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Course of Scenery Detailed program

by Giovanni Bogani




From the idea to the scenery

1. The cinematographic language. The shot. Close-up and field. The movements
of the camera: panoramic, undercarriage, zoom, dolly. The steady cam. The cutting: it detaches, fading, templates. The cutting of the attractions. The close-up-sequence. Video-Examples.

 
2. Introductory notion of the scenery. The scenery as project element indispensable for the organization of the economic and productive resources which make the realization of a film possible, has to be seen as industrial product. Signals on the role of the scenery in connection with the technical and expressive evolution of the cinema from the origins to our days: from "canovaccio" of the dumb cinema to the "iron scenery" of the Hollywood cinema, to the cinema without scenery of the vanguards 60's. The scenery as team work.

3. From the idea to the script. The preliminary phase of the elaboration of a scenery their formal specificity.
- Idea, topic, subject; - the notes;
- the treatment. 
In video: practical examples of the passage from the subject to the notes and to the treatment reported to the same film. 
Practices: reading of subjects, treatments, notes. Some typescripts of subjects, treatments and sceneries of film will be put at disposal.
To rewrite "backwards" short subjects (max 1 page) or film notes to choose. Everyone writes its own film. 
Practices of writing. Writing a short subject placed in a given location, or starting from a certain beginning.

4. The properly said scenery.
Articulation of visual elements and sonorous elements. Conventions and technical recurrent terms. The atmospheres, the shot. The Off, the fading, the detaches.
Several types of pagination of the scenery: the Italian way, the American way, the French way.
Examples of paged sceneries in several ways.
Video and practices: reading of a scenery parallel with the treated film. A sequence of "Marrakech espress" or other films of which the typescript scenery is available.

Laboratory of scenery and novelistic writing

1. Notion of telling. That what distinguish a novelistic text:

- the plot. Distinctions between "story" and "speech". The point of view. The narration as
selective process.
- the personages and their characterization. The dynamic contrast. Protagonist and antagonist. The "scheme of
personages "like peculiar instrument of job of the scriptwriter.

2. The novelistic structure of the scenery. The pattern in three actions. Conflict, development and resolution. The dialogues. Analysis of Syd Field's book "La sceneggiatura".

3. To tell in images. The rhetoric of the cinematographic narration. The ellipses, the expansion. 
Flashback, the flash forward. Examples from "2001: Odissea nello spazio "," Gli intoccabili". anticipation and
preparation. The representation of the time and the space in the cinematographic language. Vision and
discussion of examples treated in films. 2 lessons. Practical part. Excercises.

- Several exercises of creative/narrative writing, with home work and collective discussion about the work in the lessons.

- Drawing up of subjects and eventual sceneries for the individual short films which are going to be realized by the students of the direction course. Drawing up of subjects for "videominuti", video of the duration of one minute, proposed for the organized competition by the Pecci museum.

- Analysis of the scenery or more than one scenery, a comparison with the treated film.

- Formation of small groups of students, which will work together on the same scenery. Notes and
collective discussion, in the hours of the laboratory, of several subjects.

VISION AND DISCUSSION OF THE FILMS:
1. "Decalogo 12" , by Krysztof Kieslowski
2. "La doppia vita di Veronica" , by Krzysztof Kieslowski
3. "Marakech Express", by Gabriele Salvatores
4. "Cresceranno i carciofi a Mimongo" , by F. Ottaviano
5. "Smoke", by Wayne Wang
6. "I soliti sospetti", by Bryan Singer
7. "Buon compleanno, Mr. Grape", by Lasse Hallstrom
8. "Dad man walking", by Tim Robbins
9. " Get shorty", by Barry Sonnenfield"
10. " Barton Fink" , by Joel ed Ethan Coen
11. "Il ciclone", by Leonardo Pieraccioni
12. Episodi de "I mostri" by Dino Risi
13. "Il viale del tramonto", by Billy Wilder

 

SCENERIES DISCUSSED:
1. "Cresceranno i carciofi a Mimongo", by Francesco Martinotti, Fulvio Ottaviano
2. "La seconda volta", by Heidrun Schleef, Francesco Bruni, Domenico Calopresti
3. "Marrakech Express", by Carlo Mazzacurati, Enzo Monteleone, Carlo Contarello
4. "Il portaborse", by Franco Bernini e Angelo Pasquini


RECOMMENDED TEXTS:
- Age, "Scriviamo un film", Pratiche;
- Syd Field, "La sceneggiatura", Lupetti;
- Giuliana Muscio, "Scrivere il film", Dino Audino;

- Massimo Moscati, "Manuale di sceneggiatura", Oscar Mondadori;
- Francois Truffaut, "Il cinema secondo Hitchcock", Pratiche;
- Vincenzo Cerami, "Consigli a un giovane scrittore", Einaudi;
- Paul Auster, "Smoke" e "Blue in face", Einaudi;
- Vincenzo Cucimarra, "Fare uncorto", Dino Audino;
- AaVv, "Il mestiere dello sceneggiatore", Dino Audino;
- Krysztof Kieslowski, K. Piesiewicz, "Decalogo", Einaudi;
- Umberto Eco, "Sei passeggiate nei boschi narrativi", Bompiani.

