Writing film: making inferences whenviewing and readingMark Reid

Abstract

This article discusses the ways in which short films onvideo might be integrated into the English curriculum.I argue that shorts can be used to scaffold writing, andfurther than this, that students can learn a great dealabout narrative form by shuttling between the twomedia of print and film. The article focuses on a‘worked example’, being an account of an INSETsession using a short film called Father and Daughter.

Short films: a rationale

Last year the bfi (British Film Institute) produced apack called Story Shorts, a guide to using short films tosupport and extend the literacy, and wider, curriculumat KS2. As follow-ups to this, we are about to releasepacks for KS1 and KS3, the latter called ScreeningShorts. In this article, I will be examining material fromScreening Shorts. So, why is bfi Education interested inshort films?

Our remit at the bfi is to promote understanding,appreciation and experience of a diverse range ofmoving imagematerial. However, in England, the onlystatutory requirement that moving images are studiedat all comes in the National Curriculum Orders forEnglish (DfEE, 1999) at KS3 & 4, under the Readingrequirements. In order to encourage teachers to gobeyond this specific reference, therefore, we havedeveloped a powerful rationale for advocating theuse of short films which goes something like this:

First of all, short films offer complete, apprehensiblenarratives – whole texts – in a five-minute or soviewing. Second, they tell stories in a medium that iscloser to the everyday experience of many childrenthan reading print, and third, the medium of film usesa wider variety of modes in its narrative presentation –music, voice, gesture, costume, setting – and thuspotentially offers access to stories to children with awider range of learning styles. These last two pointsare particularly important for cultural diversity in theEnglish classroom: short films without dialogueremove verbal language as one of the barriers tolearning of some groups of pupils. They also offerportrayals of other cultures which are visually acces-sible. A final reason is that we want to encourage

pupils to study bothmedia – print and film – alongsideeach other, as we believe both highlight the specificityof their respective forms, as well as having much incommon in their practices and conventions. And thereis a pedagogic value in this final rationale, sinceplacing film and print versions of the same or similarnarratives against each other opens up a space forpupils to gain an explicit understanding of the ways inwhich texts operate.

I want now to look at how one film text in particularencourages us to infer meanings, and compare it withhow print versions of the same narrative mightoperate. The film I am going to refer to is called Fatherand Daughter, and will be included in Screening Shorts.

Father and Daughter: the movie

Made in 2000, Father and Daughter is a Dutch-UK co-production, directed by Dutch film-maker MichaelDudok DeWit. It is an eight-minute long drawnanimation, which tells a simple story: a small girl andher father cycle together to a dyke one morning fromwhere he rows away in a small boat. She returns thatevening but there is no sign of him. In the next fiveminutes we see her return to the spot six times, alwayswith or on her bicycle, but he never returns. Eachreturn visit is undertaken at a particular stage of herlife: as an older girl, as a teenager with a group offriends, with her boyfriend, with her small family, andfinally as an old woman. Each time she returns, thesetting is changed: either the weather, or the season isdifferent, and towards the end it is obvious that the seais retreating. On her final visit, she descends for thefirst time from the dyke, into the marsh grass that hasreplaced the sea. In a clearing in the grass, she finds anold rowing boat; she lies down in it and either fallsasleep, or into a reverie, or dies. My understanding ofwhat happens next is that the spirit of her young girl-self rises from her body and walks out towards the seawhere she meets her father. They embrace and the filmends.

There are two immediately striking things about thefilm that distinguish it from mainstream film-making:there is no dialogue used, and nearly all of the story isfilmed in the animated equivalent of long shot, anextraordinary choice in that the film still manages to

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generate a great deal of emotional power. As the filmuses no dialogue, our inferences as viewers aboutcharacter, story, theme and setting, come from otherelements, or modes in the film: the gesture, dress,movement and behaviour of characters tell us abouttheir fears, dreams, desires and relationships. And, as Ihave said, all this is filmed without the equivalent ofclose-up photography, which conventionally tells usabout how characters in films are feeling. We also inferaspects of character and story from the music: it doesnot, as is usually supposed, merely underscore feelingsalready present in the images, but adds an extradimension to the inferences we are able to make,particularly in the way the musical theme modulatesbetween major and minor keys, and the way differentinstruments are introduced with each change of scene(e.g. piano, for the lighter, teenage visit; bassoon for themore melancholy later visits).

