Library & Resources

Summer Workshop

Six scripts returned for the Summer workshop, with readings by top Vancouver actors and workshopping with advisors from previous sessions. The scripts were Kat Montagu's The Emperor of China, Alan Borden's Survivors, Travis McDonald's Normal, Michael Northey's Theze Thugz Livez, Shandi Mitchell's Touch the Moon, and Neil Every's The Ormering Tide.

Producer Niv Fichman of Toronto's Rhombus Media sat in on the readings, along with advisors Amnon Buchbinder, Sharon Riis, Peter Behrens and Noel Baker.

Niv also presented a case study of one of his own features in development, an adaptation of Carol Shields' acclaimed novel  The Stone Diaries. You'd expect an easy path for a novel that won a Governor General's Award and became an international best-seller, with an Oscar-winning director (Cynthia Scott), a hot screenwriter (Semi Chellas) and an internationally- respected production company with a financing envelope from Telefilm Canada (Rhombus). But Niv exposed a hornet's nest of complications -- from funding difficulties ('It's not commercial!') to casting concerns (finding a Canadian star in her 50's who can attract financing) to health problems that have delayed production.

Take heart, though. Of the six screenplays in the summer workshop, Survivors has been chosen for the Canadian Film Centre's Feature Film Project; Steven Hegyes and Sean Willilamson of Bright Light Films have optioned Normal;  Touch the Moon was chosen for development through the NSI's Features in Focus program: and The Emperor of China has received development funding from British Columbia Film. Let us have faith that the persistent and talented will see our work on the screen — and that the seats will be full around us.

Screenwriting Competition

Louise Deschamps
Blue Eyes
Blue Eyes is the dark drama of a girl who learns the secret sex lives and tragedies of the adult world while growing up in a run-down rooming house.

Louise Deschamp has been working in film company offices since graduating in 1997 from the music program at the University of British Columbia. After a session in the Spring 02 Workshop, Louise returns for more consultation with Advisor Michael Miner.


Carleen Kyle
Pearl's Cut & Curl
A young woman is dragged back to deal with her angry sister and a past full of scandal and family secrets after her grandmother leaves her a beauty parlour in small-town Saskatchewan.

Carleen Kyle has made several prizewinning shorts and works in Vancouver as an a.d. and location manager. She'll be working with Advisor Sharon Riis, who knows a thing or two about beauty parlours in Saskatchewan.


Adria Budd
Refuge
A reality TV show that pits residents of a war-torn African city against each other for the grand prize — a green card to the U.S. When a vicious tyrant stages a coup d'etat, the show's host and contestants are thrown into in a bigger battle between the U.S. government, the network and the terrorists.

Adria Budd has worked in development and as a producer's assistant, first at Mainframe Entertainment (where she wrote scripts for Reboot and  Weird-Ohs) and more recently on Smallville, The Outer Limits and other live action series. She's also written and produced three shorts. Adria will be working with Advisor Michael Miner, writer of Robocop and director of The Book of Stars.


Shane LaPorte
Signals Crossed
When Eliot's mother disappears and he meets up with a woman named Zorgana who's into extraterrestrials, things go from strange to downright absurd. The secret behind it all is a mysterious cleaning product called Wonder Wash.

Shane LaPorte has written seven other screenplays, one of which, After My Funeral, was workshopped at Praxis in 1995. His advisor is the inimitable John Frizzell. Shane LaPorte won the IATSE Local 891 Fellowship.


Raj Purewal
Hope
Hope is based on the 1914 scandal of the Komagata Maru, a ship full of Indian immigrants that was quarantined and eventually turned away from Vancouver after a two-month conflict. Raj Purewal's grandfather was one of the unfortunate passengers.

Raj is a Vancouver writer/director who plans to shoot his first feature this winter in BC and India. Hope is the winner of our first CityTV Fellowship; in addition tothe Fall workshop, Raj will have access to other Praxis programs throughout the year. His advisor is Vancouver producer/screenwriter Marlene Rodgers.


T.E. Simpson
The Poor Boy Special
Poor Wally's only defense against his distracted, pregnant mother and drunken stepfather is the statue of the Virgin that he carries everywhere. When this unhappy family arrives wreaking havoc at a rundown summer resort, Wally finds a real girl to love and his life gets even worse.

T.E. Simpson is a Toronto writer whose short fiction has been published in several zines; this is her first screenplay. She'll be working with John Frizzell as her advisor.