 

 


QUOTES FROM THE PROS

Here you will find some judgments given by persons which are doing or have done this profession for their whole life about the work of scriptwriters. Lots of them in order to have of an idea about that. They are all Americans, and the translation - more or less trustworthy, I hope  - is mine.
Giovanni Bogani


When you begin to write, you are for 98% pure writer, and 2% critic. After you have written a bit, you have learned a lot about your job, and you will become 2% writer and 98% critic.
David Westheimer

Beeing a writer, I needed to be alone for a lot of time. To write is for 90% a pastime, riturn: to read magazines, to eat cereals from the box, to watch the publicity in tv. Do all what you can in order to avoid to write, until it's 4 a.m. and you arrive at the moment in which you are forced to write. It would be nice to have somebody next to you, while all this happens, to testify that it is indeed like that.
Paul Rudnick

To make visible all that, what would be impossible to see without you.
Robert Bresson

To write is easy. All you have to do is to keep on staring in a white piece of paper until the blood is coming out of your nose.
Fawler Gene

I adore one of the writing-rules of from Feydeau: Personage A: my life is perfect until I do not see the personage B. Toc toc: The Personage B enters.
P. Guare

As soon as we remember ourselves that we are all sick, the mysteries will disappear and life becomes clear.
Mark Twain

(This is very famous one) In Italy, under the Borgia, they have had poverty, war, terror, murdering and blood, but they have produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they have had fraternity, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what have they produced? The cuckoo clocks.
Orson Welles

A film is not a book. If it is born from a book, it cannot be respected too much from the book. All you have to respect of the book is the spirit.
Richard Price

The greater part of the scriptwriters is failing with the fifth word. When scenery begins and he writes: "first Action, first scene, your job is exactly as good as those of Arthur Miller or Eugene O' Neill or anyone. From the fifth word on the amateurs are revealing themselves as such those.
Maredith Willson

Hollywood is the only place in the world where you cannot fail. You can only stop to try it.
Danny Foley

You can earn millions here, and your only competitors are the idiots. Don't miss the occasion.
Herman Mankiewicz, talking about Hollywood with Ben Hecht

The spectators who are going to the cinema are leading a normal life and they are going to the cinema to see extraordinary things. For me the film is not a "slice of life", but a slice of a cake. The essential thing is, as long as the spectator can appreciate the abnormality in its full value that this abnormality is shown with the most complete realism.
Alfred Hitchcock

With the triumph of the dialogue the cinema has crystallized itself from the theatre. The personages are in taxis and they are speaking; they are inside the car and are making love, and they continue to speak. The cinematographic style gets lost. I believe in the cinematographic art. I do not believe in dialogues.
Alfred Hitchcock

The spectators have to endure a great emotion while seeing the film. And this is only possible if I succeed to make them identifying with the personages on the screen. It is always necessary that the spectators are feeling the same things like the actors on the screen.
Alfred Hitchcock

The first shot of a film is important. In the greater part of the cases, it is necessary to introduce the spectator in the atmosphere. It is also convenient for him, if possible, to surprise the spectator. He must fight against the chattering and the persons who need five minutes to sit down.
Alfred Hitchcock

The public always tries "to anticipate". They love to be able to say "Ah! I know what will happen now ".
I am forced to accept the challenge: "Ah yes? Do you think? We'll see ".
Alfred Hitchcock

I never make a scene about lived life because people can find that easily at home, on the street or in front of the cinema. To make a film means to me first of all and above all, to tell a story. This story can be improbable but it never has to be banal. It must be like the life, from which are eliminated the borings moments.
Alfred Hitchcock

The difference between suspense and surprise is very simple. While we are speaking, maybe there is a bomb under the table. Our conversation is absolutely normal, suddenly: bum, explosion. The audience is surprised. Now we examine the suspense. The bomb is under the table and the audience knows that. And he knows when it will explode. Then that banal conversation becomes suddenly interesting, because the audience wants to tell the personages on the screen: "Under the table there is a bomb which will explode within some minutes". In the first case, we have offered to the audience 15 seconds of surprise. In the second case, fifteen minutes of suspense. Conclusion, we must inform the audience now and then that it can be.
Alfred Hitchcock

The more you are fantastic the more you have to be realist. That is the reason why Kafka is so brilliant.
Roman Polanski


First, to write a good scenery. If the skeleton of the story is not most solid all becomes compromise. If you want to become a director, the first thing to do is to master the writing.
Akira Kurosawa


Start as soon as you can and make your own films rather than reading how to tell from people which have done theirs.
Steven Spielberg

The cinema will not last for long. Other forms of entertainment will be born that will extend films; maybe they will connect themselves directly to the brain. Maybe there will be a central sending the images of a film via a satellite into 6000 halls at one time. A single copy, a single sonary column, a satellite, millions of halls!
Francis Ford Coppola

The novelist is lonely, its impact with the paper is lonely, and as lonely is the reader who will read it. On the contrary, the scriptwriter must write for actors, who will say certain phrases, therefore he has not only need of the reflection but also of the conversation: a dialogue must be pronounced loudly. It is a cinematographic dialogue and also if made in silence, its tone is determined by the length of the pauses.
Ettore Scola


Associazione Culturale Immagina
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