Our inferences are thus not anchored in verballanguage, either in dialogue or voice-over, or as in aprint version, in written diegesis.1 One example willillustrate this: at the end of the film, in my reading, theold woman’s ‘girl spirit’ detaches from her sleepingbody and goes to meet her father. We do not knowwhether she is dreaming that she meets him, whethershe dies and meets him in an afterlife, or whether themeeting is metaphorical of her desire throughout to bereunited with him – and of course there is no reasonwhy we should want to know which of these readingsis ‘correct’. The very indeterminacy makes it morepowerful as an ending, and also scotches anothercommonplace notion that films prescribe action andstory for viewers, and thus delimit interpretation,while prose gives the imagination more latitude tointerpret. A prose rendering of this actionwould find itdifficult not to commit itself to one of these interpreta-tions.

This indeterminacy lends itself to work in cognateareas of English, principally how narratives (print orfilm) establish or develop character and story, anduse settings. It is these aspects that a group ofEnglish teachers and I started to explore in a work-shop recently, namely how film language is used to setup character and story, how it uses setting, and howthese modes relate to the same operations in prosefiction.

Writing the film

In the workshop, the first thing we did after watchingthe film for the first time, was write in one sentencewhat the film was ‘about’. The responses we got werefor the most part thematic: they referred to some levelof symbolic operation, that the film was ‘about’, forexample, ‘loneliness and longing’. In retrospect Ishould have asked for a one-sentence account of whatactually happens in the film: this way we would have

arrived quickly at the notion that the same storywill beinterpreted in different ways by anyone who sees orreads it – and yes, this differentiation is as true of filmas it is of prose fiction.

The next activity was to focus, in groups, on what inour previous Story Shorts pack, we called the three Csand the three Ss – colour, camera and sound, andcharacter, story and setting. This introduces a simplelevel of formal analysis to the viewing of a film,encouraging viewers to connect formal technique, likethe use of colour, framing, music, with the constructionof the substantive features of a text, like the charactersand the story, and the use of place. It also has theadvantage of being made for group activity, if yourclass is divisible into three, six, or nine! I then set up anactivity around scripting from the film. Taking prosepassages and turning them into storyboards is a well-used activity; the reverse process, however, can also berewarding. Taking scenes or sequences from films and‘writing’ them as they might appear in a prose versionof the film is potentially a very effective way ofscaffolding writing.

The task we addressed was to write the openingsequence of a prose/short story version of Father andDaughter. Here is a list of some of the openings that thegroup came up with:

1 Her hand felt warm in his. They didn’t speak. They didn’thave to.

2 One day Dad left. He didn’t come back.3 The wheels turned as both father and daughter climbed the

hill on their bicycles.4 In the distance a curlew cried.5 ‘‘Will you be long Dad’’ ‘‘No, I won’t be long. Take care. I

love you.’’

What was immediately apparent with these openingswas that each one is so different. Each signals adifferent ‘take’ on the film’s story, and promises adifferent trajectory; they each draw on differentinferences from the opening of the film and highlightthem in the writing.

The first opening foregrounds the relationship be-tween the girl and her father, and infers an intensityand closeness between them, and it does this partly byreplicating the absence of dialogue in the original. Itsets up a choice for the writer from the start: will shecontinue writing the story without dialogue? It is also,in narrative terms, written from quite a subjectivepoint of view, though not as subjective as the nextexample.2 Finally, though tactile, not visual, there issomething of the ‘close-up’ about this ‘shot’. The storyis starting close-in, and will have to pull outward inwhat in film terms would be called a ‘reveal’ shot.

