Teaching Screenplay in India

7/31/2019 Teaching Screenplay in India

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T his paper was presented at the F irst A ll-India S creenwriters C onference, F ilm & T V Institu te of India -Pune,

in 2006

TEACHING TH E CRAFT OF SCREE NWRITIN G IN INDIA

Indranil Chakravarty

While there is a plethora o f guideboo ks on screenplay-writing in the tradition o f Hollywoodcinema, no such textbook exists for the I ndian cinema despite the fact th at more films are made

in this country than anywhere else in the world. While it is not difficult to surmise the reasons forsuch an anomaly, it may raise serious methodological issues related to the teaching of

screenwriting in the Indian tradition. While Hollywood cinema may look highly structured andcodified in the same vein as the western symphon y, the In dian screenplay is somewhat akin to the

Indian raga with its basic guiding principles but resolutely denying, or lacking, precise codificationas understood in the western sense. So, how can one set a criteria of assessment of the

effectiveness of a certain narrative structure? Do es it imply an impossibility of con ceptualising the

Indian cinema? Are we condemned to judge ourselves based on borrowed parameters? Is it,therefore, a futile effort to develop a methodo logy for teaching the craft to In dian students ofscreenplay?

In other words, do we need to think of a specifically Indian way of teaching screenplay-writing?

Yes. We need our own way of teaching simply because our situation in the entire world, in relationto film culture, is unique. It is needless to elaborate h ere in how many ways Indian cinema is

unique in the who le world. Unfortunately, however, the only way for us to engage ourselves in adiscussion about ways of teaching screenplay-writing is to bounce off our ideas against the Syd

Field-ian method simply because that is the only available metho d that h as been elaborated andpracticed in America and other parts of the world.

If there are no b ooks on screenwriting Ind ian style, neither are there boo ks on h ow to write it in

the Euro pean style or Latin American style though they all have clearly different cinematictraditions of their own. D oes this imply that the H ollywoodian/ Aristotelian way of telling stories

applies to all of them and is actually the only right way of do ing it?

Some of the key issues involved in teaching a course are as follows:

Can writing be taught? What can be taught and cannot be taught?

What is the role of intuition in writing and why do we need to learn certain rules? D o great writers

know their rules innately? Will awareness of rules make someone a better writer?

Syd Field himself was a disastrous scriptwriter. What does this mean? Is an awareness of rulesrestrictive? What purpose do they fulfill?

Are there guiding rules for writing specifically in the Indian context? D o the rules of the game varyaccording to the specific In dian culture o ne belongs to (comm ercial/ art; Tamil, Bengali,

Malayalam)? Is it possible to talk of common principles across cultures within India?

Certainly, Indian cinema is not a monolith in terms of its structure, content or language. While thepopular Hindi cinema and the different regional variations are characterised by idiosyncratic forms


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that emerge out of our own cultural experience, there are many strands within Indian cinema,

including some of the greatest films made in the country, that are structurally very close to theHollywoodian/ Aristotelian mod el. Without getting into essentialist arguements about a

supposedly unique and continuous dramatic tradition, it may be more instructive to see Indiancinema as a hybrid form born out of several influences and exigencies and examine the genealogy

of specific concepts (such as melodrama, realism, mythology) in the context of Indian cinemaand explore its different manifestations in the works of filmm akers with diverse convictions and

orientations.

Any person teaching screenplay-writing in India is likely to have some problems with the SydFieldian approach . Firstly, he app lies Aristotelian principles to Hollywood films in a totalising

way. However, his equating of Aristotle and Hollywood as if they were synonymous raises furtherquestions. This is what a Syd Field follower has to say to students of screenplay:

< < Aristotle was the first to put the storytellers trade tricks down on paper. The beginningmiddle-end concept is in Platos R epublic but the elaboration of this insight you will find in

Aristotles Poetics. For more demystification, buy that slim volume, read it twice, then pick it up

every three or four years and read it during your screenwriting career. Those are the few rules wehave and need.> >

