Sensory screenwriting: poetics of excess in fiction feature screenplays

• Grant number: 19/10787-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2019
• End date: April 08, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Esther Império Hamburger
• Grantee: Éri Ramos Sarmet dos Santos
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 22/10294-0 - Unproductive writing: body, sensation and excess in screenplays, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

This dissertation investigates screenwriting through a historical, theoretical, and critical approach that understands it as both practice and discourse (MARAS, 2009). To this end, I trace a genealogy of the feature-length fiction screenplay form, examining the cultural, economic, and social transformations that contributed to its constitution - from reading and writing practices in modern Europe and colonial English America to the contemporary normative poetics institutionalized by screenwriting manuals and disseminated by their "gurus." I argue that the rigidity imposed by these conventions significantly reduces the artistic potential of the screenplay by stripping away precisely the elements that link it to audiovisual language. In contrast to the notion of the screenplay as a functional tool, I propose understanding it as a space for the anticipation of mise-en-scène, capable of constructing atmospheres and evoking affects. My hypothesis is that the screenplay can engage its readers through words that long to become images, sounds, movements, sensations - a mode of writing I call "sensory screenwriting" or "screenwriting of sensations." This type of writing challenges the orthodoxy of the manuals and mobilizes readers/viewers through narrative, stylistic, and discursive strategies that appeal to the body, especially to emotions and the senses, primarily through procedures involving sound, mise-en-scène, expressions of interiority, and non-verbal behavior. Accordingly, I argue that sensory screenwriting is grounded in a poetics of excess, an aesthetic and analytical category that is central to this dissertation. Through analyses of the screenplays for Friendly Beast (2017) and The Father's Shadow (2018), by Gabriela Amaral Almeida; Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), by Céline Sciamma; and Moonlight (2016), by Barry Jenkins, I demonstrate how writers from different production contexts destabilize the normative paradigms of screenwriting. The investigation focuses on the scene text, with emphasis on the so-called commentary mode (STERNBERG, 1997). By exploring the interaction between the body and a language that is simultaneously literary and filmic, this research not only repositions the screenplay as a space of aesthetic experimentation but also proposes new ways of thinking, practicing, and teaching screenwriting.