The second opening is much more direct. Whereas thefirst withholds the key narrative information to startwith, the second reveals it. The whole story is

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represented in eight words, which sets up quite achallenge for the writer: shewill have to go somewhereelse in her continuation, possibly by exploring thegirl’s subjective experience.3 The third opening isdifferent again, emphasising the turning wheel, whichis a key motif in the film. It is worth noting here thatfilm as well as verbal language can use its languagefiguratively.

‘‘In the distance a curlew cried’’ is more elliptical,focused on setting first, as the film is too, butestablishing (as in ‘establishing shot’) the setting in adeft single stroke, and reproducing a mode – sound –that the film uses very subtly. Bird cries are one of thefew sound effects used in the film and, as the grouphad discussed, single ‘spot’ effects, like dripping taps,are often used to signify silence. A member of thegroup suggested that birds are used symbolically inthe film, in a convention taken from fine art where abird is often used to signify a death.

The transcription of this sound is interesting from anarrative point of view: ‘in the distance’ signifies boththe ambient quiet – quiet enough for single, distantsounds to be heard – but also the distance from ahearing subject. Where will the writer go next withthis? Will the hearing position be that of a character, oran omniscient narrator?

Opening number 5 – an exchange of dialogue – isnotable for a number of reasons: it fills in the absence ofdialogue in the film and it infers an aspect of therelationship between the two characters introduced inthe opening, namely that the father rushes back fromhis boat before getting in and hugs the girl, as if for thelast time. Without any overt diegesis, any actual‘telling’, this action is ambiguous: does he have aforeboding that he will not return? Is he actually intenton leaving and not coming back? The writer of this lineis preparing the reader in a similar way: ‘‘I love you.Take care’’ is similarly ambiguous, perhaps the verbalequivalent of the visual ‘afterthought-hug’.

So far, this activity has used a moving image text as thestimulus for a piece of writing. It seems from these fewexamples that ‘writing from film’ is a potentiallypowerful form of scaffolding writing: it is less crudethan other kinds of scaffold which might, for example,identify the opening twowords of sentences, and it hasthe advantage of providing the elements which mostnovice writers find most difficult: we are given thestory. Work done at the bfi does suggest that there arelearning gains in the quality of writing when translat-ing from film to print or back again (see Parker, 1999),but I would like to take things a little further.

A final sentence

What I would like to address next, and at some level ofexplicitness, is the question of what can be learnedabout print and film narratives from this exercise. Theeasiest way for me to do this is to focus on my ownattempt to write the opening sentence to the film, andnarrate, as it were in voice-over, the choices available tome, and the decisions I took. As the current fashion hasit, think of this as an example of ‘modelling writing’.

Most mornings, when the weather was fine, the girlcycled with her father to the shore, to where his boat wasmoored.

As a teacher, I occasionally found it useful to copystudents’ draft writing on to OHTs and ask them if theycould talk us through the choices they had made –particularly the scribbled out words which signalledroads not taken. The idea was that it encouraged themto think almost out loud about their own writingprocesses. This is perhaps the equivalent for myopening sentence:

Most mornings The first couple of words in a sentence,indeed in a story, commit you to a mode, mood, toneand tense. They might even commit you to a genre.Something in the opening of the film made me thinkthat the girl and the father routinely made this journey

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– though in talking with the teachers in the group, wecould not really find any evidence. It may have been acombination of the jaunty accordion music, with noovert sense of foreboding, or the fact that the fatherrests his bike against a tree, as if he is coming back later,or a vague unsupported sense that this is ‘typicalDutch-family-behaviour’. The thing to note aboutinference is that often we cannot find any evidence orjustification to support our readings.

Incidentally, ‘most mornings’ signals a particular kindof narrative time in film, called a ‘pause’ by one writer(Kozloff, in Price, 1993, p. 252), and it is worth notingthat ‘pauses’ in films are very rare, and much morecommon in print/prose fiction.4 On the same day aswatching Father and Daughter, the group of teacherslooked at ‘pauses’ in two extracts from Steinbeck’s OfMice and Men – the novella, not either of the films–andnoted that they would be difficult and time-consumingto turn into pieces of film. (Try it yourself: howmany ofthe pages introducing the scene at the start of the novel,and the introduction of Slim, would you be able to turninto film?)