What Mr F ield/ Mackee are obscuring here is that there m ay be several other ways of applying

Aristotle to cinema. Secondly, in many of his books, the index of films that are referred, have noreferences at all, to n on-American films. Rarely, if ever, are there references to the Am erican

independent cinema. Its claims to universality are therefore, highly suspect. Thirdly, they belong toa culture where myth is significantly absent in everyday living and when Francis Ford Copolla uses

myth in A pocalypse N ow, he has to make a very conscious intellectual effort to reach out to G raeco-Roman myth, to th e extent that he places the volumes of Jesse Westons F rom R itual to R omance and

Sir James Frazers T he G olden B ough on the table of Marlon Brando in the film, an army officer who

has turned to mysticism and has gone mad. It is needless to mention that India, myth is a livingtradition and it underlies much of our contemporary storytelling, in cinema and elsewhere. Oureducation thus has to find ways of incorporating that experience and explore the depths of our

minds where consciousness occasionally reaches down. Perhaps, for us, we have to make nospecial effort to reach out to m yths not only terms of content/ story material but also in terms

of narrative structures.

Is there any specifically Indian way of telling stories? D oes it help an Indian screenwriter toknow of a distinctive aesthetic tradition from N atyashast ra, etc and the larger world of folk

narratives and Indian literature. Certainly, a sense of contact with tradition is key to our sense ofidentity. It does not mean that the background material (N atyashastra) may have any direct

relationship with current cinematic narratives. If the indigeneous narrative traditions are not partof the scriptwriters lived experience, it would lose emotional value. In that case, hankering after an

elusive Indian-ness just because it is Indian, is one o f the great dangers of such an education.

However, it is important fo r students to know th e historical process thro ugh which Ind ian cinema,particularly the popular cinema, took on its peculiar, idiosyncratic form. This will make us aware

how important it is for us to have an awareness of the ro le of H ollywoodian principles within th eframework of our hybrid language. All artists writers, filmmakers, dancers want and need a

tradition that they can belong it even if it means at the end to reject it.


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How important is organicity to us as an organising principle? When we look at our mostacclaimed films (as in Rays body of work), they are remarkably organic. Nothing is wasted,

nothing is in excess, even th e smallest prop is made dynamically central to the plot . Was Ray closerto th e H ollywoodian style than others? In fact, he was deeply westernised which he himself

acknowledged but his western sensibilities (love fo r m inimalism, o rganicity and his elaborateplanning before venturing out to shoot) were simultaneously, deeply imbued with an

Indian/ Bengali sensibility, no t only in terms of subject matter and locations but alsounderstanding of characters, their motivations, their actions and their transformation within the

framework of the story. In o ther words, Rays cinema problematises our unwillingness to accept theHollywoodian screenp lay as universal.

Though organicity is favoured in Ghataks major works, his films, on the oth er hand, refuse theprinciple of minimalism and aggressively assert the creative power of excess as an aesthetic

principle. O n th is count it is easy to call G hatak more Ind ian than Ray (in a very narrow sense ofthe word) but is our culture necessarily a culture of excess so much so that we would want it to

become a rallying point fo r our cinematic identity? Ekta Kapoor would love to assert that.

The assertion of excess becomes relevant when we get into questions about th e claim to realism

and the use of melodrama. Allied to it is the important distinction between emotion andsentiment. Look at a film like Kurosawas Dodeskaden and one encounters a film where emotion

borders on sentimentalism as it were the other side of the same coin. Ho w exactly does Kurosawamaintain th at balance on the side of emot ion without allowing it to slide to sentimentality. These

are conceptual discussions in class that may clear a students mind of certain key issues that willhaunt them all their lives, particularly in the Indian scenario.

A course in screenwriting needs to have a basic emphasis on watching some of the well-crafted

films and analysing them strictly from the point of view of screenplay structure. The diversity of

approaches to storytelling will thus become clear through demonstration. That is to say, throughanalysis, one will realise the different narrative structures without raising issues to a theoreticallevel. Do ing film analysis from the po int of view of Film Studies and doing it for a film

practitioner are vastly different approaches. O bviously, one has to stick to the latter appro ach.

