পান্ডুলিলপ রচনার সূত্রাবিী

মুহাম্মদ সাজ্জাদ আহসান লপ.এইচ.লড.

অধ্যাপক, নাটক ও নাটযতত্ত্ব লবভাগ
জাহাঙ্গীরনগর লবশ্বলবদযািয়
সাভার, ঢাকা।

International Academy of Film and Media (IAFM) আয়য়াজজত

অনিাইন পব ব
২৩শে অগাস্ট, ২০২০
Plays-vs-Screenplays
The process of writing a screenplay is different from writing a play in many essential ways.
• The first is the difference in the use of action.
• For screenwriters, action is the primary tool of structure. But for playwrights, the primary tool
is dialogue.
• As a playwright, you need to visualize to some degree what is happening on the stage in order
to really create your dialogue, in order to create the piece. But you don’t have to communicate
that to anybody else.
• People don’t need to see your play in their mind like they do when reading a screenplay;
they need to hear it, and they need to see the big elements.
• For stage plays you get to rely on the director, because plays have this thing called
rehearsals. It is crazy that rehearsals, for the most part, don’t exist in filmmaking. Even
though some of the really great film directors do rehearse– for example Francis Ford Coppola had
a history of bringing the cast up to his estate to rehearse– most film directors don’t rehearse at all.
That’s for a very simple reason: stars cost about $20 million bucks, and who has that kind of
money to spend on rehearsal?
• https://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/plays-vs-screenplays-podcast/ (accessed on 21/08/2020)
 Plays versus Screenplays
• So you end up in this very weird process where not only you are going to
have no rehearsal, but also you are going to shoot all your scenes out
of order. So you aren’t even going to have a continuity of knowing
“this, leads to this and then this leads to this and then this leads to
this…” as you shoot your film. So it becomes much harder to track the
structure from scene to scene as you shoot, as you could if you were
rehearsing a play.
• Writing a play can take place on a much more intuitive(Spontaneously
derived from or prompted by a natural tendency) level, because you don’t
have to communicate what you’re seeing to anybody else beyond just the
very basics. But for a screenplay you need a much more substantial
infrastructure.
 Plays have fewer moving pieces than Screenplays .
Screenplays have way too many moving pieces! And this is actually part of what led me to create Seven
Act Structure for myself.
When I was a playwright, I didn’t need any way of consciously dealing with structure, because intuitively
I am pretty good at structure. So, when I was a playwright I didn’t think about things like “Okay what is
going to be the big turn or the big structural choice here?” I just got to dig in.
As a playwright, I always thought of writing like peeling the layers of an onion. I want to meet some people
who want some stuff, and as they try to get the stuff that they want, slowly I am going to get to know
who they really are and what they really want. Slowly they are going to reveal themselves to me, and to
themselves, and to each other over the course of the play. And that is a very intuitive process; it is like
getting to know someone. It’s the same thing that you do every day when you connect with someone…
You meet somebody you think, “Oh they are cool!” So, you hang out.
• You think you know who they are, then you start to learn things as you both pursue what you want in
the relationship– you start to learn who they really are, and who you really are with them, and who you
both really are in relation to each other. And changes start to happen; sometimes they are beautiful
changes, and sometimes they are catastrophic changes and usually they are both.
So that is a very intuitive process and it is one of the reasons we are able to channel it faster as playwrights.
https://www.stage32.com/lounge/screenwriting/7-Act-Structure-Breakiing-up-the-dreaded-Act-II
 Difference in audiences, theatre audiences, are much more
comfortable with metaphor than filmmaking audiences.
• So this is the other difference– the different level of tolerance for metaphor versus
pragmatic content in plays and screenplays.
• The theoretical premises underlying most discussions of cinematic metaphors are
based on Siegfried Kracauer's assertion that film does not lend itself to
metaphoric expression. According to Kracauer, film is essentially a realistic
medium which, like still photography, shows a marked affinity for recording the
objective world around us.' That is, the photographic image is a kind of
xerography, a literal copy of perceivable objects in nature. Literature, on the other
hand, is more suited to the creation of metaphors, for its medium is language - a
system of abstract notations which are symbols of objects, feelings, and
ideas. Language is conceptual, photography is perceptual. In other words, the
word "rose" is a mental "image" of something in nature, whereas a photograph of
a rose is a literal copy of the object.
 Literature vs Filming
Literature is more supple(readily adaptable) and complex than because language can
