1 This paper was presented at the First All-India Screenwriters Conference, Film & TV Institute of India -Pune, in 2006

TEACHING THE CRAFT OF SCREENWRITING IN INDIA Indranil Chakravarty

While there is a plethora of guidebooks on screenplay-writing in the tradition of Hollywood cinema, no such textbook exists for the Indian cinema despite the fact that more films are made in this country than anywhere else in the world. While it is not difficult to surmise the reasons for such 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 and codified in the same vein as the western symphony, the Indian screenplay is somewhat akin to the Indian raga with its basic guiding principles but resolutely denying, or lacking, precise codification as understood in the western sense. So, how can one set a criteria of assessment of the effectiveness of a certain narrative structure? Does it imply an impossibility of conceptualising the Indian cinema? Are we condemned to judge ourselves based on borrowed parameters? Is it, therefore, a futile effort to develop a methodology for teaching the craft to Indian students of screenplay? 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 relation to film culture, is unique. It is needless to elaborate here in how many ways Indian cinema is unique in the whole world. Unfortunately, however, the only way for us to engage ourselves in a discussion 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 method that has been elaborated and practiced in America and other parts of the world. If there are no books on screenwriting Indian style, neither are there books on how to write it in the European style or Latin American style though they all have clearly different cinematic traditions of their own. Does this imply that the Hollywoodian/ Aristotelian way of telling stories applies to all of them and is actually the only right way of doing 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? Do 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 rules restrictive? What purpose do they fulfill? Are there guiding rules for writing specifically in the Indian context? Do the rules of the game vary according to the specific Indian culture one belongs to (commercial/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 the popular Hindi cinema and the different regional variations are characterised by idiosyncratic forms

2 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 the Hollywoodian/Aristotelian model. Without getting into essentialist arguements about a supposedly unique and continuous dramatic tradition, it may be more instructive to see Indian cinema 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 cinema and explore its different manifestations in the works of filmmakers with diverse convictions and orientations. Any person teaching screenplay-writing in India is likely to have some problems with the Syd Fieldian approach. Firstly, he applies Aristotelian principles to Hollywood films in a totalising way. However, his equating of Aristotle and Hollywood as if they were synonymous raises further questions. 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 beginning middle-end concept is in Platos Republic 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 we have and need.>> What Mr Field/Mackee are obscuring here is that there may be several other ways of applying Aristotle to cinema. Secondly, in many of his books, the index of films that are referred, have no references at all, to non-American films. Rarely, if ever, are there references to the American independent cinema. Its claims to universality are therefore, highly suspect. Thirdly, they belong to a culture where myth is significantly absent in everyday living and when Francis Ford Copolla uses myth in Apocalypse Now, he has to make a very conscious intellectual effort to reach out to GraecoRoman myth, to the extent that he places the volumes of Jesse Westons From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazers The Golden Bough 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 living tradition and it underlies much of our contemporary storytelling, in cinema and elsewhere. Our education 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 no special effort to reach out to myths not only terms of content/ story material but also in terms of narrative structures. Is there any specifically Indian way of telling stories? Does it help an Indian screenwriter to know of a distinctive aesthetic tradition from Natyashastra, etc and the larger world of folk narratives and Indian literature. Certainly, a sense of contact with tradition is key to our sense of identity. It does not mean that the background material (Natyashastra) may have any direct relationship with current cinematic narratives. If the indigeneous narrative traditions are not part of 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 of the great dangers of such an education. However, it is important for students to know the historical process through which Indian 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 role of Hollywoodian principles within the framework 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.

How important is organicity to us as an organising principle? When we look at our most acclaimed films (as in Rays body of work), they are remarkably organic. Nothing is wasted, nothing is in excess, even the smallest prop is made dynamically central to the plot. Was Ray closer to the Hollywoodian style than others? In fact, he was deeply westernised which he himself acknowledged but his western sensibilities (love for minimalism, organicity and his elaborate planning before venturing out to shoot) were simultaneously, deeply imbued with an Indian/Bengali sensibility, not only in terms of subject matter and locations but also understanding of characters, their motivations, their actions and their transformation within the framework of the story. In other words, Rays cinema problematises our unwillingness to accept the Hollywoodian screenplay as universal. Though organicity is favoured in Ghataks major works, his films, on the other hand, refuse the principle of minimalism and aggressively assert the creative power of excess as an aesthetic principle. On this count it is easy to call Ghatak more Indian than Ray (in a very narrow sense of the word) but is our culture necessarily a culture of excess so much so that we would want it to become a rallying point for our cinematic identity? Ekta Kapoor would love to assert that. The assertion of excess becomes relevant when we get into questions about the claim to realism and the use of melodrama. Allied to it is the important distinction between emotion and sentiment. 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. How exactly does Kurosawa maintain that balance on the side of emotion without allowing it to slide to sentimentality. These are conceptual discussions in class that may clear a students mind of certain key issues that will haunt 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, through analysis, one will realise the different narrative structures without raising issues to a theoretical level. Doing film analysis from the point of view of Film Studies and doing it for a film practitioner are vastly different approaches. Obviously, one has to stick to the latter approach. A practitioner learns things only by doing it. Thus the approach has to be: 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 with each 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 components of a screenwriting programme. Classical Hollywoodian cinema needs to be contrasted with other models of storytelling. A film structured on episodic lines (such a La Dolce Vita) actually subvert traditional cinema because organicity is not the highest virtue at all. In Apocalypse Now, another film having an episodic structure, the episodes can be moved around or even deleted without hampering the storyline. In La Dolce Vita, however, it is not possible to reshuffle the episodes without making the story unintelligible. There is no better occasion to reflect on ones own cinematic Self than through a dialogue with the cinematic-Other.

4 The aspiring writer also needs to have a certain understanding of the creative process itself. There are rules in our personal lives to which experience largely conforms. One needs a lot of solitude around oneself to figure out those 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 like an oil-exploration exercise. And the teachers job is to provide stimuli to encourage students to read. But, as Albert Einstein said, Imagination is more important than knowledge. A screenplay has no independent existence unless it is made. In that sense, an awareness of the market is particularly important in film institutes where students are actually insulated from such forces during their student years. In practice, we find that it actually takes a lot to instill the skill of writing an effective logline, a captivating synopsis and developing the art of pitching a story and developing 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 point where the writer just gives up.) A screenplay 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 tricks of the trade. In other words, if the American method of training in screenplaywriting is applied with a certain critical distance, a certain awareness of Indian cinemas uniqueness, the tools of Syd Field and Robert Mckee and others can be hugely beneficial. Among the obvious things, the classical Three Art 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. One of our unique issues is how to get to an item number or cut to Switzerland logically. Or 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 how students are being trained and the reality of the current professional scenario. This is not a problem specific to India but all around the world. Our film institutions have played a key role in creating auteurist notions of cinema as hierarchically superior to other kinds of cinema. The net effect of this approach has been decidedly negative because it has created a caste system not only within the filmmaking community / film industry but also in the society at large. It implied that one form of cinema was more valid than others. Issues of assessment were confused with questions of cultural validity. An important part of our popular culture was thus sidelined or erased from our critical discourse about cinema. In other 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 the industry 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 to popular, industrial cinema as to a more sensitive, personal cinema. In this 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.