A practitioner learns things only by doing it. Thus the appro ach has to b e: write, rewrite and edit.Work on more and more drafts. If Hollywood is to be emulated, it should be on this count. An

average film there goes for 12 drafts. There is no doubt that a screenplay always gets better witheach draft. The imagination is a muscle just like any other; to perform better, you have flex it

more often, says the writer Garcia Marquez.

Watching more and more films critically and closely, is certainly one of the important componentsof a screenwriting programme. Classical Hollywoodian cinema needs to be contrasted with other

models of storytelling. A film structured on episodic lines (such a L a D olce V ita) actually subverttraditional cinema because organicity is no t the highest virtue at all. In A pocalypse N ow, another film

having an episodic structure, the episodes can be moved around or even deleted withouthampering the storyline. In L a D olce V ita , however, it is not possible to reshuffle the episodes

without making the story unintelligible. There is no better occasion to reflect on ones owncinematic Self than through a dialogue with the cinematic-Other.


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The aspiring writer also needs to have a certain understanding of the creative process itself. There

are rules in our p ersonal lives to which experience largely conform s. O ne needs a lot o f solitudearound oneself to figure out th ose rules within oneself.

In scriptwriting, one of the key skills is to discern the actual potential of an idea, not only in terms

of its dramatic possibilities but also in terms of its market-friendliness. In that sense, its a bit likean oil-exploration exercise. And the teachers job is to provide stimuli to encourage students to

read. But, as Albert E instein said, Imagination is more impo rtant than knowledge.

A screenplay has no independent existence unless it is made. In that sense, an awareness of themarket is particularly important in film institutes where students are actually insulated from such

forces during their student years. In pract ice, we find that it actually takes a lot to instill the skill ofwriting an effective logline, a captivating synop sis and developing the art of p itching a story anddeveloping a certain rigorous discipline in writing, moving from a step outline to the final draft. In

fact, there is hardly anything called a final draft. (A screenplay is never complete; there is a pointwhere the writer just gives up.) A screenp lay class has to simulate certain market situations. As

Vishal Bharadwaj movingly said to a group of film students recently, Learn the film trade, not the

trick s of the trade.

In other words, if the American method of training in screenplaywriting is applied with a certaincritical distance, a certain awareness of Indian cinemas uniqueness, the tools of Syd Field and

Robert Mckee and oth ers can be hugely beneficial. Amo ng the ob vious things, the classical ThreeArt structure will have to be deployed with the awareness that we have an interval in the middle

and we need to leave enough hook for audiences to come back after their samosas or popcorns.O ne of our un ique issues is how to get to an item numb er or cut to Switzerland logically. O r

rather, organically.

There is a strong feeling among cineastes that the language of cinema has been changing

significantly over the past few years. However, there is a mismatch/ disconnect between h owstudents are being trained and the reality of the current professional scenario. This is not aproblem specific to India but all around the world.

O ur film institutions have played a key role in creating auteurist notions of cinema as

hierarchically superior to oth er kinds of cinema. The net effect of this appro ach has been decidedlynegative because it has created a caste system not only within the filmmaking comm unity / film

industry but also in the society at large. It implied that one form of cinema was more valid thanothers. Issues of assessment were confused with questions of cultural validity. An important part

of our popular culture was thus sidelined o r erased from our critical discourse about cinema. Inother words, when students started watching European art cinema, they started looking at popular

cinema with contempt and thus stayed away from it. They could neither be integrated within theindustry nor could they carve out a space for the alternative cinema. A contemporary film

programme has to rectify that error by being more inclusive, by giving as much importance topopular, industrial cinema as to a more sensitive, personal cinema. In th is regard, our central

reference point should be Shakespeare who incorporated every commercial element possible(ghosts, royalty, murder, revenge, intrigue, blood on the stage, duels, etc) within his personal

vision. A tall task, certainly.

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Teaching Screenplay in India