for artworksâcomics, theatrical performances, operas, video games, TV shows, films, and so on.
All scripts respond to the need of planning or preparing something elseâan artwork, a conversation, a life, etc.; this is their primary function and their only common feature. Scripts can assume different formsâmaterial or immaterial, textual or non-textual; they are embedded in different sociocultural contexts and involve a different number of agents, from one to hundreds. I take film scripts to be material and predominantly textual artefacts, by contrast to other materials used in film production such as storyboards, mood boards, etc. Although all film scripts are texts, there is no formal textual feature common to all film scripts ever written: Some of them are written like short stories, others look more like theatrical plays, and others are indistinguishable from lyric poetry. Common to all film scripts is only the fact that they respond to the situation of film production, to use the terminology common among scholars of rhetoric, to which I return below.
Because screenplays are written in response to the situation of film production, they can be used in this situation in certain ways. In particular, the screenplay allows for streamlined planning of production in terms of finances, logistics, and equipment; it serves as a guideline for actors, camera operators, editors, and other members of the film crew and optimises communication between them; and it outlines the idea of the film, towards which the collaborative effort is directed. Of course, not all film scripts are actually used in film production. Moreover, film scripts can respond to the potential situation of film production in different ways: some scripts anticipate it, and others reject itâthey are called closet screenplays. In some historical cases, we do not even know for sure if a text relates to the situation of film production or not: we cannot ask the author, we have little or no contextual information, and as I mentioned earlier, there are no formal features that could definitely indicate if a text is a film script or not. In such cases, the fourth member of the quartet that defines the textual meaningsâthe author, the context, the text itself, and the readerâplays solo: It is the reader who decides, whether or not they read the text as a response to the situation of film production.
To give this statement more substance, let us conduct a thought experiment. Let us imagine an unpublished manuscript of a short story that we know nothing aboutâneither who wrote it, nor under what circumstances it ended up in our possession. It is written in present tense (as screenplays often are) and describes only visually conceivable events (as screenplays often do). We have the ability to decide whether we read it as a film script or as a short story; the essential question is, what does our decision change? If we decide to read the manuscript as a short story, we would try to experience itâemotionally, in our mindâs eye, or even physically, depending on the reading practices we have learned and prefer. At the same time as we experience it through reading, we would ask the question of what the story means. The question of meanings and/or the question of how texts enable certain experiences constitute the core of literary reading and of literary criticism in general; contemporary literary criticism usually presumes a pluralism of possible meanings and experiences that a text can enable.
If we read the manuscript in our possession as a film script, we would probably ask the same questions; at the same time, we would additionally read the manuscript as a response to the situation of film production. Our focus would therefore shift to other kinds of questions: Can we plan a film production based on this text? What kind of production does the text envisage? Does the text convey a clear idea of the film we want to make? Can other participants of the production form an idea of their contributions based on what the text describes? The type of reading that focuses on such questions can be called rhetorical or pragmatic reading, because the questions of how a text works in a certain situation preoccupy the disciplines of pragmatics and rhetorical criticism. However, for the purpose of this book I choose the term âfunctional reading,â as it is broader and not bound to any specific field of knowledge (though it is, of course, problematic in its own ways, which I discuss at the end of this chapter).
It seems logical to assume, as Ted Nannicelli does, that âreading the screenplay qua literary work and reading the screenplay qua production plan are mutually compatibleâ (2013, 192); moreover, âoneâs reading (and successful use) of a screenplay in the production process actually requires one to read it as a literary workâ (201). If we do not understand the meaning of the scriptâwhy characters act in certain ways, why events happen the way they do, why it describes certain details and leaves out othersâit would perhaps be difficult to turn the script into a film. Or would it? One of the most famous (and fictitious) anecdotes in the history of screenwriting asserts that Thomas H. Ince, father of the Hollywood studio system and the pioneer behind âassembly-lineâ filmmaking, would stamp the screenplays he approved for production with the instruction âshoot as written.â2 This instruction implies that the readers of the screenplayâdirectors, actors, camera people, and other members of the film crewâshould not question the meaning of the script, but read it only in regard to what it says about film production.
The anecdote about Inceâs stamp encapsulates the limitations that can be imposed on the reading of film scripts in film production, especially in studio productions with a strict separation of conception and execution (see Maras 2009, 21â23). At the stage of execution, the script is not to be read as a literary work, because such reading would presume a multiplicity of possible meanings and the power of the reader to interpret the script in their own way. Moreover, in commercial studio productions screenplays are usually written so as to minimise the ambiguity of meaning and eliminate the need for interpretation; screenwriting conventions ensure that the screenplay is univocal and cannot be misread.
The pervasive separation of conception and execution in film production and the dominance of screenwriting conventions are the reasons why I contend that most readers of screenplays today prioritise the functional reading over the literary. In theory, readers may consider experiencing and interpreting screenplays in their own right just as important as reading them in regard to film production, but in todayâs practice they rarely do. Our readerly expectations and reading strategies, in turn, influence how publishing, teaching, awards, and other cultural institutions treat screenplays. Take, for instance, the fact that the juries of many prestigious awards for the best screenplay are not obliged to actually read screenplays; it suffices if they have seen the film. To consider whether and how this imbalance of reading practices can be approached, we can think of different readings in terms of interpretive communities.
Interpretive Communities
The idea of interpretive communities has been famously introduced by the scholar of law and literature Stanley Fish. In different books Fish gives slightly different definitions of what interpretive communities are, but the general idea remains more or less stable: interpretive communities are not simply groups of people, but sets of reading expectations, principles, strategies, and practices, with which we approach texts (Fish 1980, 171). One and the same person can belong to several interpretive communities and approach one text in different ways; at the same time, multiple readers can belong to the same interpretive community and practice similar readings. Manfred Jahn (2001) provides a great illustration of this idea, applying the notion of interpretive communities to drama studies.
Jahn distinguishes three âschoolsâ of drama theory: they privilege, respectively, the dramatic text over its production, the production over the text, and neither. The focus of the first school is on the aesthetic qualities of the play textâthe qualities that interpreters foreground in close readings and describe using expressions such as ââpoetic drama,â âdramatic poetry,â âdrama as literature,â âtheatre in the mindâ,â and so on (2001, 661). By contrast, the second school of thought sees as the main feature of a theatrical play not its aesthetic or sociocultural self-sufficiency but rather its potential realisation as a theatrical production. Consequently, such interpreters emph...