tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post98049782346244086..comments2024-03-19T02:14:31.704-04:00Comments on <center>OnFiction</center>: Stories on the Screen (and an Announcement)Keith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-53686657553709078522010-11-02T17:40:05.049-04:002010-11-02T17:40:05.049-04:00Thanks, Dave, for this comment. I read Syd Field&#...Thanks, Dave, for this comment. I read Syd Field's book on screenwriting some time ago, and have four books on my current list on that topic, of which McKee's was the first. I can't yet make an independent judgement of whether he is overrated, but I can see how he might be. There is a good deal of hyperbole. I agree that sequences are important, but I became interested in beats, and McKee's moment-by-moment analyses of screenplays, because he pays attention both to the words said and to what is not said explicitly but is nevertheless conveyed, and this seems very important in films.Keith Oatleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-53272357565059462142010-11-02T12:37:22.324-04:002010-11-02T12:37:22.324-04:00Honestly, I think McKee is highly overrated. The c...Honestly, I think McKee is highly overrated. The concept of a beat is dubious. I much prefer the hero's journey analysis (the extensive, deeper one - see http://www.clickok.co.uk/index4.html ); that way it all makes much more sense and you start to talk in terms of sequences instead of beats.Dave's Girlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02786088318660906846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-2981772757043131942010-11-01T14:02:38.360-04:002010-11-01T14:02:38.360-04:00Thank you, Rebecca for this comment. I am not sure...Thank you, Rebecca for this comment. I am not sure I have entirely got the concept of a beat or, as I implied, its relation to a shot. Most movie scenes seem to involve several beats: the scene from <i>Casablanca</i> that McKee discusses had eleven beats. I agree that beats may not be the best unit of analysis. I was intrigued, however, that the scriptwriting people found them to be very important. The kind of scene you describe, of summer rain, does occur in movies, without any action (doesn't it?) for instance sometimes at the beginning of a film, and sometimes—as I recall—in Japanese films there can be just a shot of a piece of countryside with a particular weather pattern. It is metonymic, but I don't know what the movie people say about such matters.Keith Oatleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-49373630320214011332010-11-01T12:37:54.917-04:002010-11-01T12:37:54.917-04:00Keith, this book sounds very engaging indeed, and ...Keith, this book sounds very engaging indeed, and important for thinking about similarities and differences between literature and film. I am intrigued by the contrast between a “beat” and a “scene.” It seems to me that the “beat” concept may be too reductive to describe everything that is going on in a scene, even if, and perhaps especially if, one is attending only to the emotional dynamic. This month I’ve read two novels that struck me as extremely filmic: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery and The Underneath by Kathi Appelt. Their chapters are shorter than “usual” it seems to me and, I would say, more poetic. Two thirds of the way into Barbery’s novel, there is a chapter called “Then” and the chapter says: “Then, summer rain.” That’s it. Is this a scene? Perhaps. Is it a “beat”? Not really. But that expanse of whiteness in which the few words are floating on the page gives the reader time to reflect on what this summer rain has meant to the main character up to this point in the story and what it might mean later. Summer rain is a metonym that would probably lose its power if it were necessarily incorporated into an adjacent “beat,” in a film, but it might function very well if it were conceptualized by the filmmaker as a “scene”. It could be that neither “scene” nor “beat” adequately describes units in fictional narrative.Rebecca Wells Joplinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09485890436841556217noreply@blogger.com