The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

134 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
It seemed to me reasonable to suppose that if you were writing
for the theatre, then you shut your eyes and imagined a stage. You
put the actors on the stage, put up the scenery, you switched on
your chosen lights and so on and you ran a bit of a possible play in
your mind. You changed and improved it, still in your mind, and
then you wrote down some notes about it so you could recall it later
on.
If you were writing for radio fiction, then you shut your eyes and
listened, creating possible sound scenarios in your mind. And if you
were writing for film fiction, then you shut your eyes and ran possible
film scenes back and forth in your mind as if you had an editing
machine in your head. Then, as if you had a camera and a
microphone in your head, you change the acting and “re-shoot,”
change the dialogue and “re-record,” “re-edit” and so on, changing
these imagined scenes, improving them until you are more satisfied
with them. Then you noted them down so you could recall them
later. As a fiction film writer your aim is to work all these notes
about your imagined scenes into a film script.
This seemed to me to be a reasonable model for parts of a fictional
development process.
I began to think of this ability to imagine film scenes in a film that
has not been made yet – very concretely to see and hear them in
your mind – as an essential part of teaching any film development
process, documentary as well as fiction. I started to think of it as the
“filmic imagination” and to regard it as an important faculty,
something that any film course should continually measure, evaluate
and train in its students.
I encouraged the documentary students to use their “filmic
imaginations” in developing their films. This suited the “fictional-