symbolize concrete objects and mental states equal ease. Through the use of
metaphors and other figurative literature can be nearly as concrete as film, and far more
abstract, the camera is restricted to those objects which can be photographed. The
literalness of photography, according to this view, makes difficult if not impossible, for how
can film link a concrete object "rose" with a non tangible emotion like ‘love’.
In the twenties by V. I. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. Pudovkin's theory of associational
montage is particularly suited to the creation of metaphors. He postulates that ideas and
emotions in film are communicated by the juxtaposition or linking of two or more shots,
not one shot alone. Thus, to return to Burns's simile for a moment, "my is like a red red
rose" could be conveyed cinematically by linking a of the loved one with a shot a shot of a
rose.
That is, any two shots can be yoked together for the poses of comparison provided that the
contents of the shots are contextually probable.
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein believed that Pudovkin was too literal-
minded in creation of metaphors. Eisenstein insisted
that film, like literature, could employ "non naturalistic"
tropes(figurative or non-literal sense) - that is, shots
which are used purely figurative manner, and not
derived from the physical setting of a movie. In
Strike, his first feature, he linked shots of workmen
being cut down by machine guns, with shots of cattle
being slaughtered. The cattle are not literally on the
scene, but are brought in strictly for metaphoric
purposes.
 Jean-Luc Godard…. Flash Forward
In the past ten years, Eisenstein's metaphoric editing techniques become
more common, particularly in the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Godard
has virtually discarded plots in his movies, and freed from rigors
of traditional continuity and dramatic "logic," he has metaphors
from a variety of sources, without regard to setting. As literature,
the tropes in Godard's films are often employed thematically, not
contextually.
Since editing destroys the continuity of time as it is actually
experienced, a number of metaphorical ideas have been derived from
artificial fragmentation. The flash-forward, for example, invariably
suggests ideas of fate and predestination, since we literally see
which have not yet occurred.
Symbols and Metaphors
Movies employ symbols with great density. Indeed, next to spoken language,
the most common method of dealing with abstract ideas in film is through
symbolism. Lighting, objects, colors, costumes, settings - all of these and
more have been exploited for symbolic purposes. The important distinction
to be made about symbolism is that it emerges unobtrusively from the
context of a film.
On the other hand, metaphors usually strike us with a sense of incongruity
(the quality of disagreeing; being unsuitable and inappropriate). A metaphor
can be defined as a comparison of some kind which is not literally true: a
term is transferred from an object or idea it ordinarily describes to another
object or idea.
The amount of space permitted within the frame is also an important source of
metaphor.
Cinematic Metaphors
The theater, in restricted to "long shots."
• Other metaphors involving movement can be formed through manipulation of the
camera's speed mechanism. Fast and slow are probably the most important sources
of tropes of this kind. motion sequences, all movements are reduced to a dreamy,
gracefulness. Time is sometimes torturously elongated, as in lucinatory nightmare.
• Fast motion is particularly suitable for metaphors dealing with chaos, lack of control,
and mechanization. When screen events take place at a much faster rate than they
do in life, the result is invariably comic.
Freeze frames - the negation of movement in film - are often used to create metaphors
dealing with time and space. By "freezing" (itself a metaphor) the contents of a shot,
a director can suggest a halting of time and physical change.
• Sometimes the moving camera can suggest metaphoric ideas. The circular motif in
this movie a kind of determinism, a closed circuit of interlinked events.
Metaphors
• Through the use of nonsynchronous sound, film-makers have metaphors by
contrasting their visuals with sounds that have no within the frame. This
contrasting technique can be used with dialogue, sound effects, and music.
Music, of course, is the most common non synchronous sound in movies. A
number of directors have used music in a "literary" way, make a direct
comment on the visuals.
• There are dozens of lenses that can alter the camera's recording scene, but
perhaps the most commonly used for metaphorical are the wide-angle lenses,
which tend to wrap the edges of image into a spare.
Even the quality of the film stock can be used metaphorically.
Certain optical effects are particularly suited to the creation metaphors.
Dissolves, double and multiple exposures, literally superimpose two or more
realities simultaneously.