Writing and Cinema

Jonathan Bignell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317879527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays examines the ways in which writing and cinema can be studied in relation to each other. A wide range of material is presented, from essays which look at particular films, including The Piano and The English Patient, to discussions of the latest developments in film studies including psychoanalytic film theory and the cultural study of film audiences. Specific topics that the essays address also include: the kinds of writing produced for the cinema industry, advertising, film adaptations of written texts and theatre plays from nineteenth century 'classic' novels to recent cyberpunk science fiction such as Blade Runner and Starship Troopers. The essays deal with existing areas of debate, like questions of authorship and audience, and also break new ground, for example in proposing approaches to the study of writing on the cinema screen. The book includes a select bibliography, and a documents section gives details of a range of films for further study.

Part One
Writing for Cinema

1 ‘Whose stories you tell’: writing ‘Ken Loach’

John Tulloch in conversation with Rona Munro

Bakhtin's concept of language [is] inherently dialogic . . . it's [about] discursive polyphony, its subtle and complex interweaving of various types of speech . . . and its carnivalesque irreverence towards all kinds of authoritarian, repressive, monologic ideologies.

David Lodge, After Bakhtin (1990)¹

This essay comes out of a series of dialogues between John Tulloch (JT), an academic who has written about Ken Loach in his book Television Drama,² and Rona Munro (RM), a screenwriter and playwright, who scripted Ken Loach's award-winning film Lady-bird, Ladybird (1994). Both participants in the dialogue share an admiration for Loach's films and for his politics. Both, therefore, are 'fans'. JT and RM also share another kind of fandom – of television science fiction. While JT published an ethnographic academic study of Doctor Who,³ RM wrote the series' final British episode ('Survival', 1989). So, as they speak about Ken Loach – both as enthusiastic audiences of Ken Loach's work and as writers of 'Ken Loach' – many other narratives and genres from their various other writing activities and audience pleasures circulate in their talk.

This, of course, is the very nature of situated dialogue. As David Lodge (himself a TV writer and academic) points out (following Bakhtin), in situated, active talk, words 'come to us already imprinted with the meanings, intentions and accents of previous users, and any utterance we make is directed towards some real or hypothetical Other' (Lodge, p. 21). When JT and RM talk 'Ken Loach', their words are not only 'imprinted' with finding out what the other one likes in writing (for or about) Ken Loach, but also imprinted with the agendas in which their two different kinds of writing take place.

JT's is an academic agenda, going back to a series of influential articles about Loach by Colin MacCabe in the late 1970s.⁴ Loach's subject matter may, MacCabe argued, have pointed to the Left and to issues of liberation from exploitation, but his film form did the opposite by imposing an 'imaginary unity' on the viewer. The 'classic realist text' – whether a nineteenth-century novel or Loach's 1973 television film Days of Hope – certainly consisted of many voices, representing all kinds, classes and genders of people. But while this gave the text a 'reality effect', for MacCabe the classic realist text had two further features which in fact curtailed this carnival of voices. First, it always established a 'hierarchy of discourses', with the author's voice positioning and evaluating all the others; second, the author's voice was the only one not in inverted commas: it pretended not to be a discursive construction but reality itself – and this was abetted in Loach's film by a naturalistic shooting style. For MacCabe, Loach's practice was the very opposite of the kind of anti-authoritarian 'discursive polyphony' that David Lodge, like Bakhtin, admires.

JT's second agenda comes from researching and writing about Loach's film Fatherland (1986) and its writer, Trevor Griffiths. Sharing Griffiths's own cultural materialist position, JT also shared his concern that Loach's naturalist directorial method repressed Griffiths's 'critical realism punctuated by . . . expressionist dreams'; as Griffiths said of his film writing, 'critical realism accepts that it is a convention, a literary convention, or a filmic convention; and naturalism on the whole doesn't allow its practitioners that degree of reflexivity and self-consciousness' (Tulloch, Television Drama, p. 161). And for Griffiths this is also true of film actors. 'Performance . . . is absolutely key to my work. My texts cannot be done by non-actors. . . . Film acting is minimal acting . . . but it has to be acting for me, not. . . what naturalists are looking for, which is being' (Tulloch, Television Drama, p. 159).

These earlier academic Others are in JT's agenda as he discusses Loach with RM. Yet JT still admires Loach and uses this dialogue to continue asking himself 'why?'.