The Latest Word

Matt Holland's feature screenplay The Limit (Spring 01) has gone into production with Lewin Webb as director. A thriller about an elderly woman who becomes involved with an undercover policewoman after her high-rise neighbour is found murdered, The Limit has a stellar cast — Claire Forlani, Henry Czerny, Pete Postlethwaite and the charismatic Lauren Bacall — along with Matt himself. The Limit is a Canada/U.K. coproduction, partnering Gary Howsam of GFT Kingsborough films (Montreal) and Jamie Brown of Studio Eight Films (London).

Nathaniel Geary has gone into production with his first feature On the Corner, a densely woven tale of a brother and sister trying to survive abandonment and drugs in Vancouver's downtown east side. On the Corner will be the 23rd Praxis-workshopped feature film. It stars Alex Rice, Simon Baker and Katherine Isabelle along with Tina Keeper and Gordon Tootosis. Funding by Telefilm, British Columbia Film, Movie Central, TMN and several others. Must be a huge budget.

Ori Kowarsky's Various Positions (Fall 99/Summer 2000) has won the Prix de Montreal for best emerging filmmaker at the World Film Festival. It played to sold-out audiences in the Vancouver Film Festival in October.

Shandi Mitchell's Touch the Moon (Fall 2001) has been tapped for the NSI's Features First program, where she'll receive advice and contacts to push the project toward production.

Some Films About Time

(Adapted from a lecture by Patricia Gruben for "Uncharted Territory," a Praxis course on unconventional screenplay structure)

In classical narrative structure we have a clear sense of objective reality — that is, linear time and causal relationships. In a classical film we may have fantasy sequences and flashbacks or even flash-forwards, but these are contained within a particular character's point of view. Increasingly though we're seeing films - even wide-release American films that seem to juggle time and space in a way that's not so logically contained. This isn't a new idea — it goes back to Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, Surrealist and Dada films, and of course a long literary tradition. But what is perhaps new is the increasingly widespread acceptance of this kind of fragmentation — whether we're conditioned by TV commercials, music videos, science fiction, computer games, chaos theory, or simply boredom with predictable, conventional storytelling. We can't go into depth here about subjective time and space in contemporary film, but I will present a quick survey and then look a little more closely at a few recent examples.

It's possible to divide movies roughly into two categories — classical linear narrative structured around the Protagonist's subjectivity, and non-linear cinema structured around the Filmmaker's subjectivity. Two enormously influential temporal experiments have been Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961).

Rashomon tells the story of a rape and murder in the forest from three different points of view — the criminal's, the husband's and the wife's. It was certainly an innovative idea in its day; but even in 1950 I suspect it wasn't difficult for the audience to orient themselves in the narrative, though they may have been tempted to privilege one version over another.

Last Year at Marienbad was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain Resnais. A man, "X," encounters a woman, "A," in a spa. He reminds her that last year, at another spa, they fell in love. They agreed that in a year she would leave her husband and meet him here. But "A" denies that they have ever met. She might be lying, he might be lying, maybe she forgot, maybe it happened in a parallel universe, perhaps it's all a game like the little match game that A's husband wins, over and over.

Last Year at Marienbad develops Resnais' recurring theme of time as constructed by memory. Here it's taken to an extreme in which the characters have no psychological realism, but are simply subjects who desire and objects who are desired. The convergence of fantasy and reality are virtually complete; but the subject whose eyes we see through is not a subject that we can identify with. Our focus is on the wanderings of his imagination; eventually we stop wondering who is telling the truth in this game.

Robbe-Grillet, a well-known novelist and later a director, wrote a manifesto called For a New Novel: a critique of bourgeois fiction and its focus on character and plot. "Instead of a universe of 'signification' (psychological, social, functional) we must try to construct a world both more solid and more immediate. Let it be first of all by their presence that objects and gestures establish themselves, and let this presence continue to prevail over whatever explanatory theory may try to enclose them in a system of references, whether emotional, sociological, Freudian or metaphysical."

