The In-betweenness of the Screenplay from Screen Idea to Film

Description

When screenwriting how-to and manuals became popular at the end of the 1970’s and early 80’s (think Syd Field, Robert McKee and many others) this also triggered the interest of film and literary scholars for script analysis as an academic practice. At first these approaches referred to familiar terrain. The screenplay considered as a text might then be defined through its ‘scriptness’, a combination of an autonomous literary text that nevertheless, as Pier Paolo Pasolini as early as the late 1960’s described it as a text, ‘longing to become another text’. Despite these efforts to elevate the status of the screenplay to a more or less autonomous literary artefact, comparable to other transitionally charactarized texts such as drama, the volatile and ephemeral character of the screenplay remained an essential part of its onthology (see e.g. Winston 1973, Faber 1978, Vermeesch 2004, Van Nypelseer, Nannicelli, Sternberg).
Since the early XXIst C. research into the nature and functioning of the script broadened the concept of what a screenplay exactly is (Maras, Price, Nelmes). Ian W. Macdonald (2013) redefined the screenplay as a process in which not one instant or version can be marked as ‘the’ script or the ‘final draft’. This launched a new approach toward the research of and the status of the screenplay: as an intermedial, fluid and liminal form. This approach also questions authorship: a great number of actors in the filmmaking process contribute to the development of the screen idea: writers, producers, directors, editors, etc.
I will provide some striking examples to illustrate this and also plead for a new genetic approaches to the study of screenwriting.

Periode	20 okt 2018
Evenementstitel	Intermediality Now: Remapping In-Betweenness
Evenementstype	Conference
Locatie	Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Mate van erkenning	International