when the weather was fineWhy is the weather importantto me? Because it is important in the film maybe, as itsignifies the passage of time, and the cycle of seasons,although the girl cycles in all weathers. Andwhy ‘fine’,not ‘good’? I suppose it sounds more literary, and thefilm is, I think, literary, in that it is subtle, emotionallypowerful but understated, restrained, elliptical, indir-ect and character-focused.

the girl cycled with her father It could have been ‘the mancycled with his daughter’, but her position as theprotagonist in the story has to be signalled by comingfirst in this clause, and it must be ‘cycled’ as a verb, asthis foregrounds the bicycle, which is key to the story.

to the shore where his boat was moored. How muchinformation should be presented in the first sentence ofa story? Having introduced the girl, in a main clausefollowing two subordinate clauses, with the verb tocycle, you feel you have to say where to, and thetrouble with the film is that it does not give us thisinformation. The boat is moored at a dyke, but whetherit is sea river or a kind of Dutch in-between is not made

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explicit. It may not be important, but it is interestingwhere he is going. If it is a routine journey, I amassuming it is to work. Hence ‘shore’, and no moreinformation about where he was going. That leaves aproblem for the next sentence.

Conclusions – and inferences

What I think this activity has taughtme is that there is agenerative tension between the two forms, prose andfilm, which is not a contradiction or opposition, but awhole complex of similarities and differences. Thesesimilarities and differences are best brought to thesurface in the act of translating from one medium intothe other, but in an elaborated form, one which isexplicit enough to enable learning to take place.Questions like these below might help make thethinking process behind the writing of the one-sentence openings more explicit:

� Look at each word and phrase of your sentence; foreach, can you explain why it comes here, now?

� What does your sentence commit you to writing inthe next sentence, and beyond that, in the story as awhole?

� Are you able to express some aspects of the story inprose that cannot be expressed in the film? Does thefilm show you things that you cannot express inwriting?

� Which aspects of the film are you drawing on,referring to, in your sentence, and which are youignoring?

And finally, a footnote about the Literacy Framework. Isaid at the start that work with shorts constituted ‘textlevel’ work, though with a different kind of text, and Ihope to have demonstrated some of the synergies ofputting different media in conversation with eachother. But what I have actually been demonstrating issentence-level work – almost comparing ‘shots’ withsentences. What is important here, and maybe whatthe Strategy lacks in its crudest form, is that the writingand analysis of sentences is always in the context of itslarger contextual function and purpose. The shuttling

between sentence, shot and story in this way seemsgenuinely to provide this context.

Notes

1. As an aside, the distinction between diegesis andmimesis – tellingand showing – can be used to describe the difference betweenfilms which use purely cinematic language – image, sound effectand music, and those which ‘tell’ through dialogue. It is quitecommon to look at similar distinctions between differentexamples of prose fiction.

2. In narrative study we might talk here about stories being plottedalong a continuum of narrative depth, where some films, and partof films, or other stories, are narrated relatively objectively, whileothers are more subjective.

3. Similarly, narrative information can be plotted on a continuumfrom unrestricted, to restricted, the latter where the source ofnarrative information is confined to a single space, and a single,simultaneous, timespan. The Royle Family is a good example ofrestricted narrative range, while Father and Daughter is unrest-ricted in time, covering a woman’s life, but restricted in space,with the narrative unfolding in one place.

4. Kozloff’s other types of film time are stretch, scene, ellipsis andsummary. See Price, 1993, pp. 250–252 for glosses of these terms.

References

DfEE (1999) The National Curriculum for England and Wales. London:HMSO.

PARKER,D. (1999) You’ve read the book, nowmake the film:Movingimage media, print literacy, and narrative. English in Education,33.1.

PRICE, S. (1993) Media Studies. London: Pitman.

Filmography

Father and Daughter (Holland-UK, 2000, dir. Michael Dudok DeWit).

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:Mark Reid, Teacher Development Officer, bfiEducation: British Film Institute, 21 StephenStreet, London W1T 1LNScreening Shorts is available from bfi Education.Check www.bfi.org.uk/education for details.

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