Last Year at Marienbad is constructed as a dream and thus has links to Surrealism in its insistence on theprimacy of actions and material objects which are simply there and aren't meant to be interpreted. But whereas Surrealism was meant to be entirely spontaneous, Robbe-Grillet's work is carefully constructed (or deconstructed). He refers to classical stories, but drained of their human values. In our distinction between the protagonist's consciousness vs. the filmmaker's consciousness, Last Year at Marienbad is certainly the latter: there is no frame of reality, no border between the character's imagination and the filmmakers'. This category applies to a wide range of European art films of the 60's and beyond — the work of Roeg, Bunuel, Godard, Duras, Kieslowski and Tarkovsky, for example. All these filmmakers use various strategies to deconstruct time into a non-linear condition. Film is the most linear of media, but it is also the most dreamlike

More recently, Hollywood has taken up this motif of subjective time from a very different perspective with popular films like Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray keeps waking up to repeat the worst day of his life; Sliding Doors, in which Gwyneth Paltrow alternatively misses a subway or catches it; or Go, where an event is repeated three times from three different points of view — not necessarily contradicting, like Rashomon, but giving us new contexts for what we've previously seen. These films either have a comic premise that allows a certain absurd leeway in logic or like Go they can be reconstructed into a linear narrative without any bothersome loose ends.

But what of a new crop films that seem more playfully irrational with structure and with storytelling? Pulp Fiction is another puzzle-film. Apparently it was first conceived in a more conventional order, and broken up in the editing room. Nevertheless, it still doesn't quite add up to a conventional linear narrative like Go.

Looking at the chronological breakdown, it seems at first that we might be able to reconstruct it into a conventional story with three major subplots, or three one-act stories within an overall framework like The Red Violin or Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth. But who's the protagonist? If told in chronological order, halfway through the story Jules would have his conversion and disappear; Vince would get blown away by Butch. Butch has the chronological happy ending. Is he the protagonist? Most would argue that it's Jules, because he's the character who changes — and he's the character who ends the film. Some works that at first don't seem to have a protagonist or the coherence of a narrative arc become more transparent when they're broken down into their subplots. What about the three stories in Pulp Fiction — do they each satisfy conventional narrative structure? I would argue that they do; but the reconstitution of the narrative moves the 'plot points' into different positions in the overall dramatic structure.

Maelstrom, a film by Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, is essentially a melodrama about a young woman suffering from depression. But it is framed as a fairytale, told by a fish on the chopping block. He tells the story and then backs up and retells certain parts in order to suit his authorial vision. In foregrounding the narrator in this way, we're reminded of fiction and the oral tradition. Our narrator in Maelstrom is a bit unreliable. Not only is he a fish, but he gets his head chopped off after 16 minutes and has to be replaced twice more to get through to the end. Still though, we have a classic redemptive plot in which our heroine is restored to life through love. There's another trend in nonlinear films exemplified by Run Lola Run, The Matrix and Existenz. All three stretch the medium a little further by representing the story as a video game. Here we have a simulated chance to play multiple times with various limited but unpredictable outcomes. Of course these films aren't really interactive because the choices are made by the filmmakers — but they do present parallel worlds with the kind of frenetic pace and synapse-based thinking that occurs when playing these games. Run Lola Run is the simplest of the three. It begins with a profound-seeming quotation, followed by three alternative stories. Each is framed by a repeated 'limbo' episode where Lola and Manni, in bed together, consider their choices and their fate.

These 'parallel world' films — Robert Lepage's Possible Worlds is another example — are often built around the metaphor of the "butterfly effect;" a butterfly flapping its wings in China will have unpredictable repercussions across the universe. If only the ambulance had stopped to give Lola a ride, it wouldn't have hit the glass, or Manni. If Lola had bought the boy's bike, the derelict wouldn't have been in the right place to get caught by Manni, but he wouldn't have caused the accident that killed Lola's father. But not all the alternatives are determined by cause and effect. Lola pushes past the bank clerk, and the snapshot flash-forward shows the clerk later dying in a car accident — nothing to do with anything. Similarly, the woman with the baby carriage becomes a Jehovah's witness for no reason. Given that the alternative stories don't have a strong sense of different choices resulting in coherent different outcomes, the overall impression the film makes is of the randomness of events, not causality as in classical storytelling.

Then what is this film about? Is there some paradigm of the time-space continuum that's being developed here? Or is it only a stylistic exercise? Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum calls it "a world that is jerry-built, put together to produce certain momentary effects — a plot and a world that keep moving but wind up nowhere, since the three endings cancel one another out — a world where anything can happen and where, as a consequence, nothing matters." Do we give more weight to the third ending because it's the happy one, and the last? If we do, then despite its seeming randomness, the film ends up as a classic romantic melodrama in which the heroine's heroism saves the day.  Memento is another film whose non-linearity derives from the character's subjectivity rather than the filmmaker's. Like most detective stories, and film noir in particular, we see everything from the protagonist's point of view. But our Leonard suffers from a malady that totally disorients him (and us); he has anterograde amnesia. He can't make new memories; he has only a brief hold on the present. All he can remember for certain is his life before the assault that supposedly killed his wife and left him damaged.