RM's agenda is as a professional writer, surrounded by other professional writers – newspaper reviewers, or well-known 'Loach' writers like Jim Allen (a co-author on the planned TV soap opera that Loach originally approached RM to write), or 'dead, white female' writers RM is commissioned to adapt for film, like Mrs Gaskell. So whereas JT's agenda included 'Other' academic and screenwriter criticisms of Loach for his 'controlling' naturalism, RM's 'control' agenda related especially to the effect on Loach's films (and on her own writing) of 'Other' writers. This sense of 'Other' writers was especially strong in relation to the British media, who like to tell a potential audience that Loach's films are 'about' his Left politics, thus missing the European media's analysis of Ladybird, Ladybird as a film about emotional loss. RM's agenda includes, also, a political take on the difference between her own writing and these media 'Others'; the fact that the publicists at the Venice Film Festival liked to glamorise the director and the writer of a film about people assaulted by police and social workers, who live in a two-room flat with three kids. For RM the media's 'control' is over potential audiences, over the actual subjects of films like Ladybird, Ladybird, and over herself as writer. As a writer, RM lacks direct contact with her audience. What she is surrounded by instead is media reviews. So RM tries 'not to have anyone else's voice . . . what The Observer or The Guardian or Kaleidoscope thought about' when writing. When she writes in the author's note to her Bold Girls (the play which Loach read before first approaching her), 'in 1995, I realise that I do not know what it is like to be in West Belfast now, except as it is shown to me through the media', she is regretting the 'lost touch with my friends in Belfast' over five years in writing the play.⁵ So being 'different and fresh and original' does mean listening to other voices, and for RM it is Loach's direct contact with the voices of his audience/subjects that makes his films so special. Loach seeks to liberate onto the big screen voices of people that are all too often repressed (in courts, in the media, and among professional surveillance 'experts' like police and social workers).

According to both their intertextual agendas, JT and RM believe that Loach has 'been criticised enough'. This essay is not a 'representative' account of writing and film. Both the authors in dialogue here reject the notion of the 'transparency' of authorship that MacCabe criticises – hence the reflexivity of this introduction. Lack of 'objectivity' is not, however, the same thing as lack of critical relevance. The chapter tries, via a case study of Ken Loach, to approach the issue of what it means for academics and film writers to write in a book about writing and cinema. It tries to avoid a position where the academics are 'experts', while the film writers are simply exotic 'Others'. Not least this means reflexivity about the Bakhtinian future answering words towards which this particular academic book is oriented. This is not only for teaching students, but also is part of several academics' research output. So this is not a happenstance discussion between JT and RM. JT's academic interests in intertextuality, genre, popular culture, audience theory etc., are undeniably guiding voices in the discussion that follows, and in the reflexive framework of this introduction. However, despite the 'interweaving of various types of speech' in their dialogue, JT and RM do come to a consensus about their pleasure in Ken Loach. And that consensus is itself about the dialogic possibility of writing and film. They admire Loach precisely because of his 'complex interweaving of various types of speech' in opposition 'towards all kinds of authoritarian . . . ideologies'.

‘True stories’: Ladybird, Ladybird

Early in their series of discussions, JT raised with RM the academic debate since the 1970s around Loach's 'transparency effect', the so-called camera 'truth' of his naturalism. RM responded to this with:

RM: Is he trying to tell the truth or is he telling a story?

So, in response to JT's academic 'history', RM, like Trevor Griffiths, began to talk about writing/filmic conventions and the telling of stories in Ladybird, Ladybird.

RM: That was a true story and it was a dramatisation of a true story as it was told to me by the real people involved.

Already the developing dialogue juxtaposed both 'truth or story?' and 'true story'. How might these be reconciled within a writer's sense of creativity?

JT: As a writer what sort of ethical or professional or creative considerations then come into play? Are you trying simply to reproduce that story in another form or are you trying to change it creatively to make some more general point?

RM: At the end of the day I have to get the emotional truth right. . . . From my point of view it was telling the story that I'd been told and then getting the feel of it as empathetically as I could.

JT: But did you think of that as an individual story or as a representative story, or both?

RM: I thought about it as an individual story. I don't think of representative things, as though there's some way you can generalise people's experience. . . . You can emphasise any story as part of a larger experience, but you can't say this is typical of this or typical of that.

JT: But a lot of people would have read that film as a critique of . . .

RM: Yeah, but that's to do with the way people see Ken, isn't it? . . . In Europe the film's seen as being this great emotional story about loss and how people deal with loss; and in Britain it's seen as being an attack on government.

