”Brunnsdjup”: a part of the artistic research cluster project Theme-driven storytelling.
Aristotle (1994) defined drama as a progressive narrative with a definitive beginning, middle and end, a narrative whose actions logically follow one from another, through probability and/or necessity. This is the tradition which I have adhered to throughout my artistic career, as a researcher, a teacher, screenwriter and script doctor. However, from Bertold Brecht and onwards, this causal dramaturgy (“the Hollywood model”) has received substantial criticism, on ideological as well as on artistic grounds. It has been accused of creating passive and non-reflective audiences, and of misrepresenting reality by picturing race-, gender- and class-structured as secondary to the transcendence of individual will. Against this, the open/episodic dramaturgy of a theme-based narration, held together not by causal logic but by the “vanishing point” of theme and meaning, is believed to create truer and more artistically original films and stories:
However, in my eyes this is more often said than actually proved. Furthermore, the epic/open dramaturgy has traditionally been held up seen as an anti-model, a negation of the causal dramaturgy.
In this artistic research cluster project, I collaborate with the directors Maria Hedman Hvitfeldt and Mamdooh Afdile to explore theme-based storytelling through working with two different scriptwriting approaches referred to as the “Epic” and “causal/classical” dramaturgy, respectively. Using the input and researched (extended) family stories of Maria Hedman Hvitfeldt as inspiration, I have written two different screenplays, each with a maximum of 15 pages in the traditional screenwriting format (the normal maximum for participating in short film festivals). In the first, “Causal” one, I base my writing on the principles of the classical Aristotelean dramaturgy, with the unity of action, time and space, and with an active tragic protagonist who uncovers (analyses) the world. In the other, I instead use the principles of thematic/epic dramaturgy, as formulated by Kerstin Stutterheim and Marja-Riitta Koivumäki. A dramaturgy where the narrative is not progressive but “serpentine” – more of a pilgrimage than a fight – and where a reactive Central Self becomes a witness to the (non-chronological) action.
The causal screenplay’s text and process work as the point of comparison for the theme-based screenplay’s text and process: to my knowledge, this is the first artistic research to include a systematic comparison of two different scriptwriting approaches of the very same story.
Stockholm: Stockholms konstnärliga högskola , 2023.