The film begins with the execution of a mysterious character named Teddy, and then takes a step backward, with each sequence more or less  ending where the previous one began. This puts the audience into the same kind of disoriented state that Leonard feels. We go through events without knowing what has led up to them, and we try to figure out fragments of evidence, like Leonard's Polaroid photos and tattoos, without having a context for them.

Director Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan wrote the story on which the film is based. In an interview in  Filmmaker he said, "I wanted to use the condition as a metaphorical way of dealing with some philosophical questions without being overly philosophical in doing so to explore the nature of memory, and especially the idea of manufactured memories, memories that seem to be completely vivid, yet may only be a fiction built of stories one has heard and pieced together over a lifetime." One thread seems to be in chronological order: the recurring black and white sequence of Leonard speaking on the phone. Here we hear the parallel, probably false story of Sammy Jankis, and see parts of it in flashback. Sammy Jankis is not only a foil for Leonard's apparent guilty secret; structurally he's a vehicle of exposition, a crutch to make the story comprehensible.

Christopher Nolan says the film works because the basic plot elements are actually very simple; it's the temporal reversal that makes them complicated. Using the conventions of film noir — the insurance investigator, the treacherous sidekick, the femme fatale — helps anchor us because they're so familiar.

For me, film noir is one of the only genres where point of view is accepted as an important notion in the storytelling, and where it's totally accepted that you can flash back and flash forward and change points of view. The best film noir always involves a continuous reassessment of things. You want the double cross, you want the surprise, and you want to keep the audience mindful of the fact that they don't know the full story and can't trust all the characters. I wanted to use the structure as a way of reawakening some of the things that used to be so valued in the genre: the paranoia and exaggeration in our everyday insecurities."

One interesting discovery for Nolan was that at the end, when Teddy explains it all, audiences refuse to buy it. We've spent the whole film looking at Leonard's photo of Teddy with the caption "Don't believe his lies." "They still prefer to trust that image even after we make it very clear that Leonard's visual recollection is completely questionable. It was quite surprising, and it wasn't planned." This adds a challenging unreliability to our understnding of the film.

Robbe-Grillet, the writer of Last Year at Marienbad, was also fascinated by the ambiguity of the detective genre: "Exhibit X in any detective story gives us a clear image of the situation [in which objects are only themselves and have no symbolic value.] The evidence gathered by the inspectors — an object left at the scene of the crime, a moment captured in a photograph, a sentence overheard by a witness — seem chiefly at first to require an explanation, to exist only in relation to their role in a context which overpowers them. And already the theories begin to take shape: the [judge] attempts to establish a logical and necessary link between things; it appears that everything will be resolved in a banal bundle of causes and consequences, intentions and coincidences." But the story begins to proliferate in a disturbing way. The witnesses contradict one another, the defendant offers several alibis, new evidence appears that had not been taken into accounts. And we keep going back to the recorded evidence: the exact position of a piece of furniture, the shape and frequency of a fingerprint, the word scribbled in a message. We have the mounting sense that nothing else is true. Though they may conceal a mystery, or betray it, these elements which make a mockery of systems have only one serious, obvious quality, which is to be there. "The same is true of the world around us. We thought to control it by assigning it a meaning, and the entire art of the novel, in particular, seemed dedicated to this enterprise. But this was merely an illusory simplification, and far from becoming clearer and closer because of it, the world has only, little by little, lost all its life. Since it is chiefly in its presence that the world's reality resides, our task now is to create a literature which takes that presence into account." Robbe-Grillet's deconstruction is a radical challenge to narrative convention, and Nolan's is not. Nolan didn't want to identify an 'objective truth,' because that would violate the notion that we are inside the character's head. But he did mean the story to add up in a plausible way.

Nolan considers himself a mainstream filmmaker, though he does cite Nicholas Roeg as an influence. His 'puzzle film' contains a resolution for those who are willing to work for it. Ultimately, Nolan's ambitions are diametrically opposed to those of Robbe-Grillet and Resnais, who renounced the 'healing power' of resolution. And so ultimately are the deconstructive gestures of most of these stylish North American films.

Patricia Gruben, Associate Professor/Director of Praxis, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University