JT: Is that a worry?

RM: No, because it doesn't really bother audiences. It only bothers people that write articles in newspapers. . . . The problem is that the people that write in the papers can then limit the audience you reach. But once it reaches an audience I think most people respond to the story, they either identify with it or they don't, or they get absorbed in it or they don't. It would have been naive if we hadn't expected some of the reaction that we got. But the film doesn't get that in Europe, and most of its continuing life has been abroad anyway.

JT, wanting to tease out further Griffiths's 'creative fiction/naturalism/truth' tension, led the dialogue to Loach's 'method'.

Production relations: ‘the Method’

JT began his questions from Griffiths's concern over Loach's choice of actors/writers etc., who have 'experienced' this or that social 'truth'. RM resisted this, saying that while Ladybird, Ladybird certainly 'had strong female characters in it', like her play Bold Girls about four women in West Belfast in the late 1980s, otherwise the film was 'different emotional territory' from her own or her characters' experiences. JT followed up with Griffiths's view of realism as a thing of crafting, selection, and showing the underlying, as against Loach's 'method'.

RM: Well. . . Ken's method . . . produces a particular result that's like nothing else. And when I first saw it, on set, and he basically was very quietly saying to the actors 'what's this scene about, give me some suggestions about what the emotions here might be', and the actors were saying nothing that was in my script, certainly I was going 'Oh my God!'. But then they would do it again, and after about seventeen takes, the remarkable thing was, somewhere in the process the actors would end up saying almost exactly what I had written, and if they didn't it was probably because they were the wrong lines. For me this was really educational as a writer, because I started to learn which lines had something solid in them, and the ones that were maybe just patched together . . . and didn't hold up to that method. It meant that the ones that were left were really strong . . . so that you end up with this extraordinary thing. . . which isn't like other films. It's a Ken Loach film, and I was always very clear I was writing a Ken Loach film – that if it isn't real for the person saying the lines you can't do it.

Still unclear about the relationship between the written lines and the actor's 'real' role, JT then made Griffiths's point about actors, naturalism and 'being'.

RM: He didn't do that on Ladybird. . . . I don't think he does that nearly as much as people think – that idea that he doesn't work with real actors. We had Ray Winstanley and he's a stunning actor. . . . But I always knew that Ken was going to use his method. I did know that he's an auteur in the sense that it is one vision, it's not a collective film process. It operates as a collective because everyone's given equal status, but you're working as a collective to make a Ken Loach film, and I think that's fair enough because he's brilliant.

JT: But I think sometimes that can be a very controlling, ideologically closed device. . . . The reason in my view that it isn't with Ken Loach is that he is so open and honest with accessing voices to the screen, voices that I never ever hear, and I think that's why his films are so powerful. These are not voices that we normally get in the visual media – or at least, not telling their own stories. . . . Ken, somehow, by working through his method – and I don't know enough about the method . . . because I found it hard to get close to it – does access these voices. But. . . is that something you actually felt as you were writing?

RM: I admire the guy exactly for that, plus the end result is strong enough . . . and it's then very exciting to complement that method. . . . It's incredibly exciting – that's the team thing. With Ken it's not like you're a writer of a 'work' hoping that some director's going to be a completely empathetic mind reader and reproduce your inner vision.

JT: I wrote about Ken Loach's method in my TV Drama book, but some of that came from . . . Trevor Griffiths . . . who had problems with Ken's method on Fatherland. That's why I'm trying to probe with you as a writer. You said earlier that everybody who's seen Ken Loach's films knows what the method is. Well, I'm not sure that's true, and I'm not sure that we'd have the same way of describing it from our different professional writing positions anyway. . . . You said you learnt it as you were writing it – what for you then as a writer is the Ken Loach method?. . .

RM: You know the feel that you're going to end up with, and it's that thing of it's not fly-on-the-wall, but it's film and it's beautiful film because Barry's a great lighting cameraman. So it does have that big cinema feel. . . which obviously in one way isn't real, but it's completely real in another way. . . .

JT: Emotionally real – is that what you mean?

RM: Yeah – and in its detail and in its complications. . . . Sometimes it's messy and sometimes it's completely clear. And of course it's not naturalism, because if it was naturalism L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• General editors' preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Writing for Cinema
• Part Two Writing in Cinema
• Part Three Writing into Cinema
• Part Four Writing about Cinema
• Part Five Audio-visual Resources
• Selected bibliography
• Index