IV

esting and possibly more valid portrayal of human attempts to carry out their objectives) often evidences what happens when "things go wrong."
To keep manufacturing characters untouched by internal malfunctions, unmarked by cultural codification, free of ideological inference, independent of all legal, social, and economic structures, and to make them the originators of likely outcomes, is just a little too expedient. On the contrary, characters do not have to be of one mold. Some aspects of one's personality may contradict others. Multiple internal voices may be present, not all of them contemporary or agreeable. Characters can be undermined by the heterogeneity of language, the identity of others revealed as socially constructed. Finally all kinds of unplanned consequences may ripple out of anyone's actions, effects that may ricochet or hit back like a boomerang while one's back is turned. A human being can thus be conceived, and a character represented, in Bergson's elegant metaphor, as "the thread that holds the pearls together." 65 Or, to use Feyerabend's language, it should be possible to see characters as "loosely connected parts . . . [functioning] as transit stations for equally loosely connected events, such as dreams, thoughts, emotions, [even] divine interventions."66 In other words, more effort than before must be directed toward ascertaining the real conditions of existence which modulate how we in fact live. And we need to make clear the gaps, the deficiencies, and the profound contradictions in the personalities of the men and women who populate our films. In the end, this would provides us with richer characters and a larger, more complex canvas.
XI
Character is behavior, we are told, and "behavior is action."67 Although all kinds of actions are theoretically possible, the screenplay model focuses on conflict. "The action story," we are told, "is about engaging in combat.''68 Protagonists in other words battle it out with opponents. We are so used to this presentation of events by now that it takes an outsider like Raoul Ruiz to point out that the paradigm posits a state of "constant hostility" between people and that "the criteria according to which most of the characters behave in today's movies are drawn from one particular culture (that of the USA)."69 Ruiz reminds us therefore that there are cultural presumptions at work underneath the claimed universality of the model. Aggressivity, competition, and pushing aside those who stand in your way

 



Film Production Theory2000
Film Production Theory2000
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 126

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