‘It’s literature I want, Ivo, literature!’ Literature as screenplay as literature. Or, how to win a literary prize writing a screenplay

Abstract

Ivo Michiels, besides being one of the most acclaimed and radical experimental literary authors in Dutch literature, is arguably the first Flemish professional screenwriter. These two occupations, that he continuously tried to combine, resulted in screenplays that either have been published as novels (and awarded important literary prizes) or repurposed as fragments in the Journal Brut cycle. Michiels developed a specific style for the screenplay by turning away from economical concrete descriptions. Instead he pursued a more literary way of writing, using narrative strategies aiming at certain effects in the mind of the reader, over conventional description. This article situates Michiels’ script writing as ‘performative’ in its intention and offers a case study of his work, as an expanded notion of the screenplay that elevates the form beyond mere description of what will be visible/audible on-screen. In Michiels’ practice, a screenplay is not just a text that ‘desires to become another text’, in the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini. In contrast, this article frames Michiels’ screenplays as ‘postdramatic’ texts which become artefacts, in and of themselves, claiming a certain independence from the film, whilst at the same time maintaining dialogue with the film (Bakhtin), realized or not.

Teaching Screenwriting as Translation and Adaptation:critical Reflections on Definitions and Romanticism 2.0 -- ©2021 P. Cattrysse

“…); 12 when critics borrow Romantic values from other, adjacent (e.g. literary) art forms to assess screenplays as "worthy" objects (see, e.g., Balázs 1939;Winston 1973;Corliss 1985;Koivumäki 2010;Geerts 2014;Ksenofontova 2020), and when writers (see, e.g., Derek Jarman) and like-minded critics deliberately write and discuss screenplays in terms of unique and poly-interpretable expressions in a hybrid or fluid, and therefore mystical and un-categorizable genre (see, e.g., Mota 2005;Geerts 2014). I refer for example to Alexandra Ksenofontova, who in her study of The Modernist Screenplay, distinguishes between a "literary" and a "functional" reading of a screenplay.…”