Day four began with a round up of significant points from the previous session. Viewed the beginning and ending scenes from Hitchcoks's Vertigo. The dramatic structures of the story as adapted to the screen has been discussed in detail.
Robert McKee's book on Substance of a Story has been the rallying point to all discussions related to story writing. Mckee wrote from the perspective of cinema, a medium that required a different orientation to the story. The audience has a pact, so to speak, with the director; they have agreed to come together for exactly a fixed amount of time in which the director displays his skills in riveting their attention to the screen for that duration. The screenplay writer aims to satisfy the needs and expectations of a fly-by viewer who wants to be entertained rather than enlightened, give over to maudlin emotions over incisive thinking, suspends his disbelief in order to experience a variety of thoughts and feelings over quiet deliberation and so on.
However, what is being emphasized in the seminar, and rightly so, is the basic structure of story-telling which applies with little variation to all genres of story.
Many novels have been dramatized for the screen; however, authors have always felt the loss of the substance of the story, for melodrama is all-important in the movie.
In any case, now the focus of the seminar is shifting to our own writings - novels and short stories - and this brings back to center stage the raison d'etre of the seminar - to write and review what is written and to write again.
All said and done, kudos to Markus for carrying it off with such authority on analysis and bringing the craft - art apart - of story telling closer home.
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