SNAPlab

Another conference day in Adelaide. This time, I decided to skip one panel to get into town. I had planned my visit to Australia—my first—very short, and I was sorry to spend it only in conference halls. I walked through part of the city center and took a short stroll through the park and botanical gardens.

In the morning, I attended a panel discussion on the role of sound in writing. The panel focused mainly on teaching methods, and Elisabeth Monge, Anne Regine Klovholt, and Ben Slater talked about how sound and recordings are used in teaching screenwriting students. I liked how Elisabeth and Anne Regine showed us how they guide students in thinking about sounds. Storytelling and interpretation are preceded by simply labelling the sounds we hear. On the other hand, when working with sounds in text, they believe that it makes no sense to just describe the sounds, but rather to explain their function. I think this demonstrated the importance of sound and how authors think about it in detail and need to have more control over it than over visuals.

In the next panel, I was intrigued by Sylvie Jane Husebye’s research project. The whole time, I kept thinking that her approach reminded me of Warren Buckland. Then I learned that she is Warren’s student. Sylvie analyzes narratives, focusing on gaps in the plot. She works on the assumption that gaps in the narrative can be quantified and that storytelling patterns can be traced based on the changing number of gaps. According to her, this could help screenwriters when thinking about their narratives. It looks like a massive project that works with a lot of empirical data, which I like.

Between panels, I had the opportunity to talk to Steven Maras about film viewing. We probably don’t agree on a lot of thinks, but we gradually came to the conclusion that the models of viewers, as theorists conceive them, are often very idealistic (Steve would say “mentalist”). In my opinion, the way to remedy this is through cognitive and empirical research. Steven sees it quite the opposite and blames David Bordwell and the cognitive tradition for how schematically theorists think about audiences.

I wonder what the results of a survey among screenwriters, directors, producers, sound designers, film theorists, archivists, and projectionists would be if they were asked to describe how they think about audiences…