I’ll start by saying that this is an idea in development. My hunch is that there’s a lot to work with here, because the premise is based on drawing from an art form with a short but rich history, which includes thousands of things from which to draw.
The premise is this: films can be used to improve your writing, give you a new perspective on it, or help you experiment with it.
I’m not sure whether this is a unique idea, but I can’t find a dedicated study on using films as a means to tinker with the craft of writing fiction, and I think there’s potential here.
I’ve nurtured this idea since high school, because for a time I lived and breathed the movies. In place of english, I took film class (oh, the irony), which somehow counted as an english credit. I skipped school to study films independently. My activity of choice in my free time was making short films of my own. And I was 100% convinced I was going to go on to become a professional filmmaker.
I still don’t know what happened, because I now average a movie a month and care much, much more about writing fiction than I do scripts or the movies. But this idea has persisted and I’d like to start exploring it through actual application.
Let’s start by studying action and movement in storytelling with Kurosawa and an example from Hemingway.
If you don’t know, Kurosawa is one of the most influential film directors of all time, and you can watch a wonderful introduction to his work, and the movement in his films, here:
Now let’s take the famous and oft-analyzed opening from A Farewell to Arms.
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”
Read this as many times as you need to get a feel for it. Because we’re looking at action, at movement, we’re going to be looking at the verbs that connotate movement or direction, specifically.
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down* the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.“
*Not a verb but shows movement.
This paragraph is rich with movement. It gives us a lot to visualize. These words serve purpose. The village could have easily sat across the river and the plain to the mountains, but instead the village looks across the river. There’s not just water in the channels, there’s water moving in the channels, and swiftly, no less.
Troops went by the house and down the road. They raised dust. Leaves stirred by the breeze are falling and soldiers are marching down the road.
Note also it’s a study in contrasting movement. Troops went down the road and raised dust. Dust is rising and leaves are falling.
Let’s look at examples of filmic movement from the Kurosawa video.
The narrator, Tony Zhou, mentions 4 kinds of movement that Kurosawa liked.
1. The movement of nature (@ 1:20)
2. The movement of groups (@ 1:55)
3. The movement of individuals (@ 2:28)
4. Movement of the camera (@ 3:00)
Our Hemingway example clearly has the first two. Nature is moving, a group of soldiers is moving.
In the video essay Zhou notes that Kurosawa liked to exaggerate the movement of his characters. Let’s add a young boy to the Hemingway scene and see if we can gauge how he’s feeling through movement.
There’s no interior monologue here, no telling the reader how he’s feeling, because a film, visually, can’t do that.
“Through the slats in a wood house light fell on a boy. The boy looked through the slats at soldiers marching along the road in front of the sun, and the soldiers blocking the sun and casting shadows that stretched toward him looked at the house, and the boy crouched down and hugged his knees, and the light fell on his brown eye that looked, that saw, and dust was swirling now around the feet of the soldiers as they stared at the house. The boy dropped to his stomach, he closed his eyes. He listened for the footsteps of the soldiers.“
What I tried to do here was keep the movement of nature and the movement of a group while adding the movement of an individual. And I wanted the reader to interpret how that individual might be feeling based off of movement alone.
Now we come to a challenge: movement of the camera.
Clearly there is no camera involved in writing fiction. But the point of using film as a means to enhance our writing is to use it as a springboard for new ideas and exercises. So let’s see if we can get something interesting from this.
“What’s important here is that every camera move has a clear beginning, middle, and end.”
Ok, these are single takes, so we’ll take that to mean one sentence. We’re going to track a physical movement with a beginning, middle and end in one continuous sentence, and we want to get as much information from this sentence as possible.
“Running toward the edge of the cliff he leapt, spinning through the air and falling down, down, down and getting smaller from the view at the top of the cliff—then a tremendous splash, water flying toward the sky and he was under that water, fish darting between his legs and around his chest, and he swam through that magic water for what seemed hours, till at last the world called him back and he floated, dazed and happy, back to the wavering light of the surface.“
I tried to give different perspectives on this one character in this one sentence, as we might see in a movie: maybe a tracking shot as he’s running toward the cliff edge, then he’s far from the camera, perhaps a closeup then of the fish darting around his chest, another tracking shot as he’s swimming.
Let’s try something similar by tinkering again with Hemingway’s world.
“Imposing themselves upon the village stood the soldiers, who were shadows, on the hilltop above the boy, who watched the shadows descend, uniform, down the hillside, and they were getting larger and now smaller, because the boy was running, running through the houses of the village that he’d known all his life, houses now blurred.“
Maybe it isn’t perfect, and I feel I lost a bit of the Hemingway feel, but there’s stuff to work with here.
We can try to capture a visual power in our writing, filmic images. And we can look to the movies for other ideas, too.
For example, how can the rhythm of cuts in a film compare to sentence length, edits to punctuation? Can you capture the mood of a film through prose? And so on and so on.
I think there are things to be mined here, and I’ll likely explore it more in the future.