CINEMATIC WRITING

May 11

Literary Cinema

CINEMATIC WRITING

There are common pitfalls in cinematically presenting any creative art—choppily editing a dance sequence, reducing the immense trial and error of creating visual art to montage—but no practice is more prone to depictions that are schmaltzy, incompetent, or thuddingly literal than writing. There are many films about writing; there are few good films about writing. Perhaps this is because writers are often incapable of explaining how inspiration comes to them. Or perhaps it is because when inspiration comes it does so gradually, lacking a dramatic moment that plays well on screen. Or perhaps still it is because the writing process is, by its very nature, uncinematic. Listed here are five films that locate and successfully depict emotional and creative truths about writing.

His Girl Friday, 1940, Howard Hawks

Between the whiplash dialogue (this film still holds the records of the most words spoken on screen per minute!) and the absolutely firecracker lover-to-enemies-to-lovers-and-enemies romance it’s easy to forget that this is a story about writing. Or more specifically: editing. Cary Grant and Rossalind Russell arguments about their professional and romantic history, amending and correcting and revising and redacting their version of “the facts”, is as honest a depiction of the writer-editor relationship as I’ve ever seen. What is editorial collaboration if not ego, flashes of anger, total stubbornness—and the inevitable realisation that the other person is probably right.

Shirley, 2020, Josephine Decker

Anything but a straightforward biopic, Shirley reimagines the life of Shirley Jackson as a Shirley Jackson story. The Jackson household creaks and groans, dust lilts in whiskeyed rays of sun, echoing We Have Always Lived in this Castle and The Haunting of Hill House. Bennington’s campus is home to familiar-yet-strange social dynamics and rituals—as if the staff or students could devolve into a recreation of ‘The Lottery’ at any given moment. And Jackson is like one of her characters: wirey, unpredictable, and full of furrows. Blending the “fictional” and the “real”, Shirley sidesteps the cliche of epiphanic inspiration. Instead it comes from everywhere—writing bleeds in through the seams of life, and life through the seams of writing.

Bright Star, 2008, Jane Campion

Calling good cinematography “visual poetry” is much like describing an action sequence as “balletic”. Lazy. Yet Bright Star—Jane Campion’s second great film about writing after the criminally underrated 1990 Janet Frame biopic, An Angel at My Table—is in a phrase, well, visual poetry. In the film we rarely see Keats write, nor do we need to. The script brings his romance with Fanny Brawn to life, and Campion’s camera shows why it translated into poetry. There’s one shot in particular, of Brawn reading a letter from Keats alone in a meadow of blue flowers, that transcends my descriptive abilities. “Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou—”

The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014, Wes Anderson

All Wes Anderson films are literary, but none as self-consciously nor more successfully than The Grand Budapest Hotel. By the time you’ve dived through all (count ‘em) four framing devices— it follows a girl reading a travelogue (1), written by an older author (2) recounting their visit as a younger man to the Grand Budapest Hotel (3), where they met the reclusive owner, Zero Mustafa, who recounts how he came to own the property (4!)—the narrative has become so distallied by writerly tricks and (mis)remembrances that it’s unclear where reality ends and literary embellishment begins. And that is exactly the point. Writing at its best has the ability to recover and preserve lost histories. Take for instance Agatha, Zero’s lost love. Despite the fact that he can barely talk about her to the author, in his writing she comes through in startling detail, recreated and immortalised.

Whisper of the Heart, 1995, Yoshifumi Kondo

There’s a scene towards the end of this film that I often think about when I’m in the process of redrafting a work-in-progress. The teenage protagonist, Shizuku, finishes the first draft of her novel and asks the elderly man, Shirō, who inspired it, to be the first reader. He agrees and tries to accept it from her. She withholds, insisting that he has to read it right now, in one sitting. He agrees. While Shirō reads, Shizuku sits outside, anxious, fretting. By the time he’s finished she’s convinced herself that it’s awful, that he hates it. Shirō calms her, and explains that her draft isn’t bad, it’s just rough: “Once you’ve found your gems, you have to polish them. It takes a lot of hard work.”

Written by Joshua Sorensen